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My opinion
George F. Will : Beer a health food, essential to civilization
Perhaps like many sensible citizens, you read Investor's Business Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper's front page. It was in a report on the intention of the world's second-largest brewer, Belgium's InBev, to buy control of the third-largest, Anheuser-Busch, for $46.3 billion.
The story asserted: "The (alcoholic beverage) industry's continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer. ..."
"Nonwhat?" Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.
The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:
"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."
Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.
Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.
To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying is, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.
The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."
Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world's population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.
But that is a potential stew of racial or ethnic sensitivities that we need not stir. Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.
So let there be no more loose talk — especially not now, with summer arriving — about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, onto something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.
Q: Do you read reviews of the show, or skim some of the myriad message boards viewers have created?
Naveen Andrews: Without wanting to sound too precious, I think that being aware of what people are reading into the character detracts from my work.
Q: So you wouldn't know that on one message board a fan called you a "stone cold hottie." Do you even know what this means? Are you used to being a sex symbol?
A: No, I don't know what that means...[laughs].... What other people project or see I'm happy to take as a compliment.
I think much wisdom and insight can be gained, and applied to the scenario of the Xena movie. For example, for those of us convinced that since Rob and Katherine mentioned the movie back in January but we still don't have one, this means that the project is dead in the water, this article details how progress can be slow (but not because of opinions of fans on the internet, success of series reruns, "outrage" over plot developments, etc. - solely for internal, industry-related reasons.)
And for those convinced that since Katherine said that she hoped to set a future script that she might write post-AFIN, and apparently she mentioned Egypt as a conceivably interesting locale, that's what's going to happen period - well, we might want to read the section on how Chris Columbus is definitely directing F4, Sam Hamm is definitely writing a script, the contracts have been signed, and production is about to begin any day now.
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This was from an interview at tv.insidepulse.com/articles/44411 with Damon Lindeloff.
On being influenced by other shows (see assorted "Rob ripped off 'A Chinese Ghost Story' " discussions)
MJ: How important are the influences that you use? Alfred Hitchcock. Rosemary's Baby. Twilight Zone...
DL: I think that everything that I have ever seen and ever liked goes into the collective melting pot of the show. Obviously, Carlton Cuse (who came on very early in the first season), we work the show together, day-to-day, create the show. We sit in his office every morning and have breakfast and talk about stuff. He is a big Narnia fan and the fantasy and the influences that everybody has all contribute into the stories that we want to tell on Lost. Some movies (more than others) directly influence the show and obviously, one of the seminal key influences on the show is Stephen King's 'The Stand.' J.J., Carleton and I have all read it, and it is sort of very similar in good versus evil playing out in a dramatic and supernatural context. That is a work that is often referred to.
On the writing process:
DL: ....At the end of the day, television shows can only function as a collaboration because you are writing a script every eight days. Right now, you and I are talking on a Thursday afternoon. A script will exist a week from Monday that hasn't even been concepted yet. The rate of speed with which these things are created is astonishing. If you look back at season one of Lost, and we did 25 episodes between the months of May and April, so that's 11 months. A two-hour movie is produced in that same time period.
On who they write for:
MJ: One of my favourite quotes of yours is when you said "sometimes we get frustrated ourselves and decide it's time to download a big chunk of mythology and then the audience says that they find this confusing and alienating and too weird. So then we pull back and they say that you're not giving us enough." How do you respond to what the audience wants and how much does that effect what you put out?
DL: I think that, obviously, the "audience" is relative. If you trolled the boards, that audience is a very vocal mythology-driven audience that wants answers constantly. The audience that I sort of respond to most is my wife or my mom or the people that are just watching the show and they like certain elements of the mythology, but they also want Jack and Kate to get together and all that stuff. You have to basically distill out what you think the global sense of things is. For example, after the finale last year, Carleton (Cuse) and I heard uniformly across the entire audience 'we wish that you had given us more than just them looking down at the hatch.' We don't regret the decision that we made. In fact, we stand by it. In fact, it was the only decision to make because at the end of the day, you need a cliffhanger. You want people talking all summer long about what is in there. We knew that we had something really cool in there and we knew that when people saw what it was, they would feel like it was worth the wait. Essentially, we try to be the audience ourselves and say 'wow, when was the last time we did a mythological episode, are we doing too much mythology, it's been awhile since we have seen Kate..." We try to be the audience in our own heads.
(So once again - the average person, and/or the writer himself/herself, not the heavily-invested "fan.")
On the collaborative process (which Ren Pics was all about) -
DL: You try to build a writing team like a good baseball team. Everybody's a great hitter but if nobody's a great fielder, then you have a lot of offense but no defense. You pick people that play well together as a team. It's a constantly morphing process. Javi (supervising producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach) is the only original writer who is still on the show....
...whose name ends up on the script is a byproduct of whoever does the majority of writing on that script but every single story is broken by eight people and signed off on by Carleton and myself....
On giving out "erroneous" info in an interview about a crucial plot twist (although this was to the mainstream TV Guide, and not to an online fanzine unknown to 99% of the viewership) -
Q: First off, I have a bone to pick with you, Damon. Last July, I asked you if a female character was getting killed this season on Lost, and you said ?and I quote: "I think it would be fairly silly for us to kill a woman ?there are only three or four of them on the show. And they're all really hot." So, I guess my question is, how can I ever trust you again?
