Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  Bewkes, who took over from Fuchs in 1995, was a different kind of manager, more willing to delegate and more committed to the idea that HBO’s future lay in original series. Crucially, satellite TV had been revolutionized by the introduction of light, easily mountable Ku-band receivers, which did away with the requirement for giant dishes seemingly more appropriate for searching the heavens for alien life. Through services like DirecTV and the Dish Network, this provided a new stream of revenue for Bewkes to play with. To the consternation of some in New York, the balance of power began to shift west toward Albrecht.

  Strauss, too, had started at HBO in the mid-1980s, as a temp, and cut her teeth producing comedy specials. In style and temperament, she was Albrecht’s polar opposite: shy to the point of seeming aloof, concerned with the kinds of details in a script or pitch that Albrecht found boring, herself allergic to his brand of charismatic glad-handing. Yet the two were equally sure of what they believed constituted the HBO brand.

  “I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to sit down and write four pages of notes,” said Albrecht. “I’m going to say, ‘Big picture: Here’s what I thought.’ So Carolyn and I had skills that fit well together. The great thing is that we didn’t necessarily agree on everything, but we always saw the same thing. I never looked at a show and went, ‘That’s red,’ and have Carolyn go, ‘No, that’s orange.’”

  Ironically, given the increasing power of the California office, the first two successful series of the Albrecht/Strauss regime were about as New York as it was possible to get. First came Oz. Set behind the walls of an open-floor prison and shot entirely indoors, the show had the feel of eighties downtown experimental theater, down to a dreadlocked, wheelchair-bound Nuyorican-style poet in fingerless gloves acting as chorus. The cast—stocked with actors who would populate later HBO shows—functioned like such a theater company, often decamping from the one-floor soundstage over the Chelsea Market on Manhattan’s West Side to La Nonna, a West Village restaurant of which showrunner Tom Fontana was part owner.

  “Tom is from Buffalo, but he likes to think he grew up in Little Italy,” said Seth Gilliam, who played an unstable corrections officer for seventeen episodes of Oz and later Sergeant Ellis Carver on The Wire. “He curses profusely. More than anything, he likes to make fun of you and invite you to make fun of him.”

  Fontana had a policy of helping out his cash-strapped cast members with drinks and food at the restaurant, sometimes to the consternation of his chef and partner. He also supported his actors’ outside theater ventures, but instead of going to see them, he would make donations to the theater company. It was, he said, “worth $1,000 not to have to see a play.”

  Oz ran for six seasons, well into the The Sopranos era, and it’s hard to imagine that The Sopranos could have existed without it. Aggressively artsy, filled with shocking violence, homoerotic sex, and a charismatic main character who happened also to be a gay, neo-Nazi psychopath, it expanded the definition of HBO’s brand in crucial ways.

  It remained, though, to prove that original series could create widespread buzz—and increased subscribers. That task fell to Strauss and Albrecht’s next show, Sex and the City, which premiered June 6, 1998. For women (and plenty of men) across the country, the show, based on Candace Bushnell’s frank columns for the New York Observer, which had themselves been turned into a book, was an aspirational fairy tale about friendship and glamour in New York. It might as well have been a tourism campaign for a post–Rudolph Giuliani, de-ethnicized Gotham awash in money. Its characters were types as familiar as those in The Golden Girls: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women on TV ever had before.

  As it had been at MTM a generation prior, it was an exciting time to be at HBO. To be there was to feel suffused with a sense of mission, being outside the Hollywood mainstream (“in the ivory tower,” as Fitzgerald put it) and, increasingly, having an impact on it.

  “We took our jobs seriously, but we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. We didn’t put a lot of pressure on ourselves, because we hadn’t had some measure of success to hold ourselves up against,” Albrecht said. “I say to Jeff, ‘Hey, here’s this thing. What do you think about this?’ He’d go, ‘Looks pretty good, can you make it?’”

