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What Happened When I Started Going Back to the Track How the HBO series Luck coincided with the biggest disaster in David Milch's life.

By David Milch

Writer-producer David Milch, author of a new memoir titled Life's Work, is one of the most brilliant creative minds in television. His life story is as multifaceted, mesmerizing, and infuriating as that of his most famous characters. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, to a mob-adjacent family, he learned about betting at the track from his father, a revered vascular surgeon who was also a chronically unfaithful substance abuser and compulsive gambler. Sexually abused at summer camp and repeatedly traumatized by his father, and by the death of his childhood best friend in a car accident, Milch started using alcohol and drugs (including heroin) in his youth. He followed in his father's footsteps by betting on horse races, sporting events, and anything else his bookies would say yes to.

Despite all this, Milch excelled at creative writing. He graduated from Yale and went on to teach literature there for 12 years. Then he wrote an Emmy-winning spec script for Steven Bochco's groundbreaking ensemble cop drama Hill Street Blues, got hired on staff, and joined Bochco in creating and producing another equally influential network series, NYPD Blue. His greatest achievement, the epic anti-Western Deadwood, was conceived and produced during a period of sobriety that followed a 1999 stint in rehab. Deadwood premiered on HBO in 2004, earned solid ratings, and was critically revered, but it still got canceled after three seasons owing to a series of complex factors; two big ones were Milch's self-described lack of impulse control and inability to accept compromise, which are not helpful when dealing with network executives. Milch's follow-up, the surfer parable John from Cincinnati, debuted the following year, satisfied almost no one, and was canceled after ten episodes.

What followed was a period of failed and aborted projects and chronic depression. Still, Milch managed to create, write, and produce one of the most fascinating works of his career, the HBO drama Luck, a loosely structured metaphysical ensemble piece set in and around a Southern California racetrack; this series, too, was canceled after one season, following a series of accidental horse deaths during filming. This tragedy was intertwined with the biggest personal disaster of Milch's life: the loss of almost his entire fortune to gambling, mainly at racetracks. Milch's wife, Rita, ended up suing her husband's accountants for keeping the most damning details of Milch's financial immolation a secret from her (the suit was settled out of court).

As the following excerpt makes clear, the production of Luck coincided with — and in Milch's mind, amplified — his tendency to take potentially ruinous risks at the betting window in the name of chasing another kind of self-destructive high, different from but equal to the drugs he gave up in the name of recovery. Milch now resides in a memory-care facility in Los Angeles, where he is being treated for Alzheimer's disease. Life's Work was written over a six-year timespan with help from family and friends who supplied him with several decades' worth of archival material and transcripts. It is a rumination on pain and growth and a record of thoughts, feelings, and insights that the author may no longer have access to. —Matt Zoller Seitz




Excerpt from 'Life's Work'

There's a line at the end of John from Cincinnati, where Ed O'Neill's character is talking to his dead wife, trying to describe to her what happened over the last week. He says, "Where do you start and stop? Every event and incident ..." That's how I feel trying to explain what happened when I started going back to the track, and working on Luck.

The track is such a rich world. The characters and setting, the beauty and majesty of the horses, and, on the deepest level, the purity of the connection experienced by everyone watching the race for that minute and a half, even while everything outside of that minute and a half, and even some of the things within it, are distorted in any number of ways — that's rich ground to till. I was compelled to tell this story for a variety of reasons, not least of which was my own cultivated and nurtured identity as and commitment to being a gambler.

Gambling and horse racing were inextricably associated with my relationship with my old man. The most time we spent together was at the track, sometimes also in the company of the man who sexually abused me, and almost always with my dad's ongoing narration of my degeneracy. That association came to inform my idea of relaxation, or enjoyment, or success. Ask my kids what it was like to go with me to the track, and they'll tell you it wasn't fun, or at best it was fun intermittently. They liked seeing the animals at the barn, and learning how to read the racing form so they knew who was the long shot and who was the favorite. But my eldest also describes being 5 years old, speed walking to chase after me through the clubhouse, trying to keep track of me as I went to the booth to bet, not running because she didn't want to draw anyone's attention, thinking, "I've got to keep my eye on him, because he sure isn't keeping his eye on me."

My wife Rita eventually started taking her own car when they did come, so she and the kids could drive home separate from me. When you win a race, they take your picture in the winner's circle. Almost every picture we have where the kids are there, we're all grimacing because we just ran through the track and I was yelling at them to hurry the whole way. At the same time, they knew if they made it through the day, I'd give them a couple hundred dollars at the end, and they liked that part too. We had a drawer in the dresser in our bedroom where I kept cash and race tickets. Sometimes there'd be hundreds of thousands of dollars cash in there. Each of my kids learned to steal with that drawer. They'd show it to friends who came over. It was one of the fun parts of our house, like having a pool but harder to explain. You pass on some lessons whether you want to or not. But making them chase after me was maybe also my way of telling them they didn't belong there. They weren't like me in that way. I found a way to say that too.

I wrote the pilot of Luck in 2009. After about seven years away, I was going to the track more throughout that year. HBO liked it, but I suspect they were also trying to figure out a way to get me a bit more under thumb, not rewriting things on set, which cost money. The script was sent to Michael Mann, and he ultimately came on to direct the pilot and as an executive producer as well. Part of his coming on was an agreement that he would have final say over casting, and on set, and in the edit room. I agreed to all of it, even though it was very different from the way I had grown accustomed to working, and different from television generally, where the showrunner, the final boss, is usually the head writer rather than a director. But I also knew I had had a few misses, and I think I felt compelled to show everyone I could go along to get along. It wasn't lost on me that Michael had made a great deal of wonderful art and that someone with his level of skill could do likely revolutionary work with the racing scenes in particular. People seemed excited about the prospect of our working together. It made Dustin Hoffman interested in being a part, and Nick Nolte and John Ortiz and a number of other great actors.

We shot the pilot in April of 2010. It was not a happy collaboration for me. Michael insists upon a single voice, especially on set. I couldn't go to the set — literally I was forbidden from going. That was a loss. If we're going to engage with him as a reality, then it behooves me to evaluate him, and I don't want to evaluate him. He's a driven, enormously articulate figure, but when I watched the pilot, there were moments or sequences where I thought he was wrong. Had I been directing the series, it would have been a different series. I don't think he knew enough about the world he was trying to portray. There are certain distortions that are his idea of the conventions of the story rather than the truths of the characters and situations. The last part of my writing is being on the set and working with the actors. I wanted the actors to live in the rhythm of walking with the goat, having the rooster around, feeding the horse a carrot. The animals are the measure of the capacity for gentleness. It's being around the animals that changes you, but I wasn't there with them, so I couldn't insist on that, couldn't see what happened in those moments. Not being in the editing room, not getting to see all the footage that was there and other discoveries that might have been, that was tough too.

