ENGL 4860: Special Topics in Film Studies The Gangster Film Spring 2011 Room: PH 322

ENGL 4860: Special Topics in Film Studies

The Gangster Film

Spring 2011Room: PH 322

Day/Time: Monday, 430-730 pm

Gangster FilmGangster Film


4/4/11 | Meeting 10The Sopranos (1999-2007)Episodes: "The Pilot" (1.1); “College" (1.5)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0141842


Sopranos “Commodity Paratexts”

from TV Guide’s Fifty Greatest Shows of All Time

1. Seinfeld2. I Love Lucy3. The Honeymooners4. All in the Family5. The Sopranos

Cult TelevisionCult Television


“the most important work of American popular culture in the last fifty years”

David Chase (1945- ): The Rockford Files, I’ll Fly

Away, Almost Grown, Northern Exposure


The Sopranos has departed from many of the conventions of television drama:•Its casting, especially of the balding and overweight James Gandolfini as Tony, was a departure from television norms.•The characters, capable of extreme violence and despicable behavior, were not always loveable.•Its narrative style did not conform to traditional multi-season dramas. Though fans expected some variation on the “Who shot J. R?” cliffhanger at the end of Season One, Chase and company offered none, nor has the series exhibited any sense of urgency about resolving some of its many arcs.


•Chase repeatedly stated his desire to make self-contained

one hour movies: “Sometimes I feel like we need to take a

vacation from all that continuing stuff,” Chase explains, “It’s

just so TV” (Handleman 9).

•Chase articulates his hope that his series is “similar to the

foreign films I loved as a young adult for their ideas, their

mystery, and their ambiguity—for not having the endings

spelled out or telling the audience what to think or feel.”

•The series’ peerless use of music “as another character,

the lyrics of songs functioning as a Greek chorus” (as Chase

explains it [Chase x]) is likewise distinctive.


In order to produce his thirteen-episodes-a-year mini-movies Chase has also demanded more and more time between seasons of The Sopranos—time devoted to fine-tuning the writing (each script goes through as many as ten drafts) and planning for the on-location (in New Jersey) cinematic-style filming. (The Sopranos has a rich textual geography which, not surprisingly, has invited the attention of media ecologists [see Strate].) The hiatus between the third and fourth years lasted sixteenth months. Nor was Chase ever willing to agree to an indefinite run for the series.


Although the major American television networks, all of which passed on the show, have attributed the tremendous success of The Sopranos to HBO’s cable TV freedom to air nudity and profanity, Chase finds that explanation superficial. It is not bare breasts and obscenities that have set The Sopranos apart but, according to its creator, a variety of other factors: the narrative possibilities granted by the absence of commercial interruption, the freedom to allow characters to develop slowly over time, the series’ insistence on treating its audience as highly intelligent (Handleman 8). As Time Magazine observes, The Sopranos expects its viewers to remember details from three years back in an era in which the broadcast networks “increasingly believe it's highfalutin to air dramas like 24 that require viewers to remember what happened the week before.”


The Sopranos also assumes that its audience shares its often wicked sense of humor. In several interviews Chase has proclaimed his credo that humor should accrue naturally out of the dramatic material and not be imposed upon it, a doctrine to which the series, full of pratfalls, scatology, puns, malapropisms, funny names, clever allusions, is not always faithful. The Sopranos was one of the funniest shows on television, however, because it partakes in the great tradition of comedy: its characters are consistently hilarious because they are often clueless, devoid of any insight into themselves, any wisdom about their predicaments.


The series is an excellent example of a Bakhtinian dialogical text, like a great novel (perhaps one by Bakhtin’s much admired Dostoevsky—who puts in an appearance in The Sopranos when a psychiatrist suggests that Tony should read Crime and Punishment in his prison cell). It refuses to judge its characters or espouse a single point of view, a single authorial stance. As Chase insists, “we do not have signposts that tell the viewer how to feel. This is sad, this is good, this is scary, you should laugh at this” (Chase x).


Each and every one of the following ingredients had to be added to the mix in order for The Sopranos-as-we-know-it to come into existence.


The faith of Lloyd Braun of Brillstein-Grey Productions—the company that had developed The Larry Sanders Show for HBO—that Chase “had a great series inside,” which led Chase to begin reconsidering and reconfiguring for television ideas that had long been on the back burner.


Chase’s long-time obsession with gangster films. He was a great admirer of William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) when he first saw it, terrified, at the age of eight or nine, and a fan of television’s The Untouchables (1959-63), which he watched with his father. At Stanford he even made a student gangster film. The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos, Chase recalls, “was about alienation. It was about a guy driven crazy by the cheesiness, sanctimoniousness, and fakery of American society. He was frustrated—he shotgunned his TV set. And what got to him were the commercials, the astronauts, and the fact that white bread Nixonians ruled America. . . . And he dreamed of becoming a gangster, an old-fashioned gangster in a pin-striped suit, and he got his wish. He got killed in the end, but the film was poorly thought out.” The state of the post-Godfather, post-GoodFellas gangster genre at the time of The Sopranos’ germination left Chase nowhere to go except “into the family,” ground which proved to be fertile indeed.



