The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  “There is a tremendous unease right now with judgments of any kind, yet at the same time, as you watch the show, you make moral judgments anyway. You kind of go back and forth. That’s also reflective of this moment in history. It’s mordantly in tune with the way things are right now. The Sopranos is sort of a big moral question mark.”

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  A Star of Stage and Sopranos, Nancy Marchand Dies of Cancer

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 6/20/2000

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  NANCY MARCHAND, who played a monstrous matriarch on HBO’s The Sopranos and a blueblood newspaper publisher on CBS’s long-running Lou Grant, died Sunday night at her home in Stratford, Connecticut, after a long battle with lung cancer.

  Marchand’s death came on the day before what would have been her seventy-second birthday. She was best known to contemporary audiences for her Emmy-nominated, Golden Globe-winning work on The Sopranos, a drama about suburban New Jersey gangsters that her character, Livia Soprano, ruled with a Roman senator’s guile. Furious over being put in a nursing home by her son, crime boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), Livia plotted to unseat Tony from power by any means necessary, including murder. Her nonstop nagging and frequent admissions of memory loss camouflaged a hitman’s savagery and a monk’s patience.

  The role of Livia was merely the last in a fifty-year run of distinguished stage, screen, and TV characterizations. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, Marchand played a startling variety of roles, appearing in everything from stage productions of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams to movies (including the 1970 satire The Hospital, opposite George C. Scott) to primetime series (including Cheers, on which she played the mother of Kelsey Grammer’s character, Dr. Frasier Crane).

  “This is a great loss to American theater and film,” said Dominic Chianese, who plays elderly crime boss Corrado “Uncle Junior” Soprano on the HBO series.

  “This was someone who had enough range to play Mrs. Pynchon on Lou Grant and then do that extraordinary mother on The Sopranos,” said Mason Adams, Marchand’s costar on Lou Grant as well as numerous stage productions. “She was an amazingly versatile actress.”

  Marchand’s breakthrough came on March 24, 1953, when she starred opposite Rod Steiger in the original live telecast of Marty, playwright Paddy Chayefsky’s gritty drama about a meek Bronx butcher. One of the biggest ratings hits of the live TV era, Marty was remade two years later as a hit film that won four Academy Awards.

  Marchand’s lengthy list of Broadway and off-Broadway credits included Obie-winning parts in The Cocktail Hour and The Balcony and a Tony-nominated role in White Liars and Black Comedy. Her motion picture work ranged from Paddy Chayefsky’s 1970 The Hospital, a satirical expose of corruption and incompetence in American medicine, to slapstick roles in The Naked Gun and the Marx Bros.–style slapstick farce Brain Donors.

  During her Lou Grant stint, Marchand won four consecutive Emmy awards as best supporting actress in a drama, from 1978 to 1982. Her character, Mrs. Pynchon, was a tough, smart, socially connected newspaper heiress partly modeled on Katharine Graham, the longtime publisher of the Washington Post.

  “I first met her at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., back in 1959,” said Lou Grant star Ed Asner. “She dazzled me with her acting, and with her legs as well. She was an experience. She was a learning experience. She was a joy experience. She was a regular guy, if you know what I mean. She was tough.”

  Asner fondly recalled the speed with which Marchand could size up a script and mine it for unexpected emotions.

  “This woman would get a script and find the faults within it immediately. I was always dazzled by her incisiveness. Once we got on our feet and began acting a scene, she would just dazzle me with the depths she would pull out of a character, or from a single speech within the scene. I regarded her as one of the premier actresses in America.”

  Victor Kemper, a Newark native and president of the American Society of Cinematographers, worked with Marchand on The Hospital and several commercials. “She really had a sense of what was going on around her, and was always receptive to comments by the director or the camera crew. She was a true collaborator, as opposed to some of these people who insist on only doing it their way.”

