Q: "Our guy is dead from a stray...and this fuck Carcetti gets to be the Mayor behind his stupidity. I fuckin'
love this town." Did Ed Norris enjoy speaking that line as much as it looked like he did? Stray bullets
seem to be the most mythological of all cop stories, don't they? [Jim King]
A: He did seem to deliver that line with some gusto. I get the feeling that anything Eddie says that gives
even a generalized smack to the city's political culture does, in fact, get good to him. Fella's been through a lot.
He's becoming an actor, though, you gotta admit.Stray shootings happen. I covered quite a few of them. The target shooting scenario included. One of the best cases of that kind occurred in New York and is detailed in a great non-fiction book, Chief, by Albert Seedman, who was the NYPD chief of detectives for many years. I won't ruin it for you. But a woman driving on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn falls dead behind the wheel of her car while driving at forty-five miles per hour. No one else in the car. No one notices any dispute or road rage. No shooter seen in the area. And they solved it, by some miracle.
If we used the actual details of that particular case, we'd be mocked by critics and viewers alike for embracing fantasy.
Q: Was 'They called me every name but a child of God' a nod to Curt Flood? Did we get any writer speeches this year like Bunny's 'open container' speech last year? [Bob Rousseau, mane33]
A: Why, yes. As a union man my whole life, Curt Flood is one of my personal heroes and that was an unforgettable phrase
he coined, or put to good use, or whatever. I stole it pridefully. Good catch.Writer speeches? What are those? We try to have the characters say what we think they should say. Every now and then, something gets good to someone and they talk awhile. But writer speeches? You cut me to the quick.
If you mean soliloquies, Bodie has a pretty good one on a Cylburn park bench. And Poot's reflections on global warming, penned by Mr. Overmyer as I recall, are quite poetical.
By the way, there's a good new bio of Curt Flood out right now and it's a good one. That guy was the Joe Hill of major league baseball and he paid for it.
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