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 B

Fellini’s
Satyricon
,
a disturbing grotesquerie under even the most sober of circumstances. The trip turned bad.
    “I was sitting in the theater thinking, ‘I don’t feel so good . . . I feel pretty bad. I wish I was dead. I’m going to die,’” he remembered. At some point, he began to believe that the Zodiac serial killer, then at large in the Bay Area, was out to get him. “The more I thought about it, the more my brain waves would attract his attention. So I needed to stop thinking about it, which of course made me think about it more,” he said. “It was a long twelve hours.”
    That passage, from joy to despair, became characteristic of Chase’s work, in which characters—Tony tripping on mescaline in the Nevada desert, Carmela Soprano musing on the “cold stones” of Paris, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri seeing the Virgin Mary in the back of the Bada Bing! strip club—are constantly glimpsing various kinds of transcendence, only to feel them slip away.
    “I would always go like that, in a circle: ‘Oh, this is so cool, this is amazing, this is really threatening, oh God, oh God . . . ,’” said Chase. “Experiences like that trip showed me the pattern very concisely: ‘This is the way you are. You get all excited, and then
too
excited, and then you start to worry and go into this slew of despond until something else distracts you and you go back up.’”
    • • •
    A fter Stanford, the Chases relocated to Los Angeles. The city entranced David. “L.A. was kind of cool then. It was all happening:
Easy Rider
, the Byrds, Jim Morrison—even though I was never a big Morrison fan. There was a whole bohemian thing, a lot of drugs around. And I loved all the old studios, the Raymond Chandler aspects of them at night, the fog. I was crazy about that shit,” he said. “It was weird, but I liked it.”
    Chase set out to become a screenwriter, laboring over film scripts while Denise worked. Throughout the next twenty years, he would always have at least one screenplay going. They would come to varying states of near success before collapsing. One, titled
Fly Me
, was about stewardesses. Another,
Female Suspects
, written in 1981, concerned a sociologist in New Jersey who gets caught up in the lives of the violent women she is studying. That script flirted with getting produced for ten years and was even briefly revived at Sony Pictures, following the debut of
The Sopranos
.
“Now, it would probably be on the Black List,” Chase said, referring to the yearly index of “best unproduced scripts” that began being compiled in 2005. Time after time, however, his film dreams ended in frustration. He said, “The word was, I was ‘too dark.’”
    Back in L.A., his career was prematurely stalled. He and Patterson took the Directors Guild trainee exam; Patterson passed, but Chase didn’t. He picked up odd jobs such as assistant director on soft-core porn films and stayed home, smoking a lot of pot and working on scripts. Then came a break: Toward the end of film school, Chase and a friend had written a spec script for Roy Huggins, a television producer most famous for creating the western
Maverick
, starring James Garner
.
“It was terrible. Just some Godardian half-assed gangster thing,” he said. But it was good enough that Huggins gave him a freelance script assignment for a new show about lawyers he was producing at Universal. Chase figured he’d made it: “I joined the guild, I got paid $2,300, which I couldn’t believe, and I was in the industry.”
    In fact, it was the last paid writing he’d do for two years. Given his lack of union-aided employment, he was indignant when the Writers Guild ordered him to the picket lines during its 1973 strike. It proved fortuitous. Marching dutifully outside the main gate of Paramount Studios, Chase was introduced to Paul Playdon, a writer and story editor with a reputation as a kind of storytelling wunderkind for his work on
Mission: