71 Facts About David Simon

David Simon worked for The Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years, wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood with Ed Burns.

The former book was the basis for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street, on which Simon served as a writer and producer.

David Simon adapted the latter book into the HBO mini-series The Corner.

David Simon was the creator, executive producer, head writer, and show runner of the HBO television series The Wire.

David Simon adapted the non-fiction book Generation Kill into a television mini-series, and served as the show runner for the project.

David Simon was selected as one of the 2010 MacArthur Fellows and named an Utne Reader visionary in 2011.

David Simon created the HBO series Treme with Eric Overmyer, which aired for four seasons.

We Own This City was developed and written by George Pelecanos and David Simon, and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green.

David Simon was raised in a Jewish family, and had a bar mitzvah ceremony.

David Simon has a brother, Gary Simon, and a sister, Linda Evans, who died in 1990.

In March 1977, when David Simon was still in high school, David Simon's father was one of a group of over 140 people held hostage in Washington, DC by former national secretary of the Nation of Islam Hamaas Abdul Khaalis in the Hanafi Siege.

David Simon graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Maryland, and wrote for the school newspaper, The Tattler.

David Simon was hired by the Baltimore Sun for a piece he wrote about Lefty Driesell, who was then the men's basketball coach at the University of Maryland.

David Simon spent most of his career covering the crime beat.

David Simon says that he was initially altruistic and was inspired to enter journalism by The Washington Posts coverage of Watergate but became increasingly pragmatic as he gained experience.

David Simon was a union captain when the writing staff went on strike in 1987 over benefit cuts.

David Simon remained angry after the strike ended and began to feel uncomfortable in the writing room.

David Simon searched for a reason to justify a leave of absence and settled on the idea of writing a novel.

In 1988, disillusioned, David Simon took a year's leave to go into the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Unit to write a book.

David Simon's leave of absence from The Sun resulted in his first book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

Two detectives David Simon was riding with pulled their car to a curb to apprehend two suspects, but Detective Dave Brown got his trenchcoat caught in a seat belt when he tried to exit the car.

Brown told David Simon to assist Detective Terry McLarney himself, and David Simon helped apprehend and search one of the suspects.

David Simon learned to be more patient in research and writing, and said a key lesson was not promoting himself but concentrating on his subjects.

David Simon told Baltimore's City Paper in 2003 that Homicide was not traditional journalism.

David Simon suggested that they send the book to Baltimore native and film director Barry Levinson.

The project became the award-winning TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, on which David Simon worked as a writer and producer.

David Simon was asked by Mutrux to write the show's pilot episode but declined, feeling he did not have the necessary expertise.

David Simon collaborated with his old college friend David Mills to write the season two premiere "Bop Gun".

David Simon received Austin Film Festival's Outstanding Television Writer Award in 2010.

David Simon left his job with the Baltimore Sun in 1995 to work full-time on Homicide: Life on the Street during the production of the show's fourth season.

David Simon wrote the teleplay for the season four episodes "Justice: Part 2" and "Scene of the Crime".

David Simon was credited as a producer on the show's sixth and seventh seasons.

David Simon wrote the story and teleplay for the seventh season episodes "The Twenty Percent Solution" and "Sideshow: Part 2".

David Simon was nominated for a second WGA Award for Best Writing in a Drama for his work on "Finnegan's Wake" with Yoshimura and Mills.

David Simon has said that he thought the show was a "remarkable drama" but that it did not reflect the book.

David Simon has said that when writing for the show he had to put his experiences of the real detectives aside as the characters became quite different, particularly in their more philosophical approach to the job.

David Simon said that TV must find shorthand ways of referencing anything real.

David Simon took a second leave of absence from the Baltimore Sun in 1993 to research the project.

David Simon became close to one of his subjects, drug addict Gary McCullough, and was devastated by his death while he was writing the project.

David Simon again returned to his journalism career after finishing the book but felt further changed by his experiences.

David Simon said he "was less enamored of the braggadocio, all that big, we're-really-having-an-impact talk" and no longer believed that they were making a difference; he left his job at The Sun within a year for work on NBC's Homicide.

David Simon was the creator, show runner, executive producer and head writer of the HBO drama series The Wire for five seasons.

David Simon approached acclaimed crime fiction authors to write for The Wire.

David Simon was recommended the work of George Pelecanos by a colleague while working at the Baltimore Sun because of similarities between their writing.

Once David Simon received further recommendations including one from his wife Laura Lippman he tried Pelecanos' novel The Sweet Forever and changed his mind.

David Simon sought out Pelecanos when recruiting writers for The Wire.

David Simon pitched Pelecanos the idea of The Wire as a novel for television about the American city as Pelecanos drove him home.

Pelecanos left the production staff following the third season to focus on his next novel; David Simon has commented that he missed having him working on the show full-time but was pleased that he continued to write for them and was a fan of the resultant book The Night Gardener.

David Simon had previously worked with Simon on Homicide where the two became friends.

David Simon has said that he was impressed with Overmyer's writing particularly in synthesizing the story for "Margin of Error" as the episode is the height of the show's political storyline but must progress other plot threads.

David Simon has stated that he finds working with HBO more comfortable than his experiences with NBC on Homicide and that HBO is able to allow greater creative control because it is dependent on subscribers rather than on viewing figures.

David Simon has said that he feels unable to return to network television because he felt pressure to compromise storytelling for audience satisfaction.

David Simon produced and wrote Generation Kill for HBO with Ed Burns.

David Simon collaborated with Eric Overmyer again on Treme, a project about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Overmyer lives part-time in New Orleans, and David Simon believed his experience would be valuable in navigating the "ornate oral tradition" of the city's stories.

David Simon stated that the series would explore beyond the music scene to encompass political corruption, the public housing controversy, the criminal-justice system, clashes between police and Mardi Gras Indians, and the struggle to regain the tourism industry after the storm.

David Simon's casting of the show mirrored that of The Wire in using local actors wherever possible.

David Simon is known for his realistic dialogue and journalistic approach to writing.

David Simon says that authenticity is paramount and that he writes not with a general audience in mind but with the opinions of his subjects as his priority.

David Simon has described his extensive use of real anecdotes and characters in his writing as "stealing life".

David Simon said he had watched Carroll and Marimow "single-handedly destroy" the newspaper and that he spent over ten years trying to get back at them.

In 2006 Marimow was diagnosed with prostate cancer, something that David Simon said "took the edge off" his grudge.

David Simon has described himself as a social democrat, broadly supporting the existence of capitalism while opposing "raw, unencumbered capitalism, absent any social framework, absent any sense of community, without regard to the weakest and most vulnerable classes in society", which he described as "a recipe for needless pain, needless human waste, needless tragedy".

In 2013, David Simon compared the global surveillance disclosures uncovered by Edward Snowden to a 1980s effort by the City of Baltimore to record the numbers dialed from all pay phones.

David Simon has spoken out publicly against crime journalist Kevin Deutsch, disputing the portrayal of Baltimore's illegal drug trade in Deutsch's book, Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire.

In 2006, David Simon married best-selling Baltimore novelist and former Sun reporter Laura Lippman in a ceremony officiated by John Waters.

Lippman and David Simon separated in 2020 but neither has since filed for divorce.

David Simon's nephew, Jason David Simon, is a guitarist and vocalist for the psychedelic rock band Dead Meadow.

David Simon was the 2012 commencement speaker for the Georgetown University College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the speaker for the Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School graduation.

In 2019, David Simon joined a host of other writers in firing their agents as part of the WGA's stand against the ATA after failing to come to an agreement on their "Code of Conduct".

David Simon had previously led the rallying cry about the practices of packaging by the major talent agencies.