[SaveJFC Admin]

Besides, Mr.Milch is, unusually for a celebrity, open and painfully frank about his personal life. I watched a lot of his YouTube lectures and video recordings and can say it is at times uncomfortable to hear and sometimes simply heartbreaking.

Points well taken. 

We'll hope and wait for Deadwood!

Ditto!

[Sven2]

This article doesn't reveal any major news about Mr.Milch, although it provides details of some of the recent changes in his personal and professional life.
Sven2

http://buffalo.com/2016/04/24/news/movies/breaking-free-of-his-demons-david-milch-stays-in-the-hollywood-game/

SANTA MONICA, CALIF. – David Milch points to a framed black-and-white photo of a man in a suit, clutching a rake, cleaning a pile of garbage.

"It's my wife's idea of my mind," he said. The debris, piled high and towering like a mountain, represents the past. The rake is twice the height of the man. "His instrument is more powerful than he is," Milch said.
Milch's instrument is writing. It, too, is more powerful than he, and it happens here in this small room inside a small blue house on a Santa Monica side street. This house is the office for Milch's company, Red Board Productions. It's nice, but nice as in modest, not glamorous. The house has white lattice trim. There's a picnic table on a patchy front lawn.
This is where Milch makes stories. This is his Hollywood.
It's not what you'd expect from the Buffalo native who created shows like "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood," the man who racked up dozens of awards and many tens of millions of dollars for his writing. Some of those awards – a plaque of his star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a handful of Humanitas prizes, a pair of Peabody trophies, "the ones I didn't sell," Milch said – are in the next room over. So is a cream-colored couch with a yellowish stain. "This is a lovely sofa," said Milch, wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans. "I don't know what this is. Wax of some kind?"
The place has the feel of a startup production company, one started by a scrappy pair of young producers who scraped together some money, salvaged some furniture and masked their bare-bones operation with unbreakable self-belief.
But it's not. This is the headquarters of a 71-year-old Hollywood legend, a man who's widely considered to be one of the most celebrated writers in television history, a man whose creativity danced with demons to bring him to this place.
On the wall above the sofa are index cards with the names of characters from "Shadow Country," a novel Milch is adapting for HBO. Steps away, in the writing room, are stacks of treatments and scripts for a revival-to-be of "Deadwood," his acclaimed HBO series set in the lawless Wild West.
There's a painting, done by his wife, Rita Milch, with colorful splashes of greens and blues. It shows the Milches' estate on Martha's Vineyard, the place where they used to bring their three now-grown children. They don't go there anymore. That place, along with their Southern California mansion, was put on the market. Today, the Milches live in a Santa Monica rental home. They're in debt – $17 million of debt – according to media reports.
But they don't seem unhappy. They don't seem defeated.
"Today I'm blessed to be relieved of certain obsessions that have organized my behavior in the past," Milch said in his soft growl of a voice. "Is that adequately euphemistic?"
Milch is writing. He's teaching. And the only bets he's making are on his own creative muscles.
...
Growing up in the Delaware-Amherst area of Buffalo, Milch, a Nichols School graduate, was the second of two sons. His father, Elmer, was a physician; his mother, Mollie, served on the Buffalo Board of Education. Milch's family was close-knit, he said, but didn't spend a lot of time doing things together. The influence of his father ran deep. Elmer Milch, said his son, had three primary interests: his family, his profession, and horse racing.
David's older brother, Robert, embraced one of his dad's passions and became a doctor. David latched on to another: Horse racing.
Starting at age 6, David traveled with his father every August to the races in Saratoga. "He was kind of an elusive figure in my life," David said. "That was about the only thing we really did together."
On that first trip, Elmer Milch handed David a $20 bill and had the waiter run his little boy's bets. David won a third of his wagers that day, "but I kept all the tickets," Milch wrote in his 1995 book, "True Blue." Those early lessons in handicapping and wagering stoked what became a fiery obsession. As a wealthy television writer and producer, Milch became a horse owner and won two Breeders' Cup races. Milch was a big bettor, winning – and losing – loads of money. (He also parlayed his passion for breeding into an HBO series called "Luck," starring Dustin Hoffman. It was canceled in its first season after the deaths of multiple horses raised animal-welfare concerns.)
"I think that the interest in horse racing was very much of a permutation of my relationship with (my father)," Milch said, "so there was a driven-ness to it, and a compulsion that ... wasn't necessarily one of the best parts of my life."
Milch has battled a battery of demons: drinking, drugs, death.
He had a young friend in Buffalo named Almon – nicknamed "Judgey," after his grandfather, who was a judge. "He looked like Puck, like a clownish figure, a bit of a devil," Milch said. "Great grin, always looking for trouble, and it tended to find him."
Milch and Judgey drank. A lot. One night, Milch recalled, Judgey had a 106-degree fever and was standing by a second-floor railing. He leaned over and toppled, falling to the first floor and landing on his bottom.
"He got right up," Milch recalled, "and I had the sense at that moment that this guy was immortal. Nothing was going to take him."
Something did.
Milch doesn't recall all the details – he thinks this happened in Ithaca, "but I'm probably wrong" – but Judgey was killed in a car accident. He was 16.
Struggling to make sense of his friend's death, Milch coped by writing. He penned a story in which he imagined Judgey's family from the time of his death until his funeral. By the time he wrote the story, Milch was 19 or 20 and a student at Yale University. He decided to show it to one of his English professors, the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren.
"It looked like a very formed and conceived piece of work," Milch said. "It wasn't, but Mr. Warren saw something in it."
Warren took the young writer on as an apprentice of sorts, having him read drafts of poetry, and later involving him in a multiyear project studying the work of great American writers. After Milch graduated from Yale, Warren set up Milch with a teaching fellowship at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, where literary luminaries including Kurt Vonnegut were on faculty.
That time became a hazy period in Milch's history: He briefly enrolled in Yale Law School for a draft deferment, got mixed up with guns and drugs, ended up for a time in Mexican jail. "I was in a little trouble," Milch said, offering no details. "I was more or less in and out of trouble pretty continuously."
After his stint locked up south of the border, Milch ended up back in Iowa, where he studied for his master's degree and, according to a 2005 profile in the New Yorker, had a side job manufacturing dope. Following that, he returned to Yale, now as a teacher and still working with Warren. He met a young woman named Rita Stern, fell in love, and they married in 1982 – the same year Milch moved to Hollywood and began writing for the cop show "Hill Street Blues." He eventually became executive producer of the show, earning enough money to fly to Vegas every night to gamble, then jet back to California for work the next morning.
If "Hill Street" established Milch financially – according to that New Yorker profile, he earned $12 million on a three-year contract – his next big move etched his place in Hollywood history: With his former "Hill Street" boss Steven Bochco, Milch created the landmark cop show "NYPD Blue." Bochco ran production; Milch ran the writing. With edgy language – a Milch hallmark – and occasional nudity, the ABC series, which ran from 1993 to 2005, redefined network TV boundaries.
It also made Milch a fortune, one his demons would wrest away.
"Listen, where there's a will, there's a way," he said wryly at a 2006 Storytellers Series talk organized by the Writers Guide Foundation. "I have (lost) millions and millions of dollars. There is not an amount of money that a writer can earn that I can't blow."
Milch, with the slightest smile curving his lips, was talking about horse racing. His audience laughed. They probably thought he was joking, or at least exaggerating. He wasn't.
...
"How the $100 Million 'NYPD Blue' Creator Gambled Away His Fortune."
That February 2016 headline turned heads and dropped jaws. The Hollywood Reporter claimed that Milch, whom the publication estimated earned $100 million in his career, is $17 million in debt and on a repayment plan with the IRS.

It also claimed Milch, a race-track fixture, had lost $25 million gambling between 2000 and 2011. A lawsuit filed by Rita Milch against the couple's business managers Nigro Karlin Segal Feldstein & Bolno LLP claims she wasn't kept fully informed of his large withdrawals.
To prevent her husband from gambling, Rita Milch provides him $40 a week in cash.
The article also said the Milches put their Brentwood, Calif., mansion and Martha's Vineyard estate on the market, and sold personal items to raise money. (The Brentwood home sold in 2014 for $4.8 million.) They now live in a rental home not far from the house converted to an office for David's company.
In separate interviews with The News, both David and Rita Milch acknowledged the story was accurate. Rita Milch noted some of the figures were off, but declined to clarify them, citing ongoing litigation.
Though neither discussed the lawsuit in depth, both are open about David's struggles, which they say are in the past.
"All I do is work and be with my family," David said.
"That is true," Rita said in a separate conversation. "We have cleared away all the rest." Then, laughing softly she said, "Oh, Dave ... "
In a telephone interview, Rita's devotion to her husband is clear and unwavering. Asked why she fell in love with him many years ago, she said, "His mind, his sense of humor, and his generosity. Those are three pretty good ones, right there."
She laughed softly, and continued. "I've never met anyone else like him, that compares to him," she said. "Yeah, he's complicated and he can be difficult, but he's also wonderful and generous and sweet and to me, very touching. He just melts my heart."
Milch speaks of Rita in equally endearing terms. He says she raised their children – Elizabeth, 32, who works for Genius.com; Ben, 30, an artist; and Olivia, 27, a screenwriter – "pretty much on her own, and they've turned out wonderfully well."
"There's no question that had I not been blessed with that relationship," he said, "things wouldn't have turned out well."
Did his wife save him? Milch pondered the question for a beat.
"Sure," he said. "Sure. Not by grabbing me by the scruff of the neck, but simply by not participating, and judging as minimally as possible. So during momentary bouts of lucidity, I always saw what was possible, if only I'd stop."
...
Here's what's possible: Despite the financial tremors and attention on his personal life, Milch is still writing. Under his deal with HBO, the network sometimes tells him what to write. An example of that is the adaptation of "Shadow Country," a novel by Peter Matthiessen set in the 1900s about a land developer who is also a serial killer.
Milch also can pitch projects of his own creation, such as the revival of "Deadwood," likely to be released in one, possibly two, film-length installments.
Milch's unorthodox creative process is rooted in his long battle with obsessive-compulsive tendencies: He never touches a keyboard when he writes; it's a distraction. Instead, he sits in a black leather chair and verbalizes the script. One of his assistant writers, a muscular, tattooed man named Scott, types Milch's words from behind a desk. One computer screen faces Scott; another two are turned outward, toward Milch, who sees the script develop in front of him. He'll revise – and revise, and revise – until each sentence achieves perfection.
Earl Brown, an actor on "Deadwood," compared Milch's writing process to watching a piece of coal being compressed into a diamond. "I thought that was such a beautiful way to put it," said Rita Milch.
"It's kind of an intuitive process," Milch said. "I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn't. Someone said, 'Man's accidents are God's purposes. We miss the good we seek, and we do the good we little sought.' You've just got to stay available to doing the good you little sought."
Here's what else is possible: Milch is still teaching and mentoring. Twice a week, sometimes more, actor Michael Harney, who worked for Milch on "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood," comes to the office with his 17-year-old son Dylan, who is autistic. Dylan writes and shares his work with Milch, who gives feedback.
The invitation to write was extended by Milch during a lunch with Harney. Milch asked the actor how Dylan was doing in English class, and Harney said, "He's doing OK. It's kind of standardized, how they're teaching it."
"Well, I can teach it," Milch said to Harney, who at first thought Milch was joking. But it was a serious offer.
"Bring him in," Milch said.
So Harney did, and soon began writing alongside his son in the room with the old couch and the awards that haven't been sold. Dylan writes about his observations and feelings. His father, who often has played the role of law enforcer on camera, has been working on poetry, short stories and screenplays.
Rita Milch said her husband does "some of his best thinking" when he's teaching. David Milch takes it further. He's his "best self," he said, when teaching.
"You want to be your best self, and that happens at least 2 percent of the time," he said. "But typically your best chance to be your best self is when you're teaching. It's because you respect yourself. So much of what we do is shame-based, and when you're teaching, you have the opportunity to answer to the best parts of your nature, so I'm always grateful for that chance."
For Harney, who's spent Dylan's entire life fighting for his son's "right to be heard, to be seen, to participate," Milch's interest has been life-changing.
"David never wrote him off," Harney said. "He just says, 'Hey man, what do you got? Keep going. What do you got? Keep going.' "
Which is what Milch does, too: He keeps going.

email: toshei@buffnews.com

[Sven2]

True Detective Season 3: Can David Milch Fix This?

