Pandora's Box, page 4
Sex and the City ended its run in 2004. Although the show broke new ground by devoting itself to material off-limits to the networks, old ground was very much in evidence behind the scenes. Heather Kristin, Kristin Davis’s stand-in, describes a scene in which Charlotte was examined by a gynecologist. “I had to spread my legs in a set of stirrups and hold the position until everything was ready for filming,” she recalls. “When the director and stars left for a meeting, a member of the crew duct-taped my feet to the stirrups. Others in the crew laughed, made crude comments about my body and took Polaroids. I wanted to rip the tape off and run screaming out of Silvercup Studios. Instead, I lay there knowing I had a job for another day and health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild.” Eventually, she “couldn’t take it anymore,” and she quit.77 Kristin also alluded to an “alpha male actor,” who, pointing to another stand-in, remarked, “I want that one tied up, gagged, and brought to my trailer.” She subsequently identified him as Chris Noth, and recalled, “The first time the ‘alpha male actor’ slid his hand down my back and over my butt . . . ‘That’s your spot, sweetie,’ Noth said, inching even closer.”78
Prompted by the 2021 sequel, called And Just Like That . . . , which included a few scenes featuring Chris Noth, according to Variety, several women came forward in one month accusing the actor of sexual assault. In a press conference, the last one to speak out claimed that Noth invited himself up to her apartment, got her up against the kitchen counter, and began “slobbering all over me . . . and pushed my hands down towards his penis.” She said he called her the following day warning her that if she ever went public about it, “He would blacklist me in the business.”79 According to The New York Post, a former girlfriend of his once got a restraining order against him after he “punched [her] in the chest and ribs,” and allegedly made repeated threats to kill her.80 An account in The Hollywood Reporter accused him of raping another woman, aged twenty-two, from behind. She required stitches.81 Noth denied all the allegations against him, calling them “categorically false.”82
Sex and the City provoked extreme reactions, ranging from high praise to nasty put-downs. The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, in a review far better than the show itself, called it “sharp, iconoclastic television,” and “a bold riff on the romantic comedy.”83 That was particularly true beginning with the third season, when Michael Patrick King took over. Some feminists embraced the show for dramatizing the clash between second- and third-wave feminism, the so-called “lipstick feminists” who rejected the puritanism of their Andrea Dworkin–ized predecessors, approving accessories like makeup.
Contrarily, others denounced it for its definition of that empowerment: women behaving like men, not to mention wild-in-the-aisles-of-Bloomingdale’s consumerism, epitomized by the title of an episode in the last season called, “A Woman’s Right to Shoes,” wherein Carrie admits spending $40,000 on shoes. Sex and the City treats it as just cute whereas, by way of contrast, in an episode of SMILF, when Connie Britton spends $26,000 for a Birkin bag, it’s a critique of her class and character. One feminist wrote that Sex and the City is “to feminism what sugar is to dental care.”84 Entertainment Weekly summed up the show’s ethos: It “taught us that no flower is too big, no skirt too short, and no shoes too expensive.”85
Whatever lessons Sex and the City did or did not convey, it racked up consistently high ratings and was a near-instant success. Twelve and a half million viewers watched the final episode, an audience large enough to get the attention of the networks. It went into worldwide syndication in approximately forty countries, and sold briskly on DVD. Over the course of the six seasons, it was nominated for more than fifty Emmys, winning seven.
Sex and the City might never have found its way to the small screen had the testosterone-based analysis of the demographics of cable viewers still been guiding HBO. In any event, it revealed that HBO had been turning its back on half its potential audience.
2
“Be a Good Catholic for 15 Fucking Minutes”
Chris Albrecht took a flyer on David Chase, allowing him to fashion his own story into The Sopranos, a touchstone for almost every drama that followed.