  Strauss said, “It was loose. It was fun. We were still very much in the shadows. The fear doesn’t creep in until you start winning Emmys.”

  All of which is to say that landing at HBO no longer seemed completely insane when Lloyd Braun, a former lawyer turned manager and executive at Brillstein-Grey, caught up with David Chase at the company’s elevator bank and asked, “Have you ever thought about doing The Godfather for TV?”

  Four

  Should We Do This? Can We Do This?

  Every great TV show tells its whole story in its pilot. Often in just one line.

  Think of The Wire, in which a young black man explains why his group of friends would repeatedly let a serial (now dead) thief named Snot Boogie enter their crap game. “You got to,” the boy said, in a line borrowed from a real-life Baltimore homicide detective’s tale. “It’s America, man.”

  Or Mad Men, in which Don Draper and a potential conquest have this exchange:

  Don: The reason you haven’t felt [love] is because it doesn’t exist. What you call “love” was invented by guys like me to sell nylons. . . . You’re born alone and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.

  Rachel: I don’t think I realized it until this moment, but it must be hard being a man, too.

  Or, shorter and sweeter, Six Feet Under: “No one escapes.”

  Or The Shield, shorter and not at all sweet: “Good cop and bad cop left for the day. I’m a different kind of cop.”

  A pilot is a strange beast. It must accomplish several things simultaneously. Foremost, of course, it must pack enough entertainment punch in its own right to convince, first, network executives that an entire season is worth making and, later, viewers that they should keep watching. At the same time, it must acquit itself of a hefty amount of scene-setting business—essentially calling a world into being—without becoming bogged down in exposition. (Given only a half hour to accomplish this, sitcom pilots have notoriously erred on the side of too much “sit,” not enough “com.”)

  The pilot for an ongoing serialized drama has yet another imperative. Through some combination of deliberate craft and something less easily defined, it must imply a future often not yet imagined even by its creators. Almost alone among the narrative arts, these shows are composed with no ending—indeed, with the hope that it will stay that way indefinitely. And, of course, there is no ability on the part of the author to go back and adjust once the story begins rolling. It is a unique and uniquely terrifying trapeze act, in which the creator goes swinging out into a narrative abyss, with the conviction that the story will continue to come. The leap of faith continues throughout the process; often, once a season gets rolling and the writers’ room, inevitably, falls behind, scripts are written, shot, and broadcast before the events of two or three episodes hence are even set in stone. Again, the serialized novel is the closest analogue, and Dickens didn’t have an army of bloggers and recappers waiting to pounce when a character suddenly disappeared or changed names midstory.

  Nor did he face the added task of investing an executive with enough faith to spend millions of shareholder dollars, employ hundreds of people, put his or her reputation on the line, and essentially open a corporate division based on an hour of story.

  For all these reasons, a good pilot must engage in what’s known in network jargon as “universe building.” “You have to lay in enough DNA,” said James Manos Jr., a Sopranos veteran who went on
to write the pilot for Dexter. “You have to give it legs so you can say, ‘Wow, I can see where that character may go over the next five years. I understand what that wink means, what that one line means.’ You’re not figuring out what’s going to happen in episode 309, but you’re putting enough in the Petri dish so that character can be there in 309.”

  By the same measure, every pilot that doesn’t either get made or get carried to series—which is to say, the vast, vast majority of them—is like a universe blinking out, along with its entire potential future. Occasionally, that world can miraculously spring back to life, at a different network or after a shift in regime. But in a business ruled by fear of risk and the eagerness to find easy reasons to say “no”—not to mention the mortal terror of seeing something you passed on succeed elsewhere—dead universes tend to stay dead.

  For a writer with a good reputation and a handful of awards—as David Chase was by the 1990s—writing failed pilots is a viable career path, even an upwardly mobile one. But even to someone who purports to disdain TV and shrinks from success in it, all those dead and discarded universes start to weigh on the mind. Since Almost Grown and his stints with Brand and Falsey, Chase had moved from one lucrative development deal to the next, without getting his own show on the air.

