A quarter of a century ago, on January 10, 1999, viewers of the American pay-TV channel HBO were introduced to Tony Soprano, a depressive mobster plagued by anxiety attacks that eventually led him to a psychotherapist's office. Family man, company boss, unloved son, unscrupulous criminal, Tony Soprano was unlike any of the white men who have served as figureheads for great crime series, from Eliot Ness in The Untouchables to Frank Furillo in Hill Street Blues.
The brainchild of a Hollywood screenwriter who grew up in an Italian family in New Jersey, The Sopranos was the first to explore the freedom offered by cable TV in the early 21st century. David Chase, who at 78 is now trying to find financing for his second film as director, looks back at the genesis and still-mysterious end of this monument.
I'd started out as a TV scriptwriter in the 1970s, and I'd worked my way up on several series, some good couple, bad. Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Rockford Files, those were the good ones. I became a showrunner on other series, including Northern Exposure. I created one, Almost Grown [1988-1989], which stayed on the air only a short time before being canceled, just as it was starting to catch on. I was always offered these things called development deals, which meant you'd be paid pretty good money to think, to dream up TV series ideas and to write them, write the pilot.
Much earlier, I'd had the idea for a film, the story of a gangster with a difficult mother. And he goes to see a psychiatrist and in the end, he realizes that his enemy in the gang war is his mother. I wanted to make a feature film out of it, but my agent told me "don't bother with that, nobody cares." So I signed with a production company, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment and they said to me, "We believe you have a great TV series." And this was a shock to me because people don't usually talk that way in Hollywood. They're very seldom complimentary. And also, I had never thought that way, and I didn't want to do a TV series. I wanted to do a movie.
When I heard about the series, I thought of this script about the gangster and his mother and I thought about how I could do that as a series. And so it was developed that they were Italian and it developed into the pilot for The Sopranos, which looked exactly like the movie I'd envisioned.
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