by Brett Martin
• • •
The Sopranos couldn’t have arrived at HBO at a more propitious time, but Albrecht and team weren’t completely immune to the same worries that afflicted the networks. “Could we have a show with a criminal as a protagonist? It seems like a quaint little argument now, but at the time it was huge,” said Carolyn Strauss. “I remember sitting in a room with Jeff [Bewkes] and Chris and hashing through it: ‘Should we do this? We should do this! Can we do this?’”
Another sticking point was Chase’s desire to direct the pilot. Albrecht was set against the idea. Chase had directed the Almost Grown pilot, two episodes of I’ll Fly Away, and a Rockford Files TV movie, but he was hardly an experienced hand. Plus, on principle, Albrecht was hesitant to give one person so much control. Brad Grey called and asked that the HBO chief meet with Chase to hear him out: “That way, you’ll say no but he’ll at least feel like he got heard.” Chase came in and put on a virtuoso performance.
“He talked about his vision: about how New Jersey was a character, the tone of it all. He was able to talk about it as a visual execution, not just a written execution,” Albrecht said. “By the time he was finished talking, I thought, ‘Wow. I might find somebody who’s a “better director” than David, but I’ll never find somebody who’s a better director of this.’”
On the same day that Chase was required to make a final decision on his Fox deal by two p.m., he was summoned to a meeting at HBO at noon. Albrecht gave him the green light. And the search for the Man Who Would Be Tony began.
• • •
Chase’s first, quixotic choice was a non-actor: As a good New Jerseyan, he of course knew Steven Van Zandt from Van Zandt’s long-standing role as guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Early in the band’s career, in addition to what would become his trademark head scarves, the musician would occasionally wear a porkpie hat that Chase always thought made him look like an old-fashioned mobster. “He looked like a Jersey guy,” he said.
“We had that gangster kind of Jersey thing going on,” Van Zandt agreed. “Like the Rat Pack translated through some bizarre rock ’n’ roll prism. Bruce was like Sinatra. I was like the fun Dean Martin character. And Clarence was Sammy Davis on steroids.”
In 1996, Van Zandt had long since left the gang. He’d mostly stopped touring with Springsteen and given up his own solo career. In fact, he had given up almost everything beyond walking his dog around the West Village, where he lived, and passing his days in a state of nonproductive, though not entirely unpleasant, lassitude. “I did nothing. I literally walked my dog for seven years. I did not work. I just was sort of meditating and reflecting on my crazy world and my life and how I got to the point where I’d gotten to,” he said.
One obsession did remain: advocating for the inclusion of the blue-eyed soul band the Rascals, pride of Garfield, New Jersey, in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When that effort finally succeeded, Van Zandt was tapped to make the induction speech. And so it was that Chase, in bed one night and flipping through channels, suddenly saw that gangster face pop up on his TV screen.
It quickly became apparent that it was not the face of Tony Soprano. HBO was not prepared to bank its evolution on a musician with zero acting experience, no matter what he looked like in what kind of hat. The most serious candidate early in the process was Michael Rispoli, who would eventually take the smaller role of Jackie Aprile. As a consolation, Chase asked Van Zandt if he wanted to play any other role. Despite a nagging conscience about taking a job from a real actor, Van Zandt mentioned a treatment he’d once written for a film about a onetime hit man turned club owner. The main character’s name was Silvio Dante.
But before the birth of The Sopranos’ Silvio—he of the immaculate pompadour and chartreuse suits—Van Zandt did fly out to Los Angeles to do a screen test for Tony, alongside Rispoli and one other candidate. Leaving his audition, he passed this third actor in the waiting room and recognized him as a character actor he’d seen in the films True Romance and Get Shorty. “I didn’t know his name, but I thought, ‘That guy’s great. He’s got a kind of greatness about him. He’s the one who should get the part,’” he said.
James Gandolfini was another Jersey boy, an alumnus of Park Ridge High School and Rutgers University. He had as little experience playing leading men as Van Zandt did. And he was far more unknown. Large, balding, and older looking than his thirty-five years, he was nobody’s idea of a conventional movie star—though many women would come to find him startlingly sexy (not, in most cases, without some degree of internal conflict). What he brought with him was an almost instantaneous facility for inhabiting and deepening the role of Tony. His charisma, his petulance, his capacity for violence, his vulnerability—all of it bubbled and seethed beneath the surface as Gandolfini read at the audition.
“I felt this gut thing, that it was him, but David took some convincing. He loved Stevie Van Zandt,” said Fitzgerald, who became Gandolfini’s fiercest advocate. Gandolfini met with Chase in Los Angeles for three hours one Friday, and Fitzgerald called excitedly Saturday morning. “Is it him?” she asked breathlessly. “He said, ‘I don’t know. . . .’ ‘No, seriously, is it him?’ ‘He’s a pain in the ass on set.’ ‘I don’t care about that,’” said Fitzgerald. “‘Is it him?’”
Chase came around, but he now faced Albrecht’s worries about such an unusual leading man. “Rispoli had done a fantastic job, and his was a much more accessible Tony,” Albrecht said. “David said, ‘Look, in the real world it would be Jimmy.’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ It wasn’t a long conversation.” (Gandolfini, for his part, understood the reservations: “This was an incredible leap of faith. I mean, it wasn’t four pretty women in Manhattan [as in Sex and the City]. This was a bunch of fat guys from Jersey.”)
The rest of the cast fell eclectically into place. With an unknown in the lead, Lorraine Bracco, as Tony’s therapist, Jennifer Melfi, was the closest thing to a star; she and others would often say later that she had originally been called to play Carmela Soprano, but that casting was never likely, if only because it would have too closely aped her role in GoodFellas. From that movie, too, came an intense downtown New York theater actor and screenwriter, Michael Imperioli, to play Christopher Moltisanti. “He was already in the pantheon,” Chase explained. John Ventimiglia read for nearly every male role in the script before landing the part of Artie Bucco.
For Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, the team uncovered a rare and rough gem: Tony Sirico had played mobsters previously, notably for Woody Allen and James Toback, and he lent the cast a frisson of mobster street cred, having served time himself for some long-ago offense. As Paulie, his performance bordered on the savant; it was difficult to tell where the actor ended and the character began. As his germaphobic, immaculately dressed character might have done, Sirico insisted on preparing his own hair each day, often rising at three a.m. at his home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to coif before reporting for an early shoot. Wherever he went, a fog of Drakkar Noir cologne followed, lingering for days in the clothing of female staffers whom he never missed an opportunity to embrace.
The most difficult role to fill proved to be Carmela. Days before shooting was scheduled to start, the part remained empty. Here, Oz, which would provide a pool of talent for many future shows of the Third Golden Age, made its first contribution. Edie Falco had spent three seasons playing single mother and prison guard Diane Whittlesey on that show, about as far from a suburban Mob housewife as it’s possible to get. Nevertheless, she said, “Maybe it’s because I’m part Italian, or grew up on Long Island, but I read the part and thought, ‘I know exactly who this woman is. I can feel her already.’” After watching Falco reading two scenes—one in which Carmela tells Tony he’s going to hell as he enters an MRI machine and one in which Tony admits he’s started taking Prozac—the producers agreed, and Diane Whittlesey was sent on permanent “vacation.”
The Sopranos pilot filmed in N
ew Jersey over two weeks in the summer of 1997. Within days, Chase received powerful confirmation that casting Gandolfini had been the right move. He was directing a scene in which Christopher is complaining to Tony about not receiving enough credit for a job. As written, Tony gives him a quick slap, but instead, “Jim fucking went nuts—picked him up and grabbed him by the neck and just about throttled him.” Chase had to catch his breath. “I thought, ‘Wow. Right! That’s exactly right!’” Already, the strange alchemical process by which a character who has resided inside one person’s head comes to life outside it had begun. Tony would never again be Chase’s alone.
