EYE OF THE NEEDLE

Last summer a small party was held to welcome the cast and crew arriving in
Baltimore for the filming of "The Corner."

As partygoers settled in at the stables of the Evergreen House mansion on
North Charles Street, David Simon, the co-writer-and-executive producer of
the series, moved outside into the night and sat on steep stone stairs
looking down on the scene.

"Goals?" he said in answer to my question. "I can tell you a couple of
them: To be subversive in telling more truth about the people on the Corner
than television probably wants to know; to humanize instead of demonizing
these people. And to do that in a way that HBO can be OK with it."

What Simon, co-writer David Mills and director Charles S. Dutton have
delivered to HBO eight months later is far better than OK. They have made
landmark television -- a film that people will buzz about in coming days
for the powerful stories it tells and for the remarkable sociology that
future generations will study.

"The Corner" turns the TV police drama on its head. It shows us the world
from the point of view of the people that series like "NYPD Blue" and even
"Homicide: Life on the Street" have helped teach us to despise - drug
addicts and drug dealers in cities like Baltimore. And it does so with an
eloquence that will make some viewers care about that world in ways they
never thought possible.

American television does not get any better than HBO. But you have to reach
beyond even such HBO triumphs as the 1997 film, "The Tuskeegee Airmen," to
find an apt comparison to "The Corner." It is made of the same rare stuff
as such watershed works of social conscience as "Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men," the Depression-era study of Appalachian poor by James Agee and Walker
Evans, and Edward R. Murrow's 1960 CBS documentary on migrant workers,
"Harvest of Shame."

The beginning

"The Corner," which is based on the nonfiction book of the same title by
Simon and former police detective Edward Burns, opens like a Murrow
documentary: Dutton standing on a bombed-out Baltimore street corner
speaking directly to the camera.

"I'm Charles S. Dutton. Last summer, I came back here to Baltimore,
Maryland, to film a story about life on the Corner," he begins.

"I grew up and hung out on a corner just like this one, not too far from
here, a corner like thousands of others across the country," continues
Dutton, whose personal journey from jail (the Maryland State Penitentiary
for killing a man in a fight) to Yale (graduate study at the Yale School of
Drama) to Broadway and Hollywood has been chronicled many times in these pages.

"The contradiction of it is this," he says. "On the one hand, the Corner
pulsates with life - the energy of human beings trying to make it to the
next day. But also it's a place of death, be it the slow death of addiction
or the suddenness of gunshots. This film is the true story of men, women
and children living in the midst of the drug trade. Their voices are too
rarely heard."

The opening credits take us from documentary to docudrama as we meet Gary
McCullough, played with an exquisite vulnerability by T. K. Carter ("A Rage
in Harlem"). The choice of opening on McCullough, one of the three people
at the film's center, is one of many wise decisions made by Simon and his
colleagues.

At the intersection of North Monroe and West Fayette streets, dealers shout
out, like carnival barkers, the brand name of the heroin or cocaine they're
pushing to an endless parade of walk-up and drive-through buyers. In this
hellish cauldron of death and drugs, 34-year-old McCullough is the
character most like us, the mainly middle-class audience that subscribes to
HBO. He is the most sympathetic and, in many ways, the one who cuts hardest
against the TV stereotypes of drug fiends. Simon calls him "the soul of the
series."

Before his addiction to heroin, which started four years earlier,
McCullough was a promising young entrepreneur holding down a day job as a
supervisor at Bethlehem Steel and a night job as a security guard. He also
had his own small company that rehabbed rowhouses, and a stock portfolio
that he had managed to run up to $150,000.

McCullough is an intelligent, decent and sensitive man who you could easily
imagine running a government agency or a business. Instead, he is chasing
an increasingly elusive heroin high seven days a week. As we meet him, he's
going down, down, down, and his lingering sense of decency only makes him
less likely to survive the Corner.

The other two major stories in the series belong to Fran Boyd, McCullough's
estranged wife, and DeAndre McCullough, their 15-year-old son. Boyd, played
by Khandi Alexander ("ER"), is also a junkie. DeAndre, played by Sean
Nelson ("The Wood"), is an up-and-coming "corner boy," out on the street
selling vials of cocaine, learning the game from a supplier named Bugsy.
He's also acquiring a taste for what he sells.

With its focus on these three, "The Corner" is very much a family drama.
But that is one of several familiar television narratives it ultimately
subverts. This isn't "The Waltons"; you've never seen this kind of family
on TV before.

Of the six hours, the best is the finale, "Everyman's Blues," which opens
with the birth of a baby and Thanksgiving dinner with Fran's family - two
rare moments of joy and grace, a cease-fire of sorts amid all the
suffering. But everything that makes this miniseries great is there to see
in Sunday's first hour, titled "Gary's Blues."

Setting the scene

In the opening moments, the camera follows McCullough down the street as he
ducks into a Korean grocery store, where he buys a cigarette -- yes, one
cigarette -- for which he pays 25 cents. They are cheaper by the pack, of
course, but every dollar a dope addict has goes to dope. We quickly learn
that a different economic model operates on the corner of Fayette and Monroe.

