How the HBO drama 'Luck' coincided with the biggest disaster in David Milch’s life: the loss of almost his entire fortune to gambling, mainly at racetracks. Read an excerpt from Milch's new memoir, 'Life’s Work'
, following a series of accidental horse deaths during filming. This tragedy was intertwined with the biggest personal disaster of Milch’s life: the loss of almost his entire fortune to gambling, mainly at racetracks. Milch’s wife, Rita, ended up suing her husband’s accountants for keeping the most damning details of Milch’s financial immolation a secret from her .
We shot the pilot in April of 2010. It was not a happy collaboration for me. Michael insists upon a single voice, especially on set. I couldn’t go to the set — literally I was forbidden from going. That was a loss. If we’re going to engage with him as a reality, then it behooves me to evaluate him, and I don’t want to evaluate him. He’s a driven, enormously articulate figure, but when I watched the pilot, there were moments or sequences where I thought he was wrong.
To better understand some of our characters who were also degenerate gamblers, Michael asked me what I felt when I won. I told him, “Nothing. Absolute contingency. Everything is at risk and the specific outcome doesn’t depend on my character flaws, so that’s a release.” I have to risk my family’s welfare, I have to risk every fucking thing, risk the humiliation afterward of, “‘Here’s a guy they say has made over a hundred million dollars in his life and may wind up under a fucking bridge.
It was a sad time. I lost about 45 pounds in six months. The revelation has the effect of shaming you totally. It cuts you off from every other avenue of expression in connection with those you love. And there’s a kind of doubleness, the first half of which is that you’re ashamed about the defects of your personal, private behavior, and simultaneously you feel a profound, profound shame and divorce from the blessings of your relation with the person you love.
I was relieved when the show ended, and Rita even more so. I suspect HBO was too — we were way over budget. Still, I found some dear friends while making it. Dustin is one. The writer Eric Roth is another. Eric’s attempts at helping Michael and me work together were heroic. That’s a blessing of the work we do, getting to know and love people we wouldn’t otherwise.
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