The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  14 Van Zandt wrote the 1985 protest song “Sun City” to spotlight South Africa’s policy of apartheid and persuade fellow musicians not to play the titular resort, located within the Bantustan of Bophuthatswana, where the indigenous black population had been relocated by the white minority government. Over forty prominent musicians and other celebrities participated in the recording of the song.

  15 Chase is using the official season designations here, counting the final eighteen episodes as one season, because that was the way HBO officially wanted season six to be described. But as we’ve discussed elsewhere in this book, Chase ultimately considers them to be separate seasons, which means that in his mind, The Sopranos has seven seasons, total.

  16 Laurence Kardish, senior curator of the department of film at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Retired in 2012.

  17 From Stasi’s NY Post column about the season four finale: “If that wasn’t dopey enough, we waited a whole season to see chubbette Janice finally bag tubby Bobby? Who cares? If they had devoted one more episode to the frozen baked ziti, I would have gone over and killed them both with it, defrosted it, and eaten the evidence.” And: “At the end of the day (or night, in this case), they should have whacked somebody important and put the rest of us out of our misery. Or maybe David Chase was right when we heard he wanted to end it all—the show I mean—a season ago.”

  18 According to Sopranos casting associate Meredith Tucker, Stasi auditioned for the Roma Maffia character in “Christopher,” the woman who gives the speech at the church that offends all the Mob wives.

  19 Minter (who worked in a variety of jobs for the series in addition to being Chase’s assistant) says no one ever got fired, but only because he couldn’t catch them: “Somebody kept leaking things to the Enquirer, specifically Adriana’s death, and I went on a quest to find out who that was, and I never could,” he recalls. “There was a lot of information leaked, and Adriana was the most egregious. However, about two years ago, I learned who the person was in passing, and it was a senior crew member—like a department head. And they were making a fortune from selling stories to the Enquirer—thousands and thousands of dollars. There were photographs taken from production, so I would try to figure out who was there on that day, and I would always get derailed. I never in a million years suspected it would have been that person.”

  20 Buñuel was a Spanish filmmaker whose work often had a surrealistic flavor and tended to be powered by dream logic and imagery. Collaborated with Salvador Dalí on one of the most influential experimental films, 1929’s Un Chien Andalou.

  21 At the end of “The Knight in White Satin Armor.”

  22 See this page.

  23 “Master of Sopranos,” a pseudonym for a blogger whose real identity remains unknown, published a June 9, 2008 piece on WordPress titled “The Sopranos: The Definitive Explanation of ‘The END,’” which attempts to demonstrate via detailed analysis of shots in the final scene that there’s no question that Tony died.

  24 There was actually one more shooting day after Holsten’s, a simple shot of James Gandolfini walking toward the Bada Bing. The shoot was announced beforehand as the last scene and drew a crowd of onlookers, and area media outlets covered it as such; but it was a decoy intended to keep fans and reporters from besieging the set of the actual final scene.

  25 Terence Winter: “After the final read-through (9:30 A.M., February 26, 2007), there was a round of applause, then as we all sat there in silence, Edie Falco wept quietly while Jim Gandolfini put a supportive hand on her shoulder. After about ten minutes, David looked up and asked if anyone had anything to say. No one did—how could anyone put that incredible experience into words? Slowly, everyone started to drift off and go about their days.”

  26 The three-part study, called The Criminal Personality, was by Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow.

  27 Chase declined to elaborate further, but a few months after this interview, New Line announced that it had greenlit The Many Saints of Newark, a Sopranos prequel movie written by Chase and Sopranos vet Lawrence Konner and directed by another series vet in Alan Taylor. Chase has remained tight-lipped on exactly how much of a prequel this is—declining our requests for a follow-up interview about the movie at an early stage of development—other than that it’s set in the same fictional universe of the show, but taking place in the late ’60s, circa the Newark riots. Will it be a traditional sort of prequel, or perhaps a movie where young Johnny and Livia are briefly glimpsed arguing in the background of a scene about the main characters? We have no idea at this writing, though the title suggests the film could be about Dickie Moltisanti and his extended family (Moltisanti is Italian for “many saints”).

