[Sven2]

The approximate dates for the first airing of "Luck", from Plepler and Lombardo interview.

How are David Milch and Michael Mann working together on "Luck?"

ML: I will say they are working really well together. I think they learned a lot about each other during the pilot.

And Michael is involved with the whole series?

ML: Yes. He will be running the production on the show, the visual and production on the show, for the first season at least.

How far will it delve into the nuances of horse racing? Will the general public be able to pick it up immediately?

RP: Absolutely. It's accessible to the non-horse racing aficionado. I know nothing about horse racing, and it was a very, very clear translation for me, and I think the viewer will feel the same.

And when is that set to air?

ML: Again, we're looking at either fourth quarter of '11 or first quarter '12.

from:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118026455?refCatId=14

[Sven2]

More familiar faces will appear in "Luck", "Earl Brown is reteaming with David Milch on the HBO horse racing series "Luck." Brown, who played Ian McShane's henchman Dan Dority on the Old West series that ran for three seasons, will play a trainer in a multi-episode arc in "Luck."



from:
http://celebrifi.com/gossip/Deadwood-thesp-in-Luck-with-HBO-3962981.html

[Sven2]

Since "Caprica" was canceled, Paula Malcomson (Jerry) played a small part (I'm not sure if she'll be in future episodes) in "The Event".  She plays a journalist investigating government efforts to hide presence of aliens on Earth.

[SaveJFC Admin]

Since "Caprica" was canceled, Paula Malcomson (Jerry) played a small part (I'm not sure if she'll be in future episodes) in "The Event".  She plays a journalist investigating government efforts to hide presence of aliens on Earth.

She also plays the Irish lover of the now deceased patriarch of the Sons of Anarchy biker gang.

[Sven2]

Yes, here she is:


Thank you, Trishah!

[Sven2]

" Just in time for the holidays, HBO's brilliant "Deadwood" has been chosen for induction into the complete series Blu-ray catalog of the most important TV network in the last twenty years.

Very few HBO series are available in complete series HD sets from HBO  ("Band of Brothers," "Rome," "The Pacific") and while fans of "The Sopranos," "The Wire," and "Six Feet Under" may finally have their day next holiday season, this one belongs to David Milch's masterpiece.

The 36 episodes of Milch's brilliant deconstruction of the TV Western have been segmented on 13 discs — four per season and a disc of bonus material. Essentially, this is nothing more than an HD translation of what was released two years ago on standard disc. If you're still dreaming of that oft-rumored movie that would tie up all the loose ends of this canceled-too-soon program than you'll have to keep dreaming.

One of the best programs of the '00s is named after the real American frontier town that serves as the dramatic backdrop for a convergence of law, greed, love, the past, and the future. Deadwood was the first melting pot, a place where businessmen, soldiers, Chinese laborers, prostitutes, and gunfighters all struggled to survive. Milch's incredible drama was riveting from first episode to last, not just a great TV Western but one of the best of its genre of any medium, film and fiction included.

"Deadwood" won multiple awards, including Emmys (all technical although actors Brad Dourif, Robin Weigert, and Ian McShane were nominated) and a Peabody Award, and was massively critically-acclaimed but it fell victim to something of a house cleaning at HBO as they were trying to find their identity at the end of the '00s and cutting high-budget programming. Series like "Carnivale," "Rome," and "Deadwood" were all cut tragically-short.

Everything you'd find in the individual season sets have been imported to the complete series set along with the new special features available on the 2008 release. The best of that set was "The Meaning of Endings," a 23-minute discussion with Milch about the controversial end of the show in which the creator walks the set and talks about where he was planning to go in season four. The other features on the extra disc include "The Real Deadwood: Out of the Ashes", "Q&A With Cast and Creative Team", "Deadwood 360 Tour", and "Al Swearengen Audition Reel (as performed by Titus Welliver)"

What more is there to say about "Deadwood" other than that I still miss it? I like what HBO is doing nowadays but they don't seem to be taking the creative risks that they once did with shows like this one or "Carnivale." Let's face it — "True Blood" is fun but it's a relatively-obvious hit with its mix of sexuality and the genre trend of the day. "Deadwood" was daring, something that I'm not sure HBO is as much as it used to be. It will be again. But we'll always have these three seasons to remind us of what can be done when a brilliant TV creator is given creative freedom and when a network takes chances."


