Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (8 page)

But between reality and that lofty goal lie any number of quotidian pitfalls: writers who talk too much, writers who don’t talk at all, yes-men, naysayers, egos run amok. In other words, precisely as complicated and intense a set of conditions as one might imagine results from taking a group of artists—each the smartest and funniest in his or her class, each having gotten into the business with the dream of producing his or her own work, most neurotic to one degree or another, and all feeling the pressure of competition—and putting them in a room together for eight hours a day, mostly to face rejection and all in service of another person’s vision.

“That’s the job. You’re there to serve the Creator,” said James Manos, who also wrote for Shawn Ryan’s
The Shield
. “It’s a difficult position because someone like David or Shawn hires you because you have your own, strong voice and then, as soon as you get there, you have to start writing in
their
voice.”

Matthew Weiner admitted to being driven crazy by the idea that nobody outside the inner circle of
The Sopranos
would ever know the good writing he did while on the show. But, he said, “I could never live not expressing the fact that I was working
for
David, in David’s brain, with David’s characters, trying to please David, not operating a Matt Weiner franchise of the
Sopranos
show.”

The best analogy might be a draftsman charged with designing one small element—a sconce, say— of an architect’s grand cathedral. He may find satisfying ways to express himself, might even get some career-advancing recognition from hard-core sconce aficionados, but ultimately it’s all about illuminating the Master’s work. That gives the showrunner, who of course knows his own vision better than anybody, immense powers of rejection and benediction. The ultimate dream is to find writers who bring something absolutely new into the universe he’s created, who give him exactly what he wants but could never have dreamed of himself. “That’s when you get this stupid look on your face,” Milch said.

Or as Weiner put it, “It’s like falling in love.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that writers’ rooms are somewhat intense workplaces. (It hardly seems accidental that “the room” is a term also used in analysis and in Alcoholics Anonymous.) They are hotbeds of emotional turmoil and transference.

“I’ve never been in a writers’ room where the writers didn’t end up psychologically picking apart the showrunner, down to the finest grain,” said Chris Provenzano, a writer for
Mad Men
and other shows. “Writers are already interested in motivations and psyches. They’ve all been in therapy. They’re all messed up and trying to fill some hole. So when the showrunner invariably does something that doesn’t square or that they don’t like, they start saying, ‘He must be at war with his ex-wife. It’s got to be something like that.’ You become involved in this slow but inexorable dismantling of the person’s psyche because that’s the brain in charge of all the other brains and you’re the appendages of this superorganism.”

• • •

D
avid Chase, devotee of the film auteurs, had predictably complicated feelings about writers’ rooms. Early in his career, he had worked at
The Rockford Files
with a staff of just three who would get together and brainstorm stories, letting a tape recorder capture sudden inspiration. Later, grappling with the more complex storytelling of
Almost Grown
and
Northern Exposure
, he’d headed larger rooms. And he’d come to terms with their necessity for generating stories.

“Story construction is the hardest part of the process. It’s very difficult not to do things that everybody in America has already seen a thousand times. So, you go in there and you say, ‘What do we want to make happen?’”

That, he said, is the fun part, along with the gossip, the eating, the discussing current events, the bullshitting. It’s when it came time for what he called the “professional” part of the job that he was more dubious.

“Other people have good ideas. And they’re hard to come by. But in another sense, they’re a dime a dozen,” he said. “Turning an idea into an
episode
—that’s the grunt work. The organization can rest for a day or so, secure in the notion that we’ve got an idea. But eventually the showrunner’s the one who has to look at his watch and say, ‘How do we fill up forty-two minutes?’ We can all sit around and decide we want to make a Louis XIV table, but eventually somebody has to do the carving.”

What happens next, he says, is a private epiphany, experienced in public.