Deadwood creator David Milch's involvement in True Detective season 3 is news that we don't know how to process.

       HBO loves Davids.

And not David as in the concept of an underdog but literal Davids.

Davids have been behind some of the most successful series in the network's history. Each show in HBO's unofficial Holy Trinity was produced by a David. There's David Chase, who created and ran The Sopranos; David Simon, who created and ran The Wire, and David Milch, who created and ran Deadwood. That's not even to mention Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Each show and each David is an inextricable part of both HBO and TV history. Since the completion of each show, however, each David has had a different level of involvement with the network that helped put them on the map.

Chase still seems a little baffled that his whole "good television" thing actually took off and has spent his time either relaxing or trying to make movies. Simon has reteamed with the network multiple times in service of his own creative visions like Generation Kill, Show Me a Hero, and the upcoming '70s porn drama The Deuce.

It's Milch, however, who has the most interesting relationship with his former and now current employer. When his Western masterpiece Deadwood was prematurely canceled by HBO in 2006, he tried his hand at getting other series off the ground at different networks. In the end though none of them panned out and he resumed working with HBO.

The network hosted the one and only season of Milch's bizarre, mystical surfer drama John from Cincinnati. Then some years later they gave another crack at a Milch show in horse racing drama Luck. Luck was well received but was canceled early due to safety concerns for the horses.

Stories from the Deadwood set sound more like C.I.A. experimentsTechnically no HBO show that Milch has produced has ended its run of its own accord, which is relatively uncommon for the pay cable network. And to go along with his shows' volatile history, Milch is known to be a volatile, interesting personality as well. Stories from the Deadwood set sound more like C.I.A. experiments to test what actors will tolerate rather than production of a TV show.

Just take in some of this batshittery from a 2006 Slate article about the set of Deadwood.

    "'Apes beat their chests so they don't have to fight 24 hours a day,' Milch says, before veering into a discussion of the place of hyperbole in the oracular tradition of the American frontier and the role of language in 'muscling up' for the rugged work of mining—as well as how profanity helps create a sense of vagabond community among those with a threadbare, uneducated grasp of the language."

    "It adds up to a sly and historically accurate end-run around those who would complain that a fuck is still a fuck. Keith Carradine (Wild Bill Hickok) reveals that Milch even composed an FCC-worthy treatise on the subject should HBO executives have needed it in a legal defense. The lesson to any would-be TV provocateur: Do the research."

Or check out this AV Club interview with legendary character actor Stephen Tobolowsky about his time on Deadwood:

    "And he said, 'Just so you know, we're not shooting what we just rehearsed.' And I said, 'We're not?' And he said, 'No. In fact, you're not gonna shoot today at all.' And I said, 'Okay,' and they sent me home. And I ended up doing, like, nine shows that season. And three shows the third season. And you never knew what you were doing. You had to go out at dawn to rehearse, because David liked to shoot with natural light. So you rehearsed in the dark at 5 a.m. in pitch black," Tobolowsky said.

    "You rehearsed with the director of the show, and then David would come in and see the rehearsal. And then he would throw something to the director like, 'Maybe instead of doing the scene this way, we could do it during a cattle stampede.' Or, 'Stephen? Why don't you do that scene, but instead, do it as if you were a bird.'"

    "And I said, 'What?' 'You know, a bird. With wings.' And I said, I know what a bird is, David, but I don't know exactly what you mean.' He said, 'Just when you do it, pretend you have wings and could fly and squawk. Do whatever you want to be a bird.' And he would throw these little things at you. We never knew what we were doing."

Tobolowsky goes on to say that he broke down crying on the set of Deadwood twice because he was so happy and overwhelmed with the beauty of the art they were making.

Milch is the platonic ideal of a tortured genius for television. He's strange off-putting, difficult yet undeniably brilliant and in complete creative control. He's like if Ernest Hemingway was raised on Perry Mason, Star Trek and The Twilight Zone.

In short, he's everything that True Detective's Nic Pizzolatto wants to be.

The first season of True Detective is undeniably cool. Even those who didn't like it (misguided as they may be) can't deny that it had an intriguingly creepy aesthetic all its own.

In that sense, it perfectly mirrored the personality and temperament of its showrunner. HBO put a lot of trust in Nic Pizzolatto and for one season at least were rewarded. The short story and novel writer with little TV experience was shockingly up for the task of writing and producing 8 hours of prestige television.

Pizzolatto is clearly a guy who believes in the mystic power of writing. He's highly educated in many forms and mediums of the craft and seems to be under the (possibly mistaken) belief that it's the coolest profession in the world. I mean look at this guy.

He dresses like an assassin who kills people through sheer dirty looks while zooming by them on a motorcycle. Writing is fucking cool in Pizzolatto's world and his sheer infectious joy for the art form made all the grad school level psychobabble in True Detective season 1 exhilarating. It also made True Detective season 2 one of the most frustrating and at times laughable seasons of TV in recent memory.

I can't confidently say what went wrong in season 2 of True Detective. On its surface it has many of the same features as the first season. It's a dark noir mystery with some cultish and mystical overtones and strong, let's say masculine acting from big stars.

But it sucks.

The difference between brilliance and downright sucking must be thinner than we all realize. And Pizzolatto comes across as such a passionate, confident writer that maybe a little overconfidence coming off of season one was the small amount of sand in the machinery to completely throw off the whole operation. How else does one explain lines like "never do anything out of hunger, not even eating" as anything other than overconfidence.

Now HBO is going to try to rescue Pizzolatto's tenure at the network by bringing in the only other writer on Earth as equally confident, bull-headed, brilliant, headstrong and downright "writerly" as Pizzolatto: David Milch.

David Milch and Nic Pizzolatto is a match made in heaven, hell, and seedy earthbound heroin den. Moreso than any two showrunners I can recall in recent history: Pizzolatto and Milch are true believers. They're believers of the written word, art and above all the creative superiority of their own minds. They're remarkably similar in approach but remarkably different in the ways they've succeeded and failed.

Milch is one of HBO's aforementioned mythical Davids. And he's never produced a show for the network that was outright bad. Each of his three biggest achievements (Deadwood, John from Cincinnati and Luck), however ended before their time. This is due to a combination of little popular appeal from viewers and undoubtedly also Milch's occasional overzealous artistic behavior. There's a reason why Brett Martin's excellent modern TV retrospective book Difficult Men is called Difficult Men.

Pizzolatto on the other hand has known both highs and lows that Milch never experienced. The first season of True Detective was HBO's most-watched freshman series at the time. It captured the collective unconsciousness more than anything Milch, or almost anyone else for that matter, ever achieved. Season two, of course, was crap - another experience Milch knows nothing about.

Pizzolatto knows the extreme highs and extreme lows while Milch just knows boring old semi-anonymous sustained excellence. Each, however, knows obsessive, controlling, all-consuming creativity.

That's why the introduction of Milch into Pizzolatto's True Detective universe is going to be one of the more fascinating TV experiments of our time. Do the two cancel out each other's weaknesses or highlight them? Does their shared passion for creative excellence produce an excellent season of TV or burn out everyone involved so hard that we get another season two?

Regardless of the outcome, HBO has shown that the era of the Davids is far from over.

from:
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/true-detective/263268/true-detective-season-3-can-david-milch-fix-this

[Sven2]

David Milch's Third Act

By Mark Singer
May 20, 2019

David Milch, the television writer, lives with his wife, Rita Stern Milch, on a peaceful block in Santa Monica, in a cozy stucco bungalow camouflaged by a lush cottage garden. When they moved there, five years ago, from a much larger house a few miles away, where they had raised three children, Milch was about to turn seventy. A survivor of decades of serial addiction-recovery-relapse-recovery—and also of heart disease, childhood sexual predation, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolarity—he remained in command of prodigious gifts. Starting in the early nineteen-eighties, when a former college roommate who wrote for "Hill Street Blues" introduced him to Steven Bochco, the series' co-creator, and he began writing for the show, too, Milch earned a reputation as one of the most original and intellectually fluent figures in the history of episodic television. In 1993, Milch and Bochco created "NYPD Blue," a radical reinvention of the prime-time network police drama. He went on to create several shows of his own, among them the sui-generis Western "Deadwood," for HBO.

Before Milch went to work in Hollywood, he taught writing at Yale while collaborating on a two-volume anthology of American literature with the critics Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, who had been a mentor to Milch when he was an undergraduate there, in the mid-sixties. Reading Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, James, and Faulkner in such depth helped Milch create complex television characters whose voices were each marked by singular diction. His dialogue was suffused with psychological subtext and literary allusion. In Hollywood, his work ethic was undeviating: he showed up every day. He believed, and still believes, that any time spent thinking about writing is wasted except when one is in a room writing. He quotes Billy Wilder: "The muse has to know where to find you." He also became known for nurturing aspiring writers. Writing and teaching, Milch thought, should be "a going out in spirit."

I first met Milch in 2004, while reporting about him for this magazine, during the filming of the second season of "Deadwood." The show, which is regarded by Milch, and by many critics, as his best work, was set in the Dakota Territory in the eighteen-seventies. The town of Deadwood had been at the center of the Black Hills gold rush, one of the last of its kind in the Lower Forty-eight. He began writing the pilot episode only after having spent two years digesting biographies and historical accounts of mining, the Indian wars, territorial politics, whorehouse and gambling protocols, rudimentary systems of justice, and criminality mundane and monstrous. Deadwood, built on land stolen from the Lakota Sioux, had attracted exiles, fugitives, optimists, gamblers with nothing to lose, bloody-minded opportunists, cynics, and seekers who had come to try their luck, or to escape bad luck, in terrain that lay largely beyond the reach of the law.

