The Man Who Made ‘Deadwood’

Sheriff Seth Bullock, played by Timothy Olyphant, and Molly Parker as Alma Garret.

(Photograph by Albert Watson, Courtesy of HBO)

David Milch has taken one of the most convoluted imaginable paths to success in television. Having earned an M.F.A. in fiction at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, he went on to teach literature at Yale for nine years and became close friends with a man he now regards as one of his mentors, the great novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren. From 1982 to 1987 he wrote for “Hill Street Blues,” proving that if television scripts were not actually literature, they could, at the least, be first-rate drama. With “NYPD Blue” (1993–2005) he took the urban crime drama to new levels of complexity and intensity.

“Deadwood,” the series he created, begins its third season in June. The supercharged dramatization of actual events in the legendary South Dakota gold-mining town has done for the American West what “The Sopranos” has done for mob mythology, competing with that series for the unofficial title of the most scintillating hour on television. While preparing for the season premiere, Milch took some time off to assess the impact of “Deadwood” on our perceptions and misperceptions of frontier America.

No, you’re quite right. I did want to do a show on the American West, but I didn’t want to do a Western. I’ve never really understood or cared for the con-ventions of the Western. I always thought they had more to do with what the Hays Office would allow than with what happened on the American frontier. The more I came to read about the West, the more I realized how little what we called Westerns had to do with the West and how much they had to do with the vision of European Jews in the movie business who made a fortune selling a sanitized idea of American history back to America. The Hays Code said right up front that obscenity in word or action was an offense against God and man and could therefore not be depicted on a movie screen.

Yeah, both barrels.

No, not really. At least that’s not how I started out. At the beginning I wasn’t really reacting against anything. What I was really interested in was the development of law and order, or, specifically, how does order develop without law. In new societies, in frontier societies where there is no central authority, how does order develop? It isn’t just a matter of brute force; even brute force can only be used by somebody with an idea of order. How does chaos evolve into order?

Yes, yes. “Y’know, Nietzsche says: Out of chaos comes order.” A great moment. What does it tell you about the strict conventions of Westerns that the only time that question has been raised is in a Mel Brooks movie?

Well, this is going to sound kind of strange, but my initial feeling was that I’d set it in ancient Rome, the time of the emperor Nero.

That’s the worst pun I’ve ever heard. Thank you. I may use that. I wanted to follow a group of Roman policemen, more or less the city cops, who are called the Urban Cohorts. The Romans had a Praetorian Guard, but its function was to watch over the emperor and do his bidding. They were all involved in court intrigue, and it was left for the Urban Cohorts to more or less keep things together in the absence of genuine moral authority.

Well, the Rome mini-series was under way, so I was behind the historical curve on that idea. Some people at HBO were in-terested in the themes I talked about. What they wanted to know was: Could you deal with the same themes in a different historical setting? I then thought about placing it in the American West, but it had to be in an exact time and place in which there was near chaos, a nascent community struggling for some kind of authority. Deadwood, I realized after extensive research, was what I had been looking for. It was, after all, a completely illegal city, a town that existed without legal authority and which went through a maelstrom of turmoil before its citizens learned to impose some kind of order on themselves.

As I said, it wasn’t my intention to make a revisionist Western, but I became increasingly interested in creating a vision of the West as I saw it, as I believe it existed and which has seldom been presented before.

Precisely because their frame of refer-ence is not the West itself but the decades of television and movie Westerns that we’ve been talking about. “Deadwood” doesn’t waste time telling you that those shows weren’t truth; it simply plunges you right into the heart of this completely uncensored view of the West. I imagine we lost quite a few viewers in the first half-hour.

I’d say there’s a lot of the spirit of Hammett, particularly the Hammett of Red Harvest, in “Deadwood.” It’s hard to think of another book that is so un-apologetic in looking at that aspect of America. And it was written at a time when the so-called classic Western was being created.

I think much too much was made about the cursing. We’ve been listening to David Mamet and many others for a couple of decades now, and you’d think people wouldn’t be shocked at a few choice words.

That probably has a lot to do with it, but if you’re going to talk about language, I wish more people had noticed the overall language, the rhythms of period speech that we tried so hard to re-create, and the richness of the imagery. Profanity, I’ve come to believe, was the lingua franca of the time and place, which is to say that anyone, no matter what his or her background, could connect with almost anyone else on the frontier through the use of profanity. But there’s so much more to the dialogue than just the profanity. The language of the characters in the show is never generic, and everyone’s is different. They come from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, and they all express themselves a little differently.

