The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Pantoliano has dozens of stories like these. As the son of two combative degenerate gamblers, growing up in a town where swag was the only acceptable merchandise at holiday time and budding juvenile delinquents like the aforementioned Rabies lurked around every corner, he would almost have to.

  His parents, Monk and Mary Pantoliano, skirted the edge of indigence for most of Joe’s childhood, preferring to change apartments instead of pay bills. Failing that, Mary used her powers of persuasion, which were legendary.

  “One time, my cousin Mario worked for Sears and Roebuck and they sent him to take our furniture,” he recalls. “She made him feel so bad, he lent her $200.”

  Mary loved her little Joey, but she had little patience for the other men in her life. (Pantoliano blames this attitude on his maternal grandfather, a terrifying brute who once shot a man in the leg for spitting on the sidewalk near Mary.) She would bully Monk every chance she got, verbally and physically. One night, a triumphant Monk returned home after bowling a 300 game. Mary accused him of catting around, and when Monk pointed to his bowling trophy as a defense, she whacked him with it so hard that she broke his collarbone.

  Pantoliano is as quick to defend his mother as he is to point out her missteps. “As nutty as she was, she was fun-loving,” he says.

  Cousin Florie, aka Florio Isabella, was a mobster who flitted in and out of young Joe’s life, disappearing for a long stretch when he was convicted of robbing the Hoboken ferry.

  “Florie went right up to the captain with a gun and said, “Captain, we have a mutiny,’” according to Pantoliano.

  Movie and TV actors have a lot of downtime between takes, and Pantoliano has spent a lot of his career filling that time by telling these tales of the old neighborhood.

  “Every time I tell the stories, people say, ‘These are fictional characters. These characters can’t be real.’ And I go, ‘No, I swear to Christ, they’re real.’”

  After toying for years with the idea of turning his family’s story into a movie—he briefly held rehearsals for the project, with Diane Lane playing his mother Mary and Andy Garcia as Florie—he decided it would work better as a book. Who’s Sorry Now?, cowritten by David Evanier, traces Pantoliano’s story from his birth until the day he left New Jersey to study acting.

  After living in southern California for the early part of his career, Pantoliano moved back to Hoboken a decade ago. Despite acting under a variety of toupees since losing his hair, he’s still easily recognizable as That Guy from The Matrix or Risky Business or The Sopranos, and he spends much of this walk through his childhood politely signing autographs.

  “I used to work with the real guys, down there,” says one wise-guy wannabe, as Pantoliano tries to keep from rolling his eyes. Another calls from across the street, “Hey, Ralphie! When’s the new season gonna start?”

  “I’m like a melting pot kind of actor,” he says. “People recognize me from everything. But I always know a Sopranos fan, because they always call me Ralphie. Every other movie people know me from, they go, ‘Hey, Joe Pantoliano,’ ‘Hey, Joey Pants.’”

  Despite its gritty urban feel, Hoboken is still only a mile square, and on this walk Pantoliano keeps bumping into people he knows or used to know: a local fire captain who helped him research portions of the book related to his grandfather, a grade school classmate he hasn’t seen in forty years.

  Pantoliano recognizes that the best he’ll ever do is to become the second-most-famous person to ever come out of Hoboken, but he has a more personal connection to Frank Sinatra than most: his mother grew up down the street from the Chairman of the Board, while his father’s family had an ongoing feud with the Sinatras.

  Family legend has it that Dolly Sinatra offered Monk’s father Pete $1,000 if he would recommend her husband to succeed him as Hoboken fire captain, but that Frank refused to fork over the cash after Pete held up his end of the deal. Monk Pantoliano’s hatred for Sinatra ran so deep that he literally got up from his deathbed at a South Jersey hospital when his doctor wouldn’t stop talking about Sinatra. (Monk died about an hour later at a different hospital.)

  “One of the things I found out while researching this book is that my grandfather owed money to this local bookie, and we think that the bookie approached Frank directly and said, “This guy owes me money, so just give it to me instead of him,’” says Pantoliano. “So [the family] made it a bigger deal than it maybe should have been.”

  Pantoliano insists he never knew anyone like Ralphie while growing up—“Nobody that crazy exists,” he says—but he did have Florie, who became his unofficial stepfather when Mary left Monk, as both a negative and positive influence. On the one hand, Florie took him to Mob hangouts and made the gangster lifestyle look incredibly glamorous. On the other, Florie did everything he could to keep Joe from getting into that life. While Mary was trying to keep her son close to home, Florie was encouraging his acting dreams and hooking him up with his first real acting teacher.

  “All these groups talk about The Sopranos and negative stereotypes,” says Pantoliano. “Well, I was raised by a negative stereotype that did an incredible thing for me. In me, I guess, he found a kid who had a chance that he never did.”

  The walk continues, as Pantoliano marvels over the life he’s built for himself. A dyslexic who was held back in school three times by teachers who were convinced he was developmentally disabled, he has now coauthored a book. A child of poverty, he’s one of the most sought-after character actors in Hollywood. And he owes it all to Hoboken.

