David Milch - Creator, Executive Producer and Head Writer
In 1982, David Milch, a lecturer in English literature at Yale University and neophyte screenwriter, wrote a script for HILL STREET BLUES. The episode, "Trial By Fury," premiered HILL STREET'S third season and won the Emmy, the Writers Guild Award, and the Humanitas Prize for that season.
Milch's academic years were distinguished by achievements and honors, in some ways foreshadowing his future success in television. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Yale, where he won the Tinker Prize for highest achievement in English. He then earned an MFA, with distinction, from the Writer's Workshop at Iowa University. During his nine-year teaching career at Yale, he assisted Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the preperation of several college textbooks on literature. In addition, Milch's poetry and fiction have been published in various journals, including The Atlantic Monthly and Southern Review.
The success of his first script, however, marked the end of his academic career and the beginning of a career in dramatic television. He spent five seasons with HILL STREET BLUES, first as Executive Story Editor and subsequently as Executive Producer. During that time, Milch earned two more Writers Guild Awards, a second Humanitas prize, and another Emmy.
Milch's career gained momentum throughout the 1980's with the addition of two other series to his credits. In 1987, he created and Executive Produced the HILL STREET BLUES spin-off BEVERLY HILLS BUNTZ, which featured NYPD BLUE co-star Dennis Franz, and, in 1989, Milch served as Executive Producer of the ABC series CAPITAL NEWS, starring Lloyd Bridges.
In 1992, Milch co-created the history-making police drama NYPD BLUE. The highly-rated series set a record by garnering 26 Emmy Nominations its premier season, winning the award for Best Drama Series in 1994-1995. Milch took home Emmys for Best Writing in a Drama for the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 seasons. The first season of NYPD BLUE also earned Milch a Humanitas Prize and an Edgar Award for his screenwriting.
While still at the helm of NYPD BLUE, Milch created another police drama, BROOKLYN SOUTH, co-authored, along with NYPD Blue producer Bill Clark, TRUE BLUE: The Real Stories Behind NYPD Blue, and served as creative consultant for Steven Bochco's MURDER ONE and TOTAL SECURITY.
Below you will find his statement about the program. He read some books about Deadwood, many of which have been debunked by modern historian as being on the same level as Stuart lake's "Frontier Marshal" and Glen Boyer's books about Wyatt Earp. I do not get HBO and feel that I am not missing anything.
Series creator David Milch talks about gold, Custer, betrayal and the remarkable accidents of history that created the wildest town in the West.
Executive producer David Milch warns that Deadwood is not a docu-drama about the famed outlaw town. "I want to make it clear," he says, "that I've had my a$$ bored off by many things that are historically accurate."
That said, Milch spent months immersing himself in the true stories of the people of 19th century Deadwood, absorbing not just the events, but also the subtle motivations behind them. "I like to read the primary materials; I love reading the Black Hills Pioneer, you know," he says. "I could read that all day. I'm interested in the personalities who were kind of the first prime movers in the community."
What has emerged is a picture of a place finding its own "order" without the benefit of laws. "Deadwood was a place created by a series of accidents. A kind of original sin the appropriation of what belonged to one people by another people was enacted with no pretense at all," he says. "You know, the people who landed in Manhattan, they paid 24 bucks. Well, maybe they got a bargain, but they still recognized the obligation to pay. In the Black Hills, the land had just been given to the Indians, to get 'em to move from another piece of land."
The "appropriation" of the Black Hills began a chain of events the lead to Deadwood's strange status as a town that wasn't subject to American laws. "The Black Hills had been given to the Ogallala Sioux and some other groups. But Custer needed one more war," Milch says. "Custer was one of a group of young Turks, young generals in the Civil War. He was a psychopath, which always gives you a leg up, you know it makes you more active and more imaginative in your strategies."
With an eye toward a political career and even a presidential run, Custer organized support for a 1,000-man expedition into the Black Hills. "A lot of people were broke. There was a panic in 1873, and migrations of people." Milch says. "There were all kinds of social disruptions going on, and into this foment, you stir in Custer's personal ambitions.
"Now for years and years there had been rumors that there was gold in the Black Hills. But what would become the Dakota Territory was owned by the Sioux 'for as long as the river shall run' according to the treaty signed six years before. So Custer says, let me ascertain the scientific content about the mineral deposits in the hills. And the guys in the Senate who wanted to run Custer for president authorized the expedition. Custer gets 25 photographers, reporters from the New York Times. It's a media event."
He (Custer) was a psychopath, which always gives you a leg up, you know it makes you more active and more imaginative in your strategies.
"They don't find too much gold. But they find a little, and Custer makes some hysterical pronouncements in Harper's, I think it was: 'Gold by the handful! Gold by the pocketful. Gold everywhere you turn'."
The coverage led to expeditions into the Dakota Territory, and eventually to the big gold discovery around what would become Deadwood. But Custer's rivals urged President Grant no fan of Custer, himself to honor the treaty and oust the prospectors. Grant had a reputation of being sympathetic to the American Indian, and had even mentioned in his inauguration address that he hoped to see Native Americans one day become citizens.
"He agrees that they won't betray the treaty," Milch says. "Which makes one in a row. He sends in some cavalry in 1875, and they make all the whites leave. Calamity Jane had been in there. But in 1876, people are still broke, and the cavalry who'd been left out there, they start to go AWOL. They're deserting left and right. The prospectors come back in and find more gold. Now, you know, Grant was no idiot; he couldn't get any soldiers to stay in the army. So he said let 'em in, and pull your troops.
"Custer's got what he wants. Now he gets his troops organized, he's going to go in and kick the s**t out of the Indians. And we all know how that one turned out. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull kicked the living crap out of Custer at Little Big Horn, which is a stone's throw from Deadwood. That was in late June. By then, the hills were swarming with prospectors. And they were doing very well."
With the invasion of adventurers, outlaws and entrepreneurs into a vacuum of order, Deadwood had become a world unto itself. "This is the equivalent of the first amphibians coming out of the primordial ooze," Milch says. "In March, there was nothing. All the whites were lurking in the hills. In June, there were 10,000 people there. That's a lot of people to move to Buffalo, let alone Indian Territory. It was not part of America. They were an outlaw community, and they knew it."
That meant no government. No organized religion. Not even basic law enforcement. When a prominent figure in town was murdered, for example, "they didn't want Congress to take umbrage what are you, secessionists, are you setting up your own government? So they just let the guy go," Milch says. "Not only was there an absence of law, there was a premium on the continued absence of law. Economic forces organized the settlement."**
I've heard Custer referred to as many things, but never before a "psychopath". The idea that Custer was seeking political office has been declared a myth. Yes he was brash & yes he was a glory hound with an ego as big as Mt. Rushmore, and had a penchant for going off on his own & disobeying orders. He was known for that throughout his West Point days and his entire military career.
Milch has made it quite clear that he is bored by historically accurate material.
** The Dakota Territory, (although not yet states) was still very much a part of the United States, as are Puerto Rico, Guam, American Virgin Islands and American Samoa today. Deadwood had a city Marshal and county sheriff as well as U.S. Marshals throughout the territory. Albeit minimal, there was law in Deadwood & the Black Hills.