The Sopranos might not have inaugurated HBO’s golden age, but the series defined it, completing its journey from a fighting-and-fondling irritant to the networks into the Rolls-Royce of cable. Like Oz, its impact cannot be overstated. Perhaps the ultimate compliment came from NBC’s president Robert Wright, who sent out fifty-odd tapes to industry insiders during the third season that contained an episode in which Ralphie Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano, aka Joey Pants) beats Tracee, his pregnant goomar, to death. In the accompanying letter, he complained, “It is a show which we could not air on NBC because of the violence, language and nudity.”1
David Chase felt that Wright was virtually inviting the FCC to try to censor his show. “It was an attack,” he says. “There was a lot of envy that we had freedom, while they were crippled by Standards and Practices.”2 Mulling his response, Bewkes, then HBO’s president and COO, says, “I thought about calling [Wright], and then I thought, ‘No, what am I going to say?’ He hung himself. Isn’t there an old saying, ‘Don’t shoot a guy who’s killing himself?’”3 Chase, too, understood that in its own way, Wright’s complaint was high praise. He says, “It made me happy.”4
Oz was beginning its third season when The Sopranos premiered in 1999. Like Oz, it is confined to a “world,” a prison, of sorts. In Oz, the prison is literal; in The Sopranos, it is figurative—cultural and geographical, a small patch of a small state, New Jersey, but in both instances it constrains and defines the characters.
The Sopranos is about mobsters who make their living on the wrong side of the Hudson River, Jersey’s gray flatlands, in the shade of Manhattan’s towering skyscrapers, an enduring reminder that no matter how many envelopes they collect, its mobsters are small-timers, skimming city contracts, hijacking semis full of booze or cigarettes, betting on sports or, most famously, running a not-ready-for-primetime strip club, the Bada Bing, whose pole dancers have left their best days behind them. The Broadway of this scrap of Jersey is Bloomfield Avenue, a shabby thoroughfare lined with mini-malls, single-story working-class bars, nail parlors, and Italian restaurants with names like Roma or DaVinci’s, the walls of which are hung with black-velvet paintings. In other words, The Sopranos is more Goodfellas than Godfather. Almost all the characters reflect this, have chips on their shoulders, feel slighted, short-changed by life.
The Sopranos goes places where no other show had gone. When it tears itself away from the Sopranos’ family kitchen, it luxuriates in extreme behavior. In Season 2, Richie Aprile (David Proval) crushes a character between two cars, runs him over, backs up, and runs him over again, meanwhile wearing a self-satisfied grin for a job well done. In another ugly, not-the-networks scene, Tony’s sister Janice shoves a dildo up Ralphie’s ass.
Often, Chase’s choices were dictated by the bitter taste left by the world of broadcast TV. As Matthew Weiner, who joined the show in November 2002, before the fifth season after Chase read his spec script for Mad Men, explains, “There are things in The Sopranos . . . that are just ‘fuck you’s’ to network TV.”5
Chase was already fifty-four years old in 1999 when The Sopranos first saw the light of day. He is a slender man, with deep-set eyes, a broad expanse of forehead, and a mouth that alternates between wry amusement and a frown, as if he has bitten into a lemon. He has the chalky pallor of someone who seldom ventures outdoors. Of Italian extraction (the family name was DeCesare), he plays his cards close to the vest, lives very much in his head, listens as much as he speaks, except for the occasional explosion of laughter, because above all, he’s funny, displaying a dry, sardonic, cutting wit.
A severely truncated version of Chase’s career goes like this: When the idea for The Sopranos finally floated to the surface, he had been writing network television for some twenty years. He had come of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, and had grown up watching the great films of Federico Fellini. After film school at Stanford, he was cast onto the mean streets of Hollywood, desperate to write features, but none of his scripts sold. Instead, he ended up writing television, for which he had nothing but contempt.