After the pilot there were some real conversations about how we would continue. We all still wanted to do the show. At one point, we were discussing a different potential future project of Michael's but also about how we'd work together going forward. We were talking about what soldiers bring to and take away from battle. I said to Michael, "When your mother fell ill, was there any fucking question where you had to be?" He said, "No, of course not." And I said, "Don't say of course not. For you." For Michael, if your mother is ill, showing up at her bedside is a given. That's a good thing, but that's not true for me. I don't see any human behavior as a given. And that's just one way we see stories differently.

In July HBO announced they were picking up the show and then throughout 2010 and 2011 we were writing and shooting. I know there's a story that Nick Nolte told of me taking a bat and saying I was going to kill Michael. I don't remember that. But I remember feeling pretty fucking angry when I was waiting to see an edit. I felt so cut off from the process of the work. There were days I drove home and while I was at a red light I told my steering wheel, "This guy is an asshole and he hasn't lived very much." That kind of statement, ad hominem, ultimately diminishes the speaker. I know that. And yet I don't want to be perceived as bending over backward to avoid a fight. That was the question then, and in deciding how to talk about this it becomes the question now. At this stage in my life — old — I don't want to present a crippled version of my voice in order to defer. It's a pain in the balls. A moment has to come when you say your piece. But at the time I determined that bending was something I was going to have to live with. And while I couldn't be on the set, I could be in the clubhouse. I could still take people to the track and bet.

To better understand some of our characters who were also degenerate gamblers, Michael asked me what I felt when I won. I told him, "Nothing. Absolute contingency. Everything is at risk and the specific outcome doesn't depend on my character flaws, so that's a release." I have to risk my family's welfare, I have to risk every fucking thing, risk the humiliation afterward of, "'Here's a guy they say has made over a hundred million dollars in his life and may wind up under a fucking bridge.' But there's a chance I could win, and if I win, for about an hour and a half I get to give the money away to people and feel okay about myself."

Continued...

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continued

In March of 2011, around when I was working on writing the eighth episode of Luck, our then–business managers got in touch with Rita to encourage her to transfer the title for our house on Martha's Vineyard to our children. We had hired them back when our children were born because I couldn't be trusted, and whenever we were going to spend money, Rita would ask them if we could afford it. They managed the kids' tuition, the payroll at my company, credit-card bills, taxes, the acting classes I paid for, the other tuitions and hospital bills and apartments I took care of for various people I crossed paths with. They had never raised any flags with her before, so the title change seemed strange, and Rita asked them to meet. She went into their office the next day, and they told her I had spent about $23 million at the track in the last ten years, and a lot of that in the last two, and between that, $5 million in unpaid taxes, a few mortgages she didn't know about, and the business managers' own fees, we were 17 million dollars in debt. Rita then asked them why they didn't pull the alarm to her years ago. They said they were afraid I'd fire them if they did. Back when Rita and I were dating, I was a heroin addict; she would come home and I'd say, "You're not going to believe this. They robbed us again." I was selling the furniture.

Sometimes we are blessed with what they call a moment of clarity. One day I was looking at her and she was nodding and I recognized that she weighed about 85 pounds because she was a codependent. As I was getting sicker she was getting sicker with me. The deepest truth of the situation was, "I'm killing her." As I've told the story within various anecdotes, with whatever transient charm, you may have been able to feel, "Oh, that's just a kind of shorthand." But when I linger to look at her and see that she was dying with me, it takes on a different dimension. And now she had learned how thoroughly I had put her and the kids at risk.

If you look at my behavior, that ambivalence toward order, toward reality, it proves out. During a brief law-school sojourn, I lived in a hotel room with a credit card I never paid. I sold my novel to multiple publishers. I don't believe money is real. I made whole shows about that. But what you believe about money is real. Money had been one way that Rita and my kids felt safe, that I helped them feel safe — generally there weren't too many ways I did that, and now that was gone. When she got home from the accountants that day, she had her steam-rage silence going. She handed me the list of payouts to the track. I looked at her and said, "Why are you showing me this?" I couldn't bear to talk to her. I said I was sorry and went to bed. Our daughter Elizabeth was coming home that night for a visit, bringing her then-boyfriend to L.A. for the first time. I hid for the first two days they were there. You think this is going to be the moment they realize what you really are, and they're going to turn away. But that's not what happens. They call you down to dinner and then you're all back in the kitchen together, and you keep going.

I kept working on Luck, but I didn't tell anyone what was happening. I couldn't go to the set and now I couldn't go to the clubhouse either. Rita called my psychiatrist and told him about the money. I likely would not have told him on my own. With my doctors I am usually well mannered but often evasive, which doesn't necessarily help them succeed in my treatment. But with the new context, my psychiatrist put me on Suboxone, an opioid substitute, to help dull my urge to gamble. That treatment didn't reach any of the fundament of what was going on. In a very ham-handed, intrusive way, it pointed me toward the necessity of mobilizing my denial and suppression. I became much more an actor playing a part, and it so happened the part I was playing was my life.

It was a sad time. I lost about 45 pounds in six months. The revelation has the effect of shaming you totally. It cuts you off from every other avenue of expression in connection with those you love. And there's a kind of doubleness, the first half of which is that you're ashamed about the defects of your personal, private behavior, and simultaneously you feel a profound, profound shame and divorce from the blessings of your relation with the person you love. A portion of that is the terrible sense of isolation and inauthenticity, knowing that if you ever get well, then you'll have to look at how utterly, and at some level viciously, you've wronged the person with whom you had promised to share your life. That final element of realization isolates you in your shame. It sequesters you so that you can never feel a genuine, unqualified love for the person you know you love. The more protracted and revelatory the confession is, the deeper, the more continuous the shame is, so as to make me inaccessible to anyone normal, including my own wife, and to compound my impulse to hang out in places of misdeed and treble my pain of various kinds in my relation with my parents and particularly my dad. You indwell with the feeling that you're a monster and capable of whatever's monstrous, and so there's nothing to impede your path to whatever kind of hellish behavior provides an externalized fantasy of what you think of yourself inwardly 24 hours a day.

That's when you start to worry about taking yourself out. It's a kind of jailing that feels permanent. It's a given. If you would pursue sobriety, that's the first thing you have to accept, and in another sense it's the last nail in the coffin, at least as you feel your situation when you're trying to get well. It's a bitter, bitter joke, the idea of getting well, when you feel so profoundly isolated and you feel that's properly so because of what you've done. I'm still on the Suboxone.

The show premiered in January 2012, and HBO picked it up for a second season after the first episode aired. In March, while we were shooting what would have been the second episode of the second season, a horse died. Two horses had died while we were shooting the first season. HBO paused production, and then HBO, Michael Mann, and I agreed to end the show. The official version was that it was canceled because those three horses died. They died in very ordinary ways — one got spooked by a rabbit and hit his head when he fell, one of their knees shattered, one broke its shoulder. We were working with the American Humane Association and following every protocol. PETA was doing a land-office business sensationalizing what happened and trivializing the love and care and effort of the people who cared for those animals and the spirits of the horses themselves. Whether or not you think thoroughbred horses should be bred at all is a separate question, but they exist, and running is in their nature; it fulfills the deepest movements of their spirit. I think animals should be a part of art. To exclude them would be life-hating. Any living thing is subject to the laws of mortality.

