Pandora's Box, page 5
Chase rounded up the best un- and semi-known Italian actors in New York City. He knew that the pilot, and subsequent episodes, if there were any, would stand or fall on the actor who would play Tony Soprano. After seeing a tape of the scene from True Romance, the remarkable Tony Scott picture from a Quentin Tarantino script in which James Gandolfini opens Patricia Arquette’s forehead with a corkscrew like it’s a bottle of Chianti, he called Gandolfini.
Gandolfini thought, I’ve never been the lead before. They’re gonna hire somebody else. “But,” he says, “I knew I could do it. I have Mr. Soprano in me. I was thirty-five, a lunatic, a madman.”27 Chase recalls, “What happens every time is that people come in and read, and they read and they read, and you start to think, This is really badly written, the thing sucks. And then the right person comes in, and it all works. It was pretty obvious that Jim had too much going on for this role to go with anyone else.”28
Edie Falco had studied at a conservatory, SUNY Purchase, “where doing TV was a no-no,” she recalls. “If you were at all interested in it, you didn’t say anything.” She was already working on Oz, so she was no TV virgin. “But,” she continues, “my actor friends kept telling me about this great script going around called The Sopranos.” When she was called to read, she went: “I knew exactly who this character was, and that night or the next day, they called and said they wanted to cast me.”29
Little Steven Van Zandt read as well. He had played the guitar in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. “I’m not a Hollywood guy, so I didn’t give a fuck about anything,” he recalls. “I was just talking to David like a regular person. I said, ‘This is really a good script. But I gotta tell you, the only thing that kinda bothered me a little—I’m an Italian-American and all my friends are Italian-Americans—I’m not sure people are gonna buy this whole thing with the mother. It’s kinda outside anything I’ve ever experienced or heard.’ He said, ‘That’s my mother.’”30 Little Steven was cast as Tony’s consigliere, Silvio.
Chase shot the pilot in early fall, 1997, in New Jersey and at Silvercup Studios in Queens. He handed it in and waited. And waited. Ten months passed. No one, not him, not Gandolfini, not Van Zandt, thought it would go to series; it just violated too many do’s and don’ts, even for pay cable. Referring to Sex and the City, Gandolfini told writer Brett Martin, “It wasn’t four pretty women in Manhattan. This was a bunch of fat guys from Jersey.”31
Although Potter says Albrecht had no fear, Reilly was in the room when he and his right hand, Carolyn Strauss, first saw the pilot. “Chris had his head in his hands and rubbed his forehead for what felt like an interminable amount of time,” Reilly recalls. “That’s not the reaction you’re looking for. Finally, Chris went, ‘It’s good. It’s good. It’s really good.’ I think he had to summon the fortitude to say it. A gangster with existential crises wading in the pool with ducks? Not the most obvious thing for HBO to make their big bet on.”32
The only show as daring as The Sopranos was Oz. But “Oz was different,” Albrecht explains. “It was on later at night. The Sopranos was a primetime family drama. We were sticking our whole leg in the water with this show.”33 More months went by, and still HBO couldn’t make up its corporate mind about whether or not to go to series.
Bewkes recalls, “For us, it was a real stretch, just to pay for The Sopranos, because even in its first year, it was going to be the most expensive drama that I think anybody had ever made, $2.5 to $2.7 million per hour”—twice as much as an episode of Sex and the City. He continues, “If you were us, you were saying, ‘Okay, so let’s go spend $30 million for a series that on the surface looks like a gangster who’s going to a shrink.’ And later when we were casting Jimmy Gandolfini, we knew no network would put a guy with his bulk into the leading man role of a week-after-week series they were trying to make commercial. And when the networks come out with their new shows every year, one out of seven makes it into the vaunted syndication. So we’re saying, ‘If the show goes on and fails, we are completely wiped out.’”34
Chase was so sure it would never see the light of day that he was having conversations with the X-Files folks. At the last minute, right before the actors’ contracts expired, Albrecht ordered thirteen episodes. He explains, “It was, If we’re gonna get into the series business, this was the show that we had. It wasn’t like we were looking at ten different pilots, and thinking which one we should put on the air.”35 HBO had a reputation for being frugal, to put it tactfully, and Chase got their standard contract, probably something less than $100,000 to write the pilot, and then $50,000 or $60,000 an episode.
