Art;
E
David Simon, right, with
Jamie Hector (Mario,
Stanfield), second from --
right, and clay •layers on
the
Portrait Of Pain
In HBO's gritty series The Wire, creator David
Simon reflects the dark side of America.
Curt Schleier
Special to the Jewish News
D
avid Simon should be
delirious with joy.
After all, he's a suc-
cessful journalist, author and TV
producer. He wrote the best-sell-
ing book Homicide: A Year on
the Killing Streets, based on time
spent with the Baltimore P.D.
homicide squad. That became the
successful NBC series Homicide:
Life on the Street.
His next book (written with
retired homicide cop Ed Burns)
was The Corner, about the drug
trade in the city. That became an
HBO miniseries.
His most recent show, The Wire,
returned for its fourth season on
HBO Sunday, Sept. 10, at 10 p.m.
their neighborhood.
and will air in that timeslot. The
The show also focuses on the
series has earned widespread crit-
obstacles placed in front of a new
ical praise, as well as a Peabody
and well-meaning white mayor
Award, for its gritty realism, its
intellectual honesty and its viscer- trying to make the city better,
corruption at the highest levels of
ally charged stories.
government and police brass that
Why isn't Simon happy?
play politics instead of fighting
Perhaps it's because his work on
the dark side of Baltimore has left crime.
This is not simply noir; The
him with a sense of despair.
Wire is midnight on a freezing
Listen to his description of the
overcast moonless night when
show: "The Wire is about the end
there's not a star visible in the
of the American empire, about
heavens. It is disheartening, yet
our inability to solve our own
riveting.
problems."
That's not the kind of copy
Growing Up
HBO is likely to splash across
In a wide-ranging phone inter-
ads promoting the series. But it
view, Simon, 46, talked about how
does reflect the series' storylines,
especially this year when The Wire his Jewish upbringing influenced
• his work, anti-Semitism and the
follows four African-American
radical changes that need to be
middle-school students as they
try to navigate the mean streets of made if America is to be saved.
Class Act
Top comedy
director helms
new sitcom.
Curt Schleier
Special to the Jewish News
ames Burrows' dad
used to talk to him
about funny. "He
always wore glasses, and he'd
put them on normally and
j
58
September 14 • 2006
in Business
Without Really
Trying and Guys
and Dolls, as well
say, 'This is
as the screenplays
the way most
for films made
people see the
from his Broadway
world.' And
hits. And that's
then he'd put
just a partial list
them on askew
from his extensive
and say, 'This
resume.
is the way I see
James Burrows
Clearly, humor
the world."'
is in the genes, because,
Dad, of course, was Abe
despite what was no doubt the
Burrows, who in the '50s and
best optometric care available
'60s was the go-to guy both
to man, young Jimmy Burrow's
on Broadway and in Hollywood.
vision proved to be as out of
He wrote such great plays as
kilter as his father's.
Cactus Flower, How to Succeed
He was born in Silver Spring,
Md., and raised in an integrated
neighborhood by a middle-class
Conservative Jewish family. An
apartment building across the
street from his house had what
he calls "a significant African-
American and Latino population,"
and he numbered blacks, Spanish,
Asian — even an Iranian child
— among his close friends.
After a stint at the Jewish
Telegraph Agency, his father
handled public relations for the
Anti-Defamation League and
was director of public relations
for B'nai B'rith, as well as editor
of its magazine. His mother was
a homemaker until David was
around 13; then, she went back to
school, first earning an associates
degree and finally going on for
a bachelor's at the University of
Maryland at the same time David
attended the school.
"What was embarrassing was
that she was summa cum laude,
and my grades were terrible," he
says.
Simon attended Hebrew school
and was a bar mitzvah, but it
wasn't so much his religious
upbringing as what he calls "the
tribal aspects of Judaism" that
impacted him.
By that he means his faith is
"very inclusive and liberal. My
family was very liberal. The argu-
ments around the dinner table
weren't liberal vs. moderate, but
who would make a better presi-
dent, Bobby Kennedy or Eugene
McCarthy. My father was all the
way to the right; he supported
Hubert Humphrey."
There were lots of books in the
As a result, the younger
Burrows is the go-to guy when
it comes to television com-
edy. He directed and/or was
executive producer of some
of the greatest and funniest
sitcoms in TV history, start-
ing with The Mary Tyler Moore
Show and continuing through
Cheers, Frasier, Friends and
Will & Grace - and that's only
a partial list from his extensive
resume.
Over his 40-plus-year
career, Burrows, 65, has not
directed many overtly Jewish
characters (like Grace Adler)
but credits at least part of his
house, including Judaica. Three
newspapers were delivered to the
house every day, four on week-
ends. "We argued politics. We were
a post-modern, suburban intel-
lectual Jewish family," says Simon.
"Friday night dinners were very
much about ideas."
Were they Shabbat dinners? "If
they were on Friday nights, they
were Shabbos, de facto. Shabbos
licht, Kiddush, Motzi. We may not
have been much on shul, but fam-
ily ritual was intact."
Anti-Semitism
With that background as his
moral compass, Simon spent
13 years as a crime reporter for
the Baltimore Sun, spending sig-
nificant time for the paper and
subsequently for his books on the
street, getting to know its inhabit-
ants.
Especially when he speaks to
synagogue groups regarding his
experiences, he's asked about
black anti-Semitism. Typically he
tells an anecdote that occurred
while he was researching The
Corner
Simon and one of the young
men he wrote about stopped off
to pick something up in his home
office. The youngster saw a photo
of Simon dressed in a tuxedo and
said "Whoa, Dave, you look like
a Jew."
"I asked him what he meant,
and he just shrugged and smiled,"
Simon says. "On some level, that
was an anti-Semitic statement,
but it had no meaning, no malice.
"He'd been hanging around me
for six, eight months and religion
came up. He just had a precon-
success to his Jewish sense of
humor. Certainly, Jewishness
has increasingly factored
into Burrows' life. Both of his
parents were Jewish but non-
observant, but his first wife
was a Conservative Jew who
"made [me] get back on the
bus." He was a bar mitzvah at
47, prompting one of his pro-
ducing partners, Les Charles,
to say: "You're the first Jew I
know who was a bar mitzvah at
47 and bald at 13."
There are a couple of char-
acteristics of a Burrows sitcom
besides good writing. For one,
he prefers to work with an