The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  “I feel like I’m being singled out for praise when it’s an ensemble thing,” Gandolfini explains. “It’s not fair to the other actors on the show—Edie, Michael, Lorraine [Bracco], and all the rest. And David Chase, who is, let’s face it, brilliant. Without the mind of David Chase behind this thing, we actors might as well just go home.”

  Endearing stories about Gandolfini’s discomfort with fame have already begun circulating. HBO sources confirm a few of them—that he has been reluctant to do many interviews because he doesn’t want to draw attention away from Chase and his fellow actors; he hates posing for publicity photographs of any sort; that he nearly came to the New York premiere party for The Sopranos in a yellow cab because he didn’t want friends to see him get out of a limo and think he’d gone Hollywood.

  He dislikes interviews for profile pieces. “I’m not trying to be difficult,” he says. “It’s not that I’m afraid to reveal personal stuff. . . . It’s just that I really, genuinely don’t see why people would find that sort of thing so interesting.”

  Asked about his youth, he will volunteer only that he was raised “middle class” or “blue collar.” He says he always liked going to movies. (“John Wayne. You can’t go wrong with John Wayne.”) But he was never really star-struck, and to this day, he doesn’t consider himself a film buff. He doesn’t like most big-budget genre movies, preferring On the Waterfront, tough domestic dramas like Ordinary People, and especially outdoor films like Jeremiah Johnson and A River Runs Through It.

  “It’s funny,” he says. “All these city movies I do, and the ones that appeal to me are the outdoor movies.”

  He didn’t take his first acting class until 1985, two years after he graduated from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. He isn’t married and has no kids. He is seeing a woman and would prefer her name not be published. He has two sisters. His mother is dead. His father used to be a cement mason in New York City and now works as a janitor in a Catholic school in New Jersey. He doesn’t want their names mentioned either because of the phone calls they’ve been getting at home from strangers. He lives in a Greenwich Village apartment but is thinking about selling it, moving back to New Jersey, and getting a smaller place in Manhattan. After the second season of The Sopranos wraps, he’ll probably take a year off.

  Asked what he majored in at Rutgers, he says, “I don’t remember.” (According to Rutgers, Gandolfini majored in communications. He graduated in 1983.)

  Many actors claim to be ambivalent about fame. Gandolfini truly is ambivalent. He doesn’t even like to use celebrity status as a soapbox—a favorite pastime of supposedly shy and serious performers. Many times during this interview, he would begin to express an opinion about a particular type of film that he likes or doesn’t like, or the relative value of college acting programs versus real-world experience. Then he would trail off and say, “Scratch that” or “Never mind. Who cares what an actor has to say about anything?”

  “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s an actor getting up on a soapbox,” he says. Then he chuckles and makes a “scratch that” motion. “Hey, forget I said that. If you print me saying that, it’s me getting up on a soapbox.”

  “You have to remember, he worked in a lot of films and theater before this stage in his career, so he is known to moviegoers but not quite recognizable,” explains Imperioli. “Now he’s Tony Soprano. He’s in their house once a week. He likes that, but he wants to keep it real.”

  One thing Gandolfini is adamant about is sincerity in movies. His favorite recent film is Shakespeare in Love, which he says he found “very moving.” He hates advertising and films that look like advertising. He dislikes hipness and mean humor. He prefers films that are very emotional rather than sardonic, glib, or otherwise “cool.”

  “I like when you go to a movie or turn on a TV show that has people who, in one way or another, look like you, act like you, and feel some of the things you feel,” he says. “I like stories about regular guys, not the cool guys. Cool makes me want to vomit.”

  Hearing Gandolfini’s rare soapbox statement makes Coolidge laugh with delight.

  “Notice how his own assessment of what he’s interested in as a movie-goer points him toward the material he’s best suited to play,” she says. “By virtue of his look and his personality, James is well-suited to be in the kinds of movies he likes. That’s a happy accident. Imagine if he looked like some male model. The kinds of movies he hates are the only kinds of movies they’d let him be in. It would be Purgatory.”

  * * *

  Mob Fatigue

  ITALIAN AMERICAN GROUPS FIND THE SOPRANOS TO BE JUST ANOTHER NEGATIVE PORTRAYAL

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 3/5/1999

  * * *

  BY MOST ACCOUNTS, HBO’s series The Sopranos, about a middle-class family in suburban New Jersey whose patriarch, Tony Soprano, is a mobster in therapy, is a success for the premium cable channel. It’s a ratings hit, has already been renewed for a second season, and has won near-unanimous acclaim from critics.

  Emanuele Alfano is not impressed.

  “I don’t care how good it is as a drama,” says the Bloomfield physician, a member of the anti-bias committee for UNICO National, an Italian American organization. “The fact is, it’s just another Mob story, which Italian Americans do not need.”

  “So the show is well written, well acted,” says Nicolas Addeo, chairman of Speranza, a New Jersey–based group that promotes positive images of ethnic, religious, and racial groups in Hollywood. “Whatever. It’s a well-upholstered hell.”

  Since The Sopranos hit the air Jan. 10, it has been the object of public protest by UNICO National, Speranza, Sons of Italy, the Italian American One Voice Committee and other groups. They have targeted HBO with letters, faxes, and phone calls, and staged lectures and teach-ins about defamation.

  Alfano, Addeo, and other anti-defamation activists claim The Sopranos is merely the latest salvo in a never-ending pop culture war against Italian Americans. In their view, since the release of The Godfather in 1972, Hollywood has served up an increasing number of problematic images, some blatant and grotesque (death-dealing gangsters); others comic and outwardly harmless (the crude, back-stabbing Dr. Romano on ER, Matt LeBlanc’s dimwitted Joey Tribbiani on Friends).

  When a show like The Sopranos comes along and earns acclaim for its artistry but little criticism for its subject matter, says Addeo, it makes the struggle for positive images harder.

  “So you hear The Sopranos is a quality show, you turn it on to check it out, and it’s the same old thing again—Italian Americans stealing, hitting, shooting, cheating, killing,” Addeo says.

  The show’s creator, David Chase—an Italian American reared in North Caldwell whose family name was originally DeCesare—says the protesters overstate the damage done by gangster movies. “It has yet to be proven to me that a single Italian American has suffered in the past fifteen years because of this.”1

  He also notes the majority of the talent involved in the show is Italian American—including lead actors James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, and Michael Imperioli—and says if any of them thought the material was defamatory, they wouldn’t have become involved.

  Imperioli, who plays a low-level mobster named Chris on The Sopranos, echoes Chase’s sentiments. “I honestly think Italian Americans are at a place right now where that type of thing is not defamation, or if it is stereotypical, it’s not damaging. Italian Americans have assimilated in all aspects of the culture. They’re in government, in law. They’re corporate heads. If this were the ’20s or ’30s, which is when my grandfather came over here, a show like The Sopranos would be a lot more damaging to somebody like him.”

  “Those guys need a little consciousness-raising,” says Addeo, on being informed of Chase’s and Imperioli’s statements. “That they think there’s not a problem only proves to me that we have a long way to go.”

  Chase says there are so many gangster stories because criminality is a great subject for movies. �
�Taking money, power plays, shooting—that’s the territory in American movies, by and large.” And unfortunately, he adds, many newspaper headlines about organized crime in the past thirty years have concerned Italian American gangsters, who have had an impact on American society out of proportion to their numbers. “The man who was assassinated for control of the Gambino Crime Family in front of Sparks Steakhouse in New York City was not named Phil Van Hoovel, he was named Paul Castellano. . . . When the phenomenon to which I am referring ceases to be a demonstrable fact of life, we’ll probably see these kinds of stories disappear, just as Westerns began to decline when the vast majority of Americans couldn’t see a horse anymore.”

