by Brett Martin
• • •
David Chase, devotee of the film auteurs, had predictably complicated feelings about writers’ rooms. Early in his career, he had worked at The Rockford Files with a staff of just three who would get together and brainstorm stories, letting a tape recorder capture sudden inspiration. Later, grappling with the more complex storytelling of Almost Grown and Northern Exposure, he’d headed larger rooms. And he’d come to terms with their necessity for generating stories.
“Story construction is the hardest part of the process. It’s very difficult not to do things that everybody in America has already seen a thousand times. So, you go in there and you say, ‘What do we want to make happen?’”
That, he said, is the fun part, along with the gossip, the eating, the discussing current events, the bullshitting. It’s when it came time for what he called the “professional” part of the job that he was more dubious.
“Other people have good ideas. And they’re hard to come by. But in another sense, they’re a dime a dozen,” he said. “Turning an idea into an episode—that’s the grunt work. The organization can rest for a day or so, secure in the notion that we’ve got an idea. But eventually the showrunner’s the one who has to look at his watch and say, ‘How do we fill up forty-two minutes?’ We can all sit around and decide we want to make a Louis XIV table, but eventually somebody has to do the carving.”
What happens next, he says, is a private epiphany, experienced in public.
Invariably what would happen is I would get up, go off by myself, and they would continue talking. There was a couch and I would lie on that couch and just put my story hat on. And this is not a natural thing for me. I don’t like math. I don’t like puzzles. At all. Story work to me is that: it’s figuring out this puzzle. But I would go on that couch by myself and they’d all be talking. And then I would just sort of like suddenly—this idea, that idea—all of a sudden you get a run. It’s like music. I’d see where the peaks and valleys are: “This goes like this, like that, like this.” And I would get up and go to the board and bam bam bam. “And then and then and then.” It’s very impressionistic. You’re running really fast. Sometimes, boom: It’s done. You have fourteen scenes. I don’t know how it works, but it would happen.
To what extent such breakthroughs are facilitated by being surrounded by other writers, or happen in spite of them, appears to be an open mystery even to Chase himself.
“My experience is that the showrunner really has to just do it,” he said.
Yet if he had all the time in the world to write every word of every episode of a series? “I would hire a staff. I’d get lonely.”
• • •
Chase began building The Sopranos writers’ room by looking to old colleagues. Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess had met at the University of Iowa. Green, who had written for Rolling Stone in its San Francisco salad days, was at the Writers’ Workshop; Burgess, a tall, deep-voiced native Iowan, had just come out of a stint in the army and was a student in her undergraduate writing class. Eventually, Green landed at Brand and Falsey’s A Year in the Life and then worked for Chase on Almost Grown.
The two bonded over their equally problematic mothers. “We would laugh so hard, we’d cry,” Green said. Chase was intrigued by Green’s single (albeit tenuous) connection to the world of organized crime: as a teenager growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, she’d double-dated with a son of crime boss Raymond Patriarca.
After Almost Grown, both writers returned to the Brand-Falsey camp: Chase to I’ll Fly Away and Green to Northern Exposure. Burgess joined Green as a writing partner, and the two would go on to write nearly a quarter of the show’s 110 episodes, including many during Chase’s two-year tenure.
David and Denise Chase were creatures of gustatory habit, claiming a restaurant they liked and then returning over and over. In Santa Monica, their spot was an Italian restaurant called Drago, where they often anchored dinner parties. Green and Burgess remained regular attendees after Northern Exposure ended, and they followed the progress of The Sopranos pilot, which Chase had given them to read when it was still at Fox. If this thing goes, he asked them, will you come write for me? The answer was an enthusiastic yes. In the meantime, they suffered through staff positions in the writers’ room of Party of Five, which is where they were just a few days before Christmas, breaking yet another story of teen drama, when an assistant came in to say they were wanted on the phone: a Mr. Tommy Soprano was calling.
