Pandora's Box, page 9
John from Cincinnati, on the other hand, was a wholly owned HBO show. It was written by Milch and Kem Nunn, whose novels were their own genre, “surfing noir.” It was set in the underbelly of the surfing subculture of Imperial Beach, a derelict Southern California border town about five miles from Tijuana.
The eponymous John, variously a Jesus figure, an alien from outer space, or a half-wit—take your pick—has the ability to levitate himself at will, and appears to perform miracles. The script is packed with non-sequiturs and cryptic phrases. The nearly unanimous response to the show was confusion and consternation.
The eventual failure of John can at least be partly understood via a DVD extra showing Milch on the set vainly trying to explain a scene to a group of puzzled actors. Wearing one of his signature black T-shirts and dark glasses, he is standing in front of a motel, attempting to convey the motivation of one of the characters. Milch explains that there’s “an echo of a poem by Stanley Kunitz, where the poet says, ‘In times like these, the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.’ . . . In art, the reconstruction of experience, the reconstitution of experience does not have to be fetishized, it does not have to be what they call spiritual materialism, it can simply be a healing.”63 Hello? This wasn’t Yale!
The pilot premiered on June 10, 2007, tacked on to the series finale of The Sopranos, a riddle upon a riddle. What was it about? It didn’t seem to matter so long as Milch wrote it. He once explained, presumably with a straight face, “. . . if God were trying to reach out to us, and teach us something about the deepest nature of matter, he might use some drugged-out surfers.”64 Enough said. John was so witless that every time Milch was interviewed, he was asked the same question: “Do you know what it’s about?” In 2007, on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, supremely self-possessed and unencumbered by embarrassment, he said, “The answer is no.”65
The good news was that although viewers had lost their beloved Deadwood, they had one more season of The Sopranos to look forward to, even though Mitch Burgess and Robin Green felt the show had been changing for the worse ever since Season 4, as reflected by the decline in numbers. The family element that had attracted them in the first place had lost out to the mob. “It became much more mobby with the Johnny Sack stuff,” says Burgess. “Just having people shooting each other is easy. Writing family shit is hard.”66
Although the show was indeed leveling off, it was regularly lifted by a series of sick, kinky, or just plain nutty moments: In Season 3, Paulie paws through Adriana’s underwear drawer, sniffing the crotches of her panties; Tony’s sister, Janice, steals a prosthetic leg of Svetlana, one of his many mistresses; and in another scene, “Christofah” piously crosses himself as he drops Ralphie’s severed head into a hole in the ground. Every time it seemed like there was no place to go, Chase and his writers found one.
Still, as the seasons rolled on, and the money continued to flow, production became harder, not easier. “As David became more secure, his temper tantrums got worse,” says Green. “He demonized people. The objects of his hatred would change—the wardrobe person, the casting director, his secretary. And then he would go back on his Prozac.”67 Or, to put it more bluntly, says Burgess, “The more he got successful, the bigger asshole he became.”68 Adds Coulter, “Once he was anointed a genius, instead of feeling, ‘OK, I can relax,’ his anxiety ballooned. ‘How do I follow on the heels of this massive success? How do I be brilliant again?’”69 He also became more remote, coming to the set less often and delivering his edits by satellite from the chateau in the Dordogne that he had purchased. As French Connection director Billy Friedkin once observed, extraordinary success renders directors isolated and out of touch. “The day you take your first tennis lesson, your career is over,” he said.70 “I don’t play tennis,” says Chase.71 There is a lot of golf in the show, but “He doesn’t play golf,” observes Larry Konner. “He doesn’t play anything. He’s not a happy-go-lucky guy. He wasn’t a happy-go-lucky guy before, and he’s not now. He’s a troubled guy.”72 Adds Little Steven Van Zandt, “He’s not moody—he’s always in a bad mood. Is getting a house in the middle of nowhere, in southern France, enjoying success? You tell me.”73 Talk about anhedonia. Woody Allen had nothing on Chase.
