Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos (2024) s01e01 Episode Script
Part One
- Rolling.
- Rolling.
And action.
Mr. Soprano?
Yeah.
Have a seat.
Okay.
Can you recall what
your first memory was?
Your actual first memory?
My actual first memory is a dream.
I guess my mother had these.
It's like a metal kind of a thing
with a curlicue.
The hand comes out from the wall
and you can hang a plant from it.
I was swinging from that thing.
That is my first memory, actually.
It really impressed me.
Maybe it was the first time
I remember a dream
and I was going, "Wow, what was that?
What the hell's going on in my head?"
You know, it's funny
how much I've forgotten.
When people remind me of things.
That make me laugh.
Like, I don't remember.
I don't remember doing that,
or I don't remember but yeah.
Cut!
I was born in Mount Vernon, New York,
right near the Bronx.
Then we moved to Jersey
when I was four.
My mother's family was from Jersey.
We moved to my
aunt's house in Boonton,
Revolutionary War town.
You can still see where
the furnaces were.
They made musket balls.
There's a river that goes through it.
That's the town we used
when the character Vito
went to New Hampshire.
And I loved that town.
It was so mysterious.
I loved going into New York
at Christmas.
Rockefeller Center, the tree,
the whole thing blew my mind.
Huge toy department. Santa. Trains.
- You were on my lap five minutes ago.
- No, I wasn't.
Yes, you were.
Now you're going on Santa's List
and getting nothing!
Fuck you, Santa!
My father, I started begging him,
could we please go home down
the West Side Highway?
Because to the Lincoln Tunnel,
there were ships in the harbor
that the prow of the ship
was, like, over the road.
I couldn't get over it.
I wanted to see that.
I loved going through
the Meadowlands.
There's all these legends
that Jimmy Hoffa is buried out there.
Pennsylvania Station,
all that rubble was out there.
That's where The Sopranos,
we shot a lot of it there.
But anyway, we moved out
of my aunt's house
to Clifton, New Jersey,
kind of working-class,
larger kind of semi-city,
then moved to West Essex.
My father got this idea
to open a hardware store.
Next door was a Chinese restaurant.
See these Chinese guys
plucking chickens down there.
My parents weren't that fond
of the whole deal.
They liked Chinese food,
but didn't like being close
to the Chinese restaurant.
They sold that hardware store
and they bought
a Main Street hardware store
in a small town.
My father worked really hard
and they never got out
from behind the eight ball.
They were in business
for 35, 40 years.
It was killing them,
but they kept going.
They kept going.
Until my father was sick
and the whole thing sold
for $1,300 at a sheriff's auction.
Whole life.
They just were not happy people.
My mother was very difficult,
but she functioned.
She worked, came home,
made us dinner,
but she was terrified
and angry at everybody.
You know, somebody
called here last night.
After dark.
Who?
You think I'd answer?
It was dark out.
And she was given to having
screaming nightmares.
Her family had ten girls
and two boys.
Parents had come over from Italy,
lived in Newark,
which was a big Italian,
big immigrant community.
We used to go down every
Saturday night for dinner.
They spoke no English.
And her father, my grandfather,
Vito Bucco,
he never learned English. He refused.
Not a nice guy.
Did you feel unappreciated by her?
- My mother?
- Yeah.
She had so many negative things
to say about me.
Very complex. My father too.
It was very strange.
I mean, appreciated
One time we were in the car
with my mother and father
and my cousin Johnny.
I forget what song was playing,
but I was tapping along with it.
He said, "He should be
playing the drums.
He's got a good sense
of rhythm."
She said, "Over my dead body.
That Gene Krupa was a drug addict!"
Speaking of crystal meth,
look at this wayo.
I did not feel appreciated,
that would never have
come into my mind.
Were you scared of her?
Were you scared
that she would explode?
Stop telling me how to live my life.
You just shut up.
I am nervous.
As a kid, I was fearful.
And then I became kind of a punk.
And that saved my life in a way.
I fell in with this group of guys.
Holy shit.
Bullies, wiseguys.
We got into switchblades,
leather armbands, cigarettes.
We got our driver's licenses,
it was all about cars
and girls and alcohol.
The drinking age in New York was 18,
Jersey was 21.
So we were constantly going there.
Upper East Side was kind of hip then,
and then the Village.
I remember coming back
from Manhattan,
and it was a car full of greasers
next to us,
and we started cursing at each other
and somehow scaling plates.
Somebody's mother's plates, I guess.
You know
This is in the Lincoln Tunnel.
All of us were drunk.
1964, I go to college down South,
Wake Forest in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina.
- Hated it.
- Why?
You're going to cut this.
Yeah, it was the South.
The Klan was really active
around where we were.
The big fraternity on campus
was inspired by Robert E. Lee.
It was a Baptist school.
Had to go to chapel twice a week.
No drinking, no dancing,
no card playing.
So why did I go there?
I got rejected at Princeton.
I got rejected at Dartmouth.
My best friend was going
to Wake Forest.
Because he was going there,
I went there.
And we both were miserable.
But fortunately, someone started
foreign film night.
That's where I saw Godard, Bergman,
Fellini, La Dolce Vita
Marcello, come here!
Hurry up.
8 1/2, just, I don't even think
I understood it.
I don't even think I knew
what a film director was.
But it just blew my mind.
A whole new universe.
I left Wake Forest and went to NYU,
and I saw Cul-de-sac
by Roman Polanski.
That's when I started thinking,
"Maybe I could do that."
It was the art of it
that was so engaging.
That's it.
October of 1965, my friend was
going to Bard College.
I went up there to take acid.
That was my first time.
I remember being on the banks
of the Hudson River,
two o'clock in the morning,
and I started saying,
"I want to make movies."
That was when the idea
first occurred to me, like,
actually pursue this somehow.
- Take your mark.
- And action.
Hey, Tony.
- You okay?
- How are you doing?
- Are you okay, David?
- Yeah.
Yeah, I'm just talking
my fucking head off.
I can't believe it.
Just talking too much.
- No, man. It's good.
- No, it's not.
I really regret the amount of
fucking verbiage from this morning.
Seriously, I don't know about this.
Who gives a shit?
- All these personal questions.
- People will give a shit.
It's like, as Tony says
Remember when is
the lowest form of conversation.
And I would leave now,
but I see what you've done,
all this stuff.
And, yeah, it was a round office.
It looks a lot like it.
I did say I'd do this.
But what I said was,
"Yeah, I'll be part of this
Sopranos documentary."
But I didn't realize it was
going to be about me.
Let me explain a little bit,
which is that
part of what interests me
about The Sopranos
was how it was personal to you.
That you had an idea,
which was an amalgam
of a lot of things
that you had lived through,
thought about.
Well, for years, everybody told me
that I had to write something
about my mother.
She was so out there and so funny.
My wife, Denise,
was the first one to say that.
And then everybody was saying,
"You gotta write something
about your mother."
In like '88, I was looking for a job,
and David Chase had a new show.
It was called Almost Grown,
and he wanted to meet writers.
So I met with David
on Ventura Boulevard,
some restaurant.
I got there first, of course,
and I see him coming in the door.
I think, "Fuck."
He just looked so dour.
You know what I mean?
He looked so miserable.
And he sat down,
and in probably ten minutes,
we were just laughing with tears
coming down our faces
because we were talking
about our mothers.
And so we became friends.
It was like that, you know?
And I said to him, "Here you are,
the most powerful man."
He, like, had the suits at Universal,
you know, crying and upset.
And you're this powerful man,
and your mother
makes you into a little
screaming gerbil or something.
And I said, "This is what
you should write about."
Robin said, "You should write a show
about your mother
and a TV producer."
And I thought,
"Who's going to watch that?"
But maybe if he was like
a really badass guy,
maybe that would work.
Was the bad guy already a mobster?
Yeah.
I wanted to get De Niro
and Anne Bancroft.
At first, I thought of it
as a feature.
It was the story that was
the first season.
It was about a mobster
who goes to a shrink
after having panic attacks.
Any thoughts at all
on why you blacked out?
I don't know.
Stress, maybe.
About what?
He's having problems with his uncle,
a feud of some kind.
You may run North Jersey,
but you don't run your Uncle Junior.
He puts his mother in a nursing home.
I don't see you tryin' to mix
with the other ladies,
or talk to the nice gents
I see walking around.
You're not making the most
of your opportunities.
What do you care?
Out of sight, out of mind.
His mother sides with his uncle
in this gang war.
Three of my capos have
their mothers in this place?
Instead of living in normal homes
with their sons
like human beings.
This must be some kind of
fucking end move.
His mother conspires with
his uncle to have him killed.
a gangland execution gone awry.
And his shrink is the one
who helps him to understand that.
On the day before the shooting,
you said to me that
she kept going on, yet again,
about news stories of mothers
throwing their babies out of windows.
In the end, he suffocates her.
Ma, I know what you did.
Your only son.
But then I thought,
"That would work as a TV show."
We took it around
to all the networks:
Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Nobody wanted it.
Les Moonves said,
"Script's very good, very funny."
"But he's going to see
a psychiatrist?
Are you married
to him taking Prozac?"
So I said, "Yeah, I guess you'd say
I'm married to it."
He said, "Well, then no."
So it was dead.
But then I started saying,
"Can't we go to HBO?"
Simply the best choice on TV.
We were finding our way
from the time I got there in '85.
Television, you know, was still,
at that time, the Big Three,
and four, if you count Fox.
We didn't look at them
so much as competition
as a mark for us to compare
ourselves against,
and we knew we needed
to be different.
What HBO was trying to do
was make a name for itself.
Boxing and movies was really
what HBO was known for.
The change moment
became The Sanders Show.
- Someone's been sitting in my chair.
- Maybe it's Mama Bear.
Talentless fat fuck.
Just worry about the couch
and trying not to fuck up.
It set a mark down that HBO
could do something different,
maybe better, than what's on
the broadcast networks.
We started trying to figure out,
can we get into the series business?
Oh, boy.
Schillinger's home.
We developed Oz.
He's not such a bad guy, Diane.
What drugs are you on?
And Sex and the City.
Basically, it was a style of working,
which was, like, let's find
really great storytellers
and let them do their thing.
So David came in
and I knew his résumé.
He was a real TV veteran
and had worked on some good things,
but hadn't really had success
with his own.
Denise and I, we got married.
This is 1968.
A couple of my uncles
took me aside and said,
"You have to get out of here.
You're not going to stay married
if you stay here."
Because they knew
what my parents were like,
and they really were talking
about my mother.
My wife wouldn't have
been able to take it.
My mother was just nuts.
So we left the night of our wedding
and started for California.
We cross the country,
and I get the word
that I get a fellowship
to film school.
Stanford University.
I remember somebody telling me
that the short version
of American history is,
the scum floats west.
When I got here,
I sort of understood it.
Alcatraz.
Some of the biggest boys
did time there.
Even Capone.
Got him for tax evasion
'cause they couldn't get him
for anything else.
Did 11 years and died
of the big S in 1947.
Of course, that was a long time ago.
I went to Stanford for two years.
I did a narrative for my thesis film,
The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos.
We thought we were doing Godard.
I don't know what we thought
Godard was doing,
but we weren't doing it.
My name is Manousos.
I'm Greek, or of Greek descent.
However you want it.
Ma, the greatest little lady
that ever lived.
Let's dump this stiff
and get it over with.
Take that smile off your face,
sweetie pie.
You son of a bitch!
Ma, they got me in the back.
After the two-year graduate program
and I was graduating,
a friend of mine and I
wrote a script.
And the writing teacher
sent it to this guy,
Roy Huggins,
who was a big TV producer.
But we kind of forgot about it.
Denise and I moved to LA,
rented an apartment,
and Denise got a job at a law firm.
And I started looking for work,
but I just couldn't get a job.
Finally, I did get a job
working for this outfit
called Clover Films.
These movies
Not ten kilometers from here,
there's a golf course
and a country club
surrounded by German guards.
Every German son-of-a-bitch soldier
is to be killed.
One of the movies, we shot it
at a burned-out apartment complex
in Las Virgenes Canyon.
It was a German fort or something,
inhabited only now by these
German prostitutes.
I had a very small part,
and I was supposed to be
the first assistant director,
but I had no idea what I was doing.
And the movie itself,
it was mostly soft-core
fucking and sucking.
I did write a feature
for Clover Films
called Grave of the Vampire.
No! No!
Who are you?
I'm your son!
Your son conceived in a grave!
Yes.
It was insane.
Yes!
While I was there,
I heard that Roy Huggins,
who had read that script
from two years ago,
wanted to hire me
to write an episode.
So I got my first job in TV,
a series that was called
The Bold Ones: The Lawyers.
Everybody back east There it was.
There was my name on television.
But I didn't set my mind
to learning how to direct,
even though I wanted to be
a movie director.