From: http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/news/12586/blu-ray-review-hbo-s-deadwood-the-complete-series-archives-incredible-drama#ixzz15zNlOkDH

Amazon.com price $137.99
   

[SaveJFC Admin]

Very few HBO series are available in complete series HD sets from HBO  ("Band of Brothers," "Rome," "The Pacific") and while fans of "The Sopranos," "The Wire," and "Six Feet Under" may finally have their day next holiday season, this one belongs to David Milch's masterpiece.   

I guess JOHN doesn't count... grrrr  :'(

[Sven2]

The cast of "Luck" is growing, it would be great seeing old acquaintances that follow Mr. Milch to the new show.
Titus Welliver who played Silas in Deadwood Now, "speaks hopefully of making an appearance in "Luck," HBO's upcoming drama from Milch.


Welliver this season has raised Cain on FX's motorcycle-gang actioner "Sons of Anarchy." He plays Jimmy O'Phelan, a cold-blooded Irish Republican Army gunrunner who will stoop to anything, including child abduction, to get the job done."

from:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20101126/ENTERTAINMENT/11260316/Welliver-s-a-busy-busy-guy?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Entertainment

[SaveJFC Admin]

Matt Winston's (played Barry Cunningham) famous father...  I had NO IDEA!!

Stan Winston Studio

http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/Poniverse/news/?a=20918

Matt Winston, actor and son of legendary effects master Stan Winston, attended the 2010 San Diego Comic Con to launch the Studio's newest venture; which is designed to both educate visual effects students and honor his father's legacy.

Stan Winston needs no introduction amongst movie fans. The four time Academy Award winner was responsible for the amazing visual effects in dozens of films, including the Terminator, Alien, Predator and Jurassic Park series. Not to mention Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Pearl Harbor Constantine and the recent hit movies Iron Man and Avatar. Upon his passing in June 2008, his son, Matt Winston, knew it was up to him to continue his father's legacy in the industry. He has chosen to do just that by educating the next generation of visual effects hopefuls:

The Stan Winston School of Character Arts

Founded by the Winston Family, the Stan Winston School of Character Arts offers a training curriculum that covers the entire spectrum of character arts, from practical to digital. Each student can customize their own curriculum through a range of online videos, DVD lessons and hands-on workshops held in association with world-renowned Winston partners. From the first day of training, the Stan Winston School transports students to the realms of robots, aliens, dinosaurs and monsters as they learn to bring their imaginations to life on the silver screen.

[Sven2]

Thanks, Trishah! Stan Winston was, is - a legend in his field, kudos to his family for the school in his memory. Fascinating, how much work  and hundreds of people it takes to make practically every single movie. (Still could be a terrible flop though!)

[Sven2]

Here's the recent Mr.Milch article in its entirety. Published 12.02.10

The final and deepest gift from Zenyatta
By David Milch


"The idea of a horse retiring undefeated has an enormous appeal which ultimately, I think, does a disservice to all of the deeper connections that have been generated between the people who are privileged one way or another to participate in the horse's career.

If you identify the emotion that one feels in the aftermath of, say, a horse's first victory, the impulse is to feel, "Well, I've now been associated with unalloyed, unqualified, excellence." But as time goes on, problems show up, and some of them are inherent in the horse's excellence. That both liberates the capacity for adoration and, if we are humble enough, reminds us that the feeling of being in the presence of unalloyed, uncompromised excellence is an illusion – but it's the most wonderful illusion to have.

It's the same sort of illusion felt if we are lucky enough to be blessed with children. When you see a baby you feel that whatever tragedy will ensue, at that moment tragedy is a stranger. The longer we are able to sustain that sense of a horse's uncompromised, unqualified, transcendent excellence the more we become aware that it is an illusion, and every time that the horse seems to transcend the limits we know ultimately will express themselves, the more deeply we feel simultaneously joy and the sense ultimately that joy, for all its genuineness, is predicated on a sense of being and feeling which life will not sustain.

