David Chase: The Man Beyond The Sopranos

In 1995, David Chase began work on a script about a gangster in therapy and his toxic mother. What would come next is six seasons of one of the most iconic and influential television series of all time: The Sopranos. All the fans know this of course, and we love David for creating our favorite show of all time. But for all the respect he gets for the Sopranos, not nearly as much attention has been paid to the rest of his body of work. Though this series is of course his magnum opus, he has also had a long and fruitful career outside of the show. So in this video, let’s take a look at David Chase’s other works, and examine the man beyond the Sopranos.

David Chase was born in 1945, the only child of his parents Henry and Norma. His family was Italian, having Anglicized their family name from “DeCesare” to Chase. Growing up David had problems with his parents. His father was an angry man who belittled him constantly, and his mother was a domineering and hysterical woman. As we’ll see, both of these relationship dynamics would be featured prominently in his future work.

Growing up, Chase was fascinated with music, particularly the burgeoning rock and roll scene of the 1960’s. He originally aspired to be a musician, but eventually decided to pursue a career in film. He attended Stanford’s film school, earning a masters in film in 1971. Chase also suffered from depression and panic attacks throughout his life, another element that would be a big part of his work.

Shortly after graduating, Chase wrote the screenplay for the 1972 low budget horror film “Grave of the Vampire”. The film is about a vampire who rapes a woman in a graveyard, who then gives birth to a vampire hybrid that then hunts down his monster father. The film is honestly pretty schlocky, the kind of thing you’d expect a poor, recently graduated film student to work on. The only interesting thing about the film is the antagonistic relationship between the vampire and his son, again probably mirroring Chase’s feelings about his own father. The film is now in the public domain, and you can watch it here on Youtube if you want to check it out for yourself.

Now supposedly the film is based on a novel Chase wrote called “The Still Life”. I can find no evidence of this book online however, and the source of the information might be based on an error or rumor that got circulated around. The credits of the film also give no mention of the movie being based on a novel. If the book does exist, it’s probably something he wrote while he was in school and was never published.

Eventually Chase found work in Hollywood, beginning his career as a writer for television. He eventually worked on popular shows such as The Rockford Files, Northern Exposure, and I’ll Fly Away, even winning multiple Emmy’s for his work on these shows. He even wrote and directed an episode of the 1985 revival of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. The episode called “Enough Rope for Two” starred Timothy Daly, which is where Chase met him. Eventually, Daly would go on to be the lead of Chase’s first show, Almost Grown.

Almost Grown is a family drama about two teens who fall in love in the 50s, live through the wild and free love 60s, and by the 80’s are divorced parents of two children. I talked about Almost Grown briefly in my Many Saints of Newark Deleted Scenes video. There are many elements of the show that are autobiographical to Chase himself, again such as the conflict between an old school father and a rock and roll son, having a hysterical and neurotic mother, and a love of music from the period. They even have an episode dedicated to the Jersey Riots that would later be featured in the Many Saints of Newark.

Now, Almost Grown was canceled before the first season even finished airing, and as such the episodes have never been made available to the public in the form of VHS or DVDs. For a long time I searched for the episode online, but could only find snippets that people recorded themselves in the 80’s when this show came out. But one of my viewers “DevinfromNJ2000” was able to find the episodes archived and get them to me. We don’t have all the episodes unfortunately, but it’s honestly lucky we’re even able to watch the show at all. Devin has uploaded all the episodes to his channel, so go check him out if you want to see the show for yourself.

One episode I really love is “Joey’s 15 Minutes”. Throughout the show, Joey is the weak, unsuccessful friend of the main characters. After he rescues a paraplegic man from drowning in a pool, he’s hailed by his friends and the media as a hero. He’s even approached to have a movie done about him. However his joy soon turns to bitterness when the mediocrity of his life begins to set back in. The adoration he receives only making him more insecure of his failures in life. It’s very much a Sopranos type plot, and it’s exciting to see Chase’s obsession with psychology and inferiority complexes even in his early work.