Right.
I did not Maybe I was
too embarrassed
to, like, ask the DP,
"How do you do that?"
"How do you do this?"
I kept trying to write features
for years after that,
and none of them got made.
I believe it was 1973.
Writers Guild went on strike,
and I had to go on picket duty
at Paramount Studios
right in front of the DeMille Gate.
And that was great.
I mean, just to be there.
It was like, these were all
professional writers
that I was on picket duty with.
And I got to really look forward
to picket duty
because it was starting to feel like
I really am in Hollywood.
And I met a guy named Paul Playdon,
the story editor
of Mission: Impossible.
I had no agent,
so Paul got me an agent.
I signed with his agency.
And when the strike was over,
there was a show called
The Magician with Bill Bixby,
and Bixby played a magician
who solved crimes
and defeated the bad guys
with scarves and hats.
Get back!
They brought me on as story editor.
And then I got on
to The Rockford Files.
I did I'll Fly Away.
And then I was on Northern Exposure.
So I was in the TV business.
The problem was,
you knew what the limits were,
but you were always testing them
and you would always fail.
It was the meetings
that were terrible,
the network meetings, what they
They had this unerring sense
that the reason
you were writing this,
the thing you love most about this,
was what they were going to go for.
So because I was used to network TV,
Sopranos was a mob show
where nobody got killed.
Because I thought they
wouldn't want that.
Then I realized all those
Jimmy Cagney gangster movies
The Godfather? Nobody got killed?
Why would you ever leave that out?
So I rewrote it to include a murder.
That's when HBO got really
interested in the show.
It wasn't just,
you got to put in a murder.
That had to be part of the story.
That had to be integral
to the narrative and to the culture.
We had a big meeting with David.
My impression was, okay,
this is a network guy,
but he's already showed us
in his writing
that he doesn't think
only like a traditional network guy.
And his take on the world,
you could tell immediately,
these characters,
it was like a second skin to him.
That was an easy yes
to make that pilot.
You want to take it from here or
In casting,
I don't react much at all.
I say, "Oh, that's very good."
- Really good.
- Thanks, guys.
"Thank you very much,"
and people leave.
Casting is a long process.
- Just begin?
- Whenever you're ready.
Next, I had a breakfast meeting.
I was called in to consult
by a garbage hauling
company I represent.
Big, what's the story
with Triboro Towers?
The site manager wants
to renew his contract.
Site manager wants to renew
his contract with Dick.
The site manager wants to renew
his contract with Dick.
The site manager, he wants to
renew his contract with Dick.
But these Kolar brothers.
Let's try again.
Let me pick the energy up.
I'm very tired.
Yeah. The Kolar brothers.
They're some kind of
Czechoslovakian immigrants
or some shit.
They can save close to
a million a year
if the Kolars haul the trash
and not Dick.
They pay us 40 times the monthly
for stealing your stop.
That's the thing, they won't.
They said that if they can tell
those commie bosses
back in Czechoslovakia
to go fuck themselves,
he could fucking tell us.
In Czech Republic too, we love pork.
You ever have our sausages?
I thought the only sausages
were Italian and Jimmy Dean.
You see what you learn when
you cross cultures?
My Uncle Uvzen doesn't know I came.
But if we make any progress,
I'll have to tell him.
Oh, we gotta make progress, "Email."
I mean, you know, we must
stop the madness.
The garbage business is changing.
We're the younger generation.
We have issues in common.
Garbage business is changing,
you know?
Younger generation.
We have issues in common.
Emil.
Where'd you go to high school?
Poland?
I'm not Polish.
What's Czechoslovakia? Isn't that
That's a type of Polack?
We came to this country
when I was nine.
I went to West Essex.
Yo, you used to play
my cousin Gregory in football.
- He went to Boonton.
- Where's the stuff?
Ah, yes.
The reason for the visit.
Got it all deployed for you.
Taste the wares, "Email."
Emil.
Cut! Yeah, we're good.
You know, the idea of
a series on HBO.
Back then, there was no prestige
attached to that.
To be really frank,
it was kind of
the bargain basement of TV.
It really was.
But I loved the character.
I thought the character
was really fun.
His name was Dean Moltisanti
when I first read the script.
I didn't know who David Chase was,
I'll be honest.
And I didn't know he was Italian
when I saw his name on the script,
which kind of made me think,
"Who's this guy?
Making a show about Italians
And he's not"
You know, Scorsese and Coppola
were Italian American.
But I worked really hard on it
and went in for David.
You know, David's very
he's poker-faced.
Michael came in and he was great,
but I played it completely straight.
Very good.
I walked out thinking,
"This ain't gonna happen.
Who cares? He's not even Italian.
What does he know?"
"Who the fuck is this guy?
He's not even Italian. Fuck him."
But
- Who's there?
- You locked the door?
Seemed to me like we read
a hundred actresses.
This is a nursing home.
They all came in and they did
their crazy Italian mama thing.
You're not putting me in
a nursing home.
I've seen these women
in these nursing homes
babbling like idiots.
And it wasn't even close.
And because it was based
on my mother,
I knew how far away it was.
But then Nancy Marchand came in.
I knew her as Mrs. Pynchon,
the newspaper publisher in Lou Grant.
May I remind you, Mr. Grant,
this is not the New York Times.
I'm reminded of it
every time I pick it up.
So am I, sir, and I wish
we had their resources.
But the simple fact is, we don't.
If you want me to back off, I will.
Now, I didn't say that.
But I need you gentlemen to tell me
that we can win if we go to court.
- Should I slate it and all that?
- No.
Just thought, "This is crazy.
This isn't going to work."
But she opened her mouth and boom.
You're with active seniors
your own age.
They do things, they go places,
they go dancing.
I've seen these women
in these nursing homes
babbling like idiots.
Just eat your eggplant.
It was like And she just had it.
If your uncle has business
with Arthur,
and I don't even
want to know what it is,
then he knows what he's doing.
And I don't?
Well, all I know is
daughters are better at taking care
of their mothers than sons.
And I bought CDs
for a broken record.
Everybody always told me there
was no one like my mother.
But when all of my relatives
started watching the show,
they said, "My God,
that's Aunt Norma.
That's your mother."
I said, "No shit."
It was like she was channeling her.
I expect to see you tonight
at Anthony Junior's
birthday party with your baked ziti.
Only if I'm picked up
and I'm brought back home.
I don't drive
when they're predicting rain.
All of my career,
pretty much in my career,
I have played the tasteful lady.
And I really appreciate playing
this kind of harridan
because I never get a chance
to do that.
It's good for you to drive.
Use it or lose it.
I got to go to work.
Sure.
Run off.
I don't have
When I went in initially,
I was auditioning for about
five different roles.
Who was that woman tonight?
I read for Tony Soprano's mistress.
What, you were redoing
the garbage dump?
So don't treat me like a child.
I know there's something
more intimate.
Who was that woman
tonight at the restaurant?
You better not be
messing with that hat.
In the end,
they went with someone else.
Very good.
But David liked me.
I think he just liked the fact
that I was Italian,
and maybe I was cute.
But I didn't know that it had
anything to do with being Italian.
I thought it was about opera singers.
This is unacceptable.
I had an 8:00 reservation
I made two weeks ago.
As I explained,
people are not leaving their tables.
There are five parties ahead of you.
I don't think I read
for the hostess part.
That was a phone call,
"Would you want to play this part?"
And I said, "Sure."
But I couldn't say
my one fucking line.
Mr. Borglund, they're setting up
your table right now.
Because I was so nervous
to be around Lorraine
after Goodfellas.
Karen. So I was with Karen!
I was dying!
Look, he started to touch me.
He started to grab me.
I told him to stop. He didn't stop.
I hit him back, and then
he got really angry.
Lorraine was the only thing we had
that resembled a star
because of Goodfellas
and a couple other movies.
But at first, the casting people
brought her in for Carmela.
Carmela was definitely
something that HBO
and him had discussed,
but I went in wanting Dr. Melfi.
And David was a little taken back.
"Why do you want to play Melfi?"
I said, "Well, because
I'm a different woman
than I was years ago
when I was Karen Hill
in Goodfellas.
I don't really want to play
that part again.
Dr. Melfi intrigues me.
I've been in therapy."
- You had been in therapy?
- Absolutely.
And so David and I talked
a lot about therapy,
and I think that we've never seen
an Italian educated woman.
That pleases me.
And I don't think Tony would talk
to anybody that's not Italian.
So with that,
Dr. Melfi.
I said, "Okay, but you're
going to have to sit still
with your hands in your lap.
Keep your voice down."
- Okay, David?
- Yeah.
Okay. I got it.
Great. Good.
You know, I would always
have to work on
tamping down all my lightness.
And I would try to bury Lorraine
so that Melfi would come out
in a very different way
than who I am.
It was very far from me.
I'm not Melfi at all anywhere.
Anxiety attacks are legitimate
psychiatric emergencies.
- Suppose you were driving a car.
- Let me tell you something.
Today everybody goes
to shrinks and counselors.
They're getting on
Sally Jessy Raphael,
talking about their problems.
What happened to Gary Cooper?
The strong, silent type?
He was an American.
This guy wasn't in touch
with his feelings.
He just did what he had to do.
We were casting Tony.
We started in Los Angeles,
then moved to New York.
We read a whole lot of people,
and it just wasn't happening.
Vaffanculo, eh?
But then I had asked Steven Van Zandt
to read for Tony.
There he was, a rock and roll star.
This carried a lot of shit with me.
I used to play those
Springsteen albums
and look at this
little Italian guy and say,
"Who is that?
Kind of looks like Pacino."
For the record, tonight,
I want to say that there was
absolutely nothing
unusual about the way
The Rascals dressed.
But what happened was,
right before casting,
my wife and I were watching
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
and there's Steven Van Zandt
inducting The Rascals.
Nothing strange about that.
Dressed in a Rascals costume.
The first time I saw The Rascals
was the Keyport Roller Drome
in Keyport, New Jersey.
That's right.
No, it was no Fillmores.
There was no arenas in those days.
Rock and roll played skating rinks
where it belonged.
I said to her, "This guy
has got to be in the show."
And the way rock is selling,
we may be back in
skating rinks next year,
I don't know, but
I get a lot of scripts for music,
not for acting.
I wasn't an actor.
And David Chase calls, you know.
I get on the phone.
What was that first
conversation like?
Well, it was a little weird
because he says,
"What do you think?"
I said, "Well, I think
it's great script.
What kind of music
are you thinking of?"
He says, "No, we want
you to be in it."
I said, "I'm not an actor."
I mean, I thought,
isn't that kind of a prerequisite
for this whole TV thing? You know?
And he says, "Yes, you are an actor.
You just don't know it yet."
You know?
So I said, "All right, well,
maybe destiny is speaking here."
Ah, let me tell you something.
Everybody these days is going
to shrinks and counselors.
They're all on Sally Jessy Raphael
telling everybody their problems.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
You know, the strong, silent type.
That was an American.
He wasn't in touch with his feelings.
He did what he had to do.
And those people knew
once they got Gary Cooper
in touch with his feelings,
they would never
be able to shut him up.
Dysfunction this, dysfunction that,
dysfunction vaffanculo.
His reading was good.
I'd never seen anything
like that, really.
And I thought, "Well, yeah,
that could be Tony Soprano."
But in the end,
I guess HBO tells David,
"Look, he's okay.
But we're not going to depend on
some guy who never acted before."
He says, "All right,
well, in that case,
I'll write you in a part
that doesn't exist."
I'm like, wow, this guy's crazy.
- This guy's really
- And action.
Sandrine.
This table drinks on the house
all night.
But he didn't write in
an underboss specifically,
or a consigliere.
I was just more or less a club owner
at that first moment.
Let's do that one more time.
It was very difficult
to find a guy for Tony.
Let me tell you something.
Today everybody goes
to shrinks and counselors.
They go on Sally Jessy Raphael
and they talk about their problems.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
The strong, silent type.
That was an American.
He wasn't in touch with his feelings.
He just did what he had to do.
What they didn't know
was once they got
Gary Cooper
in touch with his feelings,
they wouldn't be able to shut him up.
Dysfunction this, dysfunction that,
dysfunction vaffanculo.
Another guy who came close
was Michael Rispoli.
That was excellent.
But then, finally, we found Jim.
I got a call.
David Chase wanted to meet
at 8:30 in the morning.
I was like, oh.
Just his choice of having
a breakfast instead of
put me off right away.
I don't know why.
But we had a good time.
We laughed about our families
and our mothers.
So, then I auditioned.
And the first audition, I stopped
halfway through and I said,
"This sucks.
I'm not doing it right.
If you want me to come back,
I'll come back
and do it differently."
He left in the middle
of the first audition.
Walked out.
Doing his Van Morrison thing.
"This is shit.
