ENGL 4860:
Special Topics in Film Studies
The Gangster Film
Spring 2011
Room: PH 322
Day/Time: Monday, 430-730 pm
Gangster Film
David Chase, The Sopranos, and
Television Creativity
Bonnie: Livia, ever hear the old Italian saying
my aunts used: col tempo la foglia, di gelso
divena seta?
Carmela: What does that mean, Bonnie?
Bonnie: Time and patience change the
mulberry leaf to silk.
From “46 Long” on The Sopranos, written
by David Chase
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David Chase (1945- )
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David Chase (1945- )
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David Chase (1945- )
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“Though he admits to loving television as a kid, the affair didn’t
last. ‘I fell out of love with TV probably after The Fugitive went
off the air [1967]. And then when I had my first network meeting,
that didn’t help’ (Rucker Interview). ‘I hated everything that
corporate America had to offer,’ Chase tells Rucker. ‘I
considered network TV to be propaganda for the corporate
state – the programming not only the commercials. .I’m not a
Marxist and I never was very radical, but that’s what I
considered it to be. To some extent, I still do.’ . . . It should not
surprise us that Chase thinks of himself as ‘The first
counterculture … person in hour drama’ (Rucker interview) He
has remained an in-house renegade.”--David Lavery and
Robert J. Thompson, “David Chase, The Sopranos, and
Television Creativity”
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Interviews with David Chase
Bogdanovich
Rucker
Lawson
Nochimson
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“You know, when it comes down to it,
I just try to entertain myself and solve
creative problems. My major impulse
is try never to do the same thing. To
run away from what was done. To run
away from what other people are
doing.”--David Chase (Interview with
Martha Nochimson)
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“[Northern Exposure was]
propaganda for the corporate
state … it was ramming home
every week the message that ‘life
is nothing but great,’ ‘Americans
are great’ and ‘heartfelt emotion
and sharing conquers
everything’.”
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“I loathe and despise
almost every second of
[network television].”-David Chase (Rucker
interview)
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“David Chase’s mulberry leaves were many, his patience
extraordinary, his creative achievement decades in the
making. A precocious child, a devotee of Freud in high
school, where he authored a blasphemous story in which
“somebody spies the Apostles sneaking Jesus’ body out
of the tomb, right before they go ‘Oh, my God, he’s
resurrected.’” Chase longed as a young man to be a
filmmaker or perhaps a rock and roll musician. An
English major in college (first at Wake Forest, later at
New York University), like contemporaries and nearcontemporaries Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese,
and George Lucas, Chase then went on to attend film
school—at Stanford. The pilot for The Sopranos,
however, would not be written until he served twenty
seven reluctant years in television, beginning as a writer
in 1971.”
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“I had a bad reputation. . . . ‘He’s very talented but he’s
too dark. His material is too dark.’ And that was both in
movies and in TV. You know, it’s that thing out there
that once you’re in the club it take you a while to wash
out. And so even though I had deal after deal after
deal, in which nothing happened, I still kept getting
hired because something had happened once.”
--David Chase (Mark Lawson interview, 2007)
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“I’m still . . . too angry. I . . . shouldn’t be this angry. I
shouldn’t be this volatile for my age and for the . . . for,
basically what’s been a really great life. I have a great
family. I have a great career. And I . . . you know, and
what am I so pissed off about?”
--David Chase (Mark Lawson interview, 2007)
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