Is David Milch confident that the colorful language his characters speak on 'Deadwood' is authentic? You're darn tootin' he is. And he thinks they're slowly learning about the sanctity of community.
Sheli Teitelbaum
During more than two decades spent disparaging various ethnic, religious and racial minorities, in acclaimed TV cop shows like "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue," screenwriter David Milch often reserved his deadliest venom for his fellow Jews.
If "NYPD Blue's" detective Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz), for instance, began the series, which ran from 1993 to 2005 on ABC, as a drunken, xenophobic lout, in his way, the Polish-American Andy was as endearing and, ultimately, as redeemable as his spiritual forebear Archie Bunker. The show's Jews, however - characters like district attorney Maury Abrams, or ADAs Arnold Rosenthal and Leo Cohen - often came across as amoral, self-interested and just plain snooty enough to almost, almost justify the self-described Polack's congenital anti-Semitism.
For many years, Milch, who is 60, attested that he gave all his characters a tough time, and that his Jews were not a special case. That is, he told The Report in a recent interview in his Santa Monica office, until an academic presented him with a dissertation asserting that no one who wasn't Jewish himself would ever have crafted Jewish characters as unpleasant as Milch's.
"Once it was pointed out to me," Milch recounted, while seeking a comfortable position for his troubled back on his office floor, "it seemed to me irrefutably a pattern in my work. My Jewish characters were unpleasant because I've only been sober for six years. The (familial) resentments that I had, (and) which I hesitated to apply to individuals, I generalized to a group."
Jewish Milch-watchers may therefore find themselves both surprised and relieved to discover that the sole Jewish character in his latest series, HBO's breathtakingly written and brilliantly realized post-modern Western "Deadwood," comes off infinitely better than any of his predecessors.
Indeed, as portrayed by actor John Hawkes, hardware merchant Sol Star may be the only true - he's certainly the most emotionally resilient - "mensch" in the whiskey-, urine- and sin-soaked Dakota Territory mining camp that gave the award-winning yet controversial series its name.
During its formative year, in 1876, this historical but illegal outpost (illegal because it was established on Indian lands despite instructions to the army from Washington to keep prospectors out) in the gold-flecked Black Hills of a South Dakota Sioux reservation killed off at least one resident a day. To keep the law out, by the show's telling, the camp disposed of the carcasses in a pig pen. Over the course of its first year, some 7 percent of Deadwood's population thereby found themselves recycled into next week's breakfast.
But not Sol Star, the son of a Viennese Jewish retailer, who rolls into the camp with his lifelong business partner, the Canadian-born Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), and a wagon packed with dry goods. Not that Star, who later became the town's mayor, has anything against bacon. As depicted in "Deadwood," he is a highly assimilated Jew with a carnal appetite and a healthy disregard for the anti-Semitic wisecracking he encounters almost daily.
Luckily, Star was handy with a Winchester as well as a balance sheet, which made him, in real life as on the tube, a good partner for Bullock, who was a staunch, if sometimes murderous, former sheriff with a complex ambivalence about law and order and a talent for staring down mobs.
But Hawkes's Star is not destined to take over as JDL poster boy quite yet. From appearances, he is a stand-up businessman who eschews the shady practices that some other characters associate with Jewish peddlers, offering good value in picks, shovels and commodes. But like so many Jews in contemporary Hollywood, he is also notoriously quick to succumb to the charms of the nearest available gentile blond.
The one depicted in "Deadwood," the fictional Trixie (Paula Malcomson), is a hooker with a keen intelligence, a foul mouth and a well-earned sense of despair. She is also, in the fashion of the women our grandmothers warned us against, not at all averse, despite her genuine feelings for Star, to making unprovoked cracks against Jews. Taking accounting lessons from Star in a recent episode, in exchange for professional favors, for instance, she refers to her studies as her "Jewish lessons."
Milch, who married Jewish documentary filmmaker and painter Rita Stern, an undergraduate at Yale when he taught there, spent two years researching the place and period, and in defense of Star, says, "I don't see too many Jewish girls in that camp. I think there were four Jews in Deadwood in 1876, all of them (variations on) Sol Star. By 1880, there may have been 25, maybe 40.
"Only a tenth of them had their women with them, because it was rough out there. So many of those people were starting over; they wanted to leave things behind. Even some who were married wanted a few years to themselves, and half the time would send for their families later."
According to the Black Hills Visitor Magazine, the real-life Sol Star was born to a Reform Jewish family in Bavaria in 1840. He emigrated to the U.S. by himself at age 10, living with relatives in Ohio. After the Civil War, he moved to Montana, where he served as territorial auditor and as personal assistant to the governor. He met up with Bullock not long after the latter, 18 and newly arrived from Entobicoke, Ontario, became the protege of a Montana judge.