That’s one of the things people like about the show, that after they’ve watched for a while, they can instantly identify each character by the quirkiness of his or her speech. These are people, you know, who all grew up long before the age of electronic media, when regional speech patterns began to lose their distinctiveness. Many of them might have been illiterate, but they knew the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and that’s what shaped the way they thought and the way they expressed themselves.

Formal letters didn’t convey a great deal of how people spoke, but informal letters—say, a brother writing a brother about life in a mining camp, or period memoirs or diaries—do. Of course, much of the best stuff wasn’t written with the idea of publication. But you can get a fairly good idea of the evolution of the language and the derivation of most words and terms in the Library of Congress papers on oral history, and H. L. Mencken’s The American Language is very good on this too.

Or of evil, perhaps, that he doesn’t yet know that he’s capable of. And by extension, of course, the town marshal, Seth Bullock, doesn’t know what depths he’s capable of sinking to when it comes to dealing with Swearengen. I think they’re two parts of the same personality. They both, I think, are more de-pendent on each other than either would be anxious to admit. Like all characters on the frontier, they probably regarded themselves as free and independent, capable of making choices that determined the paths their lives would take. But both, I think, had lives that lived them more than they lived their lives.

I never intended for “Deadwood” to go on and on for 20 years, like “Gunsmoke.” I think it’s going to continue to surprise people because it’s building in intensity. It’s got to end because the period of wildness on the frontier only lasted a short time before order was imposed. But that doesn’t mean that things can’t get worse before they get better.

Allen Barra, who writes our “History Now: Screenings” column, is the author of Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends.

Grim Reapings The classic that seeped into "Deadwood"—and many other Westerns. The first paperback edition of Hammett’s book, from 1943. Published in 1929, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest shocked some reviewers with its frank sexuality, fierce language, and graphic violence. Set in the fictional town of Personville—“Poisonville” to its inhabitants—the novel was based on Hammett’s own experiences as a Pinkerton detective in the mining town of Butte, Montana, a city that he perceived as devoid of moral authority from within and untouched by authority from without. A self-consciously modern Western, Red Harvest was written almost with a sense of outrage, as if Hammett was out to dispel the romantic notions of the movie Westerns and pulp crime stories of his era. His protagonist—one is hard put to call him a hero—is a detective, the Continental Op, a modern hired gun who becomes embroiled in the corruption of a town torn between two powerful warring factions. In a cynical twist on the traditional Western, the Op, a character Hammett used in several other stories, doesn’t hire out to the good guys—there are no good guys—but plays both ends against the middle, finally igniting a carnage of near biblical proportions. Red Harvest is the only Dashiell Hammett novel that has never been filmed. The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Glass Key, and The Dain Curse all made it onto the screen, but Red Harvest was too violent and too profane for Hollywoocontinentald. (The rights were purchased, but in a twist as bizarre as any in Hammett’s fiction, the story was rewritten into a comedy starring Jimmy Durante.) Over the years, copyright and other legal issues have kept it from being filmed, though literary detectives have seen its influence in Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Yojimbo, the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, the Bruce Willis Prohibition-era gangster flick Last Man Standing (directed by Walter Hill, who directed the first episode of “Deadwood”), and even the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, which appears to be an unaccredited splicing of two Hammett novels, The Glass Key and Red Harvest. (The Coen brothers are unabashed Hammett fans; their first film, Blood Simple, took its title from Red Harvest.) Over the years filmmakers from Bernardo Bertolucci to Mel Gibson to the Irish director Neil Jordan have expressed interest in making a movie from Red Harvest, but it remains the great unfilmed American crime story. Its influence can even be felt in “Deadwood,” which is set in another mining camp in a neighboring state and, like Red Harvest, turns the traditional Western on its head. David Milch has added a complexity to the theme that even Hammett, who was certainly not shy about giving his tales shocking and elaborate twists, never envisioned: Will Marshal Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant) continue to be a moral buffer between Deadwood’s two most powerful vice lords (played by Ian McShane and Powers Boothe) or, as he is drawn into the story’s intrigue, become the third leg in a tripod of corruption? —A.B.