WHO GETS TO TELL A BLACK STORY? (PART 2)

A White Journalist Wrote It. A Black Director Fought to Own It.

A Long Way From Silver Spring

Mr. Simon, who is 39, grew up in a mostly white world, the youngest of three
children in a liberal Democratic household in Silver Spring, Md., in which
books and newspapers were revered and argument was sport. He went to
suburban public schools that were heavily white. He recalls as a child
having heard a racial epithet used only twice, but having known enough to be
indignant.

Race was rarely discussed at home, but equality was a given. Mr. Simon's
father was the director of public relations and a speechwriter for B'nai
B'rith. His mother worked for several years for a group called the Negro
Student Fund, which helped underachieving public school students move to
independent schools.

Mr. Simon learned about race in Baltimore. The Sun hired him out of the
University of Maryland in 1983. Race was out in the open in Baltimore in a
way he had never seen before. It was no big deal, he said, to walk into a
bar in Highlandtown and hear white people talking about black folks, or to
meet a black person and be told everything that was wrong with white people,
no offense.

Race seemed to permeate everything in Baltimore: housing, education,
politics, criminal justice. It was as if the city had swallowed whole every
other trend but had choked on race, he said. The biggest crime story was
drugs, and intravenous drug use in Baltimore occurred predominantly among
African-Americans. To be a decent reporter, he had to learn to listen to
black people.

In 1988, Mr. Simon spent a year with the Baltimore Police Department's
homicide unit, doing the reporting for what became his 1991 book, "Homicide:
A Year on the Killing Streets." Waiting around at crime scenes and in
people's houses, he ended up shooting the breeze for hours upon hours with
people the police encountered on cases.

"So then the trick becomes: can I just be patient enough not to ask every
question at once, to laugh only at the jokes that they tell when they're
funny, and not to laugh at the ones that, if you laugh at them, they know
you're full up with it, and to venture your own joke about something," Mr.
Simon recalled.

At The Sun, he made a specialty of turning obscure murders into full-blown
dramatic narratives. Gregarious, voluble and funny, he believed he could
talk to anybody.

And every time someone rendered himself or herself human, he said, "it was
an argument against whatever racial simplicities you've constructed in your
mind."

In 1993, he took a leave of absence and went to work on "The Corner" with a
former police detective named Edward Burns, also white, who believed that
the drug war had led the police badly astray, and who shared with Mr. Simon
the impulse to demonstrate to the credit-card-carrying world that the people
the drug war had demonized had lives and sensibilities and deserved
understanding.

Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns picked the intersection of Fayette and Monroe
Streets, one of a hundred open-air drug markets in a city said to have the
highest rate of heroin use of any in the country. They went every day. They
talked, joked, hung around, listened, eventually winning the confidence of
dozens of people whose stories would become the soul of the book.

When "The Corner" came out in 1997, the Rev. Frank Reid, a fifth-generation
African Methodist Episcopal minister and pastor of the largest
African-American church in Baltimore, based sermons on it. He held a party
to celebrate it, and 500 people showed up.

Mr. Simon had leapt a chasm few white people cross, Mr. Mills, his friend
and writing partner, believed. He had written about black addicts not
through a microscope but by sitting next to them. He had learned the
language, sensibility and sense of humor of the ghetto, a sensibility Mr.
Mills knew from his childhood. And he had gotten more intimately involved
with his subjects than Mr. Mills could imagine doing himself.

Mr. Simon's newspaper articles, meanwhile, looked less and less like what
normally turns up in a newspaper. They began with paragraphs like " 'You
don't look so good,' says the cop, smiling. 'You look like death.' " Then an
editor at the Sun accused him of ennobling criminals. Disgusted, he left in
1995. He went to work as a writer and producer on "Homicide."

That the subjects of his journalism were often black was not what drew Mr.
Simon to them, he insisted earlier this year. Race had simply made the
territory seem less accessible, so their voices had not been heard. There
were things he missed because he was white, he said. But there were other
things a black writer from that world might have missed because he or she
was too close.

Occasionally, he found himself accused of exploitation.

"I'm losing patience with the idea of it being exploitive," he said. "Except
to acknowledge that in one sense all journalism is exploitive. Janet Malcolm
was right. We're all selling used cars. And any journalist who tries to say
we're not is lying through his teeth.

"The only ethic that I can find that you can hang your hat on says: Now that
I have the material, how do I treat my subjects? Do I accord them all the
humanity they deserve, or do I write a crude and simplistic expose?"

46aces From the Old Days

The shooting schedule in Baltimore was relentless: 12- and 13-hour days,
five days a week, no end in sight. By early October, Mr. Dutton had not
slept eight hours straight since August. The production was on time and
under budget. But at times the film was being written, cast, shot and edited
almost simultaneously.

