Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (19 page)

The massive job was made possible at least in part by creating a world in which other people managed the rest of his life. Chase lived first in a series of apartment sublets, but once the show was a success, he moved into the penthouse of the Fitzpatrick Manhattan hotel on Lexington Avenue, with the hotel staff at his disposal. As he had in Los Angeles, he dined at the same restaurant several times a week, this time alternating periods at Daniel and Café Boulud. (The ease of getting restaurant reservations, he said later, only half joking, was one of the major reasons to keep extending
The Sopranos’
run.) At work, he withdrew behind levels of gatekeepers. Chase’s assistant learned to institute a “five-minute rule” whenever bad news was delivered: the amount of time needed for the desk kicking and yelling to stop and a more rational response to commence. Not that there was a lot of bad news. “Nobody said no to David. Ever,” she said. “Except Jim. And even he said no only by not showing up.”

“I’ve met a lot of tough guys in my life,” Tony Sirico, the ex-con, once told Robin Green. “But when I see David, I step back.”

The bigger the show got, said Chase’s assistant, the more difficult even the simplest things became. “It used to be that if David needed to get somewhere, he could take a cab or get in a shared fifteen-passenger van or fly first class on the regular airline. Then, as things got more intense, he couldn’t take a cab anywhere, not even a car service. It had to be his own driver, but not in a fifteen-passenger van, in his own van. And if he couldn’t have the driver he wanted . . . His needs were just greater and greater. And his ability to handle little shifts or to be told he couldn’t have something was less and less.” (Chase said that he was happy to take advantage of the perks that HBO offered and which, he pointed out, were not unusual for the showrunner of a successful series.)

The stress only intensified after 9/11, when Chase, the man who had been obsessed with nuclear destruction for as long as he could remember, became fearful of flying. At Silvercup, he demanded heightened security and code-activated locks to be installed on the doors to the writers’ offices. The new reality of terrorist threats dovetailed with Chase’s deeper worldview, said the assistant. “It’s the world against him. People are horrible and they want to get him. Whatever’s happening, it’s an injustice against him.”

To her, the trajectory seemed clear: “I remember that first year when we worked in total obscurity and how much fun we had. The more money, the more respect, the less happy everybody was. Certainly, Jim was struggling, David was struggling. The people who were getting the most fame and the most money were struggling the most,” she said.

• • •

F
or all his other duties, the writers’ room remained the most important part of Chase’s work life, and it was a space ruled by his personality. As far back as
I’ll Fly Away
, Henry Bromell had been surprised by the ruthlessness with which he ran his room:

“My wife and I had had a baby and she really wanted to go back to work. So I told David, ‘Just so you know, I need to go home at six a few nights a week.’ And he said no. He said, ‘I need to know your top priority is this job, not your family. Make a choice.’ And he had a cold look in his eyes. I was like, ‘What, are we in the Mafia?’”

A writer in a David Chase writers’ room learned to be acutely sensitive to the boss’s moods—and that there was small margin for error. “David always made it clear, you know, ‘I’m not running a writing school here.’ Either you got it or you didn’t,” said Terence Winter. “People used to say, ‘I don’t think David likes me.’ I’d say, ‘You know how I know David likes you? You’re still here. If he doesn’t like you, you’ll be the first to know. And you will be gone.’”

Chase had declined to hire back any of the writers from season one aside from Renzulli and Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess. To that number he added two more as the staff reassembled in late 1999: one was Winter, an ex-attorney from Marine Park, Brooklyn, a neighborhood much like
Sopranos
country. He had been slaving on such shows as
The New Adventures of Flipper
and
Xena: Warrior Princess.
Winter was good friends with Renzulli; both had worked for a time as New York City doormen and met on Renzulli’s short-lived show
The Great Defender
. Renzulli had secretly funneled Winter
The Sopranos
scripts throughout the first season (this was long before the need for any security protocol), and Winter fell in love before he ever saw a filmed episode. Winter was working on
The PJs
, a claymation Fox series starring the voice of Eddie Murphy, while Renzulli bugged Chase to give him a chance. Chase finally offered him a tryout script (“Big Girls Don’t Cry”) and then a job. Unfortunately, it was for less money and a lower title than he already had. “I had to make the most horrifying phone call of my life, saying no to
The Sopranos
,” he said. Luckily, Chase and HBO relented and gave him the title of co-producer.

