Godfather to This Bunch of Gangsters

Last year’s premiere party for “The Sopranos” was held at a pizzeria. It was a big pizzeria, to be sure (John’s), with terrific pizza (the authentic New York thin-crust variety) and a celebrity crowd too, if only for Bruce, as in Springsteen--there to support his sometimes guitarist, Steven Van Zandt, who plays one of the hoods on the HBO series, the one always imitating Pacino in “Godfather III” (“Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in”).

But it was still a pizzeria. And the atmosphere? “There was a sense, ‘What is this thing, “The Sopranos”? “ recalls David Chase, the creative godfather of the whole shebang. “We had been toiling in anonymity out there in Queens and New Jersey. And all of us on the show, we’d look at each other and say, ‘Who’s going to watch this?’

“And lo and behold. . . . “

Lo and behold, indeed. A second season of “The Sopranos” will begin Sunday night with a piece of music that says a lot about what has transpired since that pizza night--Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year.”

Though its immediate use is as a wistful backdrop to a montage bringing us up to date on New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his compares--it works on more than one level, like much on “The Sopranos.” Try to imagine this show about the Jersey mob, put together by one David Chase, convincing the Sinatra estate to let it use that song a year ago--or affording those rights.

“In a sense, for me, it was supposed to be somewhat of an acknowledgment that it had also been a ‘very good year’ for us,” Chase says. “You can’t deny it. It has been a very good year.”

Chase is talking the morning after this year’s premiere party, actually just hours after it, for the thing went on past 3 a.m.

They rented out the Ziegfeld Theater to show two of the opening episodes. But when the RSVPs started coming in from Spike Lee and Stephen King and Sarah Jessica Parker and other of the New York entertainment Who’s Who, and from the friends of the cast and guys from across the river ready with Sonny Corleone jokes . . . well, they opened up a second theater, and still didn’t have room.

After the screening, the 2,000 invitees migrated to the historic Roseland Ballroom, decorated with a gondola by the front door, buffet spreads with filet mignon, chicken marsala and, everywhere you looked, blood-red roses.

At a table in the center was creator-writer-producer Chase, receiving well-wishers for five hours, whether the celebs or simply fans of the show or the others who looked like fans until they stuck microphones in his face to get sound bites, so many “I didn’t get a minute to really think,” Chase notes over breakfast.

But the instant he hears himself complaining about the octopus-like crowd, he has to laugh. Before “The Sopranos,” during his 25-plus years in show biz, he recalls finding himself in demand for interviews twice. Twice.

“Here you go,” he says. “Here you have the typical situation of the media personality saying, ‘Poor me, I didn’t get a minute to myself.’ Well, why did I get into this business?”

He got into it for this moment, of course. So why is he having a hard time figuring out how to handle it? Why is he still, too often, angry? Not like before, but feeling “plenty of rage, from something.”

You think Tony is complex?

Chase recalls a conversation from the party. “I was talking to someone who said, ‘I think the secret to this show’s success is that Tony is so pissed off. He acts out his anger at people, and very often it’s the same people we’re angry at.’ He didn’t give me any specific examples, but I guess he sort of meant, in a general way, anger at . . . just modern life.”

It shouldn’t take that leggy lady shrink, played by Lorraine Bracco, to tell you that this emotion may well have been injected into Tony by this same Mr. Chase sitting across the table on this sunny morning along Fifth Avenue, suddenly one of the anointed creative geniuses of American popular culture. Or that the anger may stem from more than “modern life.”

For if Chase is a genius now, we have to wonder whether he may have been pretty close to that for the last three decades. Then you realize how close he came to ending his career without the world ever quite seeing that.

That’s another thing that makes “The Sopranos” compelling, beyond how it entertains us or what it may tell us about the mob or America or family relations. The Hollywood story is harrowing, too.

Writing for ‘The Rockford Files’

Even a decade ago, Chase was refusing to give his age, understandably worried about the implications in a strange industry often run by kids wearing baseball caps backward. “Looks fortysomething but won’t say,” said a Newsday report in 1988, the only other time Chase got a TV series aired that was his own creation--with disastrous results.

The age business is easy to resolve with basic math. NYU lists him as graduating in 1968, Stanford as receiving his master’s in communications in 1971.

Three years later, he was a whiz kid writer for “The Rockford Files,” the James Garner detective series set in Malibu. Lighthearted as it was, the show gave him a first exposure to the pressures for political correctness on TV. Whenever they crafted bad guys who were Italian, some Italian American group would protest. He was one too (original family name DeCesare) and couldn’t get over the insanity: The Italian American “civil rights” movement had been launched by a mob boss, Joe Columbo, who was gunned down at one of its rallies to complain about portrayals of the Mafia!

