One of the great things about The Sopranos was the way it played with fact and fiction. The Sopranos had embedded in it an ongoing critique, or maybe parody, of the way reality is depicted by TV. David Chase took delight in mocking the established conventions of dramatic closure and edifying moral lesson that TV had always peddled. His show pretended to realism while depicting a perennial fictional American archetype, the Italian mobster; it became a hit dramatic series, based on wonderfully written scripts, in an era when “reality TV” and (at least putatively) unscripted stories were the hottest innovations in the medium. Untying the knots Chase’s series wove between his world and our own became one of the delights fans found so fascinating about Tony Soprano’s story.
Chase himself had described the show as The Simpsons with guns or Twin Peaks in the Meadowlands. He was thinking of the vulgarity of The Simpsons, its anarchic parody of the ups and downs of family life as it is usually shown on TV. The Sopranos would be a parody of Italian gangster movies, of the sentimental mythic sheen The Godfather movies peddled, and of day-to-day suburban life. We’d see Tony Soprano drive to the mall, buy an ax at a gardening center, play golf with his next door neighbor.
Gandolfini said that he’d heard Chase say the show was a story about “people lying to themselves” about who they are.
Gandolfini’s performance carried the greatest truth. He seemed to braid reality and art effortlessly. He was, of course, a Jersey guy—even though he needed an accent coach to get that clipped, central Jersey, staccato-Italianese sound. He was gregarious, but he could be moody; he was gently clumsy, sweet, and intuitive about the feelings of others, but he could be forceful when pushed or cornered, like you might expect of a former nightclub bouncer. On the show, when Tony is spotted at the gardening center carrying the ax, his neighbor visibly quakes with fear at the sight. Gandolfini’s eyes record first bland suburban bonhomie, then consternation, then realization, followed quickly by a faint hint of anger at his inability to blend into his identity as just another suburban dad. Jim could encapsulate the entire narrative arc of the season in three or four muscle twinges around his oddly transparent, hooded eyes.
The rest of the cast—at least, the rest of the male actors—wanted to get across the same pugnacious authenticity. It came easy to Tony Sirico, who played Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, the Soprano family captain and enforcer: Sirico had been arrested twenty-eight times in his youth, spending seven years altogether behind bars, and claimed to have been offered the chance to be made in the Mafia. He said he’d turned them down because he had “troubles with authority.” By the time The Sopranos had started he’d been in maybe forty movies and fifty TV shows, almost always playing a mobster or some other kind of heavy.
But everybody started getting into character on the set, and it got hard sometimes to go back to being themselves. Producer Brad Grey said contract negotiations became “testosterone-fueled” as the guys started channeling their characters when they talked with management.
The strangest twists started happening in real life. Michael “Big Mike” Squicciarini played hitman “Big Frank” Cippolina for two episodes of the 2000 season. Then “Big Frank” got whacked, and Big Mike left the show; and then Big Mike himself died in 2001, of natural causes.
Yet even after his two deaths—the fictional one followed by the real one—Squicciarini’s name turned up in 2002 in papers filed by Manhattan D.A. Michael Hillebrecht against the Brooklyn branch of the DeCavalcante Mafia clan. The government asserted that Squicciarini, who was six-five and weighed upward of three hundred pounds, had been present when drug dealer Ralph Hernandez was executed by Joseph “Joe Pitts” Conigliaro from his wheelchair back in 1992.
Big Mike wasn’t around to defend his good name (given his previous five-year stint in prison for an aggravated assault committed in Monmouth County, New Jersey, his defense might have been flawed in any case). But Squicciarini’s posthumous rap sheet justified “former Sopranos actor linked to cold-blooded murder” as a media factoid.
Squicciarini’s bit part on The Sopranos came eight years after a prosecutor alleged he was in the background for a mob rubout, but the story acquired legs when Robert Iler, who played Tony’s son, A. J. Soprano, was arrested for robbery and marijuana possession in July 2001. Iler was hanging out with three other teenagers in his Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan when they ran into two sixteen-year-old tourists from Brazil. Iler and his buddies demanded their wallets, making off with $40.
