by Brett Martin
• • •
After Stanford, the Chases relocated to Los Angeles. The city entranced David. “L.A. was kind of cool then. It was all happening: Easy Rider, the Byrds, Jim Morrison—even though I was never a big Morrison fan. There was a whole bohemian thing, a lot of drugs around. And I loved all the old studios, the Raymond Chandler aspects of them at night, the fog. I was crazy about that shit,” he said. “It was weird, but I liked it.”
Chase set out to become a screenwriter, laboring over film scripts while Denise worked. Throughout the next twenty years, he would always have at least one screenplay going. They would come to varying states of near success before collapsing. One, titled Fly Me, was about stewardesses. Another, Female Suspects, written in 1981, concerned a sociologist in New Jersey who gets caught up in the lives of the violent women she is studying. That script flirted with getting produced for ten years and was even briefly revived at Sony Pictures, following the debut of The Sopranos. “Now, it would probably be on the Black List,” Chase said, referring to the yearly index of “best unproduced scripts” that began being compiled in 2005. Time after time, however, his film dreams ended in frustration. He said, “The word was, I was ‘too dark.’”
Back in L.A., his career was prematurely stalled. He and Patterson took the Directors Guild trainee exam; Patterson passed, but Chase didn’t. He picked up odd jobs such as assistant director on soft-core porn films and stayed home, smoking a lot of pot and working on scripts. Then came a break: Toward the end of film school, Chase and a friend had written a spec script for Roy Huggins, a television producer most famous for creating the western Maverick, starring James Garner. “It was terrible. Just some Godardian half-assed gangster thing,” he said. But it was good enough that Huggins gave him a freelance script assignment for a new show about lawyers he was producing at Universal. Chase figured he’d made it: “I joined the guild, I got paid $2,300, which I couldn’t believe, and I was in the industry.”
In fact, it was the last paid writing he’d do for two years. Given his lack of union-aided employment, he was indignant when the Writers Guild ordered him to the picket lines during its 1973 strike. It proved fortuitous. Marching dutifully outside the main gate of Paramount Studios, Chase was introduced to Paul Playdon, a writer and story editor with a reputation as a kind of storytelling wunderkind for his work on Mission: Impossible. The two hit it off, and Playdon gave Chase his first staff writing positions—first on the back-nine episodes of a show called The Magician, starring future Hulk Bill Bixby, and then on Kolchak: The Night Stalker, an influential proto–X-Files featuring Darren McGavin as a Chicago newspaper reporter who seemed to constantly stumble upon stories of the supernatural.
Thus began David Chase’s long, unfortunate slide upward into success. Kolchak was produced at Universal Studios, which at the time was churning out some seventeen hours of prime-time television per week. To be on the lot was as close to experiencing the heyday of the Hollywood studio system as television production ever got. “The commissary was filled. You’d see extras walking around dressed like Martians. There was a huge costume department. A giant wood shop that made all the sets. It was really like 1942,” Chase recalled.
The show was a crash education in TV storytelling, both on the page and on set. Such incidentals as plot had never been of much interest to Chase before. “‘Story’ was cheap Hollywood crap,” said the Fellini fan. “For me it was all about dialogue and character.” That began to change under Playdon’s tutelage, as they pumped out script after script, often less than twelve hours ahead of that episode’s shooting schedule. Chase discovered he had not only a gift for driving a story forward in television’s familiar four- or five-act structure (separated by commercial breaks), but also a taste for the process of bringing those stories to life on-screen, detail by arduous detail.
“I remember my first production meeting, at Paramount, on The Magician. All the department heads were going through the script: ‘Okay: The police uniform. Long-sleeve or short-sleeve? Let’s see, it’s October, so short-sleeve.’ So you settle that and then you go on. This was fascinating to me,” Chase said.
As important, he was being trained in TV’s eternal, intimate dance between story (which is to say, creativity) and time (which is to say, money). “Like, you have a scene in a funeral home, but the locations person says you can’t afford to shoot a funeral home. So you need to change it to an exterior, where you see people leaving and getting into their cars. It was real fundamentals. Paul Playdon taught me all that. And then later, of course, Stephen Cannell.”
