ENGL 4860: Special Topics in Film Studies The Gangster Film Spring 2011 Room: PH 322

1. ENGL 4860: Special Topics in Film Studies The Gangster Film Spring 2011 Room: PH 322 Day/Time: Monday, 430-730 pm Gangster Film

2. David Chase, The Sopranos, and Television Creativity Bonnie: Livia, ever hear the old Italian saying my aunts used: col tempo la foglia, di gelso divena seta? Carmela: What does that mean, Bonnie? Bonnie: Time and patience change the mulberry leaf to silk. From “46 Long” on The Sopranos, written by David Chase Gangster Film

3. David Chase (1945- ) Gangster Film

4. David Chase (1945- ) Gangster Film

5. David Chase (1945- ) Gangster Film

6. “Though he admits to loving television as a kid, the affair didn’t last. ‘I fell out of love with TV probably after The Fugitive went off the air [1967]. And then when I had my first network meeting, that didn’t help’ (Rucker Interview). ‘I hated everything that corporate America had to offer,’ Chase tells Rucker. ‘I considered network TV to be propaganda for the corporate state – the programming not only the commercials. .I’m not a Marxist and I never was very radical, but that’s what I considered it to be. To some extent, I still do.’ . . . It should not surprise us that Chase thinks of himself as ‘The first counterculture … person in hour drama’ (Rucker interview) He has remained an in-house renegade.”--David Lavery and Robert J. Thompson, “David Chase, The Sopranos, and Television Creativity” Gangster Film

7. Interviews with David Chase Bogdanovich Rucker Lawson Nochimson Gangster Film

8. “You know, when it comes down to it, I just try to entertain myself and solve creative problems. My major impulse is try never to do the same thing. To run away from what was done. To run away from what other people are doing.”--David Chase (Interview with Martha Nochimson) Gangster Film

9. “[Northern Exposure was]propaganda for the corporate state … it was ramming home every week the message that ‘life is nothing but great,’ ‘Americans are great’ and ‘heartfelt emotion and sharing conquers everything’.” Gangster Film

10. “I loathe and despise almost every second of [network television].”--David Chase (Rucker interview) Gangster Film

11. “David Chase’s mulberry leaves were many, his patience extraordinary, his creative achievement decades in the making. A precocious child, a devotee of Freud in high school, where he authored a blasphemous story in which “somebody spies the Apostles sneaking Jesus’ body out of the tomb, right before they go ‘Oh, my God, he’s resurrected.’” Chase longed as a young man to be a filmmaker or perhaps a rock and roll musician. An English major in college (first at Wake Forest, later at New York University), like contemporaries and near-contemporaries Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, Chase then went on to attend film school—at Stanford. The pilot for The Sopranos, however, would not be writtenuntil he served twenty seven reluctant years in television, beginning as a writer in 1971.” Gangster Film

12. “I had a bad reputation. . . . ‘He’s very talented but he’s too dark. His material is too dark.’ And that was both in movies and in TV. You know, it’s that thing out there that once you’re in the club it take you a while to wash out. And so even though I had deal after deal after deal, in which nothing happened, I still kept getting hired because something had happened once.” --David Chase (Mark Lawson interview, 2007) Gangster Film

13. “I’m still . . . too angry. I . . . shouldn’t be this angry. I shouldn’t be this volatile for my age and for the . . . for, basically what’s been a really great life. I have a great family. I have a great career. And I . . . you know, and what am I so pissed off about?” --David Chase (Mark Lawson interview, 2007) Gangster Film