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‘Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos’ Review: Alex Gibney’s Sensationally Artful Documentary Explores Every Angle of TV’s Greatest Show
As immersive as the show itself, Alex Gibney's epic exploration of "The Sopranos" pays tribute to everything about the series that was revolutionary.
Chase, born in 1945 and raised in New Jersey, discovered art cinema when he was in college (he says Fellini’s “81/2” blew his mind open, though he didn’t necessarily understand what the film was about), and he was perfectly positioned, by age and temperament, to be one of the New Hollywood upstarts. The HBO brass pushed back against Chase on the famous fifth episode — the one where Tony, driving Meadow around on her college tour, spies a Mob rat in the Witness Protection Program and takes a detour to strangle him. “Wise Guy” teems with great stories: about how upset Tony Sirico was that he’d have to muss his two-tone hair (which no one was allowed to touch) for the “Pine Barrens” episode; about how Chase decided to cast Steven Van Zandt after seeing him as a presenter at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and how Van Zandt at one point stood a credible chance of landing the role of Tony; how the writers’ room was fueled by hours of shooting the breeze about toxic personal stories, which inevitably made their way onto the show; and how the whacking of any character became an offscreen high drama (Lorraine Bracco recalls that if Chase asked to have dinner or lunch with you, it meant you were dead), since that actor would now be out of a job.
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