This is the same store, we discover, that a young McCullough worked in some
25 years beforewhen it was owned by the Lemlers, a Jewish couple. Jews,
Koreans and African-Americans are pitted one against the other, each group
exploiting and inflicting pain on the other. This is a film steeped in
ethnicity, tribalism and class warfare.

Instead of the camera following McCullough into the store, it stops on the
doorstep. And, while McCullough is inside, director Dutton and
cinematographer Ivan Strasburg give us a slow 360 degree look at the
Corner, firmly establishing the look and point of view of the series (which
was actually filmed at East Oliver and Montford Streets for logistical
reasons having to do with the crew being based in Fells Point).

What we see is a hopelessly bleak urban landscape of boarded-up buildings,
broken windows, graffiti-spiked walls and trash-filled lots. A boy who
looks no older than 8 stands in the middle of the street and throws bottle
after bottle against a concrete wall until shards of glass cover the
sidewalk like a sheet of ice. There is not a tree in sight. This should be
Berlin after World War II, or maybe Beirut in the 1980s, or sections of
Belfast in the '90s.

But, sadly, this is part of Baltimore today.

And, when the police swoop down in sometimes brutal, usually meaningless
raids, we don't see it from the network cop drama point of view, but rather
that of the boys, men and women being slammed up against the wall. Many of
them are weak, shaky, badly diseased addicts, not the suppliers getting
rich off the residents' misery and living several steps removed from these
exercises in urban policing.

For American TV, this point of view is revolutionary. It's the same point
of view feature films like "In the Name of the Father," which is
sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army, use to show us life in Belfast.
In fact, a number of scenes that show corner boys and other residents
scrambling from police down warren-like alleys seem to have been inspired
by such films.

The larger point, perhaps, given the current real-life debate over new
models of policing here, is that Baltimore City police officers and
detectives are not the good guys they were in Simon's "Homicide." Instead,
they most resemble an occupying army that, like the U.S. Army in Vietnam,
doesn't really hold the ground that the generals and their public relations
staffs want us to think it holds.

And, yet, in this war zone there is tremendous humanity, with moments of
compassion and even tenderness.

A moment of tenderness

In one such moment Sunday, we enter an abandoned, trashed-out rowhouse
without heat or electricity. The place serves as a shooting gallery for a
group of addicts that viewers will come to know very well. One by one, the
addicts line up before a woman named Rita (Robin Michelle McClamb), who has
open sores on her face and oozing abscesses on her arms.

But Rita has a skill that's highly valued on Fayette Street: She can find a
vein with a needle. And, so, each user gives Rita some of his or her dope
in return for her injecting them.

The last man in line, Fat Curt (Clarke Peters), who's been an addict for
more than 25 years, has no usable veins in his arms or legs. When his turn
comes, he kneels before Rita, who, like a high priestess, sits in a chair
lit only by a ring of flickering candles. She tenderly takes his head,
places it on her lap and turns it sideways to expose a large vein on the
side of his neck. And then she eases the needle into that vein as she
gently strokes his head.

Of the hundreds of thousands of images that have passed before my eyes as a
television critic, that tableau with Rita and Curt in candlelight is one of
the most stunning, perfectly framed and evocative I have ever seen.

"The Corner" is filled with such remarkable imagery, especially in the
shooting galleries where Dutton and Strasburg have the addicts appearing
and disappearing in the shadows like wraiths gliding through descending
rings of hell.

But be warned, like most accounts of hell, "The Corner" is graphic, profane
and given to moments of incredible violence. It is not for everyone.
Though, like "The Sopranos" -- which is also graphic, profane and violent
- -- the premium cable world of HBO is the place where such adult fare
definitely belongs.

There are other ways in which I suspect that "The Corner" is not going to
be for everyone, even though in each of these ways it can tell us something
important about our society.

While the series includes characters who leave the Corner and drugs behind,
its commitment to documentary truth precludes the kind of neatly satisfying
story lines that TV drama has taught us to expect. As a result, some
viewers might feel it's too static. Personally, I'll take the truth, as
static and ambiguous as it might often be.

Expectations

And then there's the matter of cultural conditioning.

Our popular culture has been demonizing people of color since the 17th
century when some of the New World's first European settlers penned
captivity narratives about life among the "savages." In addition, one of
the primary ways our 20th century culture excuses the excesses of
capitalism is by dehumanizing poor people in the stories it tells.

Add to that some three decades of rhetoric from government officials about
a "war on drugs" with these folks as the enemy, and you are looking up a
mighty steep hill in terms of viewer sympathy for the poor, black drug
addicts at the center of this story.

As powerful as "The Corner" is, for some viewers six hours of great TV is
simply not going to dent what a lifetime of conditioning has taught many of
us, black and white, to believe about the urban underclass.

But, in the end, that's exactly what makes the corner of Fayette and Monroe
such an important place to visit for the next six weeks. Let "The Corner"
into your living room, and it just might change the way you see the world.