The real people depicted in "Deadwood"—among them Wild Bill Hickok; his murderer, Jack McCall; Calamity Jane; Wyatt Earp; and Al Swearengen—are greatly outnumbered by Milch's fictional characters. Through three seasons of labyrinthine story lines, an ever-rising body count, boundless scheming and exploitation, and a profusion of depravity that sometimes abruptly transmuted into tenderness, Milch's dialogue transformed the frontier demotic into something baroquely profane. In an early episode, a prospector named Ellsworth, having breakfasted on a few shots of whiskey, declaims to no one in particular, "I may have fucked up my life flatter 'n hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim, and not the U.S. government sayin' I'm trespassin', or the savage fuckin' red man himself or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passin' themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me."

By design, Milch wrote "Deadwood" under a gun-to-the-head deadline, regularly composing dialogue the day before a scene was to be shot. Milch is the only writer I have ever watched, at length, write. I sat in a dimly lit, air-conditioned trailer as Milch—surrounded by several silent acolytes, of varying degrees of experience and career accomplishment—sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room, staring at a large computer monitor a few feet away. An assistant at a keyboard took dictation as Milch, seemingly channelling voices from a remote dimension, put words into (and took words out of) the mouth of this or that character. The cursor on the screen advanced and retreated until the exchange sounded precisely right. The methodology evoked a séance, and it was necessary to remind oneself that the voices in fact issued from a certain precinct of the fellow on the floor's brain.

In June, 2006, at the start of Season 3, HBO announced, unexpectedly, that there would be no Season 4. Instead, the network said, Milch would bring "Deadwood" to a conclusion with a pair of two-hour movies. Within months, it became evident that even this was not to be. Rather than being permitted a meticulously conceived dénouement, "Deadwood" just stopped. It came as a gut punch to everyone associated with the series. "Deadwood" devotees never abandoned hope that it might someday return, but the more time passed the less likely a revival seemed. The show had sinned by failing to rack up the boffo audience numbers sufficient to convince HBO that it would become a sensation, like "The Sopranos," which was winding down after six seasons.

Still, the studio's faith in Milch never wavered. It just wanted him to focus on more potentially lucrative projects, and persuaded him to create a new series, "John from Cincinnati," set in a California surfing community, a collaboration with Kem Nunn, a novelist whose books can be found in the surf-noir section. It lasted only one season, a consequence generally attributed to a plot-coherence deficit. In the years that followed, Milch remained fiercely industrious. He created "Luck," set at the Santa Anita Park racetrack and starring Dustin Hoffman, which was shut down in its second season after multiple horses died during filming. Milch also made a pilot—the only episode shot—for an HBO series called "The Money." (Milch described it to me as "King Lear meets Rupert Murdoch and family.") Two other HBO projects never progressed beyond the pilot-script stage: adaptations of Peter Matthiessen's novel "Shadow Country" and "Island of Vice," a history of Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as the police commissioner of New York City. Earlier this year, HBO's "True Detective" aired a new episode written by Milch and Nic Pizzolatto.

Milch's career earned him a fortune—more than a hundred million dollars from "Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue," and "Deadwood" alone. This made possible both a history of philanthropy and promiscuous nondeductible one-to-one largesse. Several years after I published my Profile, as Milch was writing early episodes of "Luck," he called and tried to persuade me to work on the series. I reflexively declined the offer. He kept at it, and I kept demurring. At last, he said, "Let me just send you some money." To Milch I owe the strange pleasure of once upon a time hearing myself say, "Please do not send me money."

Unfortunately, this tendency to treat money as something to be gotten rid of also fed a gambling compulsion, which controlled Milch as unremittingly as heroin, alcohol, and pain meds once did. A 2015 lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, filed by Rita Milch against David's former business managers, revealed that between 2001 and 2011 he lost almost twenty-five million dollars betting on horses and football. (The lawsuit was settled out of court.) Only when Rita learned—from the business managers, in 2011—of their calamitous finances did David's gambling cease. They owed the Internal Revenue Service five million dollars. Both their houses—in Brentwood and on Martha's Vineyard—went on the market. Rita sold much of her jewelry. The bungalow in Santa Monica is a rental.

In late 2013, while Milch was in New York, filming the pilot for "The Money," he began having episodes of confusion and erratic memory. These symptoms coincided with severe anemia, which required blood transfusions and surgery, and Rita wishfully assumed that, once his problem was addressed, the memory issue would soon resolve itself. Instead, other ominous signs emerged: more than once, David called her to confess that he couldn't remember where he had parked his car. He found himself searching in vain for familiar names and words. When their older daughter, Elizabeth, got married, in the winter of 2014, she sensed that her father was overwhelmed by the prospect of having to interact with a crowd and deliver a toast. Never before had Milch minded being the focus of attention. Now he seemed tentative, almost frail. He was depressed and increasingly anxious, decidedly not himself. In early 2015, he was given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. For such a cerebral man, it was an especially crushing verdict.

For most Alzheimer's patients, there's a distinct emotional demarcation between the before and after of receiving the diagnosis. Although Milch accepted the validity of the diagnosis, he refused to capitulate to it. He knew that continuing to write was imperative for his survival—that stopping would, more than anything, hasten the process of his ceasing to be his most intrinsic self. His finances presented a different imperative. As his creditors awaited satisfaction, HBO, thankfully, continued to provide him with work. In late 2015, Milch submitted his adaptation of "Shadow Country." The studio passed on it, but opened a different door: reboots had become fashionable on TV, and HBO was now amenable to revisiting "Deadwood" in a film.

For the next two years, Milch worked through drafts of a story that was both new and old. Last summer, HBO green-lighted the script. The movie begins ten years after the last scene of Season 3. Characters who avoided a violent demise in the series return to Deadwood in 1889, as North Dakota and South Dakota join the Union. Extraordinarily, nearly all the surviving members of the original cast—Powers Boothe and Ralph Richeson had died—agreed to reunite, and shooting began in October, at the Melody Movie Ranch, thirty miles north of Santa Monica, using sets based on those from the series. The film will première on HBO on May 31st.

Five days a week, Milch commutes twenty-five yards along an arbor-shaded path that extends from the back of his house to a converted garage, where he writes until it's time to break for lunch. Before he developed Alzheimer's, he rose most days by 4:30 a.m., ready to work. He now shows up in the garage at nine-thirty or ten. Awaiting him are two writing assistants, Brittany Dushame and Micah Sampson, and frequently Regina Corrado, who worked on "Deadwood" and "John from Cincinnati" and returned, in 2017, to help him with the screenplay and whatever might follow. Another collaborator is his younger daughter, Olivia, who is now a successful screenwriter and director. (She co-wrote the script for "Ocean's 8.") Olivia, who lives in New York, flies to Los Angeles at least once a month. Recently, she told me, "My father and I first worked together in 2011, on an adaptation of Faulkner's 'Light in August.' Writing a scene with him was like learning to write a paragraph. That was my education in screenwriting. But Dave doesn't really write movies. He does long-form character development. I've always said that he writes novels set like plays, and shot like movies, that air on television. What he does is its own thing, but he definitely doesn't do three-act structure, where everything resolves itself by the end. Dave always says the emotional response of the character is the plot. I think about that ten times a day when I'm writing."

During the making of "Deadwood," the arc of a season, each consisting of twelve episodes, took shape over months of writers'-room conversations, all recorded and transcribed. Embedded in these gigantic texts were Milchian riffs of dialogue, which were pasted into scripts as the writing progressed. When a new episode was about to be shot, a staff writer would compose a first draft that provided the scaffolding for the wizardry I observed fifteen years ago, in the dark trailer. To everyone involved with making "Deadwood," it was a given that fixed in Milch's consciousness was a complete vision: context, character, motive, plot. Now he can no longer hold in his memory the full trajectory of anything that he writes.

These days, the workday begins with Milch, seated in a cushiony leather armchair opposite a desktop computer monitor, rereading the printout of a completed scene from the previous day or scrutinizing a new one written by, say, Corrado. As Milch scans and rescans what amounts to the scene's studs, joists, and walls, Dushame takes dictation. When things go well, the dialogue will have been planed, sanded, and smoothed by lunchtime. Every word of the final version sounds like Milch, undiminished.

This past winter, I went to Los Angeles twice to see him, in January and again in March. I didn't need anyone to explain that the work goes markedly better on some days than on others. Two projects were under way: an eight-episode bio-pic of Johnny Carson and a memoir that is to be published by Random House. The Carson project came to him from the production and management company Anonymous Content; HBO, per Milch's current contract, retained a right of first refusal. Between my two visits, HBO turned down the pilot script. It was a disappointment, but the project still had funding, and Milch continued working on it. Whenever he hit a snag on the Carson scripts, he turned to the memoir.

Rita organizes and oversees everything that Milch cannot do for himself. A doorway from the office leads to a large space that has long served as a painting studio for Rita, who has had careers as an artist and as an editor. On its floor are file boxes of source material for the memoir, including lecture transcripts, writers'-room transcripts of every series that Milch has worked on starting with "Deadwood," recordings of interviews that he's given, poetry and essays that he wrote in college—everything that hasn't already been shipped to Yale, where his papers will reside, at the Beinecke Library.

Last fall, as shooting was under way for "Deadwood: The Movie," I began talking regularly again with Milch. We spoke, by telephone, every other Saturday for about forty-five minutes, with Rita listening in and filling in blanks as needed. The American Alzheimer's Association identifies three stages of the disease's progression: early, middle, and late. Milch appears to be in the middle stage. This is characterized by a difficulty with organizing everyday tasks and remembering the events of one's personal history; social withdrawal; confusion about where one is or the day of the week; disruption of sleep habits; and an increased risk, if left unsupervised, of becoming lost. The Milch I observed fifteen years ago during the making of "Deadwood" was gregarious, physically strong, and prone to riveting discursive detours. During our recent time together, he spoke slowly and deliberately, and moved accordingly. At one point, I asked him whether, despite what Alzheimer's was stealing from him, it had given anything in return. The answer: a continuous sense of urgency.

"There's an acute sense of time's passage," he said. "Things are important. You don't want to be inconsequential in your perspective on things. I feel that with an increasing acuteness—that everything counts."

"Do you wake up to that feeling every day?"

"Yeah, I do."

Milch believes that time is ultimately the subject of every story. It is a conviction descended, ex cathedra, from Robert Penn Warren, in his spare masterpiece, "Tell Me a Story." For decades, in classrooms, writers' rooms, personal encounters, lectures, and interviews, Milch has cited its concluding lines:

    Tell me a story.

    In this century, and moment, of mania,

    Tell me a story.

    Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

    The name of the story will be Time,
    But you must not pronounce its name.

    Tell me a story of deep delight.

to be continued:

[Sven2]

David Milch's Third Act, continued

My conversations with Milch, which took place in his garage office and on the telephone, have been edited for clarity and concision.

Singer: What do you want to be the focus of our conversations?

Milch: To the extent that this sort of thing is appropriate, a focus on the illness. . . . While writing the screenplay for "Deadwood: The Movie," I was in the last part of the privacy of my faculties, and that's gone now. I was able to believe that— You know, we all make deals, I suppose, in terms of how we think about the process of our aging. It's a series of givings away, a making peace with givings away. I had thought, as many or most people do, that I was in an earlier stage of givings away than it turns out I am. It's kind of a relentless series of adjustments to what you can do, in particular the way you can't think any longer. Your inability to sustain a continuity of focus. And those are accumulated deletions of ability. And you adjust—you'd better adjust, or you adjust whether you want to or not.

