Men's Journal

The new horse-racing series, Luck, is poised to rule Sunday night. But it almost didn’t make it to the finish line.

by Fred Schruers

In late 2009, TV writer David Milch (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Deadwood) spotted a friend dining with director Michael Mann at an L.A. restaurant. Milch stopped by the table and started discussing his latest script, a pilot for HBO about the seedy underbelly of horse racing. As a courtesy, he asked Mann (whom he knew only casually) if he’d like to read it. Weeks later the director called Milch to say he wanted in.

The fruit of their collaboration, Luck — a dark drama starring Dustin Hoffman as a gangster fresh out of prison and Nick Nolte as a down-and-out trainer — is one of HBO’s most anticipated series ever, a show the network is betting will own Sunday night the way The Sopranos did. But thanks to a clash of egos between writer and director, both notorious control freaks, it almost didn’t make it to the screen.

In October 2010, Mann (Heat, Ali, Collateral) hailed the pilot — a swirling introduction to a stable of gamblers, con artists, and Hoffman’s gritty ex-con, Ace Bernstein — as “one of the best I’ve ever read.”

But shortly after Mann signed on, Milch says he was frozen out. While the reason is unclear, Milch’s rep as an obsessive reviser with an unusual writing process (lying prone in a roomful of colleagues, he dictates stream-of-consciousness dialogue to a typist) might have given Mann pause. “The fact is,” Milch says, “we did not talk an awful lot about the script.”

As the shoot approached that month, Mann ­reportedly ­delivered word to Milch that he wasn’t welcome on set. Or as Milch puts it, “During the first episode it became clear that I had . . . done my work. Is that adequately euphemistic?”

Nolte offers a more frank assessment: “Michael’s not one to dillydally around. He made it real clear he was gonna direct that first show.”

Still, Mann, Milch, and HBO, which poured about $10 million into the pilot, were committed to seeing the project through. “We have disagreements,” Mann says. “But David loves what I do in filmmaking. I love what David does in writing. The script is fucking great. OK? So we both said, ‘Yeah, we bang heads on this and bang heads on that.’ But we have exultant highs when something really works.”

Through go-betweens, the factions brokered a fragile peace: Milch was granted final say over scripts; Mann was given control over everything else, from casting to editing. Mann explains, “To Dave I said, ‘Look, there’s got to be a captain of the ship. You’re the boss of the writing, and I’m the boss of the moviemaking.’ It’s that simple.”

The division of labor isn’t as unbalanced as it might seem. Luck is about characters, and Milch decides their fate. “When episode six was being shot,” he says, “I was working on episode seven. So I was fully ­occupied. It wasn’t as if I was sitting here knitting.”

Today Mann calls the partnership “a collision in the best sense.” As if to confirm the détente, Milch has already written the first episode of Luck’s second season. “It took some working out, but we did it,” he says. “You know, Michael is indefatigable. He keeps coming at it and” — he pauses, surprised where this thought has taken him — “I don’t regret an instant of our relationship.”