David Chase, the Sopranos, and Television Creativity
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David Chase, The Sopranos, and Television Creativity David Lavery and Robert J. Thompson Bonnie: Livia, ever hear the old Italian saying my aunts used: col tempo la foglia, di gelso divena seta. Carmela: What does that mean, Bonnie? Bonnie: Time and patience change the mulberry leaf to silk. From “46 Long” on The Sopranos, written by David Chase David Chase’s mulberry leaves were many, his patience extraordinary, his creative achievement decades in the making. A precocious child, a devotee of Freud in high school, where he authored a blasphemous story in which “somebody spies the Apostles sneaking Jesus’ body out of the tomb, right before they go ‘Oh, my God, he’s resurrected.’” Chase longed as a young man to be a filmmaker or perhaps a rock and roll musician. An English major in college (first at Wake Forest, later at New York University), like contemporaries and near‐ contemporaries Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, Chase then went on to attend film school—at Stanford. The pilot for The Sopranos, however, would not be written until he served twenty seven reluctant years in television, beginning as a writer in 1971. Despite a distaste for network television he makes no effort to hide (“I loathe and despise almost every second of it”), money had kept Chase in the industry, writing, and eventually producing, for such sundry series as The Night Stalker (1974‐ 75), The Rockford Files (1976‐80), I’ll Fly Away (1991‐1992, Northern Exposure (1993‐ 95), and directing an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985‐86), but he also turned down many other opportunities as well. Though greatly admired by bigger names like Rockford creator Stephen J. Cannell and Dick Wolf, he remained largely anonymous in a still mostly authorless medium. Off the Minnesota Strip (1980), a made‐for‐television movie he wrote, did earn him an Emmy, and he still remembers proudly the ambitious Almost Grown (November 1988 to February 1989), a short‐ lived series about the sixties and seventies making use of a rock and roll soundtrack and extensive flashbacks that gave him his first opportunity to create and produce The Collected Works of David Lavery 2 his own show. But he continued to write movie scripts that never got made and to dream of leaving television for feature filmmaking. Chase recalls how exciting the early 70s were to him as an aspiring filmmaker, an era in which “movies were starting to be called ‘film’” and were beginning to be taken seriously as art, and non‐Hollywood models from Europe and Japan inspired in Chase and his generation new conceptions of the medium. A screening of Fellini’s 8½ at Wake Forest in the ‘60s left a lasting impression. (Fellini, Chase observes, inspired him to incorporate Italian themes into his stories.) The films of Polanski and Buñuel would not be forgotten. Chase began to dream about making “personal” films that did not seem to have been mass‐produced. TV, on the other hand, “ruined the movies,” or so Chase believed. Though he admits to loving television as a kid,” the affair didn’t last. “I fell out of love with TV probably after The Fugitive went off the air [1967]. And then when I had my first network meeting, that didn’t help” . Chase virtually ignored TV in the sixties and seventies except for an addiction he calls “absurd” to Medical Center (1969‐76) and an infatuation with I Spy (1965‐68), a series whose writing (especially in its last two seasons) he greatly admired . “I hated everything that corporate America had to offer,” Chase tells Allen Rucker. “I considered network TV to be propaganda for the corporate state—the programming not only the commercials. I’m not a Marxist and I never was very radical, but that’s what I considered it to be. To some extent, I still do. .” Even a quality series like Northern Exposure, a show he wrote for in its final two seasons, was for Chase “propaganda for the corporate state. it was ramming home every week the message that ‘life is nothing but great.’ ‘Americans are great’ and ‘heartfelt emotion and sharing conquers everything.’” It should not surprise us that Chase thinks of himself as “The first counterculture . person in hour drama” . He has remained an in‐house renegade. “I think it is a sad commentary on the last two decades of television,” Stephen J. Cannell writes, “that this man, who was well known to all the networks for almost twenty‐five years, could not get his fresh, totally unique ideas past the guardians of our public airwaves (read network The Collected Works of David Lavery 3 executives here). Instead of The Sopranos, we more often got mindless clones of last year’s semi‐hits, while David made his living running other people’s shows, unable to sell his own.” How he did finally manage to sell his own is a story often told. Chase has again and again insisted that “luck” was perhaps the major contributing factor, and a cursory cataloguing of the extraordinary and diverse components that contributed to the making of The Sopranos would seem to confirm the observation. Each and every one of the following ingredients had to be added to the mix in order for The Sopranos‐as‐we‐know‐it to come into existence. The faith of Lloyd Braun of Brillstein‐Grey Productions—the company that had developed The Larry Sanders Show for HBO—that Chase “had a great series inside,” which led Chase to begin reconsidering and reconfiguring for television ideas that had long been on the back burner. Chase’s long‐time obsession with gangster films. He was a great admirer of William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) when he first saw it, terrified, at the age of eight or nine, and a fan of television’s The Untouchables (1959‐63), which he watched with his father. At Stanford he even made a student gangster film. The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos, Chase recalls, “was about alienation. It was about a guy driven crazy by the cheesiness, sanctimoniousness, and fakery of American society. He was frustrated—he shotgunned his TV set. And what got to him were the commercials, the astronauts, and the fact that white bread Nixonians ruled America. And he dreamed of becoming a gangster, an old‐fashioned gangster in a pin‐ striped suit, and he got his wish. He got killed in the end, but the film was poorly thought out.” The state of the post‐Godfather, post‐GoodFellas gangster genre at the time of The Sopranos’ germination left Chase nowhere to go except “into the family” , ground which proved to be fertile indeed. The idea, encouraged by Robin Green, a writer on Almost Grown, and others (including his wife), of telling stories about his own ultra‐negative mother. Chase’s own long‐running therapy. Chase speaks revealingly of the great influence Alice Miller’s brilliant but deeply troubling Drama of the Gifted Child—a book that argues that many creative adults were abused children— The Collected Works of David Lavery 4 had on his own mindset. He jokes that with The Sopranos all the money he has spent on therapy has finally begun to pay off. The conceit of a mobster seeing a psychiatrist, the series’ germinal idea, as Chase explained to Peter Bogdanovich: The kernel of the joke, of the essential joke, was that life in America had gotten so savage, selfish—basically selfish, that even a mob guy couldn’t take it any more. That was the essential joke, and he’s in therapy because what he sees upsets him so much, what he sees every day. he and his guys were the ones who invented selfishness—they invented “me first”; they invented “it’s all about me”—and now he can’t take it because the rest of the country has surpassed him. The commissioning of the pilot for Fox, which would, of course, turn it down. Chase’s inclination never to purposely create comedy. Comedy just occurs, Chase believes, naturally accruing when a writer is faithful to things as they are. (Is it too much to say that The Sopranos is the funniest show since Seinfeld?) The casting of virtually all the roles, mostly with New York‐based actors, especially James Gandolfini as Tony—an epochal decision compared by some to having Marlon Brando play Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). The ducks, who come to hold such meaning for Tony flown in from Rockford Files TV movie producer Juanita Bartlett’s own swimming pool. The family dynamics drawn from Chase’s own family—minus the cursing. The shopping‐around of the series to all the networks and its complete rejection. The opportune successful pitch to HBO, heavily committed at the time to the development of new, original series. Having the series on HBO permitted The Collected Works of David Lavery 5 Chase to use nudity, violence, and profane language in ways that would have been impossible on network television, greatly facilitating its verisimilitude, but perhaps more importantly it enabled the uninterrupted‐by‐commercial construction of hour‐long narratives. HBO’s commitment to on‐location filming in New Jersey. Luck was with David Chase, as well, when he and his production team decided against some other possibilities, all seriously considered, and all of which, in retrospect, would have been grave, if not fatal, mistakes. Making the main character a television producer with an uneasy relationship with his mother. Having the whole series be told by Tony in flashbacks in Melfi’s office.