Singer: From my own experience with serious illness, though it's been nothing like what you're going through, I've found that my capacity for denial has helped.

Milch: Denial, I think, is a sort of ongoing operative procedure—you try and proceed as if you're capable, as if you weren't ill. And then begin making concessions to the fact that you are. . . . Things that you can't remember any longer, in particular—it's like shifting the gears of the engine of a car, except to the extent that it absolutely isn't. You just move through the day experiencing a series of awarenesses of what's gone in terms of your capacities. And there are physiological consequences. I've been describing, I guess, mental consequences, but there are absolute physical limitations that you live into, increasingly. I never thought I'd be quoting a Paul Simon song, at least not in public, but "Hello, darkness, my old friend." There's an experience you have as every day goes on of what you're no longer capable of and . . . it's an accumulation of indignities. At a more fundamental level, it's an accretion of irrevocable truths: this is gone, and that's gone. And you try to restrict the induction of self-pity, which is one of the complications of the illness. Apart from what's gone because of physiological change, there's a change of spirit. You awaken and inventory where you are on this day in terms of what you can't do, what you can't think.

Singer: When you wake up in the morning, is there a process that you're aware of—an inventorying—that you weren't experiencing five years ago?

Milch: Absolutely. As I say, it's a series of takings away. And there's a subsidiary category of shame, at not being able to do things.

David Milch on the set during the filming of "Deadwood: The Movie" with Timothy Olyphant, who plays Seth Bullock.
Photograph by Rita Stern Milch

Singer: Why shame?

Milch: It's self-imposed. More than anything else, one would like to think of oneself as being capable as a human being. The sad truth, imposed with increasing rigor, is you aren't. You aren't normal anymore. You're not capable of thinking in the fashion you would hope to as an artist and as a person. Things as pedestrian as not being able to remember the day. Sometimes where you've been. There have been a couple of times when I haven't been able to remember where I live. And then there are compensatory adjustments that you make in anticipation of those rigors, so that you can conceal the fact of what you can't do. It's a constriction that becomes increasingly vicious. And then you go on.

Singer: I'm sitting here listening to you, and you're describing what you're describing, and there is to me an immense irony: this is the same mind that I've known for as long as I've known you.

Milch: That's a blessing of this conversation, and I'm concentrating and thinking as hard as I can. I'm asking for the grace and dignity of a lucid cogitation. I'm asking of my faculties, such as they are, in whatever diminution they are, to meet you fairly.

I'm different recognizably, unmistakably, from one day to the next. I'm capable of things on one day that are absolutely beyond me. Down to things as rudimentary as sometimes where I live. One tries to adjust to those rigors and disciplines as they reveal themselves, as the day unfolds. At one level—the level of vanity, I suppose—there's a shame that shows itself as anger, an anger that is quickly internalized as unfair to the disciplines or ambitions of the exchange in which I'm involved at that moment. And I try to adapt to that because it's a distraction from what the invoked purpose, the proper purpose, of that exchange is. Sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. At a rudimentary and humiliating level, I'm incapable of lucid discourse. That's no fun.

Singer: Once you realized this was happening to you, did you say to yourself that there was anything you needed to do to memorialize what was happening? Any way of tracking this? Especially with you, given your hyper-alertness to all that's around you, but also your ability to pull back from whatever is immediate and contemporary and go to a place—say, Deadwood—where your characters exist.

Milch: I think that is the chief blessing of art, the opportunity to organize one's behavior around a different reality. It's a second chance. You pray to be equal to it, equal to its opportunities. We both know that some days you're better at that than others. In my case, there's a continuing unfolding discovery of the limitations of that vision.

I'm thinking of playing catch with my son, Ben, teaching him to play catch. The particular kind of reverence that you feel for that process, for what you know it will mean to him. To catch the ball and to throw it back right, and to know that I'm proud of him. The opportunity to do those things is transferrable to the artistic process as well—the process of passing on, for better or worse, as well as one can, what you've learned. And blessing him on the voyage that he'll begin. Those are special and particular opportunities that are given an artist.

Singer: You once told me that you try not to think about writing when you're not writing. Did that mean that writing was easy for you, and did that change when you were working on this new film?

Milch: It's not a self-conscious process. I try to think of an interior logic to things. Exploring that interior and kind of walking around inside it. And, for better or worse, finding things as I go, which instruct me how to proceed, so that it's a kind of exfoliating logic that I'm pursuing. You have to be content when a path that you're pursuing turns out not to be rewarding. It's a journey in that sense.

Singer: We're talking about your creative process and mental process pre-Alzheimer's, correct? And you didn't have a time during the production of the movie where that changed?

Milch: No. I think not. It's variable from moment to moment, but over all there's a dynamic to the process that you try to be disciplined in pursuing.

Singer: "Discipline" is the word you use more than anyone I've ever known. It seems deeply inculcated in your approach to learning and writing. You've said that Robert Penn Warren used to discuss certain disciplines. Does it derive from that?

Milch: Yeah, it does. I recall vividly experiencing a sense of being privileged as Mr. Warren would pursue the logic and emotion of his thoughts—the respect that he had for the discipline of that pursuit as organizing the exchange between us. That was universal with him. There was something holy about it. The street version of it is "Don't fuck with this." It was a beautiful experience to be in the presence of that searching out.

He was a teacher, but he was also always a searcher. He was respectful in sharing the pursuit and you felt you mustn't fail to bring anything but your best attention and respect for the transaction. You had the feeling that there were two spirits residing in a holy place. And there was an absolute lack of self-consciousness to the process. A mutual absence. You felt that you must suppress everything irrelevant or distracting.

Singer: I wonder whether there's an overlap between that sort of profound respect and the recognition you came to later, in A.A. meetings, about a higher power.

Milch: Yes. You had in his presence an effect of a continuous unfolding. It wasn't so much an unfolding of a truth as it was of a passion, or that there was some higher power that had become present as a result of a shared effort. And the presence needed to be acknowledged or the exchange could not be understood. The great blessing of Mr. Warren's presence was a rising up in one's heart of the desire to acknowledge that shared experience.

An encounter in January. Rita has joined us. Milch's Alzheimer's is complicated by long-standing cardiac difficulties.

Milch: I'm not feeling very well just now. I've got an amount of pain and my faculties aren't very good. It's in my chest.

Singer: Do you know what it's about?

Milch: No.

Singer: This is completely organic?

Milch: It's not an anxiety disorder. It's like somebody's got his fist on your chest.

Singer: One of the things we haven't talked about is fear. Do you have fear?

Milch Yeah. You need some? It's a consequence of something pressing hard on your chest. It's a kind of intrusive, dominant state of being. The pain is coercive and distracting to an extent that it's hard to think of anything else or bring one's concentration to anything else.

Singer: Does that mean you're not reading very much?

Milch: Yes.

Singer: What about listening to music?

Milch: Mostly I've been chronicling my grievances.

Singer: When your family, including your granddaughter, was around over the holidays, was that a relief?

from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/david-milchs-third-act

[Sven2]

David Milch's Third Act, continued

Milch: Yes. Our grandchild has adopted toward me a sort of casually pleasant tone—she calls me Dave—and she pats my wrist sometimes. And I amuse her. She thinks I'm funny. It's just happening. I think it's like "He doesn't mean me ill, so he must mean me well."

Singer: Do you think you're at an early stage?

Milch: No.

Singer: When do you think you were?

Milch: I couldn't pinpoint it. Maybe three months ago.

Singer: Do you think there's been an acceleration in the rate of loss?

Milch: Yes.

Rita: The past six months have been hard. I've gone to some meetings of a support group for caregivers, and I heard nothing hopeful in those meetings.

Singer: Is there anything you've been able to draw upon, David? Is there comfort in the past?

Milch: I feel the past falling away and the attachments of regret for what wasn't done or was done badly or was done without sufficient sympathy, and it was for that reason that our granddaughter's visit was such a redemptive and compelling occurrence. Everything is an adventure for her and a delight and a surprise, an opening up, and that's a big gratification.

Singer: I've never thought of you as a sentimental person, but maybe I misread that. How would you characterize yourself?

Milch: As an unsentimental person.

Singer: Right. So, when you talk about loss, sadness, are those sentimental feelings or objective realities?

Milch: Objective realities. There's increasingly little to hold on to. A kind of relentless deterioration, and that's disconcerting.

Singer: I'm so sorry this is happening. . . . And, now that I've said that, I feel like an idiot. When people tell you they're sorry, what's your response?

Milch: "Thank you." It depends on who I'm talking to and what the ambitions of the conversation are. In a lot of ways, it feels like you're living a dream, with those relentless aspects.

Singer: Tell me what in your earlier life, if anything, gave you any sense of anticipation of what aging would be like. In the brain of a twenty-two-year-old, in particular a twenty-two-year-old male, the parts that recognize risk and danger are not as fully developed, and so it becomes this Darwinistic matter. We do catch up, if we're lucky and we haven't killed ourselves first. In your twenties, you were living hard and fast. Did you ever think, I might kill myself inadvertently?

Milch: I thought I might die inadvertently in the process of doing what I was doing. You know, I assembled a number of stupidities, which took up a lot of my time. I remember Mr. Warren used to say to me, more than once, "How much of a goddam fool can you be?" And I used to devote a portion of every day to assembling evidence in support of this argument.

Singer: That question from him was not a chastening question?

Milch: Oh, yes, it was.

Singer: Did he ever try to do more than that? Was he ever paternal, and did he say, "Goddammit, cut that shit out"?

Milch: He often remarked, "Understand, David, I don't give a good God damn who writes and who doesn't."

Singer: I remember you telling me that—that if you were going to fuck it up that wasn't his problem.

Milch: Yes.

Singer: Can you actually say now that you would rather you had lived differently during that period?

Milch: Sure. When you know that you could have done something with a fuller heart, with a more open spirit, that's an occasion for regret, and the regrets do tend to pile up. But there's nothing to be done. That's the predicate of regret. And so you kind of build around it, and do the best you can to learn some useful way to proceed.

Singer: Have you talked to other Alzheimer's patients?

Milch: No.

Singer: When do you think you knew that this was going on? What told you that?

Milch: It was an irrefutable and obtrusive fact. There were lapses which were inexplicable otherwise.
"Let's just agree to disagree on everything except the dog."

Singer: We've talked about having your granddaughter here, the pleasure of that. But what about the things that gave pleasure from before, the aesthetic pleasures?

Milch: The world gets smaller. You're capable of less work and you have to learn to accept that—that's a given of the way you have to live. And that's a sadness. But it's also true that a focus comes to your behavior which is productive.

Singer: Elaborate upon that.

Milch: (after a long pause): I'm having a good deal of pain.

Rita leaves to get him some water. He's sitting in an armchair, looking away from me, as if I've left the room.

Singer: Can I ask what you're thinking right now?

Milch: I'm wondering if I'm going to be able to tolerate this discomfiture.

Singer: Can you read things you've written in the past?

Milch: No.

Singer: Would you pick up a new novel and read it now?

Milch: It's not likely.

