NEW YORK — After spending four seasons examining the failures of Baltimore's civic institutions, "The Wire" in its final run takes on particularly personal terrain for creator David Simon: the Baltimore Sun.
Simon spent 13 years at the Sun (now owned by the Tribune Co., as is the Los Angeles Times), until he took a buyout in 1995, disgusted with cost cutting. Since then, he has stewed publicly about the paper and the two editors who were at the helm when he left: John S. Carroll, who went on to be the editor of The Times, and his then managing editor, William Marimow.
Simon says both men, who came to the paper in the early 1990s after it was purchased by Times Mirror, had low regard for veteran Sun talent and an obsession with winning prizes. Among his scornful descriptions of them, "self-aggrandizing hacks" is one of the mildest.
Carroll and Marimow reject his assertions, saying that what had been a moribund paper was revived under their watch.
"He's the kind of guy whose ego needs to be fed by anger," Carroll said.
For many Sun staffers, the anticipation of seeing their paper depicted in "The Wire" is mixed with leeriness about the prospect that it has been colored by Simon's bitterness.
"David left here upset at the way people who were then editors treated him and has made no bones about it," said outgoing associate Editorial Page Editor William Englund, whose wife, Kathy Lally, is one of 10 former Sun employees who appear in cameos this season. "It's not going to be a love letter to the paper, that's for sure."
Simon said as much in a talk he gave in April as part of a Baltimore storytelling series, in which he said he watched Carroll and Marimow "single-handedly destroy the Sun." He described how he named an obnoxious police lieutenant "Marimow" in "The Wire" last season as "a little kick in the ass" and called the series' final focus on media "my fantasy for revenge," indicating that he modeled the top editors in the show after the two men.
Simon now dismisses those remarks as "hyperbole."
"I wouldn't waste 10 hours of HBO programming to settle a particular score with anyone," he said via phone from Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was working on his next HBO project, "Generation Kill," a miniseries about a group of Marines in the 2003 Iraq invasion. (He declined to do publicity for "The Wire" because of the writers strike but agreed to speak about his portrayal of the Sun.)
