Casting Gandolfini turned out to be a stroke of brilliance.
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Distance between royal eagle hotel and the lax airport series#
Nevertheless, Chase - who had earlier considered actor Michael Rispoli and musician Steven Van Zandt for the lead role (both men would end up in the series as Jackie Aprile and Silvio Dante, respectively) - personally picked Gandolfini as his guy because he passed the “real world” test. The Sopranos was ordered to series.Īt this point, the show’s leading man, James Gandolfini, was a little-known character actor who tended to disappear artfully into his roles - some of them, appropriate to his size, “heavies.” Whether he was playing a ruthless mob henchman in True Romance or a bearded southern stuntman in Get Shorty, his work had not been wildly auspicious or lavishly praised by critics. At HBO, where things were done differently, Albrecht and colleague Carolyn Strauss - fully supported by HBO CEO Jeff Bewkes - decided to go with their guts rather than succumb to the research. Networks confronting such a meager reaction would likely have passed on the pilot then and there. After it was shot and edited, the pilot was test-marketed in several cities, to a tepid response. HBO came onboard shortly thereafter, however, and produced a pilot. Then in its fourth season, The Sopranos was proving immensely popular with audiences and was in the process of becoming as much a watershed for television as Citizen Kane had been for motion pictures.Īnd yet the show that had come shockingly close to never existing in the first place was, at that moment, on the cusp of collapse.ĭavid Chase, auteur of the series, had originally written the pilot script for the Fox television network, but after a short flirtation Fox executives passed on the project, condemning it to turnaround, that limbo from which many a series or film has failed to return. In the late spring of 2003, Albrecht played host there to more than a dozen invited friends and associates for an urgent meeting, one that concerned the pay network’s most important show, and one of the most celebrated dramas ever - The Sopranos. Following that is a section from later in the book that recounts, in the words of Gandolfini’s collaborators, how the late star grappled with his fame.Īlthough Chris Albrecht owned a beautiful Mediterranean-style house in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, for his East Coast sojourns HBO rented its CEO a showpiece apartment in midtown Manhattan’s Museum Towers, not far from Radio City Music Hall. The first chronicles the cultural impact of The Sopranos and the ways in which the series catapulted a relatively little-known character actor to a level of celebrity few reach. What about the very notion of being the first successful pay television network? Or, most obvious, original series programming, which revitalized episodic shows that had been widely considered stale, even moribund.īeyond all that, is there a single image, figure, or frontage that can instantly symbolize HBO to the world? Of the many contenders for top trope, one surely emerges: the fascinating, cherubic, contrarian image of James Gandolfini, dominating and irresistible star of HBO’s crown jewel, The Sopranos.īelow are two excerpts from my new book Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers.
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Or sports: HBO lifted boxing off the canvas and let it live once more, long after it was pronounced dead. Perhaps the disruptive and transformational work HBO did in documentaries, or maybe movies - either producing its own spectacles or having a major impact on the financing of others. Will it be technology? HBO utilized satellite transmission before either ESPN or the Turner networks did. When I set out to chronicle a book-of-record on the 49-year history of HBO, I was met with a multitude of choices to make - especially when searching for a “spine” to hold it all together. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by Fred Conrad/The New York Times/Redux and HBO