Singer: Is that because the hours in the day you're able to focus are diminished?

Milch: To some extent. But more so I feel the constriction of possibility, what I'm able to undertake responsibly. I have only a certain amount of energy.

Singer: Do you feel like you're in a race?

Milch: Yes.

Singer: You're racing to finish this memoir?

Milch: More so a larger enterprise, of which this is just a part.

Singer: Can you be more specific?

Milch: I'm trying to make work, the undertaking in general, coherent. To restore a dignity to the way that I proceed, and it's a demanding process. You're tempted to . . . toss it in. Just to quit.

Singer: Before this, were you someone who had preoccupying fears?

Milch: No.

Singer: And now what is it you're afraid of, if you could identify it?

Milch: I intuit the presence of a coherence in my life which I haven't given expression to in an honorable fashion.

Singer: So this is an opportunity. Is that what you're saying?

Milch: Yes.

Singer: The rush to get to work, that inner necessity to make something. You still have that? Do you wake up every day with that?

Milch: Yes.

Singer: Did you feel during the "Deadwood" movie shoot that anyone regarded you as diminished?

Milch: I don't think so.

Singer: Do you think about the future?

Milch: In a very constricted way. I have disabused myself of any thought of a normal future, but I allow myself a provisional optimism about the possibilities of what time I will be allowed. And I'm determined to experience what life will allow me. I know I have a short while possible to me, but I don't want to constrict or profane that with recrimination or a distorting bitterness. And I permit myself a belief that there is possible for me a genuine happiness and fulfillment in my family and the work I do. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the May 27, 2019, issue, with the headline "Hello, Darkness."

   
from:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/david-milchs-third-act

[Sven2]

'Deadwood' and the Mortal Hope of "Sold Under Sin"
We're all going to die, so let's dance while we're alive.

Valerie Ettenhofer
    March 9, 2020

The first time I watched Deadwood's "Sold Under Sin," I was acutely aware of the tenderness of my new tattoo, fresh but healing. During my latest watch-through, just this week, I found myself subconsciously focused on my own persistent cough, measuring the feeling in my chest against the news' incessant coronavirus outbreak warning signs.

It is impossible not to think about one's body when thinking of Deadwood, because more than controlling Cy Tolliver or ruthless George Hearst or any number of self-professed scoundrels, the unbeatable villain of David Milch's masterpiece Western series is the human body and all its vulnerabilities. Don't let the cowboy boots fool you; Deadwood has as much medical drama and body horror as it does Western ethos. Years before both Milch and his most beloved mouthpiece, Al Swearingen (Ian McShane), began grappling with dementia, the series was already preoccupied with the ways in which communities — even lawless ones like the real-life town the series is based on — must react to failings of mortality. To the inevitability of blood on the floor.

And blood there is. While Milch's series is most remembered for its eloquent, labyrinthine language — the series puts a near-Shakespearean spin on the foul-mouthed men of the wild west — the script of the first season finale is most often punctuated by terse threats and patent reminders of life's fragility. A throat is unceremoniously cut. A delicate white napkin is unfolded to reveal a handful of glistening, bloodied teeth. A beleaguered stranger interrupts a heroic military story to reveal that he and his fellow soldiers ate their horses to survive.

Episodes earlier, the settlement of Deadwood had a plague of its own, and while the town was overwhelmed by swiftly spreading sickness and scarce resources, it was a crisis that outed some men and women as cowards, others as helpers, and yet more as beholden to capitalistic self-interest. Deadwood's social microcosm, it's clear, has only become more relevant with age. As the first season comes to a close, post-plague and with the death of Wild Bill Hickok already far in the rearview, we as viewers know which townsfolk we're rooting for, but we've also learned that death in the West can be as unpredictable and dangerous as a drunken stranger at a card table.

Early on, Deadwood set itself up as a kind of Hobbesian period drama about a place where life could be, as the philosopher said, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Yet almost immediately the show disrupts its rough exterior by introducing a cast of characters who are sympathetic, funny, and often outright loveable. Milch forgoes neither the hard reality nor the kind one, regularly allowing us glimpses of humanity — or at the very least good manners — from even the worst the town has to offer. "Sold Under Sin" is an episode rife with mud and blood, but it also lays bare the beating heart of the series with satisfying moments, like Seth and Alma's (Molly Parker) consummation and Seth's acceptance of the law badge, that reward our love for this burgeoning town.

Also in this episode, Al finally dispatches the local reverend (Ray McKinnon), who had been deteriorating as a result of a brain tumor for some time, his suffering a sort of unbearable yet steady background noise to the show's foregrounded local politics. To some, Al's act — the smothering of a man who was already gasping for breath in the throes of his pain — may appear to be a metaphorical extinguishing of innocence, a killing of the only god the camp knew. Yet it's also a twisted act of mercy, bringing tears to Al's and his henchman's eyes alike. Al's a stubborn man, unafraid of a fight, but he knows the body can't be bested.

Later on, Al himself will be beset by kidney stones and, petrified by the pain, will have to witness those around him unable to easily decide on the best course of action. Years after Deadwood aired, Cinemax's Steven Soderbergh-directed series The Knick would go on to address the terrors and moral dilemmas of developing healthcare systems more directly, often with an even bleaker approach. But in 2004, under the guise of a gunslinging Western, David Milch wouldn't let us forget the endless fragility of our lives, and the gutting decisions everyday people must make that could either save or end them.

If the hopeful heart of Deadwood is ever fully visible, it's during the short final scene of the first season finale. Doc Cochran is perhaps the series' best supporting character, carrying the throughline of logic during any emergency, woefully bearing witness to the existential pain of the sick, and keeping a sliver of fury-tinged optimism alive, all thanks to an indelible, lovely performance by Brad Dourif. Doc's constant commitment to his job often goes unnoticed by the more lofty-minded businessmen of Deadwood, as when Al makes an offhand joke about the reverend and Doc grounds him with a boldly shouted curse. No one makes an enemy of the doctor, because everyone needs him, and when it comes to beating that biological villain, he knows more than the rest of the town combined.

Meanwhile, Jewel (Geri Jewell), the Gem Saloon's disabled cleaning woman, is one of the series' most winning presences even as she's one of the town's least valued. People around the saloon often don't really see her, or if they do, they see her as less than others, but her emotions come easily and often skew toward happiness. To the audience, she's easily one of the characters most worth rooting for.

As Deadwood's major players argue and scheme and shoot one another dead in the streets, Doc makes Jewel a leg brace that will make her more comfortable. And as "Sold Under Sin" comes to a close, Jewel decides to dance. She gets Doc to join her, and their exchange closes out a near-perfect first season while others in the Gem look on. "Say I'm as nimble as a forest creature!" She commands Doc, not hesitant to move despite his warnings that her mobility may fail. "You're as nimble as a forest creature," he answers warmly. "No," she corrects him, "say it about yourself!" As the music plays us out, their bodies are working as well as they ever will. They're happy. In Deadwood, as in reality, death may be inevitable, but life is there, too, just waiting to be shared
.

from: https://filmschoolrejects.com/deadwood-sold-under-sin/

[Sven2]

'Deadwood,' 'NYPD Blue' Creator David Milch Talks About Living With Alzheimer's

by Malina Saval

Oct 16, 2020 10:15am PT

From his work on the iconic, Golden Globe-winning 1980s cop drama "Hill Street Blues" to creating such TV series as "NYPD Blue," "Deadwood" and "Luck," four-time Emmy Award-winning David Milich has been an iconic figure in the biz. Milch is battling Alzheimer's, a ravaging brain disease for which there is no cure. From his residence at a care facility in Southern California, Milch describes his experience:

"I'm 75 years old and I was diagnosed about a year and half ago," says Milch. "It's a slow unfolding as you become aware of the compromising of your faculties. And that becomes increasingly dramatic and distressing. And finally, you can't turn your back on it any longer — that's been the story with me. [It's] forgetfulness of all different sorts, which compromised my ability to meet my daily responsibilities. Finally, there comes a period where you're fighting off what is clearly a change and you have to, if you're going to be responsible and meet the concerns that other people are beginning to show, you have to encounter all of that.

It's an increasingly distressing sequence of events, but finally there's no turning your back on it. You kind of fight a rear-guard action. You look at it as a series of accumulating skirmishes where you look at the challenges for the given day and your hope is to be able to get through without acknowledging what is privately an undeniable fact. It's a demoralizing accumulation of irrefutable facts.

At a certain point you make so many adjustments to conceal or circumvent the effects of the illness. And then, if you are to retain any sort of dignity, you have to acknowledge that you've changed. And if you're going to keep your dignity you have to make adjustments to the disease, and that takes up more and more of your conscious life and emotional life. I'm grateful that I'm part of a family which has been generous and brave in trying to help me. I try to work every day, to write. Each day is about coming to terms yet again with the compromising facts of your condition, and you finally get to the point where you have to make concessions to what's going on with you. And you try to embrace your families, the concessions that they've made or are trying to make. In some ways you could describe it all as an accelerating pace of compromise.

I live in a facility which is organized around the recognition of and adjustment to what is happening and what is continuing to happen. And you just learn to live with it, as best you can. It's an accelerating deterioration. [For me], it's about being a continuing part of the community, trying to be a source of support and strength as long as you can to your family. And doing it all as you live into the recognition of the concessions that you have to make increasingly, day after day."

from:
https://variety.com/2020/tv/spotlight/deadwood-nypd-blue-creator-david-milch-brave-battle-alzheimers-1234807100/

[Sven2]

An old article, from 2019, interesting by wide reaching, if maybe a little capricious, parallels.
Sven2

"A Continuous Unfolding": D-Day, David Milch, García Lorca, and the Return of "Deadwood"

By Stuart Mitchner

Tell me a story of deep delight.
— Robert Penn Warren

On the heels of the controversially rushed, truncated final season of Game of Thrones, HBO has released Deadwood: The Movie, the final chapter of David Milch's "story of deep delight," the series brought to an equally untimely and even more unfortunate end in 2006.

While the distinguished novelist/poet/critic Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) may seem an unlikely godfather for such a work, the depth of his influence is made clear in Mark Singer's recent New Yorker article, "David Milch's Third Act." Anyone who has kept faith with Deadwood during the long wait for this moment should read Singer's piece, as well as Alan Sepinwall's outstanding appreciation in Rolling Stone. Far more significant than the revelation that Milch has Alzheimer's is what Singer's profile shows about how the lessons Milch learned from his mentor at Yale have given Deadwood the literary magnitude that sets it apart from other HBO masterworks like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Game of Thrones.

Referring to Warren, Milch says, "He was a teacher, but he was also always a searcher. He was respectful in sharing the pursuit and you felt you mustn't fail to bring anything but your best attention and respect for the transaction....You felt that you must suppress everything irrelevant or distracting.... You had in his presence an effect of a continuous unfolding. It wasn't so much an unfolding of a truth as it was of a passion ....The great blessing of Mr. Warren's presence was a rising up in one's heart of the desire to acknowledge that shared experience."

"Kubla Khan"

When Singer asks whether Alzheimer's "had given anything in return," Milch speaks of "a continuous sense of urgency ... an acute sense of time's passage." His suggestion "that time is ultimately the subject of every story" leads to a quote from Warren's poem "Tell Me a Story," lines that Milch has cited over the years "in classrooms, writers' rooms, personal encounters, lectures, and interviews":

Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.

