 David Milch, my old friend from Yale, has been called television's first artistic genius. And one of the people who has called him that is me. His powerful dramas, and often disturbing, bizarre dramas that he conceives, have troubled the censors in the networks for more than 25 years. And also in Congress. And these dramas have explored human weakness and violence in disturbing, and I believe, very artful ways. He's one of television's most honored writers. He's won all kinds of prizes for particular episodes of individual shows. And his most significant credits are Hill Street Blues, for which he wrote episodes that won a number of prizes. NYPD Blue, which he co-created with Stephen Bochko. And most of all, in some respects, and there's a kind of progression here that we may get a chance to talk about today. The show that's running on HBO now, The Pioneering Western, one of the great westerns I think in American cultural history, a show called Deadwood. And my hope is and expectation is that many of you, without even realizing it, because people don't remember the names of television writers or creators that much, that many of you have probably seen episodes of television programs that David Milch has written. As I mentioned, David is an old comrade of mine. We met when David was really a graduate student level at Yale when I was beginning my career as a professor. And we had various kinds of contact, including a meeting with David in which he heard that I had been interested in media, and he showed me a kind of film, a short film, that he made in a truck stop in West Haven, right near the exit for Yale University, that was full of the same bizarre humor and black creativity that's characteristic of his work even to this day. Well, I came to Hill Street after it had been on for a couple of years, and there was so much about its approach, the multiple storylines to which I gravitated. But I didn't feel, I felt that it was a bit of a sanitized version of what police work was having been incarcerated myself on a number of occasions, always through false accusations, misunderstanding. And so when I came on, the first character that I introduced was a character named Sal Benedetto, who was a bad cop, who was always beating up Charlie Haid and so on, who seemed to me to be a more accurate representation of at least one aspect of policing. And he wound up, Benedetto wound up robbing a bank and they send a robot in. He was hiding in a vault and they send a robot in so they can watch what he's doing and he starts beating the robot with his fists. And, you know, he's a kind of unreconstra- he's a Luddite, you know, he hates technology, he hates all of it. Anyway, in those days you couldn't have such a cop as a regular and they made me kill him. But then several years later I was put in charge of the show and so I brought the character back as Bunce, this guy. And then we did a spin-off where he was a private detective and then when I did NYPD Blue I asked Dennis if he would play a similar character named Sipowitz who was supposed to die at the end of the first episode. And he agreed, stipulating that he wanted to be killed because it was the 173rd cop he had played. So once we had him under contract I admitted I had fibbed. And he stayed with the show 12 years. I left after the 7th season. But Sipowitz is actually, you know, it's hard to believe this but, you know, I think so much of our creative process is unconscious. And my father's mother's name was Sapwich. And it never occurred to me until a number of years into NYPD Blue that there might be any connection between those things. But he is a character who had a lot of traits that my dad had and I think that one of the opportunities of my life has been the chance to discover love for complicated personalities such as that. And so he's a guy that I have a lot of affection for. One way to think about Sipowitz's character is to see him as a character that you never finished with. Yeah. One could argue that there's a connection between Sipowitz and... Swearingen. Swearingen and Deadwood. I have some clips from Deadwood that we'll show in a little while that will clarify that Swearingen's complex, humane monstrosity, David seems to have a gift for creating monstrous characters who have human qualities that you identify with. And I'm wondering whether you're aware, either of how horrible they seem but also of how human they seem when you're actually working on it. Yeah. Well, you know, my old man used to beat me pretty good. And I adored him. And he wound up taking his life. And so, you know, in fact, you know, a colleague of ours, about whom you were speaking earlier, R.W.B. Lewis. This will show you how complicated my old man was. R.W.B. Lewis is a very distinguished Yale professor who published a number of important books, one of which is a biography of Edith Wharton when the Pulitzer Prize. The truth of the matter is, I said I wasn't going to say this in public, but I will, most of that book, a good part of that book was written by David Milch. And David is acknowledged incredibly generously in the beginning of that book, but not generously enough. And R.W.B. Lewis admitted this to me because I was his junior colleague. David was a sort of inspired graduate student who was treated by the Yale faculty as some fair-haired boy. I mean, I'm sure that many members of the Yale faculty would be very disappointed to see that David became a famous writer of television programs instead of a professor. Anyways, we were doing, Dick and I, R.W.B. Lewis and I had a project called The James Family about Henry and William James and so on. And we were down at the National Endowment getting dove, I was writing the scripts and he was writing the book. And while we were down there, Dick was called out of the room while we were pitching. We finished and afterwards we went out and we had some coffee and I said, well, I think it went pretty well. We were talking for about 10 minutes and he said, listen, when I was called out of the room they were telling me that your father had died. And had taken his life and his instructions were that you were not to be told until after the pitch was finished. Just to go into a... to be absolutely inappropriate in describing the kind of torment that some souls are exposed to. My dad was the only child of the eldest of ten children and her name, as I say, was Sapwich, her last name. And several of his uncles were in fact contemporaries of his and one of them was even younger than he was. They were all in the rackets but because he was of the next generation he had to go to college and he became a very prominent surgeon and a professor of surgery as did my brother, my older brother. But he was always drawn to... he was very frustrated by his professional identity and we would, in August every year he would take us up to Saratoga to the racetrack where all of his family would congregate. And I remember... you might be old enough to remember this. There's the keyfowlver hearings which are dramatized in the Godfather where they're tested where the Congress is doing an investigation into the mob. I remember the real keyfowlver hearings I would come home every day. There must have