The tourists flagged down a passing police car and caught up with the four teens in nearby John Jay Park, sitting on a bench. Iler was sixteen himself at the time. “Life imitates television” was the lede in story after story.
When the posthumous Squicciarini story came out, the media saw a pattern. From then on, no Sopranos actor could have a brush with the law without a media ripple. As with Squicciarini, there was no statute of limitations, either. In April 2005, for example—nearly four years after “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero was liquidated on HBO—the actor who played him, Vincent Pastore, was charged with attempted assault on his then-girlfriend, Lisa Regina, in Little Italy, of all places. He ultimately agreed to do seventy hours of community service after pleading guilty to attempted assault, and later settled a civil suit with Regina out of court. Most headlines about Pastore’s problem had the word Sopranos in them.
Nine months later, the worst imitation of art occurred. Lillo Brancato, Jr., who played aspiring mobster Matthew Bevilaqua, was arrested and charged with manslaughter for an attempted burglary in the Bronx. A police officer, Daniel Enchautegui, was shot and killed when he confronted Brancato and his accomplice. The partner went to jail for life without parole; Brancato was acquitted of murder charges, but got ten years for first-degree attempted burglary. When Gandolfini died, reporters went to the New York state prison where Brancato was serving time to get his reaction.
No offense was too petty. Near Christmas in 2006, Louis Gross, who played Tony’s muscle-bound bodyguard Perry Annunziata, was arrested. Gross was pinched for criminal mischief after a woman said he had tried to break into her house in New York City. (He subsequently received probation.)
Even ending the show didn’t stop the stories. In October 2011, more than three years after the last episode of The Sopranos aired, John Marinacci was charged with taking part in a “low-level gambling operation in the Gambino Bookmaking Enterprise” along with thirty-six others. Marinacci, who taught poker in real life and had played a dealer in two 2004 episodes of The Sopranos, went on to bit parts in Boardwalk Empire, too. (His legal responsibility in the gambling case remains unresolved as we go to press.) In December that same year, Anthony Borgese, who had played captain “Larry Boy” Barese on The Sopranos, pleaded guilty to arranging the beating of a man who owed money to an upstate car dealership. A Gambino family heavy did the beating, breaking the victim’s ribs and jaw. Borgese, who also goes by the stage name Tony Darrow, got a reduced sentence by agreeing to speak to youth groups about the dangers of mob involvement and film a public service ad.
By the end of the show’s run, The Sopranos was so synonymous with American organized crime that TV news shows would use the logo—“Sopranos” with an automatic pistol as the “p”—as a symbol for crime news. When New Jersey police broke up a ring of Jewish rabbis who were selling human organs on the black market with mob help in 2009, a New York station actually ran their account over a clip of Tony getting out of his SUV taken from the show’s familiar opening credits. Jon Stewart, another Jersey native, devoted a couple of minutes on The Daily Show to the ethnic alphabet soup of organized crime his home state had become in the media.
It’s hard to interpret this leitmotif in the tabs and Hollywood press without thinking about Italian cultural stereotypes. Just about every immigrant group of any size in America has generated its own criminal subculture: There are Irish mobsters and Jewish mobsters and Lebanese mobsters. Not to mention Hungarian, Chinese, French, and Russian gangsters. Examples
show up all the time in the movies; even Gandolfini played a KGB-turned-Russian-mob killer in Terminal Velocity.
But Italians are somehow the real mobsters, even today. If you go to a strip club in the Russian section of Brooklyn called “Little Odessa,” home to local franchises of the Russian Mafia, you’ll see nude revues of pretty blond Russian girls dressed (only) in Armani suit jackets and Borsalinos, dancing to a discofied version of The Godfather theme. The movies had a lot to do with that—Edward G. Robinson (who was as Jewish as those organ-thieving rabbis) playing Little Caesar, deadly but dapper, is a case in point. But as we already noted, the movies enshrined Irish mobsters, too, like James Cagney. Tony Sirico told me that the way Paulie Walnuts holds the pinky ring on his right hand with his left, both arms held out flat in front of his stomach, is his personal homage to Cagney.