As time went on, Chase seemed to experience the show less as a triumph and more of a burden, and it showed in his relationships with his collaborators. “We are all considered the enemies of the script,” says Coulter. Chase would hover over his shoulder, watching his every move. He continues, “But you can’t direct if you’ve got someone standing over you second-guessing you. Especially someone who is not a very good director. As a writer, David is blessed with a profound gift, but that’s a different business. As he himself says, he’s not really comfortable with the tools a director has to have—where to put the camera, how to use lenses or manage transitions between scenes or use shots to tell the story.”74 Coulter carefully designed transitions between shots, and Chase would cut them.
For all Chase’s talk about wanting episodes to look like movies (he had a photo of Fellini hung over the whiteboard in the writers’ room), he was primarily interested in the story. Rumor was that he would cut with his eyes shut in sync with the actors’ dialogue. “I would think, Go fuck yourself,” Coulter continues. “Hire somebody else or do it yourself. Give me my money, and I’ll happily walk away. But he did apologize, which was very rare for David. He said, ‘I know I was up your ass, but I couldn’t help it, I was worried about the show.’” Coulter stayed, and remains one of Chase’s staunchest admirers, saying, “He created one of the most important shows that’s been on TV, ever.”75
For HBO, The Sopranos had become what Pulp Fiction had been for Miramax, a magnet for talent. Says Bewkes, “It was so respected by the creative community, that all kinds of people—writers, directors and actors—who previously had said, ‘I only want to work in feature films,’ wanted to work at HBO. We now had Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg making the $129 million Band of Brothers, and coming back to make John Adams.”76 The explosion of DVD sales demonstrated that series like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and especially Band of Brothers, regarded as no more than subscriber bait, could be profit centers in themselves. Adds Albrecht, “The Sopranos was the hammer that broke the glass ceiling for us.”77
The only problems were good problems—those caused by success. Chase found himself in the catbird’s seat, hence his posture toward HBO, which was essentially, My way or the highway. He borrowed a leaf from Gandolfini’s playbook: if Albrecht tried to rein him in, he threatened to walk.
Although Albrecht wanted another season, Chase was getting restless. He worried about overstaying his welcome. “There’s a point at which creative fatigue sets in,” he explains. “There was something about the particular nature of the characters in the show that was limiting.” He continues, “Not a lot happens to them every day. Mostly they socialize and collect envelopes. They were fairly provincial. Aside maybe rising up within the organization, from soldier to captain, from captain to boss, the male characters weren’t really trying to achieve anything. Except to stay alive, and keep earning. They didn’t solve a crime every week or perform an operation. And so it was hard to take them to new places without just repeating yourself.” Still, he adds, “I had this great situation. Sometimes I began to think of it as the family business, my own farm, so why leave it? I was growing good tomatoes.”78
According to Burgess, when Matthew Weiner joined up, it changed the chemistry in the writers’ room. “David stoked the tension between Robin and Matt competing for his affection—who was going to love him the most,” he says. “It was pretty fucked-up.”79 Paraphrasing a quip by Uncle Junior, Green says, “Matt was so far up David’s asshole that he could taste the tooth decay,” explaining that Chase was famously afraid of the dentist, and “his teeth were rotting in his head.”80 Whereas Green was more than ready to argue with Chase, Weiner rarely contradicted him. “He was initially extremely quiet and deferential,” Winter recalls.81 As Weiner himself put it, “I’d be like, You don’t like that? OK. Well, I’ve got something else. No? I’ve got something else. Did you actually say ‘Fuck you!’ to me? Okay, you don’t mean it.”82
Weiner was thrilled to be hired but unhappy to be there. He felt that he was no more than a pencil in his boss’s hand, and didn’t like it. He complained that Chase “would say ‘No’ to me about 300 times a day. And he, as far as I know, never took one of my ideas.”83 Says Burgess, “He didn’t take his ideas because Matt didn’t really have any ideas.”84
True or false, Weiner nevertheless longed for his own show. He submitted his Mad Men script to HBO five times with Chase’s imprimatur, but he complained that Strauss, who read it, didn’t even have the courtesy to respond. Needless to say, he was angry.