The last two words echo in the "deep romantic chasm" of one of the most famous poems in English, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." As he transcribes his laundanum dream, Coleridge hears "an Abyssinian maid/Singing of Mount Abora," and imagines his "deep delight" could he revive "Her symphony and song." In the opening stanza of Warren's poem, he recalls hearing the "great geese hoot northward" when he was a boy in Kentucky. Though he could not see them, "there being no moon/And the stars sparse," he "heard them." The experience of being involuntarily receptive to wonder and mystery, as expressed in Coleridge's visionary dream, similarly informs Warren's haunting line, "I did not know what was happening in my heart," which also evokes the wonders Deadwood achieves in its most poignant and powerful moments. Right now I'm thinking of the night scene near the end of the movie when Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) look up in "deep delight" at the slow magical fall of snowflakes as Milch concludes his "story of great distances and starlight."

In Walks Lorca

García Lorca is here because today, June 5, is his 120th birthday. So capacious is Milch's vision that it's possible to imagine an American incarnation of the Spanish poet walking down the muddy main street of Deadwood sometime between the shooting of Wild Bill and the snowy starlight Jane and Joanie delight in a decade later. Lorca would have a guitar, as he did when he was a student in Granada playing and singing Spanish folk music and making a name for himself before becoming a famous poet and playwright. There's a Deadwood ambiance in the "Gypsy Ballads," where "Rider and horse appear/With a long roll of the drum" and "Light like a deck of cards,/Hard and glossy and white,/Cuts in the brittle green/Horses rearing in fright." Or Lorca might sing of the "lunatic afternoon" in which "Angels of black took wing/To the far air of the West." He ends "Afternoon's Last Light" singing, "O unarriving Night,/Object of fear and dream,/How long the slanting sword,/How deep the driven wound!"

D-Day

Until Deadwood changed the dynamic, I was working on a D-Day sequel to last week's celebration of Whitman and Memorial Day, which ended with me smoking a Camel from the pack found on my bellygunner uncle's body after a freak training accident in February 1944. But for that, he might have been in one of the B-17s scouting the skies over Omaha Beach three months later.

Following the theme of cigarettes as a shared sacrament in films and fiction as well as real life, and guessing that Lorca must have been a smoker, I cast a line into the cyberstream and came up with Leslie Stainton's Lorca, A Dream of Life. It turns out that on the night of his arrest by Nationalist forces on August 16, 1936, Lorca was given a carton of (would you believe?) Camels by a friend. He was wearing "dark gray pants and a white shirt with a tie loosely tied around the collar" at the time, and when he demanded to know why he was beng arrested, he received a one-word answer, "Words."

Two nights later Lorca was handcuffed and driven to a small building six miles from Granada with a schoolteacher and two bullfighters known for left-wing politics. The poet offered the last of his Camels to a young guard who was on duty that night, asking if he could have a newspaper and "more tobacco." After humoring Lorca with smalltalk, the guard told him that they he and the other three were going to be killed. The sun had not yet risen when they were shot beside a stand of olive trees and buried in a nearby ravine.

In his introduction to The Poet in New York and Other Poems (1940), José Benjamin presents Lorca's murder as "the purest and clearest example of the martyrdom of an entire people."

"He Didn't Suffer"

Among the items the U.S. Army Air Force sent to my mother, along with the cigarettes and his dog-tag, was a large glossy photograph of a B-17 like the one my uncle died in, along with a letter to the effect that "he didn't suffer," and a handsome Citation of Honor signed by the commanding general of the Army Air Forces. The citation declares that "his sacrifice will help to keep aglow the flaming torch that lights our lives," so that "millions yet unborn may know the priceless joy of liberty." It ends: "We who pay him homage, and revere his memory, in solemn pride, rededicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the task for which he so gallantly placed his life upon the altar of man's freedom."

The Citation of Honor doesn't give my uncle's full name, which was Robert E. Lee Patterson, in honor of his grandfather, a Confederate general who served with Lee. His other grandfather, C.A. Davis, played the fiddle with Bat Masterson's band in Dodge City. I like to think he was with them when they performed in Deadwood at Al Swearengen's Gem or maybe Cy Tolliver's Bella Union. I still have the fiddle.

Telling the Story

The two characters from Game of Thrones I can imagine showing up in Deadwood are Jerome Flynn's earthy, wisecracking sellsword Bronn and of course Peter Dinklage's Tyrion Lannister, whose wit and eloquence qualify him to sling words with the likes of Ian MacShane's Al Swearengen. In the rushed conclusion of Game of Thrones it's left to Tyrion to tie up the labyrinth of loose ends in an uncharacteristically stilted speech: "What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There's nothing more powerful in the world than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it."

As David Milch shows throughout Deadwood and most movingly in his interview with Mark Singer, it's the way you tell the story that counts. In quoting Milch on the influence of Robert Penn Warren, I found myself taking out lines (see the ellipses) for the sake of moving things along, not realizing that Milch was holding forth in the style of one of his characters. That said, I'll restore a characteristic omission. Speaking of his mentor, Milch says, "You had the feeling that there were two spirits residing in a holy place. And there was an absolute lack of self-consciousness to the process. A mutual absence."

When Singer, in his frank but delicate probing of Milch on how he deals with dementia, refers to his "ability to pull back from whatever is immediate and contemporary and go to a place—say, Deadwood—where your characters exist," Milch says, "I think that is the chief blessing of art, the opportunity to organize one's behavior around a different reality. It's a second chance. You pray to be equal to it, equal to its opportunities. We both know that some days you're better at that than others. In my case, there's a continuing unfolding discovery of the limitations of that vision."

In Deadwood: The Movie, David Milch and his cast and crew are more than equal to the many unfolding opportunities.

from: http://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2019/06/05/a-continuous-unfolding-d-day-david-milch-garcia-lorca-and-the-return-of-deadwood/

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David Milch to Address Gambling Addiction, Alzheimer's Diagnosis in New Memoir

The 'Deadwood' and 'NYPD Blue' creator's autobiography, 'Life's Work,' will be published by Random House on Sept. 13, 2022.
By Seth Abramovitch
February 1, 2022 10:32am

David Milch, the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning writer and creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, will trace his bumpy personal journey in Life's Work, a new memoir set to be published by Random House on Sept. 13, 2022.

The book, from a "noted heroin and gambling addict," a statement from Random House says, features "a ferocious mind [grappling] with the bewildering effects of Alzheimer's by looking back, making what sense he can of a life of addiction, recovery, loss and creation, abuse and life-saving kindness, and the increasingly strange present and future he now faces."
Milch, 76, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2019 after he began to notice "imperfect recall and tardy recall and short temper" in himself. The diagnosis led him to dial back his involvement in the then-filming Deadwood movie.

A 2016 Hollywood Reporter cover story detailed how Milch, a former English literature professor at Yale, lost approximately $100 million to a crippling gambling addiction. He was a regular at Santa Anita racetrack — the location of his ill-fated HBO series Luck, canceled after one season following the death of three horses used in the series.

In the 1980s, Milch battled what he once told an MIT communications forum was a "bitter" heroin addiction.

"From the writer whose work changed our understanding of what television could be, this is a memoir about the transformative power of art, effort, collaboration, and family, and what holds on as you lose it all," says Random House.

from:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/david-milch-memoir-gambling-alzheimers-1235085191/

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Johnny Carson Biopic Series Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt From David Milch & Jay Roach Hits Marketplace
by Nellie Andreeva
March 22, 2022

EXCLUSIVE: The story of one of America's most beloved TV personalities, Johnny Carson, may finally be coming to the screen. A high-profile series, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Carson, written by Deadwood creator David Milch and to be directed by Jay Roach, was recently taken out and has been heating up the premium marketplace. The project, titled King Of Late Night, is a co-production between wiip and Anonymous Content.

The series will follow the life and career of late-night TV pioneer Johnny Carson from New York to Los Angeles to the Las Vegas strip. King Of Late Night will reveal how Johnny's diehard connection to his audience overlapped with his lifelong desire for a basic quality of life, and how his beloved on-screen persona came into conflict with the more colorful aspects of his personal life.

Carson, who grew up in Nebraska and served in the Navy in World War II before going to college, started his career in local radio and television before transitioning to network game shows and landing NBC's The Tonight Show, which Carson hosted for 30 years, from 1962-92. Famous for his nightly on-screen presence, Carson was very private off-screen, shunning the social circuit for a personal life that included four marriages.

King Of Late Night originated about five years ago when Milch was tapped by Anonymous Content to develop it. Roach subsequently came on board, with indie studio wiip joining as co-producer and Gordon-Levitt as star. Milch had already been working on the script for a couple of years when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2019.

Gordon-Levitt, Milch and Roach executive produce with wiip's Paul Lee and David Flynn as well as Paul Green and Salmira Productions.

There have been multiple previous attempts to mount a Johnny Carson biopic, including a feature and an NBC miniseries, both based on Bill Zehme's book Carson The Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait, which were announced about a decade ago but did not come to fruition. On TV, the late-night host was portrayed by Rich Little in 1996 HBO film The Late Shift. Additionally, the 2017 comedy-drama series There's... Johnny!, created by Paul Reiser and David Steven Simon, takes place in the 1970s and depicts the fictional goings-on behind the scenes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Gordon-Levitt, Milch and Roach are all multiple Emmy winners. Gordon-Levitt currently stars as Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick in the Showtime series Super Pumped. Prior to that, he created, executive produced and headlined the Apple TV+ series Mr. Corman. His feature credits include The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Dark Knight Rises and Inception. Gordon-Levitt, who has two Emmys in the interactive programming categories, is repped by WME and Jackoway Austen Tyerman.

Milch co-created NYPD Blue and Luck, recently worked on the third installment of HBO's True Detective and on the Deadwood movie, a continuation of his cult favorite HBO drama series. Milch, who won three Emmys for NYPD Blue and one for Hill Street Blues, also just finished his memoir, Life's Work, which is slated for release in September. He is repped by ICM Partners.

Roach won four Emmys as a director and executive producer of the HBO movies Recount and Game Change. In features, he most recently directed and produced the feature Bombshell. Roach next has Apple TV+'s comedy series High Desert, which he is directing and executive producing. He is repped by WME, Mosaic and Behr Abramson Levy Johnson.

from:
https://deadline.com/2022/03/johnny-carson-series-joseph-gordon-levitt-king-of-late-night-david-milch-jay-roach-1234983801/

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Clearing a Space

David Milch is the genius behind shows like 'Deadwood' and 'NYPD Blue,' with fundamental insight into the crooked workings of humanity, and the human soul

by Tedd Mann
July 01, 2022

Clear a space," David Milch would say, and the script coordinator or the assistant assigned to transcribe Milch's dictation would hit the return on the keyboard at their desk, creating a blank space on Milch's monitor, empty of all words and images and any trace evidence of prior creations.

Milch has a chronically bad back. He lies on the floor as he works, surrounded by annotated script pages and printouts of the current draft of his work in progress, weaving stories in and out of each other in midair. He performs this work before a silent audience of aspiring writers; paid interns, for payroll purposes.

