Why Does David Chase Hate Me? And Why Even if the Call IS Coming From Inside The House, That Isn't Necessarily a Bad Thing...

I'M HOPING that sometime over the next several days I'll get into more "slice of writer's life" posts. I've been fighting bad headaches and trying to give the gig my full attention, so I need a bit of a breather.

I will say, however, that it's a good feeling when that draft finally gets kicked back from the network, and everyone goes around the horn at the production meeting, and even though you know it's all going to change anyway -- there's something very special about the first time on a new show when you get to type those magic words on a cover page:

"PRODUCTION WHITE."

Yessss.

In lieu of anything major from me as I give notes, wait for location scouts, screen actor auditions and all, I want to point you to a couple of very interesting articles I've read in the last couple of days:

The Long Con

Now that it's been a few weeks, Emily Nussbaum weighs in with an excellent, thought-provoking article in New York Magazine about the real legacy of Tony Soprano. And she kind of puts David Chase on the couch about it.

I found myself forming many of the same thoughts that Nussbaum expresses so well in the last couple of weeks when I tuned in some first and second season episodes of the Sopranos, in reruns. I was struck, as she was, by how much broader and lighter the show was in the beginning. I put that together with all those interviews with David Chase over the years, the ones where he talked about his real ambivalence toward the TV medium and how he always wanted to make movies, and I got to roughly the same place Nussbaum did: Chase's brilliance came not just from his self-loathing, but a little bit from his loathing of us.

In one passage, she has a lovely description of TV auteurs:

But he [Chase] was willing to give us what we didn’t want. There are many breeds of TV auteurs: the great mythologizers, Buffy’s Joss Whedon and Lost’s J.J. Abrams and The X-Files’ Chris Carter; the quirky dialogists, like Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino and the maddening David E. Kelley; deadpan craftsmen like Dick Wolf and sadomasochistic visionaries like Tom Fontana and California dreamers like Alan Ball. There are the utopian solipsists (okay, just Aaron Sorkin). But they all share an essential love for their characters—a natural side effect, one might imagine, of building one story for many years. Their protagonists suffer, but they rarely corrode.

In this sense, Chase was a true iconoclast, a prophet of disgust. He seemed determined to test TV’s most distinctive quality, the way it requires us to say yes each week. To be a fan, we needed to welcome Tony Soprano again and again into our homes, like a vampire or a therapy patient. Chase gave that choice a terrible weight.

I do think somewhere along the line, Chase started to really hate what he created. And he hated how much we loved it. Now, how much of that was based in this resentment toward him not being able to do what he really wanted to do (make movies) and how much of it was rooted in just a general cant of Chase's character, I can't say, having never met the man.

And in the end, it's not relevant anyway. Artists are notoriously poor at judging their best work, or at least coming to terms with the pieces that the audience loves. Woody Allen is forever perturbed that we preferred him funny; Alec Guinness went to the grave hating being beloved for having played Obi Wan. Ingrid Bergman was lukewarm on Casablanca. Miles Davis spent a good part of his career with his back to the audience, daring us to hate him...and didn't I read somewhere that Mozart hated The Magic Flute?

Still, there's something in Nussbaum's article that fills me with a kind of cognitive dissonance: "David Chase is a genius." "He hates the medium I love, and he's not crazy about we who love his work." I dunno. I dunno.

More from Nussbaum:

Over the course of the show, Tony’s sessions with Melfi have taken on many metaphors. They are like sessions with a hooker: She takes his money and plays a seductive role. (In one sequence, he dreams her office is a bordello.) They are like sessions with a priest: She hears confessions and guides him toward meaning. They are like sessions with the FBI: By talking to her, he’s betraying his family, putting his livelihood at risk, and violating omertà.

But most unsettlingly, they became a metaphor for our relationship, as viewers, with the show. Like Melfi, we began openhearted, proud of our empathy, and thrilled to have a character so rich to explore. Then came the counter-transference, the audience crushes, the endless articles on James Gandolfini, sex symbol. And slowly, as years passed, one could feel an insistent chill, even as Melfi herself receded into the background and message boards flooded with fans aping mobspeak. The violence was growing more intense: the assassination of Big Pussy, then Adriana, that brutal scene where Ralphie killed a pregnant stripper (a brilliantly sick sequence that caused a wave of viewer protest), the curbing of Coco. Dread, not excitement, began to feel like the show’s signature emotion.