I was relieved when the show ended, and Rita even more so. I suspect HBO was too — we were way over budget. Still, I found some dear friends while making it. Dustin is one. The writer Eric Roth is another. Eric's attempts at helping Michael and me work together were heroic. That's a blessing of the work we do, getting to know and love people we wouldn't otherwise.

I wish I had more time with every one of those actors. I especially wish I got to spend more time with Kevin Dunn and Jason Gedrick and Ritchie Coster and Ian Hart, who played the Degenerates. What the four of them were able to play, what you were able to feel watching them, was the truth the characters themselves didn't understand. As individuals on the show, they have to lose — they win the big jackpot in the first episode, and over the course of the season each of them dissipates his quarter. But before they run completely out of money, out of some totemic impulse to memorialize the original victory, they buy the Cheap Horse, and thinking it's about the horse, they unite in friendship and their hearts open up. That process occurs in every one of the story lines in a different way. Ultimately, in the overall construction of Luck, by pulling back from the individual story lines, as you feel the simultaneity of all these different spirits moving in a kind of concert, drawn and brought together under the same sky, you find there is a unifying principle in the midst of all the seeming disparity and pathology. It looks as if the narrative is pathologizing everyone, but when you pull back and experience the story as a whole, you realize that what looks like pathological behavior is people vibrating according to their past experiences and the present coercions or liberations of their environment.

It's useful to think about what's involved in the process of gambling in its connection to Las Vegas, which is a much more comprehensive and straightforward symbol than the racetrack. Horse racing would never admit it, but Las Vegas has been one of the deaths of the sport. Casino gambling provides the ability to gamble beyond time, rather than the particular moment of a race, and of course doesn't have the inconvenience of having racehorses. The race itself, the creatures, the shared event, there's something there that still insists on life as lived in time. Casinos go beyond that. You can't find a clock in a casino. The difference between night and day, it's very hard once you're in the casino to see the outside. When you go to Las Vegas, that city is organized intentionally to obliterate the disciplines of time. The entire environment is contrived to assault the individual sensibility with the symbols of the American definition of success and to make accessible the most garish versions of the American definition of success, absent the constraints of time and history.

The ad campaign, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." That's not self-evident. It's a fiction that suggests, "Whatever you do in the real world, don't worry about it. You can come to Vegas and reinvent yourself and here are the instruments for reinvention. Craps, pai gow, slots. Talk about a range of possibilities! You can either be a pai gow degenerate, or you can be a slot degenerate. It's not like you have to confine yourself to one thing. You stay up, you don't have to sleep. The food's right here, if you happen to remember you're a creature who eats." That is the embodiment of a system gone mad, which has recognized that human beings can be made to want anything based on association. As long as you have the symbol agreed upon, which is currency, you can be a part of a self-sufficient and perpetual alternative reality.

As long as you're winning, you don't care about time, but the moment that you run out of the currency that entitles you to admission to the world, you're out, and back in the time you wanted to leave. The house is there forever. The house has inexhaustible currency, and you're there only as long as you can play within the rules of the game, which is as long as you have dough. Ultimately, since your energy is not inexhaustible, you're going to fuck up, and you're going to be out. People who have had that experience sit around with a kind of stunned, vacant look in their eyes asking themselves, "What just happened?" What happened was they were exposed to a false environment, an environment that reorganized the categories of reality, which seemed to deny the dominion of time, and whose predicate was ultimately revealed to be inimical to the human spirit.

Excerpted from the book LIFE'S WORK by David Milch, out September 13 by Random House. Copyright © 2022.


from:
https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/david-milch-on-luck-and-the-biggest-disaster-in-his-life.html


   

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We've Waited Our Whole Lives to Help Our Father, David Milch, Tell This Story

Sept. 13, 2022

By Elizabeth Milch and Olivia Milch
Elizabeth Milch is a writer and consultant. Olivia Milch is a screenwriter and director.

We've heard the story of our dad shooting out streetlamps while on acid more times than we can count. Sometimes he does it with a shotgun, sometimes the New Haven cops know him by name (he'd been arrested before), but it always ends with him saying, "I refuse to speak to you until your badge stops melting." It's a good line.

Our father, the TV producer and creator David Milch, is a storyteller. Even before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he was always a bit of an unreliable narrator. His penchant for embellishment, and at times ellipses, comes from his belief that in narrative storytelling, "what literally happened need not be overly determinative." Now, nearly a decade into his diagnosis, having finished his memoir, "Life's Work," he has shown us even memory itself is not entirely a requirement for finding truth.

When he first started to lose his memory, we thought it may have been hard living catching up with him. He was a guy with a lot of "city miles" on him. Remembering things like the location of an event or our friends' names was never his strong suit. But it became clear that this was more than age and disposition. He was sick. His brain, his greatest gift, was turning on him.

When we began in 2017 to piece together his story, the dementia he was diagnosed with in 2015 had already progressed. He was a different version of the person who had written hundreds of episodes of television, a different person from the one who used to hold court at any table. As a family, we knew he would need help to make his way and to finish.

This time, we weren't just another audience but interviewers, crate diggers and collaborators. In a certain sense, we'd been preparing our whole lives to help him tell this story. We'd always been listening.

He grew up the child of a venerated surgeon who was an absolute drunk, was sexually abused at camp beginning at age 6, and started drinking himself at 8 years old. He began writing in college after his best friend from childhood died in a car accident. After he graduated magna cum laude from Yale, he would continue years of what he referred to as "pharmaceutical research," including a long stint "studying" heroin.

None of this was kept from us. His stories were told freely and often, part of the large, uncensored tapestry of humanity he exposed us to as children. We could trace the tweaks, the shifts, the new lines when his jokes got better. But he always laid his truth bare.

Part of his tellings and retellings had to do with his own process of healing, of seeking the internal emotional coherence of his life. He pursued this same effort with his studies of character and language and morality on "Hill Street Blues," "N.Y.P.D. Blue," "Deadwood" and other TV series — his work has a fearless relish of complexity.

Getting to know your parents is a strange enterprise. They mediate so much of your understanding and experience of the world, including their own influence on you, and then you have to learn how that mediation is made up of their own experiences, and their parents', ad infinitum. All parents are unreliable narrators. Many conceal their personal histories from their children, or only offer an abridged version. That wasn't our dad's way.

His unreliability was its own established fact. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when we were in elementary school. He continued using drugs until 1999, when we were 15 and 10. His gambling addiction came to a head in 2011. In 2014, our parents sold the house we grew up in to pay off his horse racing debt and back taxes. Our father's demons were a part of our childhood, and our adulthood too. For better or worse, at every turn, we were privy to the truth of "life on life's terms" (one of his favorite phrases).