The Sopranos’ writers began meeting in a rented portion of Oliver Stone’s production offices in Santa Monica. Chase assembled packages of material on Mob life for his writers to read. Dan Castleman, a Manhattan assistant district attorney who would remain with the show as a consultant throughout its run, came in to talk about his organized crime prosecutions. Another visitor was a former made man, now in the witness protection program, who showed off scars from long-ago bullet wounds and shared his expertise on such matters as how best to break a person’s arm and the Mafia’s relative views on penetrating stewardesses with broomsticks (pro) and performing cunnilingus (con).
Also in the room was Manos, a chain-smoking semi-agoraphobe who had helped pen an HBO movie called The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom; two young writers, Mark Saraceni and Jason Cahill; and a colorful chatterbox named Frank Renzulli, the closest thing to an actual wiseguy that The Sopranos writing team ever had.
Renzulli, a big man with a Brillo goatee, was the son of first-generation immigrants from Sicily and Naples. He had grown up in the Maverick housing projects on Boston’s East Side, in underworld terms a stronghold of the Patriarca crime family. Renzulli’s parents were not themselves connected, but their feelings spanned the range of Italian American response to the Mafia. His father looked down on mobsters, though Renzulli suspected that, ironically, his paternal grandfather had migrated to upstate New York during Prohibition for reasons connected to bootlegging. His mother, meanwhile, had grown up in the neighborhood. “One of the wiseguys once told me, ‘Thank God your mother wasn’t born a man. We’d all be in trouble,’” Renzulli said. “She would have been the happiest woman in the world if I’d become a wiseguy.”
She half got her wish. By the time he was nine years old, Renzulli had started hanging out around the local social club. He would run errands for the older guys with shiny Cadillacs and thick bankrolls and entertain them with his precocious antics.
“You’re a poor kid in the inner city, and life looks hopeless. People are telling you it’s hopeless. Then you see a guy pull up in a fucking Mercedes. Fucking air-conditioned, smelling good, looking good. And he’s got his own little social club. They got air-conditioning in there. They got food in there, all this stuff. And one of them says, ‘C’mere, you little prick. What’s your name? Do me a favor, go to this store, get me this, this, and this.’ And then it builds from there.”
If that induction sounds as though it could have been ripped from a screenplay, it’s worth remembering one of The Sopranos’ more trenchant insights: that Mob life and pop culture’s portrayal of it have been locked in such a long cycle of reference, echo, and imitation that it’s often hard to tell which came first.
By his teens, Renzulli had become a fine pool player, an astute observer of Mob mores, and a peripheral, though increasingly involved, participant in the world of petty crime and occasional violence. By his early twenties, he began to think it was time to get out.
“I had an epiphany one night: Everything was either feast or famine. One night I’d have a couple thousand dollars in my pocket, the next I’m looking to borrow money for cigarettes.” Going straight wouldn’t be easy, especially given the disdain he’d developed for the straight world. “I needed to exorcise those demons that said, ‘You’re a sucker if you work a legitimate job.’ I was always at risk of losing my regular job the minute somebody told me what to do. I was always at risk of saying, ‘Go fuck yourself
.’”
He headed for New York, to study acting and playwriting. For two years, he worked odd carpentry jobs and lived in the Sixty-third Street YMCA. Eventually, he found work as a doorman in a Hell’s Kitchen building filled with the same breed of wiseguys he’d left behind. By now, though, the call of show business was stronger than that of criminality. He landed his first speaking role in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose.
In 1987, he went west to Los Angeles in search of more parts. After a few years, he turned to writing. “There’s only so many goombahs you can play,” he said. By the time he came to Chase’s attention, he’d co-created a short-lived show called The Great Defender, which starred Michael Rispoli as a blue-collar lawyer; developed one failed pilot set in East Boston that featured future Shield star Michael Chiklis; and worked on another with David E. Kelley, for whom he also played a recurring role as a pimp on The Practice.
Chase met with him at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, and both men left wary. “I’d read the pilot, and I couldn’t figure out what the point of view was. I mean, Why is he writing this?” Renzulli remembered. He had the feeling Chase didn’t like him. “I irritated him,” he said. “I think he called David Kelley to ask if I always talked so much.”
Chase, for his part, reported back to Green and Burgess: “This guy’s got the real marinara,” meaning Mob knowledge, “but he’s crazy as hell.”
Still, the two saw eye to eye on at least one important matter, one that would secure Renzulli’s participation in building the Sopranos universe. “Every wiseguy I saw played on TV made me want to scream,” Renzulli said. “He [David] told me, ‘It’s not bad acting, it’s bad writing. Those shows are written poorly. We’re not going to do that.’”
• • •
The first several episodes came together in the office in Santa Monica. Green would write each beat on an index card and tape them together in long strips. After four episodes were written, the crew—minus Renzulli, who, with three children and another on the way, remained in California—packed up to move to New York and begin production. Chase left no question about his ambition. “David was after big fish,” Burgess said. “He wanted this to be as good as The Godfather. As good as GoodFellas.” Over dinner at a Japanese restaurant, Chase told Burgess and Green, “This is it for me. If this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.”
Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, producers and location scouts had been fanning out across the Garden State, looking for the building blocks of The Sopranos’ physical universe. The North Caldwell house that had been the family’s home in the pilot was reconstructed at Silvercup Studios (it would become ever more expensive to get permission to shoot the handful of necessary exterior scenes at the real house each season). The Bada Bing! remained a strip club called Satin Dolls in Lodi. An empty storefront in a Scottish Irish neighborhood in Kearny became the semipermanent site of the fictional Satriale’s Pork Store, as well as production storage.
Because HBO had no real prime-time schedule and nobody was waiting on the show’s debut, Chase and team had the luxury of filming, editing, and finalizing all thirteen episodes long before a single one aired. At the conclusion of shooting, in November, Chase was his usual self. “Jim, Edie, all of us were like, ‘This was fun. It was an interesting challenge. We enjoyed ourselves.’ Which of course meant that we weren’t going to be able to continue, because TV is never about enjoying yourself.”
As the January premiere approached, there were positive rumblings from critics and a handful of private screenings, but nobody knew what to expect. “We were really living in a bubble: It was a pilot that had been passed on. Cast with unknowns and shooting in New Jersey. For HBO. Who was paying attention?” Fitzgerald said.
On January 10, while a snowstorm rolled up the East Coast, The Sopranos made its debut.
And then, as one cast member would later put it, “all hell broke loose.”
PART II
The Beast
in He
Five
Difficult Men
The opening theme of The Sopranos was a remix of a 1997 song by a mostly unknown, America-obsessed band from Brixton, London, called Alabama 3—or, in the United States, A3, to avoid legal complications involving the band Alabama. At first listen, it seemed an odd, almost perverse choice for a show so steeped in its particular social world—even less “Italian” and “Jersey” than David Chase’s other top choice of song, Elvis Costello’s “Complicated Shadows.” But Chase, early on, was shy of being too straightforward with his musical choices; it would be a while before he considered Springsteen or Sinatra. And the discordant, driving “Woke Up This Morning” quickly became inseparable from the show, so intrinsic to its effect that it was soon unclear whether it had been the perfect choice all along or had simply been transformed by the material it introduced.
In any event, the most important song in The Sopranos pilot played not over the main title, but in the closing credits: Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me.” It could be the theme song for the entire Third Golden Age.
The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bonds
Restless by day
And by night, rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me
Men alternately setting loose and struggling to cage their wildest natures has always been the great American story, the one found in whatever happens to be the ascendant medium at the time. Our favorite genres—the western; the gangster saga; the lonesome but dogged private eye operating outside the comforts of normal, domestic life; the superhero with his double identities—have all been literalizations of that inner struggle, just as Huckleberry Finn striking out for the territories was, or Ishmael taking to the sea.
