Mere months after that, on The Wire, viewers would be introduced to a collection of Baltimore citizens that included an alcoholic, narcissistic police officer, a ruthless drug lord, and a gay, homicidal stickup boy. Within three months, a bald, stocky, flawed but charismatic boss-this time of a band of rogue cops instead of Mafiosi-would make his first appearance, on FX’s The Shield. Soon the dial would begin to fill with Tony Sopranos. More than that, to be at Silvercup at that moment was to stand at the center of a television revolution. What had started three years earlier as an oddball, what-do-we-have-to-lose experiment for a network still best known for rerunning Hollywood movies had become a huge bureaucratic institution. Dailies were shuttled back and forth between the coasts under a fake company name to foil spies anxious to spoil feverishly anticipated plot points. The view of the family’s backyard-brick patio and swimming pool, practically synonymous with suburban ennui-lay rolled up on an enormous translucent curtain that could be wheeled behind the ersatz kitchen windows and backlit when needed.Ī small army of craftsmen was employed in fabricating these details, and their work added up to as rich and fleshed-out a universe as had ever existed on TV: upwards of 200 people, plus a whole other team of post-production crew stationed in Los Angeles. Downstairs, the production filmed on four of Silvercup’s huge stages, including the ominously named Stage X, on which sat an endlessly reconfigurable, almost life-size model of the Soprano family’s New Jersey McMansion. The Sopranos had spread out to occupy most of two floors of Silvercup Studios, a steel-and-brick onetime bread factory in Long Island City, Queens. The operation that came to a halt that evening was a massive one. To anybody who had witnessed the actor’s self-directed rage as he struggled to remember lines in front of the camera-he would berate himself in disgust, curse, smack the back of his own head-it was a plausible scenario. In papers related to a divorce filing at the end of 2002, Gandolfini’s wife described increasingly serious issues with drugs and alcohol, as well as arguments during which the actor would repeatedly punch himself in the face out of frustration. Other times, though, simulated misery became indistinguishable from the real thing-on set and off. An intelligent and intuitive actor, Gandolfini understood this dynamic and used it to his advantage the heavy bathrobe that became Tony’s signature, transforming him into a kind of domestic bear, was murder under the lights in midsummer, but Gandolfini insisted on wearing it between takes. Crew members grew accustomed to hearing grunts and curses coming from his trailer as he worked up to the emotional pitch of a scene by, say, destroying a boom-box radio. ![]() Not so Gandolfini, for whom playing Tony Soprano would always require to some extent being Tony Soprano. Star James Gandolfini and creator David Chase transformed cable TV into an art form. ![]() In interviews, which he did his very best to avoid, the actor would often fall back on some version of "I’m just a dumb, fat guy from Jersey." "That’s bullshit," David Chase once told me, with an affectionate chuckle. Without an actor capable of finding Tony’s melancholy, his soulfulness, his absurdity and his rage, the era of TV antiheroes may never have found its foothold. It is not too much of a stretch to say that if Gandolfini had not gotten the role of Tony Soprano-as, by all rights of all television rules ever written, he shouldn’t have-and attacked it with such gusto, television would not be what it is today. And each time, you could tell, required a return journey into that character as real and visceral as the plate of spaghetti and braciole he would dig into again and again and again. Every line delivery bringing up another subtle shade or variation of the character he had so come to embody. Every take, and there were always dozens, would be just a little bit different. Not so when Gandolfini was shooting, say, an ordinary family dinner scene of The Sopranos. I have said it many times: If and when I have grandchildren, I will tell them that I saw Michael Jordan play basketball, Jacques Pepin make an omelet, and James Gandolfini act.Īnybody who has ever been on a TV or movie set knows there is no place more guaranteed to exterminate any sense of romance about TV and the movies.
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