In that sense, there were no secrets to unearth as we worked with our dad, but there were variations, like the streetlamp stories. Versions of his time in Mexico working on an acid farm, of what happened to his first unpublished novel, of just how much money he lost at the racetrack (somewhere between $17 million and $100 million).

And there are different versions of our dad in the book. In 1966, a drunk college student finds a mentor in Robert Penn Warren and sees in Warren's discipline and enthusiasm for art a chance for another kind of life. In the summer of 1997, he claims to be sober when he isn't, pays for 30 college students to live in apartments for
the summer because he misses teaching, shows them episodes of "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and explains what he was doing line by line. In 2017, at home with Olivia and our mom, he speaks into the air, as he always would, the words that would be the prologue to his memoir. In 2021, from the memory care unit where he now lives, narrating the words that would be its final pages.

It's an odd thing to encounter so many different versions of a person simultaneously. Sometimes it would hit hard and we would be flooded with memories: Oh, wow, haven't heard that guy in a while. We remembered him and our feelings toward him at each of those different moments in his life and in our lives. We experienced a kind of mourning, too, as we said goodbye to different versions of him, imagining them gone forever, even while he was right there.

One of the strangest parts of this disease in our case has been associating a certain increasing sweetness with a sense of our father's decline. Now, when he isn't sure what else to say, he tells us he loves us.

We sometimes find ourselves missing the roughness and wildness of mind and speech that felt so core to his vitality. That was the part of him that could cause pain, but it also taught us there was no experience or feeling beyond comprehension, or beyond loving, which is another way of saying there's no experience or feeling that can't be made into art.

from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/opinion/david-milch-memoir.html

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Legendary "Deadwood" Creator David Milch Remembers (Almost) All of It.

By Sheila McClear -
September 16, 2022

For more than 40 years, David Milch has produced prolifically and influenced immeasurably the landscape of television. He wrote his first episodes in the last days of pre-cable network television, then co-created NYPD Blue, gathering Emmys along the way. He based the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood on the actual residents of an 1870s mining camp, prefiguring the current rage for neo-westerns like Yellowstone by nearly two decades. (Milch is nothing if not nimble: he had originally set the series in Nero's Rome; when HBO informed him it already had a Roman show in development, he simply pivoted to the Old West.)

Throughout his career, Milch's dialogue has been grounded in realism that takes on an otherworldly quality when spoken by his now-indelible characters: Deadwood's Al Swearengen, spouting profanity-laced Shakespearean soliloquies to the whores and gamblers at his brothel; NYPD Blue's Detective Andy Sipowicz, struggling with sobriety and cynicism in equal measure. Milch wrote dialogue that had never been heard on TV—unsparing and sometimes cruel, but with an undercurrent of compassion and redemption—and it shone like new money. His relentless rewriting is legend, seeking always, with a musician's ear for precision, to get the rhythms right. (He dictated rewrites of entire episodes while lying on his side.)

Now, at 77, Milch has published the memoir Life's Work, an unflinching assessment of himself as an artist and a man. Having grappled for much of his life with bipolar disorder and multiple addictions, Milch starts the memoir by acknowledging that he has Alzheimer's. "I'm losing my faculties," he writes on the book's first page. "Things seem a continuous taking away."

For a writer audacious enough to convince HBO that there would be an audience for a metaphysical contemplation of surfing (there wasn't—Milch's 2007 series John from Cincinnati was canceled after one season), the irony of writing a memoir in the midst of losing one's memory must have resonated. But as ever, Milch adapted. He didn't write the memoir entirely alone, he explains. As his condition worsened, it became a collaborative process, a "past recollection of mine being shared with me now by my family who are helping me compile this book," he writes.

    "I'm losing my faculties," Milch writes. "Things seem a continuous taking away."

Milch's early life was marked by overcoming appalling events and extreme dysfunction. He grew up Jewish in Buffalo; his father, a surgeon, was a drinker and gambler who took young David to the track. (He would later kill himself in front of Milch's brother and mother.) While attending Yale, Milch continued a relationship with heroin begun during his senior year of high school ("I wasn't shooting. I was snorting," he clarifies), but otherwise thrived. He joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity; one of his brothers was George W. Bush ("I liked him"). Literary scholar R. W. B. Lewis passed along his writing to Robert Penn Warren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet. Warren gave Milch an indoctrination into American literature—Faulkner, Melville, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne—that would deeply influence his TV writing. (Milch unfailingly refers to his mentor as "Mr. Warren.") 

Warren finessed Milch's admittance to the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he managed to receive an MFA in 1970 despite a detour to Mexico to manufacture LSD. ("There were a lot of guns. Several people expired . . . I didn't kill anyone, but I might as well have.") A draft-dodging stint at Yale Law School ended after Milch was arrested for shooting out a police cruiser's lights with a shotgun. Warren spirited Milch back to Yale in 1971 as a lecturer in English literature. After nine years, Milch later recalled, "My now-wife and I wanted to get married and have a family and I wasn't making any dough teaching and, of course, what I was making I was using to buy drugs."

And then Hollywood called, in the person of Milch's undergraduate roommate Jeff Lewis, who had been writing for a buzzy cop show called Hill Street Blues. Milch flew to L.A., met co-creator Steven Bochco, and wrote his first episode, "Trial by Fury." Right out of the gate, he won awards—an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, even a Humanitas Prize, for exploring "the human condition in a nuanced, meaningful way."  In a portent of things to come, Milch used the $15,000 prize to buy a racehorse.

Hill Street wrapped in 1987, and, after sampling rehab, Milch, with Bochco, created NYPD Blue—a smart, literate cop drama that first aired in 1993. Milch's idiosyncratic work ethic quickly manifested itself once the shooting began. It was pointless memorizing lines, recalls Dennis Franz, who won four Emmys portraying Detective Sipowicz, because Milch's scripts were always in flux. There would be a final run-through but the writer would swoop in and demand sweeping changes—"getting Milched," as the practice was known. (Milch suffered a heart attack on the set while arguing with Franz's costar, David Caruso, over changes in a script.) The process was "extremely stressful, difficult, satisfying, and rewarding," Franz says. "As an actor, I loved trying to decipher what he was talking about."

Mark Tinker worked with Milch as an executive producer and director on NYPD Blue and Deadwood. "You really learned how to produce a show, with all of the hurdles that Dave put in your way," Tinker says. "But the most important thing I learned from Dave was compassion and a deeper understanding of the human condition—the difference between us all, but also the sameness."

For every impingement on people's time, there was a weekly raffle of Milch's own money to soothe their irritation. "He came on the set with a bagful of hundreds of dollar bills," Franz marvels, some of it winnings from Santa Anita racetrack, where Milch was steadily perfecting his gambling addiction. He left $100 tips on $5 coffee tabs, but with genuine empathy behind the largesse. He could spot an AA member in need across a smoky room; he paid for lessons for any waiter who wanted to be an actor. "He was very helpful to a lot of people," says Tinker.

Milch especially enjoyed giving actors second chances. He offered Ed O'Neill—then near the end of his run as Al Bundy in Married . . . With Children—the lead role on Big Apple, his 2001 CBS cop drama. O'Neill, who was not sure he would be hired again after 10 years on Married . . . With Children, took the job and soon landed another long-running hit with Modern Family. "I've always said that I owed him a tremendous debt," says O'Neill. "He gave me the best stuff I ever had in front of the camera."

While supporting close friends and complete strangers, Milch himself suffered from crippling anxiety and a "tendency to become suicidally depressed when not working." While heroin helped him "organize and structure a day," his gambling—he claims to have bet $1 million in a single day—was ruinous. Over a ten-year period, Milch pissed away $23 million on horse racing and sports betting, according to a 2015 lawsuit filed by his wife, Rita Stern Milch, against his business managers. Also, they were $17 million in debt. This, despite Milch having earned an estimated $100 million from Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Deadwood. The matter was settled out of court, but the couple had to sell the Brentwood house where they raised their three children and move to a rental in Santa Monica.

"I think there were some tremendous psychological issues that weighed on Dave," says Tinker about Milch's self-sabotage. "I think his brain probably worked a little bit too hard, and he couldn't deal with it."

Milch would be in thrall to drugs until his early 50s. He's been off heroin and painkillers since 1999, and horse racing since 2002. In 2019, he moved into the memory-care unit of an assisted living facility. Eventually, his wife began picking him up in the morning hours—his most productive—and taking him to the guest house at their home, where he would work on the memoir and a Johnny Carson biopic script for HBO.

Milch's friends and associates observe that if his overindulgence in drugs was a compulsion, then writing is a drive. "He took it really, really seriously," says Carolyn Strauss, HBO's executive for Deadwood. "He's a person of great appetites, and he had a great appetite for writing." 

In Without a Net, a documentary about Milch's chaotic last weeks on NYPD Blue, Milch reflected: "I think it's too facile to say that [work] is an addiction—if you're referencing to my addiction to heroin to say that it's the same thing. Because an addiction to a drug is a way to not feel anything. And the work that I've tried to do is a way for sharing feelings."

from:
https://www.lamag.com/article/legendary-deadwood-producer-david-milch-remembers-almost-all-of-it/

[Sven2]

David Milch on Language and Obscenity in Deadwood   

The Series Creator on Westerns, Civility, and Iambic Pentameter


By David Milch
September 28, 2022

It seemed so obvious to me that the West I had encountered in my research had nothing to do with the Westerns I had experienced as a kid—Hopalong Cassidy, The Cisco Kid—which weren't even good on their own terms. They didn't interest me particularly even then. And going back and watching some classic Westerns, those too had very little to do with the West that I was studying (though they told some good stories).

Then I did some research to figure out how that had happened, how the Westerns of the 30s, 40s, and 50s had developed, and what I discovered was that it had everything to do with what Hollywood was about at that time, and nothing to do with what the West was about.

There had been a period of five or ten years in the late teens and early 20s when films had gotten a little racy. The dream factory was operated exclusively by immigrant Jews, but then some of the other popular thinkers of the 20s were guys like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, who were saying, "We've got to do something, the moneylenders are taking over," and worse than that. The Goldwyns and Lanskys and Mayers and Zanucks wanted to stay behind the scenes and keep making their movies and their money, and in order to keep doing that they wanted to send a message that they weren't going to rock the boat any more in terms of the stories they were telling.

They got together and hired a front Gentile named Hays, who instituted what was called the Hays Production Code that proclaimed, "Obscenity [. . .] in spoken word, gesture, episode, plot, is against divine and human law, and hence altogether outside the range of subject matter or treatment." That was the guys in Hollywood saying, let us run the show, and you will get 150 features a year that glorify innocence and an absence of conflict. And those rules governed all of television and film from 1934 to 1968.

But there's no rule that can stop art, though there are plenty that will change it. If you're an artist, when you're confronted with those kinds of strictures, you can refuse to participate or you can try and find a way to internalize them such that it doesn't distort the story you're trying to tell. And so some of the great storytellers in films of the 30s and 40s extrapolated a character who was very laconic. Not only didn't use swear words, this character just didn't talk much at all. His stoicism invoked a whole set of values.
The extremity of the language was, in its own way, one of the few alternatives to law.

There is a way to make a character like that credible, and that's part of what I saw in the historical Bullock and would explore in that character. But that's just one way to be, and I believed that would be a pretty rare, if important, type of person, very much the exception rather than the rule, and that what made him that way would be as dark and complicated, obscene let's say, as anyone else.

Every day, before I start to write, I pray, and I ask to be willing, and then I see what happens. "I offer myself to Thee to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will." People who've been in recovery might recognize that as the third-step prayer, and that's the one I say every day. It's my asking to have the perspective of self lifted and to give myself to the situation and the characters. I find that I function most effectively when I sort of disembody myself. I lie there on the floor and I talk and the words come up on the screen and then I fix the words, but I never actually lay my hands on anything, a computer or a typewriter, none of that.

It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say. In everything I read about the West, and gold camps in particular, one thing about which there was uniform agreement was the language that was used in these communities. The extremity of the language was, in its own way, one of the few alternatives to law. The same way that an ape may beat his chest to signify his willingness to do something that, if he had to do it every time he signified his willingness, he'd be in fights all the time, the obscenity was one alternative for people in the camps, and it was a crucial alternative for me to portray in the absence of these other ordering mechanisms.

It seemed to me that the people in that environment who had recourse to books were highly, highly motivated.

If you went out to an environment like this it wasn't because you were doing great in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. There were some personality attributes, maybe there was a warrant or two out. Because there were no laws, any question potentially had lethal implications. If I say, "Where are you from?" you're usually gonna say where you're from. In Deadwood, if you say, "Where are you from?," the response was, "What the fuck is that to you?" Immediately it becomes a potentially mortal situation. It was a way of announcing "Don't come in here with any weak shit." But the obscenity is not indiscriminate. It's calibrated according to the given personality and the given environment. The obscenity is meant to do a lot of different things.

The language, it seemed to me, had to serve two functions. The first was to beat down the viewers' preexisting expectation that any law would be obeyed, sentences so soaked with obscenity as to bleach out the expectation that civility could be expected to govern in any given scene. To ask the viewer to live in that emotional environment with the characters, that was the first part of it.

The second part was that I wanted to show how words generated meaning not because of any intrinsic quality but because of the context of emotional association in which they were expressed. The meaning would come from the community we build around and through the words. As the series unfolds, I wanted to show language complicating itself as one of the alternatives to statute, that people come to govern their own behavior as much through language as through law.