It should have been no surprise, then, that the Third Golden Age of TV began by revisiting those genres. The same had been true of sixties and seventies cinema, with its retelling of the flight to the frontier (Easy Rider), the detective story (The Long Goodbye), the western (The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller), and so on. Above all, no genre suited the baby boomers’ dueling impulses of attraction and guilt toward American capitalism as well as the Mob drama. The notion that the American dream might at its core be a criminal enterprise lay at the center of the era’s signature works, from Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown to The Godfather and Mean Streets.
The Sopranos yoked that story to one of postwar literature’s most potent tropes: horror of the suburbs, which in novels from Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road to Joseph Heller’s Something Happened to John Updike’s Rabbit series had come to represent everything crushing and confining to man’s essential nature. In his self-absorption, his horniness, his alternating cruelty and regret, his gnawing unease, Tony was, give or take Prozac and one or two murders, a direct descendant of Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom. In other words, the American Everyman. (He was also a twisted version of yet another archetype, the “TV dad”; as Chase said, “It was Father Knows Best . . . how to kill people.”)
Out of the two traditions came a very modern, very relatable hybrid: an old-school man—blunt, physical, taking whatever he wanted, a seductive if uncomfortable fantasy for men and women alike—in a postfeminist world. Rescue Me’s Tommy Gavin and The Shield’s Vic Mackey were versions of the same thing: men in the most macho of professions—fireman and policeman—undone by women the moment they stepped off duty. And Don Draper, of course, was swept up, head-on, in the revolution of gender roles and expectations.
“Here’s a guy with all that power, yet completely emasculated by his mom and wife,” FX executive, and later head of Fox Broadcasting, Peter Liguori said of Tony. “Guys watched and thought, ‘I’d like to be the boss, I’d like to have big balls. I’d like to make all the calls and do things according to my rules.’ But also, ‘Man, he’s a lot like me, because even when I am the boss, the second I go home, I’m Hazel.’”
For all that, Tony was also p
recisely the kind of character that conventional wisdom had long held viewers might embrace in the safety of a movie theater, or in the pages of a book, but would reject if he appeared on-screen in their own homes. If that was ever true, what had changed?
In part, by the late 1990s those traditional boundaries between art consumed outside and inside the home had long since started to blur, thanks to cable, video games, home video, and the nascent Internet. This process would vastly accelerate over the next ten years, until children coming to media consciousness in 2012 would make no meaningful distinction between “movie,” “TV,” “YouTube,” “podcast,” and so on.
At the same time, shifting economics revealed that maybe it had always been advertisers, rather than audiences, who were so averse to difficult characters—a throwback to the time when individual advertisers produced and sponsored their own shows and exercised a chilling effect on the shows’ content. Generally, that meant rejecting anything that threatened too directly the warm feelings and consumerist status quo that viewers would carry over into the commercial break.
HBO, of course, had no such sponsors to worry about. Its concern was building the sense that a culturally aware person could not afford not to have a subscription, even if he or she watched only an hour per week. And basic cable was quick to catch up, for reasons more similar than immediately apparent. Advertising, to which ratings matter so much, is only one of two revenue streams vital to a basic cable network’s bottom line. The other comes from carriage fees, which are what cable operators (Time Warner, Cablevision, Cox) pay for the right to include the network in its cable packages. Even as operators expanded to thousands of stations, the sheer number of networks fighting for space introduced a fear more pressing than the hoary Grendel of low ratings—being dropped and disappearing altogether.
John Landgraf, who became president of FX Entertainment in 2004, explained the value of having original shows like The Shield and Rescue Me: “There is a group of consumers out there, in the tens of millions”—way more than watch any individual FX show—“that would really be bothered if they couldn’t get FX. They would either change cable providers or bitch to their cable provider. I’m not sure that would happen if all we had was Two and a Half Men repeats and a really good lineup of Hollywood movies.”