Damon Lindelof: I never said we weren't going to kill a woman. I said it would be silly. And you know, Carlton and I are pretty silly guys. You should see the hat that he's wearing right now.
Carlton Cuse: That's all I'm wearing.
Damon: And also a sock, but that's another story.
.....
Somehow strangely reminiscent of Rob observing that he wasn't going to kill "them" off, which of course he didn't. And a good summation of just how seriously professionals in the industry take stuff like that.
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At one point (pre-DUI) Mel Gibson was developing a mini-series called "Flory" for ABC, set during WWII - sort of an Anne Frank-ish story, based on true events.
In a remarkably rare case of a network exec revealing his true thoughts:
Quinn Taylor, vice president of television movies for ABC, described "Flory" as a love story and said critics should "shut up and wait and see the movie, and then judge." .... Taylor told the show business trade newspaper Daily Variety.
This is the broadband age and it's harder and harder to find any time or place where you don't have immediate access to the world's information and opinions ?which may not necessarily be a good thing. Having a little time and distance away from something before judging it is often a much closer barometer of the thing's value (or non-value) than knee-jerk reactions, and so I tend to take most of what I hear and read with a grain of salt. If I'm told there is a definite trend ?a great number of bulletin boarders loving something or hating something ?then I might check in to see what all the fuss is about.
But I'm reminded of the early days of the Internet craze. We were doing Hercules and Xena at Renaissance Pictures, and reading fan opinions on bulletin boards was a big novelty. But then we all freaked out ?the fans seemed to love certain things that surprised us, hated things we thought they'd love ... and so we began correcting. Adjusting. Allowing the boards to influence how the shows were written and produced.
About a month later, the fans seemed to be in ecstasy ?they loved everything, they felt heard, they felt a part of the process. In the meantime, our ratings were nose-diving ?I remember drop-offs in our Nielsen numbers that were unparalleled. To this day, I wonder if those shows might've lasted another season or two had we not overcorrected and in the process marginalized their appeal. We often forget that the vastly larger percentage of "the fans" never bother to offer their opinions on the Internet, and so as showmakers we're wise to be careful how much, or little, we allow ourselves to be influenced by vox populi.
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Fascinating tidbits from a feature in USA Today (Fri. 1/13/06) about the show "24" - it got into the challenges that a serialized show faces, i.e. new viewers may be totally lost. Many shows (24, Lost, Desperate Housewives) often add a clip-show documentary here and there to keep viewers up to speed, and inaugurate new fans.
However.... just as ....Sears? Rob T.? both? once observed, even the typical "fan" i.e. one of the millions of people who enjoy a show (as opposed to one of the thousands who visit websites, buy merchandise, remember dialogue, episode titles, attend conventions, etc.) doesn't watch every episode (and the casual viewer watches even fewer.)
An analysis of Nielsen figures shows that the average 24, Lost or West Wing viewer saw just one in five episodes last season. And only 15% of "24" fans watched 10 or more episodes, which explains Fox's detailed recaps at the start of each episode....
Though heavily serialized shows such as 24 and Lost seem to require consistent attention, fans on average tune in as few as one in five episodes and are at least as loyal to other top shows:
(the first # is the pct. of episodes seen by average viewer, and the second is the pct. of viewers seeing 10 or more episodes in a season)
CSI 27% 27%
CSI: Miami 23% 22%
Des. H'wives 23% 21%
Lost 21% 21%
ER 23% 20%
West Wing 20% 16%
24 20% 15%
Law/Order SVU 18% 13%
Gilmore Girls 17% 13%
House 18% 11%
The O.C. 15% 11%
Source: Analysis of Nielsen Media Research data for sampling of prime-time for 2004-05 season; two hour episodes count as single telecasts; percentages of total viewers ages 2 and up for each series.
Several things of note there. Like the way that we see that when Rob T. referred to the age 2+ demographic, he was folllowing standard network/Neilson data reporting. And when he (or Sears?) referred to "fans" as what some us us might consider to be casual viewers, again it was standard tv definitions being used.
I also notice that as viewership drops in the #'s above, so does the % of shows seen, and the % of viewers doing so. Leading one to conclude that if you go down from, say CSI or Desperate Housewives (which pull in 20-25 million viewers in primetime on networks seen everywhere) all the way to something like XWP (not available in every market, offered at varying and odd times, subject to re-scheduling and pre-empting by sports events, etc.) you would get even lower percentages.
In other words, if the average viewer has seen only 15% or less of the episodes, then when the subject of, say, Callisto or Ares comes up, they could easily say "Who's that?" Or conversely, depending on which individual episodes they watched...they might never have seen an episode that *didn't* feature, say, Ares, or Joxer, or Eve.
.................
A fascinating and telling article written by Kevin Smith (the Jersey dude, not Ares) in the June 2nd, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone (at A fascinating and telling article written by Kevin Smith (the Jersey dude, not Ares) in the June 2nd, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone (at http://viewaskew.com/gallerynew/album08/KS_RS01 .)
Basically, he goes on at some length about his lifelong love of Star Wars, and Darth Vader in particular, establishing his street cred as not just a fan, but an obsessed fan. He segues into how the films have influenced his own professional work, and then recounts not his review of "Revenge of the Sith," but rather the online fan wars that erupted from it. (He liked it, and self-described "fans" bashed him for not finding fault with it.)
A couple of paragraphs stand out:
This new Vader cycle has split the one-time Old Republic that was Star Wars fandom into two warring factions: the Rebellion, and the normal people with a sense of perspective who don't need a term from the Star Wars lexicon to define them.
The Rebellion is populated by the joyless, cynical ubertrolls who, sadly, take up the most space on the internet. These are the hollow men and women who marched into the prequels demanding that George Lucas recapture their lost Star Wars youth for them - that simple time in their lives when they had the excuse of prepubescence to explain why they were virgins. With that much investment in make-believe, it's little wonder they emerged as more twisted by the dark side than young Skywalker himself. The rest of us who grew up in the sixteen years between "Jedi" and "Phantom Menace" view the new trilogy for what it is: three movies, not three impossible-to-fulfill expectations of folks who need a bearded billionaire in flannel to dream for them.
....I included a brief, enthusiastic review of the flick in the daily online diary I keep on my Web site...... it got linked all over the Internet, resulting in a veritable asteroid field of haters and dorks suddenly zooming at me from every corner of the cybergalaxy. In reading invective-laden posting after posting, I suddenly flashed on my hero, Vader, and realized there's a reason a guy can be turned to the dark side: because people are so stupid. How does a shut-in muster the temerity to attack the opinion of a guy who actually saw the movie, when they themselves won't be seeing the movie for weeks? If I had a light-saber, I'd cut all their hands off, tell 'em I ****ed their mothers or shred 'em like a village full of Tusken Raiders.
Despite the carping of cats who insist everything must suck so as to reflect their lives, I'm happy to report that "Sith" is a rollicking good time....
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This is an interesting excerpt from the blog of Javier Grillo-Marxuach, one of the "Lost" writer/producers. He's not the top guy, nor the next guy down from the top, so in XWP terms, he might be comparable to Chris Manheim or Eric Gruendeman (although Eric never wrote.)
Just like in every show that has ever existed, he's moving on to new projects. And he's making a point to explain why, so that the "Lost" equivalent of urban legends like "Sears/Manheim/Friedman/Becker/Orci/Kurtzman quit in outrage/were fired because they didn't write the show like I wanted them to!" don't get started.
...two years ago ?almost to the day ?i was hired on a start-up television series called Lost.?the gig was supposed to be two months at staff writer pay to work with a small think-tank in developing the long term arcs of a show that had not only not been picked up to series ?the pilot had not been written!
four months later, i sat in the audience at the san diego comic-con, watching 搇ost?with an audience of three-thousand ?stunned by how quickly it had gone from a glimmer in jj abrams and damon lindelof抯 eye to one of the best television pilots i have ever seen... and, ultimately, a popular-culture phenomenon.
two incredibly exhausting and eventful years, seven scripts, forty-eight episodes, a shelf-load of awards, several convention appearances, many great friendships, hundreds of messages in 搕he fuselage,?and one hanging hobbit later, the time has come for me to leave the island.
so, come the end of the season, i am on the raft.
the obvious question is ?of course ?搘hy??br>
the simple truth is my work is done. as television series change and evolve, so do the things they require from the writers and producers in their staffs. i have contributed everything i had to 搇ost?and now the time has come for other writers to step in and make their own contributions in their own voices.
i pride myself on being honest in this forum and am being completely so when i tell you that this parting is mutually agreed upon, beneficial to everyone involved, and ?most importantly ?amicable.
yep. amicable. go figure. it actually does happen in hollywood.
how amicable? 搇ost?and its creators are a huge part of my life, and while we all agree that it is time for me to move on to write and produce other shows (maybe even one of my own), let抯 just say that i may be the rare castaway who not only gets to leave the island, but also gets an invite to visit on occasion. it's an exciting prospect.
as a founding member of the 搇ost?writers community, i know for a fact that i am leaving this show a better place than i found it, am proud of the work i have done, and know that my employers feel the same way. the people for whom i have worked the past two years are truly extraordinary ?and i leave grateful, fulfilled, happy, and ?truly ?want nothing more than to see the series to which i have given (and from which i抳e gotten) so much continue to flourish.
now that we all know this, there抯 something else you should know...
...i抦 still not telling what the monster is!
.................
This is from a recent interview at www.empireonline.com with Joss Whedon. He mentions two things that just about every writer in history has said at one time or another, on the issues of how an artist viewes his/her own work.... and on killing off popular characters.
Q: So you were obviously pretty pleased with the film (Serenity) at that point - looking back, are you happy with how it抯 gone?
A: Oh, I feel exactly the same way about the film as I did then, which is that I loathe every shot, I made 4 billion mistakes - and I quite like it.
......
Q: Have you any apologies to the fans for killing Wash in such a spectacular fashion?
A: Not at all. I never apologise. The fact of the matter is that it was necessary to do so for many reasons - the most important being that if somebody doesn抰 die at the very beginning of that final battle you spend the whole battle going, 揟his is cool. Look! They抮e shooting.?br>
Q: True - after that we thought you might kill everyone.
A: Exactly. After that, I could do a Wild Bunch on your @$$es. And that抯 what I needed people to feel. And then, I could cheat insanely. 揙h, looks like Mal抯 dead! Looks like Simon抯 dead! Looks like River抯 dead! - Oh, they抮e all OK!?The stakes were raised, so it had to be done. So I make no apologies for it, even though I抳e had some genuinely frightening angry fans.
Q: Really?