I was also interested in the patterns of speech and the distinction between people who had what was called book learning and people who didn't. The people who had book learning tended to speak in an almost Elizabethan way. This was Victorian times. For those who had book learning, it was the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Victorian literature, plus adventure stories, but that access wasn't strictly tied to class.

There's a story about Kit Carson riding seven days to get his new collection of Sir Walter Scott. It seemed to me that the people in that environment who had recourse to books were highly, highly motivated. It was an alternative state of being for them, which stood in contrast to the way they were living. And so I found it credible that people who had recourse to that sort of rhetoric would go for the gusto. Trying to get those rhythms right was a challenge, but it was one I very much enjoyed.

Most of the show is written in iambic pentameter. I believe one way God says, "I too have a hand here" is in the rhythms and metrics of speech, that the metrics of speech are important and representative of our fellowship even in those of us who feel, mistakenly, that we are separate from each other as individuals.

When a character in Deadwood, or anyone, talks in certain locutions, unbeknownst to themselves, they honor a divine presence.

_____________________________


Adapted from the book LIFE'S WORK: A Memoir by David Milch. Copyright © 2022 by David Milch. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

from:
https://lithub.com/david-milch-on-language-and-obscenity-in-deadwood/

[Sven2]

How 'Deadwood' Updated the Traditional Western TV Series
By
David Hunter


How did David Milch's hit series Deadwood update the Western? Its several endings give us several answers.

Unlike most of the shows of TV's golden age, Deadwood was canceled prematurely. This bestowed a lot of unintended authority on the closing moments of its unexpectedly final episode. Over a decade later, the story was picked back up, as the cast reunited for Deadwood: the Movie. But the storyline was also continued, in another way, in a special feature on the DVD box set titled "Deadwood: the Meaning of Endings," a recorded conversation with iconoclastic showrunner David Milch in the immediate aftermath of the cancelation in which he spoke about how things might have continued if the show had gone on. He also offered, as consolation to disappointed fans, some paraphrased wisdom from the philosopher William James: "the idea of the end of a thing as inscribing the final meaning, is one of the lies... that we use to organize our lives."

So, we have a lot of endings to choose from when we try and decide what Deadwood means to us, and how it might relate to the Westerns before it. And on top of that, Milch gives us the choice to ignore all of them.

 Deadwood: A Show About Progress?

The final moment of the original run of Deadwood was a powerful bit of punctuation. It strongly compelled you to perceive the show in a certain way, a certain shape. The first three seasons of the show followed a distinct trajectory, one of growth. In the pilot, the town of Deadwood was just beginning to get off the ground. People were starting to flood the town, situated on the occupied ancestral land of the Sioux, Cherokee, and Iroquois, drawn by the gold recently discovered in the Black Hills.

Over the run of the show, Deadwood would prosper and grow. It would form an ad hoc government, and the new arrivals would form a community. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful and entrenched forces from within the United States would attempt to swoop in and usurp what Deadwood's founders had built. This conflict climaxes with the coming of the ruthless mining baron George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), who arrives in Deadwood for the third season, to oversee the consolidation of most of the gold-bearing land under his control. What Hearst discovers is that Deadwood is a strong enough community to, if not resist his will entirely, at least partially deflect it and make it impossible for him to personally stay in town. This is the culmination of two seasons in which the characters of Deadwood learn to care for each other, out of affection and need, and in the process become resilient.

The most dramatically important relationship is between the show's two leads, Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Al Swearengen (Ian McShane). They begin as enemies — Bullock is a lawman, and Swearengen is a murderous saloon owner and pimp — but they learn they must rely on one another, and so form a symbiotic relationship. Bullock will become the face of lawful Deadwood, while turning a blind eye to Swearengen's crimes. Swearengen will do all the killing that needs to be done, but always in the service of the greater needs of the town.

We watch Swearengen kill a lot of people, always after a period of moral calculation. But the final murder is the worst. Series regular Trixie (Paula Malcomson) has attempted to assassinate the vile George Hearst, and failed, and Hearst is calling for her death. Instead, Swearengen murders Jen (Jennifer Lutheran), another one of the trafficked women under his control. She's a total innocent but is less familiar to him than Trixie, and Hearst is unlikely to be able to tell the difference between their dead bodies. After the ruse succeeds, Johnny Burns (Sean Bridgers), one of Swearengen's lieutenants, who had a crush on the murdered girl, asks if she suffered. Swearengen gruffly tells him that he made her death as painless as possible. Then, while alone, he delivers the iconic line "wants me to tell him something pretty," while scrubbing up the blood.

A Few Takes on Deadwood's Ambiguous Ending

Swearengen's line came to be seen as the message Deadwood existed to deliver. In fact, in the video above, even as Milch is urging viewers to resist the impulse to let the ending of a show define it, he quotes this exact line. The moment is overpowering because while it acknowledges the horrors of the American frontier, and expresses contempt for anyone who won't acknowledge them, it also implies that these horrors can be confronted, and accommodated. It echoes another famous Swearengen quote: "The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back."

But, context is important. What is the ultimate purpose that gives this suffering, both endured and inflicted on others, meaning? If you watched Deadwood as it aired, the pattern you saw was of a town that only grew in size and strength, acquiring increasingly powerful enemies, but able to battle them to a draw. In this context, the losses taken by the people of Deadwood are casualties in a larger ideological struggle against the wholly depraved forces of American capital, which would gladly accept a human toll hundreds of times worse than the cost of doing business. If the town of Deadwood is growing stronger by the season, perhaps Seasons 4 and 5 would have been the ones where the town would finally be able to triumph over its enemies. The premature cancelation allows these dreams, even as its final moments encourage hard-nosed realism.

Only listening to Milch explain what would have actually happened if the show had continued dispels this fantasy. What did Milch foresee for the town? Destruction by fire. That Deadwood might burn to the ground is signposted several times throughout the show, and happened in reality. But, though the town would rebuild, Milch imagined that the influence of Al Swearengen would be permanently diminished. Whatever you think about a Deadwood without Al, it's not one that continues to take on the forces of agglomerated capital. That might have led to an ending in which all seems to have been for nothing.

The Deadwood Movie Changes the Series' Ending While Best Summarizing Its Message

Of course, none of this story was ever put on film. Not only that, but when Deadwood: The Movie returned in 2019, in the digital age, none of these events seemed to have ever taken place. When we see Deadwood again, most of the characters are exactly where we've left them, seeming to have passed the entirety of the intervening years in cozy domesticity (cancelation treated them better than us). The movie displays a sentimentality that the Al Swearengen of 2006 might not have liked. Quite literally, in fact; the movie provides several of its characters with "pretty" deaths, even symbolically returning Jen to life.

But in all this sentimentality I do think you find the best summary of what Deadwood was really all about. Milch's great gift as a writer is his ability to empathize with all of his characters, high and low, and his willingness to put words of great eloquence and understanding in the mouths of all of them. He likes people, or seems to in his capacity as a writer, and the driver of his affection isn't what values they stand for, but simply proximity and familiarity.

The pain and damage of Deadwood isn't a calculated loss in a battle between two competing ideologies, either one of which could triumph. (Although, in the movie, Milch allows the possibility for the first time that George Hearst might not "own the... future.") That pain is only meant to pay for the momentary happiness of the people who happen to live in Deadwood, even if the town is eventually absorbed seamlessly back into the United States and that happiness disappears without a trace. And, even if those original townsfolk are simply lucky to have the purchase they do, other unlucky people had to die for them to have it. In Deadwood, any quantity of human happiness and freedom is precious and worth its price. That is not a morally impregnable ethos, for sure, but while you're watching the show, it feels like something you believe.

from:https://collider.com/deadwood-western-tv-show/

[Sven2]

David Milch has Alzheimer's disease. He also has a new screenplay
by Greg Braxton
Dec.14,2023

David Milch sat in a Playa Vista restaurant, eyeing a small cheese pizza in front of him. The story he was telling is true.
"I was running bets for my old man and half a dozen people when I was a boy," Milch said, flashing a soft smile at the recollection of hanging out at the racetrack. "They'd tell me, 'Bet $10 on the seven horse and shut up!' For the big races, it was frightening, carrying around $1,000 when I was 7 years old."
Encouraged by his companions in the nearly empty restaurant — Rita, his wife of 43 years, and his good friend, John Hallenborg — Milch continued to weave his memories of those bygone days into indelible images: magnificent horses thundering across the finish line and "degenerates" wagering staggering sums.
In many ways, it was a familiar scenario. Telling vivid stories populated with colorful characters, good and not so good, has been the defining work of Milch's life. That ability made him royalty in Hollywood as he wrote for the classic police procedural "Hill Street Blues" and created provocative fare such as the gritty cop drama "NYPD Blue," with Steven Bochco, and the acclaimed neo-western "Deadwood."
But this was not just a casual lunch to indulge in nostalgia.

While Milch, 78, can still tap into his past to construct a compelling yarn, his thoughts are filtered through a degrading lens. In 2019 he disclosed that he has Alzheimer's disease. After being at the center of the TV world, his career came to an abrupt halt. Many in the legion of friends and associates who used to surround him when he was a big shot gradually drifted away.
"I'm losing my facilities" he wrote in his 2022 memoir "Life's Work," composed with the help of his wife and children. "I wonder, and not infrequently, 'Is it gone for good?' My mind."
But as he picked at his pizza, Milch demonstrated that his mind is far from "gone." His vibrant spirit and artistry are thriving in a manner that might surprise the families of those affected by the degenerative disease.
David Milch has a new screenplay.

For more than a year, driven by a dual mission of keeping Milch's artistic muscles alive and shattering the stigma that shadows those who suffer from dementia and Alzheimer's disease, Rita and John Hallenborg have established a routine of working lunches intended to stimulate the TV legend's creative juices.

"Work is at the core of David's spirit — it's his essence," said Rita, sitting next to her husband at one of the lunches. "I really don't care about the end result or whether this gets made." The idea, Hallenborg added, "is to keep David engaged and bring him a source of joy."
The result, a feature called "The Last Horsemen," could return Milch to the spotlight nearly five years after his last produced credit, "Deadwood: The Movie," was released.
It's another unexpected twist in the life journey of Milch, who was known not only for his considerable showbiz triumphs but also his notorious dark side. In addition to being diagnosed with bipolar disease in the early 1990s, his addiction to gambling and drugs did extensive damage — he lost millions at the track and on sports betting. His volatile personality made him feared on and off the set.
"The Last Horsemen" is the realization of a Milch story that was never developed, a narrative set in the horse racing world that centers on a corrupt gangster and his son and their impact on a young couple. Like other Milch projects, it contains raw language, complex relationships and unflinching violence.

Elements of the story came together as Rita was focusing on "Life's Work." "David would ramble and tell me stories, and it was often the same story," she told The Times. "It was often David's story in different manifestations, and the characters were often him and his father. David was abused as a child. It was like all these things that he'd been working through his whole life."
"There was the outline of a story he would keep coming back to," so Rita called Hallenborg, who had worked with Milch on various projects. "I needed someone who could turn that outline into script form," she added.
She trusted Hallenborg, who had been visiting Milch at the assisted living facility where he now resides. In addition to writing, their bond was built on their mutual love for horse racing — they'd spent numerous afternoons at the track — and their shared experience with addiction.
"Rita told me that David was absolutely animated about this story," Hallenborg said.
At lunches during the next year, the tale was fleshed out. "We'd ask David, 'What do you think of this?' And it will be like the click of a light on his face," said Rita. "I push 'record' on the phone, and it goes from there. It's jumbled and confused, but in there is a kernel of something that's real David."
Rita would email the recording to Hallenborg, who "would take from that the gold that David had mined" and incorporate that with his own voice.
"David, I want to talk today about happiness for gamblers," Hallenborg said at one outing. "Did you feel happiest when you won at the track, or were you anxious to parlay your winnings back into the game?"
Milch replied that he "didn't feel any imperative to prove myself again."