Very infrequently is there a horse who so utterly and wholly seems to embody excellence, but if you spend time with animals you learn to appreciate particular sorts of excellence which don't inform the animal's whole being. I once had a cheap horse named Marvin's Policy. If you look up "ugly" in the dictionary there is a small picture of Marvin's Policy. He had the worst action you ever saw, and one could not help loving that horse. He got beat, but he never liked it, and he won more often than he should have. He was always getting hurt and always coming back, so in that case one learned to feel that sort of uncompromised appreciation for bravery and for persistence, and for a kind of indomitability.

Zenyatta is a horse who transcends in her excellence every limiting category, including the category of gender. She is that extraordinary. Not only is she a girl, who at the end was running against boys, but she always came from out of it so she was always in effect conceding luck as an important variable. No matter how good she was, if she had enough bad luck getting around horses, she wasn't going to win. And the more variables one can introduce and still sustain a sense of absolute indomitability, even as one is brought to experience with absolute certainty that that sense of indomitability is an illusion, the more precious the illusion becomes.

In watching Zenyatta, going into a race there was almost a sort of perverse gratification that you felt – "Good, now she's going to show just how much better she is than them."

But knowing she was going into was her last race, one allowed oneself to hope: "Let her get the best of it for once." And of course she didn't.

In the course of her moving down the stretch the first time, her action was very choppy. It seemed like she couldn't get hold of the track. And yet, as the race progressed, she seemed to enact exactly the same course that she enacted in every one of her previous races. Although the jock had to wait a bit before he got out, once he did, at the head of the stretch, it looked as if she had enough ground left to run that she could make it. And she closed beautifully. She had dead aim on that horse that beat her. He is a very, very good horse, period, and he needed every bit of racing luck that he had to put him at an advantage against her.

We had been working all day that day on the third episode of the show, and working seven days a week for a long time. In terms of the transferability of high-emotion, if you're tired, when you begin to feel a different emotion you feel it with the same extremity that you feel tired. I really started pulling for that filly the last eighth of a mile even as one had the sense that it didn't look like she was going to get there. And yet, one remembered, even from her previous race, it was precisely that flickering doubt that was one of the last and best ingredients of the experience of watching her run. Every time you thought, "She can't get there," one felt too, "When she does, it will be even that much more wonderful."

Of course she didn't get there, and in the aftermath I was bawling like a baby and had been from the head of the stretch in gratitude for the opportunity to appreciate what she was doing. It seemed to me in the aftermath of the race, the last gift which was given had to do with the separation of that feeling of appreciation from the illusion of invincibility. The final and deepest gift that she had to give was the opportunity to accept all the qualifications of our finitude without having that dilute or alloy the joy she made available to us.

In other experiences, if one is lucky, we get that same last chance to distinguish between what joy comes to us and what I imagine is the laughter of the gods. I forget who it was that said, "Every victory leaves something drastic and bitter in the cup." In that sense, it took all of her races and the conclusion of her career to come to the last draught of what was in the cup. And to realize still, that in what one experienced as drastic and bitter for a moment was the final essence of victory. The victory was in the flowering of humility as the last component of the mix of feelings that she had made available, and how absolutely irrelevant her defeat is to the experience that she gave us, for all that period of time."

David Milch, the Emmy Award-winning creator of the HBO television series "Deadwood" and "John From Cincinnati," is the owner of two Breeders' Cup winners and an Eclipse Award champion. He is currently at work on a new HBO series set in the world of horse racing called "Luck," scheduled to debut in 2011.


from Daily Racing Forum
http://www.drf.com/news/final-and-deepest-gift-zenyatta

[skordalia]

Thanks for finding and posting this, Sven!

[Sven2]

Harry Potter fans would rejoice, Dumbledor (II) will play a part in "Luck."

"Michael Gambon jumps from big to small screen and he's making his first U.S. television debut at the same time. The Brit is to take a recurring role on HBO drama series "Luck" which is about several characters who are tied to the same horse-racing track.

Produced under David Milch/Michael Mann collaboration, "Luck" puts Dustin Hoffman in the lead role named Ace Brenstein. Now Gambon is to play a yet-to-be-named character who is "a nemesis or worthy adversary for" Brenstein. Gambon previously worked with Mann in Oscar nominated film "The Insider".

Joining Gambon as recurring character is Patrick J. Adams ("Friday Night Lights", "Pretty Little Liars"). The 29-year-old is set to be Nathan Israel who works closely with Bernstein, Deadline said. Joan Allen had also been selected to take a supporting role.

