When David Simon ("The Wire") considered HBO's proposal to script Evan Wright's book "Generation Kill," he knew the journalist should stay in the picture, he told television critics at their annual press tour last week. Simon, who worked on the Baltimore Sun's city desk for 13 years, was introduced to script writing by Tom Fontana, who adapted Simon's first book, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," into the NBC series "Homicide: Life on the Streets."
Producing partner Ed Burns "and I would not try to do this alone. I have never had military service and Ed was in Vietnam but with the Army. That's two generations removed from 'Generation Kill.' And neither of us had been to Iraq. I said, 'I will only do this project if Evan will stay involved,' " Simon said.
Simon and Wright huddled last week in the noisy lobby of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where they had come to promote their miniseries, an account of the first Marine reconnaissance unit into Iraq, to television journalists.
Wright said he leapt at the chance, even though when he first pitched HBO, he told them he didn't want to be involved. For one thing, he hadn't yet adapted his Rolling Stone articles into the book. "I didn't want to take on the stress of writing a script. I'd never written a Hollywood script," he said.
Also, he didn't think they would ask him. "I said that preemptively. You know how it is when someone is about to dump you and you dump them first?"
The subsequent collaboration to weld journalistic reality to dramatic storytelling represented a steep learning curve for Wright. "I wasn't always a good student," he said. What he admired most about Simon, he said, was that -- as an artistic intellectual -- he turned out to be a "cocky, obnoxious bastard." In his book, that was how Gen. James Maddox described the Marines' recon unit.
Another thing Wright said he learned was that in Hollywood, even if executives have read your articles and your book, they still want to hear your boiled-down pitch. "This happened again and again," he said. "They want a simple handle they can put on this." He told the HBO executives that the miniseries could be "the ultimate family road trip" like National Lampoon's "Vacation" movies, that it could be like "Jackass Goes to War."
