everything Jersey
Newark Star-Ledger [”Everything Jersey”] - June 12, 2007
‘Sopranos’ creator’s last word: End speaks for itself
What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep
quiet.
“Sopranos” creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner Sunday
night in France, where he fled to avoid “all the Monday morning
quarterbacking” about the show’s finale. After this exclusive
interview (agreed to before the season began), he intends to let the
work — especially the controversial final scene — speak for itself.
“I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or
adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene.
“No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” he adds. “We did
what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s
minds or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll (tick) them off.’
“People get the impression that you’re trying to (mess) with them,
and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”
In that final scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice
cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a
seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a
tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the
camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow’s parallel parking and a
walk by a man in a Members Only jacket to the men’s room. Just as the
tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in
mid-scene (and mid-song), with no resolution.
“Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there,” says Chase, 61, who
based the series in general (and Tony’s relationship with mother
Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.
Some fans have assumed the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the
oft-rumored “Sopranos” movie.
“I don’t think about (a movie) much,” he says. “I never say never. An
idea could pop into my head where I would go, ‘Wow, that would make a
great movie,’ but I doubt it.
“I’m not being coy,” he adds. “If something appeared that really made
a good ‘Sopranos’ movie and you could invest in it and everybody else
wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we’ve kind of said it and
done it.”
Another problem: Over the last season, Chase killed so many key
characters. He’s toyed with the idea of “going back to a day in 2006
that you didn’t see, but then (Tony’s children) would be older than
they were then and you would know that Tony doesn’t get killed. It’s
got problems.”
(Earlier in the interview, Chase noted that often his favorite part
of the show was the characters telling stories about the good ol’
days of Tony’s parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie
spinoff, it’ll be set in Newark in the’60s.)
Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final
scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a
good night’s sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:
Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene
to place the viewer into Tony’s mind-set. This is how he sees the
world: Every open door, every person walking past him could be coming
to kill him or arrest him or otherwise harm him or his family. This
is his life, even though the paranoia’s rarely justified. We end
without knowing what Tony’s looking at because he never knows what’s
coming next.
Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in “Soprano Home Movies,”
repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggested that when you get
killed, you don’t see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members
Only jacket could have gone to the men’s room to prepare for killing
Tony (shades of the first “Godfather”), and the picture and sound cut
out because Tony’s life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got
whacked from our life with the show.)
Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and
Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO’s then-chairman Chris
Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a
conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition he get “a
long break” to decide on an ending.
Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway
through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase
stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes
for this final batch of nine.
“If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been
so important,” he says.
Much of this final season featured Tony bullying, killing or
otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those
years of viewing him as “the sympathetic mob boss,” were we, like his
therapist Dr. Melfi, supposed to finally wake up and smell the
sociopath?
“From my perspective, there’s nothing different about Tony in this
season than there ever was,” Chase says. “To me, that’s Tony.”
Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly
the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the
chance to see someone’s head get blown off (or run over by an SUV).
So was he reluctant to fill last week’s penultimate episode, “The
Blue Comet,” with so many vivid death scenes?
“I’m the number one fan of gangster movies,” he says. “Martin
Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get
off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But
what you come to realize when you do a series is, you could be
killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning
when you’ve invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well
watch ‘Cleaver.’”
One detail about the final scene he’ll discuss, however tentatively:
the selection of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” as the song on the
jukebox.
“It didn’t take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of
conversation after the fact. I did something I’d never done before:
In the location van, with the crew, I was saying, ‘What do you
think?’ When I said, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ people went, ‘What? Oh
my God!’
“I said, ‘I know, I know, just give a listen,’ and little by little,
people started coming around.”
Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the
finale as a whole, Chase doesn’t know. (”I hear some people were very
angry and others were not, which is what I expected.”) He’s relaxing
in France, then he’ll try to make movies.
“It’s been the greatest career experience of my life,” he says.
“There’s nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say.”
Here’s Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:
After all the speculation Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we
saw Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil’s whereabouts and
cheering, “We’re going to win this thing!” when learning of Phil’s
demise.
“This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit
too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the’70s,” Chase
says of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris’ line.
Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what –
if anything — terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.
“This, to me, feels very real,” he says. “For the majority of these
suspects, it’s very hard for anybody to know what these people are
doing. I don’t even think Harris might know where they are. That was
sort of the point of it: Who knows if they are terrorists or if
they’re innocent pistachio salesmen? That’s the fear that we are
living with now.”
Also, the story — repeated by me, unfortunately — that Fox, when
“The Sopranos” was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony
help the FBI catch terrorists isn’t true.
“What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a
gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren’t there
long enough for anyone to make that suggestion.”
I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory
supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter, Emily) that the nine
episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the
nine circles of Hell from Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.”
Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, “No.”
Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take
out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony?
“I think Butch was an intelligent guy; he began to see that there was
no need for it, that Phil’s feelings were all caught up in what was
esentially a convoluted personal grudge.”
Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that’s
making the rounds about all the Holsten’s patrons being characters
from earlier in the series. The actor playing Members Only guy had
never been on the show; Tony killed at least one, if not both, of his
carjackers; and there are about 17 other things wrong with this
popular but incorrect theory.
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or by
writing him at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J. 07102-1200. You may
also visit the Sopranos blog at blog.nj.com/alltv/