“One family or another will kill him.”

The idea, encouraged by Robin Green, a writer on Almost Grown, and others (including his wife), of telling stories about his own ultra-negative mother.


Chase’s own long-running therapy. Chase speaks revealingly of the great influence Alice Miller’s brilliant but deeply troubling Drama of the Gifted Child—a book that argues that many creative adults were abused children—had on his own mindset. He jokes that with The Sopranos all the money he has spent on therapy has finally begun to pay off.


The conceit of a mobster seeing a psychiatrist, the series’ germinal idea, as Chase explained to Peter Bogdanovich:

The kernel of the joke, of the essential joke, was that life in America had gotten so savage, selfish—basically selfish, that even a mob guy couldn’t take it any more. That was the essential joke, and he’s in therapy because what he sees upsets him so much, what he sees every day. . . . he and his guys were the ones who invented selfishness—they invented “me first”; they invented “it’s all about me”—and now he can’t take it because the rest of the country has surpassed him.


The commissioning of the pilot for Fox, which would, of course, turn it down.


Chase’s inclination never to purposely create comedy. Comedy just occurs, Chase believes, naturally accruing when a writer is faithful to things as they are. (Is it too much to say that The Sopranos is the funniest show since Seinfeld?)


The casting of virtually all the roles, mostly with New York-based actors, especially James Gandolfini as Tony—an epochal decision compared by some to having Marlon Brando play Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).


The ducks, who come to hold such meaning for Tony flown in from Rockford Files TV movie producer Juanita Bartlett’s own swimming pool.


The family dynamics drawn from Chase’s own family—minus the cursing.


The shopping-around of the series to all the networks and its complete rejection.


The opportune successful pitch to HBO, heavily committed at the time to the development of new, original series. Having the series on HBO permitted Chase to use nudity, violence, and profane language in ways that would have been impossible on network television, greatly facilitating its verisimilitude, but perhaps more importantly it enabled the uninterrupted-by-commercial construction of hour-long narratives.


HBO’s commitment to on-location filming in New Jersey.


Luck was with David Chase, as well, when he and his production team decided against some other possibilities, all seriously considered, and all of which, in retrospect, would have been grave, if not fatal, mistakes.


Making the main character a television producer with an uneasy relationship with his mother.


Having the whole series be told by Tony in flashbacks in Melfi’s office. About half of the pilot does make use of such a narrative technique, but the idea did not survive the pilot.


Using a new song for each episode’s credit sequence. In a discussion of the opening credit sequence with Bogdanovich, Chase recalls that it had been his wish to use a different song every week and had protested unsuccessfully HBO’s insistence that Tony’s drive from New York to New Jersey always be choreographed to A5’s “Woke Up This Morning.” He admits that he originally considered a single theme song—a staple of television program for decades—“bourgeois.”


Killing off Tony’s mother, Livia, at the end of the first season. Nancy Marchand’s superb performance convinced Chase and his collaborators to keep the character alive.



The Sopranos Opening Credits

http://www.hbo.com/

Casting Steven Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist, who had never acted before, as Tony. “At the time,” Chase recalls, “I was seeing [The Sopranos] more like a live-action Simpsons. It would have been a gangster show, but some of the more tortured aspects of Tony would probably have gone away. With Steven, it would have been a little broad. We would have played it more for laughs.”


Not having Tony kill anyone on screen (as he does, for the first time, in “College,” garroting a mob traitor), fearing—as HBO itself very strongly did—that the audience might lose all sympathy for its main character.


“[A]ll of us have the freedom to do story lines that unfold slowly. We all have the freedom to create characters that are complex and contradictory. The FCC doesn’t govern that. We all have the freedom to tell stupid, bad jokes that may actually turn out to be funny. And we all have the freedom to let the audience figure out what’s going on rather than telling them what’s going on.”--David Chase on National Public Radio (responding to network complains about The Sopranos’ unfair advantage on HBO)


Written By: Will it be possible to replicate [The Sopranos’] writing experience?”

Weiner: “That’d be insane to think there will ever be another Sopranos. I will tell you this: I have tried to take everything good that I can about it. I got to sit here and watch how good ideas happen. I’d like to think that in some ways I will carry as much as I can from The Sopranos, but The Sopranos is a beacon.”


Matthew Weiner, Creator of Mad Men, Sopranos Writer, Seasons 4-6

Gangster LengthGangster Length

The Godfather 175 minutes (2.9 hrs.)

The Godfather II 200 minutes (3.33 hrs.)

The Godfather III 162 minutes (2.7 hrs.)

Total 537 minutes (8.95 hrs.)

GoodFellas 148 minutes (2.48 hrs.)

Once Upon a Time in America 229 minutes (3.8 hrs.)

The Sopranos (86 episodes at an average of 52 minutes per

episode)

4472 minutes (74.5 hrs.)

Gangster Length

ENGL 4860: Special Topics in Film Studies The Gangster Film Spring 2011 Room: PH 322

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