Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin Read Free Book Online

three years after the finale of
The Sopranos
became one of the signal cultural events of the decade. “I’m a man who wanted to make movies. Period.” Even the title
showrunner
annoyed him: “It sounds like some kind of Jet-Ski,” he said.
    In a generally triumphant story, this is one of the small tragedies: that the Reluctant Moses of the Third Golden Age, the man who, by example, opened the door for so many writers, directors, actors, and producers to work in television gloriously free of shame, was unable himself to enter the Promised Land.
    • • •
    G loom, pessimism, anxiety, paranoia, grudge holding, misanthropy—such were the highlights of most David Chase stories, including those he told about himself. Which is why it was so flummoxing to hear his own self-assessment, so difficult to tell whether he was being coy, oblivious, or simply pugnacious in yet another iteration.
    “Maybe I come off as a depressed, morose guy,” he said, complaining about a 2007
Vanity Fair
cover profile that quoted a constellation of colleagues and acquaintances on his negativity. Despite calling
The Sopranos
“one of the masterpieces of American popular culture, on a par with the first two
Godfather
s,
Mean Streets
,
and
GoodFellas . . .
or even European epics such as Luchino Visconti’s
The Leopard
,” the piece continued to irk Chase. “Maybe people find me that negative. I just don’t see it,” he said. “Because the truth is, in my experience, when I’m in a room, I hear a lot of laughter.”
    As a child, he dreamed of nuclear apocalypse under the suburban stars of Passaic and Morris and Essex counties. Perhaps this was reasonable for someone born August 22, 1945, sixteen days after Hiroshima, a charter baby boomer. He was the only child of second-generation Italians—family name DeCesare—who had more or less made the journey he would later replicate in
The Sopranos
’ opening credits. His father, Henry, owned a store, Wright Hardware, in Verona. His mother, Norma, well, you’ve met her: insecure, passive-aggressive, fearful, domineering. As embodied by the actress Nancy Marchand, she would become one of the more idiosyncratically terrifying and funny characters to ever appear in American living rooms: Livia Soprano.
    Norma was one of ten daughters of an Italian leftist who, family lore had it, once jumped out a window at a Eugene Debs rally when the cops busted in. Henry came from a line of Italian religious reformists called the Waldensians. The Chases were secular Protestants in the land of Catholics. Having escaped Newark, they had WASPy ambitions. They played tennis and golf, vacationed in the Poconos. The wiseguys and
guidos
from down Bloomfield Avenue were referred to around the dinner table as
cafoni
—peasants. “My mother aspired to a kind of genteel life, I think,” says Chase. “Although her home life was not genteel at all.”
    Norma, who had left high school after her freshman year, had the almost absurdist job of proofreading the New Jersey Bell phone book. She ruled the house by threat of filibuster: you did what she wanted because it was easier than hearing her complain. “The tyranny of the weak,” Chase called it. This played into Henry’s sense of thwarted ambition. He radiated frustration in a way that would later find expression in Tony Soprano.
    “He was a disappointed man. A frustrated man,” Chase said. “He would make her out to be the heavy. If something couldn’t happen, for whatever reason, he would blame it on her: ‘Look what I have to deal with.’ But he was the one who had picked her. He got what he wanted.”
    It was a cramped, suffocating home, with both parents intimately involved in their only child’s comings and goings. Chase suffered adolescent bouts of anxiety and depression that a generation later would likely have been identified as clinical. Outside, he and his friends engaged in the kind of petty vandalism that makes obedient sons feel rebellious: