Simon, right, with Treme co-creator Eric Overmyer.
Treme co-creator David Simon is a thoughtful, passionate interview subject who has deeply thought through every project he has done and every opinion he has held, and loves to hold forth. I am a terrible typist. Put the two together and you have an interview that I am never going to transcribe in full.
I did, however, put together some lengthy highlights from our interview—sitting in a trailer at a cemetery in Gretna, La.—during my set visit to Treme, the vast bulk of which I wasn’t able to fit into a three-page feature. (At one point, I ill-advisedly compared an argument he was making to a Bill Murray speech from Stripes. And lived to tell the tale.)
Bonus tidbit: after our interview, when we were walking back to the set, I mentioned I was going to see a screening of The Pacific while I was in town. “Great,” he said, “you can see what $250 million looks like.” He was referring to the relatively small budget for his Iraq miniseries, Generation Kill. (Simon credits his pull with HBO, in part, to getting less money and coming in on budget.) A little later, when I asked about his Lincoln assassination project which I’d heard about, he said, “There’s no money. Tom Hanks spent it all.”
Anyway, the excerpts:
On why he and Eric Overmyer wanted, long before Katrina, to set a series in New Orleans:
It was one of the last authentic places in America. It was different from anywhere else, and so nourished a distinct culture. And we wanted to make a show that was about the meaning of culture. Culture’s a very subtle & nuanced thing that doesn’t always present itself the way it does in New Orleans. … What it says about who we are as Americans and what makes us distinct.
OK, so you just heard me say that. Can you imagine me and Eric going into a room and saying that’s what we want the show to be about? Until Katrina happened, there was no hook on which to hang that coat. So we would often say, “Yeah, let’s do that show about New Orleans,” but we didn’t have a freaking clue how to pitch it. And the problem is, if I could tell you–all that effort I’ve just made to tell you what the show’s about–if I could tell you what the show is about, then there’s no need to do the show. I have to do the show to show you. It’s a little bit of an American Brigadoon, in a way. Very few places left that believe in magic in this country.
It’s funny, because New Orleans culture helped to make American culture, but life here is in many ways so unlike anywhere else in the country.
When people from here go overseas, when people ask where they’re from, they say New Orleans, they don’t say America. It’s partly the Third World, it’s partly the Caribbean. You can — it’s European, it’s so many different things. but it has given birth to the one elemental American art form that is going to transcend every other memory of the American empire, and that is African American music.
African American music has conquered the world in ways that other American ideals and forms have not. We like to think we’ve exported constitutional democracy but we’ve exported a lot less than we claim. Baseball? Well, the Pacific Rim and Latin America, yeah. But it’s been decidedly problematic telling the rest of the world they ought to be playing baseball. But you go into a shabeen or a tavern or a pub anywhere in the world, Johannesburg, Budapest, Katmandu, and Michael Jackson or Otis Redding or Fats Domino or John Coltrane — African American music, which came into the world here, in twelve square blocks, has gone out into the world. And it stands for us. And the cool thing about that is, that’s our greatest cultural contribution by far. You can’t claim Hollywood and the movies, because that’s as much Fritz Lang and the Germans. We may have learned to market it the best and we may have actually produced more product and our product may have more box office, but it isn’t a truly American invention.
This thing could only happen because we’re mutts. It could only happen because of the American ideal in practice, which is to say that it doesn’t happen without European instrumentation and arrangement and it doesn’t happen without African rhythms and a blues scale, a pentatonic scale. It could only happen here, and it could only happen through the wonderfully miscegenated American experience. We are all each other, to an extent.
[It began with black musicians and white musicians.] Then here comes the Cuban rhythms on the banana boat, so that Professor Longhair sits down and he plays the 1-3-5 and it’s got a rumba beat, but he’s playing blues. That’s New Orleans. It’s what we often claim we are, the melting pot in cultural practice. But this is the melting pot, doing one of the most creative things we have ever done in our history. And then to have this storm come, and for the city where this originated and where it is still ongoing to have this near-death experience, and then for the culture to try to come back on those terms–now I’ve got something I can pitch.
Doesn’t it also give you more natural dramatic conflict, like telling a police story did on The Wire?
If you can walk guys in the room with guns, it’s an instant crutch. I mean, I’m not saying we did it because it’s a crutch, but whatever else it is–character nuance starting to lag? Have a guy walk into a room with a gun, have the gun go off… There’s a reason that 95% of shows are cops and emergency rooms and courtrooms. They’re the natural friction points of American life. To have a show where a guy picks up a horn instead of an automatic weapon–we may not last that long. But no reason not to try.
