Episode 116

Matt Zoller Seitz and The Deadwood Bible

July 17, 20221h 20m

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Show Notes

Matt Zoller Seitz, an author, filmmaker and TV critic, loves the acclaimed David Milch HBO drama - Deadwood. Together with 130 contributers, Matt recently published The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, which includes critical essays on every episode, original illustrations, a complete account of David Milch's life and so much more. He also shares some of the backstory of how Shopify stole the thunder and celebration of pub week by trapping his team in a Kafkaesque puzzle.

Follow Matt on Twitter and buy The Deadwood Bible on MZS.press

Follow @findingfavspod on Instagram and Twitter. Rate and review on Apple Podcasts

Leah's Caringbridge has full updates.

Show Notes

Draft Transcript Follows

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Deadwood 0:00
I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness. But I am not a government official.

Announcer 0:05
Welcome to the Findings Favorites Podcast where we explore your favorite things without using an algorithm. Here's your host, Leah Jones.

Leah Jones 0:08
Hello, and welcome to Finding Favorites. I'm your host, Leah Jones. It is the earliest hours of Sunday, July 17. I finished today's interview around 7pm and heated up my fried rice from last night and got right back to watching Deadwood. This week, I am talking with author, journalist, filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz about his book, The Deadwood Bible. I got in touch with Matt, because my friend James Zeigenfus, who you know from the episode about tracking personal data. He is a huge fan of Deadwood and had a copy of The Deadwood Bible and sent me Matt's Twitter handle and nudged me in his direction.

Leah Jones 1:10
And so, and Matt was kind enough to send me a copy of The Deadwood Bible ahead of time, so I would know what I was talking to him about, which is rare for as many authors as I talk to, I don't often get a copy of their book, pre publication, or before the interview. And so I decided I would watch the pilot of Deadwood and read the chapter from the book on the opening pi lot before we talk today. And then we had this amazing conversation that probably... Matt is very easy to talk to, and I would sit around and talk to him about Deadwood a lot more than just the hour and a half or so we talked tonight. After we finished after we hung up, I watched three more episodes of Deadwood. And I got to the fourth episode, which he references and no spoilers. There are spoilers, obviously, in this podcast. The show is almost 20 years old. But he was very kind not to spoil episode four of season one for me.

Leah Jones 2:22
I sat down I watched three episodes back to back, got to Episode Four and have to agree with him that it is the closing scenes the closing minutes of episode for season one of Deadwood are some of the most incredible dramatic filmmaking on TV that I've ever seen. Thank you for not spoiling it for me, Matt, and thanks for giving me something new to watch over the rest of the summer.

Leah Jones 2:50
In my world, if you're new to this podcast, a year ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. June 24 was my anniversary, my Cancer -ersary. And I've been on edge waiting for the first mammogram, the first mammogram, post chemo and everything was yesterday. Well, Friday, and I got the all clear. I go back in six months for my next mammogram and ultrasound. But at this point, I feel like for the first time in a year, I have been told that there's I am free of breast cancer. So I'm very relieved for that. And you know, Matt and I did not talk about it. But I know from reading his bio that his second wife passed away from breast cancer within the last couple years and so it's a it's a hell of a disease. Please get keep getting your mammograms. It was so many got canceled during COVID. If you're frustrated by the backup or the delays, early detection can help save lives. I am grateful to have found the cancer early. It doesn't mean my journey is over. I am still being evaluated for multiple sclerosis. have a bone biopsy this week and I talked to my neurologist and then next week or in a couple of weeks. I'm heading up to the Mayo Clinic for a second opinion just because I have so much spicy arthritis going on in my body. I went out and bought a fuck cancer cake at Mariano's and dug a fork into it tonight to celebrate finally hearing the words that at the moment I am cancer free and I'm grateful for that. So for me I think the I don't know if the five year clock started when I had surgery in September or if it starts today but I I think July 15 will be a date that I mark for awhile, in addition to June 24, which is the day I was diagnosed.

Leah Jones 5:10
So, all of that said, this conversation with Matt, I think is a delight he needs a butterfly wing of, of, of a nudge to get going on Deadwood. And so sit back. This is a great conversation. He is truly a fan and an expert and a critic. I think I I am looking forward to watching the full series, three seasons and a movie, which is a little bit more manageable than the 15 seasons of Murdoch Mysteries that I'm also working on. of TV shows I've picked up from this podcast, the Deadwood Bible is available through the MCZ.press website. I will include that link in the show notes. .

Leah Jones 6:05
With that said, wear your mask, wash your hands, get your booster, get your mammogram and keep enjoying your favorite things.

