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R.I.P. Thread: A Celebration Of Lives Well Lived


Mr. Chatywin et al.

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I agree with others that he was just as good as Chalky White as we was as Omar - even though I stopped watching Boardwalk after the second season.  He was also pretty damn hilarious during his stint on Community.

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David Simon on Michael K. Williams, who, after reading Season 2 scripts, asked, "Why are we even doing this?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/12/opinion/michael-k-williams-david-simon-the-wire.html?

[paywall]

Quote

 

. . . . To Mike, at that moment, we were the white custodians of a rare majority-Black drama in the majority-white world of American television, and we might well be walking away from that unique responsibility.

He was asking a big question. To answer, I had to pause and regroup, and reach for an honest answer — the one less likely to please a hungry actor. I told him that we had never imagined “The Wire” as a Black drama, or even as a drama with race as its central theme. We were writing about how power and money are routed in an American city, and being from Baltimore, a majority Black metropolis, we had simply depicted our hometown.

And a bigger truth, I argued, is that if we don’t now expand the show’s field of vision beyond what happens on the streets of West Baltimore, then we stay a cops-and-robbers drama, a police procedural. But if we build the rest of the city — its fragile working class, its political world, its schools, its media culture — then we get a chance to say something more.

“We want to have a bigger argument about what has gone wrong. Not just in Baltimore, but elsewhere, too.”

Mike thought about this for a long moment. Waiting for him, I still worried it would come down to his character’s work. He had done marvelous things with Omar — his smile and the cavernous barrel of a high-powered handgun were the closing moments of the first season — and he was maybe one more good story arc from elevating his character into a star turn. With the leverage he had already acquired, Mike could have sat there and insisted on the writers gilding his every narrative arc.

Instead, he stood up, curled the early season two scripts in his hand, nodded, and asked one last question:

“So what is this stuff at the port about? What are we going to say?”

It’s about the death of work, I told him. When legitimate work itself dies in an American city, I argued, and the last factory standing is the drug corners, then everyone goes to a corner. . . .

 

 

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1 hour ago, Morpheus said:

RIP Norm MacDonald

What a talented comedian, a master of the shaggy dog story.

He was one of Conan's favorite guests and always had him rolling. People thought that Conan had turned a cold shoulder to him for not having him on for his finale on TBS, because of some controversy or other, but I'm guessing that he was in no shape for it these last months. Such a shame.

 

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My intro to Norm was through Family Guy, when he was voicing Death in the first couple of sesons. I also saw brief bits of him on SNL, never really watched that religiously(have to rewatch his stuff now for sure); but his ‘98 film Dirty Work was one of the films that made me cry from laughing so hard. Pure comedic genius.

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10 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Well, for me it's actually Mozzie from White Collar.

Me too!  He was far and away my favorite character.  He was the most interesting character too.  He was the real mystery figure.

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