Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (18 page)

Still, Bubbles may have been more than a cliché, but it was a difficult character to play day after day. “My character’s head space was not a pleasant one,” Royo said. “I’d look at Idris? Nothing but bitches outside his trailer. Dom West? Nothing but bitches. Sonja? Dudes
and
bitches. Me? I’d have
junkies
out there. They fell in love with Bubbles. I’d go into my trailer and clean my shit off and come out and they’d look at me like, ‘You’re not one of us. Fuck you.’ And then when I had the Bubbles garb back on, it’d be, ‘Hey! What’s up? Welcome back!’ That’s a head trip, man. That shit eats at you.”

By the third season, he said, “I was drinking. I was depressed. I’d look at scripts like, ‘What am I doing today? Getting high or pushing that fucking cart?’”

He was not alone. In the isolated hothouse of Baltimore, immersed in the world of the streets, the cast of
The Wire
showed a bizarre tendency to mirror its on-screen characters in ways that took a toll on its members’ outside lives: Lance Reddick, who played the ramrod-straight lieutenant Cedric Daniels, tormented by McNulty’s lack of discipline, had a similarly testy relationship with West, who would fool around and try to make Reddick crack up during his camera takes. Gilliam and Lombardozzi, much like Herc and Carver, would spend the bulk of seasons two and three exiled to the periphery of the action, stewing on stakeout in second-unit production and eventually lobbying to be released from their contracts.

Michael K. Williams, whose Omar was far and away the series’ most popular figure (a
GQ
writer quipped that asking viewers their favorite character was “like asking their favorite member of Adele”), was so carried away by sudden fame that he spent nearly all his newfound money on jeans, sneakers, and partying. At the very height of his popularity, Williams found himself evicted from the Brooklyn public housing project he’d grown up in, for nonpayment. He and Royo were only two of many
Wire
veterans who said they sought help for substance abuse once the experience was over. This is not to mention those non-actor cast members brought from the real Baltimore into the fake one—among them Little Melvin Williams himself, out of prison on parole and cast as a wise, battle-scarred deacon.

As James Gandolfini could attest, the hardships of inhabiting difficult men episode after episode, season after season, were hardly limited to
The Wire
. Still, the peculiar ways in which the show affected its participants’ lives seem like another facet of the intimacy and intensity with which Simon and his collaborators insisted on engaging with their story. Once rolling, it was, mostly for the better, a creative upwelling that tossed and lifted all in its wake. Henceforth, nearly all other depictions of police and city life would seem so divorced from reality that they might as well have taken place on another planet.

Being the Boss

I
n February 2001, New York’s Museum of Modern Art screened the first two seasons of
The Sopranos
in their entirety, along with a series of films titled
Selected by David Chase
. (They included
The Public Enemy
,
Mean Streets
, and the Laurel & Hardy feature
Saps at Sea
.) It was a triumphant moment. Under the curatorial direction of Peter Bogdanovich, MoMA had played a crucial role in elevating and institutionalizing the generation of American cinema that Chase so admired. (He honored that lineage by casting Bogdanovich in a recurring role as Dr. Melfi’s therapist.) To have
The Sopranos
effectively installed in that pantheon—and later added to the museum’s permanent collection—was, Chase would later say, among his proudest moments connected to the series.

Other signs of highbrow acceptance abounded as the show’s third season was set to begin. The
New York Times
TV critic Caryn James gushed, “As no single film or ordinary television series could,
The Sopranos
has taken on the texture of epic fiction, a contemporary equivalent of a 19th-century sequence of novels. Like Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series or Balzac’s ‘Comédie Humaine,’
The Sopranos
defines a particular culture (suburban New Jersey at the turn of the century) by using complex individuals. So what if Tony is not a prostitute out of Balzac but a mobster out of David Chase’s imagination? His outlaw status offers a way of assessing mainstream society in all its savagery and hypocrisy, even while the series creates a unique family history.”