been 25 wise guys living in our house for over a year because my dad would do herny operations on them so they wouldn't have to go and testify before the keyfowlver committee. So it was a very complicated sort of relationship between learning he was a very well-recognized surgeon and so on and this other darker part of his personality his identity as a physician was the sort of civilizing aspect of this... you know, my dad was a narcotic addict he was an alcoholic he was all the stuff that I became. Anyways, towards the end of his life my brother who had also become a surgeon and sort of idolized my dad the same way I did took over my father's care and my dad would engage in self-mutilation and all sorts of unpleasant things and in his tormented mind because his sense of self was so associated with his professional identity as a physician he became convinced that since my brother had become the caregiver in the family my brother was having sexual relations with my mother and took his life in front of them to punish them for that This is worse than deadwood David and then his last words were don't tell David until he's done with his pitch So, now, I tell you that let me hurry to say that I am a very happy and grateful person and I was saying in a class a little while ago that the future is a great is constantly in the process of interpreting the meaning of the past I'll give you a quick example of that My brother, who was a surgeon in the aftermath of my dad's passing retrained himself as a hospice physician to care for the terminally ill and has established hospice programs in Romania, in Poland, in Hungary runs a hospice in Buffalo, New York where we're from and I choose to believe that my father in many ways was instrumental in his own inability to accept himself in teaching my brother that there was another way to be a physician I think that the fundamental responsibility of a medical practitioner is not curative, it's pastoral I will walk with you into whatever darkness may come So, I also believe that my experience I didn't volunteer this information Professor Thorburn asked me a question and I try to answer it honestly that the... May I tell you one more story if I may? Very quickly When I started to write out there I won a lot of prizes and one of which is the Humanitas Prize which is given by the Catholic Church for the most uplifting whatever it is 15 grand tax-free and I kept winning this thing and at that point I was a heroin addict very bitter so I would make it my business whenever I would come back to get the next award to tell the priest the next father I can't remember his name Anyways, I said I'm sure it will please you to know that I took that money and bought a racehorse with it which is what the church probably would have wanted me to do trying to scandalize him and he would... and I hated this guy I just hated him and I could never figure out why I hated him so much and he just had his buck teeth and his stupid... Anyways, it was like he knew something he would look at you and he'd smile he knew something about you you didn't know about yourself I hate people like that so... Anyways years go by and I won a few more times and finally I got sober and... I had the opportunity finally when I won this award again I said, you know I've never liked whatever this guy's name is I don't like the way he looks I don't like his buck teeth he was sitting right next to me and this thing I really didn't like is that he always had his smile when I would try to offend him like he knew something about me I didn't know about myself and I thank God that I have lived long enough to have come to understand that the shadow in which I felt that all of my characters had to move and live in fact was cast by God's sheltering hand and that's what the father knew about me that I didn't know about myself So that's all I say about this It's... I hate to turn to sort of less somber themes but I'm... One way to do this I think maybe to pick up on what David was saying about doctors as he was talking I had two reactions one was I heard Dennis Franz and I'm absolutely amazed by the closeness with which the dialogue that Dennis Franz speaks in at least three different shows sounds like David Milch's ordinary talk and it tells you something about how close he actually is to that character and something of what he said also I think about some of the terrible aspects of his own autobiography have clearly that material has clearly seeped into his work in very interesting ways The obscenity in Deadwood is as I mentioned I was interested in trying to identify what principles of organization operate in a society in which law does not exist and because Deadwood was a criminal community it was on land which had just been ceded to the Indians and they didn't want to pass any laws because if they passed laws that would mean that their claims could be overturned so they were just trying to steal everything without having any laws at all it was sort of a laboratory environment in which one then tries to identify what principles of governance develop Language it seemed to me had to serve two functions the first was to beat down the viewer's pre-existing expectation that any law would be obeyed that is every sentence so soaked with obscenity as to bleach out the expectation that any civility can be expected to govern in any scene therefore how do you live in such an emotional environment as a viewer so that was the first part of it then I wanted to show how words generated meaning not because of any intrinsic quality but because of the context of emotional association in which they were expressed swear engines the reason that I took a moment to express my thanks to professor Thorburn is that in his choice of scenes he demonstrated a kind of emotional connection to the materials which helped me to understand my own intentions that's how in a conversation in which let's say professor Thorburn is swear engine and I'm woo one word given enough emotional communication can bear the weight of an an entire exchange of a whole story can be told with one word if the emotions in the context adequately rendered and in the development of the relationship between swear engine and woo what I wanted to show was despite all of the prejudices that existed about Asians and by extension other minorities how a kind of order could generate itself which was if not humane at least humanizing as a contrary impulse we're going to turn to questions from the audience in a second so formulate your questions and we're going to remind you that we are audio taping and videotaping this so identify yourself unless you want to remain anonymous when you come to these microphones begin to formulate your questions I'll start but I hope people will start coming to the mics one question David that well I have two a question and a half the half question is to make you continue to write about the identity in the show I remember reading something maybe it was in Mark Singer's piece in the New Yorker about you but maybe it was elsewhere but in some piece I read about your dealings with HBO I recall you're actually having been asked by HBO to justify the dirty language and did you write a paper or some sort