Chase worked on “Rockford” through 1980, the year he won an Emmy for writing the ABC movie “Off the Minnesota Strip,” about a teen runaway. He had his directing debut in 1985, on an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

“Listen, I wasn’t starving,” he says. “I was living a very nice life. But I was working on other people’s shows by and large.”

So he conceived “Almost Grown” with Lawrence Konner. It tackled three generations of a New Jersey family, the WWII one, the ‘60s counterculture and the offspring of the ‘60s folk. The most novel feature was use of rock music as a “memory trigger”--a song would send the characters back to the early ‘60s or the ‘70s, with full wardrobe and hair changes.

Chase endured years of pitch meetings to get it on the air in 1988. After seeing the pilot, showing one character as a deejay at a college radio station, locking himself in the booth to play the Chambers Brothers’ “Time” over and over, one TV executive was quoted as saying, “I hope I never hear that song again as long as I live.”

But the Chicago Tribune called the script “jarringly literate . . . a touching study of the fragility of individual and family relationships.” The Washington Post said it was “one of the few imaginative programs on any network’s fall schedule.” The Toronto Star said it could be “the next big cult series.”

“Almost Grown” lasted six episodes. The usual reason: ratings.

Though Chase is convinced to this day that “it didn’t fail rightfully,” that the network didn’t give the show a chance to find its audience, it was inevitable that some self-doubt crept in, especially after the next series he worked on--the civil rights-era drama “I’ll Fly Away”--also won great reviews but poor numbers for NBC, then cancellation in 1993.

“Maybe it was just me,” Chase says. “I was always able to maintain high expectation levels for Hollywood, which I felt were constantly not met. But at the same time, it worms its way into your heart. Maybe they’re right. Maybe I can’t connect with an audience.”

Still, he did not hurt for work. He took over as executive producer of the offbeat CBS series “Northern Exposure” and helped churn out “Rockford” TV movies. But Chris Harbert, who became his agent about this time, says there continued to be too many “disappointments” with projects close to Chase’s heart. “It was movies, too,” Harbert says, recalling one that Chase rewrote and was set to direct on the first day kids experience snow.

“I thought the script was brilliant,” the United Talent Agency agent says, “but it was the same reaction, ‘God, it’s good and cute and quirky. But we don’t know if it’s commercial enough.’ ”

Chase envisioned “The Sopranos” as a feature film, as well. He has told often how a movie he saw on TV as a kid--”Public Enemy” with Jimmy Cagney--had left him “fascinated but terrified” about the mob. Though raised in a part of New Jersey where a neighbor might be in “waste management,” like Tony, his knowledge of this subculture was not the firsthand one of, say, a Martin Scorsese--who could look out his window in Little Italy at the “GoodFellas” in action. That’s one reason Chase recruited other writers who knew various mob haunts, such as Frank Renzulli, from Boston’s North End, and Robin Green, from Providence, R.I.

Chase had some educated instincts about the mob, sure--that films such as the “Godfather” series romanticized the wise guys, whose lives--like most people’s--had “much more of the mundane than anything else. There’s a lot of killing of time.” Anyone who has reviewed masses of mob wiretaps and bugs can attest that talk of “whacking” is far rarer than grumbling about family problems or the evening menu or b.s.-ing about scams that will never be pulled. It’s captured in the first episode of the new season, when one of Tony’s crew, at a backyard party, wonders how you could steal frequent flier miles off airline computers--but can’t get the term “hacking” right. Yet you also hear “flashes of insight” from these same people, Chase notes, who “see things in a different way.”

It’s more iffy whether a brutish street boss would actually share his problems with a shrink--or have such second thoughts about his world. But Chase set out to create a drama, not a documentary, and for drama he had much to draw from, such as his own manipulative mother, who died five years ago after fuming--like Nancy Marchand’s Livia--about being sent to a nursing home.

He also could draw from his angst. Even after he’d put together “The Sopranos,” he worried “critics were going to say, ‘Oh God, another mob show, give us a break.’ ”

One believer was talent manager-producer Brad Grey, whose acerbic comedies for HBO, notably “The Larry Sanders Show,” had won wide acclaim. Grey’s firm signed Chase in 1996 to develop TV series, then began shopping “The Sopranos” to the networks--unsuccessfully. Today, both men agree that failure was fortunate, in retrospect, because of the wider leeway on pay TV.

“I made the mistake because I thought if the networks are to survive, they’ve got to be looking outside the box,” Grey says. “As I look back, I was wrong. This show would not have worked, clearly, on network television. It just wouldn’t have been the same show.”

