Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  The cultural impact outweighed the raw numbers. That much-anticipated season premiere was watched by 11.3 million viewers, not nearly enough to crack the top twenty shows on network TV. (The reality show Survivor: The Australian Outback commanded an incredible 29.8 million viewers per week that season; the top-rated drama, ER, drew 22.4 million.) Still, The Sopranos’ roughly 10 million viewers per week—including HBO’s weekday rebroadcasts—was an astonishing number for pay cable. The newly ascendant market for DVDs, giving newcomers a chance to catch up before the premiere, only added to the eyeballs.

  The show had hit the rare sweet spot of mass appeal and critical respect. It could, as the clichéd analysis had it, be enjoyed on “two different levels”: for its visceral pleasures (the plot twists, the malapropisms, the blood, the sex) or for its literary ones. More accurately, it could be enjoyed in both ways simultaneously, the pleasure residing in the tension between reveling in the culture and the artistry of the critique. The result was an out-and-out phenomenon.

  All of this, Chase had achieved on his own terms and in the very system that had caused him so much shame all those years. What could be more in the rock ’n’ roll, maverick spirit of what directors like Coppola and Scorsese had done to the big Hollywood studios in the seventies? Stick it to the bastards in their own house, right under their noses, and make them thank you for it.

  More remarkable, Chase himself had become famous. In the history of television, how many people outside the business could have identified a TV writer by name, much less by face? Who cared? Yet here was Chase being stopped for autographs on the street, the subject of adoring profiles, on the cover of Rolling Stone, dead center among his cast, staring dourly at Mark Seliger’s lens while his feet sat buried in a metal pail filled with cement.

  It was an apt image. Even in the midst of wild success, Chase was weighed down by doubt and by dissatisfaction. He worried about those viewers he felt just didn’t get it, who tuned in each week just hoping to see “big Tony Soprano take some guy’s head and bang it against a wall like a cantaloupe.” He worried that the show’s success did nothing to change the fact that he’d sold out by being in television at all. Plot leaks, for which there was a sudden, fevered market, drove him to fits—and his employees to acrobatic precautions to avoid his wrath. (In a Vanity Fair article, frequent director Tim Van Patten told Peter Biskind, “When I’m done reading a script, I will take the first 10 pages and rip them up into small bits, drop half into the bathroom garbage, and half into the kitchen garbage. Then I’ll take the next 10 pages and rip them into small bits, drop half into the other bathroom garbage, and half into the incinerator in the hallway. I’ve been doing that for 10 years. My fingers would be killing me by the end of these things.”) Chase worried that even HBO, for which the value of The Sopranos had been incalculable, didn’t give him enough respect; at the end of each season, he complained, the network waited an inordinate amount of time to commit to the next.

  Joshua Brand had his former employee’s number when he talked with a Sopranos crew member sometime during season two and asked, “None of this is making him any happier, is it?”

  With great visibility had come great problems. The tabloids had feasted on James Gandolfini’s marital and substance abuse problems. The actor was becoming increasingly erratic, culminating, just a few weeks before the MoMA event, in the multiday disappearance that ended at the Brooklyn nail salon. Meanwhile, activists purporting to represent the image of Italian Americans had lately been getting press by calling for a boycott of The Sopranos. When they briefly succeeded in barring the production from shooting in Essex County, New Jersey (causing, among other things, the relocation of the iconic “Pine Barrens” episode to Harriman State Park, just across the New York State line), Chase was apoplectic.

  “How can these people cling to their victimhood so much? These mingy little barbers. Italians are very successful people. Why is it so important that they stay a beaten, oppressed, suffering minority? It makes me sick,” he said several years later. “I remember thinking, ‘I will shoot this show in my living room if I have to. But we’ll keep on shooting it. And we’ll keep portraying these people as they are, and we’re not going to change one lick of hair one iota to suit anybody. I will do it in my living room for $10 an episode, but I won’t stop.’” Long after the incident, he took undiminished delight in pointing out that James Treffinger, the county executive who had instituted the ban, had subsequently pleaded guilty and gone to jail on federal corruption charges.

  At MoMA itself, during a Q&A with reporter Ken Auletta, an audience member had accused Chase both of sullying the image of Italian Americans and of working for the Mafia himself. That surely didn’t dissuade Chase from making an announcement to the crowd that would be picked up the next day by The New York Times and newspapers across the country: His contract was up at the end of the next season, season four, and that’s when The Sopranos would come to an end.

  • • •

  Certainly, Chase had reason to feel burned out. Since its debut, the scale and scope of The Sopranos had multiplied in every way—a combined result of success and narrative necessity. As Chase liked to point out, season one had been designed as a self-contained arc, one that, at the end, left no clear route forward: Tony’s primary antagonists, his mother and his uncle, had suffered a stroke and had gone to jail, respectively. As often happened in the open-ended universe of an ongoing series, that necessitated introducing new characters to drive the plot: first Tony’s sister, Janice—an heir to Livia Soprano’s narcissistic awfulness—then her ex-boyfriend and a rival for the Mob’s control, Richie Aprile, and so on. And with each new character came new sets, new groups of friends, and new story lines to explore and service in the kind of meticulous detail that made the show come to life.