of report to them HBO was worried about in fact the guardians of the western of the classical movie westerns were very much offended by the obscenity in Deadwood and asked me to make the case to prove that there had been such obscenity as opposed to the language which obtained in the westerns of the 30's 40's and 50's a couple of things to say about that the language which obtained in those westerns had nothing to do with the way people spoke in the west in the 1870's and everything to do with the exigencies of the Jewish immigrants who ran Hollywood who wanted to send a message that they weren't going to rock the boat in terms of the stories that they were telling and there had been a period of 5 or 10 years in the late teens and early 20's where films had gotten a little racy and what the Goldwinds and the Laskies and the Louis B. Mayers and you can finish the Xanax got together and hired a front Gentile named Hayes who instituted what was called the Hayes Production Code which proclaimed that obscenity in word thought or deed was an offense not only against the laws of man but against divine law and would not be tolerated in their films which was a way of saying we ain't going to rock the boat now if you're an artist when you're confronted with those kind of strictures you can refuse to participate or you can try and find a way to internalize those strictures such that it does not distort the story you're trying to tell and the great storytellers in films of the 30's and 40's extrapolated a character who was very laconic not only didn't use swear words he just didn't talk much at all and whose stoicism invoked a set of values which now when we see a great work of art we bind to that work of art having to do with if we're children when we see it that's a fundamental imaginative reality which we are not going to see changed so instead of saying I like Shane what we say is that's not the way they talked in 1870 that ain't my problem but it became my problem because it was HBO's problem and so I did the research the the best secondary witnesses Menken in a book called the American language who wrote about what it was that when the western impulse to the extent that it was a you know if you went out to an environment like this it wasn't because you were doing great in Wilkes Barre Pennsylvania there were some personality attributes usually maybe there was a warrant or two out for you and the other thing to remember these weren't farming communities mining law said that you owned a claim only as long as you were on it and working it and if you've left for three days whoever came could take it from you so you had to be willing to resort to violence and in the same way that apes so that they don't have to be fighting all the time develop obscenity was used as a way of announcing don't come in here with any weak stuff and the rest of it was because there were no laws at all any question was potentially had lethal implications if I say to you where are you from you're usually going to say I'm from wherever I'm from and Edward if you say where are you from the guy says what the fuck is that to you so that immediately it becomes a potentially mortal situation because he doesn't know if you're out there with a warrant for his arrest so that combination it seemed to me all of which worked to create the kind of extremity of language and what I wanted to do is I say after establishing that premise to then show how language came to complicate itself as one of the alternatives to statute in terms of how people govern their behavior now you see rich and remarkable as that is and compelling in a way as that is there's still a lot about the language of Edward you haven't discussed David I want to ask you about another aspect I've often thought that one of the things that doubles the profanity almost Shakespearean grandiloquence of some of the characters I'm thinking especially of that sleazy mayor who goes around sometimes he actually delivers soliloquies doesn't he and also the level of his language is virtually he sounds often like a kind of Victorian preacher and his vocabulary is immensely large I'm wondering about now it's obvious that you're aware of this distinction what effects do you hope is created one thing to remember is this was Victorian times and to the extent that people had book learning the book learning they had had to do with Victorian literature in the Bible and Shakespeare there's a wonderful story about Kit Carson writing Seven Days to get his new collection of Sir Walter Scott and so it seemed to me in that regard that those people who and it wasn't so much that they had been to school that they were autodidacts they were self-taught and the reason and people in that environment who had recourse to books were highly highly motivated it was an alternative state of being for them which which stood in contrast to the way they were living their lives so it seemed to me to be credible at that level that people who had recourse to that sort of rhetoric you know went for the gusto in terms of what Professor Thorburn talks about is the grand eloquence of some of their speech but it seemed to me also that as a work generates its own reality in the same way that Woo's language that Woo's single English word in English that he knows came to because of the complication of the emotional transaction became enriched in the viewer's understanding by tonalities and rhythms I feel that the metrics of speech are important and representative even in those of us who feel mistakenly as I believe that we are separate from each other as individuals it seems to me that the way God says I too have a hand here is in the rhythms and metrics of speech so that even unbeknownst to themselves they honor a divine presence in certain of the locutions of of Deadwood I don't want you to feel anxiety because I have plenty of things to ask David about so if you're happy with this don't worry about it but if you have questions please sir come up to the microphone please come forward sir I feel like Benny Hinn right there okay I'm DeWitt Henry from Emerson College and we have some mutual friends over our writing lives my question actually is I'm afraid even to think what that means well Richard Yates was one oh really oh sure sure I know yes of course and the scope of a series like Deadwood at least to an outsider it has the intensity of a Victorian novel and I'm wondering exactly how you are the auteur how you manage to subcontract various episodes to outside writers how you initiate them do you give them treatments or the storyboards that they're filling in do you really take an improvisational role in directing the direction of the story I believe that all storytelling is collaborative in one way or another and nobody writes an episode independently or goes off and writes an episode we all all the writers are in a room all the time in one room so that's so every scene is generated in that one horrible stinking trailer which is just 50 yards from the set and you know once the scene is generated we don't let it ripen particularly you know usually the scene is written either the day that it shot or the day before it shot and there are no scripts you know there's no finished script before the shooting begins if the shoot is an average of 12 days the script is finished on the 12th day of the shoot and so that's the idea of being an outtour I don't believe in any of that stuff anyway I don't care whose name is you're not on the set now what's your language give me but I just don't care about that this gives us an excuse David to talk a little bit about something I'd mention to you I wanted to ask you about and again I think I'm cribbing here from there was a brilliant maybe overly loving portrait of David in the New Yorker recently by a guy who was a Yale friend of his I don't know wait a second I never met that guy not only that but he said he finally met him but the guy had sat at David's feet at Yale David didn't remember him that's what David taught David taught courses there but in fact in the piece he talks about how intimidating even though David was only a few years older than he and he was like an undergraduate how intimidating David was to the other undergraduate it's a wonderful piece and the guy who wrote it is a wonderful writer named Mark Singer and it's a very good piece of writing in its own way and it gets deeply into aspects of David's vision of life and it's certainly worth reading one of the things that he says in that piece he describes David's methods of writing and they are astonishing and in many ways very strange maybe you could tell our audience about how you write an episode of Deadwood how you settle in in front of that screen I tried I don't think about writing when I'm not writing and I won't plan a scene before I write it and that has to do with I would hasten to add that you know the chemist Cacoolay I think I told a story in that piece about you know the guy who figured out the structure of the benzene ring and he worked on it for 20 years and then he had a dream he saw a snake swallowing its tail he said that's it that's the structure of the benzene ring so the next day they said to him you know not bad you go to sleep you wake up you got the patent on the benzene ring he said visions come to prepared spirits and so what I would propose is you know I spent years and years and years I remember I spent one useful period of 15 months writing the same 12 pages word for word every morning word for word because you know my wiring is a little iffy and so having now come to a point in my life where I feel that at one level you know I was getting ready to be able to work this way through all the period of time when I worked a different way but now I don't I don't plan the episodes I don't plan the scenes and and yet I feel that these characters are you've heard me say a few times probably until some of you want to gouge your eyes out like they're grapes that I believe that our sense of ourselves is separate from each other is an illusion and in fact that we are organs of some larger organism which knows us although we do not know it and if that is the case I regard myself as a vessel of whatever that larger organism is rather or its instrument rather than as the source of the scenes so a lot of what I do is try to get out of the way and that's the way I work on my writing that's where I work with the actors that's the way I edit and I find that it puts me in the path of an enormous amount of energy as I say 15 months for 12 pages is what some might define as a meager output but I do I've done 350 hours of episodes over the past decade or so and more recently this is high this is work which is as good as I can do no matter how long I spent on it and I think that has to do to some extent with a readying of the spirit in humility to receive rather than to regard myself as generating it some of the details are interesting David in the New Yorker piece Singer describes how you will go down and sit in front of a monitor and you don't write you do it through talking I'm an obsessive compulsive so if I have if I can put my hands on anything we're all in trouble so I have no phone I have no watch I don't know how to use a computer if I even use a pencil you know come back and see me in three months I'll be hanging upside down in gravity boots because because I think that when you're you know the brain is very plastic which is to say very malleable when you're very young and I think if it gets shaken in certain ways you're predisposed to certain neural incapacities and you fall into repetitive patterns of behavior it's called repetition compulsion it's called a lot of things I find that I function most effectively when I sort of disembodied myself so I just lie there and I talk and the words come up on the screen and then I fix the words but I never actually lay my hands on anything and it certainly helped to diminish my pharmacological obligations listening to David for a while I realize that he has a kind of repertoire of ways of describing these pharmacological being out of my mind that are witty but also unsettling in something of the way the show is another question that I've always had about Deadwood and has become much more intense as I've watched recent episodes David is the time frame sometimes it seems as if a second episode the new episode begins one minute after the previous episode is that true do you think of it as every episode like that but some episodes but if it happens that way that's the way it happens sometimes a day will go by I originally intended that each season would be one year in the life of the camp the camp was destroyed at the end of four years and but I do try to let the materials the one thing I knew for example at the end of this season that we just finished shooting last week was it culminated with the elections 90% of these are true stories Bullock was defeated in the election because George Hurst the father of William Randolph fixed the election and Bullock was so pissed off by himself in the office and wouldn't leave wouldn't turn over the badge to the idiot who had defeated him this is the yeah these are unerred episodes and so the one thing I knew at the end of the third season which we just finished shooting which will go on in June was that was the concluding sequence never got to it you know the season was over I never got to that scene and uh which caused a few raised eyebrows and all the ad campaigns and everything which were based on that culminating sequence because I had sold it seemed to me that the great moment in American history was after we'd won the Revolutionary War where everyone wanted to make Washington the king and the Continental Congress was a bunch of slugs and corrupt you know and Washington went and knelt and presented his sword to the Continental Congress saying that it would be a government of laws and not a men and Swearingen went and persuaded Bullock even though it had been a corrupt election to go ahead and acknowledge the defeat so that the loyalty would no longer be to Bullock but to the Democratic process and I really wanted to finish this season with that story but you know we just didn't get there so we're going to open next season with that story When you say you didn't get there David does that mean because as the actual act of writing scene by scene occurred you made greater discoveries and it seems that longer each scene exists in terms of its internal dynamics and then it exists in connection with each scene becomes as if it were a character in conversation with another character which is the other scene which precedes it and so on and your first loyalty has to be to the thing which already lives you know what Swearingen says if you want to hear God laugh tell him your plans you know my plan was to have Bullock but that isn't where the characters were going you know Bullock wound up Bullock led the inauguration parade for Teddy Roosevelt Bullock wound up Teddy Roosevelt's best friend see he's talking about the historical Bullock I just picked up on that not the character but this election was a real election real George Hearst fixed and to the extent that Teddy Roosevelt was the first political figure who reigned in the pure capitalists the robber barons it seemed to me crucial to render the dynamic between Bullock and George Hearst and so that's the part that took longer and so there went the election you have a huge fan first of all I just want to say I don't know if this sounds potential but thank you so much for deadwood it's just unbelievable so I have a chance to ask you a question my head is swarming so I'm going to put aside the the desire to be self seeking and ask you about the PA I've heard you help out PAs myself being a writer an aspiring filmmaker and recovering addicts I'm going to put aside that or so just go on it's off the table I'm wondering I guess the first question that was addressed the storytelling I'm wondering how you are you essentially the director if you could explain the process of directing with the actors because there's some of the most phenomenal performances I've ever seen particularly with the guy Swaringe and I forget the actor's name Ian Machane I'm just wondering if you could explain how that process had written that part for Eddie O'Neill from Married with Children he'd be good in that and they wouldn't cast them because it ain't television it's HBO but they did better they got a great actor well and then we cast powers boost and powers got sick and I told him if he got well I'd write a different part for him and shoot and so then we came to Ian and I say Ian is wonderful but anyway the way that again titles don't really mean too much to me mine or anybody else's and so we all you know after a scene has been written I come down on the set and we walk through it and I have my say and the director has his say and so on and the actors do I don't mean to suggest it's a democracy it isn't but I try to answer to a higher kind of principle which is to be respectful and of what other people are feeling or other people's incapacities sometimes an actor doesn't do well in a particular kind of scene and I'll change the scene on the spot or I'll see something and that's one of the upsides of working the way we do is that everybody's prepared to change anything you know all the way even in editing I'll take a scene I'll take the end of the scene and put it at the beginning of the scene and all that stuff Well, Waller Hill was the first director and as he said we parted very amably but he said there's only room for one king of the castle and I don't think of myself that way but he did he thought of himself that way but I thought he did a wonderful job But David, it is true that your involvement with Deadwood is much more intense than a typical writer's would be Oh yeah you're on the set every day HBO insists on that because it's because there's no script so you know they say well you better well that's true you better be down there because the actors have no chance to prepare the scene the director has no chance to visualize the scene so you know there you go Kevin Kevin Regal, I'm in Professor Thorben's television class Hi Kevin That was me Kevin You talked earlier about some of the decisions this was actually in class about some of the decisions that went into deciding into the Genesis of Deadwood but I'm curious why you decided to set it in the American West there aren't any other westerns on television today and Dave haven't had a particularly strong go of it in the movies recently I'm wondering what drew you to that yeah well I would say a couple of things about that that's a nasty piece of gum on the bottom of my shoe but I'm very proud that I got my shoe shine in a LaGuardia airport today all that you know at the racetrack where I have been occasionally abducted and forced to spend large amounts of time there's an expression about the smart money and that the smart money usually misses its bus in the morning and the application of that is that you know in terms of what kind of series is involved at a given time that's nonsense when a given form say to western is completely out of vogue what that means is that it's the opportunity exists for a revisiting from a different point of view so I never were you know the one thing everybody knew when NYPD blue went on the air was the attention span of the audience had been infantilized by MTV everybody hated cops you know no shot so I don't worry about that but the other thing is that I was interested in particular in Deadwood because it was a criminal enterprise it acknowledged itself as a criminal enterprise when Wild Bill Hickock was killed they acquitted the guy because they didn't want to be taken for having recognized any kind of law because if they recognized one kind of law then what someone would have had the right to say is you just stole all this from the Indians my name is Sajin I'm a postdoc and my question was you were talking about the rehearsal process and I was curious about over the course of NYPD blue Deadwood I guess germinates in your head and or this Roman version of it yeah so what I'm sort of really curious to know is as you kind of revisit the character sort of on a weekly episode episode basis does Swarajin really emanate in origins from from Cipawix if he does I mean he's a darker version so I guess in your heart did you kind of leave NYPD blue at some point and when did that maybe happen and when did all of a sudden you find yourself thinking more and more about Deadwood and less and less about what you were writing I'm not a good witness about that stuff about my own you know biography in that in that regard or creative biography that the big thing for me was I was loaded when I was doing NYPD blue and I got sober and so and I think that accounts for a lot of the changes and the the Swarajin is a real guy how about this Swarajin was a twin how'd you like to meet his twin and so it's a I think that there's a kind of flux you know there's my own experience but there's also you know everything that I read and I read all the time every day you know and characters will come alive in my mind and they exist independently and then experiences of mine or past characters I've worked on might get drawn into their orbit and it doesn't do to in some I guess I was teaching this morning at Columbia we didn't talk about Zeno's paradox in your class did we you know the idea that in a purely logical form you know the hair never catches the tortoise if he keeps catching if he keeps closing it by half and yet all of Weinstein's you know theorems