Pandora's Box, page 6
Tony was in shouting distance of a real human being, and became a touchstone of the best small-screen shows, as Greenblatt had once hoped: from Vic Mackie in The Shield to the eponymous Ray Donovan, and Bobby Axelrod in Billions decades later, not to mention the good-bad girls: Nancy Botwin in Weeds, the entire cast of Orange Is the New Black, Jackie Peyton in Nurse Jackie, the eponymous Gentleman Jack, Deborah Vance in Hacks, and the castaways in Yellowjackets. Graham Yost, who wrote and ran Justified for FX, says, “I’ve got a picture of William Holden, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson doing their walk in The Wild Bunch. They’re bad guys, but they have a code. It took television a long time to catch up to features, and that’s one of the reasons we would always look to them, ‘Oh, features can do that shit and we’re not allowed.’ Once the fenders came off it was like, ‘Dammit, yes, we’re going to do an anti-hero.’”66
Although often lumped together, the code is what separates good anti-heroes (the good-bad guys), who are vigilantes for justice, from the bad anti-heroes (the bad-bad guys), who are motivated solely by greed, ego, and revenge. They are vigilantes, too, but for personal, not civic, reasons.
Moreover, threaded throughout the mayhem and murder were serious themes. The Sopranos was actually about something. Green remembers, “Matt Groening said to me that The Sopranos was the only show, other than The Simpsons, that he felt really commented on contemporary America. Tony’s always saying, ‘Look at Enron. I’m small potatoes.’”67 Gandolfini adds, “Materialism and capitalism and the failure of America from when the immigrants came here—that, essentially, is the theme. David sees shopping as Satan.” He pauses. “I think he thinks too much!”68
Another difference between The Sopranos and network shows was that the latter were structured like daisy chains of stand-alone episodes because they were only aired once, and if viewers missed an episode, they wouldn’t lose the thread, because there was no thread to lose. “The assumption in broadcast was always that since even your diehard fans are only going to watch one out of every three or four episodes, you had better make them self-contained,”69 explains David Nevins, who was a senior programming executive at NBC in the ER and West Wing era, and Fox in the 24 era. That meant in, say, The X-Files, the Mulder and Scully you got in the first episode of Season 1 were the same Mulder and Scully you got in the last episode of the last season. Their quirks and foibles were familiar, dependable, and therefore comforting.
Even the episodes of early cable shows like HBO’s Sex and the City were, as showrunner Michael Patrick King recalls, tied up with bows because audiences might not watch them sequentially. Shows like these were known as “closed.” As cable evolved, its dramas, like The Sopranos, at least in part, were “serialized,” and became known as “open.”
Given the demands of the dense and complex scripts, the first season was shot on an insanely tight schedule, with each episode allotted only eight days. But long days, sometimes lasting up to sixteen hours, created a pressure cooker for the crew and cast—especially Gandolfini, who was in almost every scene. The actor, like his character, veered from lovable to scary in a millisecond. He had alcohol and drug problems, and he often disappeared for days at a time, holding up production. Relations between him and Chase were often tense.
Allen Coulter directed Gandolfini in some twelve episodes. Coulter recalls, “In one scene, he had nothing more to do than walk back and forth in front of the camera.” He asked the director, “Couldn’t I just stand here?” Coulter remembers, “That was Jim’s general approach, ‘Can’t I just stand here?’ or sit for this scene. I had to say ‘no.’ You could never say to an actor—‘Well, I agree, it doesn’t make sense, but let’s shoot it anyway’—because then it opens a discussion that could take all night.”70
Every once in a while, Gandolfini queried a line reading. Chase famously regarded every word in his scripts or those he had approved as sacred. If an actor wanted to make a change, it had to be cleared with him or his writer. Once, Gandolfini asked one of the writers, Terry Winter, “What’s the difference if I call him ‘a fuckin’ cocksucker’ or a ‘cocksucking fucker’? Is that really gonna change anything?”