Gambon expanded his fame Stateside when starring as Professor Dumbledore in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", replacing Richard Harris who died in 2002. He is the depicter of King George V in the upcoming Oscar hopeful "The King's Speech"."



from:
http://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00037314.html

[Sven2]

'Luck' Pilot, First Two Episodes Complete

"Production on the pilot and first two episodes of Home Box Office's (HBO) highly anticipated series, 'Luck,' has been nearly completed, and production and shooting for Episode Three will resume at Santa Anita on January 10.

Luck, which stars several 'A-list' actors, including Dustin Hoffman, is the brainchild of world-renowned writer/producer David Milch, and is being shot in large-part at Santa Anita.

"Their production crew completed two weeks of work on and around the racetrack last week," said Santa Anita Community and Special Events Coordinator Pete Siberell. "The pilot was completed several months ago and this will enable them to finish their work on the first two episodes."

Among the notable actors involved in Episodes One and Two are Nick Nolte, Dennis Farina, John Ortiz, Gary Stevens and (jockey) Chantal Sutherland.

Siberell noted that Milch, who has also created such blockbuster hits as 'Hill Street Blues,' 'NYPD Blue,' and 'Deadwood,' is excited about the recently shot content for the first two episodes.

"David said that everything went extremely well and he was particularly happy with the racing action they were able to simulate. He also said that his directors, Terry George and Allen Coulter, were very pleased as well."

Both George and Coulter are considered industry 'heavyweights,' as evidenced by their work experience. George's professional credits include 'Hotel Rwanda,' 'Reservation Road' and 'In the Name of the Father.'

Coulter has directed 'The Sopranos,' 'Sex in the City,' 'Law and Order,' 'Boardwalk Empire,' and 'Rubicon.'

Siberell said that when HBO returns in January, superstar actor Hoffman, who played a prominent role in the pilot, will again be on hand as production begins on Episode Three.

"Hoffman and most of the other regular cast members will be here as well," said Siberell. "This episode will be directed by Phillip Noyce, who's also worked on shows like 'The Quiet American,' 'Salt,' 'Clear and Present Danger' and 'Patriot Games.'"

(Santa Anita)

from:
http://www.standardbredcanada.ca/news/12-23-10/luck-pilot-first-two-episodes-complete.html

[Sven2]

Earl Brown about Deadwood, Dority, Mr.Milch, etc.

My apologies for posting such gargantuan segment of text, I'm doing it in hopes to protect the info from disappearance, as a lot of priceless thoughts and ideas have already become lost  when the links to the original articles stopped working for one reason or another. So, here it is, a lot about Deadwood, Mr.Milch's style, a little bit about JFC and Luck.

"W. Earl Brown: When I was in acting school, my friend Jeff Still—who was in August: Osage County, written by his roommate Tracy Letts—said something gold. He said, "I don't really care about money, fame, and that stuff. What I want to do is something that has an impact. Something that will last beyond the two hours that somebody's watching it." And Deadwood was that for me. Franklyn Ajaye said it best when he joined the cast in the second season. He said, "You know what? I've been doing this for 30 years, and this is the first show I've ever been on that when people sign out, they stick around." It was that kind of creative cauldron. It wasn't all happiness and butterflies—you know, there was a lot of stirring of the pot and sometimes contention. Not in a negative way. But we knew we had something unique, and you wanted to be there at every turn, because you didn't know what was going to happen. And ground zero for that is Milch, the mad genius.

When Ricky Jay left after season one, I got the actor-slash-writer chair. So I got to be there for the process from the very beginning of episodes, and David would be writing today what we were gonna shoot tomorrow. Truth be told, everybody wrote on every episode. You were always pitching ideas, you were always writing things. And then David would reprocess—you'd get "Milched"—and you never knew how it would go through that brain. So it was exhilarating. Which made it all the worse when we got our knees cut off like we did. None of us saw it coming. I did Justified with Tim [Olyphant] recently, and we spent the whole week and a half bemoaning, like, "Can you fucking believe that?" [Laughs.] I still keep in touch with pretty much all those guys. I talk to Ian [McShane] occasionally. I think it was, for everyone involved, something really, really special.

AVC: As far as "everyone had their input," did that go for every actor?

