Birds on a wire

Now that the third season of the HBO series THE WIRE is about to launch (the first episode airs tonight), it seems all the major papers are doing the “look! crime novelists write this show!” story ad nauseam. But a few stories rise above the rest.

George Pelecanos, who started writing a couple of episodes but has now moved up to one of the show’s producers, is interviewed in the Baltimore Sun about the show but also about his writing, how he attempts to shoehorn the opinions and voices of many disparate writers into a unified one for each script, and why he tries to keep himself fairly grounded in the face of success:

It’s natural for Pelecanos to want to connect with people who don’t read fiction for fun; they’re the people he writes about. He still has the same friends that he had in kindergarten. He remains smitten with his wife, Emily, whom he met in a shoe store when he was 20 years old.

“He is very, very loyal. There’s no question about his devotion,” says Steve Rados, a childhood friend of Pelecanos’.

“You see it a lot in the characters that he writes about. When there’s a story in the paper about a child who has died tragically, it sits with him for a long time. When he writes about children, he writes with great empathy.”

Meanwhile, Caryn James of the New York Times sits down with both Pelecanos and creator David Simon to talk about where the show is headed this year and just how difficult it can be to create a unified voice

The paradox for the novelists is that they have to submerge their own fictional voices — the very voices they were hired for — in stories and characters that already exist. Mr. Price, who has written many screenplays, including “The Color of Money,” knew when he was approached about “The Wire” that it would be a good fit. “You know what the series is,” he said after the May writers’ meeting. “You don’t suddenly start writing like a Victorian.” Mr. Pelecanos said, “Price was kind of a holy grail guy for us,” and Mr. Simon cites “Clockers,” which includes both detectives’ and drug dealers’ points of view, as a huge influence on “The Wire.” But even Mr. Price submitted to a process he cheerfully called “Simonizing,” in which Mr. Simon takes a final pass at the script to make sure everything coheres. Mr. Price described a writing process that goes through two or three drafts: “For example, if I had a scene where McNulty is talking to Barksdale’s crew, Ed Burns, who’s been a homicide detective for 20 years,” and is now one of the show’s main producers and writers, “would say, `No, he wouldn’t say that much,’ ” and the dialogue would be cut back.

The novelists, accustomed to absolute control over their creations, have had to compromise to accommodate the mosaic nature of television writing. Mr. Price, who had not written for series television before, said: “When you work on movies it’s all about power — which gorilla do you have to pay attention to? Is it the director? Is it the star?” On “The Wire,” he said, “David is the power, but he wields it very tenderly.”