Writers Robin Green and Mitch Burgess had worked on Northern Exposure with Chase. The first time Green met him, in 1988, she was new to the business, and he was interviewing her at a restaurant in Studio City to write for Almost Grown, a CBS show. She remembers, “I saw this sourpuss coming towards me, and I thought, Oh, my God. How am I going to do this? He was solemn to the point of grayness. By the end of the lunch we were laughing so hard about our mothers, tears were streaming down my face. He’s so funny. For a depressed guy.”36
Years later, when she and Burgess, whom she would later marry, were working on Fox’s Party of Five, Chase called. The Sopranos was going to series, did they want to work on it? They thought, Hallelujah, our lives are saved! Green continues, “Party of Five didn’t care if we left, because to them, HBO was not network. It was failure-land.”37 They signed on anyway. For Party of Five, they were being paid $35,000 together for an episode of a twenty-four-episode season. Now they were downsizing to a show that paid them their episode fee, but for half as many episodes.
Albrecht, who would be upped to CEO of HBO when Bewkes became chairman of Time Warner’s new Entertainments and Networks Group in 2002, and Strauss, now VP of entertainment in charge of series, invited Green and Burgess to lunch. “They were real humans,” recalls Green. “There was no ‘I know what I’m doing’ barrier. They readily admitted they didn’t know what they were doing.”38
Strauss, right out of Harvard, was whip-smart. She was Albrecht’s stealth weapon, because she rarely revealed whether she liked a pitch or not. She unnerved creatives with her poker face: no smiles, no nods, no yeses, no nos, no expression at all. When Allen Coulter and writer Howard Korder pitched her, “She sat there stone-faced so you never knew whether she liked something or didn’t,” Coulter recalls. “You just felt no support, or feedback. Howard finally said, ‘Should I just go fuck myself?’”39 One writer who admired her nevertheless likened her absence of affect to the rhythmic thump of train wheels rolling over tracks: “‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,’ not even the errant ‘Oh,’ or an ‘Ah,’ just, ‘Uh-huh.’”40
Strauss always claimed shyness as the reason she was so remote, but it must have been more than that. Some of her colleagues suspected she had a touch of Asperger’s. Strauss recalls, “People would get very anxious. Their voices would shake. I would see blood-red blotches appear.”41 Says a friend who knew her well, “She didn’t like meeting new people. Sometimes she kept them waiting for a half hour or more. Among other things, she is said to have clipped her fingernails during pitches. Powerful agents and managers felt disrespected.”42 Strauss explains, “The percentage of shows that make it from pitch to screen are so tiny, I always was very conscious of leading people on with enthusiasm and breaking their hearts later. For me, that probably caused me to start with ice. I couldn’t smile. I wish I could go back and do it all again.”43
According to some, her problem was that she didn’t know how to say no nicely, so that the disappointed hopefuls would feel like they could come back with a different pitch. She gave bad news badly. Like almost everyone else at HBO, she was controversial. Says one former staffer, “She was one of the smartest people in the building, but she’s a horrible, horrible person. She’s very judgmental, and when she doesn’t like you, she shows you. I don’t think that’s appropriate. It’s not high school.”44 On the other hand, Strauss would open her mouth and Harvard would come out. Says Reilly, “Carolyn would go, ‘I’m not fully feeling the thematic resonance.’ You’d have to kind of sort out what that meant. But I give her a lot of credit for consistently digging for deeper themes and complexity.”45 And best of all, she championed many of HBO’s most successful shows, among them Six Feet Under.
While HBO was twiddling its thumbs over The Sopranos, Alan Ball was flogging a script called American Beauty. Bored, he had left Fox in 1997 to become an indie producer with partner David Janollari, putting him in a better position to make the kinds of shows that interested him.