Chase returned to California for postproduction, and cast and crew dispersed. Before leaving, Falco remembered, Chase told them, “You’ve been great. It’s been lots of fun. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to watch this.”
Secretly, as it had upon completing Almost Grown, a part of Chase hoped the pilot would fail. If HBO declined to bring the show to series, he reasoned, the network might be willing to cut their losses by giving him an additional $750,000 to finish the story as a feature film. Even in the midst of filming, he would ask producer Ilene Landress if she thought HBO would prefer to release it that way. “Actually, no,” Landress told him. “They’re a television network. They’re in the business of putting things on TV.”
The finished pilot was submitted to HBO at the end of October. The Brillstein-Grey team arranged a screening for Albrecht. “The lights came up, and Chris, I’m not exaggerating, just sat there, with his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes. It felt like an eternity,” said Reilly. “I think that on some level he was just trying to get his bearings. Just trying to screw his courage to the sticking place to say, ‘Okay. I guess we’re doing this kind of thing now.’”
Finally, Albrecht lifted his head and said, slowly, “It’s really good.”
Still, HBO, which had until December 20 to deliver a verdict, stalled on giving the official green light. One month passed. Chase was proud enough of the finished product to pay for his own screening for friends and family, catered with pasta and sausage and peppers. The response from those who’d spent their lives in TV was at once overwhelmingly positive and reflexively pessimistic.
“I just remember feeling, ‘I cannot believe I’m looking at this. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. If it fails, it won’t be the fault of the project,’” said Barbara Hall, Chase’s friend and former colleague on I’ll Fly Away.
“It was the first time I thought, ‘Okay. Really good shit doesn’t get picked up,’” said Mitchell Burgess.
Three more weeks ticked by. HBO was silent. Chase fretted. “David,” recalled Fitzgerald, deadpan, “is not a good waiter.”
Finally, on the next to last day, the call came. Chase’s feelings were mixed, as usual. “I thought, ‘Here we go. It’s going to be a tremendous amount of work.’” At the same time, he had the conviction of a condemned man given one more chance: “I didn’t give a fuck about failing. I had nothing to lose. Once I had the go-ahead, I thought, ‘You know what? We’re just going to go for it.’”
• • •
Chase knew the main arc of the first season, where it began and where it ended, from Tony’s initial panic attacks to his dawning realization that his mother tried to have him killed. That story would have constituted the feature he’d once dreamed of making. Now, though, he had to figure out how to get from point A to point B while filling twelve additional hours of television. That meant bringing in other writers.
No other art form—certainly none that putatively bears the imprint of an auteur—is created as collaboratively as the television drama. True, the Fellinis and Altmans of the world relied on the talent and creativity of dozens of other artists—from actors to lighting designers to hairdressers. What they didn’t do was sit down in a room filled with other directors and solicit their input. Yet the very same essential truth about television that elevates the writer to Master of the Universe—the medium’s voracious appetite for ever more content, ever more quickly—guarantees that he or she cannot do it alone.
Each showrunner must bend and shape this necessity to serve his or her own method, and there are as many subtle variations of writers’ rooms as there are rooms themselves. The only near-absolute is that there will be a quantity and flow of food reminiscent of a cruise ship, as though writing were an athletic feat demanding a constant infusion of calories. (Or, to be cynical, as though writers are so craven and easily manipulated that mere food will keep them loyal and docile. To which it can only be noted that every writer brags about the food in the writers’ room. Every single one of them.)
