Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  It’s an institution worth preserving, and I consider it an honor to be a part of it.

  But if Junior Walker and the All Stars, Goldie and the Gingerbreads, Procol Harum, Big Mama Thornton, the J. Geils Band, Mamie Smith, Taj Mahal, Joe Cocker, the Runaways, Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, the Shangri-Las, Shel Talmy, and Mickie Most don’t get in soon, I’m going to burn the fucking place down.

  When Wicked Cool signed the Cocktail Slippers, a five-piece, all-female Rock band from Norway, I decided to produce the record with assistance from Jean Beauvoir, and I wrote two songs for it. We were told of a great mixer in Bergen, Yngve Leidulv Sætre, so we went to the west coast of Norway to mix it at his Duper Studios. Beautiful city, surrounded by mountains, like one of those snow globes.

  During the mix, an assistant came in to the studio to tell me that there was a couple with a baby in the lobby wanting to say hello.

  I courageously went down to the lobby, hoping it wasn’t mine.

  Kidding.

  The couple was Eilif Skodvin and Anne Bjørnstad, and the baby, theirs, was nursing. Norwegians, conservative in every other way possible, like to do that in public.

  They were TV writers, they said, and they had written a show for me.

  Hey now! Talk about your pretty special celebrity-type flattery. You don’t hear that one every day.

  What’s the pitch?

  Eilif: A New York wiseguy goes into witness protection and chooses Lillehammer, Norway. Crime and comedy ensue.

  Oh man!

  “I just played a gangster for ten years,” I sadly said.

  “Well, think about it.”

  “OK, but I’m almost finished with the mix and will be going back to New York soon.”

  “We really want you to do this, and to be very involved. You would not only star, you would be one of the Executive Producers and writers.”

  “And of course do the music if you want to,” Anne added.

  The baby gurgled encouragement.

  “The head of Rubicon, our production company will come to you if you want to continue the discussion.”

  “OK.”

  They left. Baby too.

  I knew I couldn’t do it.

  It was partly a matter of taking on a similar role for my second acting job. What serious actor trying to maintain credibility would do that?

  But it was mostly about the business.

  It felt like my various projects were on a roll that could be close to the breakthrough I had been working toward for years. But they needed me to be there.

  We had Little Steven’s Underground Garage syndicated in over a hundred cities but had never achieved full sponsorship. The two 24/7 channels on Sirius required constant attention. We had the record company, which was trying to adjust to the advent of streaming. We had the management company, three publishing companies, the music history curriculum, live local shows, and national tours.

  Plus, I had a really big idea for a website, a combination of a game and an educational tool that would have revolutionized both of those worlds. It was struggling to be born as a result of an ongoing war with the scumbag website creators, who kept robbing me blind.

  Whenever I told them, “This is not what I wanted and not what you said you were going to do,” they always referred me to some fine print in the contract. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later, I was no closer to my goal than when I started. And it was a billion-dollar idea that could’ve paid for everything. (Still is, by the way.)

  So there was all that to consider. On top of that, everybody I knew tried to talk me out of it. My Agent, my friends, my own office.

  “Now let me get this straight,” they said in unison. “You’re coming out of maybe the most important TV show in history, and you’re going to do a local show in a country nobody can find on a map?”

  What can I say? Whoever heard of somebody starring in a local TV show in a foreign country? It was going to be difficult to resist the adventure.

  Once again, it felt like Destiny at work. And I’d fucked around with that lady enough as it was. I mean, come on! A Norwegian couple show up on the west coast of absolutely nowhere and say they’ve written a TV show for you? You gonna brush that off as just another day at the office?

  The key was when they said I’d be one of the writers and Producers. I felt that that was enough protection to go for it.

  Still, when the head of the production company, who shall remain nameless for reasons that will soon be obvious, came to my office in New York, I really did try to say no.

  He walked in with a few guys and I thought for a minute a rugby match had broken out. He had a wild, working-class hooligan vibe, and though he turned out to be Swedish, he had mastered what I came to recognize as the Norwegian negotiating style, which involved pretending to be a dumb farmer as a way of concealing strategic thinking and a massive ego. I liked him.

  He opened the conversation by pleading poverty, standard practice for all who have ever controlled the purse strings, but just as quickly he told me that it would be one of the most expensive shows in Norwegian history and the featured show on the country’s biggest network. He also said I would have complete artistic control. Within reason.

  No money, huh? Let me end this right now, I thought.

  “OK then,” I said. “I want 50 percent of the back end.”

  I said it as if it was my standard deal. You know—me, Spielberg, Hanks.

  He didn’t even blink an eye.

  “OK.”

  Alarm bells should have gone off right then and there.

  There were three or four of my people in the discussion, and I tried not to look directly in the eyes of any of them.

  Uhhh… (think, man, think!) “And one more thing.” (The kid’s got balls, you’ve got to give him that.)

  Blank stares. Scandinavians probably make great poker players.

  “I’ve got all these businesses going on, as you can see.”

  They had gotten the tour earlier, seen it all, half the office full of employees, the other half taken up by a full-blown recording studio.

  “So if I do this, I can only work every other week.”

  I figured that was that. Nobody’s budget could handle that.

  They spoke to each other in Norwegian.

  “OK,” he said.

  Well, now I was fucked.

  I had just scored the two most incredible deal points in TV negotiation history.

  I was doing this show.

  Eilif and Anne started coming to New York for brainstorming sessions.

  I would find out later that even though Eilif and Anne had sold the show to me as a Norwegian Sopranos, Rubicon had sold the show to NRK—Norway’s PBS or BBC—as a local family comedy. It would be the artistic challenge of my life to marry those two ideas and satisfy those two audiences.

  Right from the start Eilif and Anne had big ambitions. They wanted a big international show, they said, but few in Norway thought the way they did. That’s why they had taken the unprecedented step of casting a foreigner as a star. They asked me how could they make it work internationally?

  As it happened, I knew exactly how to do that. “My friends,” I said, “I watched it happen not once, but twice, in, of all places, New Jersey. Not dissimilar to your own residence. In fact, at one point in history, you could say New Jersey was the Norway of America!”

  Without the money. Or the mountains. Or the snow. Or…

  In any case here’s what I knew, and what I told them.

  As evidenced by the successful instincts of both Bruce Springsteen and David Chase, the way to be international was to be as local as possible. Counterintuitive, but true. Turns out, people are very curious. They want to know about things that they… don’t know about.

  So I wanted every detail about Norwegian life they could think of. Every eccentricity. Every cultural nuance. Everything they were embarrassed about or proud of. The more granular the local detail, the bigger the show would be.<
br />
  “We can do that!” they said.

  We got down to work.

  From the start, there was a question of tone. The two of them were mainly comedy writers, brilliant ones as it turned out, but I didn’t want to do that. I could not casually make fun of wiseguys and then make my living portraying them. Not if I wanted to keep living in New York.

  It was going to have to be a dramedy, with serious moments in it too, and the humor would have to come from the characters and the circumstances. I didn’t want anybody trying to be funny. It would be harder to write, but if we could pull it off it would give the show longevity.

  There was also a question of language. How much English should we use? We had to make the Norwegian audience happy, but we also wanted the potential of an international audience.

  We decided whoever I was speaking to would speak English in return, and we would see what else felt right as we went. We had to hope the audience would buy the idea that my character understood some Norwegian but didn’t speak it. This is actually the case for many foreigners who live there because the language is a difficult one. Surely Gene Roddenberry borrowed Norwegian for the Klingon mother tongue. Take my fricative, please! Plus, Norwegians really do speak perfect English.

  My character, who I named Frankie “the Fixer” Tagliano, would look very similar to Silvio Dante, but he needed to have a completely different personality for the show to work.

  First of all, he needed to be a real boss. On The Sopranos, Silvio was the only character that didn’t want to be the Boss, and he had to be conservative and careful to balance Tony Soprano’s capricious impulsiveness. As a result, he was always on guard, not fully neurotic but always a little nervous.

  Frankie was much more outgoing, brazen, and aggressive, with no fear whatsoever. In this way, he was more similar to Tony than Silvio, and his new environment, a practically crime-free Norway, only emboldened him.

  There was also the matter of how he had ended up in Norway in the first place. In their version, he had fallen in love with Lillehammer because of the Olympics—beautiful scenery, beautiful girls—and chosen it as his new home. To fill out the backstory and make it feel authentic, I suggested we base the show loosely on the John Gotti scenario, which was still fresh in my mind at the time.

  Gotti’s caporegime (captain, his immediate boss) was Aniello Dellacroce, a street guy everybody respected who was expected to move up to Boss when Carlo Gambino died. Instead, Gambino surprised everybody by selecting a glorified accountant named Paul Castellano, thinking it would be good for the family business, which was investing in legit enterprises along with the usual criminal ones.

  Long story short: Dellacroce died, and with no one left to stop him, Gotti whacked Castellano, got away with it (no one can kill a boss without permission from the Commission), and became the Boss himself.

  We flipped that scenario. Frankie was considered such an implicit threat that the new Boss tried to have him assassinated.

  This came as a shock. The whole neighborhood loved Frankie, and Frankie loved being loved. Whenever someone had a problem, Frankie would fix it. Need a parking ticket taken care of? Go see Frankie. Baseball tickets? Go see Frankie. Landlord raising your rent? Go see Frankie. In fact, he was so universally beloved that when the new boss tried to kill him, he ended up testifying against him, something Silvio could never have done.

  And the whole thing freaked him out so much that he made his deal to go to Lillehammer instead of the usual Arizona or Utah or wherever Mob guys go where they can never find good Italian food again.

  As we started to shoot, I learned that there were some significant cultural differences.

  First of all, the budget was considerably smaller than I expected. They were do-it-yourself to the max. No sets. Every scene was on location, except the Flamingo Bar, which was the Quality Hotel’s existing bar in Olavsgaard made over for the show. I wrote it into the script my first day as a way to get bands into the show, and as a defense against the audience going snow-blind.

  The production would borrow people’s houses to use as our base and give us a place to change. We’d be getting dressed, and the kids would come home from school. “Hi, Mom!” It was… different.

