'Wire' Creator Proud of New HBO Miniseries, No Matter Who Wrote it

From the creator of The Wire! Sort of! The Iraq miniseries Generation Kill premieres this weekend on HBO, with do-no-wrong David Simon linked as co-writer/executive producer of the seven-part event. The LA Times had a look and seems to have liked it fine, despite the fingerprints of journalist and source author Evan Wright having smudged some of the central characters' "expository dialogue."

Fine — except Wright didn't write the scripts. Or did he? And did Simon and Wire collaborator Ed Burns fudge his screenwriting credit on five episodes? According to one report, excerpted after the jump, Wright could be hatching a plan for the forthcoming Generation Kill: 50% More Evan Wright Above The Line special-edition DVD:

Last summer, after HBO cut the series from eight episodes to seven, emails flew back and forth last summer from Baltimore, where Simon lives, to Baghdad, where Wright had returned to report for Rolling Stone. Wright was worried, correctly it turned out, that Simon was about to kill one of his scripts. Simon resolved the matter by giving joint credit to Wright and Burns. Again two months ago Wright had to request further credit in the wake of still more active input, and Simon agreed.
But Simon denies that Wright was responsible for half the scripts with his or Burns' name on them. "If he told you that, he's genuinely incorrect," Simon said this evening, from a screening for Marines in California, where Wright was also in attendance. He added: "Nobody wrote any of the scripts by themselves. There's stuff in Evan's script written by me and Ed. There's stuff written in total by me and Ed. There's stuff in our scripts written by Evan. That's what happens in every serialized show."

The two appear to have reached an amicable agreement, with Wright humbly acknowledging Simon's gracious Kill stewardship in exchange for the opportunity to work in this town again after a mandatory five-year probation. And seeing as that's just about as long as we have left in Iraq, a well-reported follow-up seems like an ideal re-teaming. Glad it worked out, guys.