As for the other side of the coin—popular acceptance—there could be no question that
The Sopranos
had arrived at something approaching the status of a national institution. Across the country, people would celebrate the March 4 premiere with viewing parties, complete with baked ziti and costume contests for best over-the-top Jersey-wear. There had been the
MAD
magazine parody (“The Supremos”);
The Sopranos
pinball machine; a line of
The Sopranos
cigars and humidors; the official cookbook, complete with a chapter supposedly penned by Bobby Bacala titled “If I Couldn’t Eat, I’d F**king Die.” Shops in Little Italys everywhere were stocked with Tony-related T-shirts. When the production set up to film outside in New Jersey or New York, the location would be immediately besieged by gawkers, lending the street an almost carnival atmosphere. Vendors would materialize; businesses blared “Woke Up This Morning” from their doors. Terence Winter remembered going to a show in Atlantic City with a group of cast members, including James Gandolfini, and having the spotlight turned on their table as the whole place stood to applaud. “It felt like being with the Beatles,” he said.

The cultural impact outweighed the raw numbers. That much-anticipated season premiere was watched by 11.3 million viewers, not nearly enough to crack the top twenty shows on network TV. (The reality show
Survivor: The Australian Outback
commanded an incredible 29.8 million viewers per week that season; the top-rated drama,
ER
,
drew 22.4 million.) Still,
The Sopranos
’ roughly 10 million viewers per week—including HBO’s weekday rebroadcasts—was an astonishing number for pay cable. The newly ascendant market for DVDs, giving newcomers a chance to catch up before the premiere, only added to the eyeballs.

The show had hit the rare sweet spot of mass appeal and critical respect. It could, as the clichéd analysis had it, be enjoyed on “two different levels”: for its visceral pleasures (the plot twists, the malapropisms, the blood, the sex) or for its literary ones. More accurately, it could be enjoyed in both ways
simultaneously
, the pleasure residing in the tension between reveling in the culture and the artistry of the critique. The result was an out-and-out phenomenon.

All of this, Chase had achieved on his own terms and in the very system that had caused him so much shame all those years. What could be more in the rock ’n’ roll, maverick spirit of what directors like Coppola and Scorsese had done to the big Hollywood studios in the seventies? Stick it to the bastards in their own house, right under their noses, and make them thank you for it.

More remarkable, Chase himself had become famous. In the history of television, how many people outside the business could have identified a TV writer by name, much less by face? Who
cared
? Yet here was Chase being stopped for autographs on the street, the subject of adoring profiles, on the cover of
Rolling Stone
, dead center among his cast, staring dourly at Mark Seliger’s lens while his feet sat buried in a metal pail filled with cement.

It was an apt image. Even in the midst of wild success, Chase was weighed down by doubt and by dissatisfaction. He worried about those viewers he felt just didn’t get it, who tuned in each week just hoping to see “big Tony Soprano take some guy’s head and bang it against a wall like a cantaloupe.” He worried that the show’s success did nothing to change the fact that he’d sold out by being in television at all. Plot leaks, for which there was a sudden, fevered market, drove him to fits—and his employees to acrobatic precautions to avoid his wrath. (In a
Vanity Fair
article, frequent director Tim Van Patten told Peter Biskind, “When I’m done reading a script, I will take the first 10 pages and rip them up into small bits, drop half into the bathroom garbage, and half into the kitchen garbage. Then I’ll take the next 10 pages and rip them into small bits, drop half into the other bathroom garbage, and half into the incinerator in the hallway. I’ve been doing that for 10 years. My fingers would be killing me by the end of these things.”) Chase worried that even HBO, for which the value of
The Sopranos
had been incalculable, didn’t give him enough respect; at the end of each season, he complained, the network waited an inordinate amount of time to commit to the next.

Joshua Brand had his former employee’s number when he talked with a
Sopranos
crew member sometime during season two and asked, “None of this is making him any happier, is it?”

With great visibility had come great problems. The tabloids had feasted on James Gandolfini’s marital and substance abuse problems. The actor was becoming increasingly erratic, culminating, just a few weeks before the MoMA event, in the multiday disappearance that ended at the Brooklyn nail salon. Meanwhile, activists purporting to represent the image of Italian Americans had lately been getting press by calling for a boycott of
The Sopranos
.
When they briefly succeeded in barring the production from shooting in Essex County, New Jersey (causing, among other things, the relocation of the iconic “Pine Barrens” episode to Harriman State Park, just across the New York State line), Chase was apoplectic.

“How can these people cling to their victimhood so much? These mingy little barbers. Italians are very successful people. Why is it so important that they stay a beaten, oppressed, suffering minority? It makes me sick,” he said several years later. “I remember thinking, ‘I will shoot this show in my living room if I have to. But we’ll keep on shooting it. And we’ll keep portraying these people as they are, and we’re not going to change one lick of hair one iota to suit anybody. I will do it in my living room for $10 an episode, but I won’t stop.’” Long after the incident, he took undiminished delight in pointing out that James Treffinger, the county executive who had instituted the ban, had subsequently pleaded guilty and gone to jail on federal corruption charges.

At MoMA itself, during a Q&A with reporter Ken Auletta, an audience member had accused Chase both of sullying the image of Italian Americans and of working for the Mafia himself. That surely didn’t dissuade Chase from making an announcement to the crowd that would be picked up the next day by
The New York Times
and newspapers across the country: His contract was up at the end of the next season, season four, and that’s when
The Sopranos
would come to an end.

• • •

C
ertainly, 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. We threw a gunnysack into a quarry, lit up like a movie. And then we went over to the Holiday Inn, went to bed, got up, and moved the whole company back.”

Matthew Weiner, who joined the show for season five, said, “We were exorcising David’s demons. Do you know how many decisions were based on some meeting when he was on
Northern Exposure
, or
Rockford
,
or
Kolchak
, or some other show you’ve never heard of where he worked for three years and somebody told him ‘You can’t do that’?”

Chase, for instance, banned “walk and talks”—in which two characters, in the frame together, exchange information while heading toward their next destination—because it was a common network money-saving technique
.
“Sometimes you’d be in this amazing location and we’d say, ‘Can’t they just walk down the highway? You’ve got this strip club on one side, an abattoir over there. We can see it all!’” said Weiner. “And he’d say”—with withering sarcasm—“‘Yeah. Let’s lay some track and walk backwards and get out of here by four.’ I just knew it was some executive at Universal that he was punching in the face, thirty years later.” (Weiner never shied from expressing his gratitude and admiration for Chase, his showrunning mentor. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that another Chase pet peeve was shots that showed the backs of actors’ heads. And that the first shot of
Mad Men
—indeed, its iconic logo—was the back of Don Draper’s head.)

To Chase, remaining vigilant to any and all interference was vital, even in the undeniably cozy confines of HBO. “It was necessary for me to always take the point of view that I was obligated to no one and nothing. And that unless I was going to do the show I wanted, I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “That unless I was going to be compensated at a level I thought proper, I wouldn’t do it. And that at any moment I would say, I
could
say, ‘Good-bye. No more. I’m leaving. Ending, no ending. I’m out of here.’ It was always important for me to maintain that position. In order to stay free.”

All of this made for an exhilarating creative workplace, but it also created an atmosphere of intense pressure, most of it bearing down on Chase himself, who was overseeing not only the writing of each script, but also nearly every other creative decision of thirteen minimovies in rapid succession. “David would come in in the morning and say, about some script problem, ‘I think I fixed it. I was in the shower this morning . . .’ And I’d think, ‘How come he’s always in the shower when he thinks about this stuff?’” said Weiner. “Then I got the job and realized, ‘Oh, my God, you’re
always
thinking about it!’”

As Biskind observed, Chase had good reason to understand Tony Soprano’s feelings upon being elevated to boss: “All due respect, you got no fucking idea what it’s like to be number one. Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fucking thing. It’s too much to deal with almost. And in the end you’re completely alone with it all.”

Or Uncle Junior’s assessment: “That’s what being a boss is. You steer the ship the best way you know. Sometimes it’s smooth. Sometimes you hit the rocks.”