  The Sopranos was now a mini-empire, commanding fevered scrutiny, hundreds of people, and heady amounts of money. The number of shooting days for each script—which is the surest measure of cost—had swelled from a standard seven or eight to first ten, then twelve, then eventually as many as twenty, not counting reshoots, which could often take up several more days. The production had already traveled to Italy for one episode. No piece of music was off-limits, no matter the licensing fee. Chase had begun spending more and more of his downtime near the Atlantic coast of France, where he would eventually buy a house. He would edit from there, buying time on a satellite uplink to communicate with the rest of postproduction, nine time zones away. Cast and crew lunches often included lobster tail or prime steak. There appeared to be no checks on the size and costs of the show.

  “When we got there, we were awestruck,” said writer Andy Schneider, who joined in season six, with his wife, Diane Frolov. “TV was always about saving money, but HBO was paying for these lavish parties, big night shoots, things you would have censored yourself from writing before because you could never afford it. In normal television, you take out walk-ups, you take out night shoots. It takes a long time to light a street. Here you could have a quarter page saying, ‘Character walks down the sidewalk and enters the house. And it’s night. And it’s raining.’ You were free.” In a world in which every shot on every page corresponds to a significant expenditure, there might be no greater indication of the power Chase had consolidated than that he occasionally shot alternate scenes—New York mobster Phil Leotardo shooting Tony at the start of season six, instead of Uncle Junior, for instance—to throw off potential plot leakers.

  “No matter what we wanted, we did,” said Mitch Burgess. “We wrote an episode that called for a quarry for Tony to throw Ralphie’s body into, after he cuts his head off. But David couldn’t find a quarry around here. So we all went to Pennsylvania, the whole company. We threw a gunnysack into a quarry, lit up like a movie. And then we went over to the Holiday Inn, went to bed, got up, and moved the whole company back.”

  Matthew Weiner, who joined the show for season five, said, “We were exorcising
David’s demons. Do you know how many decisions were based on some meeting when he was on Northern Exposure, or Rockford, or Kolchak, or some other show you’ve never heard of where he worked for three years and somebody told him ‘You can’t do that’?”

  Chase, for instance, banned “walk and talks”—in which two characters, in the frame together, exchange information while heading toward their next destination—because it was a common network money-saving technique. “Sometimes you’d be in this amazing location and we’d say, ‘Can’t they just walk down the highway? You’ve got this strip club on one side, an abattoir over there. We can see it all!’” said Weiner. “And he’d say”—with withering sarcasm—“‘Yeah. Let’s lay some track and walk backwards and get out of here by four.’ I just knew it was some executive at Universal that he was punching in the face, thirty years later.” (Weiner never shied from expressing his gratitude and admiration for Chase, his showrunning mentor. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that another Chase pet peeve was shots that showed the backs of actors’ heads. And that the first shot of Mad Men—indeed, its iconic logo—was the back of Don Draper’s head.)

  To Chase, remaining vigilant to any and all interference was vital, even in the undeniably cozy confines of HBO. “It was necessary for me to always take the point of view that I was obligated to no one and nothing. And that unless I was going to do the show I wanted, I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “That unless I was going to be compensated at a level I thought proper, I wouldn’t do it. And that at any moment I would say, I could say, ‘Good-bye. No more. I’m leaving. Ending, no ending. I’m out of here.’ It was always important for me to maintain that position. In order to stay free.”

  All of this made for an exhilarating creative workplace, but it also created an atmosphere of intense pressure, most of it bearing down on Chase himself, who was overseeing not only the writing of each script, but also nearly every other creative decision of thirteen minimovies in rapid succession. “David would come in in the morning and say, about some script problem, ‘I think I fixed it. I was in the shower this morning . . .’ And I’d think, ‘How come he’s always in the shower when he thinks about this stuff?’” said Weiner. “Then I got the job and realized, ‘Oh, my God, you’re always thinking about it!’”

  As Biskind observed, Chase had good reason to understand Tony Soprano’s feelings upon being elevated to boss: “All due respect, you got no fucking idea what it’s like to be number one. Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fucking thing. It’s too much to deal with almost. And in the end you’re completely alone with it all.”

  Or Uncle Junior’s assessment: “That’s what being a boss is. You steer the ship the best way you know. Sometimes it’s smooth. Sometimes you hit the rocks.”

  The massive job was made possible at least in part by creating a world in which other people managed the rest of his life. Chase lived first in a series of apartment sublets, but once the show was a success, he moved into the penthouse of the Fitzpatrick Manhattan hotel on Lexington Avenue, with the hotel staff at his disposal. As he had in Los Angeles, he dined at the same restaurant several times a week, this time alternating periods at Daniel and Café Boulud. (The ease of getting restaurant reservations, he said later, only half joking, was one of the major reasons to keep extending The Sopranos’ run.) At work, he withdrew behind levels of gatekeepers. Chase’s assistant learned to institute a “five-minute rule” whenever bad news was delivered: the amount of time needed for the desk kicking and yelling to stop and a more rational response to commence. Not that there was a lot of bad news. “Nobody said no to David. Ever,” she said. “Except Jim. And even he said no only by not showing up.”

