“The Sopranos” ended 17 years ago this week and James Gandolfini has been gone for 11 years Wednesday, but the actor gloriously lives on in a new retrospective film.
The Emmy-winning series star, who gave TV an antihero for the ages with Tony Soprano, pulls impish, goofy faces and makes “Three Stooges” sounds in Dr. Melfi’s office in revealing behind-the-scenes footage from the show.
It’s a rare delight to see Gandolfini drop his scowl and grimace and cut loose in a decidedly non-Tony Soprano way as the series gets the Alex Gibney documentary treatment in “Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos.”
The HBO film, which runs two hours and 40 minutes and airs Saturday, Sept. 7, exhaustively examines the series creator and the show that forever changed TV.
Gibney’s conversations with Chase — conducted in Dr. Melfi’s office, naturally — as well as the cast, writers and others behind “The Sopranos,” premiered June 13, months after the 25th anniversary of the first episode in January 1999.
At the end of the documentary, we get another cut to black.
Would Chase have it any other way?
Remember when
“‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony Soprano once said, undercutting all future “Sopranos” reunions.
Still, on Thursday, three days after the anniversary of the endlessly dissected June 2007 series finale, Chase reunited with the “Sopranos” cast, writers and producers for the documentary premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.
A line of actors stretched across the stage at New York’s Beacon Theatre — stars Edie Falco (Carmela), Michael Imperioli (Christopher), Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior), Drea de Matteo (Adriana), Steve Schirripa (Bobby), Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Meadow), Robert Iler (A.J.), Aida Turturro (Janice), Kathrine Narducci (Charmaine) and Annabella Sciorra (Gloria).
The gathering also drew Steve Buscemi, a “Sopranos” actor (Tony Blundetto) who directed the fan-favorite “Pine Barrens” episode, written by producer Terence Winter (”Boardwalk Empire”), who sat next to Matthew Weiner, the writer and producer who went on to create “Mad Men” (he used the show’s pilot as his writing sample for the “Sopranos” job).
Chase, who was accompanied by his daughter, Michele DeCesare, said she was not cast as Meadow’s friend Hunter because she’s a “nepo baby.” He explained that she originally had to join him at work as punishment for cursing her parents out.
But Iler had the best line of the night.
“I really want to thank David Chase for creating the show because it really changed my life,” he said. “Most my friends right now are going to, like, sh-tty high school reunions and I get to go to stuff like this.”
The Tony Sopranos that never were
Gandolfini’s absence was deeply felt by the “Sopranos” alums.
Watching the film, you can’t help but smile at his comic stylings, especially given the heavy reality of his role — and the toll it may have taken on the actor.
More laughs can be had in an anecdote about Tony Sirico, aka Paulie Walnuts, and his repeated refusal to disturb his hair and its trademark silver “wings” (he finally relented in the “Pine Barrens” episode).
And the audition tapes are gold.
Early script readings in the documentary are both a fascinating acting study and a look at the Tony Sopranos that never were.
Chief among them is Steven Van Zandt, who impressed Chase with his rockstar presence then proceeded to crush the audition (he even bought John Gotti clothes for the occasion!).
Van Zandt could’ve landed the part, but HBO wasn’t too keen on letting a first-time actor lead the drama. Chase, determined to work him into the show, created the role of consigliere Silvio Dante.
Edie Falco, who won three Emmys for playing Carmela Soprano, thought she had no chance of getting the role because she didn’t have the typical Italian “look” (Buscemi said much the same of himself at the reunion).
Another “Sopranos” Emmy winner, Drea de Matteo, assumed the show was about singers. She tried out for another role, but her enunciation of “ow” as “Owwww-ahhh!” secured her casting as Adriana La Cerva.
Denise Borino-Quinn, who played Ginny Sacrimoni, wife of mob boss Johnny Sack, had never acted before and was discovered at a 2000 open casting call in Harrison that was so swarmed with people, it had to be shut down.
When Gandolfini auditioned, he stopped halfway through because he thought it was so bad, but nailed a second tryout at Chase’s home.
Mommy dearest
“Wise Guy” opens with a dive into Chase’s beginnings as a Jersey guy and screenwriter.
Now 78, he says that as a young man, he realized he wanted to make movies one night at 2 a.m., looking out at the Hudson River after taking acid.
Instead, he embarked upon a long career in TV, with his writing and producing credits including “The Rockford Files” and “Northern Exposure” (his post-”Sopranos” feature directorial debut arrived in 2012 with “Not Fade Away,” starring Gandolfini).
We see home movies of Chase’s mother Norma, his inspiration for “The Sopranos,” which was originally conceived as a movie about a mobster and his mother.
Chase calls her crazy.
The basis for the antagonistic relationship between Tony Soprano and his piece-of-work mother Livia Soprano — played by the searing, always funny Nancy Marchand until her death in 2000 — is well known.
But Chase’s strongest influence becomes even more clear when he divulges that after he married his wife Denise Kelly, his uncles took him aside. They told him that if he wanted to stay married, he’d have to get away from his mother.
The young couple legged it to California.
‘Fire Me’
Chase may be the “wise guy” in this film, but Gandolfini looms large over the whole enterprise.
How he’d bloody his knuckles to get into the Tony Soprano mindset.
How he gave some cast members $30,000 a piece after his salary negotiations with HBO (Chase says the cable network labeled the show’s seventh season a second half of the sixth just so it didn’t have to shell out more money to actors).
How he stopped showing up to set (HBO would start fining him $100,000 for each absence).
And what he said when HBO executive Chris Albrecht tried to stage an intervention for the actor:
“Fire me.”
Gandolfini died in 2013, six years after “The Sopranos” ended.
Chase tells Gibney he was not surprised. Even so, the somewhat reserved creator is seen breaking down at Gandolfini’s funeral when delivering a eulogy for the 51-year-old actor.
He also illustrates how Gandolfini would go to extremes when he was in Tony mode. The script once called for his character to slam a refrigerator door. He tore it apart.
In old interviews, the actor appears and sounds fully removed from Tony’s whole demeanor. Going to the dark places the role required wore on him.
But Chase ventures that there may have been more Tony Soprano in Gandolfini than he would’ve liked to admit.
The whack pack
Chase remembers with glee how after insisting that “The Sopranos” film in Jersey (interiors were filmed in Queens), HBO gave him free rein to do just that.
He directed the pilot episode, crafting the look of the series.
The authenticity of setting the Soprano family among the mix of green suburbs and industry that makes up Jersey was important to him, as was showcasing the magic of the large urban wilderness that is the Meadowlands. Chase called the roadside wetland a font of creativity during his induction to the New Jersey Hall of Fame — Gibney includes the event in his portrait of the “Sopranos” auteur.
However, network execs raised eyebrows at Chase’s decision to have Tony whack someone during the fifth episode, when he goes on a college tour with Meadow.
The powers that be even thought the protagonist’s Mafia hit — Tony strangled the guy with wire — could kill the tremendous goodwill the show had produced. Chase stood firm. This was a show about people who did bad things, who were violent, who murdered.
The same stood for anxiety among the cast about who would get whacked and when. For actors, being summoned to a meal with Chase usually meant it was curtains for you. They lobbied to get Vincent Pastore another season on the show as Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, but when it was his time, it was his time.
Chase wouldn’t grant any reprieves.
The only time he came close was Adriana, who had to be dealt with after she was found out for helping the feds. Silvio’s gunshot can be heard in the episode, but Chase didn’t want her to die onscreen.
Chase didn’t want news of her death to be leaked, so they also filmed a version of events where she gets away. No one was supposed to know which would air. De Matteo figured it was the end for Adriana and got another job, angering Chase because people could’ve presumed she wasn’t on the show anymore.
As violence became an expected part of the show, Chase says the audience split into two groups — those who watched for the drama and those who watched for the kills.
But when Lorraine Bracco started reading the script in which her character, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, is raped in a parking garage — Gibney includes the whole scene in his film — she was dismayed.
She didn’t see any reason for her character to become the victim of sexual violence, so she called Chase.
He told her to keep reading.
Bracco realized that the ordeal showed how Melfi — despite being traumatized, learning the authorities bungled her attacker’s arrest and knowing Tony could swiftly take care of her attacker — would not give in to revenge.
With a single “no,” she refused to join the Mafia.
Sexual assault surfaces elsewhere in the documentary. Chase says some of what he heard his mother say during unguarded moments led him to believe that she may have been sexually abused by her father.
He says that would help to explain why she acted the way she did, and believes such abuse haunted multiple generations of his family.
The movie never ends (it goes on and on)
After “The Sopranos” became the toast of critics and a Sunday night sensation for HBO, Chase bought a home in France.
There, he could have some distance from the noise to map out storylines. He’d draw a grid and use the boxes to outline the gist of each episode.
Both Chase and those who were on the writing staff – or fired from the writing staff – talk about how exacting he could be, throwing out the first five ideas as a general rule, then becoming frustrated at nobody having any good ones.
Chase’s decision to use Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the final scenes of the show did not go over well with the writers.
He was fixated on one part of the song:
“The movie never ends, it goes on and on (and on and on).”
People try to solve or explain the finale’s cut to black with a gotcha moment by citing particular angles or scenes from earlier in the show.
Of course, that’s kind of missing the whole point.
“Sopranos” cinematographer Alik Sakharov says if Chase had written a tidy finale instead of a philosophical one, the show wouldn’t have enjoyed the longevity it has. The evidence, he says, is that people are still talking about the ending, not just about how the show still stands up after all these years.
The remedy to wondering what really happened — did Tony die, live, or are we asking the wrong question? Watch the whole show again, Sakharov says, echoing the viewing habits of a good segment of the show’s audience and surely pleasing everyone at HBO.
Chase mentions one scene from the third season that fans like to reference when trying to explain the ending: A.J., stymied by a Robert Frost poem for a school assignment, tells Meadow that black, not white, signifies death.
For the style of the final scenes, Chase says he was inspired by the shifting point of view in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” More than a decade later, he co-wrote and produced the 2021 “Sopranos” prequel film “The Many Saints of Newark,” though Gibney does not include the movie in the documentary.
His initial thinking on how to conclude the series would change.
As Chase has said before and repeats in the documentary, his previous idea for the conclusion of the show was to have Tony killed after enacting the reverse of the show’s iconic opening sequence by having him drive from Jersey to New York through the Lincoln Tunnel for a meeting.
But the diner setting at Holsten’s was ultimately more appealing to him — as was the notion, like in the Journey song, that the “movie” would never end.
The message, Chase says, is this:
You may not go on and on, but the universe goes on.
A bit of validation for anyone who proclaimed that Chase had “whacked the viewer.”
Gandolfini was gobsmacked by the ending.
Bracco recalls his two-word response:
“That’s it??”
“Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos” airs on HBO in two parts Saturday, Sept. 7, starting 8 p.m. ET/PT and ending at 10:45, and will be streaming on Max.
Stories by Amy Kuperinsky
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup.
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