• • •
Nobody (or at least no boy) growing up between the late 1970s and early 1990s could fail to know the prodigious body of work Stephen J. Cannell produced throughout that era—a collection of character-based, humor-laced, action-packed shows that included Riptide, The Greatest American Hero, Wiseguy, 21 Jump Street, The Commish, Baretta, Hunter, Hardcastle and McCormick, and more. (TV has always had a taste for last names as titles, particularly if the names are fortuitously punny and evocative.) As far as popular success went, there was, above all others, The A-Team, a perfectly calibrated piece of Reagan-era juvenile junk featuring a team of vigilante ex–Special Forces soldiers back from Vietnam and intervening on behalf of the little guy, preferably one running a wood mill, trucking company, or other suitably blue-collar operation.
What’s more surprising is that the same boys, who would have been of an age not accustomed to considering, much less caring, how their entertainment was made, would probably also know who Cannell was—even if they knew no other television producer or even that such a thing existed. This was thanks largely to Cannell’s signature “bumper,” a snippet of video that ran after the credits of each of his shows. It depicted the man himself, bearded, impressively coiffed, and usually puffing on a pipe, at his typewriter at the final moments of finishing a script. He would pound out a final few characters—no doubt a last-minute plot twist or crucial piece of character nuance—and then confidently rip the page from its carriage and fling it across the room, whereupon it morphed into animation, fluttered onto the top of a manuscript, and settled into a royal, curved “C.”
It was a classic piece of narcissism, to be sure; the video logo was periodically updated, and each iteration made sure to include more conspicuously displayed awards in the writer’s office. But it was also something more important: Regardless of what you thought of the quality of Cannell’s output (and it ranged wildly from awful to underappreciated), he was making a claim of television auteurship. What’s more, though he was a savvy, in some ways revolutionary, businessman, making a fortune by essentially starting his own studio and thus owning all his shows, Cannell’s bumper specifically insisted on his role, first and foremost, as a writer.
As he told an interviewer in 2004: “Somewhere in the early part of the eighties, I was starting to be referred to as a ‘television mogul.’ And I just kind of hated that. Because to me a mogul was a guy in a green suit who tried to score actresses. I kept saying, ‘I’m not a mogul, I’m a writer. I write every day for five hours. If that doesn’t make me a writer, what does?’”
Neither that figure nor Cannell’s pride in it, heightened by the fact that he had grown up dyslexic, ever wavered—though in later years he applied it to the writing of mystery novels rather than TV shows. Lunching at the Beverly Hilton several months before he would die of melanoma, at the age of sixty-nine, he was magnificent: bull-chested, hair swept back, wearing a thin, ribbed black turtleneck tucked into the tightest of tan pants and a corduroy jacket. He ordered tuna on white and used an entire room-service mini-jar of extra mayonnaise.
And though he could justly claim credit for kicking off the careers of such stars as Johnny Depp, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Chiklis, and many others, he seemed most proud of hiring David Chase as a staff writer for The Rockford Files.
Years later, Chase described what he learned writing for Rockford,
which ran from 1974 to 1980, was later revived as a series of occasional TV movies, and stands as Cannell’s most accomplished creation. “Cannell taught me that your hero can do a lot of bad things, he can make all kinds of mistakes, can be lazy and look like a fool, as long as he’s the smartest guy in the room and he’s good at his job. That’s what we ask of our heroes.” Jim Rockford, in other words, was an early shade of Tony Soprano.
Played by James Garner, Rockford was a semi-deadbeat private eye who lived in a beachside trailer in Malibu. He had an astonishing collection of plaid jackets that he wore with equally astonishing aplomb. He didn’t like guns, or to work very much, and beyond a grudging sense of decency, he embraced no lofty cause of justice. “With Rockford it was always about ‘$200 a day, plus expenses,’ that’s all,” Chase said, giving the PI’s oft-mentioned terms of employment.