The relationship between Renzulli and Chase had always been tense: Chase found Renzulli’s incessant talking irritating and was once infuriated when he demanded a limousine for his family in New York, precisely the kind of grudge he was prone to hang on to; Renzulli was resentful of being bossed around by someone who, to his mind, didn’t understand the world they were writing about as well as he did. As the writing staff’s most prominent Italian American, he was especially sensitive to ethnic characterizations, almost to the degree of the protesters who had disrupted production in season two. When Todd Kessler, on Chase’s instructions, included the term
guinea tee
in some screen directions, referring to a wife-beater T-shirt, Renzulli called him up. “How would you like it if I wrote ‘kike glasses’?” he asked.

To Renzulli’s mind, the show had broken its contract of verisimilitude as early as the second episode, when Paulie tells Christopher: “I went over [to France] for a blow job. Your mother was working the bonbon concession at the Eiffel Tower.”

“I just thought, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t.’ You’ve just robbed Christopher of his balls and backbone and you’ve shown Paulie to be a no-class guy. Christopher would never forget that when he became a made guy,” he said. Even worse was a season five development that he watched as a civilian viewer. To solve a thorny set of problems, Tony conspires to have a recently released mobster, Feech La Manna, played by Robert Loggia, busted for parole violation and thrown back in prison. The real-life thorny problem that the plot point addressed was the crippling difficulty Loggia was having remembering his lines. But to Renzulli’s mind, that did nothing to forgive what he saw as a fatal violation of Family protocol. “The whole crew deserves to get found dead,” he said.

“He’s wrong,” Chase said. “This is what these guys do. They send each other to jail by squealing all the time.”

These would have been mere differences in opinion were it not for deeper suspicions Renzulli was beginning to have about Chase’s attitude toward the characters they were creating. In the case of the Paris blow job line, for instance: “They went for the fucking line, thinking it was funny,” he said. “It was clear that he found these guys amusing. And not in a good way.” The characters, he came to believe, were written with more contempt than empathy: “He would run away from any of those characters he wrote. He wouldn’t want to be around them for ten minutes.”

To be sure, these feelings were colored by the writers’ far from amicable parting. Renzulli, eager to take advantage of
The Sopranos
’ success,
had departed to take a development deal after season two. Before season four, he and Chase discussed his coming back to the show, but negotiations broke down over money. Renzulli insisted that he make more than what he had before leaving and, as important, more than his old protégé Winter. He was left with the feeling that Chase had gone behind his back to ensure that HBO didn’t give him what he needed. “I wanted him to come back,” Chase said. “When you’re doing a TV series, you want all the help you can get. And he was, on balance, a help.” But once Renzulli made his demand, he dropped his efforts to hire him back. “I stopped backing him,” he said.

The deeper cut came when Winter and his girlfriend traveled to stay with the Chases in France. This, Renzulli felt, was an unpardonable betrayal, of the same kind he’d identified between Paulie and Christopher, Tony and Feech. The writer who may have most personally understood the codes and protocols that animated
The Sopranos
’
world left, devastated and embittered that they didn’t apply to the real world. The two barely spoke again.

• • •

I
t was not the only departure fraught with emotion. The second writer to join
The Sopranos
for its second season was twenty-six-year-old Todd Kessler, who shared an office with Winter. Kessler had grown up in Michigan and graduated from Harvard; like David Milch and Matthew Weiner, he was the son of a successful physician. In his short career, Kessler had shown a marked facility for connecting to older male mentors. As a theater and playwriting student in Cambridge, he had been taken under the wing of the playwright David Rabe. Later, Spike Lee offered him a full-time job at his production company and, when he turned that down, a chance to write a screenplay for a project Lee meant to direct. It fell through, but Kessler ended up as the youngest writer by far on the network TV show
Providence
,
which debuted the same weekend as
The Sopranos
. The show featured a veterinarian character; NBC once gave him a perfectly serious note suggesting that each episode endeavor to feature a litter of puppies. When Chase offered him a chance to write an audition script, Kessler jumped.