Invariably what would happen is I would get up, go off by myself, and they would continue talking. There was a couch and I would lie on that couch and just put my story hat on. And this is not a natural thing for me. I don’t like math. I don’t like puzzles. At all. Story work to me is that: it’s figuring out this puzzle. But I would go on that couch by myself and they’d all be talking. And then I would just sort of like suddenly—this idea, that idea—all of a sudden you get a run. It’s like music. I’d see where the peaks and valleys are: “This goes like this, like that, like
this
.” And I would get up and go to the board and
bam bam bam
. “And then and then and then.” It’s very impressionistic. You’re running really fast. Sometimes,
boom
: It’s done. You have fourteen scenes. I don’t know how it works, but it would happen.

To what extent such breakthroughs are facilitated by being surrounded by other writers, or happen in spite of them, appears to be an open mystery even to Chase himself.

“My experience is that the showrunner really has to just do it,” he said.

Yet if he had all the time in the world to write every word of every episode of a series? “I would hire a staff. I’d get lonely.”

• • •

C
hase began building
The Sopranos
writers’ room by looking to old colleagues. Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess had met at the University of Iowa. Green, who had written for
Rolling Stone
in its
San Francisco salad days, was at the Writers’ Workshop; Burgess, a tall, deep-voiced native Iowan, had just come out of a stint in the army and was a student in her undergraduate writing class. Eventually, Green landed at Brand and Falsey’s
A Year in the Life
and then worked for Chase on
Almost Grown
.

The two bonded over their equally problematic mothers. “We would laugh so hard, we’d cry,” Green said. Chase was intrigued by Green’s single (albeit tenuous) connection to the world of organized crime: as a teenager growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, she’d double-dated with a son of crime boss Raymond Patriarca.

After
Almost Grown
, both writers returned to the Brand-Falsey camp: Chase to
I’ll Fly Away
and Green to
Northern Exposure
.
Burgess joined Green as a writing partner, and the two would go on to write nearly a quarter of the show’s 110 episodes, including many during Chase’s two-year tenure.

David and Denise Chase were creatures of gustatory habit, claiming a restaurant they liked and then returning over and over. In Santa Monica, their spot was an Italian restaurant called Drago, where they often anchored dinner parties. Green and Burgess remained regular attendees after
Northern Exposure
ended, and they followed the progress of
The Sopranos
pilot, which Chase had given them to read when it was still at Fox. If this thing goes, he asked them, will you come write for me? The answer was an enthusiastic yes. In the meantime, they suffered through staff positions in the writers’ room of
Party of Five
, which is where they were just a few days before Christmas, breaking yet another story of teen drama, when an assistant came in to say they were wanted on the phone: a Mr. Tommy Soprano was calling.

The Sopranos
’ writers began meeting in a rented portion of Oliver Stone’s production offices in Santa Monica. Chase assembled packages of material on Mob life for his writers to read. Dan Castleman, a Manhattan assistant district attorney who would remain with the show as a consultant throughout its run, came in to talk about his organized crime prosecutions. Another visitor was a former made man, now in the witness protection program, who showed off scars from long-ago bullet wounds and shared his expertise on such matters as how best to break a person’s arm and the Mafia’s relative views on penetrating stewardesses with broomsticks (pro) and performing cunnilingus (con).

Also in the room was Manos, a chain-smoking semi-agoraphobe who had helped pen an HBO movie called
The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom
; two young writers, Mark Saraceni and Jason Cahill; and a colorful chatterbox named Frank Renzulli, the closest thing to an actual wiseguy that
The Sopranos
writing team ever had.

Renzulli, a big man with a Brillo goatee, was the son of first-generation immigrants from Sicily and Naples. He had grown up in the Maverick housing projects on Boston’s East Side, in underworld terms a stronghold of the Patriarca crime family. Renzulli’s parents were not themselves connected, but their feelings spanned the range of Italian American response to the Mafia. His father looked down on mobsters, though Renzulli suspected that, ironically, his paternal grandfather had migrated to upstate New York during Prohibition for reasons connected to bootlegging. His mother, meanwhile, had grown up in the neighborhood. “One of the wiseguys once told me, ‘Thank God your mother wasn’t born a man. We’d all be in trouble,’” Renzulli said. “She would have been the happiest woman in the world if I’d become a wiseguy.”

She half got her wish. By the time he was nine years old, Renzulli had started hanging out around the local social club. He would run errands for the older guys with shiny Cadillacs and thick bankrolls and entertain them with his precocious antics.