are based on that kind of mathematical logic and which is to say that I believe that subject and object which is the basis of Zeno's paradox is an illusion and that in fact what was subject is constantly becoming object so to separate me as a discreet entity and what was I working on and how did it germinate and stuff is to fail to recognize that I am just sort of a way station for all kinds of influences that come in and out and thankfully Vicodin has been eliminated in that very helpful thank you sir yes good evening my name is Robin comedy hi Robin I wanted to thank you for Cippowitz you're welcome I wanted to thank you also for Deadwood my heart's in Deadwood we have a person in common out there Mary Kopko Mary Kopko's a Deadwood librarian who's been so helpful to us she's wonderful I had a bunch of questions but I didn't like this gentleman over here my head's spinning as well because I don't know which to pick first let me ask you a question do you ever get out to Los Angeles not yet well you should come out and be an extra on the show we'll make you a dancehall girl cause you know Mary was Mary came out that would be my dream yes I don't know and you can ask me all the questions you want but why don't you ask one question ask one now one question ok I suppose where did Walcott come from and if I may give you an invitation I'm a future Deadwood resident I have a mineral claim right down the road from Friendship Monument at a girl and if you ever need a other backdrop with nothing in the way it would be my honor alright Walcott thank you so much oh look at that Walcott was George Hearst's geologist and I wanted to present a kind of forerunner or an avatar of George Hearst who embodied the principles of capitalism and to show that the rapacity and veracity of the capitalist process had a sexual predicate and so I wanted to have a serial killer who was also a geologist as the precursor in the second season to Hearst who would appear in the third season and then it seemed to me that the guy who had played the first murderer the murder of the first hero Wow Bill Hickock could also play the geologist were you? good for you in your mind it was significant that the same actor played the two roles it wasn't wrong it was hard to recognize him at first but it does come as a shock it's an unusual decision because usually you would think it violates the fictional autonomy of the world to have a dead person come along and you'll recall however that I did that with Bunce you know with Sal Benedetto it seems to me that you can't be too cavalier about it but there was something in the soul of Jack McCall I think which survived his decease and which reincarnated itself in an impulse you know George Hearst says I am the boy the earth talks to he believed that the earth spoke to him and that particular kind of demonic kind of messianic narcissism I think is often shared by assassins and the extremely wealthy so question here hi Paul good to meet you sir I work actually in Cambridge working for a newspaper that it's a homeless newspaper where homeless people can contribute writing and a lot of times I encounter a lot of writing by people who are mentally divergent you know whatever you want to call it I don't like to necessarily hear mental illness, mental illness all that but my question for you is through your years of self-confessed madness and subsequent drug abuse did you have any moments of clarity where I don't know maybe even in the midst of the drugs going out of control where all of a sudden you could sort of see yourself clearly or anything like that that really helped bring your writing to I don't know I don't know about the last part about it's helping to bring my I remember once I turned out to be burying myself in Mexico and that got my attention I was working for these criminals I suppose would be the fair way to put it manufacturing stuff and and the I had gotten involved with them as these things usually occur by steps and I'd sold my passport to them about six months before and told myself and that's as far as I go so six months later I'm down in Mexico doing the rest of this stuff and there's a chemist down there who took chemist he was like he was from central casting bottle glasses he'd get in a car and he'd have an accident like within 200 feet he would hit a burrow or something and start throwing pesos everywhere so he contracted a bit of a stomach ache and he had a a consort named Yum Yum who decided to treat his tummy ache with an enema are you sure this isn't an episode that you're describing well it was an episode anyways as it turned out he had peritonitis and she killed him with this enema and we were all down there illegally and so I'm out there digging this guy's grave and in our finca there outside Cuernavaca and I tossed the body and now I figure well let me see if I can get some ID in case at some point I try to do the right thing and contact his relatives let them know the news of his finish because we were all down there and it was me he had my passport that I had sold six months before that they had used and only the most liberal applications of chloroform kept that moment of clarity from extending into a protracted bout of lucidity and perhaps a life change but that's why they make chloroform and I was able to keep going for a number of... you've clearly done a whole lot of historical research for Deadwood and there's a whole set of various truths which some of them contradict how do you reconcile that with the very different truth that you're working with in the world of Deadwood give me a... for instance you've talked about several characters the doctor who is a plausible construction but he didn't exist and yet he's interacting with all the people a necessary postulate I guess what I was saying was that there were doctors out there but and the... there were... the Civil War was really the formative experience for any physician during that period and so I guess I've never consciously gone against what I took to be an historical truth and in fact certain historical truths which I decided had to be bullshit and so I tried to tell the story of why I thought of... for example when Wild Bill Hickock was killed everyone says well he had the dead man's hand aces over 8s and every time I would read that I would think who the hell noticed what his hand was if he just had his head blown off I mean I would think you'd probably be saying come on feats don't fail me now and so in my subsequent research there was a Captain Massey who toured who kept in his wrist the bullet fragment who had been playing at the table and kept the bullet fragment in his wrist so now I'm thinking well so I'm Captain Massey I'm touring I need a little embellishment you know besides here's the bullet in my wrist so I say and do you know what it is that he was holding and it just gives my story a little so I did that story of how Captain Massey came to make up what has come to be taken as an historical fact but I try not to do the other thing which is encountering some fact which I believe to be true I try never to contradict that but I do take the license of if we don't know I try to for example Calamity Jane I always nourished a suspicion