Q: Oh, I抳e had a couple. They weren抰 even large - it was just the intensity in their eyes, I was backing away. It was a test screening so the executives were all there and I was hiding behind them. But it was the right thing to do and everybody knew it.
.......................................
There is an extraordinary article in "Written By," the publication of the Writers Guild - who knew they had one? It can be found at www.wga.org/writtenby/writtenbysub.aspx?id=2195 . It's all about the creative process that has gone into the hit show "Lost," and touches on familiar fan themes like collaboration, theme, the duties of the "show-runner," and so forth. This is a fairly complex article - i.e. it's written in a trade journal for other writers. So take your time in reading it - it'll be worth it!
A couple of quotes relevant to discussions on Xena fandom that often come up:
揫Being a showrunner] is not just about coming up with the episodes each week卛t's also about managing a company that has 225 people-it's a giant enterprise. It's a little bit like being an air traffic controller. The episodes are like the planes that you're trying to guide into a safe landing, but at the same time you're trying to manage the seven other planes that have their own flight patterns.?
... Cuse remembers 搕he general consensus - this was going to be a meteor entering the atmosphere. It was going to burn bright and then vanish.?And so he and Lindelof felt 搇iberated to make a show that appealed to us.?
....
Cuse and Lindelof guide a true collective. 揥e break the stories in great detail in the writers' room, and basically we put the stories up beat for beat,?says Cuse.
Lindelof adds, 揂s far as script assignments go, it's sort of helter skelter. We have certain writers who have characters they favor, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll write scripts that are those character's flashbacks. Take [staffers] Adam [Horowitz] and Eddie [Kitsis]-they write Charlie well, or Hurley well. So if there's a Charlie or a Hurley scene in someone else's script, they will just kick it to Adam and Eddie.
A fair amount of collaboration and group writing happens, especially as we get deeper into the season. But it's more a byproduct of what the writing rotation is. Carlton and I try to get in there every fourth or fifth script, and then the other writers rotate in and out and we like to have our writers write in teams. It speeds up the process.?
揑 feel we have our own version of the New York Yankees of writing staffs,?boasts Cuse. 揥e have tremendous talent. We picked up four awesome writers off of Alias when it went down. Liz Sarnoff came out of the David Milch camp and is a wonderful and experienced writer. Eddie and Adam not only work well with Hurley and Charlie but also bring enormous talent as character writers to the show. Across the board everyone brings enormous passion to the room. One of the greatest virtues of this staff is the ability to work collectively. All the writers pitch in on every story and script. And they are fun. Fun helps when you are breaking stories on a show that is almost defined by its intensity.?
....
With such island mythology, and the show's rich character development, Lost often seems tailor-made for the current television-viewing climate, where numerous viewers have TiVo and the eventual DVD releases of the show allow for repeat viewings. In the case of a show like Lost, additional viewings truly reward the astute, focused viewer wanting to unwrap the many layers of exposition, allusion, and character dimension. Cuse and Lindelof are keenly aware of who is watching their show and how they are watching. And although they do their very best to satisfy each and every one of the show's fans, there is a fine line between detail-oriented and complete navel-gazing, a line they tread carefully upon.
揥e're writing the show for the masses who watch once on a Wednesday night with commercials, because the reality is the TiVo and downloading audiences are a small percentage of the overall audience,?Lindelof explains.
......
However, Cuse believes this approach allowed them to produce a show that stands out. 揥hat we've been able to do, which I think is different than most network shows, is leave certain things ambiguous and open to interpretation. And that allows people to get on the boards and theorize about what's meant by a given story or scene, or move in the show's direction. It allows people to feel participatory about the process.?
.......
Ultimately, they want us to know that their vision of the show might not be ours, that the fans aren't on the island-but still, it remains open to interpretation. Yet, as Lindelof says, 揑t's like reading a book in high school: 'Oh, this is a story about a group of people who move from the dust bowl in Oklahoma and trek west'-suddenly you realize, well, it's about that but it could also be about a hundred other things. It's all subjective.?
Their legion of loyal fans would probably agree. Each has a theory, their own subjective take on the show and its mythology.
A German neo-Nazi who wrote an admiring book about Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday for Holocaust denial.
The sentence was the maximum possible, Deutsche Welle reported.
In a statement to the court, Ernst Zundel said the judges should create an international commission to determine whether millions of Jews were actually massacred during World War II. He said if the commission found that they were, he would apologize for his views.
Zundel is the author of The Hitler We Loved and Why and maintains an anti-Semitic Web site. He was extradited from Canada in 2005.
One of Zundel's lawyers was dismissed during the trial for suggesting in court that the Holocaust did not happen.
11 Ontario students suspended for 'cyber-bullying'
Punishments at Catholic high school north of Toronto followed comments posted on Facebook
Last Updated: Monday, February 12, 2007 | 1:17 PM ET
CBC News
Eleven students at a Catholic high school north of Toronto have been suspended after posting comments about their principal on the online social networking site Facebook.
Students at Robert F. Hall Catholic Secondary School in Caledon East began an online group calling the principal the "grinch of school spirit" after the school enforced a district ban on electronic devices and announced it would impose a uniform policy.
Last week, the school administration was notified about the website. As a result, 11 male and female students at the 2,000-student school were given suspensions ranging from three to eight days.
Bruce Campbell, a spokesman for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, told CBC Radio on Monday that the comments posted on Facebook were demeaning to the principal. He also said they were "extremely vulgar and very profane."
Campbell said one of the suspended students was a member of school council and another was a varsity team member.
"Overall, these students were not known to frequent the office for the wrong things," he said.
Campbell said the comments violated the school's code of conduct, calling the situation "a case of cyber-bullying."
He said if the incident had involved students posting comments about a classmate, it would have been dealt with in the same way.
Facebook is a site similar to MySpace, allowing people to communicate through work, regional or school networks. Users can post comments on individual member sites or group sites.
The Facebook group that the Caledon East students set up had attracted nearly 300 student members.
It has been removed from the Facebook site.
Campbell said Facebook has also caused problems in other school boards in the province.
World Wide Web of hate emerges online
Protesters hide behind anonymous posts
By ANGELA ROZAS
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Hate is big on the Internet. With a few taps on a keyboard, one easily can vent one’s loathing of horses, clowns Starbucks, men, women or Rachael Ray — and find lots of company.
There’s an e-world where Web sites can be set up in minutes, where mass mail of any variety can be sent with a single click and anonymity is all but assured.
Thus you can type the word “hate” into Google and get more than 200 million hits. As fast as you can say “High School Musical is great,” somebody somewhere is ready to make a Web site or a blog entry about how much it reeks.
Some Web sites will even spread your message of hate — for a price, of course. Pay $5 and one site will send an anonymous note to the person you hate, saying someone hates them.
How did we get here?
In the past, if you hated, say, your dry cleaner, maybe you wrote a letter, or even protested outside the door. If you were particularly industrious, you might even paper your neighborhood with fliers.
But today, one Web site, one string of responses on a blog, can reach thousands — maybe millions — instantly.
On ihatewomen.com, posters can write anything they like about how terrible women are. Its creator, Slate McDorman, won’t censor it, as long as there are no threats or personal information — addresses or Social Security numbers, for example.
McDorman, a 31-year-old law student in Mentone, Ala., started the site and a counterpart, ihatemen.com, in 1998 after a rant session with a female co-worker about their awful exes. After a series of female Web masters for the ihatemen.com site — including the ex-girlfriend who first inspired the ihatewomen site — McDorman now runs both sites.
Like many of the hate sites, McDorman’s sites feature forums for public comment — the most popular feature — stories about bad women, quotes, music and links.
McDorman says the sites are an outlet for people who are angry or frustrated about women, but they also are comedy.
“It’s a joke. People seem to have a hard time getting that,” he said. “How can you hate half the human race? It’s just humor and sarcasm. I’ve put it on there somewhere that if you don’t get the sarcasm, then you probably won’t get the rest of the site, and you should just move on.”
Some sites claim that messages are removed if they are obscene or if they include personal attacks. But the filters we’re putting in place to protect against hate messaging don’t seem to be working.
Consider the caustic messages left for a friend of mine after she wrote a piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer about supporting the New Orleans Saints during the playoffs. Readers could immediately post feedback on the Inquirer’s site. And post they did.
Steelers fans told her she should have drowned in New Orleans, that she should kill herself, that if she ever showed her face to them, she’d get her behind kicked.
And who took responsibility for these horrid comments?
Nobody. They were nearly all anonymous. And hours after they were posted, despite being flagged (by me) as offensive, they remained.
The hate sites get hate messages, too. McDorman keeps a page for the particularly caustic hate e-mails he gets at ihatewomen.com. He says he gets one intelligent comment for every three silly posts to his site. But he says that his site and the Internet don’t promote hate;he says they just reflect society.
“I don’t see how my site could really make people hate the other gender any more than they already do,” he said. “Whatever you see on the Internet and how the Internet has emerged in its content is just a mirror of what people are doing in the real world.”
But maybe that mirror is getting a bit grimy.
The Internet was supposed to revolutionize the way we communicate: information at our fingertips. There’d be global discourse; every opinion could be heard.
But every online posting should require a name, address and telephone number — shielded from public view.
Maybe that would keep some of the hate mail off those Web sites and out of our inboxes.
SAN FRANCISCO — Brooke Brodack remembers her first online "hater."
Nearly two years ago, the person posted rude comments about a video she had posted on YouTube, says Brodack, 21, of San Francisco, whose videos show her lip-syncing and creating characters. "It was shocking to me. Why would someone want to be so mean for no reason?"
Why, indeed? Nasty comments, sometimes even death threats, have become ubiquitous on virtually any website that seeks to engage readers in discussion.
"Ur ugly u suk and u should die," says a typical comment beneath one of Brodack's many videos. Such vulgar messages have inspired heated discussions, and video responses, on YouTube.
The Internet always has had an anything-goes atmosphere where flame wars and harsh language are common. Now there are more places than ever for people to spout their thoughts — often with relative anonymity — thanks to the explosion in blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and comments sections on nearly every news site.
But a series of incidents, including one involving a female technology blogger who briefly went into hiding after receiving sexually explicit death threats, has made online incivility an increasingly hot topic and fueled a debate over how to balance free speech with social etiquette.
"The information superhighway has become the mean streets of cyburbia," says Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo. "It's just gotten steadily worse.
"If cocktail parties were like the Internet, half the people would come home every night dripping wet from glasses of Chardonnay tossed in their faces," Saffo says. "There are two ways to get famous in cyberspace: Say something clever and memorable, or say something outrageous. And unfortunately, it's a lot easier to be outrageous than clever and memorable."
