Mike Sabo is waiting for his heart to arrive. It is due any minute from Los Angeles.
Just before lunch, an assistant hands him a small brown box. Sabo slashes through the packing tape and reverently unwraps the organ. It's a beaut: crimson with purple overtones, made of gelatin, and, on this sweltering day, cool and faintly moist to the touch.
Sabo studies the heart with satisfaction. It will play a starring role in the autopsy scene of the HBO television show The Wire, which is scheduled to be shot later this May afternoon. "Perfect," says Sabo, props master for the series, which is both set and being filmed in Baltimore.
Sabo is among the hundreds of film professionals on the cable show's staff who are racing against time to re-create Baltimore's inner city in, well, Baltimore's inner city.
From its beginnings, The Wire, which is scheduled to begin broadcasting its third season in September, has had ambitions of being more than just another Hollywood cop drama. Creators David Simon, a former Sun reporter, and Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective, set out to craft a novel for television, with each episode comparable to a new chapter and full of the grittiness and ambiguity of real life. It is a nuanced world in which the "good guys" - the cops - sometimes beat up people for the fun of it, while the "bad guys" - the drug dealers - have occasional moral qualms.
"The Wire is fiction that is rooted in the real," Simon says. "Some of the scenes might have happened, some are rumored to have happened, and some never happened. But all of them could have happened."
Those crew members who grew up in Maryland, such as Sabo of Westminster and makeup chief Debi Young of Owings Mills, bring an extra dimension to the job. No one had to introduce them to crabs steamed in Old Bay or explain why grocery stores empty of toilet paper with the first wintertime flake.
That's especially crucial since several episodes this season are being written by three big-name crime writers who hail from elsewhere: George Pelecanos (Hard Revolution), Richard Price (Clockers ) and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River). Pecanos' books are set in Washington, Price's in New Jersey, and Lehane's in Boston.
Price, in particular, was determined not to make outsider mistakes. "Price was the most compulsive," Simon recalls. "His research was journalistic. He spent time riding with squad cars patrolling West Baltimore."
