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The Sopranos Sessions
A Conversation with David Chase
Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall
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eBook - ePub
The Sopranos Sessions
A Conversation with David Chase
Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall
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About This Book
New York Times âBestseller: "The authors' interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating... the definitive celebration of a show that made history." â Kirkus Reviews On January 10, 1999, a mobster walked into a psychiatrist's office and changed TV history. By shattering preconceptions about the kinds of stories the medium should tell, The Sopranos launched our current age of prestige television, paving the way for such giants as Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. As TV critics for Tony Soprano's hometown paper, New Jersey's The Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz were among the first to write about the series before it became a cultural phenomenon. Now they have reunited to produce The Sopranos Sessions, a collection of recaps, conversations, and critical essays covering every episode. Featuring a series of new long-form interviews with series creator David Chase, as well as selections from the authors' archival writing on the series, The Sopranos Sessions explores the show's artistry, themes, and legacy, examining its portrayal of Italian Americans, its graphic depictions of violence, and its deep connections to other cinematic and television classics. "Includes highly detailed recaps of each episode [and] a debate about the much-discussed final moment of the final episode." â The New York Times "Excellent... an enjoyable read." â The Irish Times
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THE DAVID CHASE SESSIONS
These conversations took place between the authors and Sopranos creator David Chase in a series of French and Italian restaurants (and one hotel bar) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan between September and December 2017.
Session One:
âWhy would I want to do that?â
On the origins of Chaseâs career and The Sopranos, finding James Gandolfini and Edie Falco,âCollege,â and more.
ALAN: Tell us about your mother.
DAVID: I said a lot back in the old days, about depression and my mother, stuff like that, and I kind of oversold it. The reason I talked so much about her and about the pressure is because I knew thatâs what the show was about, and I wanted there to be a connection, so that people would say, âHey, gee, that sounds interesting.â Over the last maybe eight to ten years, I really have to come to the conclusion that in many respects, I had a very happy childhood. My mother was nuts, and she obviously did not have a happy childhood. I have a hunch that she might have been abused. And my father was a different kind of guy altogether, although he was also an angry person. But my mother? My mother was very funny.
A: How far in Caldwell did you grow up from where The Sopranos house was?
D: As the crow flies, a mile. To actually get there? Ten or twelve minutes.
MATT: How much did the world of the Mob overlap with yours?
D: A little. My father had a hardware store in Verona, New Jersey, and he knew these two guys who had a tailor shop in Verona. They were connected. I think a lot of them lived in Hanover. As I was leaving New Jersey and the East Coast, some guy had his garage got blown up in North Caldwell, and the guy in Roseland got shotgunned to death.
I was interested in the Mob probably mostly because I was Italian. My father and I used to watch The Untouchables every Thursday night. I think thatâs the reason the Mob really grew on me. When I was watching that show, I was watching my father. He knew all those gangstersâ names, Frankie Yale and all those people. I was interested in my fatherâs youth, where he came from and what he did and what it was like then.
An even better example of that was William Wellmanâs The Public Enemy. His [Cagneyâs] mother in there looked my grandmother. It all started with Public Enemy, even before The Untouchables.
So he watched The Untouchables every week. But he and my mother especially hated the Italian Mob, the gangsters. They were ashamed of them, thought they were terrible people. From watching The Untouchables, a friend and I got the idea to shake down the president of the school class in eighth grade for lunch money, and he went and told the principal! [Laughs] I got in a lot of trouble for that. My father said, âYouâre imitating the most horrible, the worst kind of people on the planet!â He didnât say it that way, but he was furious. It was further confirmation that I was a bum and a punk and all that.
But heâd watch The Untouhables anyway. So many people were like that.
A: That makes me think of Richard La Penna. Did your father object to the idea that there were so many depictions of Italians as wiseguys?
D: There were fewer depictions back then. I mean, this is pre-Godfather, which really kick-started all that stuff, and The Godfather was so Italian. Before that, as I recall, in the original Scarface you had Tony Camonte, but there werenât Italian actors playing the roles, either. It all came due with the advent of The Godfather.
A: What do you remember of the first time you saw it?
D: I was disappointed in it because Iâd read the book. The book had the whole story in there, two moviesâ worth. And Marlon Brando wasnât Italian. I liked itâIâm not saying I didnât like itâbut I remember the book just blowing me away, so in comparing it to the book, as I was, they werenât the same thing. Iâve seen Part I since then, and I like it a lot better, though I still to this day like Part II better than I.
A: How and when did you decide you wanted to write for TV and movies?
D: When I was in film school. I went to film school because I wanted to be a director, and thatâs where I learned that films had to have a script. Writing a script was cheap in comparison to making a film. Going to graduate school, film schoolâit cost money to make films, even small ones. But all you need to write them is a paper and pencil, so thatâs when I started thinking about it. I was twenty-one, twenty-two, something like that.
I had written scripts for small films that I made, but I canât remember the name of this first one I wrote. I was inflamed by Jean-Luc Godard and stuff like that, not knowing what the hell I was even talking aboutâor what Godard was talking about. [Laughs] Stanford Film School had a documentary department, and I was there because I got in, and because I got a fellowship, so I went there because it was open to me. So over a period of two years, you could either write a thesis about . . . I donât know, whatâs that famous thing where they show an impassive face and then a baby crying?