  28 See this page.

  THE MORGUE

  Selected writing from the Star-Ledger 1999–2006

  The following is a collection of features and criticism published in the arts section of the Star-Ledger, Tony’s newspaper, by Matt Zoller Seitz, who covered The Sopranos from 1999 to 2003, and Alan Sepinwall, who covered it from 2004 to 2006. Some pieces are presented in their entirety. Others are represented by a section or fragment.

  SEASON ONE: 1999

  Married to the Mob

  A HARRIED GODFATHER STRUGGLES TO BALANCE HIS PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIVES | BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 1/9/1999

  * * *

  SHOT ON LOCATION in towns throughout northern New Jersey, The Sopranos is a bittersweet domestic fable that plays like Everybody Loves Raymond meets Goodfellas. It’s an absurdist comedy about criminal behavior and suburban life that gently mocks its targets while taking its characters and their emotions seriously.

  Says former E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt, who plays a nightclub owner and low-level mobster named Silvio Dante, “I like to call it ‘The Gangster Honeymooners.’”

  “It’s not so much about the Mob as much as it is about the family,” says Gandolfini, an Englewood native and graduate of Rutgers University who has had supporting parts in such films as True Romance (the assassin who beats up Patricia Arquette), Get Shorty (as Delroy Lindo’s bearded right-hand man), and the current A Civil Action (as a whistle-blowing employee at a polluting tannery).

  The Sopranos is also, Gandolfini says, an exaggerated comic tale of the children and grandchildren of immigrants trying to make it in so-called polite society. Tony and his pals hustle to make it in the Mob as if it were a legitimate business, complete with politicking, internal feuds over promotions, and sudden “layoffs,” many of which end with the deposit of a large, canvas-wrapped package somewhere near the Meadowlands. These guys are thugs and killers, but they also worry about throwing parties and backyard barbecues, driving the right car, and getting their kids into the right college.

  “I see the show as being about the pressure of being the first,” Gandolfini continues. “Tony is the first guy to really rise high in his profession, to get out, to move into a nice suburban neighborhood, to have a shot at fitting in. But there’s this conflict between that and what you might call the Old World way of doing things.”

  The show’s creator, executive producer, writer, and sometime director, David Chase, knows a thing or two about these issues. Raised in North Caldwell, where the Sopranos’ on-screen house is actually located, his family’s name was originally DeCesare.

  “All the time I was growing up, I knew of guys who, it was said, had ties to that kind of life—or who had ties to people who had ties,” Chase says. “I grew up seeing representations of Mob life in the movies and on TV. Those characters didn’t look much like the ones I was familiar with. The guys who were pointed out to me as having Mob ties were guys who lived in the suburbs after starting out in the city, in someplace like Newark. They wanted to get out, they wanted to get their families out. And now they had a whole different set of problems to deal with. Suburban life.

  “The fact is, in some way, every single character on this show is trying to make it.”

  ______

  Lorraine Bracco, wh
o plays Tony’s therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, knows this fictional terrain well. She got an Oscar nomination for playing a Mob wife in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 epic Goodfellas. Like The Godfather, Scorsese’s film treated Mob life as an exaggerated metaphor for life in general, and spotlighted its ambitious characters’ attempts to be taken seriously by the rest of society—by force, if necessary.

  “When I met David about being in this project, I was very unsure about committing for exactly those reasons,” she says. “But he alleviated my fears. If you watch the show, you see that it really is dealing with a lot of family issues. Tony is a man who’s lost and depressed. He feels life doesn’t make sense anymore and everything is in a decline. Everything is changing for him. He’s got troubles in his marriage, troubles in his job, with his mother, with his daughter who’s going off to college.”