Finally clambering out of the river of sewage that was the nightly network lineup, he made it into the big time when he became a writer on a heavily plotted series called The Rockford Files. The nets were so afraid of controversy that the writers weren’t allowed to give gangsters Italian names. He had, as he puts it, a “reputation for being ‘too dark.’” Says Larry Konner, an old friend who wrote three episodes of The Sopranos during the second and third seasons, as well as Chase’s second feature, The Many Saints of Newark, “David’s reputation inside the TV industry was, ‘Good writer, but what’s going on in his brain, we don’t want to be part of.’”6 Chase understood. “I felt I was out of step,” he says. “I remember seeing Pretty Woman on an airplane. Everybody was laughing their heads off. ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ It wasn’t funny to me; it wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t anything. I thought, ‘Why don’t I just open the door and jump out?’”7
Still, with a home in Santa Monica Canyon, he was successful by every standard but his own. Explains Allen Coulter, whom showrunners relied on to helm their most important episodes—premieres and finales—“David was embedded in the belly of the beast, but his mordant sensibility, his dark, caustic vision of the network world, his cynicism and bitterness, enabled him to resist the Kool-Aid, protected him from becoming a network guy. He knew TV could be better.”8
Growing up, “I didn’t really watch much television until the first season of Twin Peaks in 1990,” Chase recalls. “That was an eye-opener for me. There’s mystery in everything David Lynch does, and I don’t mean, ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ There’s a whole other level of stuff going on, this sense of the poetic that you see in great painting, that you see in foreign films, that’s way more than the sum of its parts. I didn’t see that on television, which is an outgrowth of radio. Radio is just all yak-yak-yak-yak, and so is television. It’s a prisoner of dialogue, film of people talking. Flashy words.”9 When you watch an Aaron Sorkin show, in other words, you’re listening to the radio. When you watch a David Chase show, you’re looking at a movie.
By 1995, Chase was in a position to pick and choose his shows. His lawyer, Lloyd Braun, was now running, along with Brad Grey, Brillstein-Grey, the management-slash-production company behind The Larry Sanders Show, which Chase greatly admired. Braun had once said to him, “You know, we believe you have a great television series in you.” Chase recalls, “It wasn’t something I was really dying to hear, ’cause my response in my head was, I don’t give a fuck—I hate television.” He rolled his eyes, but was flattered: “I wasn’t used to being talked to that way, and it had an impact on me.”10
Driving home that night, Chase thought about a feature idea that his agents had shot down a couple of years earlier. It was a comedy about a mobster who gets panic attacks rooted in his difficult relationship with his mother. He sees a therapist. Chase thought to himself, I wonder if that would fly as a TV series? They like these things to have female appeal, and this would have his mother and his family. He imagined a script that stitched together bits and pieces from of his own life.
“Network dramas have not been personal,” Chase observes. “I don’t know of very many writers who have been cops, doctors, judges, presidents—and, yet, that’s what everybody writes about, institutions: the courthouse, the schoolhouse, the precinct house, the White House.” Even though it would be a mob show, The Sopranos would be based on members of his own family. “It’s about as personal as you can get,” he continues. “How many times has that ever happened in the world of TV, where you actually wind up making your show in the little town you came from? About the people you grew up with? It wouldn’t have happened if HBO hadn’t invested in the idea of the writer’s voice.”11
The town Chase grew up in was Clifton, New Jersey. Very much under the thumb of his parents, he was raised in a U-shaped garden complex called Richfield Village. An only child, he had a lot of “issues,” as they say, with those parents. His father, who owned a hardware store, “was a very angry guy,” he recalls. “If he had a problem with me, I got the silent treatment. He wouldn’t speak to me for a week, two weeks. He’d go around the house with this sort of Mussolini pout.”12 Chase’s wife, Denise, says his father “belittled David. I can remember him making fun of David’s physical appearance in front of me, at the time when we were engaged to be married. Why would you do that? I hated both his parents.”13
It was his mother, however, who really left her mark. She made a cottage industry out of belittling him. When Chase was about twelve, she threatened to put his eye out with a fork because he said he wanted a Hammond organ. He describes her as “a nervous woman who dominated every situation by being so needy. She was always on the verge of hysteria. You walked on eggshells.”14 Like Tony’s mother, Livia, so memorably played by Nancy Marchand, she was a drama queen, passive-aggressive, given to every sort of eccentricity. She wouldn’t answer the telephone after dark, wouldn’t drive in the rain.