  * * *

  Uncle Junior is the Singing ‘Soprano’

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 12/2/1999

  * * *

  DOMINIC CHIANESE HAS been acting and singing for more than four decades, culminating in his high-profile role on HBO’s The Sopranos as the stoic, vengeful Mob boss Uncle Junior, and in two sold-out evenings of cabaret at Judy’s Chelsea, a Manhattan nightclub, December 5 and 12. He has performed on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV.

  If he hadn’t gotten off a bus in 1952, it’s possible none of it would have happened.

  Back then, Chianese was a wiry twenty-year-old, recently discharged from the Marine Reserves and working construction jobs with his father, Gaetano “Tony” Chianese, a bricklayer. He had been singing seriously since high school and wanted to become a professional musician. But he hesitated, partly because he wasn’t sure his father would understand or approve.

  On this important day, the two men were riding from their home in the Bronx to work on a garden apartment in Clifton, NJ. “We were on a bus full of bricklayers from the Bronx,” recalls Chianese, sixty-eight, sitting in a coffee shop not far from his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “My father was sitting in the front of the bus. I was in back.”

  Chianese came across an audition ad in the New York Herald Tribune seeking singers for a musical company specializing in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. He asked his father if he could skip bricklaying that day and get off the bus at 74th Street to audition.

  “He said, ‘An audition? For what?”

  “I said, ‘Singing.’”

  The elder Chianese waited about four or five seconds before answering. Finally, he said, “Okay.”

  Chianese auditioned and made the cut. Since then, he has performed more or less nonstop, in a surprising variety of settings.

  In the mid-to late ’60s, he was the master of ceremonies at the West Village coffee shop Gerde’s—better known as Folk City because of the musical acts that played there, from Bob Dylan to Emmylou Harris and Arlo Guthrie. He also sang in Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, a late-’60s, off-Broadway revue of the composer’s work. (Chianese will likely perform a couple of Brel songs in his cabaret act, with accompaniment by pianist David Lahm.)

  ______

  He was noticed by casting agents as a supporting player in HBO’s Mob docudrama Gotti.

  Chianese isn’t big on Method acting. He believes in studying the text, understanding the character, and saying his lines in as direct and unfussy a manner as possible. He thinks research and character identification are useful tools for an actor, but they are no substitute for poring over the dialogue and stage directions, especially if the script was written by someone with a brain in his head.

  “The playwright’s vision is the one you should aim for,” he says. “Uncle Junior can only be played one way. That’s because [series creator] David Chase was very specific in creating this character. He knows what this man is about, what he values. He protects his money, he hates the FBI, he loves his family.

  “I believe that Shakespeare has to be played a certain way. I feel the same about any playwright of talent. The text tells you what to do—at least, it should. Even in a terrible piece of writing, you can bring yourself to the character and find something in there worth playing, but our job as actors isn’t to try to make it interesting. That’s the writer’s job.”

  Chianese has six children and ten grandchildren. Three of his children are in the arts. Daughter Rebecca Scarpatti is a playwright. Another daughter, Sarah Francesca, programs film festivals. Son Dominic Chianese Jr. is an actor whose most recent screen credit is as one of the museum thieves in The Thomas Crown Affair.

  ______

  He says that, although he has been singing since he was a kid, he didn’t fixate on the notion of becoming a professional singer until he saw Frank Sinatra perform at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan in 1947. The bobby-soxers were screaming. Chianese sat tenth-row center. Sinatra was magnificent—a skinny god of music in a white shirt, a brown sports jacket, and a green tie.

  “He hit me right where the heart was,” Chianese remembers. “His first number was Harold Arlen’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.’ I don’t remember any other song but that one. It’s the first song in my act—my opener. I tell you, it made an impression. His voice! The singing. Back then, if you were an Italian American boy from the Bronx, that was your way into the dream world. If you weren’t a boxer or a ballplayer, then it had to be performing, singing, something like that.

