Wider Reading | Free Screenplay: The Wire, Season 6 Draft

THE MEAN STREETS OF BALTIMORE, EXT, DAY


The mean streets of Baltimore. Runners and dealers for the MURDOCH crime syndicate media empire lurk on the corners.

DEALER 1:

Yo! Got your Fox TV, yo! Re-up on Fox TV!

DEALER 2:

News of the World! Got your News of the World!

DEALER:

Times! Got pay-for-view online Times!

A few gunshots are fired as the dealers attempt to take total control of SKY. Their only aim is material gain, and power for the sake of power. Which means getting in with politicians.


Down In The Hole, a song about the concealment of evil rather than the annihilation of evil, plays.


COURTHOUSE, INT, DAY


ANDY COULSON (WEEBAY) sits in the back of the courtroom, dreaming of the day he'll get to work with a rare breed of slimy fish (DAVID CAMERON). Beside him, REBEKAH BROOKS (STRINGER BELL) is doodling pictures of Superman, and LITTLE MAN (Glenn Mulcaire) has his arms folded. At the front of the court, CLIVE GOODMAN is taking a twenty for the sake of the MURDOCH family. STRINGER nods, approvingly.


BRIAN PADDICK, (JIMMY MCNULTY) angry and drunk, leans forward and hisses in STRINGER's ear,

BRIAN PADDICK:

Nicely done.

MCNULTY gets up and leaves, angrily.


PROJECTS, EXT, DAY

JAMES MURDOCH (D'ANGELO BARKSDALE) is explaining the finer points of chess through an on-the-nose metaphor to IAN EDMONDSON (BODIE) and ANDY GRAY (WALLACE).

JAMES MURDOCH:

 Now this here, this is the King - like Rupe. You lose the king, you lost everything. So he got to stay back. He can't get involved in no war. And this is the Queen. Queen ain't no bitch. She take care of business.

ANDY GRAY:

 Remind me of Rebekah Brooks.

IAN EDMONDSON:
Your attitude towards women is going to get you into trouble one of these days, Andy...

POLICE BASEMENT, INT, DAY


A bunch of Metropolitan Police HUMPS, led by JOHN YATES (DEPUTY BURRELL) continue their not-too-thorough investigation into the MURDOCH family. Nobody suggests planting a wiretap on the phones, which is ironic, since that's exactly what the other side are doing. Sean Hoare (BUBBLES) attempts to give them evidence but his services are ignored. The investigation drags on for years.


A FLASHY, INTIMIDATING CLUB ENGINEERED AROUND MACHO MASCULINITY AND THE OBJECTIFICATION OF WOMEN, WHERE YOU HAVE TO PAY TO GET IN, SPECIFICALLY, THE NEWS OF THE WORLD, INT, DAY


REBEKAH BROOKS and RUPERT MURDOCH (AVON BARKSDALE) discuss their support of DAVID CAMERON (FUTURE PRIME MINISTER CLAY DAVIS). They also note that ANDY GRAY may be snitchin'. They also worry about their small-time, poverty-stricken competitor, who keeps attacking them and putting himself out there as a socialist Robin Hood figure, THE GUARDIAN (OMAR LITTLE). BROOKS in particular tries to strike out against OMAR.


POLICE BASEMENT, INT, DAY


OMAR gives evidence against the MURDOCH family. The case begins to shift slowly forward. There's simply too much evidence now to be ignored forever.


PROJECTS, EXT, DAY


NEWS INTERNATIONAL, cleaning up their house, has WALLACE (ANDY GRAY) gunned down by his own colleagues in the projects. Nobody cares, because he sort of deserved it. Truly, there is no black-and-white in this complex, realistic depiction of a society in decay.



COURTROOM, INT, DAY


WEEBAY (ANDY COULSON) takes life for the MURDOCH family; meanwhile, the Met's investigation has been closed down before it can really pinpoint the biggest political figures touched by this corruption, or the heads of the family itself. Some more mid-level players, including IAN EDMONDSON, are given up by BARKSDALE in exchange for his own freedom; STRINGER gets off free as well. NEWS INTERNATIONAL has to lose the NEWS OF THE WORLD, but sets up shop instead in an abandoned, dreary funeral parlour where nobody goes any more (THE TIMES). PIERS MORGAN (CUNT) complains publicly about WEEBAY's fate.