The effort to answer the question of why Strauss passed on Mad Men became a cottage industry. The theories run from Weiner’s personality—he could be very funny, but he also had a reputation for being abrasive and disputatious—to the fact that Weiner’s future wife was Strauss’s roommate at Harvard, and Strauss always dismissed him as a loser. Besides, Weiner’s script was conspicuously lacking in those Holy shit and What the fuck moments with which Fontana, Chase, and Milch had so spoiled HBO. Instead, the script was talky and slow, and worse, it had knocked around for a while. HBO was too full of itself to pick through leftovers. Nor, finally, did Albrecht want to deprive Chase of one of his flavor-of-the-week writers while he was still going strong on The Sopranos.
In the course of the fifth season, in 2004, Albrecht had told Chase that he needed to begin to think about wrapping it up. As the cast of The Sopranos got bigger and the story lines more convoluted, the show became more and more expensive to produce. Eight-day shoots became twelve-day shoots, with some episodes reportedly taking nearly a month. The cost reached an estimated $10-plus million a pop, with Chase and Gandolfini pulling down eight-digit salaries, while the audience numbers were dwindling. But HBO was not about to clip the wings of its golden goose. Had Chase proposed to take the cast to the moon, HBO would have gone, “Well, those three-stage rockets are expensive, but I guess we can swing it.”
After the season was over, Chase was exhausted. He said he didn’t know if he had it in him to go on. Chase convened a meeting of the writers to sound them out. “We loved the show,” says Green, not to mention that shutting it down was like “seeing a bag with a million dollars in it flying away from you. We’d have been idiots to get off that train.” Chase decided to do one more season, a sixth, but one more turned into two parts of twelve and nine episodes each. Adds Green, “If I had had any integrity, I should have left. Instead, we made a deal with the devil.”85
Ever since Season 4, Green’s relationship with Chase had been tense. She felt it got worse after Weiner arrived, turning into a boys’ club, a lovefest between the two of them, and she couldn’t stand it. She came to feel that Chase was shooting “hate-rays” at her.86 After the first half of Season 6, Chase fired her. She had been with the show from ground zero. In almost the same words he used when he fired Todd Kessler, Green says he told her, “We never got the voice of the mobsters.”87 Says Kessler, “After six seasons of working on a show, you’ve lost it, that’s absurd.”88
Green thought Chase’s excuse was no more than a pretext. “’Cause really,” she says, “he told me that he had a list of things that he’d hated about me for seventeen years. As a person. Like I’d be eating and if I had a fleck of food on my face, he’d point it out. I started to think I repelled him physically.” She had noticed that in the writers’ room he moved her chair so that he didn’t have to look at her. “He didn’t want to straighten things out with me—he wanted to kill me. I was dead to him. He would give me the silent treatment. His father was the same way, a grudge-holding prick. When David fired me, he smiled. I loved him so much. I loved him for so long, it was just so hard to deal with the fact that he really hated me.”89 She had seen it coming, but when it did finally come, she was devastated. Her face crumbled. She didn’t want him to see her, and turned her back to him until he left the room.
One has to wonder whether firing Green, the only woman in the writers’ room, was somehow related to Chase’s widely publicized ambivalence toward women, most infamously expressed by Tony’s aborted attempt to smother his mother.
Approximately 18 million of HBO’s 29 million subscribers watched the final episode of The Sopranos, an unprecedented audience for cable, but many walked away dissatisfied because it was ambiguous and open-ended. Nobody who paid attention to what Chase was all about, however, should have been surprised. He had always refused to spoon-feed his audience. His anti-network instincts dictated restraint. He disliked the contrived drama of broadcast TV, the big climaxes, the dramatic go-to-commercial cliff-hangers, the overexplicitness lest viewers experience a moment of confusion. Network shows used music and camera movement to lead their lowest-common-denominator viewers by the nose, telling them who they should be listening to and what they should be looking at.
“I didn’t want to punctuate what was important in the scene and what wasn’t,” he explained. “I hated that.”90 According to Van Zandt, Chase was so anti-network that he hated anything he considered pretty. Everything was understated, from the cinematography, to the makeup, to the lighting. If the nets pursued closure like the holy grail—those huggable moments—he scattered loose ends galore, like the “Pine Barrens” episode, where the Russian gangster disappears in the woods. Fans wondered what happened to him and wanted Chase to resolve the issue, but he never did. Dr. Melfi never tells Tony who raped her, and consequently Tony never avenges her.
Chase didn’t want to reward Tony because, as he always tried to show those of his audience who wanted more whackage, crime is wrong. He was always shocked by viewers’ bottomless appetite for murder and mayhem. On the other hand, now he was also shocked by their insistence upon punishment. “They wanted to see him go face-down in linguini, you know?” he says, speaking of Tony. “And I just thought, ‘God, you watched this guy for seven years and I know he’s a criminal. But don’t tell me you don’t love him in some way, don’t tell me you’re not on his side in some way. And now you want to see him killed? You want justice done? You’re a criminal after watching this shit for seven years.’”91
Despite the title of the first post-Sopranos feature Chase directed, Not Fade Away, Tony Soprano did just that—faded away. Closure resolves the narrative, makes viewers feel comfortable. Echoing Alan Ball, Winter observes, “We didn’t want to make you feel okay.”92
The audience furor over the enigmatic ending annoyed Chase. He felt that the critics turned on him like a pack of wolves because Hollywood taught its audience to demand closure on everything, no matter how minor, leaving no place for mystery. Shunning closure, leaving loose ends, and refusing to wrap up seasons with the big red bows that Strauss discouraged in Ball is a kind of closure in itself, Chase’s kind of closure.
By 2007, when it was all over, Albrecht recalls, “People went, ‘What’s next? Where’s the next Sopranos?’” Answering his own question, he says, “There was no next Sopranos.”93 Indeed, there wasn’t. The show was sui generis. There would never be another show like it. When asked about his legacy, Chase said The Sopranos has no legacy. Perhaps he was defaulting to his curdled view of life, but we’re familiar enough with him to know there’s a robust ego lurking behind his façade of modesty, and so many gifted showrunners who followed in his wake have tipped their hats to him that we know that’s nonsense. All roads lead back to David Chase.
4
HBO’s Annus Horribilis
With no more Sopranos nor Deadwood, Albrecht was busted for attempting to throttle his fiancée. The party was over—until The Song of Ice and Fire knocked on the door.
Under cloudy skies early on a cool Sunday morning—cool at least by Las Vegas standards—Chris Albrecht, fifty-four, then chairman and CEO of HBO, architect of its golden age, and at the time arguably the most influential figure in television—network or cable—was arrested at 3:00 a.m. in the valet parking area of the MGM Grand Hotel for assaulting his fiancée, thirty-seven-year-old Karla Jensen, a correspondent for HBO and Telemundo.
It was May 5, 2007. HBO had just aired the championship fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Oscar De La Hoya for the light middleweight title. With both hands wrapped around her neck, Albrecht was dragging Jensen across the lot when a security guard intervened. Albrecht’s grip was so tight that the guard had to pry his fingers away, leaving a necklace of angry red welts around her throat. Reportedly, Albrecht reeked of booze and was having trouble standing up. Slurring his words, he explained that Jensen “had pissed [him] off.”1
According to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, an officer placed him in a “submission hold,” forcing him to the ground. Albrecht was charged with domestic assault and battery, apparently no more than a misdemeanor in Nevada. Despite Jensen’s refusal to press charges, Albrecht spent twelve hours at the Clark County Detention Center, after which he agreed to undergo domestic abuse counseling, was fined $1,000, and sent back to New York. A slap, in other words, on the wrist. For his company, however, it was a catastrophe.
Initially, Albrecht claimed he was not drunk, but thinking clearly. “The idea came up that I would say that I had been drinking and was drunk and fell off the wagon,” he explained later.2 The idea seemed to be that a “heroic struggle against alcohol addiction” narrative would make him more sympathetic, transform him from a victimizer into a victim—of alcohol abuse. Albrecht later explained, “Jeff [Bewkes] said to me that it would soften everything and would help him to keep me.”3
