Talking with David Milch, the bodhisattva of all teleplay writers and the creator of the crypto-Western Deadwood, is not unlike a lesson in surfing, which happens to be the subject of his new HBO series, John from Cincinnati. Early on, the listener loses balance, tips over, struggles with the surge. But hang in there and keep your toes on the nose, and the world will start to look a little different.
Loosely based on the surf-noir novels of Kem Nunn, John From Cincinnati centers around a trinity of surfers—a father, son, and somewhat holy grandson (played by Bruce Greenwood, Brian Van Holt, and Greyson Fletcher). Each member of this family—the Yosts—is blessed with the ability to shoot the curl, ride giants, or pull off any other feat to which SoCal beach culture ascribes quasi-religious significance. But these men of the longboard have some short tempers. Into their realm comes John, who's not really from Cincinnati or any other point on the map but mimics all he hears and encourages the Yost hotheads to chill. Suddenly, the patriarch starts to levitate, the son wakes up from self-medicating, and the grommet brings a dead bird back to life.
Once again, HBO is blessing Milch with perilously free rein, and during a recent day on set in Imperial Beach, California, there's an abiding sense that the cast and crew must strain to get on his wavelength. But the daily struggle, with scenes performed mere minutes after they're written, appears to be a happy one. After all, many on the payroll have already worked with Milch on Deadwood (which wraps up with a four-hour epilogue later this year), NYPD Blue, or even Hill Street Blues, the seminal eighties cop drama for which he first left academia. They know what to expect.
"He's a lunatic," says Austin Nichols, who plays John as a pompadoured Christ figure in checkerboard Vans. He adores Milch, who has just suggested that Nichols's mom, an accomplished water-skier, show up one day and perform a few stunts—he'll write a scene! Nichols smiles as Milch passes by and offers hugs to the wardrobe team and to cast member Luis Guzman's visiting foster kids. (Guzman plays a motel super.) The slouchy 62-year-old in black T-shirt exhibits rabbinical bliss in every interaction.
"We are creatures of electrical association," Milch says, theorizing about pop culture and how it makes people feel—or more specifically, how the Del Shannon song "Runaway" always brings to mind a transcendentally carnal teenage moment. Milch speaks a profane Buffalo dialect—think Tim Russert with Tourette's—and his earthy monologues are embroidered with lofty abstractions. "The intuition of mass entertainment is that if you can simulate those hyper-secretions through certain images," he says of sex urges, fight-or-flight instincts, or any vicarious thrills coaxed through ubiquitous screens, "you can make a pretty good living exploiting our chemistry." But Milch, the former Yale English lecturer, is interested in more than that, as he then expounds on philosopher William James, cargo cultures (tribes worshipping first world oddities that wash ashore), and string theory (everything that appears solid is moving in, of course, waves).
There's a little trailer on a side street, just down from the taco stand, and inside, between takes, Milch contemplates further mysteries. He lies on the floor and looks up at a screen, where his words, typed out by a dutiful assistant, appear. Amid four other writers, Milch reads aloud each line and its revised version and yet another after that. The lanky, grizzled Nunn, who works as a story consultant for the show, chimes in with pointers about the imagined town of Snug Harbor and its sun-kissed grime.
The actual neighborhood outside is a welcoming place, despite the needles and occasional dead goat that now pollute the waters. Milch—known for his own story of addiction and redemption—can't help but find a little beauty here. After drifting into a chat with a local matron called Rosa about her Avon business, he devises one more new path for the show's circuitous script: A doctor character will encounter Rosa's gap-toothed smile and find a sublime pause in his disorderly life.
Television, Milch explains after the encounter, is the central place to tell a story, and every dramatic moment has a chance to "unlock some secret energy." In other words, he has a different measure of show-biz success. Sure, it's nice to get a second season or a syndication deal. But can John From Cincinnati get a mass audience to think something bigger, something universal, something about the mystical force that creates each ocean ripple? It's the kind of slow, mellow toke that any surf dude would savor.—NED MARTEL
digg this | add to del.icio.us | add to reddit | add to newsvine
[To discuss this article—or to comment on anything in the magazine or on mensvogue.com—visit the Men's Vogue Forum.]