  “Broke as we were, I always had a lot of fun living here,” he says. “It was a tough neighborhood. So what? You’d get smacked around every once in a while, but it helped me down the road. Getting rejected for an audition in a room, going in front of Bob Fosse and Martin Scorsese and having them say no is a lot easier than having Rabies hold you down and kick the [bleep] out of you. I was born to have somebody say no to me.”

  The grin that’s been plastered across Pantoliano’s face all day finally disappears as he approaches a building on Monroe Street, the second place he lived in and the location where the book’s cover photo was shot. The stoop he used to run up and down was torn up and badly reconstructed a few months ago.

  “Would you look at what they did to my stoop?” he sighs. “Who’s sorry now?”

  * * *

  Best of Both Worlds: Michael Imperioli Shines as Actor and Writer on The Sopranos

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 9/14/2002

  * * *

  FOR THIRTEEN WEEKS a year, Michael Imperioli gets to play impatient Sopranos wiseguy Christopher Moltisanti. For one or two weeks a year, he gets to play with everyone else on the show.

  ______

  “Writing for the show came out of my love of the other characters and wanting to put myself into their shoes for a bit,” says Imperioli, who also cowrote the screenplay for Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam. “I loved the characters, particularly Paulie Walnuts, who for some reason I have an affinity for, and for Silvio, whose voice I really like getting into.”

  During the hiatus between the first two seasons, he sat down and wrote an uncommissioned script that featured Christopher overdosing on heroin and having an out-of-body experience.

  He warily approached Sopranos creator David Chase, who explained that the writers were already planning to have Christopher get shot. The two ideas were combined for “From Where to Eternity,” which became one of that season’s highlights.

  ______

  “Michael’s just like any other writer on the show at this point,” says writer/producer Terence Winter. “His stuff is really good.”

  Imperioli has written two of the upcoming season’s thirteen episodes, including “Christopher” (the title refers to Columbus, not Moltisanti), a comic look at ethnic pride—and a not-so-thinly-veiled rebuttal to all the Italian American activists who claim that the Sopranos mobsters promote negative stereotypes.

  “I don’t buy this thing that we’re supposed to represent
demographics and ethnic groups of people,” says Imperioli, who also appeared in Good-fellas. “It’s drama. Were the Greeks upset because one of the first plays was Oedipus? Does that mean Greeks are these treacherous, crazy people? This show is not meant to represent the Italian American experience. It’s about a specific group of people, a specific time and place.

  “I think most people know it’s a TV show and don’t think every Italian person they meet is in the Mafia,” he adds. “And the idea that Italians are held back by The Sopranos? We assimilated years ago, we’re already senators and governors and lawyers on all levels of society. I just think [the activists are] crybabies.”

  * * *

  ‘Sopranos’ Cast Flourishes with Late-Blooming Actors

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 9/5/2002

  * * *

  GROWN MEN DON’T up and quit their jobs to join the Mafia. They do, on occasion, quit their jobs to play Mafia bosses on TV.

  ______

  The latest addition to the cast continues the Sopranos tradition of late-bloomers. Vincent Curatola, who becomes a full-time regular this year as New York underboss Johnny Sack, was a masonry contractor until the early ’90s.

  ______

  Until 1989, the closest Curatola came to acting was working the phones at his Bergen County contracting company.

  “My wife, Maureen, said to me, “You’re so good with customers, with people at banks, and you change gears so quickly from one phone call to the next, you really need to be an actor.’”

  Curatola had grown up admiring the actors he saw on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movie, but he didn’t think much of his wife’s flattery until she showed him an ad in Backstage magazine about an acting class being taught by Michael Moriarty. Moriarty was intrigued enough by Curatola’s call to invite him to audit the class, and the contractor quickly became a classroom fixture.

  “After about a month and a half, I was comfortable enough to begin actually working on a monologue, and that’s how it began,” he says. “I would go out and rent a space every couple of months to let the students come and do a showcase for agents. I took over the production end of the Michael Moriarty acting studio.

  “Every time I walk into something, I wind up taking it over.”

  “None of us are kids,” he says. “There are things that we’ve all experienced being businessmen or whatever we were before this that enhances what we do on-screen. It fits so well that we would be so adamant about a particular deal or a particular split on the money. The fact that a lot of us have come from other avenues just adds to the realism.”

  SEASON FIVE: 2004

  Buscemi Joins the Family

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 3/4/2004

  * * *

  STEVE BUSCEMI WANTED to be on The Sopranos from the minute he first saw it. David Chase wanted Buscemi on the show from the minute he created it.

  But both men were too afraid of rejection to approach the other about a role on the show—even when Buscemi was on set to direct the famous “Pine Barrens” episode.

  “We never talked about it,” recalls Chase, “because I was embarrassed to ask him to come on the show. He’s Steve Buscemi, he’s got a thriving feature career, and the TV life is very difficult for an actor.”

  “It’s something that I thought about sometimes,” says Buscemi, “but I was too shy to mention it.”