  “He’d come into my office, very pale, sit on my couch, and say, ‘I’ve got nothing,’” said Susie Fitzgerald, then in development at Brillstein-Grey, where Chase had signed a two-year deal in 1995. “I’d say, ‘Well, come on! Let’s talk about some ideas.’”

  One abortive effort from those years was an idea about a Miami Mob wife, to be played by Marg Helgenberger, who enters the witness protection program and moves back to New Jersey. It featured a character named Big Pussy—a fact that could scarcely have helped its chances at CBS.

  Another potential gig was unintentionally funny: ABC briefly considered handing Chase the reins of the sitcom The Wonder Years, hoping to add a little edge to the show’s gauzy nostalgic glow as its main character, Kevin, matured into high school age. In what must surely be considered one of the great lost scripts of history (or a Saturday Night Live sketch), Chase brought his usual sensibility to a trial run, having Kevin discover The Catcher in the Rye and start smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and conversing with the shade of Holden Caulfield. The powers that be quickly decided that perhaps they didn’t need quite so much edge.

  All of this, said Kevin Reilly, then of Brillstein-Grey, had the effect of hardening, rather than softening, Chase’s resistance to outside interference. “You could say to him, ‘I love everything you’ve done here. But you know how the character, at the end, lets the bad guy get away? And he’s really depressed? Can we just get the sense that he’s going to continue tirelessly, that he’s not going to give up? Even if the bad guy gets away?’ And David would say, ‘No. I just can’t see it that way.’ And sometimes you’d say, ‘Can we just move this comma over here?’ And he’d say, ‘I thought about it and I just can’t do it.’”

  Rejections, like punches, eventually start to hurt whether you respect the person giving them or not. “Some creative people are very volatile: up today, down tomorrow. David was down today, more down tomorrow,” Reilly said. “After CBS passed on that Helgenberger thing, he called me at home probably every Sunday. He wanted to know why. ‘But why? Why? Why?’ I was like, ‘David, I don’t know. It was a year ago. Let it go.’”

  “I had done five, six, seven of these things and I started to think, ‘What the fuck?’” Chase said. “They always raved about the writing, but, ‘It’s too dark.’ ‘Oh, it’s too complicated.’ Every time, I’d think, ‘Thank God I don’t have to do that fucking series.’ But after a while, you get . . . dejected.”

  • • •

  Driving home after that brief meeting with Lloyd Braun at the Brillstein-Grey elevators in 1995, Chase quickly dismissed the notion of a TV The Godfather. But an idea began turning over in his head. The world of the Mafia certainly interested him; as a child, he had watched countless late-night movie re-airings of such James Cagney movies as The Public Enemy and Angels with Dirty Faces. Later, he’d been fascinated by the New Jersey cafoni from which his family had worked so hard to distinguish itself. New Jersey itself—its layers of trash and aspiration, its voices—had always acted as a kind of muse for Chase, even when he was writing about, say, the lost girl of Off the Minnesota Strip. “I could never really get the fucking thing until I imagined her back in Caldwell, New Jersey,” he said. “Then I felt more secure.”

  Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, his heroes of America’s New Cinema, had long since claimed the gritty world of organized crime as a subject worthy of high art. “The pantheon,” as Chase described The Godfather, Mean Streets, GoodFellas, and others, had posited the Mob as the quintessential American story, a way to talk about both the aspirations and the rot at the nation’s core.

  Meanwhile, a legion of colleagues and friends had by now been treated to his mordant, hilarious stories about growing up with Norma. He’d been exploring the same material on and off with a series of therapists since his mid-thirties, when a family trip to Rome finally made him seek help. Alone for the day, he had been sitting in a café on the Piazza della Rotonda, across from the Pantheon, drinking a glass of champagne.