The full article's really worth the read. Go here to read it.

Secondly, Will Dixon's got a fun and interesting post up about the problems of "The Telephone Cheat."

Most people carry a cell phone these days, so the "We can't reach them." or "We aren't able to call for help." complication always seems a little convenient. Most often it's solved with 'No Service' on the call display or whoever is trying to be reached is 'Out Of Range', but both are feeling more and more like a cheat or a cop out.

I tend to come down on the side of, "you gotta cheat sometime," but I hate it when those cheats grow lame. In The Ice Harvest, the whole thing doesn't work if John Cusack can be contacted by cell, so one of the first things he does in the movie is drop his cell phone and fry it. It works.

In the script I'm working on for The Border, we establish right off the bat that "cell phone service is being jammed." Because something getting out is a plot point, and you can't make it easy to get out or there's no tension. The fact that everyone's got a cell phone camera and access to YouTube is wreaking havoc with the news cycle and celebrity image-making, (not to mention "macaca") but boy, when you're trying to plot out a story where people can't know something is going on, it is murder.

Answering machines. Now this one's a biggie. I mean, my mom still has a 'push the Play button' model that creaks and whrrrs and needs a cassette tape, but EVERYONE else I know has Message Manager or Talkmail or some variation thereof. This makes the plot device of leaving the warning like "Pick up, Laura. Pick up! Well, I hope you get this message...the killers your husband!" (for the killer to hear and/or erase), or the exposition message where the audience gets to hear the crucial information (either as it's recorded or when its played back) a lot more difficult to execute with voicemail. Especially since not just anybody (a friend, the detective, the killer) can access and play back a voicemail.


I've been involved with two rewrites recently that included answering machines and faxes, plus no one in either script had a cell phone. Now I acknowledge these were rewrites of movies that have been in development for many many years, or are based on books written years ago, but regardless, they aren't period pieces. They're supposed to be set in the present. But if an entire plot turns on someone hearing a message or not able to be reached by phone...what to do, what to do?

Okay, Will, there I gotta disagree with your police work. I have a chip-based answering machine that's part of my cordless phone. Millions of these things are out there and all the big companies make them. I don't have the voicemail because why should I pay 8 bucks a month for something that I paid 60 bucks for, once? Plus, when I phone in to check my messages, if it rings more than twice I know I aint got any. And I get less spa...

Hey wait a minute. I think I was even on tv about this once.

Freaky. But this isn't about consumer electronics.

The larger thing Will's Calvinism on this issue raises is, "what is an acceptable cheat or shorthand, and what isn't?" Different writers will come down on different sides of this issue...Arguing about minutae is one of the things we really do well. (So long as you're arguing about minutae, you don't have to face the writing -- it's our version of going to long "strategic vision planning" meetings.)

For my money, the answering machine thing is an acceptable cheat. People on TV, by and large, have answering machines rather than voicemail. Just like they all have 555 numbers, and just like they can always find parking places, and live in $5000 a month Greenwich Village lofts on a waitress' salary, and have sex standing up with hair looking perfect and in place, and just like if they smoke, they're really evil inside.

Oh, and they have miscarriages, not abortions.

And if they really, really, really fuck up, they have to appear before the Female Black Judge.

And anyhow, help, she is on the way: the march of technology is slowly starting to help us poor, beleaguered screenwriters. These days, if your cell phone goes dead or something, it's actually harder to make a call than it used to be, because everywhere I look it seems that pay phones are disappearing. The days when there would be a phone in any greasy spoon are going away, at least in the major cities I've visited over the last while.

If we wait a few more months, "dead cell phone battery" may become something other than the "guy wakes up with a newspaper on his head and removes it to see an article on the front page that talks about exactly the thing he needs to find/see/realize/get"

Finally, Alex has got a good book recommendation.

Walter Murch is God.