As the show's second season begins, creator David Milch shares his vision of the blood-soaked Old West town that struggled for order without law
By Steven Rosen
Newhall Calif.
Sunday, March 06, 2005 -

It's a good day to die here in the Western town of Deadwood, or so it feels wandering through the muddy, chilly set soon after torrential rainstorms have ended. This is where HBO's "Deadwood" series, which begins its second season at 7 tonight, is filmed.

The creek protecting the entrance to the remote Melody Ranch outdoor set 35 miles northwest of Los Angeles has lowered just enough that cars can finally cross the rushing water. But the dirt streets of Deadwood have big puddles. Overall, the atmosphere is inhospitable.

And, one might add, ghostly. For this is a series known for its dark, violent portrayal of the settling of the West. It is rough stuff. Just seeing the now quiet "real" sites where, during last season's episodes, men were murdered and women beaten with graphic dispatch can make a bystander nervous. It feels like blood-soaked ground.

And down a long straight service road, all by himself, walks David Milch. He's the vision behind "Deadwood" - the series' creator, chief writer and executive producer. Wearing a black T-shirt, slightly paunchy but sturdily built, he's the Man in Black coming toward a showdown. This is ominous.

But as he approaches, he reaches out his hand and smiles. "You're the man from the mountains," he says, having been told earlier that a reporter on assignment for The Denver Post would arrive today. He says he'll talk during lunch, and tromps on his way. He has more scenes to write if "Deadwood" is to make its shooting deadlines.

While it's shot in Southern California on property once owned by singing cowboy Gene Autry, "Deadwood" is rooted in an actual American time and place. In 1876, the town in South Dakota's Black Hills was a kind of post-Civil War outlaw territory where men and women, the latter mostly prostitutes, could start anew. By federal treaty, it was part of the Sioux nation; whites were supposed to stay out.

But after an expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer found gold, the government stopped enforcing that ban. Some 5,000 people soon arrived and created a messy but lively encampment. They all wanted to get rich, and they couldn't make laws - they were in Deadwood illegally. Milch says his research shows that at one point there was a murder a day, as townsfolk struggled to create civility out of chaos. "Deadwood" mixes historical figures, such as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, with fictional characters as it reinvents the town's history.

"I was interested in the idea of order without law," Milch says later, inside the loud mess-hall-like lunch tent where the cast and crew eat. "One environment where storytelling derives from is the gap between the ideal and the real," Milch says. "In 'Deadwood' what I wanted to explore was, 'What if there was no ideal?' How do you generate the ideal?"

Until moving to a quieter area in the back of the tent for this interview, Milch sat with Ian McShane, whose singular mixture of malevolence and humor as the murderous bar-brothel owner Al Swearingen has made him a breakout star. Today's menu features steak to build energy for the grueling, long workdays. Milch estimates he puts 80-90 hours per week into the show.

"I had originally proposed an HBO series set in Rome, at the time of Nero, about Urban Cohorts - city cops who had no laws to administer - and how they figured out what to do," he says. "Since HBO was already doing a story set in Rome, they asked me to consider setting it elsewhere."

Ian McShane won a Golden Globe award for his portrayal of the murderous bar-brothel owner Al Swearingen.
He explains all this with a confident smile, in complex sentences that maintain their emphatic flow through a roller-coaster ride of asides, elaborations and references to everyone from Calamity Jane to William James, author of "The Varieties of Religious Experience" and brother of famed novelist Henry James. He is Exhibit A that smart people do create TV shows - at least for HBO.

Born in Buffalo in 1945, Milch has had, at first glance, a gifted life. He graduated with high honors at Yale, where he studied with poet-novelist Robert Penn Warren. After getting an MFA at the University of Iowa, he returned to Yale as a lecturer in English literature and co-edited (with Warren and others) "American Literature: The Makers and the Making."

In 1982, a script he submitted to producer Steven Bochco's "Hill Street Blues" was filmed and won an Emmy. He began a long, successful career in television that included creating "NYPD Blue" with Bochco. He has written more than 300 scripts in his career and is a published poet, as well. He and his wife have three children.

But during all those accomplishments, he also fought alcoholism and heroin addiction.