  Van Zandt, who immersed himself in books about mobsters to get in character, puts the gangster element in an even larger context.

  “In the romantic version of the criminal lifestyle, there is always the suggestion that the gangster is the guy who breaks all the rules and gets away with it, at least for a while,” Van Zandt says. “It’s booze and broads and horses and dice and killing a guy if he gets in your way and not caring what anybody thinks of you. It’s no wonder audiences love that kind of story.

  “It’s not just Italian American gangsters,” he continues. “It’s Cagney and Bogart movies, it’s Westerns. American seems to have some kind of fascination with outlaws in general. Maybe it’s because we were an outlaw nation to begin with. This nation was born of rebellion against authority, and in a weird way, that’s what these characters represent. That image is very attractive to Americans. It’s part of the national unconscious. It’s practically in our genetic code.”

  * * *

  The Godfather Meets Ralph Kramden

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 2/2/1999

  * * *

  IN AN ERA when television and movies prefer to fill leading roles with known quantities, it is a real thrill to watch a star being born. That star is James Gandolfini, the lead actor in HBO’s drama series The Sopranos. His is the kind of excellence that doesn’t announce itself. In scene after scene and episode after episode, he keeps sneaking up on you, pulling small miracles out of his hip pockets.

  It’s one of the richest roles in TV history—maybe as rich a role as any actor has ever had. Tony is like Michael Corleone as played by Ralph Kramden. He’s pathetic and noble, fearsome and tragic, sweet and grand.

  Yet Gandolfini inhabits the part with such ease and subtlety that you take the complexity of either the character or the performance for granted. He never suggests he is superior to Tony, or invites us to feel superior. He never implies, though voice or gesture, that Tony draws a distinction between lawful and unlawful business activities—or that he can imagine any life but the one he has.

  There’s a disconnect between Tony’s business activity and his family life. There has to be, otherwise Tony couldn’t function. But there is no disconnect between the character and Gandolfini. He talks like an average guy, not an actor pimping a role. Often the lines and situations are funny not because of the words themselves, but because of how Gandolfini plays them.

  Watch the scene in tonight’s episode where Tony visits his mother in the retirement home and offers her macaroons. “Oh, they’re too sweet,” she says coldly. Tony hides his hurt from his mother, but we sense it by the way he pauses, unmoving, before he speaks again. You want subtlety? In this particular shot, Gandolfini’s back is turned and we can only see a sliver of his face. The man is acting with the back of his neck.

  ______

  Gandolfini suggests Tony’s brooding, yearning, troubled qualities with just a few choice bits of body language. He sometimes looks up at the sky after a violent act, as if to say, “Geez, I hope you didn’t see that, God.” When he’s not getting through to somebody in conversation, he’ll push the heel of his hand against his forehead as if trying to force his brain to work harder. When he’s really feeling put upon, he’ll slouch forward in a chair and peer up at the camera from beneath his broad brow; the image suggests that Tony really is carrying the world on his back.

  * * *

  Gandolfini: Star Quality, Not Attitude

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 2/14/1999

  * * *

  “IT’S LIKE SHOWING emotion has become a bad thing. Like there’s something wrong with you and you’re really in love or really angry and you show it. Like if you feel those powerful emotions and you express them, instead of keeping them inside or expressing yourself politely, then you must be someone who needs therapy, or Prozac. That’s the world we’re in right now.”

  The words would flow easily off the tongue of Tony Soprano, the North Jersey Mob capo who serves as the comic antihero of HBO’s acclaimed new drama, The Sopranos. Nearly every episode contains a monologue by Tony—sometimes bitter, sometimes comic, sometimes poignant—about how difficult society makes life for guys like him.

  Except this time, it’s not Tony who’s venting. It’s James Gandolfini, the 37-year-old actor who plays him.