Italian-Americans attribute the focus on Italian gangsters to sheer prejudice. “My grandfather never considered himself white.…” Italian-American cultural organizations protested The Sopranos throughout its run. Some towns along “Guinea Gulch,” like Bloomfield itself, refused to allow the show to film in their precincts. All of Essex County public property, including the parks and nature preserves, was declared off-limits for filming The Sopranos in 2000 because the county commissioners felt the production showed Italian-Americans in a “less than favorable light.” In 2002, after the episode titled “Christopher” tackled questions of Italian-American identity through Newark’s annual Columbus Day parade, its organizers officially banned Sopranos cast members from taking part. “Come on, you can’t poke fun at yourselves,” Gandolfini said about this Italo-delicacy. “What is that? You got to be able to poke fun at yourselves. In terms of the violence and things like that, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. ‘Oh, they are making these monsters cuddly and nice,’ and then we will do an episode with the stripper where we show what these guys are capable of and the violence is too much. Are you crazy? It’s a depiction of these people.”
But other towns, often more affluent ones farther along on the northwestern trail to suburban assimilation—like Montclair, Verona, and the Caldwells—embraced The Sopranos. Perhaps they understood it was a parody of movie gangsters; maybe they recognized that a hit TV show filmed in their midst would be good for business. Probably they realized that it was just make-believe. If they did, they were right. In August 2001, Fairleigh Dickinson University, in Madison, New Jersey, conducted a national poll that found that 65 percent of Americans disagreed with the statement that The Sopranos was portraying Italian-Americans in “a negative way.” By the end of the series they repeated the survey and found that 61 percent still disagreed with the idea that Tony Soprano was a negative stereotype.
By then, most of the state had swallowed its objections. Anyway, Bloomfield had. The fade-to-black wrap-up was shot in Holsten’s ice cream parlor, one of Bloomfield’s better-known eating establishments.
The towns that welcomed The Sopranos also subtly acknowledged the élan of being an outlaw culture. It’s almost as if the Mafia were the Northeast’s version of southern secessionist fantasies: Italian-American culture is fondly portrayed as a law unto itself, outside mainstream American culture, and comfortable with violence as a means to maintain its prerogatives. The bella figura of hand-tailored suits and Borsalino hats, Roman Catholicism, and Italian cuisine all exist in opposition to mainstream culture for many Italian-Americans. Especially among men and boys.
Gangster movies do tend to flourish when government is perceived as corrupt or overreaching. The Godfather became an antiassimilationist tract for many, an assertion that Italians were not yet melted into the pot. This placed The Sopranos at an angle to Italian-American fantasies, in a way. Tony’s ongoing difficulties with blending in were funny, but telling, too. The instant he became successful, he would lose his special identity, his livelihood, his family. But he kept trying.
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Not everybody recognized the success of the first season. Only Edie Falco took home an Emmy in 1999 (Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue won for leading actor in a drama, his fourth, still a standing record). Falco told Rolling Stone she remembered stashing the gold statuette in a big tote bag after climbing aboard a cast bus filled with actors who felt slighted.
But HBO knew what they had, and Gandolfini’s salary took a nice bump. He’d signed a five-year exclusive deal in 1998. But his value had shot up in Hollywood because of Tony Soprano: in 2001, The Last Castle, in which he costarred as a repressed military prison commandant with Robert Redford, earned him $5 million for a supporting role. HBO voluntarily increased Gandolfini’s pay from $55,000 per episode to something in the neighborhood of $100,000 in 2000, without negotiations.
Gandolfini won his first of three Emmys in 2000, and after that he signed a new contract with HBO that would give him $10 million for two more (the third and fourth) seasons. His first contract had given him a life-changing financial security, but this, doubling his already bumped salary at one fell swoop, was serious money (though, as his agent said at the time, he was still paid less than Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue, Noah Wyle of ER, and “every actor but the dog” on Frasier). In 2001, he bought a slate-roofed, 150-year-old house on thirty-four acres in Bedminster, in central New Jersey’s Somerset County, for $1.14 million. It was in horse country, not far from a home owned by occasional presidential candidate and publishing heir Steve Forbes. Gandolfini told The Star-Ledger that his “two-year-old needs to run on grass a little bit.”