Did Katrina make the show harder to write in any way?
In one sense: we wanted to have fealty to that world. We had to have things happen when they happened. So first season is about displacement… But for instance, you can’t write about a lot of the institutional dysfunction that’s related to crime and corruption and the political realm being so stunted and amoral. Because crime didn’t come back until late spring ’06… and it really didn’t come back until ’07. [Because, he explains, poor people had evacuated and had the hardest time coming back.] Within them, there’s a greater percentage who were engaged in the underground economy that you engage in because you’re poor.
On trying to get the city right:
New Orleanians, they’re tenacious about defending this. They’re wary of us as a film project. Are you going to fuck it up again? You’re going to fuck it up–you’re not from here. And they’re not wrong. That’s why we brought New Orleanians into the writers’ room, because it has been fucked up routinely… The city has no public school system anymore, but the culture is coming back, they just refuse to let it die, they don’t know what else to do. It’s a city where before the storm 70 percent of the city were natives. No other city has a nunmber like that. They’re born here, and they can’t imagine going anywhere else. “Where would I go? When I die, they won’t have a parade. Nobody will second-line me. What do they eat there? Jesus!”
Detroit, they used to make cars, Pittsburgh, they used to make steel. Here’s there’s still a factory. It’s manned by an underpaid, poorly represented workforce of skilled workers. And what they manufacture is moments. New Orleans is a factory that gives you moments. And just when you think you’re in an ordinary place, some [Mardi Gras] Indian in a suit* will come out between two shotgun houses and stand on the street. Or a band will break into a second line and people will go 30 blocks out of their way, following the second line, forgetting what they were supposed to do… It’s a much of a dystopia as any place we’ve ever depicted. And yet, people won’t give up on it.
*[Co-creator Eric Overmyer told me that this linked photo, from the New York Times at Mardi Gras 2006–which Treme’s first season builds toward–was something of a touchstone in writing Treme: “Everything was grey and covered in mud, and wrecked, and then all this beautiful plumage. It was on the cover of the New York Times that day. That’s exactly what the show is–people living, coming back.”]
You could have made a series like The Wire, before Katrina, about New Orleans.
Here’s a thing about The Wire that I don’t think most critics got, which is understandable. Yes, we were saying that it had become dystopic, and that America was no longer even recognizing the depth of its problems, much less responding to them. … But nowhere in that were we saying that the city wasn’t salvagable or that there was any alternative to salvaging the city. The notion that, ‘Baltimore’s fucked up, why don’t they just leave?’ That’s an absurd, infantile argument. We are an urban people. 80% of us live in metro areas…
When we were making the Wire, we never meant to say that walking away was an option. Even if we did say–which we did say–that the moneyed interests are now entrenched in our political system, and in order to succeed in our political system, you have to walk away from problems and not address them. I believe that’s happening now with health care. [Note: the interview took place before the healthcare bill passed.] But I can believe that all I want, there still no other place to go if you’re an American. You still have to commit to voting the right way and making things better, whether you’re going to win or lose. … It’s Izzy Stone’s line that the only battles worth fighting are the ones you know you’re going to lose. So the one last piece we could never address in The Wire, because it was a political and economic tract, was culture. The way a city is a generator of Americanism. People talk about the melting pot as sort of a social/political ideal. Yes, we all come into this country and we all assimilate — we say it like it’s a civics class. But New Orleans, as fucked up as it is like any other American city, it actually lives that on a day to day basis and demonstrates it.
When people talk about the “melting pot,” they usually mean everyone subsuming their own culture to the same homogenized culture.
We want diversity, but we don’t want it to be an argument. But that’s what diversity is. Sometimes the arguments are creative. When you start a dialectic between people who are different, it benefits… I believe in arguing. I’m often accused of being opinionated and argumentative, I plead guilty to that, but I’ve never had anything not end up better because people in the same room were arguing back.
[In New Orleans culture and cuisine] a creative argument happened every day. It was the triumph of the mutts. We’ve always been the dregs from some other country, where [laughs] we weren’t cutting it somewhere else, but here’s the second chance.
That’s like the Bill Murray speech from Stripes. “Our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world!” [ed. note: I meant that as a compliment!]
You’re right, I have swung dangerously close to the Bill Murray speech from Stripes. But let me just say this: nothing was more true in that movie. Except for maybe the little Aunt Jemima moment.