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Don't Stop Believin'

Emmy Awards 2007: The Sopranos is Honored as the Best Drama Series... Was There Ever Any Doubt?
WantMoreSopranos.com
September 17, 2007

The 2007 Primetime Emmy Awards were a roller-coaster of unexpected events. Going into the Award show with a whopping 15 nominations, David Chase and The Sopranos had very high expectations to completely dominate the awards show.

After about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the 2007 Emmys and with The Sopranos winning 0 of 4, Alan Taylor, Director of The Sopranos, won an award for Best Directing for a Drama Series.

Shortly thereafter, the mastermind behind it all, David Chase, won the award for Best Writing for a Drama Series...

This is really great," Sopranos creator David Chase said, accepting the best drama award. "I've said it many times and I'll say it again, but maybe the best thing about this has been working with this cast. They are great."

"I couldn't have done it by myself, it seems like I did, but I didn't," Chase said. "This amazing cast is really what it comes down to, the whole thing, it really is all about them," he said.

With the show leaning towards it's final moments, The Sopranos, after falling short 5 times in past Emmy Award shows, won the award for Outstanding Drama Series.

Though individual actors/actresses such as James Gandolfini and Edie Falco did NOT win awards for Best Male/Female Performance in a Drama Series, the cast as a whole were thrilled to have won the award for Best Drama Series.

Tony Sirico, who played Paulie, said those who weren't whacked in the show's waning weeks are hoping their characters might live on in a movie: "There's hopeful talk among us who are still alive."

James Gandolfini To Play Sports Promoter Sonny Vaccaro In HBO Film About Kids' Basketball Camp
Starpulse News Blog
August 14, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) - From waste management to hoops! James Gandolfini will follow up his role as fictitious mobster Tony Soprano by playing real-life corporate sports scout Sonny Vaccaro in an HBO film.

The movie, called ''ABCD Camp,'' is a drama about the youth basketball camp established by Vaccaro, who's also known as the man who got Michael Jordan to sign the first million-dollar shoe deal at Nike.

HBO spokeswoman Angela Tarantino confirmed the project - first reported by Variety - is in development with HBO Films.

The Vaccarro film won't be Gandolfini's first appearance on HBO after concluding his eight-year run on ''The Sopranos'' in June. As executive producer of ''Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq,'' he interviews U.S. veterans from the Iraq war in this documentary, which premieres Sept. 9.

David Chase on the ending of "The Sopranos"
Orlando Sentinel
July 22, 2007

David Chase finally had some thoughts to offer about the it-just-ends-in-a-diner finale of "The Sopranos."

"It is possible and very likely to be sitting in a restaurant in New Jersey, and everything just stops," Chase said Saturday night.

He made the comment in collecting a prize from the Television Critics Association. He drew on his past in explaining how audiences sometimes misconstrue endings. He told of being 23, attending Stanford University and seeing "Planet of the Apes," the 1968 sci-fi classic with a memorable ending.

"When the movie was over, I said, 'Wow, so they had a Statue of Liberty, too,' " Chase said as critics laughed. "That's what you're up against."

Earlier in the evening, Chase was more flip. "Here's another clue for you all: The Walrus was Paulie," he joked.

TV critics saluted "The Sopranos" as top drama of the past season. Later, the mob drama earned the Heritage Award, which honors an influential program. Edie Falco and Lorraine Bracco attended the event in Beverly Hills, Calif. Chase paid special tribute to James Gandolfini, who wasn't there.

Calling the actor "Mr. Gandolfini," Chase added, "We all know without him there would have been no show at all or a show so different I shudder to think about it."

Chase left the event quickly after collecting his second prize so he wouldn't have to listen to more questions from admiring but inquisitive critics.

NBC's "Heroes" earned the award for program of the year. Creator Tim Kring said the show offered a "message of hope and interconnectivity."

Individual achievement winners were Alex Baldwin of NBC's "30 Rock" for comedy, Michael C. Hall of Showtime's "Dexter" for drama and Mary Tyler Moore for career achievement.

Discovery Channel's "Planet Earth" won two awards: top special and outstanding news program. Other winners were NBC's "The Office" for comedy, NBC's "Friday Night Lights" for new program and ABC Family's "Kyle XY" for children's program. NBC was the big winner with four awards.

Fans Flock To 'Sopranos' Final Scene Diner
Starpulse News Blog
June 22, 2007

Fans of The Sopranos have been flocking to the New Jersey diner where James Gandolfini's character Tony Soprano sat with his family in the TV mob show's final scene.

The Sopranos' followers are inundating Holsten's in Bloomfield, New Jersey with bookings for the booth where Gandolfini sat and selected Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" from the jukebox. In fact, Holsten's is an ice cream parlor and doesn't have a jukebox.

Co-owner Chris Carley says, "The phone just rings constantly all day from people wanting to make reservations. They ask, 'Can we reserve the booth? Can we get a T-shirt?' It's just so funny that people want to sit in that booth. A lot of people are taking pictures."

'Sopranos' Set Items Up For Sale At Warehouse Near Show's Studio
The Associated Press
June 20, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) - The Sopranos are clearing out of the neighborhood. But first they're having a garage sale. It's not as if Dr. Melfi's chair, Tony's bathrobe or Silvio's hair care products are for sale, though. All the iconic stuff from ''The Sopranos'' has been shipped to California while HBO decides what to do with it now that the series is over.

Left behind Tuesday at a Queens warehouse were lamps, rotary telephones, Catholic statuettes, kitchen utensils, bed linens, clocks, chairs, more lamps and toys. Not much was recognizable, even to the most devoted fans of the show.

In fact, most of it is quotidian, ''The Sopranos'' producer Henry Bronchtein said.

''Ten years of junk, that's what we've got here,'' Bronchtein said. ''But you know, one person's junk is another person's treasure.''

If your idea of treasure is a yellow flour jar with fairy tale characters that might or might not have been in the kitchen of a character who disappeared after two episodes, it's yours for a dollar.

''If it doesn't get sold here,'' Bronchtein said, ''it's going to wind up in a big Dumpster, crushed and useless.''

Despite the reverse sales pitch, fans of the show made the trek to the warehouse around the corner from Silvercup Studios, the sound stage where most of the show's interiors were shot. The critically acclaimed series ended its run this month after debuting in 1999.

Jerome Jordan said he came to find the stripper pole from the Bada Bing, the strip club that was Tony's home away from home.

That wasn't available. But Jordan picked up a 6-inch horse statue he's sure was on the set during the brief period Tony owned a race horse.

George DelFarno drove from southern Delaware for the sale. He bought a desk lamp that looked like one of Tony's - the one the FBI put a bug in during an early season.

It wasn't the actual lamp, but owning a lamp that looked just like the one that had been bugged and was owned by the production company - well, that was close enough.

''Seven degrees of separation,'' DelFarno said with a laugh.

David Chase Interview Regarding Final Episode of The Sopranos
The Star Ledger
June 11, 2007

What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting 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 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 man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched 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 already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

"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, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, 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 mindset. 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 suggests 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 chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that 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 9.

"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "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 that 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 that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that 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," says Chase 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. "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 apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn'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 Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, 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.