It was emotionally grueling, too. Day in and day out, they were shooting in
the depths of the world they were depicting, in the decaying row house
neighborhoods that in Baltimore seem to stagger on forever, with the drug
corners, tumbledown bars, boarded-up windows, rumble of demolition trucks,
shriek of sirens. Everywhere, there were children.

Every day people would turn up to watch, a shifting collection of
neighborhood residents, acquaintances of Mr. Dutton, survivors from his
prison drama group, aspiring actors and hangers-on -- more than a few of
whom found their way into small parts in the series, blurring the boundary
between the film and the street.

46or Mr. Dutton, being back in the old neighborhood was not necessarily
fun -- the handshaking, embracing, hearing sob stories, shelling out money,
seeing people he had once idolized who had gone nowhere. He kept waiting for
someone, he said, just someone, to arrive by car, not on foot, and get out
with kids and a wife and everyone looking healthy.

Mr. Simon was around, too, along with many of the people from his book. Of
those who had not died, some were clean and turning their lives around. Mr.
Simon had remained close to them. Now he found joy in helping them get small
roles, for which those in speaking parts could rake in the princely Screen
Actors Guild rate of $596 a day.

Mr. Mills visited the set rarely. What he loved was the solitary process of
writing, so he passed his days in the office, writing and fine-tuning
scripts. Mr. Simon let him try anything, and relied on him. But there was a
well-defined hierarchy, Mr. Mills observed without resentment. "The Corner"
was Mr. Simon's project; he was there to serve Mr. Simon's vision.

They had first worked together on the University of Maryland student
newspaper and Mr. Mills, like Mr. Simon, had gone into journalism. They had
written their first television script together, for "Homicide," in 1992,
winning an award from the Writers Guild of America. Mr. Mills had then quit
his job at The Washington Post to become a television writer. Their
friendship, they both said, had long ago moved well beyond the issue of
race. And that appeared to be the truth.

46or the first few weeks of production, Mr. Simon was on the set every day,
often in the background, watching or talking with Mr. Colesberry and Ms.
Noble, and occasionally Mr. Dutton. Then, after a few weeks, he began coming
less often. At the time, he said he had pulled back because he was confident
that the production was in good hands. But later, he said he had also begun
to sense that Mr. Dutton responded better to Mr. Colesberry than to him. Mr.
Dutton seemed distant, more curt. Mr. Simon said he figured Mr. Dutton was
feeling the pressure, like everyone.

In fact, Mr. Dutton had come to distrust Mr. Simon.

"As good as some of this material is, I'm wondering where his real heart is
in this," he said in October. "Is this really and truly an effort to do
something about this?" No matter how sincere Mr. Simon was, he was "taking
somebody else's misery and making a dollar off of it. Which can't be denied,
whether he's the most sincere goddamn white man in the world."

Where the distrust had started, Mr. Dutton could not say for sure.

Early on, he had gotten the impression through HBO that Mr. Simon and Mr.
Mills had doubts about having him direct all six episodes. Then, the initial
encounter with the crew had badly soured his enthusiasm. He blamed Mr.
Simon, in part; if his niche was going to be writing about black people in
Baltimore, then he should have made sure there were more behind the camera.

46rom the first days of the shoot, Mr. Dutton said, Mr. Simon was getting
on his nerves. Mr. Dutton was not accustomed to having a writer on set, and
he was not interested in hearing how Mr. Simon had envisioned particular
scenes. There always seemed to be people, like Mr. Simon and Ms. Noble,
whispering in corners.

He hated to say he felt unappreciated. But he did feel monitored, judged and
second-guessed. The only reason he had not cussed somebody out was because
he had to get through the shoot. If he had gotten angry, it would have been
intimidating and disruptive. To keep the peace, he let things go.

He was suspicious of white writers, he said at the time. Every aspect of
black life had been distorted by white people, he said, and the series was
about an element of society that he knew white people detested. He would
have felt more comfortable, he said, if the writer had been black. As for
Mr. Mills, Mr. Dutton felt he knew little about him; when they had first
met, he had not even realized that the light-skinned Mr. Mills was black.

"I know that David Simon can visit and sit with as many black folks in this
city as he wants to," Mr. Dutton said one day in late September, standing on
a crumbling stretch of sidewalk in the rain. "They can pay the families to
get the stories. They can listen and walk around with dope fiends. They can
write about murders, and they still won't know a damn thing about black
people. Not this, you know. Not this."

He added: "I know the pulse of this. I know what people think the minute
they walk out them doors. I know what mothers feel when their sons and
daughters walk out of the house to go to school. I know what it feels like
to kill somebody. I know what it feels like to get shot. I know what it
feels like that people be looking to kill me. I don't have to show up as a
crime journalist after the fact."

(con't)