That script—“D-Girl,” revolving around Christopher’s foray into screenwriting—installed Kessler as the house wunderkind. Chase flattered him, asking for advice and reassurance. “He leads with his insecurity,” Kessler said. “I remember him asking, ‘I don’t know. Do we have a show here?’ I’m twenty-six years old, giving him a pep talk. It pulled me in. Bonded me with him.”

Kessler threw himself into the show, staying on unpaid at the end of the season to watch the shooting of the finale, “Funhouse,” which he’d co-written. At the end of that season’s shooting, he said, Chase allowed him to come to Los Angeles to sit in on two months of editing, asking him not to mention it to the other writers. He became close with the Chase family, often going out to dinner with them. Kessler’s agent, who happened to also represent Chase, told him that Chase was considering the possibility of someday handing the show off to another writer and that he, Kessler, was being groomed.

Chase dismissed that idea outright, saying he had never thought about handing the show over to anybody. In fact, he said, he had been growing increasingly unhappy with Kessler’s work as the writers reconvened for season three. “He had written a really good episode, and then it seemed to me that it was declining after that,” Chase said. “I don’t remember a lot of this, but I imagine he was being increasingly rewritten. Some people understand this completely strange, bizarre mind-set of organized crime. Some people don’t.”

As Kessler remembered the sequence of events, on July 21, 2000, at about eight thirty a.m. the nominations for that year’s Emmys were announced. They included one for Chase and Kessler as the writers of “Funhouse.” Chase had written the first thirty pages—a long fever dream, occasioned by a bout of food poisoning and punctuated with graphic bathroom sound effects—in which Tony’s subconscious reveals what he’s known for a long time but refused to acknowledge: that his deputy, Big Pussy, is a rat. Kessler wrote the second half, in which Pussy paid with his life.

Kessler spent the next ten minutes fielding congratulatory phone calls. Then came one from Chase’s assistant, saying that Chase wanted to see him in the office. When Kessler arrived, still buzzing from the news, Chase closed the door and sat down.

“I guess the timing isn’t great,” he said, “but I think I need to end this relationship.”

Kessler, astonished, asked what he meant. “I think you’ve lost the voice of the show,” Chase said.

“David, the last thing we wrote was nominated for an Emmy, less than an hour ago,” Kessler said. “If you felt this way, why didn’t you say something?”

Chase considered this. “I guess you’re right,” he said finally. “Do you want a second chance?” Kessler, more confused than ever, said yes. “Well, I need to think about it,” Chase said, showing him the door.

Kessler left work and went to see his brother, Glenn, an actor and writer, at the SoHo apartment they shared. “As soon as I started to tell him what happened, I burst into tears. Like the embarrassing, childlike crying where you can’t catch your breath. The show had been my entire life.” As he sat on the curb, sobbing, a call came from Chase.

“He was asking my advice on writing a scene. Like, would Tony say this or something else. No mention of what had just happened,” Kessler said. Two days later, Chase told him that he’d get his second chance, but that his next script had better come in “production ready,” with no need of revision. Given Chase’s way of working—and really any showrunner’s—this was as definitive a death sentence as a fish in the mail. Sure enough, several months later—and after the two had lost the Emmy to
The West Wing
—Kessler was summoned once again to Chase’s office. This time it was definitive.

“I’ve never seen people get fired so fast. You walk into David’s office and ten seconds later the door opens and you have your shit in a box. He does not mince words,” Winter said. This time, he didn’t even see that much. Winter called Kessler a week later, wondering if he was sick, since he hadn’t been showing up for work. Chase hadn’t told anybody about the dismissal.

Chase’s memory of the incident wasn’t nearly as dramatic. “It’s never good to be fired, maybe there’s no such thing as amicable, but it didn’t appear to me I was cold when I did it. Although, look at the message. It probably can’t come through very nicely.” About the unfortunate timing around the Emmy nomination, he said, “It’s hard for me to picture getting the news the nominations came out and then telling him, ‘By the way, you’re fired.’ I guess I’m capable of such thoughtlessness, but it’s hard for me to picture.” When told Kessler’s version, complete with its overtones of Freud and betrayal, he said dryly, “I might have had more on my mind than he did.”