“People say, you must really revel in the freedom of being at HBO,” Chase says, “and what they really think that means is the freedom to say [expletive] every other word and to shoot people in the head and to show bare [breasts]. But it’s not that stuff. It’s just the ability to kind of be ironic, or at least just have it be representative of this absurd thing we really got out here, which is life in America, which is great and funny and contradictory.”

He also had the ability to be politically incorrect. You have to wonder whether a network would have allowed one hilarious visual gag in Sunday’s show: a familiar Italian name being called at a stockbroker’s exam followed by an unfamiliar face that looks quite . . . Asian.

What none of them expected--not Chase, Grey or HBO--was how such touches would win record ratings for any drama series on the cable channel. Last season, 10 million people caught one of the showings of the final episode, and some replays last Sunday outscored the networks among viewers with the pay channel.

Chase rattles off various explanations offered up, from how people are “attracted to power and to people who get away with things,” or how they like Tony, for all his crimes, because “he asks these existential questions,” or how they adore the mother because she’s allowed to be nasty. The premiere audience howled when the woman in the bed next to her starts in about her cancer and Livia instructs a visitor, “Close that curtain, will you.”

In the end, Chase shrugs and says, “People just love mob stories. It’s cowboys and Indians.”

But he does not take it for granted that the world will continue to embrace his mob story. He is “more nervous” this season than last, he says, because “we have something to live up to.”

To make sure Tony does not rest on his laurels, the opening episodes introduce new characters to further complicate his life--and drive him back to that shrink. Fans who chose to view the show as a soap opera, and not an existential musing, should know that Chase remains firm, though, on one issue: no hanky-panky between Tony and Dr. Jennifer Melfi. “Maybe if he wasn’t a patient,” he says. “Not in the context of therapy. Otherwise she’s just another bimbo.”

But there are no easy answers to the long-term “Where do you go from here?” For either Tony or Chase.

Chase knows that the paradigm for American mob movies is “the rise and fall of.” Whether it’s Cagney’s tough guys, the Corleones or Scorsese’s Goodfellas, they generally lose their souls, go to jail or die full of holes--they’re held to account, in other words.

Chase insists he hasn’t decided Tony’s eventual fate--he envisions four seasons of the show--but he may well break the formula.

“It’s begun to occur to me,” he says, “that out there in New Jersey, we read about who got busted, who went to prison, who was found in the trunk of a car. Yet you know what? There’s a lot of mobsters who die of natural causes at the age of 75 semi-wealthy men, grandfathers and for all we know pay no price whatsoever.”

Chase himself?

“There are certain chips which have been removed from my shoulder,” he acknowledges. “It’s hard to maintain rage at the system. It’s hard to maintain this attitude that ‘Hollywood’ just doesn’t get poor little ol’ me . . . that they’re all a bunch of idiots.”

Success ‘Comes at a Time of Life’

Chase has to think a moment when asked how he indulged himself. Then he remembers: A “nice coat” for his wife. Some “nice antique pieces” for their house back in L.A.

But that’s not all the “The Sopranos” has done for him. “It comes at a time of life. I guess I sort of feel if I never did anything again, it would be OK. That I wouldn’t have to be at age 75 hooked up to some chemotherapy tube and saying, ‘Maybe if I’d worked harder. Maybe if I’d had the better idea. . . . ‘ “

Then he hears himself--and laughs again.

“Is this ridiculous? To think that when I’m hooked up to chemotherapy I’ll be spared self-flagellation?”

The point, of course, is that even a radical external change in your life--whether rising to the top of a mob family or getting anointed a creative genius--doesn’t mean you change much internally.

“You begin to wonder, ‘Am I ever going to smarten up?’ I think you’ll see some of that this season with Tony. In particular, I guess, with anger, rage. You start thinking, ‘Where is this inexhaustible supply of this stuff coming from?’ ”

Chase knows not to blame his own reserve all on his Hollywood experience. He recalls how, even as a child--a generally quiet and observant one--he would drive his parents nuts by having playground fights, “going crazy, running around, vandalism, stuff like that.” He also takes heart in studies showing that this male intensity eases with age, naturally.

“I can see that as you get older, there are so many things that go on in your life that you can’t really deal with all of them all the time. A lot of your fixations, you have less time to give them. You know what I mean?”

This we do know: His agent recently closed a deal for him to direct one of those movies he conceived in his pre-genius days--oh, 1981--but which never got made. You don’t want to know how many studios it went through.

“Female Suspects” is a “female buddy comedy adventure movie,” Harbert says. There’s this woman sociologist at the fictitious University of New Jersey who has this theory. . . . Well, Harbert is not the least bit worried about getting top stars to take the lead roles.

“Casting will not be the toughest thing in the world,” the agent says, “with an original David Chase script.”