If you’re having a conversation about the greatest TV dramas of all-time, HBO’s The Wire is probably going to come up at some point. The show has long been admired for its nuanced take on inner-city life and its depiction of the Baltimore drug trade was as authentic as it gets.
So authentic, in fact, that many of the show’s minor characters were played by real-life Baltimore police officers, politicians, and even drug dealers. Case in point: Melvin Williams (AKA “Little Melvin”), who died Thursday at the University of Maryland Medical Center at the age of 73.
Williams — who played a street-wise deacon in the series — was once a notorious drug kingpin, but turned his life around after a stint in prison, and began working with local pastors to steer young people away from life on the street.
The Wire creator David Simon tweeted out his condolences yesterday, and credited Williams as the man who made him “begin to rethink the drug war.”
RIP to Melvin “Little Melvin” Williams, 73, who made me begin to rethink the drug war. You ended it free, brother. pic.twitter.com/UjtshQAmzz
— David Simon (@AoDespair) December 3, 2015
“Melvin did a lot of damage — and he’d be the first to admit it,” Simon told the Baltimore Sun. “He was a fascinating man in terms of Baltimore and what the drug war was going to do to this country.”
As a crime reporter for the Sun, Simon penned a series of articles on Williams’ life entitled Easy Money: Anatomy of a Drug Empire and the expose was one of the inspirations for the show that has defined his career.
Williams had previously told friends that he had cancer, but the exact cause of his death is still unknown.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?