WEB: David Milch, twice I got lectures from him about the theory of writing. I told my wife one night when I got home, "I feel like I'm being paid to sit at the feet of Aristotle." He was trying to sell me on a future to focus on writing, because you're a vessel. Stories have a way of telling themselves. He said, "You gotta set your ego aside and listen, and that story will tell itself through you."  And knowing David the way I got to know him, the part that he loved was the thrill of not knowing where the story was gonna go. He really felt like whatever was happening in his subconscious at the last minute was the way the story wanted to be told. He listened to everybody.

Richardson—you know, with the horns? He was a background guy, Ralph Richeson. David saw one take where Ralph responded naturally instead of acting, and Ralph had that hangdog look and David just loved it. He goes up to Ralph and says, "Who are you? I mean who are you in Deadwood? Come up with a background story. Write two pages. Let me see that." David, the whole horns thing and all of that—he loved the idea of Iago having a whipping boy. E.B. [Farnum] wasn't really Iago, he was the Fool. But the Fool in [King] Lear—shit rolls downhill, so there's someone for the Fool. So that's how Richardson came about. With David's mind, that was part of the story that wanted to tell itself. Absorbing everything from everybody. There was no disagreeing with David. You could make your case, and you'd sometimes, you know... And then some days you just stayed away, because David was really leading the pack. That said, he was open to input from everyone. And what made it exhilarating was that it was alive at every moment. It was a live process. Because he's writing it, and 12 hours later, we're shooting it.

AVC: Dan is a tough guy, but he also has a childlike vulnerability. Was that something you brought to the role?

WEB: They had sent me the script to Deadwood and said, "We want you to read for Dority." I had guest starred on Six Feet Under. Same casting people, same production team. Well, I read it, and as I said to my agent, Jack McCall was the role that jumped out—because I knew McCall was only going to be three or four episodes. He was going to kill Wild Bill and be gone. I said, "You know what? I want to audition for McCall. It's more fun. I don't want to be the thug in the shadows for seven years. I'm really not interested." So I go in, and Libby Goldstein, the casting director, came out and she said, "Okay, you got Dan." I said, "Yeah, I got it. But I want to read McCall." [Laughs.] She goes, "Hang on." She goes in and comes back out and says, "Okay, do McCall and then we'll do Dority." So I read McCall. Then David, I see him stick his head out and he goes, "You got Dan right? Let's do that scene." There's little dialogue, next to nothing. So we do it. And I see him look over at Walter Hill, who was directing the pilot, and he says, "Think about this." And he starts giving me this whole litany of my history with Swearengen. And what dawned on me—it sunk into me, sitting there in that room—is that David doesn't write thugs and shadows. There are no simple thugs and shadows in anything he creates. That was the point where I just gave over, like, I can trust this guy.
........
Then, a year later, Steve is a Deadwood fanatic, and I introduced him and Milch. We had breakfast together. They're a lot alike. They got this mind—this voracious mind that just goes 180 miles an hour—and both of them were junkies for years. And within five minutes, they start telling junkie stories, and they hit it off. We had like, a two-hour breakfast. At the end of it, Milch goes, "So Steve, I know you did The Wire. You did some of [David] Simon's show?" Steve says, "Yeah, like four episodes or whatever it was." "Would you like to do our show?" "Yeah!" "I'm gonna write something for you. Next season I want you to come and do an episode or two." So next season rolls around, we're a few episodes in, and he comes to me and he goes, "Hey, call your buddy Steve. I got this idea. He's Hooplehead Steve. He's a guy that's been screwed out of his claim, and they want to tar and feather Jarry, but they can't 'cause he's a rich connected white guy, so they find Franklyn. They're gonna chase down the General and they're gonna tar and feather him. It's funny, but it's creepy."