On many online sites, people are kind and supportive and have formed virtual communities.
"People on the Net are overwhelmingly trustworthy and civil to each other," says Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, the popular community bulletin board site. "But there's always fanatic and crazy people out there."
Like many sites, Craigslist relies largely on readers to police behavior: If enough people flag an ad or comment as inappropriate, it's removed automatically or reviewed.
Many sites, including those operated by newspapers, remove offensive comments reported by readers or staff members.
"They want to allow free speech, but at the same time, they want to do it in a respectable way," says Ellyn Angelotti, interactivity editor at the Poynter Institute, which does continuing education for journalists. "They want to make sure it's not turning their other users away."
'It really crossed the line'
Several newspapers, wary of outrageous posts by readers, have banned all comments during major news events. That's what happened in April at The Roanoke Times in Virginia, which shut down a message board it had set up to discuss the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech.
Initial comments were "very civil," says online editor John Jackson, but they quickly turned ugly. "All of a sudden, we started noticing the nastier comments."
He can't recall exactly what they said but remembers they were laced with profanity. "It was really a no-brainer decision to take it down because it really crossed the line so terribly," Jackson says.
At The Orange County Register, editors had to remind readers that the rules of discussion required civil conversation after several nasty and often profane comments were posted in response to a March story about an obese woman who had given birth to a baby she hadn't known she was carrying.
The newspaper now removes a comment after two — rather than three — complaints from readers. It also uses trained retirees to monitor the boards, says deputy website editor Jeff Light.
Although many of the comments were "horrible and unacceptable," Light says such feedback from readers — even when it's rude — can be enlightening to journalists.
"I was looking at it and said, 'Oh look, these people are enraged by the way we had looked at the story.' Unfortunately that was all lost because their rage was so ugly and inarticulate. But I still think there was value in there. Not everybody sees things the way a middle-of-the-road, liberal newspaper reporter sees things. They see things in many different ways, and that's why we have comments."
The Sacramento Bee recently decided to do away with anonymous comments and requires readers to use their real names.
Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, says that is the least newspapers should do. "If you want enlightened conversations on your site, people have to use their real names," he says, adding that news sites also should clearly differentiate comments from stories.
USA TODAY, which launched comments boards in March, requires people to register and provide a valid e-mail address before they are allowed to post comments. The newspaper also uses filters to catch profanity in postings and asks readers to report abuse. Repeat offenders may be blocked from posting on the site.
"We're in the infancy of this," says USA TODAY executive editor Kinsey Wilson.
"The hope is the intelligence of the crowd will help inform the news in the long run. Everybody's experimenting with this and trying to find how to make it more valuable, how to keep it civil and how to keep it more constructive."
But sometimes, as Newmark says, people go a little crazy. On the Web, writing under pseudonyms can allow people to feel free to say whatever they want with little fear of retribution, says Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated Miss Manners column.
Anonymity on the Internet is relative, however.
People who use pseudonyms while posting on websites actually may be trackable through their Internet Protocol address, a unique designation that allows computers to communicate with others on the Internet. Still, most sites won't try to track someone unless there's a legal reason, such as a subpoena.
Even when people use their real names, they don't always feel the ramifications of their words: The online world puts blinders on us.
"Without seeing the immediate consequences of rudeness on the recipient's face or in their voice, it is easier to cross boundaries," says Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.
People "forget that there are real people reading what they write," Newmark says.
This month, several people, some of them anonymous, went to great pains to post online spoilers of the new Harry Potter book before it was released.
Some said they did so because they hated Potter author J.K. Rowling's books and the publicity they generate. Others did it for kicks.
"It was fun for myself at the expense of others," one 17-year-old from Pittsburgh said when contacted by USA TODAY.
A 'frightening' level of hate
The spoilers were irritating, but they were harmless compared with some of the personal attacks that have popped up on blogs.
Kathy Sierra, an author and computer-game developer from Denver, kept a popular blog about designing software.
But after receiving a series of sexually graphic and threatening posts this year, including death threats and a picture of her neck next to a noose, Sierra was so shaken she suspended writing the blog in March. She also canceled a public appearance, saying she was afraid to leave home.
As a longtime blogger, she says, she had confronted "trolls," people who intentionally write provocative things to spark a reaction. But these threats "crossed the line to be frightening."
"Even if the chances are really low that it will carry over into real life, it's not worth the risk. It's frightening that people hate just based on visibility. There's a lot of hate out there. Why? Nobody really knows."
She did call local police but didn't have enough evidence to pursue charges. The poster was anonymous and, as she says, "any halfway decent hacker can make themselves undiscoverable."
'People come out swinging'
Perhaps the Internet simply is reflecting an increasing rudeness in everyday life as displayed on talk radio, TV talk shows and in political discourse.
"Society has gotten very abrasive," Martin says. "In the slightest altercation, people come out swinging and swearing."
But the online world is markedly different from the offline one, Martin says. In real life, people have learned there are rules they dare not break. For instance, racism is now considered intolerable, she says, pointing out that radio shock jock Don Imus was fired in April for a racist comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team.
Online, people feel free to express all sorts of otherwise socially unacceptable thoughts — often without repercussions. "Civilization is about thinking before you express everything," Martin says.
She and others say online nastiness should be reined in. "When people find they are held accountable for what they say or write, then they tend to want to restrain themselves," she says.
