Treme, HBO, 11. april

[reg]

Jos dva dana i pocinje da se daje Treme, nova serija od ekipe koja je stvorila The Wire.homepageStruggling musicians and other locals u post-katrina nju orleansu. Eto jos jedne serije [pored pacifika] koju treba skinuti u ponedeljak.

[morgana]

bas bi u soundtrack mogli da ubace i louisiana 1927 u izvedbi drive by truckers, uklapa se u koncepttreme bi trebalo da ne moze da ne valja :)

[gervasius twinkleminkleson]

can't fuckin' wait :)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLd__SO5WdY

[Ajant23]

Jos dva dana i pocinje da se daje Treme, nova serija od ekipe koja je stvorila The Wire.

Pa, nije to nova serija od ekipe koja je stvorila The Wire...David Simon, da... Ernest R. Dickerson i Agnieszka Holland jesu režirali veći broj epizoda, ali The Wire nije proizvod sistema zato i jeste The Wire... A, inače, fali u ovoj ekipi mnogo toga da bi se to tek tako povezivalo sa Žicom...

[Filipenko]

Realno, tema je žešće sranje. Da nije ekipe, ne bih nikada ni pilot pogledao. Valjda će valjati čemu.

[Aleksija]

prve 2 odlicne.

ajd i ja nesto da kazem u iscekivanju

[Ajant23]

Pa, ljudi, nećemo valjda sa spoilerima, a serija još nije ni počela...

[reg]

Pa, nije to nova serija od ekipe koja je stvorila The Wire...

Naravno, ako uporedimo sve clanove ekipe itd. ali ljudi sa HBO moraju nekako da je reklamiraju. Ucestvovalo je sasvim dovoljno ljudi [simon, Pelecanos, Holand] da bi mogli da je u najavi povezu sa The Wire. Kakva ce biti, nemam pojma. Vidimo se ovde kada izadje prva epizoda.

[Ajant23]

Naravno, ako uporedimo sve clanove ekipe itd. ali ljudi sa HBO moraju nekako da je reklamiraju. Ucestvovalo je sasvim dovoljno ljudi [simon, Pelecanos, Holand] da bi mogli da je u najavi povezu sa The Wire.

Nije učestvovalo sasvim dovoljno ljudi, ali 'ajde...A, otkud ti da George Pelecanos radi u ovoj seriji?EDIT: Sad vidim da i on radi, ali se ne vidi na IMDB-u, ipak daaalleko je ovo od ekipe Žice...Iako, i sam rado čekam seriju, ali nije ovo Žica... Pre, nastavak Simon-HBO saradnje, ali nipošto The Wire... Edited April 8, 2010 by Ajant23

[Sludge Factory]

Od Wajerovaca fali pre svih Ed Burns. On je bivsi pajkan, tako da ovde verovatno nije bas bilo potrebe za njegovim inputom. Ko zna, Simon rece da bi u drugoj sezoni (ako je bude) voleo da ubacio Dominica Westa. Mozda tako bude nesto i za Burnsa. Ali da se ceka, ceka se. :)

David Simon: 'Treme is a story about how American urban culture defines how we live'The creator of The Wire discusses Martin Amis, Baltimore accents and Treme, his upcoming TV show

Tell me about Treme, the show set in New Orleans you're currently producing.It's a very different piece from The Wire. We're not trying to do a crime story or a political story. This is a story about culture and how American urban culture defines how we live. New Orleans is an extraordinary and unusual culture, but it comes from the same primal forces in American society of immigration and assimilation and non-assimilation and racism and post-racialism that really are the defining characteristics of this melting pot society. What is it about Americans that makes us Americans? The one thing we have unarguably given the world is African-American music. If you walk into a shebeen in South Africa, or whatever version of a bar they have in Kathmandu, if they have a jukebox, you're going to find some Michael Jackson, some Otis Redding, some John Coltrane. It has gone around the world. That is the essential American contribution to worldwide culture. The combination of African rhythms and the pentatonic scale and European instrumentation and arrangement. That collision of the two happened in a 12-square block area of a city called New Orleans that had a near-death experience in 2005.What shape is New Orleans in now?Before the storm, the city had the highest ratio population in America of natives, because nobody left. But people have not been able to get back. I would say only about two-thirds have returned. The housing stock is still diminished. The political infrastructure is still dysfunctional – it still has lots of crime problems. But the culture is resurgent and right now the city is ecstatic. Mardi Gras has just finished but also the Super Bowl has brought the city together. There was an allegiance over the Saints march to the Super Bowl that transcended all other arguments over race and class. How long that lasts is another thing. But right now the city's riding a peculiar high that's wonderful to be around.There were plenty of in-jokes in The Wire, with local figures like the real police commissioner cast in an unlikely role. Do you get up to similar antics in Treme?Yeah, we do. There are references to locals and some lines that only New Orleanians will get but they won't interfere with the contextual understanding of the scenes as a whole for viewers outside New Orleans. But for people in the music community and in the cuisine culture, these lines are going to be inside jokes. It's one way of saying that we want the show to be written from within rather than without. When you write from the inside, it creates a credibility for the piece for a whole. There were lines in Generation Kill that only a marine would laugh at.Martin Amis was an early fan of yours. Do you reciprocate that interest?Before I got together with my current wife, we were co-workers in prior relationships at the Baltimore Sun. One day she came back from interviewing Martin Amis and he had been reading Homicide in preparation for writing Night Train. To her, I'm the ink-stained schnook and she came up to my desk and said: "You're not going to believe this but I've just interviewed Martin Amis and he thinks you're the bee's knees." Because I was so ignorant, I said: "Who's Martin Amis?" She ran through his canon and I got nothing. And she goes, "Kingsley Amis's son?" And I go, "Who's Kingsley Amis?" Last year we went out to dinner with Martin – I've since read a lot of his books – and I told him that story by way of saying, "This is the ignorant unread ass I was and, look, she still married me!"Your work pays a great deal of attention to authentic detail. It was surprising to discover, therefore, how many British and Irish actors you cast in The Wire.Sometimes a guy comes in and nails a part in an evocative way and you think he can do it. And when you get a read like that, you hear the accent and the cultural differences and you say, "Well, can we get there?" That's what happened with Dominic [West], Idris [Elba] and Aidan [Gillen]. None of them was able to get a Baltimore accent. But none of the black or white actors from New York or LA was able to get a Baltimore accent. It's the toughest. There are people who tell me it is reminiscent of what you hear in Devon and Cornwall. I went to see War Horse in London last year. When the woman who played the Devon farm wife came out with her first line of dialogue, my son and I turned to each other and we both said: "She's from Baltimore."Any compromising stories about Dominic West?His first season in Baltimore seemed to suggest that bacchanalian feats would be legendary and the town would never be the same again. Then Dominic hooked up with his wife midway through our run, and he became as quiet and temperate as a church mouse. The thing is, Dominic is really smart and he hides it. There's a degree from Trinity College there and a lot of book learning and a lot of cultural points that do not elude him. He plays the Jack the Lad character, but he directed for us and he did a good job. I want to use him on Treme if we get a second season.How do you think Obama is doing?I'm a little disappointed, but actually what I'm most disappointed in is the Democratic leadership in the Congress. This new administration's own inexperience, coupled with some really ineffectual law-making, have conspired to grind the body politic to a halt. The money interests have managed once again to make us inert.You've gone from the desert to a flood, a biblical transition. What's next up, pestilence?Yeah, or frogs, or vermin, or death of the first-born. The next project, in terms of producing, is this mini-series based on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. It was an act of terrorism in war time that shocked the entire nation and it resulted in some very rational immediate reaction on the part of the government and then some other things that were irrational and destructive, right down to military tribunals. It has a lot of parallels to the 9/11 moment.Interview by Andrew Anthony

Edited April 8, 2010 by Sludge Factory

[Ajant23]

Od Wajerovaca fali pre svih Ed Burns. On je bivsi pajkan, tako da ovde verovatno nije bas bilo potrebe za njegovim inputom. Ko zna, Simon rece da bi u drugoj sezoni (ako je bude) voleo da ubacio Dominica Westa. Mozda tako bude nesto i za Burnsa.

Ma, daj...Ed Burns kao kreator... Ajde, fali toliko, da je smešno reći od ekipe Žice...Mislim, više nego smešno...

[gervasius twinkleminkleson]

nemojmo sitnicariti. dovoljno je da je tu simon [ipak je on glavni i u wire], te hbo i par glumaca, da bi se moglo pricati o 'istoj ekipi'. mislim, u sustini nebitno, ali tesko je ne povuci paralelu, s obzirom da je i jedno i drugo u sustini prica o gradovima [makar tako kaze simon].

[Ajant23]

nemojmo sitnicariti. dovoljno je da je tu simon [ipak je on glavni i u wire], te hbo i par glumaca, da bi se moglo pricati o 'istoj ekipi'. mislim, u sustini nebitno, ali tesko je ne povuci paralelu, s obzirom da je i jedno i drugo u sustini prica o gradovima [makar tako kaze simon].

Pa, u stvari, u suštini je veoma bitno...HBO neprestano cepa nekakve formalizme i sisteme... Ma kako paradoksalno to zvučalo, The Wire je pomalo prikrivena kritika samog HBO-a...Drugim rečima, nije ovo baš svima samo marketing...

[Sludge Factory]

Down but not out: Treme, New OrleansSet among musicians in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, David Simon's new TV drama Treme documents a city surviving in the wake of natural and political disasters. Gabe Soria joins the cast behind the scenesThe Guardian, Saturday 10 April 2010 Article history

The man in the next room is delivering a low-key breakdown of the political realities of post-Katrina New Orleans, advising his host, an aspirant to the City Council, on strategy. The wannabe candidate, an itinerant musician wearing a shirt emblazoned with the campaign slogan "Davis Will Save Us" is busy sucking down a beer and wondering aloud if he should have run for Mayor instead. City Council, he figures, isn't a "big enough venue to move records". His advisor pauses. "Man," he says, taking in the filth of the room he's in, "You could hide a dead prostitute in here."Welcome to New Orleans. Or, at least, David Simon's version of it. We're on set in a ramshackle house in Tremé, a historic New Orleans neighbourhood adjacent to the French Quarter. Founded by "free people of colour" and incubator of much of the city's musical heritage, the area also lends its name to the series created by Simon and Eric Overmyer; the former the creator of The Wire, the latter a longtime collaborator.Premiering in the US tomorrow, to say that it's heavily anticipated is a slight understatement. You don't come off of five seasons of what some have called "the best television series ever made" and follow it up with a show about New Orleans musicians without a high expectation or two."We like to think we've exported all this democracy," Simon tells me later. He's a solid man, slightly wincing through a slight back injury sustained earlier in the day, and he speaks with a quiet, calm authority. "Bullshit. We've exported a lot less democracy than we claim. We like to think that baseball has become a universal. Baseball is not a universal. African-American music is universal. What we're going to be remembered for, if anything, a hundred years from now, in terms of world culture, is going to be African-American music."Simon and Overmyer had been chomping at the bit to essay their vision of New Orleans for years. The two had been toying with the idea of the show since working on Homicide: Life On The Street. A subject proved elusive until Simon suggested anchoring the drama around the lives of musicians. The project simmered over the years, throughout production on The Wire and Generation Kill. For a moment, it looked as if Katrina rendered the idea obsolete, but the pair saw dramatic opportunity in the rebuilding efforts of the citizenry, as well as an opportunity to shine a light on an often misrepresented and unique corner of America.Inevitably, after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast, Hollywood came calling. There were incisive documentaries (Spike Lee's When The Levees Broke), earnest independents, (Low And Behold), and ham-handed Hollywood thrillers, (Déjà Vu). New Orleans has also hosted college sex comedies, 3-D horror movies and more, every one of them injecting much-needed money into the local economy. But for projects set in New Orleans, authenticity and fidelity to the spirit of the city have been short in supply. The main offender: a cops-with-problems drama called K-Ville. Lasting for one seemingly endless season, it ladled policier cliches on top of New Orleans cliches, creating an almost toxic mix. "It proved what we were talking about," says Overmyer. "It was sort of a network idea of what [New Orleans was]. It certainly was a blueprint for what not to do. David sold it because he's David," Overmyer adds. "We went up to HBO to see [ex-president] Carolyn Strauss when she was there. She said, 'I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what the fuck a Mardi Gras Indian is, but … OK, go write a pilot.' She said, 'I'm in the David Simon business.' We got to kick the pilot around for a couple of years before we turned it in."And though Treme (pronounced "trih-may") shares DNA with The Wire (its keen eye for the rhythm of a city, its insightful racial commentary and its sprawling scope come courtesy of Simon, Overmyer and other members of The Wire's tight-knit writing staff, including George Pelecanos and the late David Mills) the two series are wildly divergent. The Wire's focus on politics and crime is largely absent in Treme (for now, though the subject of New Orleans after Katrina has unavoidable political undercurrents). Instead, Treme is about how a city survives despite erosion at the hands of the combined forces of nature, ignorance and economics.The pilot episode of Treme (directed by Agnieszka Holland, another holdover from The Wire) lays out these differences. The first shot one sees is a close-up of a musician's mouth and the reed of his saxophone. A scene that could rival The Wire at its most inscrutable follows, as a brass band negotiates their terms with an employer in a corner bar before a second line parade. Though the action itself is intelligible, the particulars (brass bands, compliments on outlandish outfits) are almost inscrutable.Another aesthetic holdover from The Wire is Treme's Dickens-sized cast of characters. Antoine Batiste (Wire veteran Wendell Pierce) is a perpetually broke trombonist struggling to support a new family and maintain ties with his old one; his ex-wife LaDonna Batiste-Williams (Khandi Alexander) is a bar owner searching for her convict brother lost in the maze of post-Katrina bureaucracy; Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo), is the spread-too-thin civil rights lawyer helping LaDonna track down her brother; Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) is a lowlife, loudmouth guitarist dedicated to both speaking truth to power and hustling his music; Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens, Joanie from Deadwood) is a chef trying to keep her small restaurant alive; Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters, another Wire alumnus) is a Mardi Gras Indian chief with no tribe; Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) is an apoplectic professor entrenched in the messy politics of the rebuilding of New Orleans. Their lives intersect and diverge, and what they all have in common is a Quixote-esque refusal to do anything but live in New Orleans. It's a shared love, conscious and unconscious.What's also striking upon watching the first episode of Treme is its fascination with New Orleans' obscure rituals and arcane signifiers; the dialogue is thick with obscure slang; surreal images (like Peters's Mardi Gras Indian chief walking and chanting through a darkened Lower 9th Ward in full regalia) seem more like dream sequences, until you realise that what you're seeing is actually happening."It's going to be a very authentic thing," says Wendell Pierce during a break in filming. He should know, after all: he's a New Orleans native. He's just pointed out a house down the street that he used to rent from his childhood friend Lolis Elie, now a local newspaper columnist who's joined Treme's writing staff. "[Treme] has the pacing of The Wire, so it's going to be a cumulative thing, and I think people outside of New Orleans are going to be dropped into a little foreign world, but the thing that's going to interest them is that they know it's real. That's how people in New Orleans actually deal with life. That's their culture."Culture. It's the word that Simon and Overmyer and almost everybody on the set repeats like a mantra when referring to what motivates Treme."Cities, especially today, have lost that," says Zahn as the crew breaks for lunch. "They've lost their culture. They celebrate it in, like, 'Atlanta Day'. This town doesn't have a New Orleans 'day' – it has it every fuckin' day.'""Other cities made cars, Baltimore used to make steel and ships," Simon adds. "New Orleans has one factory that's still open: they manufacture moments. They manufacture these ineffable musical moments."We're not making anything in the rest of America any more; it's like that line from The Wire: 'We don't make anything, we just put our hands in the next guy's pocket.' In New Orleans there's a whole passion to provide, for the sake of its own glory, culture and to deliver it as if it was a product. A third of the people aren't back yet but the culture's going to survive and we know this. And we didn't know this five years ago."But are they afraid of falling into the trap of obvious cliches, or misrepresenting the city?"I am not sanguine that we're not going to suffer our share of ridicule, because everyone in New Orleans feels passionate in their defence of the authentic. And everyone has their own version of New Orleans. You have to make choices and say we're going to show this and not that ... or we're going to get to that in a later episode. And you realise that three or four New Orleanians are going to write you off. 'You fucking frauds.' And how can you argue with them? That's why this city didn't become Atlanta or Houston. It's because what somebody did 60, 70, 80, 100 or 150 years ago mattered to everybody who came after them."________________________________________Old New OrleansVisually referenced throughout Treme and cited by the series' creators as a major influence, Always For Pleasure is a 1977 film by veteran documentarian Les Blank."Eric and I love that documentary," says David Simon. Always For Pleasure is less a rigorous analysis of New Orleans than a visual riff on the city's unique rhythms and rituals. Directed by Blank, (whose credits include Burden Of Dreams, an account of the production of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo) and shot in luminous 16mm, the obscure documentary is a kaleidoscopic portrait of New Orleans during 1977. Scenes flow from sombre, brass-scored funeral marches to raucous street dancing, to beer drinking Indian chiefs, to Professor Longhair playing in a dive, to a black woman hilariously breaking down the racial realities of Mardi Gras, and beyond, all with little or no authorial comment. The result: an impressionistic, ramshackle account of New Orleans' cultural life that encapsulates its lackadaisical delirium, yet keeps it – like the city that is its focus – admirably loose.

[reg]

coaxial