The Brown Dog — A short film about isolation and the search for human connection

The last time Jamie-James Medina saw Michael K. Williams was during the pandemic. “I was walking down Houston Street and I saw him sitting outside a restaurant,” Medina says. “It was nighttime, and he had that mask on, but I knew it was him, because of that massive scar running down his face.” They had met a few years earlier, when Medina had arranged for Williams to record an audio version of a short story by the artist and musician Willis Earl Beal called “The Brown Dog Chronicles.” Williams’ voice, like his face, was easy to recognize. He was best known for playing Omar Little on “The Wire,” delivering threats and observations in a warm snarl. Omar was a wise but reckless outlaw who seemed to have no real allies at all—except, of course, for the millions of viewers who loved him. On that day on Houston Street, Medina remembers, Williams greeted him with a wink, and they chatted for a few moments about nothing in particular. It was their last conversation: on September 6, 2021, Williams was found in his Brooklyn apartment, dead of a drug overdose. He was 54 years old.

Medina didn’t know Williams well, but in the months that followed he found himself thinking about the project they had begun. Williams’ narration of Beal’s “The Brown Dog Chronicles” had been recorded for “The Organist,” a podcast from the publishing company McSweeney’s. Medina is a photographer, filmmaker and creative consultant—the kind of person who always seems to have half a dozen interesting projects in process. He recruited Nadia Hallgren, a director who is known for documentaries, including “Becoming,” the Emmy-nominated portrait of Michelle Obama. Working with the animator Fons Schiedon, they found a way to bring Williams back to the screen, as the voice of an animated short film, “The Brown Dog.” I’ve been friends with Medina and Hallgren for years, and while I’d long heard rumors about this project, I don’t think I realized the significance of what they were creating: a final tribute to Williams. Steve Buscemi, who acted alongside Williams in “Boardwalk Empire,” signed on as an executive producer, and also lent his voice to the film. “I was surprised that there was this untapped vehicle that Michael’s voice is in,” Buscemi told me. “It really was like finding this buried treasure that you didn’t know was there.”

Actors are often mistaken for the characters they play—it’s a risk of the job, especially if you’re good at it. But this was particularly true for Williams, whose portrayal of Omar Little was so intense, and so specific, that many people imagined that he was an actual Baltimore desperado who had somehow wandered onto the set of a great television show. In fact, Williams was a Brooklyn native who sometimes felt out of place in the tough East Flatbush housing development where he was raised. In “Scenes from My Life,” a strikingly thoughtful memoir that was published posthumously, Williams remembered how self-conscious he was. “My attraction to boys, my desire for acceptance, and my yearning for a male figure in my life were all jumbled together in my mind,” he wrote. “It was confusing for me, and what hurt was that the boys whose acceptance I wanted the most picked on me the hardest. It was like they sensed my desire and punished me for it.” He found an identity through dance: after having been mesmerized by the moves in a Janet Jackson video, he fell in with a community of like-minded young dancers in Washington Square Park, and made some of his first onscreen appearances in videos by Crystal Waters and George Michael. A few years later, when his face was slashed in a street fight, he implored the emergency-room staff to wait for a skilled plastic surgeon before operating, because he didn’t want to be disfigured. He said, “You’ll ruin my career if you stitch me up!” Despite a surgeon’s best efforts, Williams was left with a scar that was impossible to ignore. In the book, he considered the irony of the situation: being the victim of violence gave him a kind of street credibility—“a gang sign on my face.” It helped him book one of his first film roles, playing High Top, the brother of Tupac Shakur’s character, Tank, in “Bullet,” from 1996. Shakur apparently saw a photograph of Williams, and said, “He looks thugged-out enough to play my little brother.” And it seemed to fit the role of Omar Little, a cerebral and relatively ethical predator who robbed the city’s drug dealers while also sharing casual affection with a handful of boyfriends. Buscemi remembers that Williams brought a similar “warmth” to the role of Chalky White, a racketeer and community leader in “Boardwalk Empire.” Buscemi says, “It was just so exciting to have him as a scene partner—it was electric.”

In “The Brown Dog,” Williams plays a more mysterious character named “NOBODY,” a security guard who is trying to decode his surroundings, trying to figure out what’s real. Willis Earl Beal, who wrote the short story, had actually worked as a security guard in Chicago. Like NOBODY, Beal was required to keep a security log, and he added characters and ideas in the margin. “He kept on seeing this dog that was haunting the grounds, and he was trying to figure out if it was real or just his imagination,” Medina says. Eventually Beal turned this marginalia into a work of fiction, “The Brown Dog Chronicles.” Medina loved the idea of a corporate security guard being a psychedelic version of an old-fashioned movie detective, recording facts and hallucinations with equal seriousness. Hallgren liked it, too—“She was very protective of the character,” Medina says. Before she was an acclaimed filmmaker, Hallgren, too, was a security guard. “I used to do security, from the time I was 19 years old until I was about 25,” she says. “I believe that that is the one job that taught me the most about life, and prepared me for what I do now: observing people, trying to understand people, trying to pass time—and part of that is sometimes making up stories about who people are.”

From the beginning, Medina had a sense of how “The Brown Dog” should look. “He’s working a graveyard shift in Chicago in the dead of winter,” he says. “And then you add Michael’s voice: it’s so dark, authentic, full of life, full of experience. It just lent itself to that noirish world: saturated yellows, dead-of-night blacks.” Schiedon, the animator, emphasized the contrast between the hand-drawn characters and the anonymous, mostly empty landscapes around them. “At times the amount of information and detail wavers, in keeping with NOBODY’s ability to make sense of things,” Schiedon says. “Stuff gets a little fuzzy, and then springs back into focus.” The score, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tyshawn Sorey, starts out dark and ominous, growing more wistful and perhaps more hopeful as it becomes clear that the character is pursuing a kind of spiritual quest, even if he doesn’t fully understand it. Chiwetel Ejiofor, another executive producer of the film, saw NOBODY as both a descendent of Travis Bickle, from “Taxi Driver,” and also a reflection of the contemporary hunger for social connection. “The job of security guard is one that encourages you to disappear, to become a nobody,” he says. “A good day, for most people, is when they don’t notice you at all, because having an interaction with security is almost, by definition, a negative experience.” At one point, NOBODY calls into a radio show, trying to connect with the host, played by Buscemi. “He was just such an empathetic human being,” Buscemi says, about Williams. “I can tell that he feels this way towards this character that he’s voicing—there’s a deepness in this, and it feels like it comes from the depths of his soul.”

Ejiofor acted alongside Williams in “12 Years a Slave,” and he says that Williams knew that strangers sometimes found him intimidating, so he would make a point of putting people at ease. “There was something very playful about Michael, but also something deeply serious—a sense of not fucking around,” Ejiofor told me. “You felt that around him, and you felt that on set with him.” For Williams, a determination to do great work co-existed with a lifelong struggle with substance abuse, which he detailed in his memoir. “Addiction is my legacy as much as the darkness of my skin and the sound of my voice,” he wrote. Part of his legacy, too, was his willingness to tell his own story, and to draw from it in his work. Ejiofor hopes that “The Brown Dog” will remind people of Williams’ range—“how talented an actor he was, how in control he was, how infinitely watchable.” Listenable, too. “His voice is so connected to him that you see him within the context of this,” Ejiofor says. “He’s brought to life as soon as you hear it.”

To watch The Brown Dog, click below.