  “The character is a good fit,” says Gandolfini, who was raised in Park Ridge, NJ. He’s sitting in a sunny window seat at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village after a workout at a nearby gym. “Obviously, I’m not a mobster, and there’s other aspects of the guy I’m not familiar with, like how comfortable he is with violence. But in most of the ways that count, I have to say, yeah—the guy is me.”

  Created by producer-writer David Chase, the thirteen-episode series is The Godfather meets The Honeymooners, about a mobster who feels disconnected from his wife and kids, feels guilty for putting his mother in a nursing home, is convinced the world is out of balance, and is even seeing a therapist to cope with stress. The guy can’t win for losing.

  With material this rich, it’s no wonder Tony and The Sopranos, seen Sunday nights at 9, have become a lightning rod for media stories on a variety of topics: Italian Americans on film, the persistent allure of crime stories, images of suburban life in pop culture, even the malaise affecting some Baby Boomers as they enter middle age. Chase’s show is a coast-to-coast critical favorite, a hit with pay cable viewers (posting the highest ratings for an original drama in HBO history) and, perhaps most importantly, a success with executives at the cable channel, who ordered up another thirteen episodes after airing only two.

  The Sopranos has also cemented Gandolfini’s stardom. For the first few years of his career as an actor, which started fourteen years ago, he has done mostly stage work at small theaters in New York and Los Angeles. His breakthrough film role was in 1993’s True Romance, where he played the hired killer who perishes in a fight to the death with Patricia Arquette. “It was like a dance,” Gandolfini says. “We kind of made it up as we went along.”

  Since then, he has been cast mostly as thugs, murderers, and sweet-natured palookas—in Gandolfini’s words, “the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.”

  But these days, he’s looking suspiciously like a leading man. In the current film A Civil Action, starring John Travolta as a crusading litigator, Gandolfini’s scenes as a whistle-blowing worker at a tannery serve as the film’s moral compass. Gandolfini also plays the heavy opposite Nicolas Cage in 8mm, a bleak thriller from the writer of Seven that opens February 29. (“A dark, dark film,” Gandolfini says.)

  And of course, it’s getting hard to walk the streets of any city without passing posters and bus billboards featuring Tony Soprano and his stare of death.

  Filmmakers and actors who have worked with Gandolfini are rhapsodic in their praise.

  “I don’t think he has any idea how good he is, which may be one of the reasons he’s as good as he is,” says Edie Falco, a regular on HBO’s Oz, who plays Tony Soprano’s wife, Carmela.

  “He has an extremely large emotional well that I guess he can draw from whenever he wants,” says Michael Imperioli, a veteran of Good-fellas and
several Spike Lee movies, who plays Chris, Tony’s impulsive young nephew. “It’s quite powerful. The force of it sometimes can knock me out of any kind of complacency that I might fall into.”

  “He is a very serious actor,” says Steven Zaillian, who directed Gandolfini in A Civil Action. “He was one of the very few actors in that film who would ask me to do another take. . . . He always thinks he can be better when what he has just done is perfect.”

  You might think such praise would excite an actor who has struggled so long for recognition. In one way, it does. But in another way, it makes Gandolfini uncomfortable. In interviews, he often chalks up his success to pure luck, makes self-deprecating remarks about his weight and his hair, and expresses astonishment at the notion that a guy who looks like him could suddenly have so much industry heat behind him.

  “That’s a genuine part of him,” says Martha Coolidge, who directed Gandolfini in 1994’s Angie, in which he played his first romantic role as Geena Davis’ lover. “I’m not talking about looks, because I think he’s an enormously attractive man. I’m talking about his own impression of how he looks. It’s that [self-deprecating] attitude that makes him a character actor. In Angie, I got the best of both worlds. I wanted a guy who was very real but who also had leading man qualities to play opposite Geena. James is a real man, so he can be tough and sexy, but he also can be vulnerable and sensitive. He was ideal for that kind of part, and he’s also ideal for The Sopranos.