BRIAN PADDICK leans over and whispers in STRINGER's ear,

BRIAN PADDICK:

Catch you later.

He won't, though.


THE MEAN STREETS OF BALTIMORE, EXT, DAY

Nothing has changed. The dealers and runners still run around spying on public figures and cooking up scandals, the politicians still allow their journalistic connections to dictate their decisions and vice versa, the Met still have corrupt high-ranking officers in their ranks, and PIERS MORGAN remains a CUNT.


All in the game, yo. All in the game.



Swamp | Mixtape | Vol XV, Narrative for Orchestra

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Music As Reading: Mixtape XV, Narrative for Orchestra

For a background to this mixtape, a rather hysterical and dreadfully organised set of paragraphs are available here. To summarise, it is intended to be a reflection on the way that we can’t help but read certain songs forever tied up with the television show/ film/ whatever narratives that we’ve seen them accompany/ introduce/ symbolise/ whatever enough times that this connection has become the point of the song, whether we like it or not. Such tracks, indeed, represent an act of Music As Reading that we’ve all engaged in, subconsciously or not, at one point or another, and deserve to be recognised as such. Lyrics and even mood are discarded and the connotation is king! Half of the mixtape will illustrate the various points made in those aforementioned paragraphs, the other will introduce a few other particularly compelling examples – for the potential scale of this mixtape is enormous, but citing examples such as the Star Wars theme and Singing in the Rain would be a waste of everybody’s time.

We’ll begin then, to pay lip-service to this week’s theme, with Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ along with another of his recent tracks, ‘More to Life (C’Mon C’Mon)’ to demonstrate that ‘Bad Things’ probably isn’t as good as we think it is. Then we’ll draw out the strand of teenage association via Remy Zero’s ‘Save Me’, Mates of State’s decent attempt to make ‘California’ listenable and Simple Mind’s ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ to demonstrate that this has been going on for some time in a teen-sense – since 1985’s Breakfast Club, certainly. We’ll then explore four of the five versions of The Wire’s ‘Way Down in the Hole,’ two versions of Twin Peaks’ ‘Falling’ (the Wedding Present cover proving that even when a band with a significant, important, connotative identity take on one of these songs, the narrative prevails) and finish off with Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ in order to state, in less explicit terms, I hope it was the fucking label what sold it to Hollyoaks. ‘Red Right Hand’ also offers a useful segue into Cave’s cinematic soundtrack work, an unsurprising example of music acting, beyond its original context, as a vessel for narrative – considering that Cave wrote a soundtrack for the audio version of his most recent novel and just generally has form here, as regular readers will have noticed. Then, by way of conclusion, three other examples of this phenomenon manifesting in film: Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’ from The Spy Who Loved Me, mainly because of Alan Partridge. Bernard Herrman’s Psycho work for straightforwardly evocative reasons as well as the fact that when he combined all the cinematic fragments into a single composition he called it ‘a Narrative for Orchestra’. And the Door’s ‘The End’ because, despite the fact it was the final song played at the band’s last ever gig i.e. represents a fabulously important musical-biographical punctuation mark (and a staggeringly appropriate one at that), one can’t hear that without first thinking of Kurtz/Brando. A fitting final testament to the power of the imposed filmic narrative. And one that comes full circle, in terms of its relation to this week’s theme. For Apocalypse Now = Martin Sheen, in blackface, in primeval swamp, as much as it = anything, right?

TRACKLIST, Y’SAY?

