HBO's "Deadwood"
features Jewish
character based on
real-We pioneer.
John Hawkes (Sol Star) and Timothy Olyphant (Seth Bullock) in 'Deadwood"
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
D
avid Milch's HBO Western series,
Deadwooc4 tells of a grimy mining town
where drinking, whoring, killing, cussing
and cheating are de rigueur.
Illegally located on Sioux land ungoverned by
United States law, its saloons and gambling dens
seethe with debauchery — largely orchestrated by a
Machiavellian pimp, Al Swearengen, whose language
rivals Tony Soprano's.
In an interview, Milch, 59, eschews expletives,
although his grittily poetic speech resembles
Swearengen's, as does his fascination with vice. It's an
interest that dates as far back as his bar mitzvah,
when this son of a Jewish surgeon learned a thing or
two about sin.
"I studied with a cantor who was susceptible to
being bribed," he said in a raspy voice. "He was a
great stamp collector, so I was able to get around
some of the more stringent requirements."
But something about the religion apparently stuck,
because Milch added that "Judaism is predicated on
an ethical and legal perspective, and I imbibed that."
Indeed, his TV work has obsessively focused on
laws and lawlessness since he left his Yale English
teaching post to write for the cop drama Hill Street
Blues in 1982.
Milch, co-creator of NYPD. Blue, envisioned a
more unusual police show when he pitched the series
that would become Deadwood around 2001. It was a
cop drama set in ancient Rome, but the HBO execu-
tive said the network already had a proposed Roman
series, and would Milch like to try a Western?
He quickly agreed. "I realized the genre was perfect
for exploring how laws emerge in a place where noth-
ing is explicitly forbidden," he said.
While poring through historical documents, the
writer-producer discovered that the real town of
Deadwood was perhaps the quintessential example of
how order develops from the "primordial ooze of lib-
ertine anarchy."
He decided to set the series there, mixing fact and
fiction to people it with real characters who had
flooded the area after gold was discovered in
Deadwood Gulch in fall 1875.
The show's historical figures would include the
famed "Wild Bill" Hickok (Keith Carradine), the
crude Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), ex-Marshall
Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and his temperate
Jewish partner, Sol Star (John Hawkes), who founded
the town's first hardware store (their most popular
item:
chamber pots).
During a year of meticulous research, Milch was sur-
prised to discover that Star, an immigrant from
Bavaria, was elected to Deadwood's first city council in
1877 and went on to serve 10 terms as mayor. Milch
had conceived the series before Los Angeles' Autry
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2004
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