Milch is a friend and professional colleague I've had the good fortune to work with many times over the last 40 years. He has written and produced hundreds of hours of popular dramatic entertainment, initially for broadcast TV, later for the cable network HBO. Milch's shows, like NYPD Blue, which he created with Stephen Bochco, and Deadwood, were popular and commercially successful, but they were even more influential than their popularity would suggest, often appealing to those who don't normally watch popular media. I loved working with David, not only because he was a line-level genius, but because of his insight into the crooked workings of humanity, which he understood fully, with love.

There's no guarantee of popular success for writers, especially writers of genius; writing is a calling, a vocation. For some, it's a curse. It's not a choice, except for the hobbyist. In David Milch's case, his survival depended on the work, and the work depended on prayer.

Other writers and journalists often asked Milch about his "process," or writer's methodology. Writing is a mixture of craft and inspiration around which professional writers often construct elaborate superstitious rituals, just as athletes frequently do. Milch always replied truthfully that his "process" was his reliance on prayer.

Prayer is indispensable to Milch in his work and in his life. Milch works every day, and he prays every day. His sense of the possibility of a world beyond the one we see on an everyday basis is essential to his art, and to his judgments of men. Even his memorably foul-mouthed demystifying creations like Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue or Al Swearengen from Deadwood, who were so often taken as Milch's own alter-egos, were in constant conversation with the beyond. Inventing characters, he knew whether the soul of a man had passed through previous transmigrations or whether it was one of the "new souls."

As a result of birth, his genius, and despite, or because of his sexual abuse, Milch was destined for a top spot in the mirror world. He might truly have run nations, operated vast covert financial networks, made and broken lesser men. He could have created and captured industries. The kingdoms of the world were on offer, in line with the capacities that were his birthright, and which had been nurtured in him by the traumas and other advantages of his upbringing. Instead, Milch felt called to the work that would save his life, and which benefit our world in ways most of us are unable to really see.

David Milch's father was a prominent Buffalo physician—a surgical innovator, the respected and successful head of his department at the principal hospital of that then-thriving upstate city. Milch's mother was, according to her son, politically progressive. During his childhood, she was occupied with the improvement by education of the lot of working people; as head of the Buffalo school board, she was preoccupied with that task.

Many of Dr. Milch's patients were "successful Buffalo businessmen" who had prospered greatly in prohibition, and after WWII, were actively engaged in the modernization of bookmaking, loan sharking, prostitution and new gambling enterprises in Havana, Cuba, and later, after Cuba's revolution, with building Las Vegas. Milch recalls his childhood home as often filled with convalescing gangsters under Dr. Milch's care. He also noted that their delicate cardiac conditions often correlated with congressional hearings on organized crime, which the convalescent wiseguys watched with much amusement, their comments providing an education for the young boy in the ways of the real world. "I had one great-uncle we had to visit outside territorial waters on a boat off Florida," he recalled. "There were certain members of the family who would never be seen in public with my dad—not because he objected, but because they didn't want to screw him up."

In 1950s Buffalo, the rackets were a career so lucrative, open and accessible to all, that the work was, if not respectable, a lesser disgrace than being poor. When Meyer Lansky said, "We're bigger thant US Steel," he was being modest. If you were part of the world of OC, the mirror world, by birth or elective affinity, you knew cops and crooks were not opposite poles of a moral continuum, but rival predators. (Anyone familiar with the horrendous Whitey Bulger case in Boston will recall how the FBI partnered with Bulger's criminal faction to wipe out the previously dominant Italian mob.)

---continued

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Milch was a child prodigy. He could read, understand and remember books, songs, faces, numbers, images, and stories. He never forgot anything, a trait that was perhaps not always to his benefit. Milch often tells how, in his childhood, a "family friend, a friendly uncle type," introduced him to a "gang of pedophiles who passed me around from the time I was 8." Even if most people prefer not to think about it, the trade of children is a lucrative feature of the mirror world, and the building of pedophile blackmail/control networks is the meat-and-potatoes of every intelligence service.

"The pain of the past in its pastness is translated to the future tense of joy," David Milch liked to say, quoting the great American literary figure, poet, author, and teacher, Robert Penn Warren, Milch's mentor at Yale. Milch had a spectacular undergraduate career at Yale. No undergrad in living memory is recalled by his peers as so brilliant, so charming, so candid, so amusing and so fucked up. Milch graduated first in his class. Of Penn Warren, Milch said, "He saved my life, just in terms of showin' an example of how to live a coherent life. He also engaged me to work on a history of American literature. 'I can't help you,' he said, 'until whatever is troubling you remits itself, but you can study during this period.'"

At Yale, Milch was a member of the same fraternity of which George W. Bush was president. The other brothers were the patrician, moneyed sons of established WASP families. Whatever the qualifications are for a cabinet post in the Underground Empire may be, David Milch, a Jewish doctor's son from Buffalo, met them. Once, on a duck hunting trip to Louisiana with some fraternity brothers, Milch was sitting in a swamp, slapping flies and attempting to avoid injuring any ducks. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was a friend's father, then director of CIA, later president himself, who'd joined the hunt. "You're a good Jew, Dave, you're a white Jew. I like you," George H.W. Bush blessed him.

David Milch, whose mother ran the Buffalo school board, whose father tended to gangsters' hearts, and who was passed around by pedophiles as a child, was invited to join the most storied of all secret societies, Skull and Bones. There is a procedural ritual. The invitation is formally made and the candidate advised the only responses accepted are one word, either "accept" or "decline."

Today, Milch's fraternity brothers run Fortune 500 companies, intelligence agencies, and foundations which bend dreams into shapes that fit together in ways that the so-called beneficiaries can't see, but the grant-makers can. A tremendous opportunity for a (relatively) poor but talented Jewish child from soon-to-die Buffalo to have power and make money. Milch declined.

Milch tells a story about a bachelor party in Houston, which perhaps may shed some light on that choice. Milch and several of his fraternity brothers were invited to the wedding of another frat brother. The family jet of the future groom flew the groom's party to Houston for a week of pre-wedding festivities. The high-spirited youths were each given Mercedes to drive, compliments of somebody's father's dealership. The future operators of the world all got drunk and they took those Mercedes off-road, onto a golf course and had a Paris-to-Dakar rally on the local country club greens and fairways. You can imagine there was heck to pay, and quite a bit of shouting. In the end, somebody's father had to pay for the extensive landscaping that was needed to restore the Bob Rees' golf course.

Then came the night before the wedding, and the groom was asked, "is there anything special you'd like to do on this, your last night of freedom."

The groom replied he'd like to destroy an original work of art.

After a brief scavenger hunt, a Chagall drawing was located and ceremoniously incinerated in the wastepaper basket in the library of a Houston plutocrat's home.

There are mystics who believe it is wrong to retain beyond the immediate needs of self and family, riches that flow from a freely given gift of God. I don't know if Milch believed that. If he didn't, though, his lack of such faith could not be told from his behavior. David Milch made large amounts of money, but he gave it away almost as fast, constantly, in private and in public, making no distinction in persons on religious, racial, economic, or public health grounds, as long as they would share in his wealth.

Milch helped friends, relatives, friends of relatives, friends of friend's relatives, and thousands of strangers. He eased countless family emergencies, helped with hundreds, perhaps thousands of substance abuse disasters, broken cars, burned homes, dead batteries, and felony warrants. Milch was a source of unsecured, no-interest, often no-repay "loans" to the worthy and unworthy alike.

Milch's beneficiaries, erstwhile creditors where they had the brains, would find his advice more valuable than money. Rita, nee Rita Stern, David's long-suffering wife, would periodically purge the charitable rolls, evicting excessively tenacious clients. However, Milch is an earnest member of several recovery communities, which continuously provide an ethnically diverse multitude of worthy and unworthy persons in indubitable need.

Milch, under no illusions, loves them all. He loves the scamps, the wiseguys the perverts and fools, Mormons and Mormon-haters, good and evil; though the latter tended not to hang around long, due to Milch's long friendship and professional association with NYPD Detective Bill Clark. Milch's only close male friend in adult life, Clark is an Irish American Vietnam vet who began his career in NYPD's (then secret) Intelligence Division. On patrol in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Clark developed an eye for hidden trip wires and booby traps. As head of a big city homicide division, Clark's work involved handling hot cases, politically dangerous cases, involving powerful people and terrible secrets. Many of the stories on Milch's NYPD Blue police drama originated in Clark's case files.

David Milch's own celebrated descents into the world of addiction, compulsions, and the demonic occurred at long intervals separated by decades of productive work. The experiences informed his dramas, as did his childhood experience of sexual abuse. He elevated with love that fallen world, this realm with its multitude of addicts, golems, killers and demons inhabiting the walking wounded of diminished capacity. All dramas begin, "Back," Milch would quote the poet William Yeats, "where all the ladders start; in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Besides opiates and the rest of pharmacopeia, Milch suffered from another, more dangerous addiction: high stakes gambling. He owned racehorses, and won the Breeder's Cup Juvenile back in 1992 with the beautiful filly Gilded Time. For this reason, he was hesitant about doing the dramatic series Luck, a story about organized crime and revenge set in the mirror world of horse racing.

In gambling parlance, David Milch was a whale—a high-net-worth individual who meets the definition of hope-to-die gambler, an addict who, once he "gets his nose open," will make million-dollar bets and find it difficult or impossible to stop. Las Vegas bookies offered a million-dollar cash reward for anyone who delivered Milch as a client.

What we know, for sure is that in the end, the house wins. Perhaps the mirror world takes the money back, or a beat forces the gambler to reflect on who he is and what he wants. "We let you walk around like a man for a while, then we turn you back into a little boy," is an old Vegas saying Milch liked to quote. Milch lost, they say, $70 million. I wasn't there and did not discuss his losses with him; we mutually acknowledged those facts through silence. It was a bad beat.

Milch wasn't quitting, though. He thought he might have one arrow left in the quiver. He talked about a show set in a CIA-run bordello in London. The players were Sir James Goldsmith, several Rothschilds and Guinnesses, Lords Aspinall, Lucan, and a spectrum of addicts, occultists, extortionists, and spies engaging in espionage, extortion, entertainment, political blackmail in the treacherous hypersexed milieu of the London clublands.

We were driving to lunch in Santa Monica, discussing the prospective CIA project one afternoon, when Milch said he'd made an appointment with the former director of the CIA, James Woolsey, to meet at the LA airport to discuss the projected U.K. spy-honeypot project. An important meeting, a necessary conversation. Milch was to meet the former director between planes in the not-so-secret VIP spook lounge at LAX, when something entirely unexpected happened.

"I forgot," he told me.

David Milch didn't forget anything. Ever. We both knew that. If he forgot anything, it was a sign of something awry, an ominous warning of pathology at work. In retrospect, Milch recognized there had been other warning signs. It wasn't long, perhaps a week or two, between that conversation and Milch being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, a progressive dementia for which the only treatments are palliative. "It's not scary," he said soon after his diagnosis, "it's just like ... the world slipping away."

