New York Times Article Today

The New York Times -- By BILL CARTER -- February 26, 2006

HIGH on the wall of the otherwise-nondescript conference room inside the production offices of "The Sopranos" hangs a small, framed photograph of a man with his face half shadowed by a fedora.

Ambling by in his lumbering gait, slowed by a slight limp from a recent leg injury, James Gandolfini stopped to take a look at the photo. "Who's that?" he asked.

"Fellini," said David Chase.

Federico Fellini might seem an odd choice to oversee the room where an American television series is planned, but why not? Has there ever been one that was richer, more dense with the complexities of family life — in all its connotations — and yes, more atmospherically Italian (Italian-American in this case) than "The Sopranos"? "It's all a big discovery process," said Mr. Chase, the creator and executive producer of the series, summing up how it has all unfolded. "Actually, I think Fellini said making a movie is like a voyage."

The voyage of "The Sopranos" has been among the most celebrated in television history. The series, the most popular ever on cable television, is a force to be reckoned with across the whole landscape of the medium, and even the larger culture. No two people have been more instrumental in guiding that voyage than Mr. Chase, whose hand has been on every episode in the show's seven-year run, and Mr. Gandolfini, a three-time Emmy winner for best actor, who has brought Mr. Chase's central character, Tony Soprano, to vivid, visceral life.

In a joint interview at Silvercup Studios in Queens, where the interiors for "The Sopranos" are shot, the two men considered the fascinating, volatile, deeply conflicted man they have jointly created. Mr. Gandolfini, as laconic in person as he is mercurial in the show, replied, "I hate to say this, but it's a bit of a blur at this point."

Mr. Chase threw in, "You know, what's interesting is, being your own self is kind of a blur."

One thing both men now know for sure is that the voyage of "The Sopranos" is coming to an end. After several years of speculation, Mr. Chase and the executives of HBO came to an agreement that the latest season of 12 episodes, which starts up on March 12, would be the show's last — and then they renegotiated again and added a mini-season of eight more episodes that will be shot in the coming months and played starting next January.

Mr. Gandolfini called the additional episodes "a reprieve," allowing him to delay for a bit having to think about what the end of the show will mean for him.

Mr. Chase conceded that he has known generally how he will end the series "for a couple of years now."

Mr. Gandolfini said: "He told me one thing. But I think it's different now."

Though they did not appear to be especially close, and even sat at the conference-room table several chairs apart, the two men clearly have an ease with each other, joking easily back and forth about moments from the past seven years of joint creative effort. The work has always been a collaboration, though not the kind you often hear of in television, where a star begins dictating plotlines and character points. Mr. Gandolfini is not that kind of actor — and Mr. Chase is not that kind of producer. "Some actors suggest things and they don't even know why they're suggesting it," Mr. Gandolfini said. "If I started imposing my own ideas, that would be complete pandemonium."

Mr. Chase, despite a preference for film and a personal antipathy toward television — in an earlier interview he confessed, "I just resented every moment I spent in television" — worked most of his pre-"Sopranos" career on network series, and so he spoke from long experience when he made the point: "Actors will say, 'My character wouldn't say that.' Who said it was your character?" As Mr. Gandolfini laughed, Mr. Chase added, "By the way, Jim has never said that."

Mr. Gandolfini has, however, made significant contributions — in particular, Mr. Chase noted, a sense of the emotional depth behind Tony's physical menace, conveying so much just with his eyes.

Mr. Gandolfini was quick to mention the other cast members, including Edie Falco and Michael Imperioli, saying, "They all convey that depth — that's why the whole thing has more than just a surface quality."

But as Mr. Chase said, the show "has been engineered" around Tony's point of view. Nothing illustrated that more, and more helped differentiate the series from any previous gangster saga, he said, than the scenes between Tony and his therapist, Dr. Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco.) "They opened up this whole feminine side of Tony," Mr. Chase said. "The thing with his mother, and the thing with the shrink. It had all been about men before. Here he had this other aspect to him."

Mr. Gandolfini labeled his scenes with Dr. Melfi "a Greek chorus." He said: "You go to the therapist and he explains what is happening to him. And you see how it is affecting him. I'm not sure without that the show would have been successful."

Mr. Gandolfini and his imposing physical presence influenced Mr. Chase's understanding of the character from the very first days of filming. Mr. Chase recalled that in the pilot script, originally written in the late 1990's for the Fox network (one of the great misses in TV history), he had conceived a scene where Tony's nephew, Christopher, reveals that he is thinking of selling his story to Hollywood. In the script, Tony responded by cuffing Christopher behind the ear.

After HBO finally agreed to shoot the script, that moment remained in the pilot. When they got to the scene, Mr. Chase, who was directing, called "Action," and instead of that affectionate little cuff, he remembered: "Jim picks the guy up and just throws him. I can still see Michael Imperioli. He was just sitting there with a beer bottle in his hand and the next thing I know there's like this blur of movement and the beer bottle is rolling along the ground and Michael is up off his feet." Mr. Chase laughed, remembering the impression Mr. Gandolfini's move left on him. "Of course, this is how you lead people," he said.

That one gesture changed the show. "He was always going to be a tough, hard person for most people to love," Mr. Chase said. "But that is what a gangster is. "

Mr. Gandolfini doesn't take much credit for the insight. "It was just logical," he said. "I was younger," he said, "and even more volatile at the time."

Another transformative moment came when Fox passed. "In retrospect," said Mr. Chase, "the reason I think the show never went at Fox is that there was no murder in it." At least none committed by Tony. "And I realized afterwards: who wants to see a mob show where no one gets killed?"