  ______

  Because Buscemi had been a Sopranos fan from the beginning—he had actually hoped to direct episodes in the first two seasons but couldn’t because of schedule conflicts—he found himself a bit starstruck when it came time to step in front of the camera.

  “All of a sudden being in a diner with Tony Soprano—there’s this thing that I just go, ‘I can’t believe that I’m doing this,’” he says.

  ______

  Buscemi is remaining mum on the overall plan for Tony Blundetto, but he did let one detail slip at a recent news conference: “I keep my head, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  * * *

  Chase Follows His Inner Mobster

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 3/2/2004

  * * *

  DAVID CHASE TRIES not to pay attention to the complaints. Really, he does. The Sopranos creator still remembers the blissful experience of making the first season, when every scene was written, shot, and edited long before anyone had any idea what the show would become. So every year, he encourages his fellow writers to seal themselves into soundproof cocoons and ignore what’s being written and said about their work.

  But occasionally, he lets the rising din get to him.

  “There was one woman writer who said, ‘Whack somebody! Whack somebody for God’s sakes!’” says the Caldwell native. “So this year we decided to whack somebody who looks like her.”

  Whacking—or the lack thereof—was the hot-button issue surrounding the fourth season. After getting slammed the previous year for too much violence, suddenly Chase was being accused of not showing enough blood and guts.

  “I’m somewhat mystified by a lot of those comparisons,” he says. “I thought there was a fair amount of violence last year, and then people say there’s not enough violence, too much violence.”

  Season five seems to have upped the potential for mayhem with a story arc inspired by an article Chase read in the Star-Ledger about mobsters convicted in the RICO trials of the ’80s finally getting paroled. But Chase denies the arc is a reaction to any of the people who view Sopranos as a reality-style show where someone has to get whacked every week.

  “We just try to do what interests us at the time,” he says. “When people look at it as Survivor with bullets, I find that kind of galling.”

  ______

  All the “Where’s the whacking?” carping might cause another writer to wish he was creating a less brutal world, but Chase understands the deal he made with the devil when he turned a show about his own family into a Family show.

  “There wouldn’t be the same show if Tony wasn’t a mobster,” he says. “That Mob spine intensifies everything. If Tony was selling medical replacement hips, it wouldn’t be life and death. The little things of every day wouldn’t have the same resonance. It intensifies the banal and mundane stuff.”

  Tony’s winter will come at the end of next season (premiere date unknown), which will be the show’s last. Previous seasons have been written largely in isolation from each other, but the fifth was crafted with an eye on the finish line.

  “There are things that were laid down some time ago that have yet to play out,” he says. “I’m talking about people’s destiny—not so much crime plots, but how people are going to grow up or not grow up or how they’re going to finish out their final years.”

  SEASON SIX: 2006

  Until “Whacking Day” Do They Part

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 3/7/2006

  * * *

  THE QUESTION OF who gets whacked and when can be a fun parlor game for Sopranos fans, but it’s deadly serious business for the people who work on the show, from the actors who constantly have to fear for their employment to the writers who have to put them out of work.

  “One of the things we agreed on early on was that we would not keep a character alive because we liked the actor,” says writer/producer Terence Winter. “We’ve liked all the actors, from Vinny Pastore and before him on. We’d never kill anybody [otherwise]. The writers have to say, ‘What makes the best sense for this story? What would Tony do? Pussy was a rat: gone.’ But we work with these people for so long, and they’re your friends. I’m sure for them it’s hard, too, you’re out of work. But it’s sad, it feels like somebody is going.”

  “We realize that someone is going to be put out of work,” says creator David Chase. “But the fact of the matter is, we’re all here to tell a story, including the actors, and that’s their part in it. And when you take a job in a Mob show, you have to understand that.”

  Chase’s willingness to sacrifice other characters for the sake of Tony’s story has created an understandable climate of
paranoia on the set.

  “We always ask each other, ‘What have you heard?’” says Joseph Gannascoli, who plays capo Vito Spatafore.

  “I race through the scripts every time I get one,” says Tony Sirico, “just to make sure that it ain’t my time. It’s just the luck of the draw that I’ve made it up until now.”

  ______

  “There are some people who come to me constantly,” says Chase, “and tell me conditions under which they will and won’t go: ‘If I’m going out, I’m not going out as a rat. I told you that from day one!’ ‘If you’re gonna kill me, you’ve gotta massacre me.’ ‘I gotta be in the movie.’ ‘I want to launch a spinoff. Don’t do it!’”

  ______

  “When you’re asked to dinner,” deadpans Michael Imperioli, “it’s not such a good thing.”

  * * *

  The Stuff That Tony’s Dreams Are Made of

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 3/6/2006

  * * *

  THERE ARE GOING to be more dreams. Deal with it.

  ______

  The only complaint more persistent among Sopranos fans than all the whining about whacking are those loud and long protests whenever Tony checks into a hotel and the viewers check into his unconscious mind.

  “The Test Dream” seemed to especially anger the whacking crowd because it took place late in the season, just as the New York Mob civil war storyline was threatening to satisfy their bloodlust.