“You’re a poor kid in the inner city, and life looks hopeless. People are telling you it’s hopeless. Then you see a guy pull up in a fucking Mercedes. Fucking air-conditioned, smelling good, looking good. And he’s got his own little social club. They got air-conditioning in there. They got food in there, all this stuff. And one of them says, ‘C’mere, you little prick. What’s your name? Do me a favor, go to this store, get me this, this, and this.’ And then it builds from there.”

If that induction sounds as though it could have been ripped from a screenplay,
it’s worth remembering one of
The Sopranos
’ more trenchant insights: that Mob life and pop culture’s portrayal of it have been locked in such a long cycle of reference, echo, and imitation that it’s often hard to tell which came first.

By his teens, Renzulli had become a fine pool player, an astute observer of Mob mores, and a peripheral, though increasingly involved, participant in the world of petty crime and occasional violence. By his early twenties, he began to think it was time to get out.

“I had an epiphany one night: Everything was either feast or famine. One night I’d have a couple thousand dollars in my pocket, the next I’m looking to borrow money for cigarettes.” Going straight wouldn’t be easy, especially given the disdain he’d developed for the straight world. “I needed to exorcise those demons that said, ‘You’re a sucker if you work a legitimate job.’ I was always at risk of losing my regular job the minute somebody told me what to do. I was always at risk of saying, ‘Go fuck yourself.’”

He headed for New York, to study acting and playwriting. For two years, he worked odd carpentry jobs and lived in the Sixty-third Street YMCA. Eventually, he found work as a doorman in a Hell’s Kitchen building filled with the same breed of wiseguys he’d left behind. By now, though, the call of show business was stronger than that of criminality. He landed his first speaking role in Woody Allen’s
Broadway Danny Rose
.

In 1987, he went west to Los Angeles in search of more parts. After a few years, he turned to writing. “There’s only so many goombahs you can play,” he said. By the time he came to Chase’s attention, he’d co-created a short-lived show called
The Great Defender
,
which starred Michael Rispoli as a blue-collar lawyer; developed one failed pilot set in East Boston that featured future
Shield
star Michael Chiklis; and worked on another with David E. Kelley, for whom he also played a recurring role as a pimp on
The Practice
.

Chase met with him at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, and both men left wary. “I’d read the pilot, and I couldn’t figure out what the point of view was. I mean, Why is he writing this?” Renzulli remembered. He had the feeling Chase didn’t like him. “I irritated him,” he said. “I think he called David Kelley to ask if I always talked so much.”

Chase, for his part, reported back to Green and Burgess: “This guy’s got the real marinara,” meaning Mob knowledge, “but he’s crazy as hell.”

Still, the two saw eye to eye on at least one important matter, one that would secure Renzulli’s participation in building the
Sopranos
universe. “Every wiseguy I saw played on TV made me want to scream,” Renzulli said. “He [David] told me, ‘It’s not bad acting, it’s bad
writing
. Those shows are written poorly. We’re not going to do that.’”

• • •

T
he first several episodes came together in the office in Santa Monica. Green would write each beat on an index card and tape them together in long strips. After four episodes were written, the crew—minus Renzulli, who, with three children and another on the way, remained in California—packed up to move to New York and begin production. Chase left no question about his ambition. “David was after big fish,” Burgess said. “He wanted this to be as good as
The Godfather
. As good as
GoodFellas
.” Over dinner at a Japanese restaurant, Chase told Burgess and Green, “This is it for me. If this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.”

Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, producers and location scouts had been fanning out across the Garden State, looking for the building blocks of
The Sopranos
’ physical universe. The North Caldwell house that had been the family’s home in the pilot was reconstructed at Silvercup Studios (it would become ever more expensive to get permission to shoot the handful of necessary exterior scenes at the real house each season). The Bada Bing! remained a strip club called Satin Dolls in Lodi. An empty storefront in a Scottish Irish neighborhood in Kearny became the semipermanent site of the fictional Satriale’s Pork Store
,
as well as production storage.