M: The Kuleshov Effect.1
D: Yes. The Kuleshov Effect. You could write about something like that, or you could make a film. I decided to make a film. It was called The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos. It was about a grad student who has a fantasy of this alternate universe where heâs a mobster. It wasnât very good. [Laughs] Although I did get $600 from a student film distributor! My father loaned me the money, about a thousand [dollars], and then I got the $600 and he never let me pay him back!
A: What was the first thing you sold on a more adult, legitimate scale?
D: An episode of a TV series called The Bold Ones: The Lawyers. The producer was a guy named Roy Huggins.2 Our teacher had sent him our script . . . and he read it and wanted to hire us. So he hired me, but by that time, the friend I wrote it with had given up and gone back to Chicago, so I wrote this episode, and that was the first thing I did.
A: Huggins then went on to create The Rockford Files. Was that how you wound up on Rockford Files?
D: No, it was more circuitous than that. I was under contract at Universal almost that whole time.
A: So you had gone to film school, wanted to be a director, been into Godard, and now youâre writing episodic hours of TV for Universal. How did you feel about that at the time?
D: I was excited by it. I was actually inside a major studio. I went there every day, I had a parking spot, and I got to work with really talented people. I then became terrified of directing, and didnât want to do it anymore because I saw how they were treatedââHey asshole, look what you did!â So I thought, âI could never do that.â I had worked [on TV] before The Rockford Files, but that wasnât as stirring to me. The Rockford Files, to me, had a feeling of real place and real time, and I felt it was taking place somewhere other than its time slot, that it was really Los Angeles.
A: You wrote a couple episodes late in the run of The Rockford Files, both with Greg Antonacci: one where the two Jersey guys come to LA, the second where Jim goes to Jersey, with a Mob boss named Tony who has a son named Anthony Junior!
D: The son was a drummer, he took drumming lessons.
A: And in the episode before that, thereâs a reference to a Carmela.
D: Thatâs right: âSay hello to Cousin Carmela.â
A: Was the second Mob episode conceived as a backdoor pilot?
D: Yeah. [NBC president] Fred Silverman in action. It was ahead of its time. In fact, how could they have possibly made a TV series at that time like that? I didnât expect it to get picked up.
A: Around when would you say you went from that excitement you felt before, when you were going to Universal every day to work on Rockford, to your later feelings of being done with TV, and wanting to get out and make movies?
D: Well, I had always wanted to make movies. When did the thrill of TV wear off? I donât know. I think after enough network meetings. I canât stand talking to these people. I canât stand what they want to do. What a paucity of entertainment.
M: What kind of notes did they give you?
D: Just . . . the worst. I had worked on a show before that that I had liked a lot called The Night Stalker. I was very excited by the medium at that point. But that show was kind of absurd. If there was anything in an episode that could possibly have disturbed anyone, youâd get a note saying âTake it out.â And I guess it was a good thing, because it taught you to find another way to do what you wanted to do.
A lot of what I disliked about the job was broadcast standards, not the people in programming so much, but what you could say or couldnât say, and how long you could hold a shot.
A: You told me back in the day that The Sopranos, as an idea, started more as you telling your friends stories about your mother, and them saying, âYou should do a show about that.â
D: My wife was the one who told me. She didnât say what kind of show it should be, but she said, âYou should do a show about your mother. Sheâs hysterically funny.â I agreed with her, but I didnât know how to do it. And given what weâre talking about now, what TV network back then would do a show about Davidâs mother?
A: The Sopranos premiered in January â99, so it was in development for a long time, but do you remember when you started getting serious about the idea of, âOh, it should be a Mob bossâ?
D: I changed agents, and I signed up at UTA. When I went in to meet them, they said, âWhat kind of ideas do you have?â I told them the idea that was The Sopranos and my agent said, âForget that. Itâs never going to happen. Not going to work.â But I pitched it as a movie then, and he said Mob movies were out of date, especially Mob comedies. I think maybe . . . whatâs the movie with Alec Baldwin?
A and M: [Simultaneously] Married to the Mob.
D: I think it had not done too well. Because of that, he said a feature with the Mob wouldnât work. I was going to cast De Niro as the character who became Tony, and Anne Bancroft as Livia. I think it couldâve been very interesting, but he told me to forget about it as a feature. And then, when I went over to Brillstein-Grey on a development deal, they suggested doing The Godfather as a TV series. And I said, âWhy would I want to do that? Itâs already been done.â
Then I was driving home that night, and I started thinking about the fact that the guy had a wife and a son and a daughter, and the shrink could be a woman, and that network TV drama was very female-oriented, so I thought, âMaybe that feature idea could work as a TV series.â It had home life in it, it had . . . womenâs points of view, kids, all of that.
A: Do you remember the first network you took The Sopranos to?
D: Fox.
A: They wanted Anthony LaPaglia to play Tony?
D: That came later. They had nobody in mind. They got the scripts and maybe a month or two [passed] . . . I hadnât heard from them, and then I got a call from a woman whoâs still in the business. She said, âListen,...