David Chase, the man who revolutionised television drama with The Sopranos, doesn't really watch much television. He really wanted to make films, although at the age of 69 he has only made one, 2012's Not Fade Away.
Instead, he has spent a lifetime toiling away on the smaller screen. Why? "Because that's where I got my first job," he says. "I wanted to be in film but there was a teacher in Stanford Film School who had a connection to a TV producer named Roy Huggins who had done Maverick and Run for Your Life and Alias Smith and Jones . . . and my material was sent to him and I got the job in that way."
Stuck in the small screen
And then he was stuck. He went on to write for a string of top network shows including The Magician, The Rockford Files and later Northern Exposure and his self-created series, Almost Grown, but television writers could not cross over to film in those days.
“At Universal they had one building called ‘the black tower’,” he says. “It was a 17-storey building . . . with the offices of Lewis Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg down to the lowest executive. And ‘features’ was on the 11th floor and ‘television’ was on the 12th floor, or vice versa, and you couldn’t even go to the features floor – there was no way you were going to cross that line. If you were a TV writer you were not going to cross it. It was very frustrating.”
Had he grown to hate the medium? “That’s accurate,” he says.
Why? “There was no reality to it – no real use of language, no real people. The leads of the shows were all goody-goody. Everyone was always doing good. They were all heroic.
"There were exceptions. It's startling to think of it now with all that's going on, but I Spy with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, that was a really good show. And when I was a kid everyone loved Maverick because he was a maverick and TV didn't have many mavericks."
Was Maverick the closest thing there was to an antihero? “He was the closest.” He laughs. “He was kind of mavericky.”
In the face of this, Chase’s tactic as a television writer was to try “sneak things in”. What sort of things?
“Anything that had to do with real life . . . Any detail of real life, of daily human existence. That’s what we would try to sneak in. And there was no interest in that.”
What changed?
“HBO,” he says. “They changed their business model and decided that the way they were going to succeed was not going to be about the Nielsen numbers but about press reaction and buzz and water-cooler talk and that was the way they would get subscribers.
"And it turned out they were right. The Sopranos was, I think, the third show they tried. They did Oz and they did Sex and The City and both were successful, but The Sopranos became a phenomenon and that changed television."
Even so, in 1998 when Fox decided not to accept The Sopranos pilot they funded, Chase was hoping HBO would not pick it up.
“I kind of liked the way it looked,” he says. “It didn’t feel very TV-like . . . and I was kind of hoping that they would just give me another $500,000 and I could make it a 90-minute feature and take it to Cannes.”
Instead, Chase’s deep, dark, funny tale of a gangster in crisis ran on HBO for six seasons, becoming a television game-changer. What was the original idea?
"Just what you saw. That was the originally idea." He pauses. "I didn't expect it to go as long as it did. The analogy I've always said is that The Sopranos was like the Mir space station. It was only meant to stay up there for a year but wound up staying up there five years. So we had to improvise a lot because I didn't expect it to last that long . . . I had it mapped out in terms of plot as far as the first season went. [Tony] realises his mother is trying to kill him and that he would have a confrontation with her. That was as far as the planning went. Then every year we had to do the next story construction."
Why does he think it was it so successful? "For the first time the audience was being treated as adults and they were not being looked down on . . . I was not a kid when The Sopranos started and I was getting fed up of the whole situation. So my thing was, if people don't get it or don't understand it, too bad. There'll be someone who understands it and that's who we're doing it for."
Was he aware at the time how revolutionary this approach was? “I knew it was revolutionary but I did not know the revolution would win. I knew that what I was saying was anathema in network television and all television before that. I knew that, but I was going to do it anyway. If I went one season and that was it, that was fine with me, because really, as I say, I wasn’t getting a lot out of [television] creatively.
"So I was more than prepared to fail with The Sopranos or for it to seem to fail. But that didn't happen . . . And after that the edifice came down."
He reconsiders this. “Actually the old thing kept on doing what it does, but you know what happened to cable TV.”
Enter the auteur
He's referring to the auteur-led explosion of quality US television drama that followed on from The Sopranos – The Wire, Mad Men (made by Sopranos writer Matthew Weiner), Deadwood. This said, he thinks some supposedly groundbreaking shows (he won't name which) are overhyped.
“I saw a lot of shows on cable that I consider ‘sheep in wolves’ clothing’ – renegade cops, psychotic serial killers, coroners – they were just cop shows pretending to be bad boys.”
Chase's next project, Ribbon of Dreams, currently in development, is focused on an earlier artistic upheaval. It's about the first years of cinema. And this drama about cinema will be told . . . on television, as a miniseries on HBO. "I would rather have done that as a movie but I couldn't sell it." He laughs. "Nobody wanted to do it."
He still wants to make movies, “because that was my plan and I don’t want to give up the plan . . . And to me there’s still something special about going to the movies in that big dark space and having the projector come on. There’s this dreamlike sensual state that takes over. Although, there’s less and less of that because of all the advertisements, all the people talking, that horrible smell of buttered popcorn: it’s not as magic as it used to be.”
What does he think when he sees film directors such as Steven Soderbergh or Woody Allen going the other direction, moving towards television?
"I get it. I understand why they want to do it. If you look at American cinema, it's become pretty constrained. Right now, it doesn't seem that way, because its Oscar season and you have things like Birdman which do not toe the line, but most American movies are cartoons or stories where toys are the central characters."
Have TV and movies switched places in the cultural imagination, with TV now the medium for serious work?
“It seems that way, doesn’t it?” he says. He says it a little glumly, as though he regrets elevating this upstart medium over the one he truly loves.
“Movies over time have lessened their dependence on narrative and on storytelling,” he says. “Television has become more important.
“The only place where you can really dependably get narrative now is on television.”