I'm not doing this right," and left.
But we thought he was great.
So our casting directors
got him to come to my house,
and he read the scene
and it was like, you know
Bang.
Let me tell you something.
Nowadays, everybody's gotta
go to shrinks and counselors,
and go on Sally Jessy Raphael
and talk about their problems.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
The strong, silent type.
That was an American.
He didn't worry about his feelings,
he just did what he had to do.
What they didn't know
was if they got Gary Cooper
to talk about his feelings,
they wouldn't be able to shut him up.
'Cause dysfunction this,
dysfunction that,
and dysfunction vaffanculo.
It was just pretty obvious
when Jim did it,
he was Tony.
You know, sometimes
life is good.
Life is often good.
Regaleali, for example.
We had cast everybody,
but we didn't have a Carmela yet.
Carmela
Something I got to confess.
Edie, we did the audition
right before shooting.
What are you doing?
Getting my wine in position
to throw in your damn face.
You're always with the drama.
Go ahead and confess already.
Get it over with.
She did the scene from the pilot
where he tells her
that he's taking Prozac.
I'm on Prozac.
Oh, my God.
I've been seeing a therapist.
Oh, my God.
I think that's great.
I think that's so wonderful.
I think that's so gutsy.
- It was like, wow, this is it.
- I think that's very wonderful.
Did you think I was
Hannibal Lecture before?
It's great.
Psychology doesn't address the soul.
That's something else.
But this is a start.
This is something.
I'm gonna shut up.
I'll shut up now.
I definitely knew who this woman was.
And I was sure
I would never get cast because
my experience up to that point
had been that,
you know, if you're being cast
as an Italian American,
you've got to look a certain way.
And I felt like there were
other women
that looked more that way
and were cast
more often that way.
But I went and auditioned,
and the next day they called
and said, "You got the part."
And I thought, "It's one of
these fly-by-night productions."
You know? Cast it, shoot it.
Mark.
Mark.
Somebody gonna say action or what?
And action.
You know, Grandma,
this place is pretty neat.
What goes on behind there?
Very good!
Did you call that guy
at Tribeca Towers?
DAVID CHASE: Wait until I give you
the cue for the line.
Action.
Girls, you gotta have more than
just cranberry juice for breakfast.
Cut. Good.
DAVID CHASE: Action.
What the hell's the name
of the place?
DAVID CHASE: Triboro Towers.
Jesus.
Action.
Look
Anybody for ice cream?
DAVID CHASE: Line.
Did you call that guy
down at Triboro Towers
about the hauling contract?
Cut. Let's go again right away.
Right out of the gate, did he say
he wanted to direct it?
Yes. That was the next big decision.
We didn't know a lot about
what we were doing,
so we didn't want to give
anybody that much control.
He was going to be the
showrunner-writer-producer,
but if he was going to direct it,
then it was really
going to be his vision.
But it was clear when David
was talking about it
that it lived so much
in his heart and soul
and in his head
that we were like, "We gotta."
Let's let him direct it.
Action.
Every year on this date
since you were itty-bitty,
Mom and Meadow get all dolled up,
drive into New York Plaza Hotel
for tea
The scene where Carmela goes
to get her daughter
to bring her to the Plaza.
I have too much homework.
Meadow, it's our little tradition.
We always have so much fun.
Tell you the truth,
I've felt it was dumb
since I was eight.
I just go because you like it.
I remember something about
David's directing of that scene
Cut. Good.
that made me realize
this is personal to him.
He's speaking about something
that may have really happened
Action.
or something he was really
going through
with his wife and daughter
at that time.
But I remember thinking,
"Oh, this isn't just a director.
This is personal."
You have something
you want to say to me?
Mom, do you have any idea
how much it means
to actually go skiing in Aspen?
I mean, do you think that's
going to happen every year?
Like lame tea and scones
at the Plaza Hotel?
Goodbye.
Close my door, please.
And cut.
- Cut.
- Good.
Were you nervous about
shooting the pilot?
Thinking, this is my opportunity now
to be a director?
Yeah. Sure, I was nervous, yeah.
I mean, I had directed
some before that,
but, yeah, I was very nervous.
I depended on
Alik Sakharov a lot, DP.
I remember it was the first
or second week of prep on the pilot.
David would walk into the office,
put his feet up,
look out the window,
and just like gray mood.
You were like, "Dave, what's up?"
"I don't know who's going
to fucking watch this shit."
It's a good script, bro.
You know? It's a good script.
I distinctly remember, he said
we don't want to do
another television project.
Let's just break all the rules.
I didn't want TV coverage.
Coverage is the most boring
fucking thing in the world.
Typically, it would be a master,
two overs, and two close-ups.
So basically you fracture the scene
into smithereens.
It wasn't cinematic at all.
We talked about Bertolucci.
We talked about Coppola up the wazoo.
You know, Godfather.
We talked about Martin Scorsese.
We talked about Polanski.
With Chinatown, the language of it
was very close to how we wanted
to present Sopranos.
The scene where Jake Gittes
drives his car through
the orange orchard
Hold it right there!
That was the model for a scene
where Tony and Chris
chase this guy
in front of this office building.
Asshole!
Tony!
Wait up!
Then I said, "Okay, I want to take
the camera inside."
Two guys are working in there
when this goes by them,
and they jump.
People were like,
"What's that got to do with it?"
But it worked well.
And then it just basically
breaks into handheld mode
when Tony is out of the car
and he just pummels this guy.
- You all right?
- My leg is broken.
So in it, there's a lot of Chinatown.
I'll give you a fucking bone,
you prick.
Where's my fucking money?
- Cut.
- That was my fault.
- I didn't wait long enough.
- Let's do one more.
When you're doing TV,
it's one scene
right after another one.
So you have to learn
to prepare very quickly.
- In one scene, you'll be
- Hey, old man. Happy birthday.
talking to your son,
the next scene
you'll be beating somebody up,
and the next scene you'll be
making love to your wife.
And so it's this constant
change of emotions
all through the day,
and you have to be able
to shift quickly.
What are you talking about?
We discussed this.
Mr. Soprano?
Lorraine and Jim.
We rehearsed for three days
right before we shot.
But look, this shit I'm telling you?
It will all blow over.
Just stop for a second.
For him, it was like,
what's your attitude
in a psychiatrist's office?
There was a lot of things
he wasn't used to.
It's okay. It's not a big deal.
It's just me.
Should we cut?
And I'm not It's my fault.
My concentration.
I shouldn't say that. Hi.
Have you ever had any personal
experience with psychoanalysis?
Yeah.
In other words,
you're not just making it up.
You know what it feels like.
I've been in some of those rooms,
not for long periods, but
But you know what it feels like.
Yes, but, you know,
I don't think when I started
the series I did.
I think that led me right into it.
- That pushed you into it?
- Yeah. Oh, definitely.
Was it research or was it real?
- No, it was real.
- It was real.
It was a cry for help.
No, it was
Ah, yeah. Uh-huh, sure.
Yeah, hose him down.
- Would you like a Kleenex?
- Nah, fuck that.
You're getting me
hot and sweaty, doc.
Jim had never been in therapy.
Action.
So that was fun to kind of lead him,
push him,
manipulate him, in a way.
There are some very intimate moments.
Yes, which is why I loved it.
Which is why I wanted Melfi.
I thought he was more intimate
with me than with anybody.
And I loved that.
Mark.
You have strong feelings about this.
Let me tell you something.
I have a semester and a half
of college,
so I understand Freud.
I understand therapy as a concept,
but in my world, it does not go down.
Could I be happier? Yeah.
Yeah. Who couldn't?
Cut.
Action!
Jim had his own way
of becoming Tony Soprano.
He understood the character.
There was a scene where Chris
was off sulking,
so Tony goes up to him and says
Enough of this shit,
what's wrong with you?
In the script, what I had written in
or had imagined was,
is Tony going, "Hey!"
That was what I was picturing.
I'll fucking kill you.
But Gandolfini yanked him
out of his chair.
That came out of nowhere.
That wasn't in the script.
And cut. Fucking great.
But it was mostly,
I would give direction,
and he'd say, "Well, you do it."
Action.
I would do some stupid fucking thing.
And he later told my wife, he said,
"You know that pilot?
I just copied the way David behaves."
Cut.
In the beginning, I do remember
Jimmy would say, like,
"How does David know
so much about me?"
Maybe there were similarities
in the cultural upbringing.
David grew up in New Jersey,
Jimmy grew up in New Jersey.
Italian households, you know,
just a lot of similarities.
It just fit.
Everything seemed to fit, you know?
David grew up in New Jersey,
so he can take a lot of things
from real life,
which you would never think
would work,
but he makes them work.
It was not, like, slam dunk.
I mean, it was a very strange pilot.
Blatantly uncommercial, frankly.
Hey, kids. Come here!
They're trying to fly!
The babies, they're trying to fly!
- The basic premise
- Look, they're trying to fly.
A bunch of ducks come
into a boss's pool.
The ducks leave.
He has a nervous breakdown.
Do you feel depressed?
Since the ducks left,
I guess.
The ducks that preceded
your losing consciousness.
Let's talk about them.
This is the premise of a hit show?
Nobody really expected it
to even be picked up.
Dr. Cusamano put me in the hospital,
gave me every kind of test.
They tested the pilot in four places:
Connecticut, Dallas,
and two other I forget.
And surprisingly enough,
it tested best in Connecticut.
This is fucked up.
Of course, it's loaded
with Italians
And it's near New Jersey.
New Jersey, yeah.
You cannot accept a gift like that
from Tony Soprano.
- No way.
- Listen to me, Charmaine.
They said that testing had shown
that Charmaine Bucco,
Artie's wife, was the moral center
of the show.
And we should focus more on her.
But the tickets were comps.
Tony is a labor leader.
Arthur, please, grow up.
Does the mind not rebel
in any possible scenario
under which dentists are sending
the Don of New Jersey,
first class on a Norwegian steamship?
Come on, Arthur,
somebody donated their
kneecaps for those tickets.
And she was great. Kathy was great.
But that's not what
the show was about.
And it just took forever.
It was ten months
before you guys greenlit it.
It was a long time.
'Cause this was a big jump.
Because that's the deal you're making
with a showrunner.
You're saying, "Okay, I'm going
to give you millions of dollars,
and we're going to take
a number of years
and we're going to create something.
And do I trust you?"
They finally said yes.
And I got to tell you,
I just feel so grateful for that.
You're not getting me
into a nursing home.
I mean, I was at the end
of my career, really.
I was actually finally going to quit
working in television
and go to work
writing features on spec.
Then Sopranos came up.
It was like I had been in the middle
of a terrible ocean.
- Ma.
- No.
Anthony, people come here to die.
And I had landed on a desert island,
a beautiful palm-covered island.
I thought, "My life is saved."
Oh my God!
Somebody get a doctor.
So what happened
with you and The Sopranos,
it was like HBO said,
"Go for it, man."
They trust the instincts
of the creator.
That was the amazing thing
that happened.
I guess I had the right concept,
and they decided to trust me.
The morning of the day I got sick,
I'd been thinking.
It's good to be in something
from the ground floor.
I came too late for that. I know.
But lately I'm getting the feeling
that I came in at the end.
The best is over.
Many Americans, I think,
feel that way.
I think about my father.
He never reached the heights like me.
But in a lot of ways,
he had it better.
He had his people.
They had their standards.
They had pride.
Today, what do we got?
When I wrote the beginning
of the pilot,
what I was talking about was America.
I just had a sense that things
were really going downhill.
Everything's for sale here.
Everything is for sale.
And also,
the comic part of it for me was that
Americans had gotten
so materialistic and so selfish
that it made a mob boss sick.
I wanna know why there's zero growth
in this family's receipts.
Where's the fucking money?
You're supposed to be earners.
Each of you,
go to your people on the street,
crack some fucking heads,
create some fucking
earners out there.
Sil, break it down for them.
What two businesses have
traditionally been recession-proof
since time immemorial?
Certain aspects of show business
and our thing.
You know, you do a mob story,
of course you're doing a mob story.
But there's also the element
of corruption and business,
like anything to make a buck.
- Where's the rest of the money?
- It's everywhere.
The whole idea of both
that it's the American dream
and the American nightmare,
all at once.
It was about money and death.
- And they're related somehow.
- Right.
You better give me your jewelry.
It was capitalism
in the rawest sense.
They know we can't produce receipts.
You want them stealing from us?
And it was on television,
which was the instrument
that capitalism used to sell.
- A new Dodge.
- Camel.
- Jell-O.
- Kodak.
What I thought
from the very beginning was,
okay, here we are,
this is now 50 years we're doing TV.
And people are being sold something
every 15 minutes,
would mean a hard sell.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,
bullshit.
And we're so used to, on that screen,
a face comes on and says something.
It has an effect on us.