If The A-Team’s cigar-chomping, leeringly macho colonel John “Hannibal” Smith was the perfect incarnation of 1980s triumphalism, Rockford was equally in tune with his times, a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam wiseass, the closest that TV could get to Elliott Gould’s shambling, scruffy take on Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s 1973 version of The Long Goodbye. The show was underscored with just a whiff of melancholy, an intimation of resignation and loneliness discernible in the harmonica break of Mike Post’s theme music, if you were inclined to hear it.
Even allowing for retrospective clairvoyance, it’s hard not to see Chase’s fingerprints all over “The Oracle Wore a Cashmere Suit,” his first credited episode of Rockford. This is less true in the main action—a characteristically convoluted double murder into which Rockford is reluctantly drawn—than in the details stuffed in around the edges: the rock-and-roll references, the malapropisms, the happy coincidence of Rockford making an appearance, shuffling, Tony-like, out to the beach in his bathrobe. The “oracle” of the episode’s title is a celebrity psychic with the Sopranoesque name Roman Clementi, whom Chase seems to have taken gleeful pleasure in writing as an oily, unrepentant charlatan. Clementi has precisely the blend of qualities most likely to draw out the sharpest point of Chase’s pen: vanity, fatuity, pretension, physical cowardice. To see the psychic flinch from a drug dealer who hits him in the face is to immediately flash on Assemblyman Ronald Zellman cowering as Tony Soprano beats him with a belt for the crime of falling in love with the mobster’s old mistress.
An even clearer indication of Chase’s creative temperament came with Off the Minnesota Strip, which aired in May 1980 on the ABC Monday Night Movie. It is hard to imagine a film of its bleak tenor appearing in a modern movie theater, much less on prime-time network TV, interrupted by sunny ads for detergent. It was the story of Michele, nicknamed Micki and played by Mare Winningham. Micki is a teenage runaway who returns home to suburban Minnesota after spending time as a prostitute in New York. Again, premonitions of The Sopranos abound: Micki’s mom is harsh and remote, her father an impotent milquetoast. Micki herself is no reformed angel with a heart of gold: she’s a narcissist, a sexual manipulator, and a pain in the ass. There is a brutal scene in which the dad, played by Hal Holbrook, is forced to sit and listen to a frank account of his daughter’s sexual exploits. (There is also wicked wit: “Anyway, I guess it feels good to hit the old bed again,” Holbrook says by way of good night.) “Just My Imagination” and other rock-and-roll hits are on the sound track.
Above all, Minnesota Strip showcases Chase’s gift for granting complicated psychologies to characters who are themselves incapable of examining, much less expressing, what’s going on in their heads. This is the primary distinction between Chase and two fellow showrunners whose work he loathed: David Milch and Aaron Sorkin, both given to investing all of their characters with an eloquence suspiciously close to that of their creators. (Chase never understood how somebody could like both The Sopranos and, say, The West Wing. “It’s like when I was in high school: if you liked the Supremes, you couldn’t like the Marvelettes. If you liked Dylan, you couldn’t like Donovan.” He left little doubt as to which show was which.)
Off the Minnesota Strip ends as untidily as can be, with Micki and a boyfriend lighting out for the Sunset Strip and stopping just short, the question of what they’re looking for and whether they’ll get it left dangling and unanswered. In The New York Times, John J. O’Connor called it “the champion downer of the year.”
“In the end, Off the Minnesota Strip is little more than a homily on the futility of it all,” O’Connor wrote. “For Michele, for her parents, presumably for the rest of us, the message seems to be ‘turn off the set and start slashing your wrists.’”
Nearly thirty years later, after a similarly ambiguous ending, The Sopranos fans would be debating whether the message of that series amounted to the same thing.
• • •
Chase won his first writing Emmy for the script of Off the Minnesota Strip. To his consternation, it made him that much more sought after by television companies. Of the many development deals he was offered by studios such as Warner Brothers, he chose to spend two years with an obscure company called Comworld Pictures.
“I thought, ‘These cocksuckers will never get anything on the air and I’ll be able to do nothing and write my movies.’ Which is what I did,” he said.