Ball was pestering Greenblatt and Janollari to read it. “We were thinking, Oh, here’s another television writer who just longs to be a movie writer”—like Chase, Greenblatt recalls. “We’re going to have to slog through a screenplay that’ll never get made. Then he told us DreamWorks was going to option it. We were like, ‘Yeah, right, DreamWorks is going to make your movie.’ We read the script and we were absolutely blown away by his writing.”46 Eventually, American Beauty scooped up five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
It was after the Oscars in 1999 that Strauss called. She had read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death and wanted Ball to write a show about a funeral home. At the mention of funerals, Ball perked up. He had an intimate relationship with death. When he was thirteen years old, he was riding in the front seat of the family car next to his sister, Mary Ann, who was driving. She turned into a blind curve, hit an oncoming car, and died instantly. It was her twenty-second birthday. He was soaked in her blood.
Ball knew that a show about a funeral home was a nonstarter at the networks, unless they could unearth a mortuary that thought television was a good way to strike it rich unloading coffins and formaldehyde. He wrote the pilot for Six Feet Under on spec. He recalls, “I had just discovered The Sopranos, and I was amazed that like, ‘Oh, TV can be like this?’”47
Ball met with Strauss. “She said, ‘Could you make it just a little more fucked-up? And not tie everything up in a nice little bow,’ which is not a note that you get in Hollywood very often. I was like, ‘Thank you God, thank you God.’”48 That was Strauss at her best. Says Greenblatt, “The version of Carolyn that we got was fantastic and unconditionally supportive and just a partner in crime with us.”49
Strauss kicked Ball’s script up to Albrecht, who also loved it. Ball contrasted his experience at HBO with that at ABC, where “everybody felt like they had to give notes, just to justify their job.” At one point, “people’s assistants were coming up and giving me notes, like, ‘I don’t like the color of the wall on that set.’”50
Six Feet Under included several major gay characters, most prominently one of the sons of the Fisher family that owned the funeral home, played by Michael C. Hall, and it featured as well what was perhaps the first interracial gay relationship on American TV, between his character and one played by Black actor Mathew St. Patrick. Greenblatt recalls, “HBO was just completely open to this. There was never one second of discussion about, ‘Oh, can we get away with that? Or should it be a white guy instead of a Black guy?’”51
In the same way that The Sopranos was marbled with characters and themes drawn from Chase’s own life, “There was a lot of my own story in Six Feet Under,” continues Ball.52 Like Chase, he had a difficult mother who was something of a religious nut. When he came out of the closet to her, she put her hands to her temples, and exclaimed, “Oh, God has dealt me some blows in my life.”53 Once again, HBO was breaking new ground with personal television.
One of the writers on the show was Joey (then Jill) Soloway, who would go on to write and run the hit Transparent for Amazon Prime Video. “I had written a comedic piece called ‘Courteney Cox’s Asshole,’ about being Courteney Cox’s assistant, and my agent sent that writing sample to Alan Ball,” Soloway recalls. Soloway was hired. “I was like, Okay, I’m a real writer. The writers’ room was like a therapy group. Urged to draw on their own experiences, all sorts of things would come out. Someone would say, ‘I went out with this guy last night.’
“‘Tell us, tell us! Feed the machine, feed the machine!’ the writers would chant, pounding the table.
“‘OK, although I don’t want this in the show,’” but as often as not, the machine was fed and it went on the show. “Alan was my first gay boss,” Soloway goes on. “I had always had straight bosses, which caused this confusion of ‘Do they think I’m a good writer? Or is this just flirtation? What is this relationship?’” Alan Poul, Ball’s executive producer, was gay, too. “I was in a gay world, so as a woman, I was free,”54 adds Soloway. But not so free as it appeared.