He bought the $15,000 necklace Marcy wore to the Emmys. He began to indulge his private passion for electronic gadgets (Gandolfini was such a frequent customer at B&H Photo in Manhattan that checkout clerks remember him—he’d happily sign autographs and greet fans while he waited). But he didn’t start to collect automobiles, like Jerry Seinfeld, or Art Deco objects, like Barbra Streisand, or Maxfield Parrish paintings, like Jack Nicholson. Friends say as he grew wealthier his biggest splurge would be on time, turning down lucrative acting projects so he could spend time with his family. He rented bigger houses on the Jersey Shore every year.
One thing his success meant right away was better parts in films, and better films, too. In addition to The Last Castle, Gandolfini starred in two other movies released in 2001, The Mexican, directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt, and The Man Who Wasn’t There by the Coen brothers, starring Billy Bob Thornton. Both are interesting movies, a cut above the commercial razzle-dazzle of The Last Castle. Both earned him considerably less than $5 million. But they were good parts, and he was looking for parts that meant something to him more than he was looking for money.
The Man Who Wasn’t There is a black-and-white neo-noir movie about murder in a small town and the barber who knows all about it, played by Thornton. Gandolfini played Big Dave, who is running his father-in-law’s home furnishing business and may be cuckolding the barber. The role culminates in Gandolfini smashing his office with Thornton’s passive-aggressive body until the barber stabs him in the neck with a fake Japanese war trophy, which sounds like an odd reprise of True Romance. Jim later said it was a fun scene to shoot because Thornton was “so thin.” Tarted up throughout with a dry-as-the-Gobi sense of humor, The Man Who Wasn’t There uses Gandolfini’s ticking temper to remarkable effect, and stands out as one of the more intriguing movies of his career.
The Mexican could be seen more as an actor’s protest against typecasting. Gandolfini played a disillusioned gay hitman named Winston Baldry, who charms Julia Roberts with self-help lore and his own romantic aspirations even as he forces her to help him search for her lover, Brad Pitt, whom he may have to kill. The Mexican is the ultimate Gandolfini Effect movie. He is so fascinating, so teetering on the edge between sensitive and lethal, comic and threatening, that when Pitt shoots him three-quarters of the way through the picture it seems as if the heart drops out of the film.
The movie was advertised with the frisson between two of Hollywood’s greatest sex symbols, but in f
act Pitt and Roberts only had a few scenes together, while the slimmed-down Gandolfini shares the screen with the then-highest-paid actress in the world throughout most of the movie. That was a little like the surprise awaiting Sopranos fans who thought they were watching their favorite mob killer in a beard until Gandolfini came out to Roberts in a roadside diner.
Playing a gay hitman was the ultimate reversal on Gandolfini’s best-known role. The Sopranos took up the theme of a closeted gay wiseguy five years later in its sixth and final season, with the sad story of Vito Spatafore, played by Joseph Gannascoli. But in The Mexican Gandolfini comes out of the closet with a kind of happy shrug—he and the slightly miscast Roberts undergo the only real psychological development in the movie. Their story so neatly displaces Pitt’s that the Peckinpah-like mytho-comic fade-out, with its cameo by Gene Hackman, seems like an afterthought.
Winston Baldry is a character actor’s triumph. Julia Roberts told the press that the way Gandolfini poor-mouthed his own performance throughout the production made him a “liar,” that he’d been “genius from the start.” In all three of his films from 2001 his characters benefitted from that dense backstory research that he and Susan Aston, who worked with him on each of these roles, thought was a mark of craftsmanship. From little gestures—like Baldry pressing the tips of his forefinger and thumb together and putting them over his eyes to see what he’d look like in glasses—to underlying character traits, like his prison commandant’s interest in entomology, Gandolfini worked to create characters with at least some of the complexities of Tony Soprano.
For two years, James didn’t make another movie (his next picture would be the widely panned comedy Surviving Christmas with Ben Affleck in 2004). There were all sorts of reasons for that, ranging from working harder for those two years on The Sopranos than he ever had before, to scheduling conflicts, to just not getting the scripts he thought worth doing.
James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano Page 11