Though Chase had a lot of success in television, he was unhappy with medium and the simplistic way most networks told stories. He wanted to break out of television and go into feature films. However he was convinced by his agent to try and develop a new series, as they believed he had a great television series within him. Eventually he got the idea to write a show about a man in therapy because of his toxic mother, something Chase was experienced with. He combined the idea with his love of gangster films like The Public Enemy, and thus the Sopranos was born.

Now I’ve of course talked extensively about the show already, but in addition to being the showrunner, Chase wrote and directed the pilot episode and the finale himself. He was also featured in two cameos on the show, one in the episode in “Commendatori” and one in “Luxury Lounge”.

What makes the Sopranos so influential though, beyond the show itself, is the writer’s room that Chase created. Several of the writers on the show would go on to create massively successful shows of their own, such as Terence Winter with Boardwalk Empire and Matt Weiner with Mad Men. Robin Burgess and Mitch Green, who Chase met working on Northern Exposure, would create Blue Bloods, which has been going for 13 seasons at this point. Even James Manos Jr, who only co-wrote one episode in season 1, would go on to write the pilot for Dexter, another wildly successful show.

After the Sopranos finished, Chase finally got to direct a feature film, something he had been wanting his entire career. Not Fade Away tells the story of Doug Damiano, a rock and roll obsessed teen from New Jersey in the 1960’s. Hey, that sounds familiar. This is perhaps his most autobiographical piece to date, with the ending of the film showing Doug drifting away from music and into a life of film. Doug is played by John Magaro, who would also star in Chase’s next film.

Most interesting of all of course is the casting of James Gandolfini as Doug’s father Pat. Gandolfini and Chase had a strained relationship on the show, caused in part by Jim’s unhappiness with the role of Tony Soprano.

However despite this, they were able to work together successfully on the film. Gandolfini plays a similar angry, traditional father figure type like what we saw in Almost Grown. There’s also a lot of parallels to scenes of the Sopranos.

After this, Chase began work on a potential miniseries for HBO called “A Ribbon of Dreams”, the title of which is taken from a book about Orson Welles which you can see in Not Fade Away. The miniseries would have been about the development of the movie industry from the silent era all the way to the present day. However the deal eventually fell through when HBO only offered a limited budget for the project.

David’s next project would not be for another 6 years. In 2018 he sold the script for The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to the Sopranos set in the late 60’s. For a long time Chase was against the idea of making any kind of sequel to the Sopranos, given James Gandolfini’s death. However he was inspired to do a prequel set during the era of Tony’s father by Tom Fontana, the creator of such shows as OZ and Homicide. He also combined the film with an idea for a movie he had in film school about the Newark Riots, something he had always been interested in.

Now I’ve memed on The Many Saints plenty in my videos, honestly because it’s funny. But while I do think the film has problems as a Sopranos story, it’s still a great film overall, and it’s clear he was a passion for this time period. If they do end up making another film in the Sopranos universe, I would 100% be on board, and I really hope we see more from David Chase in the future.

As I’ve shown here, he has had an incredible career outside of The Sopranos, and I hope this video has helped draw some more attention to his work. As always thank you for watching, and stay tuned for more content, coming soon!

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Ok so I just finalized the video and had it ready to go, when news dropped that David Chase is developing a new series. We don’t know much about it yet, only that it’s going to be on FX instead of HBO, and it’s based on one of his previously unproduced scripts. Now, going off of what we know about him, that means it’s about a rock and roll obsessed teen in the 60s and the Jersey Riots.

However it actually seems to have something to do with the witness protection program. Boy, I can’t wait for all the click bait theory videos about how the show’s going to be about Tony in the witness protection program. It’s going to be great.

The only other thing we know at this point is that Chase is partnered with Hannah Fiddell for the project. She written and directed a few small movies, and it seems like they were paired up mostly because they are part of the same agency. Now, the articles keep throwing around the phrase, “Contemporary take”. Yeah… that scares me. If you wanted a woke version of the Sopranos, just buy my spec script Meadow Soprano: Mob Lawyer. Seriously David I’ll love to work on this show please call me.

But we’ll just have to wait and see for more news about the show. Either way I’m excited. I’m hopeful that this will be another great series from Chase, and even if it isn’t, it will still give me something to talk about! And even if this doesn’t work out, David can just go back to directing Mr. Peanutbutter’s House.