Leah Jones 6:27
Hello, and welcome to finding favorites. I'm your host, Leah Jones. And this is the podcast where we learn about people's favorite things without using an algorithm. And I am very excited. Today I am talking with Matt Zoller Seitz. He is a journalist, a filmmaker, and a publisher. A voice into the wind about why not to use Shopify, and the creator and primary author of The Deadwood Bibl: A Lie Agreed Upon. Matt, how are you doing this afternoon?

Matt Zoller Seitz 7:06
I'm doing very well. Thank you for having me on the show.

Leah Jones 7:09
I'm so happy you're here today. We're talking to each other because my friend James, huge fan of Deadwood, huge fan of your writing. And he backed the Kickstarter that helped fund this book. And you had said a couple of weeks ago that you were looking for podcasts to talk on. And he texted me the link and he said, "Please, pretty, please see if you can get him on." Thank you to James Ziegenfus for the introduction. It seems like the launch has not gone as smoothly as planned because of Shopify.

Matt Zoller Seitz 7:51
Oh, That's putting it mildly. Yeah, well, yeah, they're the E commerce platform that the bookstore used to use. And it's kind of a long epic story. But essentially, you know, what they do is, and we've never been a victim of this before is they would contrive these reasons why they were holding your funds and not depositing them in the bank, like when people pay you for books, right. And this happened, they stopped depositing money that was collected immediately after 5500 Deadwood books arrived at the store that we ship out. And it was a real serious problem. Because you know, as any small business owner will tell you, it's like, the money that you need in order to fulfill things is coming, at least, you know, in part from the commerce of what is happening at that moment.

Leah Jones 8:41
Right.

Matt Zoller Seitz 8:41
You know, so we were in a situation where basically, we were paying money for postage to ship things out, but no more additional money was coming in from the store. And we were looking at, like how many weeks to go until we have zero balance and we are dipping into a personal checking account was a nightmare. And Shopify was we they made us feel like characters in a Kafka novel. We didn't know what we'd done wrong, and they wouldn't tell us and they were saying we're doing a we're doing a it was a formal it was something like a routine review of your account or something. It was like okay, but then it went on for a few days. And then they said that there were some concerns about whether or not we were authorized to sell trademarked merchandise, and we don't sell trademark merchandise, right? So books, we sell books and as and as the the example that they gave was a section of books we had on Star Wars, we have all we had all of these, you know, we're rebuilding them at the new store, which is MCZ.press, but we had, you know, a couple of dozen different sections that were very carefully curated, you know, very specific and one of them was Star Wars and you know, we had one on Deadwood, Mad Men, kaiju films, gangster stuff like that, you know Hollywood crime, disability, you name it. I guess there's a problem with the Star Wars section.

Matt Zoller Seitz 10:05
But there's a thing called the First Sale Doctrine which states that any published material, once you bought it from the people who originated it, they don't have any claim on it anymore. You can resell it, you can give it away, you can give it to the library, you can throw it out whatever you want to do, you can make a sculpture. And and so that this trademark thing actually legally did not apply to us. So we were completely mystified. And we had to jump through some paperwork hoops, we had to give them proof that we were authorized to resell things, and I have that certificate from the state of Ohio. And, you know, I won't give you every detail of it, because we'd be here for a week. It was right, crazy. I mean, what they were doing. And, and but the worst part of it was, they wouldn't actually tell us exactly what we could do to make things better. It was like they kept moving the goalposts, like where are you holding our funds? Because one of our financial partners is concerned about trade selling a trademark merchandise, we don't sell trademark merchandise. Okay, Are you authorized to resell things? Yes. Here's the paperwork. You know, our I can't remember what else they said there were like seven or eight different things. And every single one of them was either erroneous or didn't apply to us. And we started doing some research.

Matt Zoller Seitz 11:17
What we discovered was, they're all over the country. There are Shopify merchants who have had this happen to them. I didn't know this, and since I went public with our story, we have been contacted by all of these Shopify merchants who have reached out to us through the store address, some of them talked to me through Twitter, and told their stories of woe. And basically what Shopify was doing is it was a scam. They were they would, once you had a certain amount of money in your account, they would contrive some reason why they were quite concerned that you had violated the terms of service, they wouldn't tell you exactly what part of the terms of service you'd violated, they wouldn't connect you with a department that could tell you and give you more information. So you could correct whatever the problem was. And then they would give you 48 hours to do some ridiculous thing. Like, two or three different occasions, they asked us for records proving that we had purchased certain books. And they didn't say which books we have, we have almost 1000 books, right? We've been in existence for three years. And also many of these books. Some of them we buy from regular publishers, some of them we buy from independent press, and some of them, I get them at thrift shops, I get them at garage sales, people send them to me, you know, some of them are my books. And and it's like hard enough to produce, you know, a week's worth of sales receipts for a lot of merchandise. But three years worth, that was all we could think to do, because they wouldn't tell us if there was a particular book or books that they believed we weren't authorized to sell, which is crazy again, you can, if you're a bookseller, you can sell books, there's no brain and body that you apply to it's like you either you're authorized with a merchant, you're registered with the state and save any pay sales tax, or you aren't, and we're and we're legal. So it was very, very strange. And And honestly, this is the worst part.

