It's all what happened yesterday, police said, police said, police said.
You come in at 4:00 PM and you leave at 2:00. I started as a night police reporter which was very reactive.
#David simon how to#
So in 1983, you start at The Sun and you developing a very deep understanding of Baltimore.ĭavid Simon: Slowly, I would say the first few years I was just trying to figure out how to do reporting.Īlec Baldwin: What did you write about in the beginning?ĭavid Simon: It was the same thing I wrote about at the end. And you would drive that 895, the Harbor Tunnel and auto graveyards and rusting peers and you'd think 'My God, you take a wrong turn if you end up here.'Īlec Baldwin: But you began at The Sun in 1980? Was it 1980?Īlec Baldwin: '83. Baltimore was one of those places I drove through to go visit relatives in New York. As soon as I got hired at The Sun it was like, hey, ok, that's where I'm going.ĭavid Simon: But I didn't know Baltimore at all. I don't know that I was looking, you know it wasn't like I had the world as my oyster and I could have chosen a daily.
#David simon plus#
I was on the five year plus summer plan.Īlec Baldwin: But what did you write about?ĭavid Simon: And while I was there, I became their stringer. But I got in, so I still had to get a degree even after I finished editing the paper.
#David simon professional#
I failed out so many times I was the editor so I failed out two semesters in a row just for laughs.Īlec Baldwin: You are a professional newspaperman who was hiding in a college, basically.ĭavid Simon: You know what? I tried to say that to my father but he has pissed away the tuition checks.Īlec Baldwin: He is still burned how you didn't play properly in college.ĭavid Simon: Yeah, I'm not sure he bought it. And that's –Īlec Baldwin: What were you writing under those hundred bylines when you are at the school? What were you writing about?ĭavid Simon: I was still trying to get out of – by the time I finished editing The Diamondback, which is a broadsheet five days a week paper at Maryland, I had maybe sixty-five credits. I didn't have to do the three, four years in Roanoke or at a smaller market paper to get to a major metro daily. And the Metro editor told the union quietly look, when he graduates, we are going to hire him.ĭavid Simon: And they did. And I had so many bylines that the unions had to sort of formally complain and said you got to hire him if he's writing this much. I was a stringer for a year and sort of paid thirty, forty bucks a story. I'm not sure Mencken could get published.Īlec Baldwin: David Simon wrote for his high school paper in Bethesda, Maryland and continued writing in college.ĭavid Simon: I worked on the college paper at Maryland and I sort of wrote my way onto The Sun. And so I was reading old guys who, a kind of newspaper style that isn't even allowed anymore. " And then once I got involved with The Sun, he threw Mencken at me. His son David inherited his dad's passion for newsprint.ĭavid Simon: Once he saw that I was interested in newspapers as a teenager, he was like throwing Swope and Damon Runyon and, "watch what he does here. He'd studied it in college but with a growing family, he opted for the security of public relations. Rhetoric was prized in my household.Īlec Baldwin: Simon's father had been to be a journalist. He did that for thirty years.ĭavid Simon: Out of DC. He was raised in Washington DC in a family where the tradition was words.ĭavid Simon: My father was a professional Jew, by which I mean he was the PR director for B'nai B'rith which is like a Jewish service organization. You might assume David Simon grew up in Baltimore in a family with a tradition of law enforcement. And then he created The Coroner for HBO, a miniseries based on his book about the open air drug market in West Baltimore. Simon wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets about his time spent with the Baltimore police Homicide unit. When you ask David Simon, the show's creator and my guest today, which character he loved writing most, he invariably answers 'Baltimore.' Baltimore looms large in Simon's life.Ī resident for over 30 years, he got his start as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Middle schooler Dukie Weems, drug kingpin prop Joe and of course, Omar. People like Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, the Greek who smuggle drugs and humans. Fans of The Wire seemed most attached to its authentic characters.
#David simon series#
The HBO series explored Baltimore's drug scene and the corruption of the city's social, governmental and media institutions.
Alec Baldwin: Some critics called The Wire the greatest television show of all time.
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