The convoluted strategies didn’t end there: Chase dreamed of selling a TV idea that was good enough to get a pilot made but not so good that it would ever go to series. That way, he reasoned, he could ask the studio, having already invested in an hour-long pilot, to cut its losses by putting up a relatively small amount to finish the story as a stand-alone movie. One idea he pursued on his deal at Universal seemed perfect. It was the story of a dissolving marriage, set in the present but told heavily through flashbacks to happier times in the 1960s. “I thought, ‘Most pilots don’t get bought, so I’ll shoot this, cut it together, and I’ll be in the movie business.’”
Not for the last time, Chase’s plan backfired. CBS, enchanted by the success of two ABC shows about baby boomers, thirtysomething and The Wonder Years, picked up Chase’s series, now called Almost Grown. Chase called his agent, who naturally expected that his client would be elated. “I said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to get me out of this.’ He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I told him, ‘I want to kill myself! I don’t want to do a series.’”
Almost Grown debuted in November 1988. The central couple was played by Eve Gordon and Tim Daly, who would later appear in a recurring guest role on The Sopranos. On the writing staff was Robin Green, a former magazine writer and alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose career, along with that of her future husband, Mitchell Burgess, would be intimately entwined with Chase’s for the next two decades.
“I don’t know how he managed to get it on the air,” said Henry Bromell. “It was a show about failure. And that’s not a surprise, something you realize in season five: it starts with a marriage having failed. Only David would have written that show.”
Though well reviewed by critics, Almost Grown proved too grim, and with a little help from CBS’s decision to air it opposite Monday Night Football, the show was canceled after only eight episodes had been broadcast. Chase was left with his worst opinions of TV confirmed and the growing conviction—given the lack of positive response to any of his feature screenplays—that he’d made a fatal karmic error.
“I began to think that I was not going to succeed in movies because I wasn’t sacrificing enough. I wasn’t willing to quit, to get off that nipple, the weekly salary, the nice house in Santa Monica. I wasn’t willing to do the artistic thing, cut myself off and live the freelance life,” he said.
The outside world, meanwhile, saw someone with a growing reputation for outsize but wasted potential, a kind of human version of a Black List script: the most talented failure in television. When John Falsey called to enlist Chase as a writer for a new show set in the South during the civil rights movement, Falsey recalled, “The truth is, I don’t think anybody
else wanted him.”
Three
A Great Notion
The industrial coal country of eastern Pennsylvania is an unlikely place to find the seed of an electronic media revolution, much less a cultural one. Yet in this story it provides two.
The first came in 1948, when an enterprising appliance salesman in Mahanoy City, a town nestled in the picturesque but receptionless hills one hundred miles outside of Philadelphia, planted an antenna atop a nearby mountain, ran a literal cable into town, and began offering a new service. He charged $100 for installation and $2 per year thenceforth for the privilege of watching TV without the vagaries of wireless transmission.
The second occurred twenty-four years later, on November 8, 1972, and a mere forty miles away, in Wilkes-Barre. That was when, despite weather problems that forced a technician to stand on top of a roof, physically holding a microwave-receiving dish in place, HBO debuted to a tiny group of subscribers.
The idea for premium cable had been dreamed up by Charles Dolan, who had recently sold a large chunk of his Manhattan cable company, Sterling Communications, to Time Life Inc. and was casting about for a way to make it profitable. The answer—dreamed up, according to company lore, on a family vacation aboard the Queen Elizabeth II—was a subscription service focused on sports and movies. He called it “the Green Channel.” The name was quickly replaced with a placeholder: Home Box Office.
From the time of that first broadcast—of the film Sometimes a Great Notion, based on the Ken Kesey novel—much of both the problems and the promise that would drive HBO for the next four decades was already in place. The primary question, of course, was how to make people pay for something they either already paid for or, worse, got for free. In 1972, the answer was relatively easy: In those pre-VCR days, there were few options to see Hollywood movies outside of the theater, or even in the theater, since cinemas had yet to catch up with demographics by shifting from urban downtowns to suburban multiplexes. (The TV writer and essayist Rob Long has argued persuasively that this, as much as any particular upswell of artistic sensibility, was responsible for the New Cinema of the early 1970s and, once the suburbs got screens, its death at the hands of blockbusters such as Jaws and Star Wars.)