Matt Zoller Seitz 13:16
I am as as one of my old journalism professors said, "semi famous". I'm not a big celebrity. I'm not the sort of person who recognized walking down the street. But I'm just enough of a name that when I raised a stink, they backed off. And Shopify is such a big company that there were three different times when I had to raise a stink because one department didn't know that I had, you know, blown up their spot on Twitter. And it had gone viral and embarrassed them and that experts on copyright law and retail, were answering them and saying, You guys, this is ridiculous. They haven't done anything wrong released the fun. So eventually, what we had to do was, you know, they threatened us with the shutdown a third time. Yeah, I know, it was it was, again, this went on for, you know, nearly a month and the third time and it was once again, it was a different department. And they said, If you don't give us a this, that and the other thing in 48 hours, we're shutting you down, and when they shut you down, they can keep the funds. They're not obligated to return the funds. See, that's what I think the scan is, right? That's because they can say, well, they violated the terms of service and the terms of service service say that if you violate the terms of service, we can shut you down, and you don't have any recourse and we get to keep whatever funds when you're an account. We're not obligated to deposit them. That's a pretty neat trick, right? Yeah.

Leah Jones 14:37
That's like when the police do asset.... forfeiture of assets.

Matt Zoller Seitz 14:44
That's exactly what it is. Yeah, we suspect that illegal activity has been going on so we're taking your house or your car, right? That's very much that's very similar to what the logic that they were arguing, and, and again, like I keep bringing up Kafka and I'm not trying to be melodramatic here, but it really I really did feel Have a character in his fiction, because we were being accused of a crime, but they wouldn't tell us what the crime was or who was accusing us of it. Right. And so we left. And eventually what we did was store, the executive director of MCs press, which encompasses the store and the publishing imprint Judith Carter. She basically weaved together it was, you know, she's really brilliant about this kind of stuff. But she just said, Well, according to what I'm reading here, we can just refund all of the money that they've been holding. And that way at least, they can't take it from us. So it's like the equivalent of you have a bag of cash. If you were a cash business, and somebody takes it from you and says, I'm holding this until further notice. Basically, what we did was we set the bag on fire. Yeah, everybody had ordered a book after June after July 15, I'm sorry, June 15. We just refunded their money. And we took a loss on that because Shopify, they get approved, they get every transaction they get, they get a fee, and they get a percentage. And that's not refundable.

Leah Jones 16:02
So they got to coming and going, the fees.

Matt Zoller Seitz 16:04
We got to come in and going, but we thought it was better than we couldn't we couldn't sleep at night, if we knew that Shopify had robbed us in this way. So that was what we did. And then we started the new platform over at a Ecwid, which is linked to a bank, they're linked directly to a bank, they're partners with PNC. And it's much more transparent. It's much more, it's quicker. There's not all these hidden, like transactions and fees and things that decrease your your profitability, and it's just much, much easier to work with. And I wish we'd been on it the whole time, honestly. And still, like, it's heartbreaking, because I'm, you know, I just recently got a letter from somebody who's short or store, they're holding twice as much money as they were holding from us. And there's no end in sight. And they and I said, you know, tell your story online? And I'll amplify it. Yeah, you know, because this has got to stop and like, I'm happy to, you know, be the face of people who are complaining about this company. You know, like, I don't have that much clout, but whatever, I have a happy user, because this is absurd. This is people's livelihoods here, right? Anyway, it's, it's, but it's just, you know, we're not quite out of the woods yet. There's still like it was a major hit, it was a major disruption in the distribution of the book. And it was a major financial hit that we took, we're gonna overcome it, I'm confident. And everybody who pre ordered a book at the old store is going to receive their book, we've we've been, you know, contacting them, letting them know that they're in the system. Some of them have not been easy to reach what we were finding them one by one, and just letting them know, if you bought a book you're getting, it's gonna take a while, because of all the stuff that's been thrown at us, but you're getting your book. So yeah, it shouldn't be this difficult.

Leah Jones 17:50
Do you feel like you've had a moment to celebrate the release of the Deadwood Bible?

Matt Zoller Seitz 17:57
Not really. Um, but I will say that people have been receiving the book we've shipped out, oh, God, I don't know, certainly, of the of the, of the 5000 copies that we had printed. I think we got about 2000 out there by now and vary in various forms, like, pre orders from the old Shopify store, Kickstarter, people and people associated with the making of the book. We interviewed 130 people for this book, who were associated with the show in some way, or with David Milch. And each one of them gets a book, you know, because they gave so generously, time and in some case, they gave up, they gave material, they get manuscripts, they gave research they gave, you know, you know, there are some people who I did like eight hours of interviews with, you know, like Robin Weigert and Kim Dickens and Dayton Callie and Ian McShane, and there's probably another six to 10 people where I did I did eight hours with each of them if I did a minute, Jim Beaver, W Earl Brown. And then there were other people like and the Milch the entire Milch family was just, you know, actively assisting and making this thing possible.

Matt Zoller Seitz 19:07
Rita Milch, David's wife, she wrote a an unpublished memoir about her marriage to David gave me permission to use pieces of that, and I have big fat chunks of that in there, which is, to me, that's one of my favorite parts of the book, because I always compare it to the point the point in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta is narrating and then all of a sudden, Karen takes over. And you get to see a different percent like to see the perspective of this trouble, brilliant, hard charging, he's almost like an HBO hero like an antihero, David. And then suddenly to see him the way that his wife sees him, it's a completely different perspective for

Leah Jones 19:45
sure to see him through like that the eyes of his partner of someone who loved him. I'm sure it's a completely different story.

Matt Zoller Seitz 19:54
And also you know, the another great thing about Rita, is Rita is a documentary filmmaker and read it. Rita tells it like is. When David's final weeks on NYPD Blue. And, you know, he ran that thing, like, you know, whatever the opposite of a well-oiled machine was, that's how David ran that show. Okay. He was notorious for rewriting things at the last minute and throwing the production into an uproar. And, and people just knew that this was the way he worked and, and people loved him, because what he would do is he would watch a scene in rehearsal, and the actors would do something that inspired him. And he would say, give me an hour, and I'm gonna go rewrite this scene, and then he would go rewrite it. But if you do that enough times, the entire episode is behind schedule, and then you get to the end of the season. And it's really a nightmare, because it's like, it's

Leah Jones 20:45
your budget is, yeah, dwindling and patience.

Matt Zoller Seitz 20:49
And people's patience are right, we love you want to murder you, right. And that's what it was like. And Rita did this wonderful documentary called Without a Net. And that was, I said, I can't even believe that you did this. And that it was it was released in the form that it was released in and she said that when she showed it to David, the light of the movie ended in the lights came up and he turned he turned to his wife and said, "that wasn't a movie that was an intervention."

Matt Zoller Seitz 21:22
I tell that story, just by way of saying that, like Rita Milch, Elizabeth and Lydia Milch, his daughters. And many, many of David's friends and colleagues, they all brought that same attitude. So like, this is not like most books about a genius that you've read, who's still alive. People talk shit about David, people talk about David's foibles, they talk about, they talk about how much they love him and how brilliant he is, and what great contributions he made to television, but they also talked about how self destructive he was, and how destructive he was and how irritating he could be. And you know, I have a quote in there from Dayton Callie where Dayton Dayton is like, he's like the fool to David's King Lear. He says things. He's always been the guy who says things to David that if anybody else talked to David the way David Kelly talks to David, their character would be dragged by a horse the next day.

Matt Zoller Seitz 22:12
Dayton it seemed to me special dispensation to talk to Dave and and that was Dayton said, "You know, when I met him, we said, most of these people, David hired them, and that's how they know David, and he said, David and I were junkies." A whole different dynamic and and Dayton said, he described one of my favorite quotes in the book is he said, "David is this is the stupidest intelligent man I ever met." And I sympathize. I get that. I mean, and I mean, that in sense of, I get that a lot myself, like, you know, how can you be so smart and so stupid at the same time? That's been a recurring refrain in my life. And that's probably why I feel such an affinity for David Milch. In his work, yeah. You know, I'm empathetic. And I feel like, you know, He speaks to me in a way that almost no other television writer does.

Leah Jones 23:27
So I have to admit that David Miltch is someone that I know of, because he is... My Hollywood crush is Jason Mantzoukas

Matt Zoller Seitz 23:39
That's a good one to have. He's a charming guy.

Leah Jones 23:42
He's charming, and he loves David Milch. And he loves Deadwood. And he talks about them both regularly on podcasts. And so most of what I know about Deadwood other than the episode I watched last night, I know from his descriptions on podcasts about Deadwood. I just wanted to get that out of the way. So you know, like where I'm coming from.

Matt Zoller Seitz 24:05
It's totally fine. I don't expect you to have read that book. It's 512 pages.

Leah Jones 24:12
Right? But okay, so I want to ask you this question. And then we're gonna do some time travel... Cowboy [Leah's cat walked across keyboard]. You've got to get out of the way!