  The Sopranos creator David Chase said Marchand’s passing left “a huge hole” in the show—not just because the issue of Livia’s declining health was not resolved before Marchand’s death, but also because Marchand was well-liked for her talent, professionalism, and “deadpan” sense of humor. “She could defeat any stupid or pompous situation with just one or two well-timed words. . . . When we used to rehearse the scenes between Livia and Tony, and we’d kind of unveil them for the first time so we could block them, she just had everybody in stitches the whole time.”

  Marchand’s casting as a middle-class Italian American struck some observers as surprising, since most viewers knew her from her WASPy part on Lou Grant. Marchand, as always, confounded those would pigeonhole her, winning critical acclaim and numerous awards and nominations. She continued to act on The Sopranos even after it became known she was fighting a losing battle with lung cancer. (Marchand’s husband of forty-seven years, actor Paul Sparer, died in November, also of cancer.)

  Chase said he and Marchand had discussed what to do in the event the actress died—whether to film a death episode in advance or to have it happen offscreen. By mutual agreement, the matter was never resolved.

  “We came to the conclusion that we would deal with it when it happened,” Chase said. “I mean, what could you do? We really had no contingency plan.”

  Chase said the most surprising thing about Marchand’s performance as Livia was her ability to make a monstrous character seem human, as sad and lonely as she was ruthless. “The most surprising thing, given what the character of Livia is like, is that so many people came up to me after the series debuted and said, ‘My God, I hate to tell you this, but my mother is like that.’ Or maybe they had a grandmother, or an aunt. I don’t think they meant these women took things as far as trying to have a son killed. They were talking about general long-suffering morbid attitude. A complete and utter selfishness.”

  Asner fondly remembered another side of Marchand: her driving. “I brought her home to dinner one time. She followed me on the freeway. You know these people who feel they have to leave 1,000 feet between you and them as you’re leading them? Nancy was like that. . . . I’d practically have to come to a complete stop on the freeway and wait around for her to surface. It was the most unbelievable, mind-destroying trip I’ve ever taken. I hope somebody doesn’t have to lead her to heaven.”

  Mason Adams said he last saw Marchand a few weeks ago, when she came to Westport, Connecticut, to see her son-in-law sing at a concert. “She was there in a wheelchair. She was obviously very weak. But she came to hear her son-in-law sing. She was really something.”

  SEASON THREE: 2001

  Actor behind Artie Bucco Shows Another Side

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 9/16/2000

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  ACTOR JOHN VENTIMIGLIA is best known for his work on The Sopranos, where he plays restaurateur Artie Bucco. The character is a kind-hearted working man on a show full of violent misfits; a regular Joe who’s proud of his own labor, yet tempted by the dark allure of Mob life, represented by childhood pal Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). If you only associate Ventimiglia with Artie, his star turn in the low-budget independent picture On the Run might come as a bit of a shock. The film, which opened yesterday in a limited run in Manhattan, is a droll urban comedy that pairs him with longtime friend Michael Imperioli, who plays volatile young mobster Chris Moltisanti on The Sopranos.

  In typecasting terms, they’re playing each other’s roles. This time, Imperioli is the law-abiding, responsible one, meek travel agent Albert DeSantis. Ventimiglia takes the showier role as Albert’s childhood buddy Louie Salazar, a sexy, dangerous charmer who reenters Albert’s life after busting out of prison. As Louie, Ventimig
lia, who is not a large man, somehow seems enormous—a charismatic, Jack Nicholson–style alpha male who has a good time at everyone else’s expense.

  “I’m a big fan of ’70s films,” said Ventimiglia, talking to a reporter over sandwiches and olives at his favorite Italian deli in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and two young children. “This is that kind of movie, with that kind of role—something like you’d get from Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino or Gene Hackman back then.”

  Ventimiglia isn’t banking on this one role to prove his versatility as a leading man, but he thinks it’s a step in the right direction. But since he plays a recurring role on a hit show, it’ll be an uphill battle.