A bad beat. And yet, Milch had rejected the position on offer. He declined membership in the semisecret club, did not sleep naked in a tomb with a stolen skull; instead, by prayer, personal sacrifice and constant lifelong effort, he created redemptive works of dramatic art.

The worlds of Deadwood, of NYPD Blue and John from Cincinnati and every other dramatic world that Milch created stood opposed to the pure materiality and marketing of the mirror world. The economic and popular success Milch's shows enjoyed was outweighed in importance by the powerful and enduring effect on human consciousness of thousands of hours of dramatic entertainment which showed, and which itself is, a work of the spirit.

Prayer is how David Milch thought about his work, and stages of contemplative ascent occur in sequences of scenes. For some, an eschatological elevation of the soul occurs unexpectedly. While Milch always identified himself as a Jew, like another old friend, Kinky Friedman, he is somewhat estranged from traditional, formal practice of Judaism, as I am from the Anglican faith of my birth. My own interests and our irreligious times inclined many of us, "Christians, Jews and Sigma Nu's," as Kinky Friedman likes to say, to a semi-agnostic secularity that did not frown on prayer or the possibility of redemption. Once a fellow writer described the deity in Milch's presence as "the foul demi-urge that made this world." Milch was profoundly shocked. Not much shocked him, but his face showed unmistakable horror.

Milch was able to look with love on all the polar extremes of experience, a capacity that is especially necessary and lacking now, as times are changing. The world has a way of opposing and mistreating unusual people while the person is in the body, and so it is better they remain anonymous while within the world's reach. When they are beyond it, as David Milch now is, it is better their works be known. He was the "Rosh ha-Dor, the leader of his generation, in the spiritual sense of the person who lives in communion with God, but utilizes his power in order to draw his contemporaries upward with him.

Ted Mann is an Emmy award-winning writer who worked on NYPD Blue, Deadwood, Hatfield McCoy, and Homeland.

from: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/clearing-space-david-milch

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David Milch Still Has Stories to Tell

The TV producer and creator of "Deadwood" recounts his tumultuous upbringing, his trailblazing career and his experience with Alzheimer's disease in "Life's Work."

By Dave Itzkoff

    Sept. 2, 2022

LOS ANGELES — The door to a room at an assisted-living facility swung open, and out darted one of its occupants: a cat named Mignonne, who was eager for some fresh companionship. Then, with more deliberation, came the apartment's primary resident, David Milch, who was similarly happy to have visitors.

"I'm so grateful," he said, allowing entrance to the quarters where he has lived for nearly three years, but which still feel to him like an intermediate space. "As you may imagine, things are all in a state of flux."

To television viewers who have followed the medium's resurgence of erudition and artistic credibility, the 77-year-old Milch is a towering figure. A onetime writer-producer on the influential 1980s police drama "Hill Street Blues," he went on to help create boundary-busting programs like "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and his personal masterpiece, the uncompromising HBO western "Deadwood."

In his industry, Milch is well known for his writing style, which blends articulate grandeur with defiant obscenity, and for his appetites. He is a recovered drug addict and a compulsive gambler who, by his own admission, lost millions of dollars on horse racing and other wagers.

Now he rises each day in his modest accommodations here, decorated with family photos, some Peabody Awards near a sink and some Emmy statuettes on a shelf, and furnished with a bed, a small TV and a refrigerator containing a single can of LaCroix sparkling water. This is where he has lived since the fall of 2019, a few months after publicly disclosing that he had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Having welcomed me and his wife, Rita Stern Milch, into the room, Milch explained that he has not lost the powers of observation and articulation that have served him as a writer. Instead, he has found himself training those abilities on his own life as he navigates his experience with the disease.

"When you're in transition, there's a sense that life lives you," he said, fiddling with an elastic bracelet that he wore to keep his room key attached around his wrist. "You're holding on and trying to accommodate all of the impositions and uncertainties."
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Describing his present relationship to life and the way he once lived it, he added, "I'm estranged. I can kid myself, but I ain't a regular."

Preserving what he can remember about himself and sharing it with an audience are already demanding tasks for Milch, and now they have taken on a particular urgency. In the years since he received his diagnosis, he has been working on a memoir called "Life's Work."

The book, which will be published by Random House on Sept. 13, offers a poetic but unvarnished account of his personal history, abundant with the barbarity and grace that have animated Milch's fictional characters.

The project is a quintessentially Milchian lesson in accurately depicting a life, even one composed of events that he may not always be proud of having lived.

At the start of 2015, amid other health problems and difficulties with his memory, Milch received a neuropsychological evaluation and was told he had dementia; a few years later he was given a diagnosis of "probable Alzheimer's."

By the summer of 2019, he was becoming confused on car rides where he was a passenger and fighting with Rita over car keys he had forgotten he was no longer allowed to use. On one exit from his house, he had a particularly nasty, face-first fall on the steps. That October, he moved into the facility where he now resides.

Milch was already in the habit of composing his screenplays through dictation and had been recording his speeches at work for the past 20 years. His family members and colleagues expanded that process, recording his personal remembrances and reaching out to others for stories that could stimulate Milch's memories, all in the service of creating "Life's Work."

"There were days where the recordings are a lot more wading through confusion," said his daughter Olivia Milch. "And then there are days where he just rolls and it's stunning, how he's able to talk about the disease and what he's going through." The book's prologue was essentially transcribed verbatim, she said, including her father's ethereal opening words: "I'm on a boat sailing to some island where I don't know anybody. A boat someone is operating, and we aren't in touch."

As Rita explained, the memoir showed there was beauty in "how he took his life and turned it into art — all the experiences he had, which seemed so wild, he was able to tame in narrative and take back."

David saw an even more fundamental value in the project: "I have felt the blessing of feeling like I know who I am," he said.

A few days before the visit, Rita — who lives about 20 minutes away — had cautioned that he has bad days and good days; even on good days, he can be discursive in his thinking or unaware of his surroundings.
"He still thinks like a storyteller," she said. "And maybe because I love him, but I just find it fascinating. Even when it doesn't make a lot of sense, there's something in it that's just Dave."

On a Tuesday morning in July, David Milch was in a genial mood and voluminous in his affectionate praise for Rita. He said something elliptical about the difficult work that lay ahead, now that it was time for students to enroll in their classes. He saw me admiring a trophy he'd won for a racehorse he once owned and asked, with a gleam in his eye, if I liked going to the track.

"Life's Work" is by turns a brisk and brutal memoir, beginning with its author's upbringing in Buffalo, N.Y., at the hands of his father, Elmer, an accomplished surgeon as well as a relentless gambler and philanderer. Elmer operated on mobsters, scammed Demerol prescriptions for himself and enlisted David, while he was still a child, to run his bets for him.

The author himself grew up to develop his own crippling vices — he recalls being introduced to heroin as a high-school senior — as well as a prodigious writing talent. As an undergraduate at Yale, Milch studied with the Pulitzer Prize winners Robert Penn Warren and R.W.B. Lewis, and he vacillated between futures at Yale Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop while he made L.S.D. in Mexico and continued to use drugs. "I loved heroin," Milch writes in the memoir. "I loved checking out. You were here and you were not here at the same time. That has appeal."

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In television, Milch writes that he found a constructive outlet for his energies and learned to open his "imagination to the particular truths of a different person and a different environment." He was hired at "Hill Street Blues" by its co-creator Steven Bochco, and together they created "N.Y.P.D. Blue," whose sophisticated storytelling and then-unprecedented use of nudity and explicit language influenced decades of prestige TV that followed.

Milch continued to gamble, betting tens of thousands of dollars on individual horse races; he had a heart attack, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and got sober at the age of 53. Then in 2004, he created his magnum opus, "Deadwood," a drama set in the Dakota territory in the 1870s, a merciless era of American frontier expansion.

On that show, Milch writes, "It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say." He adds, "The actors told me their characters' deepest truths. They gave themselves up, and they inhabited the parts they had come to."

Paula Malcomson, who played the saloon prostitute Trixie, said that Milch maintained a daily presence on the "Deadwood" set as a kind of wandering, salty-tongued philosopher.

"He granted us permission to be ourselves," she said. "He let us bring forth the things that most people would say, 'That's too much. This is uncouth."

Robin Weigert, who played Calamity Jane on the series, said her portrayal of the disenchanted sharpshooter was influenced by Milch's own language and physical demeanor.

"I will always feel that there is a little piece of David's soul that I got to dwell inside of," Weigert said. "It creates a different feeling than when you just work for somebody. I felt like I worked inside of him."

But "Deadwood" was canceled at HBO after only three seasons; other shows Milch made for the network, like "John From Cincinnati" and "Luck," had even briefer runs and still others weren't picked up at all.

In 2011, Milch writes, his wife went to their business advisers and learned that he had spent about $23 million at racetracks in the previous 10 years. They had $5 million in unpaid taxes and were $17 million in debt, she found.

A yearslong period of downsizing followed for the Milches, during which David was able to complete the story of "Deadwood" in an HBO movie that aired in 2019. He has been open about his disease with his colleagues and co-stars, many of whom remain in his life, and say that Milch has retained his fundamental expressiveness.

Weigert visited Milch while he was still living at his home. He had forgotten the names of some of his dogs, she said, and where his bedroom was, but "we had this high-level conversation about the transmigration of souls."

W. Earl Brown, who was an actor and writer on "Deadwood," visited Milch after he moved to the care facility. As Brown recalled, "Dave takes a long look around the room, leans into me and says, 'I have to tell you something, Earl: The indignities of decrepitude are boundless.' That quote perfectly encapsulates David Milch."

Malcomson described Milch as "the most human of anyone I've ever known."

"I comfort myself a little bit, thinking he burned so bright and there was so much life lived, and maybe that was his exact quota," she said. "I'm not saying he's not living life now, but I'm saying that it is a different version of it."

As the publication of "Life's Work" approaches, Rita Stern Milch said she was anxious about seeing so many intensely personal stories about her husband and their family shared with a wide readership. Having worked as a film producer and editor, she said, "I'm a background person, a behind-the-scenes person. It doesn't make me comfortable."

But she said those concerns were less important than allowing David to tell readers what he has experienced while he still can. "It's a horrible diagnosis and it ain't fun," she said. "But life goes on. You don't have to hide people away. They don't have to disappear."

Over a pizza lunch at an outdoor restaurant near the facility, David and Rita explained that they continue to work together on writing projects, whether they end up getting produced or simply provide David with a means of keeping his mind active. (As he writes in the memoir, "I still hear voices. I still tell stories.")

They had revisited an early screenplay of David's called "The Main Chance," which takes places at the Saratoga Race Course, but Rita said they backed off once David became agitated, thinking he was back at the track. They have also continued to develop a biographical series about the late-night host Johnny Carson.

On the car ride back from lunch, they listened to a radio station that was broadcasting news updates about Major League Baseball.

"Did we bet on baseball games?" David asked from a passenger's seat.

"No," Rita answered as she steered the car.

David smiled and seemed glad for the admonishment. "Nor are we going to," he said happily.

Dave Itzkoff is a culture reporter whose latest book, "Robin," a biography of Robin Williams, was published in May 2018. @ditzkoff

from:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/books/david-milch-still-has-stories-to-tell.html