didn't look like Doris Day so you know I did my research and I figured out I mean I decided that that was what she was like the way she's portrayed but forgive me if am I encountering the question you're trying to put or I'm that is the question but if I'm remembering correctly which I may not be in the first episode you changed the dates and everybody arrived in the city and sort of I'm curious about I mean that may be the only place you do something like that but how you made the decision I mean it's more artistic that way the best documentation I could find had Hickock arriving July 30th and Bullock arriving August 2nd of 1876 and I figured you know that was okay there are those who argued that Bullock never met Hickock but his great nephew named Kellar I think was the fellow's name the great nephew recounted an anecdote that Bullock told about having encountered Hickock and but having said all of that you know those kinds of minor reconciliations or illusions or so on I think so long as you know Melville talked about the truth and the very truth and if I can stay with what I feel as the very truth I guess I do allow myself that sort of latitude you know 48 hours you're welcome I think that was a very interesting question absolutely and requires I mean look it could be a thesis it's a very important matter the treatment of history in westerns in general David you may have not given you may have given the impression at least to members of the audience who don't know the show as well as some of the rest of us that or don't know the background that in fact there are only a few connections to historical fact but indeed but in fact most of the show is grounded in history I would say 90% not just Bullock but the death of the boy has it happened right? There was a man named Sweringe in that sort of Oh yeah, E.B. Farnham was the first mayor and Merrick, A.W. Merrick was the first newspaper guy and Sol Star was the second mayor and served 10 terms and even Trixie is recorded as having existed and having put one through the guy's head in a collection called The Early Pioneer Days in the Black Hills by a writer named McClinic in the story that he tells the guy got up and was walking around the following day and that's one that I disagreed with so but it's Cleance Brooks for whom both Professor Thorburn and I have a real reverence and gratitude in trying to educate me a little bit about the different kinds of truths suggested that the truths of reportage or of history depend upon to the extent they depend upon anything a correspondence to an externally verifiable reality and the truths of storytelling are the truths of an internal emotional coherence and that can quickly become the refuge of charlatan but I guess I'd have to plead guilty to that possibility Cleance Brooks former professor at Yale author of among other great works anyone know The Well-Rodern one of the great books of formalist criticism and who found a little something to admire Professor Thorburn not to mention this guy first I'd like to say your work is really great I think when you sat in a network it was hard because the networks were very scared of a lot of stuff I think you and Stan Blaschko work great together and you really put some stuff together really hope TV see what it was because when cable came around networks were in trouble anyway so when you did Deadwood it surprised them all with stuff that is real and people really like it they get Emmys and the network is going on what this is about because it's real because it's honest and they don't see that because it's so afraid of the licenses of yours and everything when you show people's rear-ends and things like that to go so far there are rear-ends in David's show too though help them see that people want to see that for some reason even Genesis but still it's something real and I think people there's an audience out there far that they don't like stupid like when Evan Spelling did this stuff he did there's basically comparable material but when you guys came along it was different it was supposed to be what it was and I want to thank you for that because you really helped TV move along and save them from cable I don't know I appreciate it thank you very much folks we're in what my friend Henry Jenkins calls the lightning round now we have eight minutes so I want to ask our questioners to be succinct and I want to ask David to be succinct also do your best hi my name is Aggie I'm not a writer I'm an engineer so my question will be somewhat general as I understand it your work seems to focus on finding the humanity in characters that are somewhat morally ambiguous shall we say and this can make for very moving and interesting television but I wonder if you think that there's any downside to it or to put it another way do you think some things and maybe even some people are merely unforgivable and if not can that be a dangerous position to hold and I think I ask this in part because of the current political climate and thank you thank you are certain people unforgivable no I don't think so I think that not even that serial killer in your show no and that was sort of why I wanted to not even your old fraternity friend the president not even my old fraternity friend the president especially not him who I find to be more of a genial boob and a moral menace let me say forgive me for not being brief but I do want to say something to the writers please forgive me sir you ask your question why don't we let Wally do the last question take your time finish I think that the war in Iraq has ever so much more to do with the abdication with the media's abdication of its moral responsibility than with the deficiencies of our president I think that the media have infantilized the expectations of the audience for the lack because of the lack of a some sort of transcendent informing vision I believe that the surrogate existence that is provided by television has come to supplant the genuine emotional life of the populace I believe therefore that the reason that I have chosen not to do any more contemporary drama is because the assault on the collective sensibility of 9-11 was such as to make the audience give the audience so much fear that the only way that they could be placated was with a television series a miniseries which would be finished in three weeks and which would tell them that you do not have to fear danger here because we are going to take the war over there and the rationale for that war had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and everything to do with the habituation of the viewing public keeping of human experience in distorted forms for which the media is responsible so that the first three weeks of the Iraq miniseries was received with enormous public approval because it was the series that we wanted to see and it was the triumph of American weaponry and it had a beginning a middle and an end and the disaffection with the Iraq war has nothing to do with what is going on with the Iraqi people and everything to do with the fact that that series is over we don't want to see that series anymore we wanted to be narcotized in our reaction to the assault on the world trade center we got what we were looking