Bad Things – Jace Everett (True Blood)
More to Life (C’mon C’mon) – Jace Everett
Save Me – Remy Zero (Smallville)
California – Mates of State (The OC)
Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds (The Breakfast Club)
Way Down in the Hole – The Blind Boys of Alabama (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – Tom Waits (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – The Neville Brothers (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – Domaje (The Wire)
Falling – Julee Cruise (Twin Peaks)
Falling – The Wedding Present
Red Right Hand – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (NOT Hollyoaks)
The Proposition #1 – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Proposition)
Song for Jesse – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Assassination of Jesse James...)
The Road – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Road)
Nobody does it Better – Carly Simon (The Spy Who Loved Me)
Psycho: Narrative for Orchestra – Bernard Herrman (Psycho)
The End – The Doors (Apocalypse Now)

Swamp | Music | Somebody saaaaaaaaaaaave me from Remy Zero's other songs

So, True Blood eh, eh, pretty sexy right? Pretty naughty? Pretty fucken outrageous? Move over Twilight, let’s have the grown-ups come and play for a bit, eh? Who needs vampires as symbols of 19^th century Christian (or, indeed, 21^st century Mormon) sexual repression when you can have sexy vampires doing sexy stuff through a veil of HBO production values, eh, beautiful lighting and a script so knee-deep in irony and literary camp it springs a boner you can be proud of, eh, a boner to talk about in seminars, eh, eh, know what I mean, more like semi-nar, know what I mean, eh?

Maybs. The one thing we can all agree on, however, is that the True Blood title-sequence is the tits, an intent-laden feast of well-chosen filters, asymmetrical fonts, and impeccably cut (see, say, the superspeed rotting fox) flashes of ridiculously atmospheric footage both reliant upon and inverting Louisianan cliché – y’know, hicks, gospel churches, SWAMPS, that sorta thing. Along with Jace Everett’s rattlesnake-flecked crooning on ‘Bad Things’, a song we’re all pretty sure is as rad as the cinematography it accompanies, because both halves gel so well. A sultry, dirty, swampy song representative of all of the best things about naughty, sexy, exotic True Blood, then.

Maybs. Listen to one of the three Jace Everett albums on Spotify, though, and you might, like me, begin to suspect something different. Because they’re just not very good. His tracks have names like ‘More to Life (C’Mon C’Mon)’ and ‘Lean into the Wind’ and sound like a cross between Louis XIV, mid-noughties strutting tweeny gimps Rooster and (the admittedly achingly romantic) Chris Isaak. (Chris Isaak, it should be acknowledged at this point, puts in a sparkling turn in the otherwise mediocre Twin Peaks film, Fire Walk With Me, a fact which might become more relevant a few paragraphs down, but that I mention now in order to scream the following from Rooster’s proverbial rooftops: PEOPLE SHOULD TAKE CHRIS ISAAK’S ACHIEVEMENTS MORE SERIOUSLY.)

Which makes me think that perhaps ‘Bad Things’ isn’t very good either. It makes me think that ‘Bad Things’ was, in fact, an excellent choice for a show that endeavours to cartoonise Louisianan culture (albeit ironically, amusingly, sexily and so on) because it is, in fact, a cartoon, synthesised and soulless version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival swamp-rock and low-slung blues influence that it wouldn’t exist without.

But it’s become so jumbled up with the content that it parenthesises – content far better, in many ways, than it – that we listen to it differently and, more important, hear it differently. People assume the relationship that exists between a title-sequence track and a show/film/whatever is almost entirely an issue of establishing mood, of utilising the atmospheric power of music (and, invariably, visual bricolage) to do what would require mindblowingly good writing if it were to be similarly done with dialogue or action in an equivalent thirty seconds (see Generation Kill, a title-sequence-less piece that did just that). And certainly, when only a fragment of Everett’s song appears in a context that means one doesn’t ever really listen to it properly, it does, as ‘arry Redknapp would have it, a job.

But the relationship is, surely, just as much about a show/film/whatever’s plot, and an individual’s response to slash memories of it, imprinting themselves upon the title-track to the extent that they begin to read it as much as they listen to it. It goes, I think, both ways. Indeed, such songs as Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ strike me as an important example of Music As Reading occurring without Music As Readers being aware that they're even doing it. With that in mind, this week’s mixtape will be a collection of tracks so well-suited to their show/film/whatever that this process can only occur. But before constructing that, let’s break this idea down a little further.

