On HBO’s The Wire, actor Michael K. Williams plays Omar Little, a stick-up guy who robs only drug dealers. Omar has a scar running down his face. That’s not a prosthetic scar; it’s real. Williams tells Terry Gross the story behind his scar â and lots of other stories about himself and Omar.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18299087
THE ART OF THE WIRE: A DISCUSSION WITH CAST AND CREATORS. Check it out below as ROBERT CHEW enacts what PROPOSITION JOE would think of Barack Obama, and JAMIE HECTOR explains the back-story he created for MARLO STANFIELD, and writer GEORGE PELECANOS admits they could’ve done a better job portraying women characters, and FRAN BOYD — the inspiration for David Simon’s The Corner — explains love and redemption, and POOT … well, TRAY CHANEY will tell you that Poot is just Poot.
Jesse is joined by Wendell Pierce ("Bunk," top) and Andre Royo ("Bubbles," bottom) from HBO’s brilliant crime drama The Wire. The Wire isn’t just another cop show — it’s an investigation of contemporary urban America that uses the drug trade as a lens to get at even larger issues. Royo and Pierce discuss what its like to authentically portray urban life, and whether a white writer can capture the largely black experience of inner-city urban life in Baltimore.
Here Bill Moyers sits down with David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, the stunning HBO production. As anyone who has watched the show knows, The Wire is not just a splendid drama. It is, as Simon has once called it, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” It takes a penetrating and aesthetically rich look at some of America’s most vexing social issues. And it’s why Moyers says, “What Edward Gibbon was to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or Charles Dickens to the smokey, mean streets of Victorian London, David Simon is to America today.”
http://www.openculture.com/2009/04/bill_moyers_with_the_wires_david_simon.html
Fiction in the Age of Inequality
Now that markets have proven a flawed index of our economic well being, our cultural life needs to look beyond the pat certainties of laissez faire ideology. Among the ills afflicting the American novel at the height of boom culture, Walter Benn Michaels argues, was a curatorial obsession with past oppressions—from slavery to the Holocaust to memoir-style accounts of family abuse. Writers should now be asking less about what it meant to oppose the Holocaust, he contends, and more about what it means to support free trade.
David Simon, creator of The Wire, and Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon, join Michaels and novelist-critic Dale Peck to discuss the social vision of contemporary storytelling.