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 Page A

knocking over mailboxes, breaking into the local country club and throwing furniture into the pool. “It was a time when you could just run wild,” he said. “Outside the home, it was really an idyllic American boyhood.” Chase developed a fierce love of rock and roll and took up the drums. And he began learning the trick of alchemizing family psychodrama into mordant humor. Long before Livia came to life in America’s living rooms, stories about Norma would entertain a generation of procrastinating writers’ rooms.
    Senior year, he fell in love with Denise Kelly, whose reserved French Irish family was everything the Chases were not. Still, for college Chase fled to Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was an ROTC student and thought seriously about the prospect of staying in the army after graduation—the brewing conflict in faraway Vietnam perhaps seeming preferable to a return to the Chase household.
    Northern Jersey to Winston-Salem constituted about as large a cultural leap as it was possible to make in 1964 America. “There were cross burnings still going on in North Carolina. You had to go to chapel twice a week, and if it was before a big football game, they’d play ‘Dixie’ and everybody had to stand,” Chase said. “It was awful. Really terrible. Not only were you not allowed to drink on campus, you weren’t allowed to dance or play cards.”
    There was, however, against all odds, a Friday night European film series, part of the great flowering of film appreciation on campuses and in downtowns across the country. “I wasn’t hip enough to know that I was seeing new film techniques in a film like
Breathless
,”
Chase said. “But it sure
seemed
different. Godard said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. I certainly got that part of it. I was into it.”
    In particular, he fell for Fellini—starting with the director’s contribution to
Boccaccio ’70
, a lurid anthology of shorts inspired by the Renaissance poet. Fellini’s segment featured a woman afflicted by visions of saints. “It was my first glimpse of Italy,” Chase remembered. “I thought, ‘This is the kind of nonsense that goes on in my house. The melodrama and the self-pity and the obsessiveness and the craziness: This is my DNA.’”
    Soon he began dabbling in photography, taking still pictures of
8½
and Stanley Kubrick films on his television. After two years, he transferred to NYU to be closer to Denise and to immerse himself in Greenwich Village’s film scene. As they would for scores of others, the art films of that period presented Chase with a new creative model. Leaving a screening of Roman Polanski’s
Cul-de-Sac
in 1966,
he had a revelation. “Before, I thought films just arrived from the factory, like they were Chevys or Fords. Leaving that theater, I remember thinking, ‘These films are personal, they’re made by a
person
.’ It crystallized for me that it was something one could do.”
    After college, Chase and Denise married and the couple headed west, ending up at Stanford University, where Chase took film classes. There, Chase became close friends with a fellow student and teaching assistant, John Patterson. He was dashing: ruddy, bearded, an ex-navigator for the Strategic Air Command that had spent twenty-four-hour shifts airborne during the Cuban missile crisis. On the surface, Patterson, who would go on to be the most prolific director of
The Sopranos
’ early seasons, couldn’t have been more different from Chase, who had left Norma behind, but not her legacies of fearfulness and depression. But the men bonded over film and drugs and rock and roll. On one memorable night, the Chases and Patterson and his girlfriend dropped acid and headed into San Francisco to see
2001: A Space Odyssey
.
“It was the best time of my life,” Chase recalled. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of trying to go back to the well—tripping once again for a Palo Alto screening of