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The Wireallowed its audience space to interpret.
One early moment hammered that methodology home.
In retaliation, she had threatened to turn Savage into the states attorney.
A gunman killed her, firing from outside a glass window.
Through that case, Burns and Edgerton unearthed Savages connection to Melvin Williams.
Television had never seen anything quite like it.
McNulty and Bunk conversed in the nearly five-minute scene by using only iterations of the word fuck.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR):Were standing at a crime scene.
Were staring, and cops are just cursing left and right.
And it was just a throwaway line for Terry, but I remembered it.
So, I came to Ed with it, and then Ed wrote that scene.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR):Terry is an amazing guy.
He might even still be on the force.
I wrote it, and I used four variations of the word fuck: What the fuck?
I didnt particularly see it that way, but it was fine.
WENDELL PIERCE (DET.
WILLIAM BUNK MORELAND):David comes up to us and describes a scene.
He says, Youre going to go to the scene.
Youre going to realize that [the previous] detective, he did a bad job.
Wendell, youre going to see the photos of the girl.
Dominic, youre going to start getting the stats, looking at what the report was.
The glass is on the inside.
It means it came from the outside.
That means whoever the perpetrator was wasnt inside, like the person they say in the report.
The bullet came from outside.
From there, lets see the trajectory.
It would be right here, in the refrigerator.
Lets see, not the wall.
In the refrigerator, we find the bullet here.
Lets go outside, make a new discovery.
He explained the whole scene to us.
So, I said, Lets just come out the box with it.
I said, What?
It took a long time to shoot that scene, but I wanted to get it right.
The story was told visually, and so I was very detailed in shooting that scene.
WENDELL PIERCE (DET.
That was one of the best-acted scenes that I did on the show.
The one thing they cut out that I regret is we said, Fuck.
Fuckity fuck, all of that.
Then we were [being] watched the whole time by the super.
We go outside and we find the casing, and the super says, Well, Ill be fucked.
They cut that out, though.
I was like, Oh, man, they should have left that in.
DOMINIC WEST (DET.
Reprinted fromAll the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of the Wire Copyright 2018 by Jonathan Abrams.
Published by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
