7.
Five years after The Sopranos ended, scriptwriter Terence Winter, who went on to create the cable series Boardwalk Empire about the Jazz Age gangsters who built the Jersey Shore, told Vanity Fair that there was a sort of barbershop-mirrors effect to writing about the Mafia.
“One F.B.I. agent told us early on that on Monday morning they would get to the F.B.I. office and all the agents would talk about The Sopranos,” Winter recalled. “Then they would listen to the wiretaps from that weekend, and it was all mob guys talking about The Sopranos, having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side. We would hear back that real wiseguys used to think that we had somebody on the inside. They couldn’t believe how accurate the show was.”
Forget about what the F.B.I. thought of The Sopranos. The real point here is that the mob thought it was so true that Chase or someone at HBO had to have an inside source—they thought there was a stool pigeon singing in David Chase’s ear.
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.
* * *
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 fact 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 Sopranosthan he ever had before, to scheduling conflicts, to just not getting the scripts he thought worth doing.
But surely one reason had to do with family crises—successive crises, really, in both his real and his professional families.
* * *
In the week before he died in June 2013—mind you, this was almost six years after The Sopranos had ended—food-writer-turned-Sopranos-chronicler Brett Martin published a story in GQ magazine that described an epic four-day AWOL Jim went on as the crew was trying to shoot a complicated scene for the 2002 season finale. The scene required a helicopter (the sine qua non of expensive action thrillers) and the rental of the Westchester County Airport. It was a Friday night set, and the crew spent their time switching the schedule to shoot the handful of scenes that didn’t require Tony Soprano. But he never showed up.
Missing a big scene was not unheard of. People on The Sopranos crew had first gotten used to the sounds of farm animals—chickens, horses, that sort of thing, pigs were rare, though—coming out of Jim’s trailer before he did a scene. Animal sounds were part of his warm-up for performing. And everybody knew he could destroy refrigerators and telephone booths, and put his fist through stage-set walls, when he couldn’t remember his lines. He’d been late, or gone missing, before.
“His fits were passive-aggressive,” Martin wrote. “He would claim to be sick, refuse to leave his Tribeca apartment, or simply not show up. The next day, inevitably, he would feel so wretched about his behavior and the massive logistical disruptions it had caused—akin to turning an aircraft carrier on a dime—that he would treat cast and crew to extravagant gifts. ‘All of a sudden there’d be a sushi chef at lunch,’ one crew member remembered. ‘Or we’d all get massages.’ It had come to be understood by all involved as part of the price of doing business, the trade-off for getting the remarkably intense, fully inhabited Tony Soprano that Gandolfini offered.”
But this disappearance spooled out into two, three, four days. Scriptwriter Terry Winter told Brett Martin he was so worried that when he heard a radio report while driving to work that began, “Sad news from Hollywood today…” he immediately thought Gandolfini was dead.
That proved to be greatly exaggerated. On the fourth day, the production company got a call from Jim, from a beauty salon in Brooklyn, asking someone to send a car to pick him up. He’d walked in with no money and no ID and asked the owner to call the only number he could remember for the offices.
They sent a car.
GQ’s timing for this article was uncanny. Combined with the utter shock of Gandolfini’s sudden death, it seemed to establish a sort of James Dean-too-reckless-to-live scenario for another uncommonly electric actor. Soap and success may not be as quick as a massacre, but they are just as deadly in the end.
The pressure was intense, of course, but it wasn’t entirely coming from the need to prepare for the next pretend murder or apt malapropism. On February 1, 2001, Gandolfini had left Marcy’s duplex in the West Village. He never went back. A year later, in March 2002, he filed for divorce.
Going through a New York City divorce while starring in the hottest television show in the country is something shy people should avoid. In the same way the press would love the stories of Sopranos actors getting pinched for felonies and minor mischief, they adored the idea of James Gandolfini with marriage troubles. Some papers and TV gossip shows, naturally enough, led their accounts with comparisons of Tony’s marriage to Carmela with the Gandolfinis’ relationship in real life.