"I've been locked up a few times," he told a sold-out crowd at Beverly Hills' Museum of Television & Radio last fall. He finally stopped his usage, and confronts that past with tough frankness.

With my visit, occurring just days after Hunter S. Thompson's suicide, I ask Milch what he thinks of that writer's famous boast: "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

Milch is dubious. "When you first take drugs, you don't take them because they don't work," he says. "But what's the definition of something that works? Is it a palliative? Does it remediate some state which then recurs, and does it then begin to develop autonomous characteristics that are destructive? That seems to me to be inevitably the progress of addiction.

"The other thing I would say (about Thompson) is, God rest his soul."

In its first season, "Deadwood" won two Emmys - for directing and sound editing - after being nominated for 11. It won a Golden Globe for

McShane's acting. But while the series has won awards and attracted its devotees, it also has left others perturbed by the extremity of its vision.

Besides the body count, characters speak in an unusual mixture of archaically elegiac prose and stone-cold obscenities. Think of Shakespearean soliloquies delivered by an angry Lenny Bruce. And it is starkly unromantic in the way it shows how the women-for-hire flaunt their livelihood and the drunken men discuss their sexual organs and bodily functions.

During a walking tour of the set, there was evidence this season won't be radically different. In a side alley of wooden structures that represents "Deadwood's" Chinatown, cages sit on the street - signaling the arrival of prostitutes who will be kept in the open like wild animals. In a large soundstage, Paula Malcomson, the actress who plays the prostitute Trixie, practices some F-word-sprinkled dialogue.

Milch realizes this vision of Americana is hard for many to accept. To some people, rampant public obscenity is a modern phenomenon. They can accept it from Tony Soprano, but not Wild Bill Hickok. Yet, Milch explains, it rings true even as it scorches the ears.

"In terms of the profanity, all of my research suggested that those who went west were renouncing certain conventions," he says. "In the language of the West, particularly the language of the mining camps, the profanity was overwhelming. It was almost a kind of battering. It seemed to me to make all sorts of psychological sense that that would be true. To the extent it was an outlaw community, it would announce its rejections of the law verbally.

"(And) to the extent people had book learning, it tended to be King James Bible, Shakespeare and Victorian novels," he adds. "If you look at even the newspaper reportage of the time, it's very ornate."

But that same walking tour also reveals some signs of pending gentility and sophistication for "Deadwood" this season. A Denver Safe Co. vault has been placed inside Seth Bullock and Sol Star's hardware store, a signal that the town may be moving toward establishing a bank. And a new brothel, Joani

Stubbs' Chez Ami, has a feminine designer's touch - curtains, soft furniture, rabbits' feet on a dressing table for the application of cosmetics. Also, a new character this season is George Hearst, who arrives to make his fortune mining gold.

Such changes will become increasingly important as the town tries to evolve and survive. But they will happen in an organic, unforced way. "I want to suggest the improvisatory quality of the social contract," Milch says.

At his Museum of Television & Radio lecture, Milch was asked what moves and influences him about life and art. He had an unusual answer: watching baseball players leap for joy when a teammate hits a home run in the bottom of the ninth. He called that a "community of spirit."

During this lunchtime interview, Milch elaborates on that inspiration. "There are certain acts upon which the spirit focuses," he says. "Baseball has a very complicated set of rules, within which it is possible for an apotheosis of physical excellence to occur. When that occurs within those rules, everybody cheers because we have agreed upon a set of assumptions which will exalt our humanity, and then we have watched it demonstrated."

Writing "Deadwood," he says, works the same way for him - and hopefully for all of us.

"William James said all spiritual experience has this in common - the suppression of the ego and death," Milch says. "When the sense of 'I' is suppressed, what he described as an oceanic sense flows in - a sense of our oneness. When I am able to hear the characters speak through me, that becomes my cheering. I feel they are literally alive."

Watching the cast and crew realize his vision of "Deadwood" - from the lead actors to the wardrobe people spending hours applying rips and bleached-in "sweat stains" to make the costumes look suitably old - fills him with joy. And awe.

"And I believe it's also the case for the viewer," he says. "When gradually the humanity of the characters becomes a living imaginative reality, then that's the community of the spirit."

(This story appeared in the Denver Post)