Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin

Author:Brett Martin [Martin, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781594204197
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Published: 2013-06-27T07:00:00+00:00

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Certainly, Chase had reason to feel burned out. Since its debut, the scale and scope of The Sopranos had multiplied in every way—a combined result of success and narrative necessity. As Chase liked to point out, season one had been designed as a self-contained arc, one that, at the end, left no clear route forward: Tony’s primary antagonists, his mother and his uncle, had suffered a stroke and had gone to jail, respectively. As often happened in the open-ended universe of an ongoing series, that necessitated introducing new characters to drive the plot: first Tony’s sister, Janice—an heir to Livia Soprano’s narcissistic awfulness—then her ex-boyfriend and a rival for the Mob’s control, Richie Aprile, and so on. And with each new character came new sets, new groups of friends, and new story lines to explore and service in the kind of meticulous detail that made the show come to life.

The Sopranos was now a mini-empire, commanding fevered scrutiny, hundreds of people, and heady amounts of money. The number of shooting days for each script—which is the surest measure of cost—had swelled from a standard seven or eight to first ten, then twelve, then eventually as many as twenty, not counting reshoots, which could often take up several more days. The production had already traveled to Italy for one episode. No piece of music was off-limits, no matter the licensing fee. Chase had begun spending more and more of his downtime near the Atlantic coast of France, where he would eventually buy a house. He would edit from there, buying time on a satellite uplink to communicate with the rest of postproduction, nine time zones away. Cast and crew lunches often included lobster tail or prime steak. There appeared to be no checks on the size and costs of the show.

“When we got there, we were awestruck,” said writer Andy Schneider, who joined in season six, with his wife, Diane Frolov. “TV was always about saving money, but HBO was paying for these lavish parties, big night shoots, things you would have censored yourself from writing before because you could never afford it. In normal television, you take out walk-ups, you take out night shoots. It takes a long time to light a street. Here you could have a quarter page saying, ‘Character walks down the sidewalk and enters the house. And it’s night. And it’s raining.’ You were free.” In a world in which every shot on every page corresponds to a significant expenditure, there might be no greater indication of the power Chase had consolidated than that he occasionally shot alternate scenes—New York mobster Phil Leotardo shooting Tony at the start of season six, instead of Uncle Junior, for instance—to throw off potential plot leakers.

“No matter what we wanted, we did,” said Mitch Burgess. “We wrote an episode that called for a quarry for Tony to throw Ralphie’s body into, after he cuts his head off. But David couldn’t find a quarry around here. So we all went to Pennsylvania, the whole company.

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