for we bother in us anymore with the goddamn roadside bombs bring the boys home well the boys were never coming home after three weeks war isn't like that it was a war undertaken for the wrong reasons and responded to for reasons that the public has absolutely no conception about and therefore the dialogue that's going on with President Bush has nothing to do with President Bush and everything to do with the fact that he is the failed central character in an infantile drama which was being staged to narcotize the American public and no matter who was in office the so-called intelligentsia would be trivializing him and criticizing him now that's what I'm more on I know better than anyone else I spent a lot of time with him we're fraternity brothers but that is not what's happening in society in America today war is a terrible, terrible, terrible thing and if you want to know who told the biggest lie in order to get our country into war it wasn't George Bush it was one of our great presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt who knew that we were going to be attacked at Pearl Harbor and sat on the information because he knew what he had to do to mobilize public opinion so it's got and I'm not defending criticizing Franklin Roosevelt I'm not defending George Bush I am saying that there's a different drama which is enacting itself in our country right now and it has to do with a failure to acknowledge the necessary moral and imaginative predicate in what has become an entirely virtual existence which is, you know, people spend more than half their waking hours watching television just think about that for a second they spend more than half their waking hours watching television that has to shape the neural pathways it creates an impatience for example with e-resolution and I'm doing what I can to tell stories which engage those issues in ways that can engage the imagination so people don't feel threatened by it that's why I won't do any more contemporary series because that image is so indelibly imprinted on the American consciousness that we are prepared let me tell you for a genocide all this bullshit about Iraq let one more plane go into one more big building and the American public will sign on to the extermination of every one of the Muslim faith trust me I hope you're wrong about that but it'll happen like that that's a great question that's alright go ahead so we're shifting gears to conclude this is our final question I feel like a schmuck and a half because what I'm about to say might come off as mildly critical come on this has also been it's a bit intimidating to come up here because there are not one but two people that I greatly admire on the stage I'm gonna go over here I wanted to ask you about Hill Street Blues and what about that show you've been working on and this is a question about women um I've been watching NYPD Blue and Deadwood download it I'm sorry lately we can't afford HBO at my house and um it's an extraordinary feeling to be in an environment of eloquent masculinity of a kind that experiences a kid and by the time I got to college I got sort of eloquent something in the middle from my housemates and what not but I always wonder it seems like someone like Cipwit someone even like John Kelly are these whole consciousnesses but I wonder where's the women and the women are clearly there but none of them have ever struck me as being all the way there and I wonder if you're it's partially a question about writing this is hard as hell man this is partially a question about the writing process when you are sort of reaching out to this consciousness of a character that you're creating do you find is there a barrier there is there a kind of is there a gulf that you experience or is it just a matter of trying to relate to just the practical I have this set of experiences directly applicable to a fictionalized male character and uh do you feel remains for you or do you see that there are challenges I feel no abstract responsibility to count votes about how many credible female character that's what I mean I think that I'm the product of a society which obviously in which women are not given the opportunity to develop as fully in ways that are accessible to my understanding but I try to the character of Alma Garrett in Deadwood is a pretty complicated figure the character of Calamity Jane I believe is pretty complicated the character of Stubbs becomes pretty complicated she was a real figure too but uh is that the Sweringens girlfriend no that's Trixie Trixie is a complicated character but the fact is that there are stunted effects in the women characters in the worlds that I write about because women are encouraged to believe that they exist as adjuncts of the male will or the male fantasy it wasn't just the prostitutes in Deadwood but in society times around this time women were imprisoned in a different way they were imprisoned in bustles and all kinds of and treated with this sort of elevated rhetoric which in fact was incapacitating to them realized you know Alice James Diary is a wonderful document in that regard and she found that only once she had begun to die of a tumor that she discovered her voice Henry and William James younger sister hysteria literally is derived from of the womb that it so that when a woman began to feel as if she were thwarted she was diagnosed as being hysterical which is simply to say her womb was driving her and they would give her opium which was the accepted treatment for hysteria so you know I I I take the characters as I find them I'm sure that now Alma as it turns out becomes a writer in the fourth season and she's encouraged by another character who actually came to the camp in the first year but for whom I would not settle until we got the right actor it was a theatrical producer named Jack Langrish who's played by Brian Cox who appears in the third season and Langrish encouraged Alma to resume what she had lied about as her original impulse coming out there which was to be a writer and there's a good deal of sort of Willa Cather's experience that I hope to mine for the character of Alma Garrett but so I don't know if I've answered your question it's always an ad mixture of the limitations of the artist's own imagination and sort of the psychic cards that he's been delved and the prevailing conventions of the time I wish I had one answer for it I'll try to do better They are very masculine worlds and this world is a Victorian one in which women are not equal to men I want to thank David Milch very much for this candid I want to thank you all Let me thank you and let me say from my heart please engage the things we're talking about don't give up on mass culture contribute to it break your heart in trying to make it better instead of standing outside it our species is in a fight for its life and nobody says that the decision is going to go one way or another so put your bodies up and put your spirits up get in touch with me I'm very open to that kind of stuff and anything that you want to do just feel as if this stuff about that we don't have to vote anymore we're just not voting in the right election you know and you can all you all come and vote with me, okay?