  I was accustomed to changing in a trailer, which I had on every fifth location or so. During the brief negotiations with Rubicon, the trailer kept coming up, over and over again. I couldn’t understand why. Turns out I had ended up with the only trailer in Norwegian TV history. They just don’t go in for that American diva–type stuff.

  The trailer ended up being a shit two-banger they had to bring in from Belgium and couldn’t be used in half the locations. The other actors approached it like the 2001 obelisk. Of course, I told everyone to use it, not realizing it was something unique.

  The government in Norway supports the Arts, as does pretty much every country except ours, and the actors were very flexible. They’d do our show during the day, shoot a movie at night, do a commercial on the weekend, and do theater, both Ibsen and children’s, between seasons.

  And they were all amazing. Great actors would take even the smallest parts, which I knew would give the show depth and longevity.

  As brilliant as Eilif and Anne were at casting, they were equally good at knowing exactly how much self-deprecating humor a Norwegian audience could take, and how much cultural comedy international audiences needed.

  Nobody knew a thing about Norway, which was perfect. Most Americans think it’s a city in Sweden. You can’t name one Norwegian product or celebrity to this day, can you? Didn’t think so. A-ha doesn’t count because they had to move to London to have a hit.

  So we could be as surreal as we wanted to be. Ironically, the stuff the international audience thought we made up was actually normal Norwegian behavior. Like a driver’s license taking months to get or fathers being forced to leave work and stay at home for a month with new babies.

  We filmed about a quarter of the time in Lillehammer, which I fell in love with and whose name Eilif and Anne intentionally misspelled to be more incorrectly American.

  It’s a tiny town. The first thing that hit you was, How the fuck did they have an Olympics here? Everything important was just a few blocks from my hotel. Walk a block in either direction, and you’d find our two favorite bars: Nikkers, where we’d play table sand hockey and in the spring enjoy the back area that looked down on a pretty stream that leads to the Car Museum; and the Toppen Bar at the top of an old grain silo, which makes the best Stevie colada (piña colada with half a shot of Kahlúa) you’ll ever have with snow on the ground.

  Equally close was one of the city’s half-dozen great restaurants, the Bryggerikjelleren (I told you—Klingon), whose exterior we used as the entrance of the Flamingo.

  The Olympic ski jump is the only place that’s a fifteen-minute drive away. Everything else is a short walk—even the pedestrian street that we would turn into a reindeer racetrack, complete with Keith Richards soundtrack, in one of my favorite episodes.

  Filming in Lillehammer was a fundamental part of the show. It said so right in the title. But the producer, Anders Tangen, kept scheduling Oslo because it was cheaper. He kept running out of money by spending foolishly on the wrong things. He couldn’t grasp the concept that fans of the show from all over the world would watch to see our Lillehammer locations.

  I made it a point to film in the harshest winter months. Luckily, there were plenty. In an average winter, Lillehammer got between six and ten feet of snow. After a while, they had no place to put it, so they steamrollered it. The road just got imperceptibly higher as the winter went on.

  It got so cold that the snow would freeze twice. When the moon was out I looked out my hotel window, the snow on the ground sparkling as far as I could see.

  Absolutely magical.

  One freezing February night—and I mean five below zero, Fahrenheit—I looked out the trailer window and saw about ten extras dancing around a spontaneously constructed fire.

  “I
s that some Norwegian actor–type ritual?” I asked the Director.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s called keeping warm!”

  Such eccentricities were cute, but enough was enough. The next night, a tent was erected, with heat and an actual craft-service table with more than a pot of coffee and a bag of apples!

  The contrast between our countries’ filming process was made all the more dramatic to me when I flew home each week to work on David Chase’s movie, where the craft service resembled your average 7-Eleven.

  I learned everything I needed to know about Norway’s TV culture. Namely, that they didn’t have one. It was strictly a film culture transplanted to TV. What’s the difference? I’m glad you asked. One big difference: in film, the Director is the boss. On TV, it’s the writer.

  I was usually the only writer on the set, because Eilif and Anne were off writing the next episode or casting. Too many times, I had to explain to the Director that the script wasn’t an outline. If it said the scene ended when Frank sat down, the scene ended when Frank sat down. In the TV world, there’s no time for philosophical discussions on the set. I welcomed all input, but not during shooting.

  Another difference was that the actors were used to improvising.

  I explained that since I came from the David Chase school of writing, every fucking word was sacred! So no improvising. If they had an idea, I wanted to hear it, but I didn’t want to be surprised. “And by the way,” I said, “if you’re improvising in Norwegian, my character might understand you, but I don’t!”

  But after a while, I ended up enjoying the way their method of continuous creativity carried all the way to “Action!” We learned from each other and found a compromise. And being the only writer-Producer on the set—checking lighting, adjusting wardrobe, rewriting constantly—helped me a lot as an actor. I didn’t have time to think. As soon as the camera rolled, I was just there, in the moment, no time for second-guessing.

  About six weeks into filming, I started noticing a distinct dearth of grips and gaffers (yes—I am a little slow). And where were the production assistants? Why was the makeup man also the hair guy? And why was he carrying one of the cameras as we went from one location to another?