“Well, yeah, it sounds better the first way,” Winter replied.
“I don’t understand.”
“You just have to trust me that, to my ear, it sounds better. I can’t explain it.”71
The actors formed a close-knit group, and they often pranked one another. Gandolfini would moon Lorraine Bracco, who played his shrink, when no one was looking. In response, she took Anabella Sciorra’s hair extensions, wadded them loosely in her pantyhose, and uncrossed her legs. Gandolfini went, “You’re disgusting.” She responded, “I learned everything from you.”72
Among the new subscribers the show attracted was, apparently, the mob. In one scene, Tony is at a cookout wearing shorts. Gandolfini’s phone rang late at night. A voice said, “A don doesn’t wear shorts,” and hung up.73
HBO would never reveal how much money The Sopranos generated, save for saying it was worth “tens of millions of dollars.” In 2004, The New York Times estimated $100 million, which was the amount of damages for which HBO sued Gandolfini during a salary dispute.
Gandolfini’s original deal paid him $5 million a season. Eventually, riding the show’s phenomenal success, he demanded $20 million, still well under what network leads like Kelsey Grammer were pulling in, $35 million a season. Toward the end of Season 4, Gandolfini “got a phone call, and came back in the worst possible mood,” Coulter recalls. “The reason was he had been holding out for a new deal, and he had been told that it had closed, and that he was going to get a huge amount of money for the next season.” Coulter continues, “If you’re filled with self-loathing, and find that you’re going to make a ton of money you feel you don’t deserve, it just adds fuel to the self-destructive fire. You get all fucked-up.”74 As Chase puts it, “He didn’t like who he was.”75 Coulter goes on, “Unlike some actors who are just plain aggressive and hostile, dealing with Jim was closer to being in a room with someone who was beating himself up, and you’d catch an elbow in the eye.”76 Gandolfini had settled for $13 million a season, and in this case, the elbow in the eye amounted to checks for $33,333 he distributed to other members of the cast in an unprecedented gesture of generosity.
Chase ridiculed the networks for making shows about institutions with which the showrunners had little firsthand knowledge. David Simon—fifteen years younger than Chase—also portrayed institutions, moving from the drug trade on “the corner” to the unions to city politics to Baltimore’s public schools. But thanks to his lengthy run as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, he actually knew something about them. And what he knew told him they didn’t work; this is revealed in the striking difference between the way they are portrayed by the networks, and the way he would portray them. Unhappily, the history of America demonstrates that Simon was right.
Simon did ride-alongs with the Baltimore Police Department’s drug and homicide squads, and immersed himself so thoroughly into the street culture that the dealers took his presence for granted. Simon wanted to use nonactors drawn from among them and their customers. He teamed up with a former homicide detective named Ed Burns. They first met when Burns was preparing to indict a drug kingpin based on an investigation that involved an elaborate wiretapping scheme; this would provide the framework for the first season of The Wire.
If the two of them knew anything, it was the mean streets of West Baltimore. In this sense, Simon’s show, like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, was personal. He turned his day job into a series. And unlike the network shows, the crimes The Wire dramatizes were rarely solved. They couldn’t be, because they were systemic, and often the cures administered by the authorities were worse than the illness.
Simon firmly believed that the Times-Mirror Company, which eventually acquired his beloved Baltimore Sun, destroyed it. The Times-Mirror Company was to him what network television was to Chase. It fostered his cynicism about the “system,” a term that meant to him, as it did to Chase, free-range capitalism or, in Simon’s words, “raw, unencumbered capitalism” that devalues human beings in favor of profits. Every season of the show captures the devaluation of yet another group native to one of those institutions. A touch grandiosely, and perhaps prematurely, but not inaccurately, he describes The Wire as a story about the “decline of the American empire,” emblemized by Ronald Reagan’s so-called war on drugs. He regarded it as “perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.”77
As it turned out, even though he admired the police Simon started becoming less interested in the cops and more interested in the robbers. The result was that he started telling his stories from the point of view of the pushers and addicts instead, a slippery slope that led to his follow-up, We Own This City, years later in 2022, wherein the cops are the bad guys, lacking even the quasi-redemptive qualities that would make fans swallow the good-bad guys of The Shield.