"I think David is happy for a brief time when gambling ... minutes, hours," offered Rita. "His high was being at risk, having everything on the table."
"Absolutely," Milch said.
"When he was happy, I was happy," Rita continued. "But no, I didn't enjoy the gambling."
"She felt the danger, even at a remove," Milch said.
At times, the memories came flooding back. "My dad was a big tipper," Milch said. "He would take me down to the winner's circle, carrying me."
Recalling how he got more serious about gambling in high school, Milch said, "My old man tightened up the cashier to carry his bets. And I would have a little action on the side. There was so much action going on. At some level, I became an irritant because I was carrying all this stuff, and sometimes I would forget."
Although he was quieter at other moments, Milch was attentive as Rita and Hallenborg exchanged stories. "Even when he was working at the office, David was keeping tabs on what was happening at the track," Hallenborg said. "He would send people to the track to place his bets or pick up money. He would talk to the trainers."
"Now I'm the wretched wretch you see before you," Milch quipped, much to the delight of his tablemates.
Rita and Hallenborg were both stunned by Milch's enthusiasm when they presented him with pages of the script. They said his sharpest talent, still, is shaping and editing screenplays.
"He'll just start in on them," Rita said. "I compare it to a musician playing an instrument. He just starts riffing. He can still bring the magic, even though he'll forget or get disconnected."
That disconnection is visible in one draft of "The Last Horsemen." While making notes around lines of dialogue, Milch suddenly segued into composing a scene for "NYPD Blue," which includes exchanges between Det. Andy Sipowicz (played in the series by Dennis Franz) and other characters from the ABC TV show, which ran from 1993 to 2005.
As "The Last Horsemen" script reached its final stages with Milch adding his notes, Rita had other contributions and insights on characters that significantly improved the story, Hallenborg said. After those additions, they thought maybe, just maybe, "The Last Horsemen" might have enough commercial appeal to be produced.
While the screenplay is shopped around, the focus of the unusual partnership has switched to an idea hatched by Hallenborg that he hopes will lead to a TV series. The story is inspired by two young men he met on social media — one who has been in recovery and another who has been in and out of prison.
"He's a fascinating, talented, handsome, smart, charming sociopath," said Hallenborg of the second man. "I'm 38 years sober, but prior to that I had plenty of association with people who were outlaws. This is not unfamiliar ground to me."
Gambling and racetrack shenanigans are once again a key part of the narrative, and Hallenborg continues to prod his former mentor with questions about his racing past and the culture of gambling, using those details to add authenticity to the new story.
Hallenborg, who has a 40-year background as a freelance writer for business publications, is open about his own ambitions, keenly aware that any successful project that links him with Milch will heighten his own profile in Hollywood. He has optioned three screenplays that were never produced.
Even so, his work with Milch has an emotional element that's much deeper than any suggestion of fame or finances. Milch helped support Hallenborg years ago when he was in treatment for prostate cancer and could not work, once pre-paying him for two scripts that were never developed. Their new partnership is Hallenborg's way of returning the favor.
"From a spiritual standpoint, this is the most rewarding work of my life," Hallenborg said. "Yes, it would be great if this would lead to something. But my No. 1 priority is to keep David's engine going."
At one of their recent outings, Hallenborg expressed awe at what the trio have already achieved in helping to craft "The Last Horsemen": "Sometimes a little inflection from David, something that he just adds, will give insight into characters that was not there before. That is the magic of the guy."
Rita reached out and affectionately stroked her husband's hair. "See, Dave? You're magic."
Milch nodded his head and smiled: "Shows you what prison can do."
That exchange could easily fit into a Milch-penned drama, although it's hard to reconcile the mild-mannered person who slips $10 to the waitress before she even takes orders from the table ("Please indulge him — it's important," Rita advises the startled server) with the fiery force of nature who once referred to himself in an essay for young screenwriters as "David f— Milch."
:::
Although Rita is heartened by her husband's ability to remain creative at this stage of the disease, she acknowledges a harsher reality.
"David's mind is getting harder and harder to get to," she said later. "It's heartbreaking. He's leaving, piece by piece. He lives in a state of agitation, brought on [by] a sense of unfulfilled obligations. He has paranoid moments, which is common with dementia."
Two oddly kindred spirits wind up on the same page
That agitation can be explosive, as evidenced by an early-morning visit to the assisted living home. Hallenborg had arranged with Milch in advance to go over some script pages based on conversations the pair had a few days earlier.
But minutes after Hallenborg escorted Milch from his apartment to a conference room, it became clear that something was not right. Milch frowned as he riffled through the pages.
"Why haven't I seen this before?" he finally asked.
"Because I just wrote it," Hallenborg replied.
After a few tense minutes, Milch grew more confused.
Realizing the strain, Hallenborg apologized: "I tried to call you earlier, David, and there was no answer. You said I was imposing when I came to your room to get you, and that was not my intention."
"Well, your intention is not the be-all and end-all," Milch snapped.
"I never said it was."
"YOU JUST DID!" Milch fired back. "You just gave me this to read, and I don't know what the f— it is."
"OK, I apologize for imposing on your morning," Hallenborg said calmly. "It was not my intention to do that."
"It wasn't?"
"No, David. I've stopped by here many times. Today there's friction and bad communication between us and I have to accept that. I really am sorry for imposing on you."
"If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done it!"
After returning Milch to his room, Hallenborg said the encounter would have been smoother if Rita had been present. It's a mantle she's become used to wearing.
"In horse racing, there's the goat, which is to keep the horse calm," Rita explained. "If I'm there, David can reach out and put his hand on my knee, and that will make him feel better. I see that as my role — the calming influence."
Milch's current situation might be compared to the later years of Tony Bennett and Glen Campbell, popular singers who were able to keep performing years after they were diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
Monica Moreno, senior director of care and support at the Alzheimer's Assn., said Milch's ability to access his talent for storytelling is similar to the experiences of the two singers.
"His ability to be a TV writer and producer was such a huge component of who he is," Moreno said. "Considering the work he had in this area, it's not uncommon to see where they're discussing things he's done his whole life that it stimulates those memories and allows him to engage."
:::
Milch first made his mark in the 1980s as a writer and executive producer on "Hill Street Blues," which was co-created by Bochco. He and Bochco went on to co-create "NYPD Blue," which broke network barriers, and frequently stirred controversy, with its foul language and nudity. The series was a massive hit and won numerous Emmy awards.
Milch's creation of the HBO series "Deadwood" in 2004 was another success, proving that he could extend his writing prowess far beyond the urban milieu of police precincts and crime scenes. The revisionist western, set in the real-life mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota, starred Timothy Olyphant and Ian McShane at the head of an ensemble of evocative characters and was marked by brutal violence and toe-curling obscenities, often projected with Shakespearean flair.
After "Deadwood," though, Milch struggled to match his earlier accomplishments. In 2007, HBO yanked his trippy surfer family drama "John From Cincinnati" after just one season, and the premium network also canceled his 2012 horse racing drama "Luck" after one season when three horses died during production.

Work was one of Milch's addictions, said Rita. "It was all very intense, and that's probably a part of the attraction — this heightened sense of reality. He worked seven days a week for all his working life. We lived separate lives, but it was always intense and scary. We would be walking on eggshells."
A typical day now for Milch begins in the morning, when he will read and edit scripts and manuscripts. "People bring him stuff to read, and he'll go over pages with a pencil," said Rita, who visits him several times a week.
"People ask me about him all the time," Hallenborg said. But "he doesn't get many visitors, versus the whirlwind of people who wanted his attention back in the day. They're scared of what he's going through."
Moreno said the main thing for families affected by Alzheimer's is that as the disease progresses, "there is still the ability for families and friends of the individual to maintain a connection to that person's likes and dislikes. It's important to treat them with dignity and respect."
Even though she is pleased with the breakthrough, Rita is realistic about the future.
"I'm aware of what David is able to do at this point, and what he was able to do when he was at his best," she said. "We're at a different point, and we have to accept that."
In the final pages of his memoir, Milch addresses his plight in another true story.
"I still hear voices. I still tell stories. There are those in my head and another in my throat and others in my work. There is the voice in my wife's head and the one in my children's heads. The deepest gift I think an individual can experience is to accept himself as part of a larger living thing, and that's what we are as a family. Shut the f— up, Dave. I still hear that voice too."

from:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-12-14/david-milch-deadwood-nypd-blue-alzheimers-disease-dementia-rita-stern-milch-john-hallenborg

or:
https://archive.ph/BLEAa#selection-2123.0-2319.388