The OC is a perfec example, a fact attested to by the Simpsons’ curious take on the show what aired as part of another just-not-quite-right new(ish) episode last night. One wouldn’t have actually known that it was supposed to be a satirical reference to the show if it wasn’t for the music, such was the sequence's arbitrariness – Wikipedia seems to think it features a guy dressed up as Snoopy because Ryan Atwood played Snoopy in a school play once or something. To be honest, maybe it wasn’t about all this at all, but with the opening chords of Phantom Planet’s ‘California’ such a tidal wave of OC connotations flood one’s consciousness that, assuming one spent their mid-teenage years caring about such things like me, it’s impossible to think of anything else.

Dreadful song though. By a dreadful band – like Mr Everett, one need only listen to an entire Phantom Planet (I mean, really, ‘Phantom’ fucking ‘Planet’, who thought that was a good idea) record to realise that. But I can’t bring myself to despise it. See also Remy Zero’s ‘Save Me’ off-of Smallville, a show I don’t even like that much. Sounds like somebody emphasising, in song-form, all the worst things about U2 but again, one can’t help but read it differently to other music. It’s this, I think, rather than the ‘burden of having one song everybody knows’ that's usually discussed, which makes the rest of bands like Remy Zero’s music unlistenable. It is, in fact, universally unlistenable, but one doesn’t actually listen to that all-important ‘exception’.

I guess The Wire is the most interesting way of testing this theory. Does (can?) one draw an education-focussed narrative out of Domaje’s version of ‘Way Down in the Hole’ (Season 4) or a political emphasis out of the Neville Brothers’ version of the same song (the preceding season). Not explicitly? Not surprising, really, considering David Simon’s opinions on the relationship between music and cinematography:

I hate it when somebody purposely tries to have the lyrics match the visual. It brutalizes the visual in a way to have the lyrics dead on point. ... Yet at the same time it can’t be totally off-point. It has to glance at what you’re trying to say.

And is there not a pretty substantial GLANCE behind the fact that Domaje are five Baltimore teenagers soundtracking the Wire series specifically about teenagers – a musical glance, indeed, designed to act as a vessel for a viewer’s specific responses to that series?

Twin Peaks is another important example. I was explaining to somebody the other day, half-cut, my own theory regarding Twin Peaks’ uniquely obsessional appeal, namely that something within its extraordinary textured atmosphere fuses with what’s going on in one’s own real life, parallel to your watching of it for the first time – to the extent that in one’s memory a gorgeous fragment of art that you’ll never see for the first time again becomes entwined with a part of your life that you can’t reclaim, whether happy or bleak. The combined effect representing a great remembered shimmering donkeypunch of nostalgia – and one is therefore compelled to return to its source, again and again.

Well, when I stumble across Julee Christie’s ‘Falling’ (seldom by design, it hits me too hard) I hear within it Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper et al but also the week I spent revising for my finals and watching Twin Peaks with my girlfriend in a little house in Leamington Spa. I honestly do. I read the song in order to tap into that narrative. Whether I like it or not. I haven’t read Maria del Pilar Blanco’s recent collection of essays, Popular Ghosts: the Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, but I can only assume this concept is the background to that book’s decision to dedicate several paragraphs to ‘the haunted soundtrack of the Twin Peaks TV series.’

Romanticised nonsense y’say? Maybs. Really, this was all just a very long way of introducing the only question anybody’s got any business asking this week, so such a judgement is a bit of a moot point: WHY THE FUCK HAS NICK CAVE ALLOWED FUCKING HOLLYOAKS TO USE ‘RED RIGHT HAND’ IN A FUCKING TRAILER FOR ITS FIERY LATE NIGHT HALLOWEEN SPECIAL THING? That is an imposition of a narrative onto a song that makes Wilhelmus de Rijk’s bread-knifing of Rembrandt’s Night Watch in 1975 look like a favour to us all by comparison.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor