David Milch has Alzheimer’s disease. He also has a new screenplay
LOS ANGELES — David Milch sat in a Playa Vista restaurant, eyeing a small cheese pizza in front of him. The story he was telling is true.
“I was running bets for my old man and half a dozen people when I was a boy,” Milch said, flashing a soft smile at the recollection of hanging out at the racetrack. “They’d tell me, ‘Bet $10 on the seven horse and shut up!’ For the big races, it was frightening, carrying around $1,000 when I was 7 years old.”
Encouraged by his companions in the nearly empty restaurant — Rita, his wife of 43 years, and his good friend, John Hallenborg — Milch continued to weave his memories of those bygone days into indelible images: magnificent horses thundering across the finish line and “degenerates” wagering staggering sums.
In many ways, it was a familiar scenario. Telling vivid stories populated with colorful characters, good and not so good, has been the defining work of Milch’s life. That ability made him royalty in Hollywood as he wrote for the classic police procedural “Hill Street Blues” and created provocative fare such as the gritty cop drama “NYPD Blue,” with Steven Bochco, and the acclaimed neo-Western “Deadwood.”
But this was not just a casual lunch to indulge in nostalgia.
While Milch, 78, can still tap into his past to construct a compelling yarn, his thoughts are filtered through a degrading lens. In 2019 he disclosed that he has Alzheimer’s disease. After being at the center of the TV world, his career came to an abrupt halt. Many in the legion of friends and associates who used
