David Chase selected Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ to soundtrack the final moments of The Sopranos in part because he liked the lyric about how “the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on”. (His decision was sealed when he floated the idea to his writers’ room and everyone reacted in uniform revulsion.)
Depressed kingpin Tony’s attempts to self-improve, compromised wife Carmela’s delicate program of rationalization, the capitalistic churning of America – it all continues ad infinitum, and last night at the Tribeca film festival’s premiere of the documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos, it was clear that the saga of New Jersey’s top “waste management consultants” wasn’t over, either.
The legacy of The Sopranos has only grown in the years since its polarizing cut-to-black finale, gaining a massive new wave of younger obsessives during the idle streaming hours of the pandemic. Judging by the line on Broadway outside the Beacon Theatre, the average fan isn’t some cigar-chomping central-casting type pulled out of your local butcher shop, but rather a nerdy guy on the millennial/gen Z cusp wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of tragicomic meme fodder Christopher Moltisanti.
The new film directed by the prolific Alex Gibney does a fine job itemizing the many reasons that this unimpeachable masterpiece keeps reeling in and flattening viewers 25 years after its premiere: the potent combo of sensational violence with deep-tissue psychological introspection, the permissive doctrine of an HBO still in its original-programming nascency, the prodigious embarrassment of talent collected between the cast and crew. And a sampling of those same people had gathered for the same reason the audience had turned out – not to see a movie, but to be part of a family reunion.
Everyone handed a microphone repeated some variation on the sentiment that they’d never been part of a such a genuinely loving, tight-knit production team. In a perfect distillation of the difference between their characters, Jamie-Lynn Sigler (formerly overachieving daughter Meadow) effused that “that set was home, these people were home, and they accepted and loved you no matter what,” while Robert Iler (one-time troublemaking son AJ) added: “My friends are all going to shitty college reunions, and I get to come here.” Grizzled but resplendent, the 93-year-old Dominic Chianese (who stole scenes as the cantankerous Uncle Junior) said that the most rewarding part of the experience was being part of the ephemeral community that materialized around the show. While playing the soft-souled soldier Bobby Baccalieri, actor Steve Schirripa flew himself back and forth from a full-time gig at the Riviera in Las Vegas just so he could continue playing the role. He punctuated his response with a laugh and shrugged: “I don’t know if that answers your fuckin’ question!”
Others shared intriguing tidbits from behind the scenes at Satriale’s, Bada Bing! and the rest of the famiglia’s regular haunts. Season five guest and occasional director Steve Buscemi recalled reading the pilot script and thinking: “I didn’t get it.” He passed, watched the show explode into a universally acclaimed megahit and thought to himself: “Wow, I fucked up!” Before she booked the job as Tony’s maddening sister Janice, Aida Turturro told star James Gandolfini – to her, like everybody else on hand, the friend she warmly remembers as “Jim” – that if she didn’t get it, he’d have to spot her rent money. Kathrine Narducci portrayed co-restaurateur Charmaine Bucco, the one character to unilaterally reject the seductive yet destructive influence of the Soprano organization, and she used to beg Chase: “Can’t I just be a little nice to him?” (Chase’s emphatically delivered response at the time: “I KNEW THIS WOMAN. SHE WAS NOT NICE.”) Narducci shed a tear as she recounted her habit of apologizing to Gandolfini for the cold shoulder “because I loved him so much”.
The night’s MVP may have been Drea de Matteo, who prefaced her comments with the disclaimer: “I’m so fucking hungry right now I can’t even think straight.” She claimed that she learned to act by spending so much time close to Michael Imperioli but demonstrated her natural-born abilities by treating the crowd to the reading of the line “ow!” that clinched her audition. Just like her mother taught her, she stretched the single syllable into four through the Jersey brogue, a noise most accurately spelled out as “uh-ow-oo-uh!” The main cast members played their part in the evening well, with a certain unimpressed aloofness expected from major-league stars. Imperioli deadpanned, “Rewatching it, it’s way better than I remembered,” though Edie Falco didn’t seem to be joking when she said that she never thought playing Carmela was hard. “Even the hard stuff was easy!” Her secret was always withholding judgment from her character, a woman slipping deeper and deeper into amorality with every blind eye turned to her husband’s misdeeds. “She loved him,” Falco said. “Who wouldn’t?”
The panel concluded with the writing triumvirate, Chase joined by his consiglieri Terence Winter (the creator of Boardwalk Empire and screenwriter of The Wolf of Wall Street) and Matthew Weiner (the creator of Mad Men). Weiner wrote the pilot episode of his later smash before joining Chase’s staff, and rewrote the whole thing afterward with the good habits he’d picked up on set. “This is a mass medium, but it can be art,” he said. “I didn’t know that before The Sopranos.” Winter likewise grew during his tenure, training himself to cut out the “joke-jokes” he leaned on as a crutch and instead trust in the organic comedy of eccentric characters being who they are. Deprogramming a background in sitcom writing, “I learned to stop thinking in setups and punch lines,” he said.
And finally it came to the big man himself, who led with a salute to his trustiest writerly device of all: “If it wasn’t for the word ‘fuck’, where would any of us be right now? Nowhere!” He treated everyone to the story of how his daughter Michele came to play Meadow’s bestie Hunter Scangarelo after being made to do gofer work on set as punishment for mouthing off to him, an appropriately paternal anecdote to close things out. He watched his collaborators through the night like a proud papa seated at the head of the table, in his element while his people – by their own admission – continue breaking each other’s balls. “This, everyone up here, that’s a family,” Chase said. “And that’s the best thing we could’ve been.”