Soloway begged Ball repeatedly, “‘Can I direct an episode?’ I was told ‘No.’ Over and over again.” Being a woman was not going to help: “All the spots were being reserved for people who came out of Sundance and their buddies. A lot of gay men were saying, Hey, we’re making a revolution here, we’re not hiring straight men, but it was still just men. I really bought into it, thinking, I’m just not ready. I must not know something. There was a huge amount of—not open misogyny—but men admiring the work of other men, straight men for straight men, gay men for gay men. I watched Jason Reitman come up, [saw] the homosocial behavior of men where they really know how to mentor a rising star, but they didn’t know how to do that with women. Opportunity hoarding. So we were just left to one side.”55
The Sopranos premiered on January 10, 1999. To say it made a splash is an understatement. Recalls Albrecht, “Nobody had ever paid attention to us before. Now, Saturday Night Live was doing parodies of a first-season show. We were the focus of media attention, whether it was five o’clock news or The Tonight Show or The New York Times.”56 Adds Konner, “David was a guy who, for twenty-five years, had been told, ‘You can’t do it,’ but when he was given the chance, did it better than anybody else had ever done it, being his own dark, twisted self.”57
The excitement generated by The Sopranos was as intoxicating as it was contagious. Even the Teamsters were reading the scripts on the set, virtually unheard-of. The writers were flying high, so high that from the pinnacle of Mt. Soprano, other HBO shows, no matter how good, were pygmies. Somewhat embarrassed, Green tells stories on herself. They would run into the Sex and the City people and it was like high school. Green and Burgess were writing The Sopranos, and they were just writing a dumb comedy. It was the same with The Wire. Green and Burgess felt they were writing meanly funny drama, while David Simon was writing corny melodramatic bullshit. She recalled Ball coming up to her a few years later during an HBO party at Spago, then the “in” Hollywood restaurant. Intending to compliment her, he told her that The Sopranos made it possible for him to write Six Feet Under. She thought, You’re equating Six Feet Under with what we did? You’re speaking to me like we’re equals? Oh my God, if I could die now I would be so happy that I achieved that for you! Go fuck yourself! 58
Green wasn’t alone. Gandolfini and company became instant celebrities. He recalls going to a fight at Madison Square Garden with some of the cast. “I walked in, there was a stampede,” he says. “The whole crowd started chanting ‘Toh-nee, Toh-nee!’”59 Executive producer Ilene Landress recalls, “We were like the Beatles.”60
Some fans were hard-pressed to distinguish the actors from their roles. “I was living in the meat market district on the far West Side, below Fourteenth Street,” Gandolfini remembers. “I heard this banging on the outside door and screaming. It was late, like after midnight. So I opened the door, and the guy turns white. All of a sudden I realize, Oh, fuck, he thinks I’m Tony.”61
Sometimes it seemed like everyone in America was watching the show. When Annabella Sciorra, who plays Gloria Trillo, hurled a steak at the back of Tony’s head, a female fan came up to her on the street and said, “When you threw that steak at Tony, you threw that steak for all womankind!”62
In the middle of the third season, after Ralphie beats his girlfriend to death, Joey Pants recalls, “I was getting stopped on Fifth Avenue by little old ladies who were like ‘Oh my God, you were so bad to that woman,’ feeling my arms. They were flirting with me, turned on that I was the guy who beat up this hooker. It was sick.”63
Chase says he was troubled by how much the “less yakking, more whacking” contingent of his fan base loved his mobbed-up characters, no matter how badly they behaved. The show is “about evil,” he said. “I was surprised by how hard it was to get people to see that.”64
The fans might have loved the violence, but HBO, which prided itself on letting the showrunners run, drew the line at the fifth episode of the first season, called “College.” Tony takes his daughter Meadow on a campus tour, where he stumbles across a fink in witness protection. He garrotes the “rat.”
When Albrecht saw “College,” he finally said, “No!” “That was a truly big flap,” Chase remembers. “We’d gone four episodes, and I thought, ‘If this guy really is a mobster, c’mon, he’s gotta kill somebody.’” Albrecht told Chase, “You know, you’ve created one of the best characters in the past twenty years, and you’re gonna destroy him in one fell swoop. The audience’ll hate this guy. You can’t do it.”65
At that point, Chase did not have the clout to prevail. He had to shoot a new scene in which the fink plans to kill Tony, which kosherizes Tony’s behavior. Nevertheless, that put an end to the likability issue, a holdover from network. The Sopranos audience didn’t seem to mind. Tony is a killer, pure and simple, although by his lights, he has his reasons. The black-and-white-ists in the audience demanded clear-cut heroes and villains, but Fontana, Chase, and the other cable pioneers refused to oblige. Their characters blended good and evil, making the good-bad guy, and occasionally gal, imperfect figures alternately sympathetic and repellent, and sometimes both at once.