  In the middle of the interview, a stranger walks into the deli, ducks around the seated Ventimiglia to get a Coke from the refrigerator, and delightedly exclaims, “Hey, Artie! How’s the restaurant business?”

  “It’s doing fine, man, just fine,” says Ventimiglia, smiling.

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  HBO Turns an Office Manager into a Mobster’s Wife

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 2/22/2001

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  WHEN DENISE BORINO auditioned for a bit part on The Sopranos, she says she wasn’t anxious. She had so much on her mind that winning a part was the least of her worries.

  “My grandmother had just passed away,” says the Roseland resident, who has a small role in three episodes this season as Ginny Sack, the wife of New York Mob captain Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola). “On the Tuesday night when I went to read, I was missing the night-time part of her wake. With all of that going on, I never had the chance to think about being nervous.”

  Borino is an office manager and legal assistant for Coffey & Sullivan, a law firm in Morristown. Like seven other nonprofessionals—four from New Jersey, one from Philadelphia, two from New York—Borino attended an open casting call in Harrison last July seeking fresh faces for HBO’s crime drama.

  ______

  Borino says she came away from the experience impressed with the production—and very interested in acting again. “My first scene in my first episode was a scene with James Gandolfini. He was a very intelligent, nice guy. At the end of the shoot he made a point of coming over to tell me that I did a nice job. That made my day.”

  She insists she’s not going to have a party the night her first episode premieres. But her friends may have other ideas.

  “I said to my friends, ‘Gee, I don’t know if I’m gonna let you guys watch it with me.’ They were gonna tie me to a chair.”

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  Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 5/8/2001

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  SUNDAY’S SOPRANOS, titled “Pine Barrens” and built around a bizarre foot chase through snowy woods, was a brutal black comedy set in an icy white hell. It was also the finest hour the series has produced this season. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again; though some episodes this year have been quite good, this was the first one that indisputably equaled or surpassed anything from Season 1.

  The change of scenery probably had something to do with it. The Sopranos has two dominant colors, brown and green—brown for the whiskey-colored interiors where family business is conducted; green for the suburbs the title clan calls home. The bleached-out ivory tones of Sunday’s hour commanded attention; you got the sense that you were watching an hour which, somewhere down the road, would turn out to be pivotal.

  Written by a longtime Sopranos producer and director named Terence Winter (yes, that’s his real name), “Pine Barrens” was directed by actor Steve Buscemi, who knows a thing or two about shooting in snow after starring in the Coen brothers’ Fargo. (He’s also a superb filmmaker in his own right; if you haven’t seen his two features, the barroom comedy Trees Lounge and the prison drama Animal Factory, rent them immediately.)

  The main plot was delightfully strange: When regular bagman Silvio (Steve Van Zandt) falls ill with the flu, Tony (James Gandolfini) assigns Paulie (Tony Sirico) and Chris (Michael Imperioli) to collect money laundered by a Russian business associate. Unfortunately, the meeting with the Russian contact—a giant, loud-mouthed drunk named Valery (Vitali Baganov)—degenerates into an argument, then a fight, whereupon Paulie strangles the guy with a floor lamp—to death, or so he thinks.

  Turns out Valery’s too tough to die. Paulie and Chris stuff Valery, referred to in cell phone conversations as “the package,” in the trunk of Paulie’s car and take him out to the Pine Barrens to bury him. When Valery turns out to be alive, they make him dig his own grave.

  But the resourceful Valery, who was once an elite soldier in the Russian army, escapes (“The package hit Chrissie with an implement,” Paulie tells the boss, proving he’s not exactly the king of euphemisms). The baddest Russian since Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, Valery survives a wound to the head and leads the two hapless Jersey suburbanites on an increasingly weird and hopeless foot chase that resembles The Blair Witch Project by way of Dr. Zhivago. (Can a shooting war between two Jersey mobs be far off?)