In November 2001, after Season 2 of The Sopranos, Simon pitched The Wire as a cop show to Strauss. Neither she nor Albrecht was particularly receptive. Cop shows were what the broadcasters did, and Simon had to overcome HBO’s not-the-networks bias. The two also worried that portraying a drug-addicted population of mostly Black folks would invite pushback from the sizable Black audience HBO had cultivated over the years, not only with Oz but with its diet of prizefights and shows like Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam. Hosted by Martin Lawrence, that show featured comics like Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, JB Smoove, and Chris Rock.
Simon cleverly argued that now that HBO had successfully mined subjects that the broadcast networks wouldn’t touch, it was time to hit them where they lived, the genre that was their lifeblood. As Simon put it, the network cop shows were phony. Not only did they glamorize cops, they misrepresented the poor. “So much of what comes out of Hollywood is horseshit,” he said. “How is it that there’s nobody actually on a human scale from the other America? The reason is they’ve never met anybody from the other America. I mean, they could ask their gardener what it’s like.” He added, “The only time [these people] go downtown is to get their license renewed.”78 By doing a cop series better, more realistically, more truthfully, underdog HBO had a golden opportunity to humiliate its top dog rivals.
Like The Sopranos, The Wire shunned the conventions of its genre. There are no shoot-outs, no hair-raising car chases. Instead, there was even more yakking than whacking, a lot of standing around in front of blackboards while the cops tracked beepers and burners used by the dealers.
Dan Attias, who came from network and went on to direct for shows like The Americans, Homeland, and Billions, did four episodes of the show. He says Simon is a “brilliant, brilliant writer. He thought the script was where all the value came from, [but] I’m not sure he understood what directors can bring to a project.” Unlike Chase, “he wasn’t really terribly interested in how you were going to do something.”79
Neither Albrecht nor Strauss liked Simon’s pilot script, and they asked him to write two more. The story was loosely based on the saga of Little Melvin Williams, who introduced heroin to Baltimore. His brainy number two took college classes in business and turned Little Melvin’s street sales into a sprawling, money-minting enterprise. In the script, the two morphed into Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell; the latter character launched Idris Elba’s career.
The Wire cemented HBO’s reputation for going beyond the networks’ white-bread programming. It featured actor Michael K. Williams, who played Omar Little, a frightening, shotgun-toting killer who preys on street dealers while whistling “The Farmer in the Dell.” And he’s gay. “I’m a character actor, I always look for challenges,” Williams said. “I look for things that are going to make me stand out. I’m a black dude from the projects of Brooklyn with some talent. It’s like, ‘Get in line.’ I knew I needed to stand out from all of this motherfuckin’ talent out here. When I read Omar, I didn’t look at it and say, ‘Why does he have to be gay?’ I said, ‘Oh, this is it. He’s a homo. That’s what I need.’”80 He added, “I went into The Wire like any newly budding actor: I was narcissistic. It was just about my career and how much screen time I had and blah, blah, blah, [but I saw it become] bigger than just a hood story. It was never about that. It was a social story told on an American tapestry. Just happened to be in the hood.”81
The Wire made its debut on June 2, 2002, as a cop show that wasn’t just a cop show, but something more, as Williams puts it, three months before The Sopranos entered its fourth season.