  “I couldn’t be a boxer. My father knew that. I couldn’t follow in his footsteps, either, and he knew that, too. That’s why he let me get off the bus.”

  SEASON TWO: 2000

  Location, Location, Location

  FEEL LIKE YOU’VE BEEN THERE? YOU PROBABLY HAVE

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 1/16/2000

  * * *

  WHEN YOU’RE EXPLORING fresh TV terrain, it helps to have a guide who knows the territory. On The Sopranos, that role is filled by locations manager Mark Kamine, an industry veteran who is New Jersey to the bone: born in Jersey City, raised in Wayne, and a resident of Montclair.

  ______

  Kamine describes The Sopranos as “the most intense New Jersey experience I’ve ever had on a [project].” Currently, at least 75 percent of exteriors on The Sopranos are shot on location in New Jersey, with side trips into New York City and Long Island. Most interiors are filmed on soundstages at Silvercup Studios in Queens. Most of the cast and crew live and work in the New York–New Jersey area.

  Kamine is careful to point out that few locations in The Sopranos have an exact real-world equivalent. . . . The Sopranos crew can shoot an exterior in, say, Verona, another interior in Montclair, and a couple of interiors at Silvercup Studios, then put the shots together in the editing room to create a convincing place.

  Take episode four of the first season, in which Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) takes his teenage daughter, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) on a driving tour of colleges. While in Maine, they stay at a motel and tour a college; in the process, Tony randomly encounters a stool pigeon who’s in witness protection, tracks him down, and kills him.

  The Sopranos crew never set foot in Maine.

  “The college they toured was actually Drew University in Madison,” says Kamine. “The motel they stayed at was in Oakland, New Jersey. We filmed the scenes where they’re driving around the roads, and the scene where Tony kills the guy, in New York state, up in Rockland County.”

  The opening credits sequence also takes a few liberties with geography, says Jason Minter, the assistant locations manager and New York City native who helped create it. But the ultimate goal is the same: to give viewers an abstract, almost poetic sense of New Jersey and its landscapes.

  A couple of years ago, when Chase was looking for ideas on opening credits, he had Minter and first assistant director Henry Bronchtein drive around northern New Jersey with a camcorder, taping whatever they saw. Chase liked the jagged, staccato look of the raw footage so much that he wanted to duplicate it on film. So Minter, frequent Sopranos director Allen Coulter, and cinematographer Phil Abraham revisited the locations on the videotape twice with 35mm film cameras: the first time with a fully loaded camera car, the second time with a hand-held camera in a car
driven by star James Gandolfini.

  There were complications (the State Police don’t permit camera cars on the Turnpike) and fakery (the World Trade Center is seen in Tony’s rearview mirror coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel, which is not possible; the shot was taken from a road near the Liberty Science Center). But the result has the desired effect.

  “One of the producers said, ‘I don’t know—I think you need Dramamine to watch it,’” says Minter. “But it works on you, especially if you’re from New Jersey. It has all these things that stay in the back of your mind even if you move away.”

  * * *

  Changing Direction

  DIRECTOR PETER BOGDANOVICH TRIES A NEW ROLE—AS AN ACTOR

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 1/22/2000 (EXCERPT)

  * * *

  “PEOPLE ARE OFTEN afraid of the word ‘ambiguity,’ but this show really embraces it in the best ’70s tradition. You would be hard-pressed to find someone in real life whose not laced with ambiguity. Not that the first goal of The Sopranos isn’t to entertain, but the characters are written so well that they are rich with ambiguity.”

  ______

  Bogdanovich says although the The Sopranos is very specific in its settings and characters, its significance goes beyond that. He says it’s the right show for this period in American history—the dawn of a new century when people aren’t quite sure if the old rules still apply, and are concerned that the past and its values might be fading away.

  “On this show, values aren’t black and white. That reflects what’s going on in the country at the moment. I get the sense that people aren’t entirely sure what’s right anymore. The whole Clinton thing brought this feeling to a boil,” he says, referring to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.