  “I found myself thinking, ‘What is it with this city? It’s just thousands of years of death. The center of Western civilization and there’s this feeling of death, violence, decay.’ It just made me feel horrible. Then I thought to myself, ‘Here you are, you have a healthy child, you have a happy marriage, you’re sitting in front of the Pantheon, holding a glass of fucking champagne, and you’re thinking this way. You need help.’” Recently, he had worked with a talented, patient female analyst named Lorraine Kauffman, who became the model for Jennifer Melfi.

  Perhaps most important, Norma had died in 1992, freeing her son to tell his stories to a wider audience. As he drove west from Brillstein-Grey’s Beverly Hills office toward home in Santa Monica, he recalled a conversation he had had with Robin Green, in which she’d encouraged him to write about his mother. He had gone home and jotted a short note in a computer file he called “Themes File”: “Mafia Mother and Son—The father dies. Junior is in charge. His only rival is his mom. The old victim becomes the ballbuster/killer she always was. She must kill him or vice versa. (Or maybe he should put her in a nursing home.)”

  At the time, he had imagined the project as a comedy. But now, turning it over in his head, he began to see deeper possibilities.

  “Really early on, David started talking thematically, about America,” said Kevin Reilly. “I remember a very early conversation in which he said, ‘Look at what’s going on in this country. This used to be a place where people would join a company and they knew the company would take care of them forever. Now, nobody’s taken care of. And marriage is the same thing: You go to work and everybody’s selling you out and you get home and your wife’s busting your balls.”

  Thus the line in The Sopranos pilot that foretold so much staring into the cultural and spiritual void that was to come: “Lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

  If the pilot was a culmination of David Chase’s career and life experience, it started out acting just like a regular, doomed pilot. Chase and his agents went first with a pitch to CBS. President and chief executive Leslie Moonves, perhaps vying for the Executive Cliché of the Year Award, said he loved the idea but asked whether Tommy Soprano, as he was then known, had to be in therapy.

  Next up was Fox, then still enjoying the role of insurgent network based on the strength of unconventional programs such as The Simpsons and Married . . . with Children. Bob Greenblatt, who then headed prime-time programming at the network, bought Chase’s pitch in the rooms, making a $300,000 commitment for a pilot script. Chase was excited but characteristically pessimistic.

  “As I started to write, I began
to think, ‘How is this going to work?’ You know, with the language: ‘Fuck this’ and ‘Fucking that.’ I thought it was probably going to be a case of diverging expectations, that both me and the network were going to wind up hugely disappointed,” he said.

  “Strangely, I’d say the challenges of the show working on broadcast TV had more to do with narrative than with language,” said Reilly. “Granted, you wouldn’t have had as authentic an experience if you couldn’t say ‘Fuck you.’ But the real problem was the story.” As in the eventual pilot for HBO, this involved Tony’s friend Artie Bucco, who is worried about the fate of his restaurant, Vesuvio. In impeccable Mob logic, Tony’s solution is to blow the place up. “What he doesn’t realize is that he’s ruining his friend’s dream. And at the end, he’s sort of adrift,” said Reilly. “That’s not a network story.”

  Neither man was wrong. After many weeks of silence, word came that Fox would pass. Years later, at the height of his success, Chase delighted bitterly in naming the executive who had neglected to call and deliver the news; he would relate a chance meeting at a Television Critics Association event at which the poor fellow (who surely suffered more than his share of sleepless nights) came up to him to say, “Well, it all worked out for the best!”

  The pilot now made the rounds—to NBC, to ABC, back to CBS. Everywhere, the answer was no. The universe of Dr. Melfi and Paulie Walnuts and Vesuvio and the Bada Bing! seemed destined to vanish in the usual atrophic way. Tired and dispirited, with his contract at Brillstein-Grey a few days from its expiration, Chase was preparing to sign yet another development deal, at Fox, that would include running Millennium, a spin-off of Chris Carter’s The X-Files. That’s when Braun called. “Listen,” he said. “We sent the script over to HBO. There’ve been some changes over there and they may have some needs in this department.”