Mr. Johnson’s story — illustrating a bent toward great expectations that has come in handy in the elbows-out world of show business — was told recently as he sipped coffee in Doma, a cafe in Greenwich Village. He began his career at 9 in theatre (he was Jerome in South Pacific), and nowadays, on The Wire, he is the slightly weary but always cool and dedicated Gus Haynes, the city editor of a fictional newspaper called The Baltimore Sun (not to be confused with the real Baltimore Sun). He also directed the last episode of the series, a fitting bit of closure after directing its first episode in 2002.
"It was bittersweet," Mr. Johnson said of directing that last show. "It took forever. Not for any technical reasons, but because when someone’s character ended, we’d give them an ovation. It’s so rare for us, our little tribe of actors, to be part of something so critically acclaimed. For a lot of us it’ll define our careers." Tall, 50ish, with a low, unhurried voice, Mr. Johnson is perhaps best known for portraying Detective Meldrick Lewis in Homicide: Life on the Street. His directing credits include episodes of that series and The Wire as well as The Shield, Sleeper Cell, The West Wing and others. He also directed Boycott, the widely lauded 2001 film on HBO about the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Wire, created by David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who was a producer and writer for Homicide, has been a critical darling too. Each season the series has picked apart some looming national problem — the failed war on drugs, the deterioration of working-class life, dysfunctional political leadership, overwhelmed urban schools — as it affects a sprawling group of characters that has included cops, drug dealers, politicians, teachers, longshoremen and other (often tawdry) Baltimoreans.
This season the newspaper industry is in the spotlight. Because of cuts by its owner, the fictional Sun’s city editor and his staff are buffeted by buyouts, closed foreign bureaus and less space for news, all of which have afflicted the real Sun and many other newspapers around the country. "Your piece took a bad bite there," Gus Haynes tells a young reporter in one episode. Her 35-inch article about three murders was cut to 12 inches and buried inside the paper. "There’s no explaining it," he tells the reporter when she asks why. "Advertising’s down. We’ve got a smaller news hole." A black reporter, though, tells her that her story has the "wrong zip code," explaining that had the murder victims been white and affluent, the article would have landed on Page 1.
The Wire has not attracted viewers and awards the way other critically lauded HBO series like The Sopranos and Sex and the City did. Mr. Johnson said he was hopeful that the new season would change that. "I really hope people who haven’t tapped into the show will tap into it," he said. "Maybe they don’t care about gangbangers, but they care about newspapers and how information is transmitted." A self-professed news junkie," Mr. Johnson hung out at the real Baltimore Sun to learn the language and the rhythms of a newspaper for his role. He was impressed by the fact checking and the speed of reporters, not to mention the great piles of junk on their desks.
The trick to directing a show in which you are also acting can be summed up by "preparation," Mr. Johnson said. "I was in the family," he said. "I didn’t just go into somebody’s kitchen. I knew every role intimately." He also directed the series finale of The Shield, scheduled to be broadcast on FX sometime this spring. Nina Noble, the executive producer of The Wire, said: "There’s an incredible poetry in Clark directing the last episode. He’s the bookend of the show, in terms of directing. There were 30 original crew members with the show at the end, and everyone knows everyone well, and Clark is probably our most beloved director. On the surface he’s a laid-back, casual kind of guy," she said. "Inside, he’s so passionate about what he does."
Timothy A. Franklin, editor of the real Baltimore Sun, said he found Mr. Johnson "impressive" as the city editor. Based on the few new episodes he had seen, Mr. Franklin was less keen on how The Wire depicted Baltimore and the newspaper business and dismissed a coming story about a fabricating journalist as a cliché. "I think the suggestion that this paper doesn’t cover urban affairs, or the texture of urban life the way it used to, is ludicrous on its face," he said.
Mr. Simon has made no secret of his unhappiness with The Sun, which has gone through two changes of ownership in the last eight years. Mr. Johnson said he found Mr. Simon’s views fairly congruent with reality. Mr. Johnson recalled that Mr. Simon told him that he was writing the part of Haynes for him, although he had spent several years only directing. "It was a chance to get back and just be an actor," Mr. Johnson said, "and not deal with all the problems of directing." As both an actor and director, Mr. Johnson said, police shows seem to find him. "I like the yin-yang of a cop’s life, where he’s part fascist and part saint," he said. "That’s where the good dramas are."
His next directing project is a film called Chinese Wall, about the politics of oil in Nigeria. Politics are in his blood. His father, an African-American, grew up tagging along with his mother as she cleaned homes on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. Mr. Johnson’s mother came from a wealthy white family and grew up on Park Avenue. They married, had four kids, worked in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Philadelphia and eventually settled in Canada.
"My mom set up relief programs in third world countries," Mr. Johnson said. "We would do things like go to Bogotá with her instead of summer camp." These days Mr. Johnson, the father of two college-age daughters, keeps a home in Toronto and an apartment in Chelsea in Manhattan. And he still shares his parent’s sensibilities. "Film is the only language I speak," he said, "and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don’t want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities."