In Deadwood, the two men hit pay dirt, though neither ever devoted a minute to prospecting. In mid-76, they established Star & Bullock: Auctioneers and Commission Merchants. Four years later, they bought an interest in the Deadwood Flouring Mill Company, a move that contributed mightily to Star's political popularity when he began giving away sacks of flour for the asking. Eventually, the two men opened up one of the West's first luxury hotels, complete with steam heat and a bathroom on every floor.
Well-liked and much trusted, despite the widespread suspicion of Jews endemic to the period, Star served 10 terms as mayor of Deadwood (a town that still exists today, surviving largely from tourism and gambling), a stint in the legislature, and as county clerk of courts until his death in 1917.
But Milch attests that Star was also tougher-minded than he initially comes off in the series, a quality he promises will increasingly come to the fore as Star squares off with Deadwood's brutish and scheming saloon-owner Al Swearengen (British actor Ian McShane) over the loyalties of the steely-eyed Trixie.
"How tough?" says Milch. "He and Bullock once stole a courthouse and dragged it four-and-a-half miles because they wanted it on their land. They didn't f--- around."
Neither, of course, does Milch, who says he created "Deadwood" in part to resurrect the long moribund Western. The genre was nearly killed off, Milch has argued, by an earlier generation of Jewish movie moguls who homogenized it beyond most historical and, especially, linguistic recognition.
This accounts for the plethora of "durns," "consarn its," "tarnations" and other folksy or even bogus cuss words that did such an inadequate job of spicing up most cinematic and televised tales of the Old West. It may also account, believes Milch, for the archetype of the silent "Man With No Name" persona perhaps best portrayed by actor Clint Eastwood, who if he couldn't swear a hole through you, chomped on a stogie and scowled instead. For many frontier types, says Milch, scatological language served an important role in communicating, among many different things, one's readiness to stand up for oneself.
A former freon sniffer, heroin addict, alcoholic and compulsive gambler, with an undergraduate degree from Yale and a graduate degree in creative writing, Milch enjoys a rep as possibly the best TV writer now working in America.
On National Public Radio last year, reporter Andrew Wallenstein opined that he was "second only to writer David Mamet in his devotion to capturing the idiosyncracies of speech." And in a recent New Yorker piece, writer Mark Singer noted that "the language on 'Deadwood' ranges from Elizabethan-like ornateness to profanity of a relentlessness that makes 'The Sopranos' seem demure."
New York Times columnist Frank Rich gushed approvingly, observing that the series "probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history," something of course not permitted on the airwaves in the U.S., but no big deal on cable and satellite stations. "Deadwood," Rich concluded, was a celebration "of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture, and that our new Puritans want to stamp out."
Milch's familial resentments initially involved his paternal lineage. His father, Elmer, a Buffalo gastrointestinal surgeon, was the scion of a Galician-Jewish family of bootleggers, bookmakers and "knock-arounds" whom Milch describes as "not such wonderful people - although my Dad was a wonderful guy." During army service in the U.S. during World War II, Elmer was in a near-fatal car accident. The physical injuries he sustained, combined with pre-existing emotional disorders, predisposed him, as they would his brilliant but bipolar and ultimately self-medicating son, to various addictions, most notably alcohol, pain meds and horse racing.
Although he grew up in a Jewishly observant home - Milch describes his mother and her family as quite devout - his father did not profess any great affinity for Judaism, and in fact would tell his son that he found aspects of American Jewish life riddled with hypocrisy.
"He lived a devoutly religious life practically," Milch says, "which is to say he was a physician, he took care of people, he cared for my mother's parents devotedly. So although he did not talk the talk - and in fact had contempt for the talk - he walked the walk pretty good."
As for the son, Milch reserves most of his own religious fervor, these days, for the task of bringing Deadwood, and the language spoken by its denizens, back to life. But this was hardly his only agenda in creating the series, which in fact he originally conceived as a cop show set in Nero's Rome in 60 CE. That is, until he learned that a similar series was somewhere in the pre-production pipeline.
"To me, all of Deadwood is a single organism," he says. "What these people think they are individually is never as much as they can be when they can combine. And finding different principles of combination is what the story is about." As if to illustrate this, in an episode midway through the first season, a local pastor presides over the burial of Wild Bill Hickok, who was shot in the back in Deadwood while playing poker. The Reverend Smith cites Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: "...the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body..."
Growing up, says Milch, he had "no sense there was any spiritual substance to Judaism." Thinking about the people of the community of Deadwood, of all things, appears to have made him change his tune just a tad. He continues to believe that there is little, spiritually, "in the traditions of Judaism to distingush it from Christianity and Islam." However, the characters Milch has created for "Deadwood" are, he observes, "discovering that they are members of a great spiritual entity. Nothing in Judaism contradicts that. And to that extent, nothing in what I've come to believe contradicts what I believe is true of the essence of Judaism."