{"id":624208,"date":"2024-06-14T09:55:42","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T06:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/watch-wise-guy-david-chase-and-the-sopranos-a-sensational-exploration\/"},"modified":"2024-06-14T09:55:42","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T06:55:42","slug":"watch-wise-guy-david-chase-and-the-sopranos-a-sensational-exploration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-wise-guy-david-chase-and-the-sopranos-a-sensational-exploration\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch &#8216;Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos&#8217;: A Sensational Exploration"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_89 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6af0e4838661a\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6af0e4838661a\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-1'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-wise-guy-david-chase-and-the-sopranos-a-sensational-exploration\/#%E2%80%9CWatch_Online_%E2%80%98Wise_Guy_David_Chase_and_the_Sopranos_A_Sensational_Exploration%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos&#8217;: A Sensational Exploration&#8221;<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-2' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-wise-guy-david-chase-and-the-sopranos-a-sensational-exploration\/#%E2%80%9C%E2%80%98Wise_Guy_David_Chase_and_the_Sopranos_A_Sensational_Exploration%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;&#8216;Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos&#8217;: A Sensational Exploration&#8221;<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h1><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%9CWatch_Online_%E2%80%98Wise_Guy_David_Chase_and_the_Sopranos_A_Sensational_Exploration%E2%80%9D\"><\/span>&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos&#8217;: A Sensational Exploration&#8221;<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h1>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%9C%E2%80%98Wise_Guy_David_Chase_and_the_Sopranos_A_Sensational_Exploration%E2%80%9D\"><\/span>&#8220;&#8216;Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos&#8217;: A Sensational Exploration&#8221;<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<div>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    Overflowing with insight; stuffed with revelatory interviews and anecdotes and archival footage; as bursting with flavor as a baked ziti; and as immersive, in its way, as the show itself, \u201cWise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos\u201d is Alex Gibney\u2019s sensationally artful and engrossing two-hour-and-40-minute documentary about the greatest show in the history of television.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    If you\u2019re a fanatic for \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d (and who isn\u2019t?), you probably already know a fair amount about how the show came to be, and \u201cWise Guy,\u201d for a while, treads familiar ground. The film is framed as a profile of the show\u2019s visionary creator and showrunner, David Chase (the opening credits redo the driving-into-Jersey \u201cSopranos\u201d credits with Chase in the passenger seat), who is interviewed by Gibney on an exact mock-up of the set of Dr. Melfi\u2019s psychiatrist office, a joke\/stunt that recedes into the background yet never loses its playful resonance, since it pings off the way that \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d for Chase, <em>was<\/em> a kind of therapy. For him, even talking about the show, analyzing its secret sauce, is offered up with a certain gnomic reticence. (Within that, the disarmingly sincere and at times ruthlessly blunt Chase is actually something of an open book.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    Chase, born into an Italian-American family in 1945 and raised in New Jersey, discovered art cinema when he was in college (he says Fellini\u2019s \u201c81\/2\u201d blew his mind open, though he didn\u2019t necessarily understand what the film was about), and he was perfectly positioned, by age and temperament, to be one of the New Hollywood upstarts. We see the imitation-Godard student-thesis film he made while at Stanford, and he and his wife, Denise, then moved to Los Angeles, where he tried to break into the film business, with zero success. Chase wrote a horror cheapie called \u201cGrave of the Vampires.\u201d He was then tapped, based on an old spec <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">script<\/a>, to write an episode of \u201cThe Bold Ones\u201d (one of my favorite shows as a kid), which launched him as a TV writer. \u201cThe Rockford Files,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll Fly Away,\u201d \u201cNorthern Exposure\u201d: he became a successful power player in the world of the small screen. But every day he worked on those shows, the restrictions of network television made him die inside a little. He couldn\u2019t pretend that those shows expressed his dreams. What everyone he knew told him is that he should try to write a show about his mother. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    Chase, haunted by his desire to be a big-screen director, originally conceived \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d as a feature film; he wanted it to star Robert De Niro and Anne Bancroft. He then tried to sell it as a TV pilot, but the networks all passed. HBO, however, flush with its new identity as a place that created drama and comedy more close-to-the-bone than anything you could see on network (\u201cThe Larry Sanders Show,\u201d \u201cOz,\u201d \u201cSex and the City\u201d), was ideally positioned to launch Chase\u2019s vision. The budding cable behemoth, represented here by former chairman Chris Albrecht, actually made a point of suggesting that Chase should shoot the show in New Jersey, even though it would be more expensive. In fact, every single exterior was shot there. (The rest of the <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/watch-movies-tv-seriess\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"8\" title=\"Watch Movies &amp; TV Series\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">series<\/a> was shot on a soundstage at Silver Cup Studios in Astoria, Queens.) All of this will be familiar to the multitude of \u201cSopranos\u201d fans who\u2019ve done deep dives into the show\u2019s background.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    But then \u201cWise Guy\u201d starts to capture some of the aspects of \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d that maybe only a documentary can \u2014 and, in the process, to navigate the show\u2019s inner mysteries. We see montages of the audition process, watching many of the actors who tried out for each role. Chase keeps saying that none of them were right, but most of the auditions are actually quite good. Almost any of the actors could have nailed the roles on network (had the show gone that way).<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    What Chase really means is that they\u2019re doing standard old-school TV acting. Then we see a long-haired Michael Imperioli reading for Christopher, and he has something: a fullness of personality, a quietude so confident that he pops; the role suddenly exists in three dimensions. (Imperioli thought the show was some bargain-basement thing, and figured Chase was a Mob-drama lightweight because of his non-Italian last name.) Lorraine Bracco was the one movie star in the cast, and based on her role in \u201cGoodFellas\u201d she was tapped to play Carmela. But she didn\u2019t want to do that sort of role again. She had her sights set on Dr. Melfi, because Melfi\u2019s wily poker-faced quality would be so different from anything she\u2019d done before, and she wanted the chance to create a new kind of Italian-American woman onscreen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    As for James Gandolfini\u2019s audition, he left all the actors in the dust the way that Brando left the entire studio system in the dust. When Gandolfini reads for the role of Tony, he has a volcanic intelligence, a <em>speed<\/em> of anger that guarantees that Tony, regardless of how depraved his actions, will always be the smartest, most compelling guy in the room. As for the guilt-<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/trip-and-travel\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"10\" title=\"Trip &amp; Travel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">trip<\/a>ping, castrating, borderline homicidal Livia Soprano, Chase explains that the character absolutely <em>was<\/em> his mother. That was a big part of what gave the show its screwily personal dimension.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    The template was set, yet \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d in that first season in 1999, would grow deeper and darker. There was a point at which executives at HBO wanted Artie Buco\u2019s wife, Charmaine (Kathrine Narducci), with her ability to see Tony clearly for who he was, to become the show\u2019s \u201cmoral center.\u201d That\u2019s classic network thinking. But what was radical about \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d \u2014 and still is \u2014 is that Tony, the gangster we\u2019re asked to identify with, is so far from being a moral center that the audience is prompted, at every moment, to test what it\u2019s rooting for. The HBO brass pushed back against Chase on the famous fifth episode \u2014 the one where Tony, driving Meadow around on her college tour, spies a Mob rat who\u2019s been hiding in the Witness Protection Program and takes a detour to strangle him. But this was the show\u2019s revolutionary daring, as bold as anything in \u201970s Hollywood. We would now be in cahoots with a monster, obeying a compulsive code of loyalty that rendered his violence as ugly as it was badass. As Chase puts it in the film, every character on the show, even Melfi, has made a deal with the devil. That\u2019s a major part of what kept the drama high-stakes, off-balance, mesmerizing. <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    Chase got his shot language from \u201970s movies too. Instead of the master shot\/medium shot\/close-up recipe that turns TV into bite-sized visual nuggets, Chase went back to Bertolucci and to \u201cChinatown,\u201d building the flow of cinema into the show\u2019s DNA. Gibney threads clips from \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d throughout the documentary, and does it so deftly that we relive the show in all its hot-wire intimacy, and also reexperience it as the spiritual epic it is. A thousand moments, one journey: Tony\u2019s odyssey of pleasure and peril, guilt and fear, conventionality and anarchy. Chase makes the fascinating point that the medium of television has always been about <em>selling<\/em>. Part of the revolution of \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d is that it flipped the capitalist energy of the small screen on its head, making the show\u2019s drama a deconstruction of the money culture that was coming at us from every angle: Tony\u2019s crimes, the American consumer culture that was now so ramped up it disgusted Tony even as he binged on it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    \u201cWise Guy\u201d teems with great stories: about how upset Tony Sirico was that he\u2019d have to muss his two-tone hair (which no one was allowed to touch) for the \u201cPine Barrens\u201d episode; about how Chase decided to cast Steven Van Zandt after seeing him as a presenter at the Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll Hall of Fame, and how Van Zandt at one point stood a credible chance of landing the role of Tony; how the writers\u2019 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 regular 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    And, of course, there are the stories about Gandolfini. He has been a man of conflicting legends, but what emerges here is that he was enormously well-liked by almost everyone who worked on \u201cThe Sopranos.\u201d They considered him generous, funny, playful, and devoted. But he had complications. He became notorious for not showing up on set (to the point that HBO would ultimately fine him $100,000 for every day he didn\u2019t show), though when we hear Gandolfini describe the crunched intensity of his work schedule we almost understand his erratic behavior. I would usually never say this about an actor, but it genuinely seems as if tapping into Tony Soprano\u2019s rage, and pushing it further and further the way he did on \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d loosened a screw in Gandolfini. It\u2019s almost as if, in the mania of his superstardom (combined with his fierce privacy), he began to merge with the character.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    As Edie Falco points out, there was a child alive inside Tony that was central to what we responded to in him. And maybe that child was alive in Gandolfini as well, a child who threw a tantrum against the world (Gandolfini vented more fury at paparazzi than any actor since Sean Penn), and against his own health (he ignored his doctor\u2019s orders about the food-and-drink intake that would ultimately kill him). Chris Albrecht recalls that he staged an intervention for Gandolfini, and when the actor entered Albrecht\u2019s New York apartment and saw everyone sitting there, he turned around in disgust and walked out, saying to Albrecht, \u201cFire me!\u201d Gandolfini died in 2013, and we see Chase\u2019s eulogy for him, which is a thing of beauty. One of \u201cWise Guy\u2019s\u201d most haunting insights is how the entire series \u2014 the scripts, the other actors \u2014 evolved in tandem with Gandolfini sinking into the life force of Tony\u2019s darkness. He gave the largest performance the small screen has ever seen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    And what of the last episode, and the show\u2019s fateful final moments? The meaning of that cut to black has been debated for 17 years, but David Chase isn\u2019t coming clean, and no one else is either. (The documentary tweaks that with an ending sublime in its wit.) But isn\u2019t it obvious what happened during the final seconds of \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d? Tony got whacked. And he didn\u2019t get whacked. Both possibilities loomed, floating in the air \u2014 and in that iconic moment, it\u2019s as if both happened at once. Tony died\u2026and he also lived. Just as the show itself ended and, at the same time (as Chase points out in the lyrics to \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Believing\u201d), it went on and on and on. \u201cWise Guy\u201d is a thrilling testament to how \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d changed television forever and, in doing so, changed us.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMN63nwsw68G3Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more Like this articles, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/watch-movies-tv-series\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Watch Movies &#038; TV Series <\/a><\/span>category<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2024\/film\/reviews\/wise-guy-david-chase-and-the-sopranos-review-alex-gibney-1236037610\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos&#8217;: A Sensational Exploration&#8221; &#8220;&#8216;Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos&#8217;: A Sensational Exploration&#8221; Overflowing with insight; stuffed with revelatory interviews and anecdotes and archival footage; as bursting with flavor as a baked ziti; and as immersive, in its way, as the show itself, \u201cWise Guy: David&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":624209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/large_WISE_GUY-Clean-16x9-01.png?w=980&h=551&crop=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-624208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-watch-movies-tv-seriess"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}