Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
David Milch talks about turning the sanitized Hollywood western on its head with foul-mouthed misfits and miscreants who, no matter how vile, are touched by the divine.
Mar 5, 2005 | We're so familiar with the clichis of the western -- the swinging saloon doors, the gunfights, the 10-gallon hats, the card games that erupt into a brawl -- that HBO's "Deadwood" can seem bewilderingly unfamiliar. Substitute manicured, Mae West-style dancing girls with prostitutes with black eyes, trade in "Howdy ma'am" gentility for foul-mouthed invectives fit for the prison yard, swap out the cheerful ragtime piano and spirited card games for scams and senseless murder and smallpox outbreaks, and exchange the black and white hats for honorable men prone to fits of murderous rage and scoundrels with the empathy of saints. Unlike the cute little Western towns of Hollywood lore, "Deadwood" is a muddy, disheveled pit of deceit and despair and an unchecked playground for the most disgraceful human behaviors.
But unlike the unmitigated misery of its cousin, HBO's Depression-era drama "Carnivale," "Deadwood" is buoyed by a wicked sense of humor. Each moment of suffering, greed or fear tends to be lightened by an odd moment of kinship or a shared sense of the absurd. It's as if the townspeople themselves are blessed with an uncanny self-awareness, and even sworn enemies can recognize something of themselves in each other.
"Deadwood" creator David Milch took a roundabout path to Hollywood, earning his MFA in fiction at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, then teaching literature at Yale University for nine years before writing his first script, a "Hill Street Blues" episode that won an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award and a Humanitas Prize. Taking the awards as a less-than-subtle hint that he had a talent for dramatic writing, Milch left New Haven, Conn., to join the staff of "Hill Street Blues" for five seasons. Later, he co-created "NYPD Blue" with Steven Bochco, and during his seven years on the show, helped transform the procedural drama into something far richer and more dynamic than audiences had seen before.
Milch spoke to me on the phone recently from "Deadwood's" Santa Clarita set during the last two weeks of shooting the show's second season (which premieres Sunday on HBO). With a steady drawl as wry as Jack Nicholson's, Milch talked about how Hollywood fear created the saccharine westerns of yore and how the community of Deadwood strove to maintain order in the absence of law.
What fueled your move from academics to television?
Well, my now-wife and I wanted to get married and have a family and I wasn't making any dough teaching, and of course what I was making, I was using to buy drugs. She was getting a little tired of me selling her clothes and furniture.
That's a common problem among Yale professors.
Yes, we decided we would take a different approach.
How did you first become interested in writing a western?
I had proposed to HBO a series about the city cops in Rome at the time of Nero. What had interested me was the idea of order without law. The Praetorian Guard, who were the emperor's guards, understood how they were to proceed. But for the city cops, who were called the Urban Cohorts, there was no law at all. So they were sort of making themselves up as they went along. I wanted to focus on that idea of how order is generated in the absence of law. They [HBO] were already doing a show about Rome in the time of Caesar, so they asked if I could engage the same themes in a different setting, and that was how I decided to do the western.
Were you a fan of westerns before?
No. It wasn't that I didn't like them; it's just I didn't watch them particularly. When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.