And it was all about
money, money, money.
Just so you understand
that I have to charge you
for the missed session.
All right. Fine.
Fine, here. Here you go.
- As it was said in the show.
- This is what it's all about.
Motherfucking, cock-sucking money.
Here.
And now we had no more commercials.
We were on HBO.
Everywhere I'd gone prior to that,
of all the networks,
"Where do you want to shoot it?"
I said, "New Jersey."
"What do you want to do that for?"
I said, "I believe it belongs there."
"It's going to be a lot of money.
I don't know what for."
Then when I went to HBO, they said,
"Now, it says here
it takes place in New Jersey.
You're going to shoot it
in New Jersey, right?"
I was like,
"Oh my God, I'm in heaven."
Really, I felt like,
fuck the whole past 30 years.
This is it.
A broadcast network
would shoot it in LA
and do second unit in Jersey
and find, you know, locations
that they could double
to create that wonderful
suspension of disbelief illusion.
"Oh, I'm really in Jersey."
We'll keep right on going,
shooting in the rain.
I like it when it's cloudy
because the colors get nice
and saturated and rich.
We got into this idea of
looking for locations
not because they were locations.
We got to find places
that have character
that could basically
parallel our characters. Right?
All we need to do now is bring
the camera and shoot it.
For rehearsal, please.
Well, we actually shot
all the interiors in Queens.
And all the exteriors,
I forbade any exterior shots
to be shot anyplace but New Jersey
because I wanted it to be realistic.
I knew New Jersey really well.
For example, the Meadowlands,
the combination of really
heavy industry
and the largest urban wilderness
in the world.
Marty Scorsese doesn't like the show.
Says, "I don't get it.
It's like all these trees and shit."
All mob things before that
had been Manhattan or Brooklyn.
And I knew there was a mob presence
in New Jersey.
Kids whose fathers were
heavy bookmakers, loan sharks.
Where the Soprano house was,
that was the town that we moved to
when I was in eighth grade.
There was a lot of woods and ponds.
At the same time, some guy
got blown up in his garage.
Start his car
So I knew about all that,
and I thought,
"I think it'll actually work."
It gave it an entirely
different look.
And I think it was
kind of a different culture.
Tony was a suburbanite,
Tony and Carmela.
This says "with pulp."
You like it with pulp.
Not this much.
I like the one that says "some pulp."
The fuck was that for?
I'll write you up a list.
- New game.
- He's got a regular family, kids.
- Attagirl, Mead!
- His daughter plays soccer.
Brick wall!
He loves his wife very much.
I think she
she's the strength of the family,
pretty much.
He's just got a regular life.
His job is the Mafia.
That's his job.
It's not fair.
He's got a regular family
on top of it,
which creates as many problems,
if not more,
as the other job.
When you're choosing projects,
what are the most
important factors for you?
What comes first?
The writing, the writing,
the writing
So when you got picked up for series,
then you had to put together
a writers' room.
Was that a difficult process
in terms of
figuring out how you're going to work
with a bunch of other writers?
Yes and no.
I had worked rooms before,
so I knew what to expect.
But this one was
going to be different.
I was in a mood where I just
wasn't going to accept TV writing.
I kept thinking,
"God, we're free here.
Let's really dig down into this."
Let's think about it.
I came on for episode, I guess, two,
you know, after the pilot.
He talked about what he had,
which was an arc for the season,
which he always came in with.
But nothing beyond that.
Now, because of movie people
coming into the business,
you have to have five years' worth.
You have to tell them everything
and know everything.
And we didn't know anything.
As a matter of fact,
in the very beginning,
David said, "If this doesn't work,
that's it for me."
And forgive me, HBO,
but they were nowhere
at that point.
It was an elephant graveyard,
and they didn't know
if it would work either.
But they just gave us
complete freedom.
It was our little artistic
experience.
That's what it felt like.
Quiet, please.
It was a lot of hard work,
a lot of hours.
The hours were brutal.
And writers were on the set.
So it was, you know, from dawn
Good morning. You're late.
Where you been? Sleeping?
until you'd see the towers
coming back from New Jersey
at around 3:00 in the morning.
Maybe you'd sleep for seven hours
and it'd all start again.
But when you're that age
or you're working like that,
what else is there to do?
So we all worked like that, you know.
It was the most fun you can imagine.
For everyone.
I'm proud of it.
Still my favorite line
of the whole series.
- "Hasidim but I don't believe 'em"?
- No.
- My favorite line was
- 900 Jews held their own
against 15,000 Roman soldiers.
"The Romans, where are they today?"
And Robin wrote this line
- You're looking at 'em, asshole.
- That's great.
That's great. It was great.
In episode four,
when we were trying to find
Chris's girlfriend,
we brought Drea de Matteo
back in to read.
Where'd you park?
In back, there.
I ain't crossing that.
No one followed me.
Adriana, you wouldn't know
if they did.
Oh, yeah, like Tony Soprano's
hiding in my back seat.
You are so paranoid.
Bring the car right here.
I know.
He's in disguise.
That could be him.
Hey, Tony. Or maybe
She got it because
it said in the script, "ow."
But she said
Ow-ah!
- Get over here.
- Let go of me!
"Ow-ah!" Like that. That was it.
You're hired.
That was great.
- That was great.
- Thank you.
I heard the nurse say you made
number two in your pants.
- Is that what happened?
- Get the car.
That stuff is sort of my specialty
because I was from Queens,
even though I tried to
leave that behind.
But, I mean, all the girls
in my neighborhood,
it's all the Italian girls.
You gotta talk like this.
Don't fuck around.
Everything has got to be
ten syllables.
I'm really fucking doing it.
And it's all thanks to you.
I couldn't do the accent
without the nails.
I couldn't do half of it
without the hair and makeup.
Why don't you forget about working
and be with me?
Oh, yeah, and be one of those wives
like Carmela Soprano?
Breastfeed a bunch of rug rats
then spend the rest of your life
at the gym,
just you and your stretch marks.
You're right.
My cousin's always had a brain,
but what does she use it for?
A husband who can't even tell you
where the money comes from.
You know, just the whole way
David set that story up,
and then seeing the next episodes
that would come after,
I was mind-blown.
I would call my mom from payphone
and read her the entire script.
You'd publish a script.
It would only come out
right when it was being filmed,
pretty much.
The crew would be reading it.
You know what I mean?
They were reading it.
They wanted to know.
They took pleasure and joy in it.
When we went back
and started shooting season one,
it was really then
when you started seeing
the next few scripts
that I realized, whoa!
This is really
genius and complex.
You know? And really risky.
David, he always says,
"Television in the past
was always about
making you feel good."
Cop shows.
Why are cop shows so great?
Because at the end of the day,
the bad guy gets put in jail.
You know, there's some kind of order
to the universe.
There's some kind of justice.
David was all about the opposite.
Are you in the Mafia?
- Am I in the what?
- Whatever you call it.
Organized crime.
That's total crap. Who told you that?
Dad, I've lived in the house
all my life.
I've seen police come with warrants.
I've seen you going out at
three in the morning.
So you've never seen Doc Cusamano
go out at three in the morning
on a call?
Did the Cusamano kids ever find
$50,000 in Krugerrands
and a .45 automatic while they
were hunting for Easter eggs?
I'm in the waste management business.
Everybody immediately assumes
you're mobbed up.
It's a stereotype and it's offensive.
You're the last person
I would want to perpetuate it.
Fine.
There is no Mafia.
When they saw the fifth episode,
HBO said, "You've created
one of the most dynamic
characters in television history,
and you're going to blow it all."
What the fuck?
I think I just saw Fabian Petrulio.
- Refresh my memory.
- What's he, before your time?
Made guy flipped about ten years ago
and he got busted for peddling H.
Rat fuck took out a lot of people.
A lot of people from our outfit.
He went into the witness
protection program
then they kicked him out.
I am your soldier, Antonio.
This is my duty.
Like we're always talking about.
The way this went down,
this is my call.
I got to vouch for this myself.
Jimmy says hello from hell, you fuck!
I brought it up in the script.
And the answer was,
you're gonna feel differently
when you see it.
Good morning, rat.
Who are you? What is this?
Don't make me laugh, you pimp!
You fuck!
Teddy, there must be
something we can do.
Tony, it's Tony, you fuck.
Know how much trouble you're in?
You took an oath and you broke it.
And then when we saw it,
it was even
more troublesome
than I thought in the script.
Please, Tony. I'm begging you.
Jimmy says hello from hell, you fuck!
Chris says, "I'm seeing it now
and how gruesome it is.
And we're going to lose everything.
People, they're going to hate him."
Could you have a criminal,
a killer, as your lead?
Can you have an antihero in the lead?
That was the big debate.
My big objection
was that the audience
was really going to not like Tony,
and that we hadn't earned that yet.
I mean, this was just
the fifth episode.
I said, "Chris, think about it."
How'd it go?
They got a 48 to 52 male-female
ratio, which is great.
He's up there in Maine,
and he sees this rat.
He's a captain in a mob crew.
If he doesn't kill that guy,
people are going to lose faith in him
or interest in him completely.
So if Tony doesn't kill this guy,
he's full of shit.
And then the whole show
is full of shit.
And I thought,
"Well, that makes sense."
I said to Dave,
"Here's the problem.
Like, this was a bad guy.
So let's find ways to give Tony
a little bit more justification."
David made some adjustments
to the victim.
He became a more menacing figure
than he had initially started.
Where we all got down to
is, like, look,
Chris and I are not going
to write it, direct it.
So at the end of the day, I think,
when you hit that kind of impasse
with a show creator,
you kind of have to go with them.
Better.
They left us alone completely,
and there was
some weird stuff we did.
Whoa, Junior!
"Whoa, Junior," what?
One of the episodes about Dominic.
Uncle Jun's in the muff.
- He loves to
- What?
you know, go down on women.
Oh, did I say muff? I meant rough.
65-year-old man,
this is what the whole
episode's about.
I'm reading this thing going,
"We can't do this."
What's that smell?
- And we did it.
- Did you go to a sushi bar?
- The fuck's he talking about?
- I don't know.
I thought you were
a baccalà man, Uncle Jun.
What are you doing eating sushi?
You fucking run off at the mouth.
South of the border, down Mexico way
Season one was shot
in the summer of '98
and went on the air
in January of '99.
We thought we did a great job.
We thought it was
something really special.
But are people going to watch?
- Mike, what's your last name?
- Imperioli.
And that was a big question.
Are people going to watch this on TV?
- You know, violence
- Snaky motherfucker!
profanity, nudity.
Oh, Marone.
It's time for your sponge bath.
Is there a place for that
on television?
I thought it would
take eight or ten shows
before people just got used to it
because it was so different.
It was so different, you know? No.
Within two, three weeks,
it was a hit.
Right from the beginning,
the reviews were psychotically great.
The Times said it was
the greatest work
of pop culture in the 20th century.
It was like that.
Like, really over the top,
to the point where
Saturday Night Live did a spoof.
The San Francisco Examiner says,
"The Sopranos is so good
that I'm afraid
to look away from the screen
while it's on
for fear that it will disappear
and I'll be forced to kill myself."
The Chicago Tribune predicts,
"The Sopranos will one day
replace oxygen as the thing
we breathe in order to stay alive."
The Houston Chronicle says,
"Compared to the guy who created
The Sopranos,
Michelangelo is a douchebag."
The reviews came out
and they were all, like, raves.
Except for one guy from Miami.
And some other critic said,
"We don't know where his body is.
He's in a barrel somewhere
in Miami Bay."
Or something like that.
Salute.
It got so successful and so popular,
the best thing about it
was that people were having
pizza parties
and watching the show.
To think that people are out there
eating Italian food
and drinking Italian wine
and watching this, family groups.
I just, I mean, it's getting me
choked up thinking about it now.
Every Sunday night, man.
It was Soprano night.
Everybody shut the fuck up.
We're eating mozzarella
and prosciutto
and we're gonna watch this thing.
We caught lightning in a bottle.
You know, the chemistry
between the cast,
the writing, the filmmaking.
Come on. Get inside.
- It better be open.
- Forget the umbrella.
Artie, thank Christ!
The Sopranos really
changed television.
What are you doing, Ton?
Where people realized, oh,
you can be challenging.
Look at that fucking lovesick
pygmy over there.
Push the envelope.
You saved our friggin' lives here.
It's beautiful, Artie. Thank you.
It really redefined what people
are willing,
and what people want
to watch at home.
Ah, fuck!
Hey!
You said "frig."
Now wait a minute.
I'd like to propose a toast.
To my family.
Someday soon, you're gonna have
families of your own.
And if you're lucky,
you'll remember the little moments.
Like this.
That were good.
Cheers.
The first season
set everything in motion.
But there was an enormous
amount of pressure on David.
He set the bar really high
and you gotta surpass it every year.
This was only the beginning.
- Rolling.
And action.
Mr. Soprano?
Yeah.
Have a seat.
Okay.
Can you recall what
your first memory was?
Your actual first memory?
My actual first memory is a dream.
I guess my mother had these.
It's like a metal kind of a thing
with a curlicue.
The hand comes out from the wall
and you can hang a plant from it.
I was swinging from that thing.
That is my first memory, actually.
It really impressed me.
Maybe it was the first time
I remember a dream
and I was going, "Wow, what was that?
What the hell's going on in my head?"
You know, it's funny
how much I've forgotten.
When people remind me of things.
That make me laugh.
Like, I don't remember.
I don't remember doing that,
or I don't remember but yeah.
Cut!
I was born in Mount Vernon, New York,
right near the Bronx.
Then we moved to Jersey
when I was four.
My mother's family was from Jersey.
We moved to my
aunt's house in Boonton,
Revolutionary War town.
You can still see where
the furnaces were.
They made musket balls.
There's a river that goes through it.
That's the town we used
when the character Vito
went to New Hampshire.
And I loved that town.
It was so mysterious.
I loved going into New York
at Christmas.
Rockefeller Center, the tree,
the whole thing blew my mind.
Huge toy department. Santa. Trains.
- You were on my lap five minutes ago.
- No, I wasn't.
Yes, you were.
Now you're going on Santa's List
and getting nothing!
Fuck you, Santa!
My father, I started begging him,
could we please go home down
the West Side Highway?
Because to the Lincoln Tunnel,
there were ships in the harbor
that the prow of the ship
was, like, over the road.
I couldn't get over it.
I wanted to see that.
I loved going through
the Meadowlands.
There's all these legends
that Jimmy Hoffa is buried out there.
Pennsylvania Station,
all that rubble was out there.
That's where The Sopranos,
we shot a lot of it there.
But anyway, we moved out
of my aunt's house
to Clifton, New Jersey,
kind of working-class,
larger kind of semi-city,
then moved to West Essex.
My father got this idea
to open a hardware store.
Next door was a Chinese restaurant.
See these Chinese guys
plucking chickens down there.
My parents weren't that fond
of the whole deal.
They liked Chinese food,
but didn't like being close
to the Chinese restaurant.
They sold that hardware store
and they bought
a Main Street hardware store
in a small town.
My father worked really hard
and they never got out
from behind the eight ball.
They were in business
for 35, 40 years.
It was killing them,
but they kept going.
They kept going.
Until my father was sick
and the whole thing sold
for $1,300 at a sheriff's auction.
Whole life.
They just were not happy people.
My mother was very difficult,
but she functioned.
She worked, came home,
made us dinner,
but she was terrified
and angry at everybody.
You know, somebody
called here last night.
After dark.
Who?
You think I'd answer?
It was dark out.
And she was given to having
screaming nightmares.
Her family had ten girls
and two boys.
Parents had come over from Italy,
lived in Newark,
which was a big Italian,
big immigrant community.
We used to go down every
Saturday night for dinner.
They spoke no English.
And her father, my grandfather,
Vito Bucco,
he never learned English. He refused.
Not a nice guy.
Did you feel unappreciated by her?
- My mother?
- Yeah.
She had so many negative things
to say about me.
Very complex. My father too.
It was very strange.
I mean, appreciated
One time we were in the car
with my mother and father
and my cousin Johnny.
I forget what song was playing,
but I was tapping along with it.
He said, "He should be
playing the drums.
He's got a good sense
of rhythm."
She said, "Over my dead body.
That Gene Krupa was a drug addict!"
Speaking of crystal meth,
look at this wayo.
I did not feel appreciated,
that would never have
come into my mind.
Were you scared of her?
Were you scared
that she would explode?
Stop telling me how to live my life.
You just shut up.
I am nervous.
As a kid, I was fearful.
And then I became kind of a punk.
And that saved my life in a way.
I fell in with this group of guys.
Holy shit.
Bullies, wiseguys.
We got into switchblades,
leather armbands, cigarettes.
We got our driver's licenses,
it was all about cars
and girls and alcohol.
The drinking age in New York was 18,
Jersey was 21.
So we were constantly going there.
Upper East Side was kind of hip then,
and then the Village.
I remember coming back
from Manhattan,
and it was a car full of greasers
next to us,
and we started cursing at each other
and somehow scaling plates.
Somebody's mother's plates, I guess.
You know
This is in the Lincoln Tunnel.
All of us were drunk.
1964, I go to college down South,
Wake Forest in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina.
- Hated it.
- Why?
You're going to cut this.
Yeah, it was the South.
The Klan was really active
around where we were.
The big fraternity on campus
was inspired by Robert E. Lee.
It was a Baptist school.
Had to go to chapel twice a week.
No drinking, no dancing,
no card playing.
So why did I go there?
I got rejected at Princeton.
I got rejected at Dartmouth.
My best friend was going
to Wake Forest.
Because he was going there,
I went there.
And we both were miserable.
But fortunately, someone started
foreign film night.
That's where I saw Godard, Bergman,
Fellini, La Dolce Vita
Marcello, come here!
Hurry up.
8 1/2, just, I don't even think
I understood it.
I don't even think I knew
what a film director was.
But it just blew my mind.
A whole new universe.
I left Wake Forest and went to NYU,
and I saw Cul-de-sac
by Roman Polanski.
That's when I started thinking,
"Maybe I could do that."
It was the art of it
that was so engaging.
That's it.
October of 1965, my friend was
going to Bard College.
I went up there to take acid.
That was my first time.
I remember being on the banks
of the Hudson River,
two o'clock in the morning,
and I started saying,
"I want to make movies."
That was when the idea
first occurred to me, like,
actually pursue this somehow.
- Take your mark.
- And action.
Hey, Tony.
- You okay?
- How are you doing?
- Are you okay, David?
- Yeah.
Yeah, I'm just talking
my fucking head off.
I can't believe it.
Just talking too much.
- No, man. It's good.
- No, it's not.
I really regret the amount of
fucking verbiage from this morning.
Seriously, I don't know about this.
Who gives a shit?
- All these personal questions.
- People will give a shit.
It's like, as Tony says
Remember when is
the lowest form of conversation.
And I would leave now,
but I see what you've done,
all this stuff.
And, yeah, it was a round office.
It looks a lot like it.
I did say I'd do this.
But what I said was,
"Yeah, I'll be part of this
Sopranos documentary."
But I didn't realize it was
going to be about me.
Let me explain a little bit,
which is that
part of what interests me
about The Sopranos
was how it was personal to you.
That you had an idea,
which was an amalgam
of a lot of things
that you had lived through,
thought about.
Well, for years, everybody told me
that I had to write something
about my mother.
She was so out there and so funny.
My wife, Denise,
was the first one to say that.
And then everybody was saying,
"You gotta write something
about your mother."
In like '88, I was looking for a job,
and David Chase had a new show.
It was called Almost Grown,
and he wanted to meet writers.
So I met with David
on Ventura Boulevard,
some restaurant.
I got there first, of course,
and I see him coming in the door.
I think, "Fuck."
He just looked so dour.
You know what I mean?
He looked so miserable.
And he sat down,
and in probably ten minutes,
we were just laughing with tears
coming down our faces
because we were talking
about our mothers.
And so we became friends.
It was like that, you know?
And I said to him, "Here you are,
the most powerful man."
He, like, had the suits at Universal,
you know, crying and upset.
And you're this powerful man,
and your mother
makes you into a little
screaming gerbil or something.
And I said, "This is what
you should write about."
Robin said, "You should write a show
about your mother
and a TV producer."
And I thought,
"Who's going to watch that?"
But maybe if he was like
a really badass guy,
maybe that would work.
Was the bad guy already a mobster?
Yeah.
I wanted to get De Niro
and Anne Bancroft.
At first, I thought of it
as a feature.
It was the story that was
the first season.
It was about a mobster
who goes to a shrink
after having panic attacks.
Any thoughts at all
on why you blacked out?
I don't know.
Stress, maybe.
About what?
He's having problems with his uncle,
a feud of some kind.
You may run North Jersey,
but you don't run your Uncle Junior.
He puts his mother in a nursing home.
I don't see you tryin' to mix
with the other ladies,
or talk to the nice gents
I see walking around.
You're not making the most
of your opportunities.
What do you care?
Out of sight, out of mind.
His mother sides with his uncle
in this gang war.
Three of my capos have
their mothers in this place?
Instead of living in normal homes
with their sons
like human beings.
This must be some kind of
fucking end move.
His mother conspires with
his uncle to have him killed.
a gangland execution gone awry.
And his shrink is the one
who helps him to understand that.
On the day before the shooting,
you said to me that
she kept going on, yet again,
about news stories of mothers
throwing their babies out of windows.
In the end, he suffocates her.
Ma, I know what you did.
Your only son.
But then I thought,
"That would work as a TV show."
We took it around
to all the networks:
Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Nobody wanted it.
Les Moonves said,
"Script's very good, very funny."
"But he's going to see
a psychiatrist?
Are you married
to him taking Prozac?"
So I said, "Yeah, I guess you'd say
I'm married to it."
He said, "Well, then no."
So it was dead.
But then I started saying,
"Can't we go to HBO?"
Simply the best choice on TV.
We were finding our way
from the time I got there in '85.
Television, you know, was still,
at that time, the Big Three,
and four, if you count Fox.
We didn't look at them
so much as competition
as a mark for us to compare
ourselves against,
and we knew we needed
to be different.
What HBO was trying to do
was make a name for itself.
Boxing and movies was really
what HBO was known for.
The change moment
became The Sanders Show.
- Someone's been sitting in my chair.
- Maybe it's Mama Bear.
Talentless fat fuck.
Just worry about the couch
and trying not to fuck up.
It set a mark down that HBO
could do something different,
maybe better, than what's on
the broadcast networks.
We started trying to figure out,
can we get into the series business?
Oh, boy.
Schillinger's home.
We developed Oz.
He's not such a bad guy, Diane.
What drugs are you on?
And Sex and the City.
Basically, it was a style of working,
which was, like, let's find
really great storytellers
and let them do their thing.
So David came in
and I knew his résumé.
He was a real TV veteran
and had worked on some good things,
but hadn't really had success
with his own.
Denise and I, we got married.
This is 1968.
A couple of my uncles
took me aside and said,
"You have to get out of here.
You're not going to stay married
if you stay here."
Because they knew
what my parents were like,
and they really were talking
about my mother.
My wife wouldn't have
been able to take it.
My mother was just nuts.
So we left the night of our wedding
and started for California.
We cross the country,
and I get the word
that I get a fellowship
to film school.
Stanford University.
I remember somebody telling me
that the short version
of American history is,
the scum floats west.
When I got here,
I sort of understood it.
Alcatraz.
Some of the biggest boys
did time there.
Even Capone.
Got him for tax evasion
'cause they couldn't get him
for anything else.
Did 11 years and died
of the big S in 1947.
Of course, that was a long time ago.
I went to Stanford for two years.
I did a narrative for my thesis film,
The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos.
We thought we were doing Godard.
I don't know what we thought
Godard was doing,
but we weren't doing it.
My name is Manousos.
I'm Greek, or of Greek descent.
However you want it.
Ma, the greatest little lady
that ever lived.
Let's dump this stiff
and get it over with.
Take that smile off your face,
sweetie pie.
You son of a bitch!
Ma, they got me in the back.
After the two-year graduate program
and I was graduating,
a friend of mine and I
wrote a script.
And the writing teacher
sent it to this guy,
Roy Huggins,
who was a big TV producer.
But we kind of forgot about it.
Denise and I moved to LA,
rented an apartment,
and Denise got a job at a law firm.
And I started looking for work,
but I just couldn't get a job.
Finally, I did get a job
working for this outfit
called Clover Films.
These movies
Not ten kilometers from here,
there's a golf course
and a country club
surrounded by German guards.
Every German son-of-a-bitch soldier
is to be killed.
One of the movies, we shot it
at a burned-out apartment complex
in Las Virgenes Canyon.
It was a German fort or something,
inhabited only now by these
German prostitutes.
I had a very small part,
and I was supposed to be
the first assistant director,
but I had no idea what I was doing.
And the movie itself,
it was mostly soft-core
fucking and sucking.
I did write a feature
for Clover Films
called Grave of the Vampire.
No! No!
Who are you?
I'm your son!
Your son conceived in a grave!
Yes.
It was insane.
Yes!
While I was there,
I heard that Roy Huggins,
who had read that script
from two years ago,
wanted to hire me
to write an episode.
So I got my first job in TV,
a series that was called
The Bold Ones: The Lawyers.
Everybody back east There it was.
There was my name on television.
But I didn't set my mind
to learning how to direct,
even though I wanted to be
a movie director.
Right.
I did not Maybe I was
too embarrassed
to, like, ask the DP,
"How do you do that?"
"How do you do this?"
I kept trying to write features
for years after that,
and none of them got made.
I believe it was 1973.
Writers Guild went on strike,
and I had to go on picket duty
at Paramount Studios
right in front of the DeMille Gate.
And that was great.
I mean, just to be there.
It was like, these were all
professional writers
that I was on picket duty with.
And I got to really look forward
to picket duty
because it was starting to feel like
I really am in Hollywood.
And I met a guy named Paul Playdon,
the story editor
of Mission: Impossible.
I had no agent,
so Paul got me an agent.
I signed with his agency.
And when the strike was over,
there was a show called
The Magician with Bill Bixby,
and Bixby played a magician
who solved crimes
and defeated the bad guys
with scarves and hats.
Get back!
They brought me on as story editor.
And then I got on
to The Rockford Files.
I did I'll Fly Away.
And then I was on Northern Exposure.
So I was in the TV business.
The problem was,
you knew what the limits were,
but you were always testing them
and you would always fail.
It was the meetings
that were terrible,
the network meetings, what they
They had this unerring sense
that the reason
you were writing this,
the thing you love most about this,
was what they were going to go for.
So because I was used to network TV,
Sopranos was a mob show
where nobody got killed.
Because I thought they
wouldn't want that.
Then I realized all those
Jimmy Cagney gangster movies
The Godfather? Nobody got killed?
Why would you ever leave that out?
So I rewrote it to include a murder.
That's when HBO got really
interested in the show.
It wasn't just,
you got to put in a murder.
That had to be part of the story.
That had to be integral
to the narrative and to the culture.
We had a big meeting with David.
My impression was, okay,
this is a network guy,
but he's already showed us
in his writing
that he doesn't think
only like a traditional network guy.
And his take on the world,
you could tell immediately,
these characters,
it was like a second skin to him.
That was an easy yes
to make that pilot.
You want to take it from here or
In casting,
I don't react much at all.
I say, "Oh, that's very good."
- Really good.
- Thanks, guys.
"Thank you very much,"
and people leave.
Casting is a long process.
- Just begin?
- Whenever you're ready.
Next, I had a breakfast meeting.
I was called in to consult
by a garbage hauling
company I represent.
Big, what's the story
with Triboro Towers?
The site manager wants
to renew his contract.
Site manager wants to renew
his contract with Dick.
The site manager wants to renew
his contract with Dick.
The site manager, he wants to
renew his contract with Dick.
But these Kolar brothers.
Let's try again.
Let me pick the energy up.
I'm very tired.
Yeah. The Kolar brothers.
They're some kind of
Czechoslovakian immigrants
or some shit.
They can save close to
a million a year
if the Kolars haul the trash
and not Dick.
They pay us 40 times the monthly
for stealing your stop.
That's the thing, they won't.
They said that if they can tell
those commie bosses
back in Czechoslovakia
to go fuck themselves,
he could fucking tell us.
In Czech Republic too, we love pork.
You ever have our sausages?
I thought the only sausages
were Italian and Jimmy Dean.
You see what you learn when
you cross cultures?
My Uncle Uvzen doesn't know I came.
But if we make any progress,
I'll have to tell him.
Oh, we gotta make progress, "Email."
I mean, you know, we must
stop the madness.
The garbage business is changing.
We're the younger generation.
We have issues in common.
Garbage business is changing,
you know?
Younger generation.
We have issues in common.
Emil.
Where'd you go to high school?
Poland?
I'm not Polish.
What's Czechoslovakia? Isn't that
That's a type of Polack?
We came to this country
when I was nine.
I went to West Essex.
Yo, you used to play
my cousin Gregory in football.
- He went to Boonton.
- Where's the stuff?
Ah, yes.
The reason for the visit.
Got it all deployed for you.
Taste the wares, "Email."
Emil.
Cut! Yeah, we're good.
You know, the idea of
a series on HBO.
Back then, there was no prestige
attached to that.
To be really frank,
it was kind of
the bargain basement of TV.
It really was.
But I loved the character.
I thought the character
was really fun.
His name was Dean Moltisanti
when I first read the script.
I didn't know who David Chase was,
I'll be honest.
And I didn't know he was Italian
when I saw his name on the script,
which kind of made me think,
"Who's this guy?
Making a show about Italians
And he's not"
You know, Scorsese and Coppola
were Italian American.
But I worked really hard on it
and went in for David.
You know, David's very
he's poker-faced.
Michael came in and he was great,
but I played it completely straight.
Very good.
I walked out thinking,
"This ain't gonna happen.
Who cares? He's not even Italian.
What does he know?"
"Who the fuck is this guy?
He's not even Italian. Fuck him."
But
- Who's there?
- You locked the door?
Seemed to me like we read
a hundred actresses.
This is a nursing home.
They all came in and they did
their crazy Italian mama thing.
You're not putting me in
a nursing home.
I've seen these women
in these nursing homes
babbling like idiots.
And it wasn't even close.
And because it was based
on my mother,
I knew how far away it was.
But then Nancy Marchand came in.
I knew her as Mrs. Pynchon,
the newspaper publisher in Lou Grant.
May I remind you, Mr. Grant,
this is not the New York Times.
I'm reminded of it
every time I pick it up.
So am I, sir, and I wish
we had their resources.
But the simple fact is, we don't.
If you want me to back off, I will.
Now, I didn't say that.
But I need you gentlemen to tell me
that we can win if we go to court.
- Should I slate it and all that?
- No.
Just thought, "This is crazy.
This isn't going to work."
But she opened her mouth and boom.
You're with active seniors
your own age.
They do things, they go places,
they go dancing.
I've seen these women
in these nursing homes
babbling like idiots.
Just eat your eggplant.
It was like And she just had it.
If your uncle has business
with Arthur,
and I don't even
want to know what it is,
then he knows what he's doing.
And I don't?
Well, all I know is
daughters are better at taking care
of their mothers than sons.
And I bought CDs
for a broken record.
Everybody always told me there
was no one like my mother.
But when all of my relatives
started watching the show,
they said, "My God,
that's Aunt Norma.
That's your mother."
I said, "No shit."
It was like she was channeling her.
I expect to see you tonight
at Anthony Junior's
birthday party with your baked ziti.
Only if I'm picked up
and I'm brought back home.
I don't drive
when they're predicting rain.
All of my career,
pretty much in my career,
I have played the tasteful lady.
And I really appreciate playing
this kind of harridan
because I never get a chance
to do that.
It's good for you to drive.
Use it or lose it.
I got to go to work.
Sure.
Run off.
I don't have
When I went in initially,
I was auditioning for about
five different roles.
Who was that woman tonight?
I read for Tony Soprano's mistress.
What, you were redoing
the garbage dump?
So don't treat me like a child.
I know there's something
more intimate.
Who was that woman
tonight at the restaurant?
You better not be
messing with that hat.
In the end,
they went with someone else.
Very good.
But David liked me.
I think he just liked the fact
that I was Italian,
and maybe I was cute.
But I didn't know that it had
anything to do with being Italian.
I thought it was about opera singers.
This is unacceptable.
I had an 8:00 reservation
I made two weeks ago.
As I explained,
people are not leaving their tables.
There are five parties ahead of you.
I don't think I read
for the hostess part.
That was a phone call,
"Would you want to play this part?"
And I said, "Sure."
But I couldn't say
my one fucking line.
Mr. Borglund, they're setting up
your table right now.
Because I was so nervous
to be around Lorraine
after Goodfellas.
Karen. So I was with Karen!
I was dying!
Look, he started to touch me.
He started to grab me.
I told him to stop. He didn't stop.
I hit him back, and then
he got really angry.
Lorraine was the only thing we had
that resembled a star
because of Goodfellas
and a couple other movies.
But at first, the casting people
brought her in for Carmela.
Carmela was definitely
something that HBO
and him had discussed,
but I went in wanting Dr. Melfi.
And David was a little taken back.
"Why do you want to play Melfi?"
I said, "Well, because
I'm a different woman
than I was years ago
when I was Karen Hill
in Goodfellas.
I don't really want to play
that part again.
Dr. Melfi intrigues me.
I've been in therapy."
- You had been in therapy?
- Absolutely.
And so David and I talked
a lot about therapy,
and I think that we've never seen
an Italian educated woman.
That pleases me.
And I don't think Tony would talk
to anybody that's not Italian.
So with that,
Dr. Melfi.
I said, "Okay, but you're
going to have to sit still
with your hands in your lap.
Keep your voice down."
- Okay, David?
- Yeah.
Okay. I got it.
Great. Good.
You know, I would always
have to work on
tamping down all my lightness.
And I would try to bury Lorraine
so that Melfi would come out
in a very different way
than who I am.
It was very far from me.
I'm not Melfi at all anywhere.
Anxiety attacks are legitimate
psychiatric emergencies.
- Suppose you were driving a car.
- Let me tell you something.
Today everybody goes
to shrinks and counselors.
They're getting on
Sally Jessy Raphael,
talking about their problems.
What happened to Gary Cooper?
The strong, silent type?
He was an American.
This guy wasn't in touch
with his feelings.
He just did what he had to do.
We were casting Tony.
We started in Los Angeles,
then moved to New York.
We read a whole lot of people,
and it just wasn't happening.
Vaffanculo, eh?
But then I had asked Steven Van Zandt
to read for Tony.
There he was, a rock and roll star.
This carried a lot of shit with me.
I used to play those
Springsteen albums
and look at this
little Italian guy and say,
"Who is that?
Kind of looks like Pacino."
For the record, tonight,
I want to say that there was
absolutely nothing
unusual about the way
The Rascals dressed.
But what happened was,
right before casting,
my wife and I were watching
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
and there's Steven Van Zandt
inducting The Rascals.
Nothing strange about that.
Dressed in a Rascals costume.
The first time I saw The Rascals
was the Keyport Roller Drome
in Keyport, New Jersey.
That's right.
No, it was no Fillmores.
There was no arenas in those days.
Rock and roll played skating rinks
where it belonged.
I said to her, "This guy
has got to be in the show."
And the way rock is selling,
we may be back in
skating rinks next year,
I don't know, but
I get a lot of scripts for music,
not for acting.
I wasn't an actor.
And David Chase calls, you know.
I get on the phone.
What was that first
conversation like?
Well, it was a little weird
because he says,
"What do you think?"
I said, "Well, I think
it's great script.
What kind of music
are you thinking of?"
He says, "No, we want
you to be in it."
I said, "I'm not an actor."
I mean, I thought,
isn't that kind of a prerequisite
for this whole TV thing? You know?
And he says, "Yes, you are an actor.
You just don't know it yet."
You know?
So I said, "All right, well,
maybe destiny is speaking here."
Ah, let me tell you something.
Everybody these days is going
to shrinks and counselors.
They're all on Sally Jessy Raphael
telling everybody their problems.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
You know, the strong, silent type.
That was an American.
He wasn't in touch with his feelings.
He did what he had to do.
And those people knew
once they got Gary Cooper
in touch with his feelings,
they would never
be able to shut him up.
Dysfunction this, dysfunction that,
dysfunction vaffanculo.
His reading was good.
I'd never seen anything
like that, really.
And I thought, "Well, yeah,
that could be Tony Soprano."
But in the end,
I guess HBO tells David,
"Look, he's okay.
But we're not going to depend on
some guy who never acted before."
He says, "All right,
well, in that case,
I'll write you in a part
that doesn't exist."
I'm like, wow, this guy's crazy.
- This guy's really
- And action.
Sandrine.
This table drinks on the house
all night.
But he didn't write in
an underboss specifically,
or a consigliere.
I was just more or less a club owner
at that first moment.
Let's do that one more time.
It was very difficult
to find a guy for Tony.
Let me tell you something.
Today everybody goes
to shrinks and counselors.
They go on Sally Jessy Raphael
and they talk about their problems.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
The strong, silent type.
That was an American.
He wasn't in touch with his feelings.
He just did what he had to do.
What they didn't know
was once they got
Gary Cooper
in touch with his feelings,
they wouldn't be able to shut him up.
Dysfunction this, dysfunction that,
dysfunction vaffanculo.
Another guy who came close
was Michael Rispoli.
That was excellent.
But then, finally, we found Jim.
I got a call.
David Chase wanted to meet
at 8:30 in the morning.
I was like, oh.
Just his choice of having
a breakfast instead of
put me off right away.
I don't know why.
But we had a good time.
We laughed about our families
and our mothers.
So, then I auditioned.
And the first audition, I stopped
halfway through and I said,
"This sucks.
I'm not doing it right.
If you want me to come back,
I'll come back
and do it differently."
He left in the middle
of the first audition.
Walked out.
Doing his Van Morrison thing.
"This is shit.
I'm not doing this right," and left.
But we thought he was great.
So our casting directors
got him to come to my house,
and he read the scene
and it was like, you know
Bang.
Let me tell you something.
Nowadays, everybody's gotta
go to shrinks and counselors,
and go on Sally Jessy Raphael
and talk about their problems.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
The strong, silent type.
That was an American.
He didn't worry about his feelings,
he just did what he had to do.
What they didn't know
was if they got Gary Cooper
to talk about his feelings,
they wouldn't be able to shut him up.
'Cause dysfunction this,
dysfunction that,
and dysfunction vaffanculo.
It was just pretty obvious
when Jim did it,
he was Tony.
You know, sometimes
life is good.
Life is often good.
Regaleali, for example.
We had cast everybody,
but we didn't have a Carmela yet.
Carmela
Something I got to confess.
Edie, we did the audition
right before shooting.
What are you doing?
Getting my wine in position
to throw in your damn face.
You're always with the drama.
Go ahead and confess already.
Get it over with.
She did the scene from the pilot
where he tells her
that he's taking Prozac.
I'm on Prozac.
Oh, my God.
I've been seeing a therapist.
Oh, my God.
I think that's great.
I think that's so wonderful.
I think that's so gutsy.
- It was like, wow, this is it.
- I think that's very wonderful.
Did you think I was
Hannibal Lecture before?
It's great.
Psychology doesn't address the soul.
That's something else.
But this is a start.
This is something.
I'm gonna shut up.
I'll shut up now.
I definitely knew who this woman was.
And I was sure
I would never get cast because
my experience up to that point
had been that,
you know, if you're being cast
as an Italian American,
you've got to look a certain way.
And I felt like there were
other women
that looked more that way
and were cast
more often that way.
But I went and auditioned,
and the next day they called
and said, "You got the part."
And I thought, "It's one of
these fly-by-night productions."
You know? Cast it, shoot it.
Mark.
Mark.
Somebody gonna say action or what?
And action.
You know, Grandma,
this place is pretty neat.
What goes on behind there?
Very good!
Did you call that guy
at Tribeca Towers?
DAVID CHASE: Wait until I give you
the cue for the line.
Action.
Girls, you gotta have more than
just cranberry juice for breakfast.
Cut. Good.
DAVID CHASE: Action.
What the hell's the name
of the place?
DAVID CHASE: Triboro Towers.
Jesus.
Action.
Look
Anybody for ice cream?
DAVID CHASE: Line.
Did you call that guy
down at Triboro Towers
about the hauling contract?
Cut. Let's go again right away.
Right out of the gate, did he say
he wanted to direct it?
Yes. That was the next big decision.
We didn't know a lot about
what we were doing,
so we didn't want to give
anybody that much control.
He was going to be the
showrunner-writer-producer,
but if he was going to direct it,
then it was really
going to be his vision.
But it was clear when David
was talking about it
that it lived so much
in his heart and soul
and in his head
that we were like, "We gotta."
Let's let him direct it.
Action.
Every year on this date
since you were itty-bitty,
Mom and Meadow get all dolled up,
drive into New York Plaza Hotel
for tea
The scene where Carmela goes
to get her daughter
to bring her to the Plaza.
I have too much homework.
Meadow, it's our little tradition.
We always have so much fun.
Tell you the truth,
I've felt it was dumb
since I was eight.
I just go because you like it.
I remember something about
David's directing of that scene
Cut. Good.
that made me realize
this is personal to him.
He's speaking about something
that may have really happened
Action.
or something he was really
going through
with his wife and daughter
at that time.
But I remember thinking,
"Oh, this isn't just a director.
This is personal."
You have something
you want to say to me?
Mom, do you have any idea
how much it means
to actually go skiing in Aspen?
I mean, do you think that's
going to happen every year?
Like lame tea and scones
at the Plaza Hotel?
Goodbye.
Close my door, please.
And cut.
- Cut.
- Good.
Were you nervous about
shooting the pilot?
Thinking, this is my opportunity now
to be a director?
Yeah. Sure, I was nervous, yeah.
I mean, I had directed
some before that,
but, yeah, I was very nervous.
I depended on
Alik Sakharov a lot, DP.
I remember it was the first
or second week of prep on the pilot.
David would walk into the office,
put his feet up,
look out the window,
and just like gray mood.
You were like, "Dave, what's up?"
"I don't know who's going
to fucking watch this shit."
It's a good script, bro.
You know? It's a good script.
I distinctly remember, he said
we don't want to do
another television project.
Let's just break all the rules.
I didn't want TV coverage.
Coverage is the most boring
fucking thing in the world.
Typically, it would be a master,
two overs, and two close-ups.
So basically you fracture the scene
into smithereens.
It wasn't cinematic at all.
We talked about Bertolucci.
We talked about Coppola up the wazoo.
You know, Godfather.
We talked about Martin Scorsese.
We talked about Polanski.
With Chinatown, the language of it
was very close to how we wanted
to present Sopranos.
The scene where Jake Gittes
drives his car through
the orange orchard
Hold it right there!
That was the model for a scene
where Tony and Chris
chase this guy
in front of this office building.
Asshole!
Tony!
Wait up!
Then I said, "Okay, I want to take
the camera inside."
Two guys are working in there
when this goes by them,
and they jump.
People were like,
"What's that got to do with it?"
But it worked well.
And then it just basically
breaks into handheld mode
when Tony is out of the car
and he just pummels this guy.
- You all right?
- My leg is broken.
So in it, there's a lot of Chinatown.
I'll give you a fucking bone,
you prick.
Where's my fucking money?
- Cut.
- That was my fault.
- I didn't wait long enough.
- Let's do one more.
When you're doing TV,
it's one scene
right after another one.
So you have to learn
to prepare very quickly.
- In one scene, you'll be
- Hey, old man. Happy birthday.
talking to your son,
the next scene
you'll be beating somebody up,
and the next scene you'll be
making love to your wife.
And so it's this constant
change of emotions
all through the day,
and you have to be able
to shift quickly.
What are you talking about?
We discussed this.
Mr. Soprano?
Lorraine and Jim.
We rehearsed for three days
right before we shot.
But look, this shit I'm telling you?
It will all blow over.
Just stop for a second.
For him, it was like,
what's your attitude
in a psychiatrist's office?
There was a lot of things
he wasn't used to.
It's okay. It's not a big deal.
It's just me.
Should we cut?
And I'm not It's my fault.
My concentration.
I shouldn't say that. Hi.
Have you ever had any personal
experience with psychoanalysis?
Yeah.
In other words,
you're not just making it up.
You know what it feels like.
I've been in some of those rooms,
not for long periods, but
But you know what it feels like.
Yes, but, you know,
I don't think when I started
the series I did.
I think that led me right into it.
- That pushed you into it?
- Yeah. Oh, definitely.
Was it research or was it real?
- No, it was real.
- It was real.
It was a cry for help.
No, it was
Ah, yeah. Uh-huh, sure.
Yeah, hose him down.
- Would you like a Kleenex?
- Nah, fuck that.
You're getting me
hot and sweaty, doc.
Jim had never been in therapy.
Action.
So that was fun to kind of lead him,
push him,
manipulate him, in a way.
There are some very intimate moments.
Yes, which is why I loved it.
Which is why I wanted Melfi.
I thought he was more intimate
with me than with anybody.
And I loved that.
Mark.
You have strong feelings about this.
Let me tell you something.
I have a semester and a half
of college,
so I understand Freud.
I understand therapy as a concept,
but in my world, it does not go down.
Could I be happier? Yeah.
Yeah. Who couldn't?
Cut.
Action!
Jim had his own way
of becoming Tony Soprano.
He understood the character.
There was a scene where Chris
was off sulking,
so Tony goes up to him and says
Enough of this shit,
what's wrong with you?
In the script, what I had written in
or had imagined was,
is Tony going, "Hey!"
That was what I was picturing.
I'll fucking kill you.
But Gandolfini yanked him
out of his chair.
That came out of nowhere.
That wasn't in the script.
And cut. Fucking great.
But it was mostly,
I would give direction,
and he'd say, "Well, you do it."
Action.
I would do some stupid fucking thing.
And he later told my wife, he said,
"You know that pilot?
I just copied the way David behaves."
Cut.
In the beginning, I do remember
Jimmy would say, like,
"How does David know
so much about me?"
Maybe there were similarities
in the cultural upbringing.
David grew up in New Jersey,
Jimmy grew up in New Jersey.
Italian households, you know,
just a lot of similarities.
It just fit.
Everything seemed to fit, you know?
David grew up in New Jersey,
so he can take a lot of things
from real life,
which you would never think
would work,
but he makes them work.
It was not, like, slam dunk.
I mean, it was a very strange pilot.
Blatantly uncommercial, frankly.
Hey, kids. Come here!
They're trying to fly!
The babies, they're trying to fly!
- The basic premise
- Look, they're trying to fly.
A bunch of ducks come
into a boss's pool.
The ducks leave.
He has a nervous breakdown.
Do you feel depressed?
Since the ducks left,
I guess.
The ducks that preceded
your losing consciousness.
Let's talk about them.
This is the premise of a hit show?
Nobody really expected it
to even be picked up.
Dr. Cusamano put me in the hospital,
gave me every kind of test.
They tested the pilot in four places:
Connecticut, Dallas,
and two other I forget.
And surprisingly enough,
it tested best in Connecticut.
This is fucked up.
Of course, it's loaded
with Italians
And it's near New Jersey.
New Jersey, yeah.
You cannot accept a gift like that
from Tony Soprano.
- No way.
- Listen to me, Charmaine.
They said that testing had shown
that Charmaine Bucco,
Artie's wife, was the moral center
of the show.
And we should focus more on her.
But the tickets were comps.
Tony is a labor leader.
Arthur, please, grow up.
Does the mind not rebel
in any possible scenario
under which dentists are sending
the Don of New Jersey,
first class on a Norwegian steamship?
Come on, Arthur,
somebody donated their
kneecaps for those tickets.
And she was great. Kathy was great.
But that's not what
the show was about.
And it just took forever.
It was ten months
before you guys greenlit it.
It was a long time.
'Cause this was a big jump.
Because that's the deal you're making
with a showrunner.
You're saying, "Okay, I'm going
to give you millions of dollars,
and we're going to take
a number of years
and we're going to create something.
And do I trust you?"
They finally said yes.
And I got to tell you,
I just feel so grateful for that.
You're not getting me
into a nursing home.
I mean, I was at the end
of my career, really.
I was actually finally going to quit
working in television
and go to work
writing features on spec.
Then Sopranos came up.
It was like I had been in the middle
of a terrible ocean.
- Ma.
- No.
Anthony, people come here to die.
And I had landed on a desert island,
a beautiful palm-covered island.
I thought, "My life is saved."
Oh my God!
Somebody get a doctor.
So what happened
with you and The Sopranos,
it was like HBO said,
"Go for it, man."
They trust the instincts
of the creator.
That was the amazing thing
that happened.
I guess I had the right concept,
and they decided to trust me.
The morning of the day I got sick,
I'd been thinking.
It's good to be in something
from the ground floor.
I came too late for that. I know.
But lately I'm getting the feeling
that I came in at the end.
The best is over.
Many Americans, I think,
feel that way.
I think about my father.
He never reached the heights like me.
But in a lot of ways,
he had it better.
He had his people.
They had their standards.
They had pride.
Today, what do we got?
When I wrote the beginning
of the pilot,
what I was talking about was America.
I just had a sense that things
were really going downhill.
Everything's for sale here.
Everything is for sale.
And also,
the comic part of it for me was that
Americans had gotten
so materialistic and so selfish
that it made a mob boss sick.
I wanna know why there's zero growth
in this family's receipts.
Where's the fucking money?
You're supposed to be earners.
Each of you,
go to your people on the street,
crack some fucking heads,
create some fucking
earners out there.
Sil, break it down for them.
What two businesses have
traditionally been recession-proof
since time immemorial?
Certain aspects of show business
and our thing.
You know, you do a mob story,
of course you're doing a mob story.
But there's also the element
of corruption and business,
like anything to make a buck.
- Where's the rest of the money?
- It's everywhere.
The whole idea of both
that it's the American dream
and the American nightmare,
all at once.
It was about money and death.
- And they're related somehow.
- Right.
You better give me your jewelry.
It was capitalism
in the rawest sense.
They know we can't produce receipts.
You want them stealing from us?
And it was on television,
which was the instrument
that capitalism used to sell.
- A new Dodge.
- Camel.
- Jell-O.
- Kodak.
What I thought
from the very beginning was,
okay, here we are,
this is now 50 years we're doing TV.
And people are being sold something
every 15 minutes,
would mean a hard sell.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,
bullshit.
And we're so used to, on that screen,
a face comes on and says something.
It has an effect on us.
And it was all about
money, money, money.
Just so you understand
that I have to charge you
for the missed session.
All right. Fine.
Fine, here. Here you go.
- As it was said in the show.
- This is what it's all about.
Motherfucking, cock-sucking money.
Here.
And now we had no more commercials.
We were on HBO.
Everywhere I'd gone prior to that,
of all the networks,
"Where do you want to shoot it?"
I said, "New Jersey."
"What do you want to do that for?"
I said, "I believe it belongs there."
"It's going to be a lot of money.
I don't know what for."
Then when I went to HBO, they said,
"Now, it says here
it takes place in New Jersey.
You're going to shoot it
in New Jersey, right?"
I was like,
"Oh my God, I'm in heaven."
Really, I felt like,
fuck the whole past 30 years.
This is it.
A broadcast network
would shoot it in LA
and do second unit in Jersey
and find, you know, locations
that they could double
to create that wonderful
suspension of disbelief illusion.
"Oh, I'm really in Jersey."
We'll keep right on going,
shooting in the rain.
I like it when it's cloudy
because the colors get nice
and saturated and rich.
We got into this idea of
looking for locations
not because they were locations.
We got to find places
that have character
that could basically
parallel our characters. Right?
All we need to do now is bring
the camera and shoot it.
For rehearsal, please.
Well, we actually shot
all the interiors in Queens.
And all the exteriors,
I forbade any exterior shots
to be shot anyplace but New Jersey
because I wanted it to be realistic.
I knew New Jersey really well.
For example, the Meadowlands,
the combination of really
heavy industry
and the largest urban wilderness
in the world.
Marty Scorsese doesn't like the show.
Says, "I don't get it.
It's like all these trees and shit."
All mob things before that
had been Manhattan or Brooklyn.
And I knew there was a mob presence
in New Jersey.
Kids whose fathers were
heavy bookmakers, loan sharks.
Where the Soprano house was,
that was the town that we moved to
when I was in eighth grade.
There was a lot of woods and ponds.
At the same time, some guy
got blown up in his garage.
Start his car
So I knew about all that,
and I thought,
"I think it'll actually work."
It gave it an entirely
different look.
And I think it was
kind of a different culture.
Tony was a suburbanite,
Tony and Carmela.
This says "with pulp."
You like it with pulp.
Not this much.
I like the one that says "some pulp."
The fuck was that for?
I'll write you up a list.
- New game.
- He's got a regular family, kids.
- Attagirl, Mead!
- His daughter plays soccer.
Brick wall!
He loves his wife very much.
I think she
she's the strength of the family,
pretty much.
He's just got a regular life.
His job is the Mafia.
That's his job.
It's not fair.
He's got a regular family
on top of it,
which creates as many problems,
if not more,
as the other job.
When you're choosing projects,
what are the most
important factors for you?
What comes first?
The writing, the writing,
the writing
So when you got picked up for series,
then you had to put together
a writers' room.
Was that a difficult process
in terms of
figuring out how you're going to work
with a bunch of other writers?
Yes and no.
I had worked rooms before,
so I knew what to expect.
But this one was
going to be different.
I was in a mood where I just
wasn't going to accept TV writing.
I kept thinking,
"God, we're free here.
Let's really dig down into this."
Let's think about it.
I came on for episode, I guess, two,
you know, after the pilot.
He talked about what he had,
which was an arc for the season,
which he always came in with.
But nothing beyond that.
Now, because of movie people
coming into the business,
you have to have five years' worth.
You have to tell them everything
and know everything.
And we didn't know anything.
As a matter of fact,
in the very beginning,
David said, "If this doesn't work,
that's it for me."
And forgive me, HBO,
but they were nowhere
at that point.
It was an elephant graveyard,
and they didn't know
if it would work either.
But they just gave us
complete freedom.
It was our little artistic
experience.
That's what it felt like.
Quiet, please.
It was a lot of hard work,
a lot of hours.
The hours were brutal.
And writers were on the set.
So it was, you know, from dawn
Good morning. You're late.
Where you been? Sleeping?
until you'd see the towers
coming back from New Jersey
at around 3:00 in the morning.
Maybe you'd sleep for seven hours
and it'd all start again.
But when you're that age
or you're working like that,
what else is there to do?
So we all worked like that, you know.
It was the most fun you can imagine.
For everyone.
I'm proud of it.
Still my favorite line
of the whole series.
- "Hasidim but I don't believe 'em"?
- No.
- My favorite line was
- 900 Jews held their own
against 15,000 Roman soldiers.
"The Romans, where are they today?"
And Robin wrote this line
- You're looking at 'em, asshole.
- That's great.
That's great. It was great.
In episode four,
when we were trying to find
Chris's girlfriend,
we brought Drea de Matteo
back in to read.
Where'd you park?
In back, there.
I ain't crossing that.
No one followed me.
Adriana, you wouldn't know
if they did.
Oh, yeah, like Tony Soprano's
hiding in my back seat.
You are so paranoid.
Bring the car right here.
I know.
He's in disguise.
That could be him.
Hey, Tony. Or maybe
She got it because
it said in the script, "ow."
But she said
Ow-ah!
- Get over here.
- Let go of me!
"Ow-ah!" Like that. That was it.
You're hired.
That was great.
- That was great.
- Thank you.
I heard the nurse say you made
number two in your pants.
- Is that what happened?
- Get the car.
That stuff is sort of my specialty
because I was from Queens,
even though I tried to
leave that behind.
But, I mean, all the girls
in my neighborhood,
it's all the Italian girls.
You gotta talk like this.
Don't fuck around.
Everything has got to be
ten syllables.
I'm really fucking doing it.
And it's all thanks to you.
I couldn't do the accent
without the nails.
I couldn't do half of it
without the hair and makeup.
Why don't you forget about working
and be with me?
Oh, yeah, and be one of those wives
like Carmela Soprano?
Breastfeed a bunch of rug rats
then spend the rest of your life
at the gym,
just you and your stretch marks.
You're right.
My cousin's always had a brain,
but what does she use it for?
A husband who can't even tell you
where the money comes from.
You know, just the whole way
David set that story up,
and then seeing the next episodes
that would come after,
I was mind-blown.
I would call my mom from payphone
and read her the entire script.
You'd publish a script.
It would only come out
right when it was being filmed,
pretty much.
The crew would be reading it.
You know what I mean?
They were reading it.
They wanted to know.
They took pleasure and joy in it.
When we went back
and started shooting season one,
it was really then
when you started seeing
the next few scripts
that I realized, whoa!
This is really
genius and complex.
You know? And really risky.
David, he always says,
"Television in the past
was always about
making you feel good."
Cop shows.
Why are cop shows so great?
Because at the end of the day,
the bad guy gets put in jail.
You know, there's some kind of order
to the universe.
There's some kind of justice.
David was all about the opposite.
Are you in the Mafia?
- Am I in the what?
- Whatever you call it.
Organized crime.
That's total crap. Who told you that?
Dad, I've lived in the house
all my life.
I've seen police come with warrants.
I've seen you going out at
three in the morning.
So you've never seen Doc Cusamano
go out at three in the morning
on a call?
Did the Cusamano kids ever find
$50,000 in Krugerrands
and a .45 automatic while they
were hunting for Easter eggs?
I'm in the waste management business.
Everybody immediately assumes
you're mobbed up.
It's a stereotype and it's offensive.
You're the last person
I would want to perpetuate it.
Fine.
There is no Mafia.
When they saw the fifth episode,
HBO said, "You've created
one of the most dynamic
characters in television history,
and you're going to blow it all."
What the fuck?
I think I just saw Fabian Petrulio.
- Refresh my memory.
- What's he, before your time?
Made guy flipped about ten years ago
and he got busted for peddling H.
Rat fuck took out a lot of people.
A lot of people from our outfit.
He went into the witness
protection program
then they kicked him out.
I am your soldier, Antonio.
This is my duty.
Like we're always talking about.
The way this went down,
this is my call.
I got to vouch for this myself.
Jimmy says hello from hell, you fuck!
I brought it up in the script.
And the answer was,
you're gonna feel differently
when you see it.
Good morning, rat.
Who are you? What is this?
Don't make me laugh, you pimp!
You fuck!
Teddy, there must be
something we can do.
Tony, it's Tony, you fuck.
Know how much trouble you're in?
You took an oath and you broke it.
And then when we saw it,
it was even
more troublesome
than I thought in the script.
Please, Tony. I'm begging you.
Jimmy says hello from hell, you fuck!
Chris says, "I'm seeing it now
and how gruesome it is.
And we're going to lose everything.
People, they're going to hate him."
Could you have a criminal,
a killer, as your lead?
Can you have an antihero in the lead?
That was the big debate.
My big objection
was that the audience
was really going to not like Tony,
and that we hadn't earned that yet.
I mean, this was just
the fifth episode.
I said, "Chris, think about it."
How'd it go?
They got a 48 to 52 male-female
ratio, which is great.
He's up there in Maine,
and he sees this rat.
He's a captain in a mob crew.
If he doesn't kill that guy,
people are going to lose faith in him
or interest in him completely.
So if Tony doesn't kill this guy,
he's full of shit.
And then the whole show
is full of shit.
And I thought,
"Well, that makes sense."
I said to Dave,
"Here's the problem.
Like, this was a bad guy.
So let's find ways to give Tony
a little bit more justification."
David made some adjustments
to the victim.
He became a more menacing figure
than he had initially started.
Where we all got down to
is, like, look,
Chris and I are not going
to write it, direct it.
So at the end of the day, I think,
when you hit that kind of impasse
with a show creator,
you kind of have to go with them.
Better.
They left us alone completely,
and there was
some weird stuff we did.
Whoa, Junior!
"Whoa, Junior," what?
One of the episodes about Dominic.
Uncle Jun's in the muff.
- He loves to
- What?
you know, go down on women.
Oh, did I say muff? I meant rough.
65-year-old man,
this is what the whole
episode's about.
I'm reading this thing going,
"We can't do this."
What's that smell?
- And we did it.
- Did you go to a sushi bar?
- The fuck's he talking about?
- I don't know.
I thought you were
a baccalà man, Uncle Jun.
What are you doing eating sushi?
You fucking run off at the mouth.
South of the border, down Mexico way
Season one was shot
in the summer of '98
and went on the air
in January of '99.
We thought we did a great job.
We thought it was
something really special.
But are people going to watch?
- Mike, what's your last name?
- Imperioli.
And that was a big question.
Are people going to watch this on TV?
- You know, violence
- Snaky motherfucker!
profanity, nudity.
Oh, Marone.
It's time for your sponge bath.
Is there a place for that
on television?
I thought it would
take eight or ten shows
before people just got used to it
because it was so different.
It was so different, you know? No.
Within two, three weeks,
it was a hit.
Right from the beginning,
the reviews were psychotically great.
The Times said it was
the greatest work
of pop culture in the 20th century.
It was like that.
Like, really over the top,
to the point where
Saturday Night Live did a spoof.
The San Francisco Examiner says,
"The Sopranos is so good
that I'm afraid
to look away from the screen
while it's on
for fear that it will disappear
and I'll be forced to kill myself."
The Chicago Tribune predicts,
"The Sopranos will one day
replace oxygen as the thing
we breathe in order to stay alive."
The Houston Chronicle says,
"Compared to the guy who created
The Sopranos,
Michelangelo is a douchebag."
The reviews came out
and they were all, like, raves.
Except for one guy from Miami.
And some other critic said,
"We don't know where his body is.
He's in a barrel somewhere
in Miami Bay."
Or something like that.
Salute.
It got so successful and so popular,
the best thing about it
was that people were having
pizza parties
and watching the show.
To think that people are out there
eating Italian food
and drinking Italian wine
and watching this, family groups.
I just, I mean, it's getting me
choked up thinking about it now.
Every Sunday night, man.
It was Soprano night.
Everybody shut the fuck up.
We're eating mozzarella
and prosciutto
and we're gonna watch this thing.
We caught lightning in a bottle.
You know, the chemistry
between the cast,
the writing, the filmmaking.
Come on. Get inside.
- It better be open.
- Forget the umbrella.
Artie, thank Christ!
The Sopranos really
changed television.
What are you doing, Ton?
Where people realized, oh,
you can be challenging.
Look at that fucking lovesick
pygmy over there.
Push the envelope.
You saved our friggin' lives here.
It's beautiful, Artie. Thank you.
It really redefined what people
are willing,
and what people want
to watch at home.
Ah, fuck!
Hey!
You said "frig."
Now wait a minute.
I'd like to propose a toast.
To my family.
Someday soon, you're gonna have
families of your own.
And if you're lucky,
you'll remember the little moments.
Like this.
That were good.
Cheers.
The first season
set everything in motion.
But there was an enormous
amount of pressure on David.
He set the bar really high
and you gotta surpass it every year.
This was only the beginning.