David and Denise, high school sweethearts, married in 1968. She is credited by some with keeping his head above water. Says Konner, “She is his emotional rock, let’s say. She is the one he turns to in times of trouble.”15 Chase adds, “It’s not that she is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, she’s not a Pollyanna,” continuing, “but she’s not subject to this endless dismal terror and negativity.”16
Denise supported him against his parents. Chase recalls, “When Denise’s younger sister died of a brain aneurysm, we went back to New Jersey for the funeral. My parents were like not speaking to me, because I was spending too much time with her family.” When he told his mother how his sister-in-law had died, her response was, “You see, David, she was too smart.”17 Chase goes on, “Instead of focusing on Denise, I was focused on my problems with my parents. They were in my head all the time. Denise said, ‘The amount of influence your parents have over you is stupid.’”18
With parents like these, it’s not surprising that Chase was on intimate terms with depression. At Wake Forest, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he went for two years of college, and detested it, “I slept eighteen hours a day,” he recalls. Did he contemplate suicide? “Well, doesn’t everybody?”19 He spent some time in therapy, but didn’t stick with it. Later, he gave Livia the immortal line, “Psychiatry? That’s just a racket for the Jews!”
Braun brought Chase to Brillstein-Grey and put him to work. Grey, who is often credited with launching The Sopranos, took one look at Chase and said, according to Kevin Reilly, then head of its TV division, “‘Who’s the old guy that’s writing this script about the Italian?’ In the formative stages, Grey had nothing, zero, absolutely zero to do with this. His support grew in direct proportion to David’s success.”20
Chase was determined to write a script in which the material wasn’t pre-chewed for viewers. “On network, everybody says exactly what they’re thinking at all times,” he explains. “I wanted my characters to be telling lies.” Chase was also determined to avoid the tiresome uplift that is de rigueur on network where, as he puts it, “By the end of the show, there’s been some sort of a breakthrough. One character understands another: ‘I didn’t realize that I was not giving you your space.’” He calls them “huggable moments.” Above all, he wanted the pilot to be cinematic: “I didn’t want it to be a TV show. I wanted to make a little movie every week.”21
The entire first season is about depression, cancer, and death, as befitted a writer who was chronically depressed and whose mother, as he puts it, “Talked about cancer, cancer, cancer all the time. I was raised with this dread of cancer.”22 The heart of the show is the casual violence, murder, and betrayal folded into the humdrum routines of family life—Tony and Carmela Soprano driving their kids to school, going shopping, attending weddings and funerals. They get sick, get better, just like we do. In other words, gangsters ’r’ us. Scarface meets Ozzie and Harriet.
When the script was done, Brillstein-Grey steered Chase to the networks. “Because of The Larry Sanders Show, which, despite enormous critical acclaim, made no money, I really didn’t want to do it at HBO,” says one source. “Nobody went to cable, certainly not to pay cable.”23
Bob Greenblatt, who was head of primetime programming at Fox, had an overall deal with Chase. He too was bored by the heroic cops, miracle-working doctors, and clever lawyers who populated his shows. He wanted, in his words, “to see if we could put the bad guy, quote-unquote, in the driver’s seat of the show, where the anti-hero was the protagonist, because it had never been done.” Greenblatt loved Chase’s script for the pilot, but, he explains, it “was dark, so we ultimately said, ‘Are we ever going to be able to do the right version of this show on the broadcast TV network?’ So we passed.”24
Broadcast television was a dead end. Chase recalls, it “has an unerring system for detecting whatever it is that gets you excited about a project, and telling you to get rid of it. ‘Does Tony Soprano have to be seeing a psychiatrist?’ That was, of course, what made the show different. They all looked at me like I was a poor fool, you know, ‘You idiot.’”25
Braun suggested taking it to HBO. Albrecht says he saw right into the heart of the show, and understood that the mob was a red herring: “I said to myself, This show is about a guy who’s turning forty. He’s inherited a business from his dad. He’s trying to bring it into the modern age. He’s got an overbearing mom that he’s still trying to get out from under. Although he loves his wife, he’s had an affair. And I thought, The only difference between him and everybody I know is he’s the don of New Jersey. So, to me, the Mafia part was sort of the tickle for why you watched. The reason you stayed was because of the resonance and the relatability of all that other stuff.”26