In most rooms, there is a conference table around which the writers gather. In the center will be a pile of snacks and takeout menus, as well as pads, pens, and other implements of creativity. Along the walls, there will be spaces to organize and visualize ideas—usually either whiteboards or bulletin boards covered with index cards. Depending on where in the process the room is, one might contain random ideas, bits of dialogue, stray themes. Another may have the evolving outline of a particular episode, a vertical stack of numbered scenes, or “beats.” Along the longest wall, there will likely be a grid divided into twelve or thirteen vertical columns, representing the number of episodes. Running horizontally will be the names of characters and what happens to them in each episode, thus allowing the writers to see each story arc at a single glance. If there’s a signature tool of the Third Golden Age, the whiteboard is it.
In one seat around the table, there will be a younger person, the writers’ assistant, feverishly transcribing the proceedings into a laptop. He or she will be the only one apparently engaged in what most of the world identifies as “work.” Indeed, a functional writers’ room must embrace, at least in its early stages, the creative ferment of procrastination, as its members get to know one another, trade stories, and mull over the themes and narrative threads of the show at hand. Most successful showrunners encourage such bullshit sessions. Eventually, the business of the room will turn to actually “breaking” story—that is, creating an outline of specific beats. As the show progresses, the writer assigned to a specific episode will take these often incredibly specific outlines and disappear for a week or two, to write. Later still, there will be rotating absences as writer-producers supervise the shooting of their scripts on set or location.
The ultimate goal, even if it’s unstated, is something that goes well beyond some version of screenwriting by committee: a kind of creative communion. Said David Milch, “The best situation of all is to come clean in the writers’ room and discover, through your encounter with your fellow writers, the nature and rhythms of the story that you’re trying to tell.”
But between reality and that lofty goal lie any number of quotidian pitfalls: writers who talk too much, writers who don’t talk at all, yes-men, naysayers, egos run amok. In other words, precisely as complicated and intense a set of conditions as one might imagine results from taking a group of artists—each the smartest and funniest in his or her class, each having gotten into the business with the dream of producing his or her own work, most neurotic to one degree or another, and all feeling the pressure of competition—and putting them in a room together for eight hours a day, mostly to face rejection and all in service of another person’s vision.
“That’s the job. You’re there to serve the Creator,” said James Manos, who also wrote for Shawn Ryan’s The Shield. “It’s a difficult position because someone like David or Shawn hires you because you have your own, strong voice and then, as soon as you get there, you have to start writing in their voice.”
Matthew Weiner admitted to being driven crazy by the idea that nobody outside the inner circle of The Sopranos would ever know the good writing he did while on the show. But, he said, “I could never live not expressing the fact that I was working for David, in David’s brain, with David’s characters, trying to please David, not operating a Matt
Weiner franchise of the Sopranos show.”
The best analogy might be a draftsman charged with designing one small element—a sconce, say— of an architect’s grand cathedral. He may find satisfying ways to express himself, might even get some career-advancing recognition from hard-core sconce aficionados, but ultimately it’s all about illuminating the Master’s work. That gives the showrunner, who of course knows his own vision better than anybody, immense powers of rejection and benediction. The ultimate dream is to find writers who bring something absolutely new into the universe he’s created, who give him exactly what he wants but could never have dreamed of himself. “That’s when you get this stupid look on your face,” Milch said.
Or as Weiner put it, “It’s like falling in love.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that writers’ rooms are somewhat intense workplaces. (It hardly seems accidental that “the room” is a term also used in analysis and in Alcoholics Anonymous.) They are hotbeds of emotional turmoil and transference.
“I’ve never been in a writers’ room where the writers didn’t end up psychologically picking apart the showrunner, down to the finest grain,” said Chris Provenzano, a writer for Mad Men and other shows. “Writers are already interested in motivations and psyches. They’ve all been in therapy. They’re all messed up and trying to fill some hole. So when the showrunner invariably does something that doesn’t square or that they don’t like, they start saying, ‘He must be at war with his ex-wife. It’s got to be something like that.’ You become involved in this slow but inexorable dismantling of the person’s psyche because that’s the brain in charge of all the other brains and you’re the appendages of this superorganism.”