Despite the long hours, the first-season shoot of The Sopranos had been expectation-free. Not so the second season, which was just the opposite. The pressure to do it again, and again, and better every season took its toll on Chase. Gandolfini’s tantrums were mirrored by his own. “I have these same tendencies as he does, which is I’m very infantile about temper tantrums with inanimate objects,” says Chase.82 In the grand tradition of producers Scott Rudin and, yes, Harvey Weinstein, he was a thrower of pens, phones, laptops—anything close at hand. “We’re not allowed to have a temper anymore?” exclaims Gandolfini. “There’s something wrong with you, ’cause you raised your voice? When did that happen? To me, David is truthful, he’s clear, he tells me when something’s wrong. When actors came to me asking, ‘Am I doing okay?’ I’d say, ‘Believe me, if you weren’t doing okay, you would hear from David.’ I appreciate that.”83
Anger is a great motivator. “What was driving the show, and driving David, is that he doesn’t like the world as he finds it, and he certainly doesn’t like the world of television,” explains Konner. “He’s taking out a lot of his frustrations by letting these characters act out, with no superego, with no sense of responsibility, because he wants to—and to some extent, we all do.”84 Adds Coulter, “He has a flame of anger, almost violence, that burns just below the surface. People sense that, and it scares them.”85
Chase took no prisoners. As Tim Van Patten, who directed almost twice as many episodes of The Sopranos as anyone else, puts it, “If he finds your Achilles’ heel, he will go for it, at war or play.”86 Tony Sirico (aka Paulie Walnuts), who had done time for extortion, took a step backward whenever Chase approached him.
Cast, crew, and writers were afraid of Chase, especially the writers, who worked with him closely and with whom he had complicated relationships. He had little patience for those who were learning on the job. Either you got it or you didn’t. He used to say, “I’m not running a writing school.”87 After the first season, three writers were dropped; only Green and Burgess were left standing. Chase and Green were especially tight. “Every time David said something, he would look to me to see what I thought,” she recalls wistfully. “I was like his consigliere for a very long time. I adored him, because he revealed himself as a human being. He would come into my office and throw himself down on the couch and was able to say, ‘I’m so depressed.’”88
Terry Winter, who joined the show in Season 2, had written, among other shows, a single episode of Flipper: The New Adventures, a tackier remake of a tacky 1960s series about a crime-solving dolphin, which Green would never let him forget. Winter grew up poor in Brooklyn. He went to a vocational high school and trained to be an auto mechanic. He made pocket money working as a security guard at Lutheran Medical Center in a crummy neighborhood called Sunset Park, where he packed troubled people into an ambulance nicknamed the “Disoriented Express”—destination: Bellevue. Suffice to say, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver changed his life. “Until I saw Taxi Driver, I was a fan like every other kid. That was the movie that made me stop and think about movies for the first time as an art form. I probably saw it twenty-five times that summer.”89
According to Winter, it took Chase two years to warm up to him, the reason being he was prone to firing writers whom he thought didn’t understand Tony, how he would behave, and why. Winter says he always kept his bag packed. “I don’t think I hung any pictures up in my office the whole seven years I was there because I was afraid I might be fired. I’d never seen anybody fire people as quickly as David did. People would walk into his office and fifteen seconds later, the door would open again and they were leaving with their shit in a box.”90 Winter would say, pointing at Chase, “Don’t fuck with the boss. See David? That’s the person whose ass you have to kiss.”91
Todd A. Kessler, now working on The New Look for Apple TV+, was then twenty-six and had a successful show on NBC called Providence, about the crime-riddled capital of Rhode Island. He recalls that Standards and Practices told him, “We do not accept the use of the word ‘Mafia,’ ‘mob,’ or ‘mobbed up’ on an NBC show that airs at eight o’clock on Fridays.”92 He left to join the writing staff of The Sopranos for the second season in 2000.
A writer friend had warned that “I could learn a lot from David, but that the challenge would be to stay only so long as I was learning and to get out before David’s personality, which was dark, permanently warped my personality.” Kessler still jumped at the chance. “I was thrilled by the experience. I was on the set a lot and I sat in on editing. We were very close.” Chase also introduced him to his wife, Denise, and included him in family dinners. Once, Chase asked him if he should fire Terry Winter, with whom Kessler shared an office, because he just didn’t think that Terry was producing the stories that were really in keeping with the show. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t you talk to him?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, I guess you’re right, I should do that.’”93
