‘Treme’ Creators Mourn Loss of David Mills, 48

By MCN Staff -- Multichannel News, 4/5/2010 1:37:52 AM

NEW YORK — At a lunch hosted by HBO at Aureole in Midtown for its new series Treme, executive producers David Simon and Eric Overmyer briefly eulogized their friend and fellow writer David Mills, who died suddenly, at age 48, of a brain aneurysm on the Treme set two days earlier.

Simon began by explaining how Treme was not his alone, and how collaborative television writing is compared to most other writing pursuits, “with people shooting down the worst ideas and making the best ideas great.”

“It’s more than one guy,” said Simon, who in 2004 lost another close collaborator, The Wire executive producer Robert F. Colesberry, from complications after heart surgery at age 57, shortly before production began on season three. “I’m sort of like the front guy in a very good band.”

Both Simon and Overmyer had fallen in love with the Crescent City and knew the story they wanted to tell.

“What we needed was someone from the outside, to ground the story,” Simon said. “Where are you going? What’s the theme here? How does this resonate with anybody who’s not from New Orleans? And that’s what David and George [Pelecanos] did.”

Simon described Mills, who wrote for Simon’s earlier HBO series The Corner and The Wire, as a light-skinned African-American with a “special voice” who had “an amused intolerance for ideology.”

“I’ve loved this guy since I’ve been at the University of Maryland paper,” he said.

Overmyer said he believed Mills might have preferred to die on set, or maybe “in the middle of an argument with David Simon and the writers.”

Simon said, “David was a huge influence. It’s just heartbreaking that he’s not going to be there at the premiere to gauge the reaction.”