  “I’ve met a lot of tough guys in my life,” Tony Sirico, the ex-con, once told Robin Green. “But when I see David, I step back.”

  The bigger the show got, said Chase’s assistant, the more difficult even the simplest things became. “It used to be that if David needed to get somewhere, he could take a cab or get in a shared fifteen-passenger van or fly first class on the regular airline. Then, as things got more intense, he couldn’t take a cab anywhere, not even a car service. It had to be his own driver, but not in a fifteen-passenger van, in his own van. And if he couldn’t have the driver he wanted . . . His needs were just greater and greater. And his ability to handle little shifts or to be told he couldn’t have something was less and less.” (Chase said that he was happy to take advantage of the perks that HBO offered and which, he pointed out, were not unusual for the showrunner of a successful series.)

  The stress only intensified after 9/11, when Chase, the man who had been obsessed with nuclear destruction for as long as he could remember, became fearful of flying. At Silvercup, he demanded heightened security and code-activated locks to be installed on the doors to the writers’ offices. The new reality of terrorist threats dovetailed with Chase’s deeper worldview, said the assistant. “It’s the world against him. People are horrible and they want to get him. Whatever’s happening, it’s an injustice against him.”

  To her, the trajectory seemed clear: “I remember that first year when we worked in total obscurity and how much fun we had. The more money, the more respect, the less happy everybody was. Certainly, Jim was struggling, David was struggling. The people who were getting the most fame and the most money were struggling the most,” she said.

  • • •

  For all his other duties, the writers’ room remained the most important part of Chase’s work life, and it was a space ruled by his personality. As far back as I’ll Fly Away, Henry Bromell had been surprised by the ruthlessness with which he ran his room:

  “My wife and I had had a baby and she really wanted to go back to work. So I told David, ‘Just so you know, I need to go home at six a few nights a week.’ And he said no. He said, ‘I need to know your top priority is this job, not your family. Make a choice.’ And he had a cold look in his eyes. I was like, ‘What, are we in the Mafia?’”

  A writer in a David Chase writers’ room learned to be acutely sensitive to the boss’s moods—and that there was small margin for error. “David always made it clear, you know, ‘I’m not running a writing school here.’ Either you got it or you didn’t,” said Terence Winter. “People used to say, ‘I don’t think David likes me.’ I’d say, ‘You know how I know David likes you? You’re still here. If he doesn’t like you, you’ll be the first to know. And you will be gone.’”

  Chase had declined to hire back any of the writers from season one aside from Renzulli and Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess. To that number he added two more as the staff reassembled in late 1999: one was Winter, an ex-attorney from Marine Park, Brooklyn, a neighborhood much like Sopranos country. He had been slaving on such shows as The New Adventures of Flipper and Xena: Warrior Princess. Winter was good friends with Renzulli; both had worked for a time as New York City doormen and met on Renzulli’s short-lived show The Great Defender. Renzulli had secretly funneled Winter The Sopranos scripts throughout the first season (this was long before the need for any security protocol), and Winter fell in love before he ever saw a filmed episode. Winter was working on The PJs, a claymation Fox series starring the voice of Eddie Murphy, while Renzulli bugged Chase to give him a chance. Chase finally offered him a tryout script (“Big Girls Don’t Cry”) and then a job. Unfortunately, it was for less money and a lower title than he already had. “I had to make the most horrifying phone call of my life, saying no to The Sopranos,” he said. Luckily, Chase and HBO relented and gave him the title of co-producer.

  The relationship between Renzulli and Chase had always been tense: Chase found Renzulli’s incessant talking irritating and was once infuriated when he demanded a limousine for his family in New York, precisely the kind of grudge he was prone to hang on to; Renzulli was resentful of being bossed around by someone who, to his mind, didn’t understand the world they were writing about as well as he did. As the writing staff’s
most prominent Italian American, he was especially sensitive to ethnic characterizations, almost to the degree of the protesters who had disrupted production in season two. When Todd Kessler, on Chase’s instructions, included the term guinea tee in some screen directions, referring to a wife-beater T-shirt, Renzulli called him up. “How would you like it if I wrote ‘kike glasses’?” he asked.

  To Renzulli’s mind, the show had broken its contract of verisimilitude as early as the second episode, when Paulie tells Christopher: “I went over [to France] for a blow job. Your mother was working the bonbon concession at the Eiffel Tower.”

  “I just thought, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t.’ You’ve just robbed Christopher of his balls and backbone and you’ve shown Paulie to be a no-class guy. Christopher would never forget that when he became a made guy,” he said. Even worse was a season five development that he watched as a civilian viewer. To solve a thorny set of problems, Tony conspires to have a recently released mobster, Feech La Manna, played by Robert Loggia, busted for parole violation and thrown back in prison. The real-life thorny problem that the plot point addressed was the crippling difficulty Loggia was having remembering his lines. But to Renzulli’s mind, that did nothing to forgive what he saw as a fatal violation of Family protocol. “The whole crew deserves to get found dead,” he said.