For James, it was excruciating. Marcy told friendly outlets that she was mystified by his decision, and wondered darkly about “something bipolar or manic depressive.” Then, in October 2002, The National Enquirer published a story based on a source who claimed to have seen legal papers prepared for the divorce case. The Enquirer wrote that Marcy claimed Gandolfini had entered drug and alcohol rehabilitation in 1998, and that costars like Julia Roberts and Edie Falco had both tried to get him to stop using drugs. It quoted Marcy naming fifty-two people who were aware of James’s drug use, including everyone from other Sopranos actors to Steve Tyler of Aerosmith.
The Enquirer has since taken the story off its Web site, but an October 17 Daily News account summed it up:
Marcy kept a diary that included claims that “Jim would go on a drug binge every 10 to 14 days.” … He [often] woke up somewhere not knowing his whereabouts. [Marcy] later found out he would do drugs with various bimbos and women and have sex with them.
She also said in her diary that “James would get drunk and make a fist and punch himself repeatedly in the head to see if he could get a reaction from [Marcy] during a quarrel.”
Marcy said her husband bought a gun for protection while traveling to Harlem to buy drugs.
Marcy’s lawyer, Norman Sheresky, acknowledged that the claims were contained in papers not filed in court, but were “attorney-client correspondence that was private.”
Such charges are often the stuff of celebrity divorce. Wudarski later claimed that she was “annoyed” those charges went public, saying she never intended for that to happen. And of course it is an old tabloid tactic to run negative stories unless the star does an on-the-record interview.
And that’s what happened, after a special PR consultant was hired to guide the star through this ordeal. Gandolfini, who hated giving interviews, especially about his personal life, sat down with The National Enquirer in October 2002, to admit he’d had a problem with cocaine and alcohol four years earlier.
He started out with a criticism of celebrity culture itself, saying, “God, I can’t believe I’m doing this.… I’ve watched celebrities doing this. It’s like a rite of passage. But I’m clean and sober now. I’m done with everything.”
Drugs were part of the nightclub scene where he’d worked in the 1980s, Gandolfini said, and that was where he’d first encountered them. He insisted that it was all over now, that he’d gone to Alcoholics Anonymous from time to time, and that his problems were in his past, from a period before he was an international star and he’d had a son. The Associated Press ran an item, GANDOLFINI ADMITS PAST DRUG ABUSE, on October 17.
Friends and professional associates of Gandolfini’s say the experience was harrowing. To get married just as this incredible fame had descended and then divorced as dealing with it became a daily routine was an assault on Gandolfini’s dignity like none he’d ever endured. And it left him snakebit as far as the press was concerned for the rest of his life.
Particularly galling was the way the press got hold of intimate details of his personal life by playing sides in the divorce. Jim had never had anything to do with the New York Post, the Rupert Murdoch tabloid that thrived on scandalous celebrity stories. (That may have been his mistake—the Post can treat celebs well or nastily, but the tone of their coverage is pretty much determined by whether or not the subject gives them access.) Now, Marcy was willing to sit down with Post columnist Cindy Adams to say she “always believed Jim would be there for me. That he’d take care of me and love me, as I did him. That we’d be together ninety years.
“I became close to his father, his sisters, Leta and Joanne [sic], his brother-in-law, Eddie,” Wudarski continued. “They became my family. He gave me a family and now he’s taken them from me. I won’t have them anymore because they’ll back him, as they should. That’s even though his father said to me, ‘I know Jim’s a handful.’ And, ‘I’m sorry. This is not the way we raised him.’”
One of Jim’s best friends told me that he had always advised Gandolfini to handle the press gently, because anything else wasn’t worth it. “I told him it was like he was on guard duty,” the friend says, and takes the pose of a soldier stiffly holding a rifle. “Don’t slap that mosquito, because you’re not supposed to move, and if you slap it the sergeant major will come along and make you dig a six-by-six-foot-deep hole to bury that mosquito in. It’s not worth it.”
When the case went to court, the celebrity media were disappointed. The settlement was amicable, the press was shut out, and Gandolfini has consistently pointed out how famously he and Michael’s mother have gotten on ever since. In December 2002, Gandolfini and Wudarski were divorced. She kept their adjoining condos in the West Village, worth an estimated $2 million, and Michael, then three years old, continued to live with her. James bought a condo downtown in nearby Tribeca, the neighborhood where Robert De Niro lived.
And then, of course, art imitated life. The Sopranos being what it was, the 2004 season opened with Tony in the middle of an angry separation from Carmela, which would become one of the main plot lines for the rest of the season.
“Having gone through something similar personally, [it] was a little difficult to have to dredge those things up sometimes,” Gandolfini later told a local Florida reporter. “In terms of acting, anything that’s huge [personally] just makes you dig real deep.
“It’s going to just take you to places that you haven’t been before. Sometimes it was hard. It was very difficult some of those days to do some of those things and to continue on into it.”
Writers for The Sopranos, like everyone else on the set, knew what Gandolfini had been through. They gave Tony lines—“I’m old-school. I don’t believe in this separation … and divorce,” he screams at Carmela—that didn’t take much imagination to assume echoed the actor’s own feelings. Unlike Jim, however, Tony went straight to coercion, threatening to end Carmela’s nice suburban lifestyle and personal security. “He’s got a lot of rage,” Gandolfini said.
Aston told me that Gandolfini usually called writers “vampires,” because they’d listen to you sympathetically, like any friend, and then turn around and use what you’d told them in a scene. It was the Post that made the meanest play on this game of real and false, quoting Marcy saying you could tell Jim wasn’t Tony Soprano because “Tony would never hurt his family.”
* * *
When an actual family fights about money, they’re usually really fighting about love. But when a theater family fights about money, it’s about money—and love, too, just not for each other, but for the audience.
In 2003 the cast of The Sopranos started a fight about money that threatened, for a time, to end the show. When it was over, it turned out all along to have been about the audience for The Sopranos, which happened to be the most multiplatform-accessible hit TV show in history. They were a different kind of audience for a different kind of show, and they suggested new possibilities for entertainment that aspired to art.
It started when four of the show regulars banded together—an idea inspired by four regular players on The West Wing, who had recently done the same thing with great success—to demand more money per episode. Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Tony’s daughter, Meadow), Robert Iler (his son, A.J.), Drea de Matteo (Christopher’s girlfriend Adriana), and Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) were all getting $20,000 to $30,000 per episode, and they wanted an increase to $100,000. That would add up to $1.3 million for each per year—maybe not Kelsey Grammar money, but more than the dog got on Frasier.
The West Wing quartet had more than doubled their per episode salaries to over $70,000 after missing a couple of early read-throughs, so the demands weren’t beyond reason. Even more troubling to HBO executives, however, were press reports that they weren’t facing just the Four Horsemen in supporting roles. Lead actor James Gandolfini was waiting to hear how their negotiations went before he decided to set an asking price of his own for the next season.
This smelled terribly of unionization, employees banding together to demand higher wages—something that had not been happening much in America for some time in 2003. The year before, at the behest of Steve Buscemi, who would both perform as an actor and direct some of The Sopranos’ best-known episodes, Gandolfini had made radio ads for the New York City Uniformed Fireman’s Association in their contract dispute with the city. Buscemi used to be a fireman himself. The suits at HBO worried that they might be cast in the same light as city union-busters. It left hurt feelings, and the dispute became public very fast.
HBO said publicly that Gandolfini was being “greedy,” that he was more interested in his own ability to earn big money than in the rest of the crew. At one point HBO shut down production for a week, throwing all the grips and caterers and cameramen out of work with no pay, blaming the show’s star for it in the press. Gandolfini filed suit to dissolve his own two-year $10 million contract. HBO felt it had no choice but nip this sort of thing in the bud, and it responded with a $100 million lawsuit of its own against Gandolfini, charging him with trying to break a legitimate contract and destroy what together they’d made into a very lucrative property.
Jim tried several personal overtures to calm the waters, one at the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony in March, walking over to the gathered HBO execs and telling them how much he “appreciated” what the company had done for him, and again at a private meeting later in that week. The response every time was pretty stony. Producer Brad Grey—who had noted that contract negotiations at The Sopranos had started sounding like a Mafia shakedown—did a last-minute negotiation that found a compromise.
Gandolfini’s salary was more than doubled again, to over $800,000 per episode; all told, he stood to earn more than $13 million for the fifth season, more than the $11 million HBO had first offered, but less than the $16 million he’d initially demanded. The rest of the cast and crew went back to work immediately, with back pay for the week they’d missed. That meant a lot to Gandolfini at the closing.
And the four regular players who’d started the whole thing? Their salaries more than doubled too, to around $75,000 per episode.
But the story doesn’t end there. After the brinkmanship of the 2003 salary negotiations, things were quiet on the money question for two years. But only a very few people knew that some of that quiet had been bought by Jim personally.
“He was a really good guy,” actor Steve Schirripa, who played Uncle Junior’s right hand, Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, told New York’s WFAN radio station after Gandolfini died. “A really good guy. As good of an actor as he was, he was a better guy. A generous guy. The guy gave us $33,000 each—sixteen people. There’s a lot of people who made a lot more money than him. In season four he called every one of the cast members and gave us a check. He said, ‘Thanks for sticking by me.’ It’s like buying sixteen people a car.”
The other way of looking at it is $528,000 out of Gandolfini’s $13 million for the fifth season went to his fellow Sopranos cast members. While it’s probably true that other actors have done extremely generous things with the money they’ve received, stories like this one have few if any contemporary precedents. Certainly not at that amount. And it goes a long way toward explaining the loyalty—extending to their own sort of omerta about James’s personal life and his behavior on the set—that his cast mates and friends consistently express for James.
It definitely set a tone on the set—the play was the thing, not the ego of the individual actors. Aston told Gandolfini in those years that he’d be able to work as an actor as long as he wanted to, for the rest of his life, after The Sopranos. But he knew some of his fellow actors weren’t so lucky. And it was the ensemble that made it work, that gave them all the best career opportunity they’d ever likely have.
The 2003 negotiations happened when the revolutionary impact of The Sopranos was only just beginning to be understood. Nobody thought a show like it could ever be syndicated on basic cable (it was, in an expurgated version—the actors really didn’t say “fuck” as much as everyone thought—earning an initial $195 million from A&E less than two years later). All the books, DVDs, video games, spin-off merchandise, and promotional publicity HBO got from its signature series were only beginning to be totaled up.
And, more important, the negotiations acknowledged something fundamental about American cultural habits in the new century. Movies were once group cultural events, part of a night out on the town, done in public in the great gathering places like downtown movie palaces and suburban cineplexes. And those places are dying.
Actually, public space in the United States has been defunded and marginalized since the early 1980s, and by the turn of the century we were only beginning to understand the impact of those policies. But one effect was declining movie ticket sales and the explosion of big, flat-screen TVs in living rooms around the country. The “theater crowd” was becoming virtual. Cable TV was a new medium that had different ways of finding an audience for serious art—it could conjure that paying audience out of the living rooms into which they’d retreated. Soon they’d be able to watch The Sopranos in an eighty-six-hour marathon on DVD, or on TiVo, or any other on-demand service, and while the producers made money off those forms, they didn’t show up in TV ratings or audience share stats.
The sour blossom that David Chase had fashioned out of frustration for his native state, which James Gandolfini helped turn into a vehicle for sympathy and pathos, had found a huge audience out there. Because the world really was filled with simulated New Jerseys: Everywhere you had a corporate back-office securing profits by shaving labor costs and dodging regulations, whether in the United Kingdom or Fujian province or the suburbs of Sydney, you had a little piece of Jersey. Really, they were everywhere you looked.
As Tony said in the first episode, “It’s good to get in on something on the ground floor.” And in the matter of finding a new audience, The Sopranos did not come too late.
Even though he compromised for his crew at the very end, the 2003 negotiations were a personal triumph for James Gandolfini. Tony had been helpless to save his wild ducks, but Jim saved his, and gave them a nice raise to boot. At least, all the wild ducks in his professional family.
In four years, Gandolfini had leaped from working class to the 1 percent, but he had not forgotten where he’d come from, or all the people he was constantly thanking for his own success. “All the fuss during The Sopranos really was pretty ridiculous,” he said much later. “None of us expected it to last, and it lasted almost ten years. Honestly? I don’t think I’m that different. I’ve lived in the same apartment for years. I’ve kept a lot of the same friends. I’m still grumpy and miserable.… But in a good way!”