Matt Zoller Seitz 24:21
I wish people can see this because it's like, you know, this cat is walking back and forth through your through in front of your camera, and it reminds me of like, in Jaws when the shark passes in front of the camera, and that's like, the dark blue of the shark. That's what it's like.

Leah Jones 24:38
In the book page 11.

Matt Zoller Seitz 24:40
Yes.

Leah Jones 24:41
Do not skip this page. Hoopleheads. What is the Hoople head?

Matt Zoller Seitz 24:46
Oh, Hooplehead is what they call the people who came to Deadwood, basically prospectors. Okay, like, oh, like, like, just the, you know, the folks who came there with like, 12 cents in their pocket, hoping the pan for coal can strike it rich. . Yeah, that's that's that's it and it's the probably the lowest level of society that you can be and it's kind of a point of pride to be a Hoople, head and their nerves on the show who they were who Hoopleheads when they came to Deadwood, and then they they made something of themselves, they made their fortune or there was success in some way. But they still think of themselves as Hoopleheads and anybody knew them before they succeeded. They there's, there's still a Hooplehead that that person. Now there's people I went to college with, who were three years behind me, and I thought of them as being really young. And now I'm 54. And they're 50. They're 51 and freshmen. Right, exactly. It's like, it's Freddie little Freddie. That's like little Fred and his daughter just graduated from college. Right.

Leah Jones 25:47
So I was I couldn't figure out was it is was it a name that you have for people that follow your writing? Or was it from the book or like the show? So thank you.

Matt Zoller Seitz 25:58
It's just a Deadwood thing. I mean, and I address people in the updates, updates that I did for Kickstarter. I always began them Dear Hooplehead, right. And, you know, just part of the vernacular of the show.

Leah Jones 26:10
One of my friends was like, I said, Oh, I'm watching the Deadwood season one episode one tonight, and he came back with like, you fucking cocksucker Don't worry, you'll understand it later. And I was like,

Matt Zoller Seitz 26:24
Well, yeah, the profranity on the show Cody Henderson. There's a lot of contributors to the book besides me. And one of them is Cody Henderson, who's a critic for Rogerebert.com. The Boston Globe, Vulture, a lot of other places, and Cody wrote a piece about the language of Deadwood called "Truth and Decency need not be at odds", which is a quote from the newspaper publisher, aw, American character on the show. And it's about the use of profanity and various kinds of slurs on the show and how they're sort of integrated into this richly formal Victorian language and the language of the show has often been described as Shakespearean. I have some actual Shakespearean actors who were in the cast who addressed that and they basically said that's not really accurate. I mean, only in the sense that it doesn't sound the way that our language sounds okay. And and it sort of seems kind of backwards and twisty and turny and everything but it Shakespearean in that way like like the subject and the verb may not be where you would normally expect them to be in working to find them. But other than that, it's kind of this made up vernacular that David Milch and his and his other writers came up with where there were certain characters on the show who curse and some don't. Right and and the people like on the Garrett, who's in New York socialite, she doesn't really she almost never uses profanity in the one time that she does, she's almost charmingly inept at it, is how do you put it "shit or get off the chamber pot?" And she's and she looks rather like saucy like, she can't believe she's using such filthy, right? And then there are other people for whom like every other word is fucking cocksucker and motherfucker. And the and I should say that the profanity is not period accurate.

Matt Zoller Seitz 28:09
And David. David and his writers kind of wavered on a you can tell that they're extremely frustrated with people who would say, Well, is this show historically accurate? And it's like not really. It's accurate in the sense that it's true to the physical conditions of how people lived in a mining camp in the 1870s. But the history is not really accurate. I mean, it's sort of accurate, but they have like Wild Bill Hickok is in town and he becomes friends with Seth Bullock, who was laid off of Deadwood. And in real life, they were never in town at the same time. And the fact that Bullock is believed to have arrived in town somewhere around four days to a week after after Hickok was killed. And instead they have them there at the same time and they develop a friendship and Bullock is very sad when Hickok is killed, and it's wonderful and, you know, so things like that. And like the character on the garret, the character that I just mentioned, she's not based on anybody real but Al Swearengen, the saloon keeper who's played by Ian McShane, is based on a real person and a lot of the other characters on the show are based on real people including calamity chain, okay, and, and some of them are fairly close to the real person like the Al Swearengen character in real life. He was not, in my opinion, as interesting as the one on the show, he was more of a straight up criminal, a gangster businessman criminal, he didn't have poetry in his soul the way that Al has on the show. Sure. And, you know, in the way that like Don Draper is probably 10 times more interesting than real advertising man from that time would have been absolutely poetic license and but then on the other hand, Calamity Jane is by by the agreement of a lot of historians probably closer to the real Calamity Jane than any other fictional version. We've seen that right down to the alcoholism and the and the same sex attraction. You know, sometimes people get a little confused when I say this because I don't mean things literally, I'm kind of going for more of just a point of comparison. But I describe Deadwood as being science fiction. And when I use the word science fiction, I don't mean there's spaceships and lasers, and they're going to other planets and stuff. I just mean it's like, it creates its own world and and the show takes place in this town. They call it a camp. And 99% of the action on the show occurs within the borders of this place. It's like our dirt and welders our town. Right, I call it Sam Peckinpah is our town.

