King David

David Milch, creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, speaks.


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Published: Apr 20, 2010

TRUE BLUE: David Milch has left his mark on television. His new show is called Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman.

Courtesy of David Milch

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From Hill Street Blues to Deadwood, David Milch has left a formidable mark on series television over the last 28 years. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Yale teacher as well as a recovering heroin addict and compulsive gambler, Milch creates richly detailed worlds that move to their own rhythms, most evident in their ornately circuitous dialogue. Deadwood's pungent profanity may have spawned innumerable drinking games, but it was merely the fertile loam in the characters' quasi-Shakespearean soliloquies. After a few years' hiatus following Deadwood's abrupt conclusion and the spiritualist surfer drama John From Cincinnati, Milch is currently shooting the pilot for HBO's horse-racing drama Luck, directed by Michael Mann and starring Dustin Hoffman as a ex-con Ace Bernstein. On Monday, Milch visits the Penn campus as a Kelly Writers House fellow for an evening talk, followed by a brunch conversation the following day.

City Paper: You've talked a lot about the importance of the mentors in your life, particularly the novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, who was your teacher at Yale. And in turn, the late David Mills gave you credit for shaping him as a writer on NYPD Blue. What do you hope to get across when you talk to students or young writers?

David Milch: At one level, you're just trying to be cogent and communicative on the subject of writing, trying to demystify a little bit the process generally, and in particular as it's attempted in what is aptly described as a mass medium. So there's all of that. But beyond that, I think that it was Joyce who said that paternity is less a matter of blood than an apostolic succession. Just as someone reached out to me, more or less in an exemplary fashion — that is, everything that Mr. Warren and also R.W.B. Lewis and Cleanth Brooks did, it was the fact of their presence and their sense of responsibility and the fact that they took seriously an obligation to try to communicate to someone who obviously had much less to give back to them than they had to give to me. That was something that I treasured then, and as the years have gone on have come to understand in so many different ways as something that I can best express gratitude for by doing likewise. So there you go.

CP: You started out as a novelist.

DM: I suppose. To the extent there was any sort of literary antecedent, it would have been that.

CP: Do you have a sense what effect that had on your writing?

DM: I've never really given that much thought. But clearly when I went to work on Hill Street Blues, I really had no sense whatsoever of what would be called dramatic structure. As a practical matter, that meant that my sense of dramatic structure was occasional and incidental, sort of moment-to-moment, as opposed to having a larger sense of obligation to a coherent plan. I guess paradoxically that's probably stood me in good stead. I feel like I'm content to take things moment by moment and let the larger pattern declare itself to me as it does to the audience.

CP: It seems that your shows often proceed from a sense of place, or of community, rather than from a central heroic figure.

DM: I think that's right, although what I'd hurry to say is that the individual personality is probably best understood in the context of its relation to other personalities, and in another sense to the context in which the individual moves. So in that regard, the theme of community is another version of the theme of the discovery of individual identity, which is that it exists only in relation to the community. Or it exists in a healthy fashion only in that relation.

HALF OFF DEPOT

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CP: You didn't get a chance to wrap up Deadwood as you had intended, but on a documentary on the DVD you discuss what some of your plans would have been while walking through what was left of the sets. That was somewhat excruciating to watch.

DM: It wasn't a lot of fun for me to do.

CP: But that's part of the medium in which you work. It's as if you're staging a five-act play, and someone comes up to you at intermission and says, "You've got 10 minutes."

DM: You know, I don't know that anyone ever guaranteed us a five-act structure for our lives or our careers or any individual project, so I try to adapt to the given of external circumstances. I'm working now on a project the process of which is very unfamiliar to me, in terms of the nature of my collaboration with my colleagues. I think a proper respect for the work that one does is to take it as you find it, and try and within those disciplines discover the best way to make the story come out. In retrospect, I am satisfied with the conclusion of Deadwood. Would I have liked to have told some more stories? Yes. But I feel that it's coherent work, and I think a proper humility doesn't waste an awful lot of time in regret. The only reason I did that walkabout for the documentary is because they asked me to and it meant a $5,000 payday for Keone Young [Deadwood's Mr. Wu], who needed the money. You may notice that we had Mr. Wu dress up and appear at the very end of that for no reason whatsoever. But my stipulation when they asked me to do it was they had to use Keone. The strictures of work in one medium as opposed to another — they always exist. So I'm pleased enough to get to go to bat again and we'll see what happens.

CP: A certain amount of restrictions come with the fact that you're asking for several million dollars of someone else's money to play with.

DM: My attitude about that is, 'Fuck 'em.' I'm not asking for several million of their money unless they know that they've got a chance to make several millions more. It's a fair transaction.

CP: How is the Luck pilot coming?

DM: Michael Mann, who is directing the pilot, has a very particular method, which is probably one that's less familiar to me than others than I've encountered in working with directors. So that's a process of adjustment, and I think the challenge is always to take the givens of the challenge and try and figure out the way to best serve the work in that context. That's what you do with every project.

CP: On Deadwood, you would often be rewriting up to the last minute, and even in the middle of shooting, whereas Michael Mann's style seems to be one that involves a lot of precise pre-planning. Is that the kind of adjustment you're talking about?

DM: I think there's probably some of that, although we haven't got to the end, so it wouldn't be fair really to go into detail. As a show is up and going and one understand the coordinates of the imaginative environment, everyone gets a lot more comfortable. Had you visited the set of Deadwood at the beginning, you would not have seen such a loose and spontaneous environment. It was a pleasure to work with [Deadwood pilot director] Walter [Hill], but everybody has their own nooks and crannies.

CP: You've been involved in horse racing for a long time, both as an owner and a gambler, so you bring a lot of personal history to Luck. You've joked that if you earn $25 million on the show, that will just about cover your research costs.

DM: It was a flippant remark that I will regret as much as the IRS will appreciate it. I've been involved in horse racing one way or another since I was a little boy, and like any sort of special world — by special I mean a sort of self-sufficient or self-contained world — over the course of time it develops its own dynamics and rules and aberrations. I'm delighted that I have access, that I have some familiarity to those things, but at the same time, that familiarity is only important or positive to the extent that it allows you to get the world right. All the old obligations remain in terms of how the story engages the human spirit.

CP: That depth of detail is particularly important to episodic television, where we spend so much time lingering in the same space.

DM: You know, as Marlow, Conrad's alter ego in Heart of Darkness, remarks, the jungle will find out what you're doing there. That's true of episodic television, too. For me, I'm easily confused and easily misled, so I'm glad to have a big canvas to work on and take the time to find out what I'm doing there.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

DAVID MILCH Mon., April 26, 6:30 p.m.; Tue., April 27, 10 a.m.; free (reservations required, whfellow@writing.upenn.edu), Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, 215-573-9749, writing.upenn.edu. Both events will be streamed live at writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv.