Word: chase
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...Glocks-up review amuses Chase, a Mob-movie buff from childhood, but it doesn't shock him. "I knew that contemporary wiseguys were very much influenced by the Godfather films and watched them continuously," he notes. "That becomes kind of a strange loop." Thus, in the show, Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) cracks up his Mob buddies with an Al Pacino impersonation from the maligned Godfather III ("Just when I thought I was out--they pull me back in!"), while family chief Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) expresses a preference for The Godfather II over the original. What characters, indeed. Like...
Emmy voters are not exactly like mafiosi--the Cosa Nostra places greater emphasis on giving people what they've got coming to them--but they too honored the series last year with 16 nominations, including a stunning four of the five slots for drama writing (Chase and James Manos Jr. won for the episode in which Tony takes time out from a college tour with his daughter to kill a Mob informer). The show won only four statuettes, but its dominance of the writing category was its most appropriate tribute. For all its crisp direction, impeccable casting and at least...
Note the plural. Chase is the undisputed boss of The Sopranos, and its origins are highly personal. He says he based Tony Soprano's crafty, malevolent mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) on his own, now deceased mother. Yet this seamless series--more like a continuous movie--is the work of eight writers, including Chase, working from story arcs that he sketches each season. One of the writers, actor Michael Imperioli, not only is an accomplished screenwriter (Summer of Sam) but also plays a Soprano soldier who dreams of writing movies. Imperioli gave Chase a script on spec last season...
...like What Ever Happened to Baby Janice? over there," Tony says when Pavarti/Janice offers to care for Livia) and far deeper and more complex than most "quality" dramas. And yet its greatest indictment of TV may be that there is nothing unique about the people who make the show. Chase, 50, is no wunderkind; he kicked around TV for decades, doing fine but hardly epochal work on The Rockford Files, I'll Fly Away and Northern Exposure. His writers include TV pros who have slaved on noodles-and-catsup fare like Providence. If it's sad to think The Sopranos...
Just don't expect David Chase to produce it. He wants to make films, and he suspects this will be his last series. Yeah, sure. Isn't the old soldier who can't escape the Business the oldest story around? Maybe not, if Chase learned something from all those analyst sessions. "Michael Corleone had always been a reluctant gangster. 'I try to get out, and they pull me back in.' Well, why do you let them?" Chase says with a chuckle. "Why don't you go to a psychiatrist? Why don't you get some therapy...