Video Interview: David Milch

Per Variety from this Wednesday:

This just in from HBO: The pay cabler has given a greenlight to “Luck,” the Dustin Hoffman series from David Milch and Michael Mann.

“Luck” centers on horse racing, including “the owners, gamblers, jockeys and diverse gaming industry players.” Show will begin shooting at Santa Anita Park, among other L.A. spots, this fall.

“Michael Mann delivered a pilot from David Milch’s brilliant script that took our breath away,” said HBO programming prexy Michael Lombardo, who announced the pickup. “We are truly excited that these two artists, and our extraordinary cast headed by Dustin Hoffman, will be bringing ‘Luck’ to life.”

Not sure what your reactions are to this news, but mine was immediately this: To zero in on the writer David Milch. Per Wikipedia, here are Milch’s writing credits:

Television credits (as creator)

• Beverly Hills Buntz (1987–1988) — co-creator, writer, producer of this Hill Street Blues spin-off.
• Capital News (1990) — co-creator, writer, producer.
• NYPD Blue (1993–2005) — co-creator, writer, executive producer.
• Brooklyn South (1997–1998) — co-creator, executive producer.
• Total Security (1997) — co-creator, writer.
• Big Apple (2001) — creator, writer, executive producer.
• Deadwood (2004–2006) — creator, writer, executive producer.
• John from Cincinnati (2007) — co-creator, writer, executive producer.
• Last of the Ninth (2009) — creator, writer, executive producer.
• Luck (2010) — creator, writer, executive producer.

Awards and recognition

• 1993 Emmy Award, Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series (Hill Street Blues)
• 1994 Edgar Award, Best Episode in a Television Series Teleplay (NYPD Blue, “4B or Not 4B”)
• 1995 Emmy Award, Best Drama Series (NYPD Blue)
• 1995 Edgar Award, Best Episode in a Television Series Teleplay (NYPD Blue, “Simone Says”) (shared with Steven Bochco and Walon Green)
• 2006 Austin Film Festival, Outstanding Television Writer Award recipient

Not to mention the 259 episodes of “N.Y.P.D. Blue” he’s credited with writing.

Milch, who graduated summa cum laude from Yale and received an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, is a fascinating character. For a taste of how Milch thinks, here is an excerpt from an interview Milch had with David Boles:

In 1995 Milch wrote TRUE BLUE: THE REAL STORIES BEHIND NYPD BLUE with Bill Clark. Clark was the real life detective who provided rich stories for Milch’s inspiration in NYPD BLUE scripts. In that book Milch spoke about one of his Yale mentors, Robert Penn Warren, and how he taught Milch that “the secret subject of any story worth telling is what we learn or fail to learn over time.” What lessons has David Milch failed to learn over time?

“I still gamble,” Milch laughed. “I have a horse running tomorrow in the Breeder’s Cup. Watch on Channel 4 in New York. The mile race. 2:30 pm. Horse’s name is Val Royal.” [Editor’s Note: Val Royal won the Breeder’s Cup Mile the next day.] “Anyway — we don’t know what we fail to learn. It comes to us only once we learn it. What we have not known up to that point only becomes clear to us only when what not known becomes known. I continually discover levels of meaning and experience in my work which I had not known could exist before. The simple way to say it is to say that it didn’t interest me. You must admit I didn’t know how to be interested — it isn’t the sort of thing that at the end of your life you’ll have 100% — what was learned. We grow or we fail to grow. That process is the experience of living. It is not a sum of knowledge that you are supposed to acquire and you do or don’t and your life continues to exfoliate and you are aware of that process or you aren’t.”

What about lessons learned?

“Okay, let’s call that a moment of clarity — I stopped using drugs. In terms of my work I have just come to trust the process of the active imagination. It entails suppression of the Ego. I am able to develop exercises where I can suppress that quickly. I am able to get to the work faster every day. I don’t linger a lot in self-delusory exercises in control — don’t describe too much or even have to have an objective idea of what a scene is about. My only responsibility to an active imagination is to submit myself to a state of being where characters other than I move around and I try to serve that process. I just get to that — I don’t plan scenes. I don’t outline. I feel my way along because I have come to believe everything you believe about writing instead of writing is bullshit. It doesn’t apply. You can make an outline but an outline is not going to work because it doesn’t apply to what is actually written. I am content to work in uncertainty much more than I used to be — content to not know where I am going.”

What leaped to mind when I read the news about the new HBO series was a series of presentations Milch gave at the WGA Theater several years ago. They were covered and excerpted in the fine WGA journal “Written By” over the course of several months. I remember reading them, both fascinated and inspired by Milch’s ideas.

I contacted “Written By” and they have kindly offered to create electronic versions of the original hard copies, so I can excerpt them on GITS. Look forward to that sometime soon.

But then, I started bumping around the Web to see what else I might find re Milch. Lo and behold, I hit the mother lode! First off, it seems that Milch gave another series of talks at the WGA Theater in December, 2007. The subject: “The Idea of the Writer” and there are podcasts and video available for all 5 daily sessions here.

And then I found this: A sit-down interview Milch did at M.I.T. on April 20, 2006. Its run-time is one hour and twenty-three minutes, but believe me, it is worth every second of your time.

Enjoy the interview with Milch. More insight from him in the weeks to come on GITS.

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