We agreed that race wasn’t going to go away, as a dynamic. I think it was three times that we renewed the book option while the scripts were slowly coming together. And then, it was going to be the next mini-series, but Generation Kill needed to go next because it was time pegged to the invasion of Iraq. This got bumped a few times, in terms of our development, because The Wire happened. Maybe it’s not the most effective part of their brand, but it became part of their brand. My weirdness, in terms of wanting to do stories like this, became part of their brand. SIMON: It almost suggests that they don’t know what they’re doing, or they just don’t give a good god damn. I think they’re the only entity on earth that would be willing to make a six-hour mini-series about public housing desegregation, with the backstory being political. I hate to blow smoke up HBO’s ass, but it is a testament to them, collectively, that they were willing to stick this out. ZORZI: It’s not just a lot of conversation, it’s a lot of city council meetings and technical things. He said, “You need to read this book,” and I was like, “Yeah, okay.” Two weeks later, he called back and said, “Did you read that book?” I was like, “What’s the name of that book again?” I thought we were go right into it, but little did I know. He had forgotten what it was like to be on deadline because he had left the paper to go into TV. I was working on the desk at the Baltimore Sun as an editor, and there were a lot of young reporters around me. WILLIAM ZORZI: I didn’t think it was going to be that many years. The 20-year hell that Yonkers went through means absolutely nothing, two jurisdictions over, right this moment.īill, what was it about this subject that made you want to spend so many years working on telling this story? They’re fighting court-ordered integration, as if these issues haven’t already been decided, all the way up to the Supreme Court. It’s going on right now, two towns north of Yonkers in Tarrytown, in the same county with the same rhetoric and same demagoging. It is a period piece, but it just keeps going on, over and over. Do you worry about audiences tuning in and sticking with it?ĭAVID SIMON: I think we will lose people on the subject matter alone, but we’ll gain people on Oscar Isaac and the rest of the cast. Collider: This is a tough subject matter that takes a bit of time to get into.
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