So I call Steve. He had, like, a week and a half available between the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival and the beginning of his tour. I mean, touring is how he makes his money. So I gave David the dates—didn't work out. So David brought in Michael Harney, who he'd worked with before, and Hooplehead ends up being on all the rest of that season and the next season. So the next episode rolls around. I was at home. I wasn't in for that—I don't know if I had taken the afternoon off, 'cause I was usually there every day, either in the trailer or on set, in the writer's trailer. I get the sides sent to me, and I call Steve and say, "Hey man, what's going on?" "Oh man, just got the night off. Just stayin' on the bus. We didn't get a hotel." And I say, "You might be glad your schedule didn't work." He said, "Why the fuck would I be glad? I ain't glad. I want to be on that show, man. Why would I be glad?" I said, "Because at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning you'd be going to work to fuck a horse. Bullock has humiliated Hooplehead, and Hooplehead Steve can't face him, so he goes to the livery and fucks Bullock's horse for revenge." "You shitting me?" I said, "Well, he can't bring himself to actually stick it in so he just beats off on his haunch." [Pauses.] "What kind of impression did I leave on Milch at that breakfast?"

So I tell anybody if you ever encounter him, call him "Hooplehead Steve the Horse-Fucker." And he said it's happened to him twice, that somebody's come up and said that. And he goes, "Yeah, you know Earl Brown."

AVC: Did your experience working as a bouncer help you prep for Dan?

WEB: I was a bouncer, when I was in DePaul in Chicago at the theater school. I threw drunks out of bars—unless I had a play running that weekend. But I only had two actual fights. Some were like out of old Westerns.

AVC: How was it taking over the scriptwriting reins on "A Constant Throb"?

WEB: Well, like I said, everyone wrote on every episode. [Milch] had already conceived the idea—we were over budget.

AVC: Like all the time, right?

WEB: Yeah, but we were way over at this point. He said, "All right, episode 10 is yours. I got a problem. Come up with a way to solve it. Keep as much of the episode inside the Gem as you can, because we're so far fucking over budget we can't afford to shoot outside." He already had Alma being shot at. He said, "We're gonna start with where they're trying to bait Ellsworth, so Pinkerton's gonna fire at her. She needs to talk to Al about it." So all of the stuff in the Gem—again, everybody's pitching ideas. Someone once commented, "That speech of Jane's at the end is so beautiful." Well, Regina Corrado wrote that, I didn't. Likewise, there were things in other episodes that I had conceived that got twisted and turned.

AVC: Anything you want to take credit for?

WEB: No. Because again, David twists it. Example: that eyeball fight. David told me two weeks in advance, "We're gonna have this fight with you and Turner. You're gonna almost die, but it's gonna turn at the very end. You're going to survive and kill him." First of all, I put my fat ass on a treadmill. [Laughs.] We had three days of rehearsal with just me and Allan Graf, Mike Watson the stunt coordinator, Dan Manahan the director, and Milch. Milch says, "I got three rules. Number one, I want it completely realistic. I don't want cowboy roundhouse, flying-through-plate-glass bullshit. Number two, every time the audience thinks they're gonna be able to draw their breath and relax, I want it to escalate and go to the next place. Just when they think they can't fucking take no more, you give them more. Third, I want something I never seen before. Make it up." So Manahan goes, "We've never been in the meat market. That is such a great set, and I love the primacy of fighting amongst raw meat." I said, "We've gotta drown in horse piss."

But we didn't have an ending. I had written a thing in season two called "Son Of A Bitch." It's based on my grandfather, who would not allow anyone to call him a son of a bitch. And my mother's first husband did. Long story, but my grandfather hit him. My uncle witnessed it when he was 9 years old. He hit him so hard his eyeball popped out. And then my grandfather grabbed a chunk of coal and was about to brain him. And my uncle, who was 9, grabs him by the chest to make him stop. Because my grandfather's eyes would go black, man. His pupils would dilate. I witnessed it three times—the devil comes. He was dangerous. He was loving—again, I love my grandfather. I worshipped him. But there was a broken part of him. A lot of that was in Dority.

So I had written "Son Of A Bitch" for me and the soap-seller, who Milch never got around to using. We had some old rodeo cowboys who were advisors on the show. There was one guy who shall remain nameless, but he had been Benny Binion's enforcer. When you owed serious money to Binion, that's who came to visit you. He used to remove people's eyeballs with his thumb. That's what Milch told me: "Some people that were in serious trouble lost one of their eyes to him." That's how this cauldron of eyeball-ism starts. [Laughs.] We had rehearsed for two days, and we still didn't know what we're gonna end it with. I play cards with Jerry Cantrell, the musician. Jerry's in it—he's in the first season. He and Rex Brown are in the background in one scene. Like Billy [Gibbons] and Dusty [Hill] are in it, Lemmy Kilmister's in it, Scott Ian—all my metalhead buddies. So Jerry, I told him about the fight, about the eyeball gag. He goes, "You know, that happened to my brother David. He's in a biker bar in Oklahoma, he got into a fight, this guy's got him on a pool table by the ear, and he's cracking his head. David said it was like tunnel vision—he was just trying to push the guy off of him and he felt some soft tissue, and he jammed it, and he popped the guy's eyeball." The next day I go to work and I say, "I got an ending!"

