That voice belongs to David Chase. He is 78 now. The anger is still there—the coiled, suburban, Italian-Catholic rage that birthed the greatest television drama of all time—but it has mellowed into something resembling rueful wisdom. For two decades, Chase has been asked the same questions: Was Tony a good man? Did he die in Holsten’s? Is the whole thing just a long joke about Americans being full of shit? He has answered them with the patience of a man pulling teeth. Now, in Wise Guy , he doesn’t so much answer as he does excavate.
He pauses. A car honks on the street. “I wanted to be them. Then I wanted to kill them. So I wrote them. And now they’re all dead. The actors, the real guys, the whole world they lived in. It’s just a show now. That’s all it ever was.” Wise Guy- David Chase and The Sopranos Miniseri...
The documentary’s brilliance lies in how it maps Chase’s early career failures onto the DNA of The Sopranos . He wrote for The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure —shows he hated for their neat resolutions. He pitched a movie about a hitman in therapy in the early 1990s. It went nowhere. Gibney finds the original script. It’s titled “The Man Who Knew Too Little” (no relation to the later Bill Murray film). In it, a mobster named Donny has panic attacks about his mother. The studio executive’s notes are brutal: “Too dark. Too Italian. Too… psychological.” That voice belongs to David Chase