Matt Zoller Seitz 30:44
And, and there are other movies that do this, like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the Robert Altman film, which is a big influence on Deadwood. And John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, they all have a touch of this, those are town westerns. They really commit to the idea that this is like a big outdoor theater space. And the people are like actors on a stage. And sometimes they're inside of a building. And sometimes they're out on the street. And sometimes they're talking and sometimes they're beating each other up or shooting each other. But it's always theater. And it feels a bit like theater. Yeah, and and there's a supernatural or religious or theological undercurrent to the show where it's difficult to describe unless you really immerse yourself in it, but it feels like the town is alive, it feels like the town is alive in the way that like the planet insularis is alive, or the monolith in 2001. Or the force in Star Wars. It's like, here's energy in this town. Sometimes very good things happen. And sometimes very, very bad things very dark, evil things happen. And it seems to be linked to the energies of the of the people in the town, and what they're doing. And it seems like when evil is gaining the upper hand, it's gaining more power and oppressing people more because it's drawing on that energy, and it's monopolizing that energy and something has to happen to break that and return the energy to the side of good and it's not a Manichaean it's not like people are either good or bad. Like everybody on the show is a mix. Right? And some people are purely good. Like I think Doc Cochran, Who's the doctor of the town and played by Brad Dorf. He's a purely good character. I mean, he's, you know, he's an alcoholic and suffering PTSD from the Civil War. But he's an honest, ethical person, and he never refused his medical treatment to anybody for any reason. But other characters are a bit more complex. And sometimes they'll do things that you think are really quite moving and beautiful, and kind of the sort of things you think a person ought to do. And then they'll turn around to do something that's supremely self interested. And it's kind of shocking, how quickly they learn, you know, and there's a plot in the second season where there's a murderer, there's somebody in town who's a murderer, and the people who are running the town know that this person is a murderer, but they don't immediately move to punish him for his crimes because he's connected to a very wealthy person who could describe it. And and boy, does that resonate today. Yeah. You know that story? Yeah. And and that's and also power relationships are something that the show is very much into. And Milch Milt started out. He was a Yale literature professor when he was hired to write a spec script for Hill Street Blues. And the script was brilliant. And it went on to win several Emmys and, and a Humanitas prize, the very first row.

Matt Zoller Seitz 33:51
And it was about a, it was called Trial by Theory. And the plot of it was that the Hillstreet precinct house, a suspect is brought in who raped a nun? And he's black men. And they know he did it. He's guilty of the crime. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that he's guilty. But they can't, they can't. There's something there's some reason why they can't nail him on the crime. Like there's I can't remember exactly what it is. It's a it's a legal technicality. But it's something that you can't, you can't just go around it, you have to obey it. And the solution the police chief comes to at the end as he goes to him and a mob of these, these Catholics, these white ethnic Catholics have surrounded the precinct house because they want to kill this black man is none. And he tells them, he tells the guy, I'm going to let you go and you're free to go and you can leave right now and you can walk out and if he does, he'll be killed. The mob will tear him apart, right? And the guy signs a confession so he forced him to sign the confession he completely violated his oats as a as an officer of the law and the constant tution and it's not the kind of cop show where they presented as like, Good for him. Right? Like the end of it is he goes to confession and the last shot is the police chief going to confession and sitting in the confession booth and the last line in the episode is, Bless me father for I have sinned. Wow. That's the and that's the sort of the mentality that David Meltzer always brought to his writing. Yeah, he was fascinated by you know, he worked on Hill Street Blues, he and his friend Jeffrey Lewis became the executive producers of the show after Steven bochco, the creator left, they ran it for the last two seasons. And, and then he went on to, to co create an executive producer will be the primary writer on NYPD Blue, which is even even bigger success. And he worked on a number of other cop shows in the interim. And he went distinguished David Milch, from almost every other person who ever made a handsome living writing cop shows is David Mills doesn't like cops. He doesn't like cops, he doesn't trust cops. He thinks that people often become cops for bad reasons. And and and he sympathizes with the people that get arrested. His sympathies almost always are with the people who get arrested or who are kind of being forced through the system. And with the people who don't and he always sides with the powerless over the powerful and that's one of the things that I've loved about David as writer and as person, you know, it not only in informs his writing about power relationships in society, not just the police, but you know, in finance and banking, in the law, in government services, real estate, you name it, he's always very, very aware of like power differentials and and how the law what's the phrase, there are certain, you know, there are certain people that the law enjoins but doesn't protect and other people that the law protects, but does not enjoy. You know, and and that's and he believes that this is just a fact of life. And he presents it in a very frank way and a lot of his writing where you come away going, you're really mad, and how unfairly the characters are treated, you know? And Deadwood kind of expanded that vision outward, and it's in the first you what you watch the pilot. Yep. So the river scene is very similar to that history episode that Yeah,

Leah Jones 37:16
yeah. And I was certain that Well, I guess I didn't want to believe that that first that the hanging when he was like, I'll help you fall. Yeah. I wanted to believe somehow that his partner coming through and with the carriage, like it was a fake hanging, and everybody was in on it. And then then the guy was like, after the mob dispersed was going to escape. And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, that is not what happened. So I misread that. Because the, it's interesting, the last lynching in my hometown is exactly what you've described on the Hill Street Blues episode. Really? Yeah. Our history teacher in junior high made sure that we understood that lynchings were not so far out of our history. I'm from Indiana, right. And it was some it was a young black man accused of a sexual assault, or maybe just walking down the street with a white woman. arrested, a mob came to the jail, and they did let him out.

Matt Zoller Seitz 38:27
as you know, huge, huge stage for the Klan. I grew up in Georgia.

Leah Jones 38:33
Yeah. Well, we, so he was led out he was lynched. And then he was burned. [Oh, my God.] And our history teacher in junior high told us a story about just he was just trying to make sure we understood that when we talked about the Civil War, we weren't talking ancient history. And then he told us a story of having maybe 10 years prior told the story of that lynching and class. And the next day a kid showed up with the guy's a bone, like a family souvenir from that lynching. Oh my god. Yeah, Indiana and the Klan and lynchings is not ancient history.

Matt Zoller Seitz 39:20
No, certainly not. Certainly not. Um, so that there's a lot of that kind of thing on Deadwood. Yeah. It's almost a treated for dark comedy. Almost sometimes. It's so absurd. Like there's a there's a scene in season two, where this alcoholic white prospector who has found out that the territorial government is has come up with this completely arbitrary reason to invalidate everyone's gold claims. And turn around and you know, sell it to a banking magnate. I mean, a mining magnate, and this guy he drunkenly read is the statement until he finally withheld from others understands it. And he's enraged and he tries to kill the commissioner, the commissioner who insisted that this notice be posted. And when he fails to kill the commissioner because the sheriff intervenes and stops him that and the mob that he's leading, they spot a black man a block and a half away, and they just decide to lynch him instead. Right. And it's like, it's almost like, it's almost like Blazing Saddles. Except it's not funny, right? That's That's how like random and arbitrary the violence is, and, and the violence on Deadwood is really, really harsh. And with almost really, there's only one exception in the entire run of the show. It's like when violence is inflicted, usually people don't see it coming, or they are powerless to halt the violence. If they do see it coming. And, and it's completely one sided. It's like people have guns and other people don't, or somebody has a, somebody has a club and the other person's on armed, somebody gets hit from behind. A guy starts beating up someone else for almost no reason at all. And the other person has maybe never been in a fight in their life. And they can't even defend themselves. It's very realistic, like the way that they portray it. And they often and again, that power differential comes into play. There's a scene in the third season where the sheriff goes to confront George Hurst who is you know, the guy who's trying to buy up all the gold claims and Deadwood. And this is a very, very bad person. And he wants to basically put, as he says, Put him on notice and say, You're, you're breaking laws, you're killing people who want to eat workers who want to unionize, you're terrorizing the population, and it has to stop. I'm gonna put you in jail. And this guy makes some insinuating remarks about him and the widow Garrett, who I've mentioned. And he is this guy has a lethal temper. The sheriff does Bullock. But he can't strike George Hearst because George Hearst is not only the richest man in town, but one of the richest men in the United States. So he, he fumes and seeds and bears his teeth. And then he goes downstairs and pulls the hotel clerk out from behind his desk and beats him up. Yeah, guy hasn't done anything to him. And he actually says to him as he's being beaten. He says, What have I done to give offense? Yeah. And the answer is nothing. It's just he has no, he's somebody who can be beaten. And there's no fear that, you know, what are they going to do? Call the cops? It's the sheriff who's getting the shot. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Leah Jones 42:33
Matt, I want to do a little time traveling with you. Yeah. You say in the introduction, and now this is because my friend James told me to read he like was like, there's not a spoiler you can read this part. Because your notes no spoilers ahead. Warning is so severe. But you said that it was your first wife who turned you on to Deadwood? Yes. That she would she was watching season one late at night while she was feeding your your first son. Your oldest child?

Matt Zoller Seitz 43:04
Yeah, my Yeah, I use my it's a long story. Let's say one of my sons.

Leah Jones 43:09
Okay. Yeah. And so how did you know did she was she recording it on the VCR and then watching it at night? Like at what point did she during waking hours, say hey, man, you gotta watch a show.

Matt Zoller Seitz 43:26
Well, she can't she I knew she was watching it. And it was a thing where this was the spring of 2004. And I, you know, I was working at the star ledger as a television critic. And I was working as a film critic in New York Press. And I was also in post production on the feature film. And it was in the sound editing and color correction phase. So I was keeping my show watching to a minimum, I was watching the things that I was assigned to watch. And I was not watching things that I wasn't assigned to watch. I wasn't assigned Deadwood. But I knew you know, I love David Milch. And I intended to get around to it eventually. But what happened was, I watched the first couple episodes. And I thought this is this is really interesting. The language is very dense. The plot is very complicated. And I don't have the mental or emotional bandwidth for a show like this right now. Like no disrespect at all, but it was just like, I can't handle this. I'm going to revisit this a few months down the road. And then one morning at breakfast, Jen comes over to me. I'm standing by the coffeemaker and she says I have two very important things to tell you. And I said, What are they? And she said, Deadwood might be the greatest drama in the history of American television. And I said, Okay, all right. And you said your son's first word is going to be cocksucker. And, and I got to tell that to David Milch. And he laughed and then he said, I'm pleased as punch about the first thing and not so much about the second. And for the record, his first word was was was Daddy it wasn't the other one. But yeah, but that was Eugen was a film major with me at SMU, and our relationship revolved around art, movies and music and, and television and literature and poetry and all that stuff. You know, that is kind of not considered very cool in the United States anymore, unfortunately. Uh, but yeah, and I, you know, loved her very much and Mr. Terribly, and she certainly turned me on to a lot of great things. And one of them was dead wood. And I became a great great fan of dead wood and I and and I wrote many articles about it. And I, it just became one of those things that I wouldn't shut up about. There's certain things that people if you know me, you know that what I'm obsessed with. And one of those things is Deadwood, and then always has been ever since it was on the air and I was devastated when it was canceled. And I'm pleased to say that this book I can say with confidence that we finally untangled why Deadwood was canceled. Okay, there have been different versions of what happened that were somewhat at odds with each other over the years, and we did some detective work me and Jeremy Fassler, who was my my co writer on the biography section of the book, Jeremy's a, in addition to being a great organizer of material and a transcriber, and researcher, just an all around like x executor, I would say, he's also a journalist, and he's got a great nose for, you know, putting together the pieces of a story so that you can see the whole thing laid out and, and we figured it out. We can we even have a date. We have the date when that happened, which was May 5 2006. And it was the afternoon it was a Friday. Wow, you know, who was in the room and we know who was on the phone.

Leah Jones 46:43
Amazing. Yeah,

Matt Zoller Seitz 46:44
I mean, then none of that, you know, that doesn't exactly mend anybody's broken heart if they've missed the show, but at least you know now. Yeah.

Leah Jones 46:51
Well, then it did. Come back for the the movie, which I heard about a lot on every pop culture podcast that I listened to.

Matt Zoller Seitz 47:01
Yeah, that was pretty miraculous that they got it done. And there's a chapter in the book about that as well. And of course, that was David Meltzer had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, when he began working on that, and he had to have helped to complete it. His wife, his daughters, Regina Corrado, who started out as a writer on the show, and Nicole Beatty, who also started out as a writer on the show helped nic pizzolatto, who created crew detective came in for a few weeks, but it was really a lot of the heavy lifting was done by Regina, and Nicole. And their names will be familiar to television fans because Regina Corrado was one of the people who ran Sons of Anarchy, okay, for a number of years and and, and that was a show that they used a lot of Deadwood people on that show. Some were regular, some are guest stars. Yeah. And Nicole Beatty, basically, you know, she supervised Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. Wow. So she went on to and it's kind of funny, like, I didn't put all the pieces together. But until we started working on this book, but Deadwood may have died prematurely. But boy did it have an impact, like you look at like you can see echoes of Deadwood and all these other shows. Not just obvious ones like that AMC series Hell on Wheels wanted very badly to be Deadwood. And it was quite an interesting show. Like it wasn't on dead Woods level. I don't believe anything has been but it was it was like a 70s hippie pot Western. And they had music and slow motion and stuff. You know, I thought it was kind of cool. And it was like the kind of Western like Dennis Hopper would have made, you know? Yeah. But also, you know, Sons of Anarchy is they it was described as Hamlet on bikes and like they it's really like basically it's like a bunch of outlaws and instead of ridi

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