AVC: There's never going to be a Deadwood movie, is there?

WEB: You know, it took me 14 months to stop beating a dead horse. I was the guy who literally, on a notebook, kept track of who was doing what. Because how do you just stop? It threw me for a loop. It threw a lot of us for a loop. Personally and every which way, because you feel like, "This is seven years!" Only in the third season did the money start being pretty good. It had a huge impact on my family, it had a huge impact on my career. You wanna talk about the worst fucking 12 hours of a career? Bloodworth, we were in pre-production, so I'm riding high, man. I'm in pre-production on the first movie that I've written, we've got a $5 million budget, we got some attachments from stars, and I'm a writer and one of the supporting leads on the hottest thing in television, which I think is sheer genius.

Within a 12-hour span of time, right after I left a casting session for Bloodworth, I had a message from Milch: "Hey Earl, call me at home when you get the chance." He didn't like to be bothered at home. Fuck. Dority was actually murdered, but not until 10 years later, and I thought, "I bet he's gonna up the murder. Dority's gonna die next season." So I call him, and he says, "Earl, I hate making these calls, but the show's over. It's cancelled." I pulled over to the side of the road and said, "What'd you say?" "Yeah, we were offered two movies or six episodes to wrap it up. But I don't want to mess with what we've already created by this truncated timeline. Fuck it, it's over. It's cancelled." I got a tattoo that night, and the whole time I'm getting the tattoo, I'm focusing on the pain. Have you ever gotten a tattoo? You take your mind elsewhere so you don't think about how much it hurts. But not that night. It was like, bleed. Fucking hurt.

The next morning, I called our line producer on the movie. Gibson was getting us some guitars, and I said, "I need a check to cut to Gibson." He says, "Problem. Can't cut a check." "Why can't you cut a check?" "We've lost our money." We'd lost one of the actors that got us the money. So within 12 hours I go from, like, "Look at me!" to completely unemployed. [Laughs.] That was not a good 12 hours. It was 14 months of depression. It was like, you can't wait to go to work, you know you're doing something, it's a hit, it's the second-biggest show on the network, Golden Globes, Emmys, we're about to step up, we got the nominations, we're gonna win—and then the rug's pulled out from under you.

Where it really ended is, I went to visit the set of John From Cincinnati, because they shot their interiors up on that lot. Sean Bridges [Deadwood's Johnny Burns] and I both met. I didn't want to be on John From Cincinnati, because it felt like our show was killed for that show—even though it wasn't. David planned on doing both. It was much more complicated reasoning than that. But Sean and I sat on the steps of the Chez Amis—because we had built the Chez Amis. That exterior, we added it to the back lot. We sat there for half an hour, never said a word. Literally, we met in the parking lot, we walked up the main street, and we sat there on the steps of the Chez Amis. That was my morning. I was in the graveyard and the last shovel of dirt had gone in. And after that, the burden lifted.

There's always talk and rumor and who knows. David's doing the new show [Luck] with Michael Mann, which is a nitroglycerin combination of personalities. If it ever happens, I'll be the first in line to say, "Count me in." But I'm not ever holding up hope for it happening. But Michael Lombardo, the head of HBO, in a recent interview they were talking about the success of True Blood, and how HBO now, with Boardwalk Empire—which is phenomenal—they're becoming a water-cooler network again. He said, "Looking back, it was a mistake to stop Deadwood. I felt like there was more of that show to go." And it was the first time anyone had acknowledged, on any level, that it was not a good decision. So that was kind of healing. To read that and go, "Okay. Yeah, it was." And now I've let it go. Like I said, I would gladly be back. But I don't have a lot of hope of that happening.

from:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/w-earl-brown,49370/1/