Word: milch
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...creator David Milch whether pioneers in 1876 really swore like the Sopranos, and the former Yale instructor quotes Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century The Miller's Tale, which used the same anatomical slur that Calamity Jane does (though, in Middle English, it started with a q). Milch says most of our high-megaton profanities are centuries old, and accounts of the West "are full of the testimony of people whose sensibilities have been scandalized by the resourcefulness of the human spirit in fitting so many obscenities in the most ordinary declarative sentence." This, he says, was the point: Deadwood...
...Milch says he set out not to write a western but to explore a society just starting to form its laws. He first pitched to HBO a series about cops in Rome during Nero's reign. After that project fizzled, he started reading about Deadwood, a town that sprang up when reports of a gold strike were hyped to justify expansion into Indian territory. "It was like time-lapse photography," he says. "Two months before [Deadwood begins], there was nothing. Two years later, they had telephones, before San Francisco did." The settlement had no laws, purposely. "It was a primordial...
...appear, except as a constantly invoked and useful menace. Swearengen's road agents even scalp their victims to make it look like an Indian attack. You can't miss the post-9/11 point about the line between danger and exploitation. "An Indian was never seen in Deadwood alive," Milch says. "But if you keep people agitated, they'll drink more and they'll gamble more. So the deep thinkers--the guys who ran the saloons and the brothels--liked to keep people stirred up to the idea of an outside threat...
...Milch knows a thing or two about the addict's mind-set. While studying and working at Yale in the '60s and '70s under literary giants Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, he says he led a double life as a heroin junkie and gambling addict before cleaning up and becoming a writer for Hill Street Blues. Addicts and gamblers, says Milch, have a "risk taker" personality--just like prospectors, which is why so few of them got rich and so many saloonkeepers did. Says director-producer Davis Guggenheim: Milch has "something most people with intellect don't have--very...
Deadwood is not the next Sopranos. Everyone likes Italian food, whereas this is beef jerky--slow chewing, an acquired taste but substantial. Sometimes Milch's Shakespearean ambitions get away from him, and the story can drag. But the acting is strong, especially Carradine's leonine, sad gunslinger, who asks his handlers, "Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?" Then there's Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif), the town's physician and its secret keeper--he inspects Swearengen's whores, covers up cases of smallpox, ignores evidence of murder under duress and hides a young girl...