The Sopranos creator David Chase is in Los Angeles this weekend to honor the 25th anniversary of TV’s greatest drama series this Sunday, when he joins Matt Weiner and Terry Winter to swap stories in a sold out event at the American Cinematheque. What better time to hail such an important milestone by drawing Chase out on the influences and experiences that honed the unique creative outlook, sense of humor and yes, demons, that informed the groundbreaking HBO series that changed TV in its six season run from 1999 to 2007?
Like his fictional mob boss Tony Soprano, Chase grew up in New Jersey in not the happiest of households — his mother was the inspiration for Tony’s diabolical mother Livia Soprano — and found his way to NYU and Stanford U before starting his Hollywood rise as story editor for the Darren McGavin series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He began writing and producing eps of the James Garner series The Rockford Files, and also wrote on I’ll Fly Away and Northern Exposure. He nurtured his own show creation, about a dysfunctional mob family headed by a depression-suffering don. It began as a feature, and then a TV series. Turned down by Fox after Chase wrote the pilot, the series was embraced by then-HBO programming head Chris Albrecht. Chase directed his pilot script himself, and the rest is history. A haul of Emmys later and a cache not seen on its scale by a series since, Chase wrote and produced the prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, in which precursors of characters including Tony Soprano (played by the late actor’s son Michael) but its feature fortunes were hobbled by the pandemic.
Find out here how Chase found his creative mojo and watch this Sunday as Deadline rewinds a lengthy oral history of the show, which I did to commemorate the show’s 20th.