  Though the bickering desperation of Paulie and Chris occupied center stage this hour, there was plenty of interesting secondary action, including Tony’s newly strained relationship with mistress Gloria Trillo (Anna-bella Sciorra), whom he keeps pushing away whenever work intrudes. “If I wanted to be treated like —, I’d get married,” she complained, before beaning Tony in the back of the neck with a cold slab of London broil.

  ______

  It’s interesting that “University,” the sickeningly violent episode of The Sopranos that aired earlier this year, was intended to evoke comparison to the first-season episode “College,” which some fans still think is the drama’s finest hour. Despite the lack of structural similarities, “Pine Barrens” is actually much closer in spirit to “College.” While furthering some of the series’ major plot strands, it’s a stand-alone, one-hour mini-movie that can be enjoyed by anyone who likes rough-edged black comedy.

  SEASON FOUR: 2002

  Can This Marriage Be Saved?

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 9/15/2002

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  AS THE SOPRANOS enters a season of which creator David Chase says the dominant theme will be the state of Tony and Carmela’s marriage, how healthy does Carmela’s alter ego Edie Falco find the union?

  “Who’s to say what’s healthy and unhealthy?” Falco asks. “It’s hard to see from how close I am [to the role], but I look around in the world, and there are a lot of marriages very similar to it, minus the Mob aspect. A lot of marriages exist with compromises, spoken and unspoken. For Carmela, there’s a sense of consistency: he does provide for his family, he does care for her and the children, and it gives her a place in society.”

  While Falco has never been married, she is frequently approached by female fans who explain how much Carmela inspires them in dealings with their own inconsiderate spouses, who may not be killers but nevertheless engage in plenty of hurtful behavior.

  “These women come up to me and say, ‘I just have to say I really find you a role model,’ which is really amazing to me,” says Falco. “‘He’s just like my husband, I love the way you deal with him, you tell it how it is.’”

  Which is not to say that Falco resents playing Carmela, who is now as comfortable as an old pair of shoes for her—literally. She noticed earlier this year that a pair she had been wearing as Carmela since the first season were completely worn out.

  “I can’t be more different from her, and on another level, I am her. She is this other corner of myself. It is an exceedingly fulfilling experience for an actor. I love that people know her.”

  And, of course, there’s always her acting marriage with James Gandolfini.

  “It is just perfect, the two of us,” she says of the partnership. “It reminds me of when I was a little kid and you used to play House. It feels like playing. I have never been more comfortable opposite an actor. It is pure serendipity; they could have cast two people where i
t didn’t happen.”

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  “Joey Pants” Comes Home

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 9/13/2002

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  “THIS IS WHERE I got my ass kicked by Rabies,” says Joe Pantoliano, grinning in the courtyard of the Jackson Street housing projects in Hoboken.

  “And right over there,” he says, racing excitedly into the middle of the street, “is where my dad and cousin Florie got into a fistfight and the car started rolling backward while Mommy was still in it.”

  Pantoliano, who plays sociopathic mobster Ralphie Cifaretto on The Sopranos, isn’t describing scenes from one of the dozens of movies and TV shows he’s appeared in. On a drizzly afternoon in late August, he’s taking a walk down his own personal Memory Lane.

  Pantoliano—or Joey Pants, as he’s known from Hudson County to Hollywood—spent the first fifteen years of his life growing up on the streets of Hoboken. Not the cleaned-up, yuppified Hoboken of today, but the rough-and-tumble, On the Waterfront Hoboken.

  “Now right here,” he says, pointing at a sewer grate a few blocks away from the projects, “is where Daddy dangled the kid who threw my ball down the sewer.”

  And, a few blocks north, he studies a forty-year-old dent left in the side of a brick apartment building when a car careened into it.

  “We were living on the second floor at the time, and Daddy poked his head out the window to see what happened, and it was a guy he knew,” says Pantoliano, amazed the brick hasn’t been replaced in all this time.