Of course Tony did get around to killing people. In one of the series's most famous episodes, the fourth after the pilot, he breaks away from taking his daughter, Meadow, on a tour of elite colleges in Maine to garrote a former mobster turned informer. When he saw that episode, Chris Albrecht, the top HBO executive, was appalled. "Chris said, you've invented one of the best leading characters in television in 20 years and you're going to destroy him," Mr. Chase said. "I said, at this point: 'That guy is a squealer. Tony is a Mob boss. If he doesn't kill him, you've lost more of the audience than you're going to lose if he does.' "

It was also about that time that the show got an unexpected endorsement. Mr. Chase said the show has, on occasion, "indirectly heard" from real-life mobsters. "After about four episodes," Mr. Chase said, "we heard, 'You're O.K.' With one caveat: 'We got word about those barbecue scenes where Jim would wear shorts. A don does not wear shorts.' "

"Of course he walks around in his underwear all the time," Mr. Gandolfini said.

Another plot point that Mr. Chase conceded might not stand up to such fact-checking was Tony's decision after Season 1 to allow his Uncle Junior, played by Dominic Chianese, to live after Junior tried to have Tony killed. Mr. Chase said he loved the scenes between the two characters too much to take that step. But Mr. Gandolfini found it completely understandable. "I think there's a place Tony knows that if he goes to, he's not coming back, and that's the place," Mr. Gandolfini said. "If you start killing family members, what's next?"

Tony did eventually kill one family member, his cousin, but only to spare him from a worse fate at the hands of enemies. In that and other ways, Tony has diverged from gangster conventions. He is clearly more curious about the world. At the very least, he spends more time watching the History Channel.

But another significant factor in the development — or perception — of Tony's character has been its unusually slow roll-out. Between each of the "Sopranos" seasons, cast and crew have gone on long breaks, something no hit series has ever experienced before. The current break — new episodes haven't been on the air since June 2004 — has been the longest. "Honestly, the last break affected me detrimentally," Mr. Gandolfini admitted. "It was long. I think your brain starts to eke out other places. I don't think I was horribly affected — I hope not. But it was long."

Looking back, both he and Mr. Chase confessed to being somewhat amazed at having wrought a work so memorable, so indelible. "I remember sitting around during that barbecue scene," Mr. Gandolfini said, recalling the skepticism that prevailed at that time, "looking around at everyone and thinking: this is a collection that has never been assembled on a TV show before. Look at this group. I was thinking: all right, maybe a few people in Jersey will watch this."

Mr. Chase — who, like Mr. Gandolfini, is from an Italian, New Jersey background — said: "It was strange. I remember thinking I had been to those barbecues in North Caldwell, eating that sausage, when I was 17. And I'm here again, but we're making all of this up? How the heck did this ever happen? I had the same feeling as Jim: who are all these people? They were certainly not Hollywood people; they were real people."

Though much work remains on the final season, Mr. Gandolfini and Mr. Chase acknowledged that they have considered what it will mean finally to move on. Mr. Chase said he believed he would "three-quarters miss doing it, one-quarter not." Mr. Gandolfini, having earlier said "half and half," decided Mr. Chase's equation sounded about right.

Asked if he was concerned about having to shift into something new after having played such an iconic character, he all but snickered. "Not at all," he said. "Ask the crew if they think I'm an iconic character." Then he went out of his way to praise them: "They are not like some movie crew. They are really involved. They make a real contribution." Many have been there from the beginning. The end of the series will be a big change for them, too.

So how will "The Sopranos" draw to a close? Mr. Chase was revealing nothing, of course, other than reasserting that "this is the absolute end." But, he added: "I could not promise that we would not come back and do a movie. It may be that in two or three or four years I could be sitting around and get an idea for a really great 'Sopranos' movie. I don't think that will happen. But if one morning somebody woke up and said this would make a really good, concise, contained 'Sopranos' story, I wouldn't rule that out."

Mr. Gandolfini has only tentative plans for his first post-"Sopranos" work. He is talking about starring in a film about the mid-life of Ernest Hemingway.

Mr. Chase said he has not yet formed a plan for future ventures. In the past he has chafed just slightly under the demands of producing more episodes under such intense scrutiny, including protests from an Italian-American group, caviling from some fans with ever more demanding expectations.

Now all that is behind him, overwhelmed by the excellence of what he, Mr. Gandofini, and the others involved with the show have put on film since 1999. For Mr. Chase, the looming end of what, by any standard, is a classic, career-defining achievement, seems to have finally dispersed the ambivalence he always held about expressing himself on television, an art form, which, as he put it, "I was always trying to get out of." Now he will always be known as the creator of one of television's greatest series, and he seems fully appreciative of that recognition.

"I do think that I've been a part of something extraordinary here," Mr. Chase said. "It's been an amazing ride. This is not being coy. We really work hard here. I'm not going to say that we don't. But you have to believe at some level in luck. We still try to do work that pleases us. But, you know, a lot of things happened. For some reason there was a zeitgeist going on, where this thing connected to whatever was out there. Who knows why that happens? "

Also




NASCAR driver Clint Bowyer, third from right, poses with the cast of television series 'The Sopranos' and the 'Sopranos' car that he'll race in the UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400 in Las Vegas, during a news conference outside SilverCup Studios, where the 'The Sopranos' films, in Queens, New York, Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006. Left to right: Frank Vincent, Joe Gannascoli, Vincent Curatola, Bowyer, Steve Schirripa, and John Ventimiglia pose with the car. The race will be held on March 12, the same day as the season premiere of 'The Sopranos.' (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)

Thanks to lbracco.com for those.

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