Separated at birth?
I first got interested in The Sopranos when someone told me I looked like the star. I was insulted that someone would mistake me for a middle-aged balding mobster until I tuned in the HBO mega-hit. (After all, when I was much younger my mother used to claim I resembled Omar Sharif, but that was many hairs ago, and she was prejudiced.) These days I’d be happy to be mistaken for James Gandolfini (he’s the balding middle-aged guy above right) whose nuanced, sympathetic performance as mob chieftain Tony Soprano is so captivating that during one show in the latest season, I blurted out to my wife, “I’d go to Tony’s funeral!”
Like many fans though, lately I’ve been suffering Sopranos withdrawal, a syndrome that develops after the current season finishes its run and we have to wait many months for a new one to begin.
To counter it, I recently picked up a copy of The Sopranos: Selected Scripts from Three Seasons which reproduces the shooting scripts of five episodes, including my favorite about the hapless adventures of Tony’s underlings, Christopher and Paulie, after an errand at the gaudily-mirrored apartment of a Russian gangster goes sour and they have to dispose of his body. The pair spend a bone-chilling night in the New Jersey Pine Barrens hunting for the victim who turns out to have nine lives. Static over cell phones between the pair and Tony lead to a hysterically funny mix-up, one of the comic throughlines that makes the series so unexpectedly appealing:
EXT. STREET – DAY
Tony walks down the street outside Slava’s, talking on his cell phone as he heads to the Suburban.
TONY
(through some static)
It’s a bad connection so I’m gonna talk fast!
The guy you’re looking for is an ex-commando!
He killed sixteen Chechen rebels single-handed!
PAULIE
Get the fuck outta here.
TONY
Yeah. Nice, huh? He was with the Interior Ministry.
Guy’s like a Russian green beret. He can not
come back and tell this story. You understand?
PAULIE
I hear you.
EXT. WOODS – DAY
Paulie clicks off, looks at Christopher.
PAULIE
You’re not gonna believe this.
(off Christopher’s look)
He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.
CHRISTOPHER
(amazed)
His house looked like shit.
Bada-Bing!
What makes this collection invaluable for any student of the writing craft is the four-page introduction by David Chase, the series creator. In it, he reveals the writing process behind the Sopranos, a series that reflects Chase’s love for “the foreign films I loved as a young adult for their ideas, their mystery and their ambiguity…”
I’ve boiled it down to a step-by-step run-through of the journey that Chase and his fellow writers take to produce one of the most successful series in television history:
1. Outline story arcs or “touchstones.”
Touchstone is Chase’s term for what journalists call the “focus,” or theme, that is, what the story is really about. As the show’s creator and executive producer, these are his call. “The main theme of season 2,” Chase explains, is “plateau therapy — it deals with what Tony discovered and acknowledged in therapy during season one and the feelings these insights evoked.”
2. Fill in the outline.
The touchstone will play out over the season’s 13 episodes, each of which features three to four story “strands — What we call an A, B, (the main storylines) C, (a less major strand) or even D storyline, usually a comic runner.”
As a template, Chase uses the “Happy Wanderer” episode, the one where gambler David Scatino loses at high stakes poker and pays off Tony with his son’s SUV: “The A strand of the story is the spider-fly relationship between Tony and David and how they both behave according to their true natures … The B story is the relationship between Meadow and Eric Scatino (the two men’s teenage children) … The C strand is Tony finding out he has a retarded uncle, and the D story is the funeral for the father of Tony’s brother-in law.”
3. Flesh out the story
In the writing room, Chase and the show’s other writer/producers “flesh out the story for each episode, listing the ‘beats,’ i.e. scenes, for the A-D stories, one story at a time, on a wipe-off board. Each strand has a beginning, middle and end and could stand alone as films.”
That explanation helped me understand why the Sopranos, unlike almost all other TV fare, so often delivers the narrative satisfaction of a feature film, that sense that characters have reached a resolution, if not a final stop. At its most frustrating, especially in the episodes leading up to the final one last season, episodes stopped frustratingly short of climax.
Each episode has about 35 beats; with the main A and B strands each getting 13 scenes. The C strand gets 5 or 6 and the comic runner D plays out in “just a few beats.”
4. Cut and (Scotch) Tape
The scenes on the board are typed up and then “literally cut apart with scissors” and then “married” together with Scotch tape in the order of the complete script. “For example, a scene from story A could be followed by a scene from B, then back to A, then C and so on,” Chase explains.
Once the writers are satisfied with the scene order “aka story” the taped pages are retyped and voila: an outline that the writer, whoever he is, must faithfully follow.
5. Writing and Whacking
Scripts may go through 10 drafts, revised with notes from Chase and other producers, before they’re seen by any of the cast or crew. And even after filming, Chase may spend months in the editing room, generating “many cuts all the way to the final — which could include reordering and omitting scenes.”
“I firmly believe,” Chase says, “that the more time a filmmaker has to edit, the better a piece will be.”
What impressed me about Chase’s deconstruction was the way the process mixes creativity with mechanical procedures, equal parts brainstorming and Scotch tape. Even the most creative enterprise involves a measure of tedium.
Now as I wait for the Sopranos’ next season to start- – Will Tony sleep with the fishes? Will Carmela run off to Italy with Furio? Will Christopher stay off smack? Will Meadow find her own mob man? Will Dr. Melfi get Tony back on Prozac and into the witness protection program? — I can watch the reruns and watch as each strand of the Sopranos’ stories weaves a dramatic experience that compels millions of law-abiding Americans to turn a stone-cold killer into a star.
It’s a fascinating process, and one that I think any storyteller can profit from studying. I’m grateful to David Chase for revealing it.
Displaying a refreshing humility for someone who’s achieved such success, Chase concludes his essay by paying homage to a legendary Japanese filmmaker and an attitude about craft dedication that he clearly emulates.
“I remember Akira Kurosawa saying at age 80-something that the great thing about filmmaking is you’re constantly learning. He was still learning, he said.”
And despite the Sopranos’ critical and commercial success, Chase says, “We’re continuing to learn.”