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, a technology book publisher in Sebastopol, Calif., responded to the threats to his friend Sierra by calling for a code of conduct for blogs. He has urged bloggers to ban anonymous comments and to delete threatening or libelous comments.
"There is a kind of ethic on the Internet that says it's OK to be abusive, or to have to tolerate it, in the interest of free speech," O'Reilly says. "It's a mistake."
Recently, O'Reilly Media has "shifted our focus from a code of conduct to developing technology that will allow blog readers to participate in moderating comments," says O'Reilly spokeswoman Sara Winge. "We think that's more likely to get widely adopted than a written code that requires agreement from bloggers."
Saffo agrees the solution should be technological, "where the network becomes the nanny," he says. "My concern is that this is not a self-correcting phenomenon. The bad will drive out the good."
On YouTube, video posters can control who sees their work and who can comment on it. They can keep videos private, allowing only invited guests to see them. They also can moderate or shut down comments on public videos.
Brodack leaves her comment board alone because she values feedback and "to just remove things would be an endless battle."
She has decided the best thing to do is simply ignore the nastiness as much as possible.
"I get things like death threats or, 'If I ever see you I'm going to kill you,' " Brodack says. "There is always foul language included. It's very immature. For every 20 positive comments, I get one negative one. … I just kind of ignore them. It's the same thing over and over. It's a waste of time, truthfully."
Message board mess
By LEONARD PITTS JR. - Miami Herald
Some of you guys are jerks.
No, I’m not talking about you, dear reader, whose erudition and class I’ve always admired. And you smell good, too.
But some of you other guys are some seriously pre-literate knuckle draggers. Exhibit A would be the relatively new message boards on the Web site of that great metropolitan newspaper, The Miami Herald. Or at least it would have been, before management stepped in a few weeks back, began policing the boards more closely and put up a notice asking people to keep their comments on-point.
Before that, the message boards, theoretically a place where readers engage in robust debate on articles and commentaries in the paper, were a sewer of sexist, racist, pornographic crudity. For instance, a story on Shaquille O’Neal’s divorce engendered an exchange on the basketball star’s probable penis size. A story on Cubans brought the “I Hate Hispanics” crowd out in force. A story about the search for a black suspected cop-killer begat a call for lynching. Which, in turn, inspired someone to respond, “Bleep the police and all of you white racist folk.” Yadda yadda yadda.
Frankly, the only robust debate was the internal one among reporters and editors appalled at one called “vandalism.” I even received e-mails from readers asking me to ask my bosses to clean up our message boards because they were stinking up the whole Internet.
Not that Mother Herald’s experience is unique. Other papers that provide online message boards — the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, for example — have reported the same problems. There’s something depressing about watching how this ideal, so noble in the abstract, unfolds in reality. You start out hoping to provide a forum wherein citizens can engage in discussion — frank, spirited, even rude, mind you — of the day’s news. You end up policing a debate over Shaq O’Neal’s jockstrap.
Is this what we have an Internet for? Does this latest and greatest medium of mass communication really exist only so that some of us can vent our ids?
Yes, I know. I protest too much.
This is nothing new. These same issues surfaced 200-odd years ago, when print was the latest and greatest (and for that matter, the first and only) medium of mass communication. In Infamous Scribblers, his book about journalism in the colonial era, Eric Burns takes us to a time when it was common for writers, using pseudonyms, to engage in vicious, ad hominem attacks against political opponents.
Facts were often optional. They loved to wallow in the gutter. And anonymity made people brave.
Sound familiar?
For a devotee of the First Amendment, it’s a sobering history lesson. We tend to think of free speech in lofty terms, to regard it as a means of liberating the human intellect, spirit and body. And why shouldn’t we? We are the nation of Thomas Paine and John Steinbeck, of Betty Friedan and Cesar Chavez, of Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder. What further proof do you need that when people are allowed to say whatever they want, sometimes they will say great things?
Problem is, we are also the nation of Larry Flynt and Don Imus, of Charles Coughlin and David Duke, of 50 Cent and Luther Campbell. What further proof do you need that when people are allowed to say whatever they want, sometimes they will just tell fart jokes?
To put it another way: not everyone has something to say. This will not stop them from saying it. For some people, freedom and anonymity are always an invitation to sink like an anchor to the lowest common denominator. Which is distressing until you consider the alternative.
TV Writers Were Also Watching ‘Sopranos’
By BILL CARTER
Published: June 12, 2007
After he completed the final episode of “The Sopranos,” David Chase told publicity executives at HBO that he was leaving for France and would not take any calls asking him to comment about the ending of his classic television series.
He also said that he had instructed all of his writers and producers to turn down any requests for information about the decisions that had gone into shaping the show’s last chapter.
The reason for his resistance became clear on Sunday night when “The Sopranos” ended, not with a moment of final summation, but with a literal blank. The reaction to the stunning last shot of an empty screen has been a mix of outrage among some fans at being left sitting on the edges of their seats, where they had been perched for much of the show’s last batch of episodes, and awe among others who have always regarded the show as the most ambitious and unconventional of television series.
Included in the latter group were many people in the same line of work as Mr. Chase, storytellers in the entertainment business.
Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the ABC hit show “Lost,” another series whose viewers have high expectations about quality, said: “I’ve seen every episode of the series. I thought the ending was letter-perfect.”
Like millions of other viewers, Mr. Lindelof said he was initially taken aback by the quick cut to a blank screen and thought his cable had gone out at that crucial moment. He even checked his TiVo machine and saw that it was still running several minutes beyond the end. When he checked the scene again, he said, he noted “the scene cut off right as Meadow is coming through the door and right at the word ‘stop’ in the Journey song.”
He said: “My heart started beating. It had been racing throughout the last scene. Afterward I went to bed and lay next to my wife, awake, thinking about it for the next two hours. And I just thought it was great. It did everything well that ‘Godfather III’ did not do well.”
In an e-mail message sent right after the final scene, Doug Ellin, the creator of another HBO hit series, “Entourage,” said: “The show just ended, and I’m speechless. I’m sure there is going to be a lot of heated discussion, but that’s David Chase’s genius. It’s what made ‘The Sopranos’ different from anything that’s ever been on TV. It invented a whole new approach to storytelling that isn’t afraid to leave things open-ended, and now the biggest open story line in the history of television.”
For David Shore, creator of the Fox hit “House,” one of the best touches was Mr. Chase’s own refusal to discuss the ending. Mr. Shore said: “Obviously he wants us to speculate on what it all means. Obviously that’s what we’re all doing.”
David Milch, who has created highly regarded dramas like “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” said: “It was a question of loyalty to viewer expectations, as against loyalty to the internal coherence of the materials. Mr. Chase’s position was loyalty to the internal dynamics of the materials and the characters.”
Comedy writers also said they were impressed with Mr. Chase’s choices. Chuck Lorre, who created and leads the CBS hit comedy “Two and a Half Men,” emerged from screening the final episode and said with a laugh, “This is what you get when you let a writer do whatever he wants.”
But he added that he was saying that with admiration. “People just finished watching that show and immediately talked about it for a half-hour,” Mr. Lorre said. “That’s just wonderful. What more could you want as a writer?”
If any shows feel special pressure from the attention “The Sopranos” finale is receiving, it is current series looking down the road at their expected finales, even if long in the future.
Tim Kring, the creator of this year’s NBC hit “Heroes,” said, “I have to admit that as soon as it ended, I immediately went there. I don’t have an ending for the series yet. I put myself years in the future thinking about what you do when you have viewers with these sorts of expectations. And I think you just have to be true to what you were originally trying to say.”
Mr. Kring said he had only come back to “The Sopranos” this season, anticipating the buildup to the ending, and he said he found “the storytelling in the finale a bit disjointed, so that you lost the cause and effect of some scenes.” But he said he admired the choices Mr. Chase had made to be true to the nature of his series. “This was a show that always did everything its own way,” Mr. Kring said.
For the producers of “Lost,” who have declared an official finale in three more seasons, the conclusion of “The Sopranos” carried special weight. “There was immediate blowback for me,” said Carlton Cuse, Mr. Lindelof’s creative partner on the show. “A sense of fear ran through my veins, thinking that we are going to be in this position,” he said, adding, “we know the end is coming in 48 short episodes.”
He had admitted to some initial frustration with the ending of “The Sopranos.” “But it settled well with me,” Mr. Cuse said. “In that blank screen, there was a certain kind of purity in the choice Chase made to make it the fulcrum of the ending.”
Mr. Lindelof said that as daunting as it is to think of the expectations of ending a popular piece of entertainment, there was also a bit of benefit. “If you feel that everybody is going to hate it anyway, no matter what you do,” he said, “there’s a certain liberation in writing it.”
"All this Oscar talk is a phenomenon of the Internet age that I like to call 'a wish-fulfillment rumor.' If people say it often enough, they think it will happen," said Leonard Maltin, film critic for TV program "Entertainment Tonight."
"That's not to say it might not happen," he said, citing a "great performance" by Ledger. "But I assure you that the people who are spreading all this are neither Oscar voters nor (Hollywood) movers and shakers."
At Sci Fi Channel, the Universe Is Expanding and the Future Is Now
By TIM ARANGO
Published: May 19, 2008
The letters still keep coming to the Rockefeller Center offices of the Sci Fi Channel. Please, they all say, pick up “Jericho,” the science fiction show with a small but passionate following that was canceled in March by CBS, for a third season.
But those letters are falling on deaf ears. The Sci Fi Channel, still viewed by many as a niche network, is no longer a repository for failed fantasy shows cast aside by the broadcast networks. Instead, through a mix of original shows, movies and syndicated reruns (including old “Jericho” episodes but no new ones), the network has expanded its audience, especially among women, chiefly by stretching the definition of science fiction.
It is not just “Star Trek” or “Star Wars” that would fit the definition. Superheroes, Indiana Jones and even the baseball fantasy movie “Field of Dreams” would all be considered part of the genre as defined by Sci Fi’s programmers.
“It’s not just aliens, spaceships and the future,” said Dave Howe, who was promoted to president of Sci Fi from general manager in January. “It’s about asking that simple question, ‘What if?’ ”
The changes evolved over several years. One result is a widening audience, especially among women. In April, for example, Sci Fi ranked sixth in cable networks in the 25-to-54 age group. Growth in female viewers outpaced that in men; 43 percent of Sci Fi’s viewers are female.
The network has been a boon for its corporate parent, NBC Universal. The channel, alongside its corporate sibling CNBC, the business network, has quietly become the focus of NBC Universal’s global expansion efforts.
“For an international standpoint, we really have two global brands,” said Jeffrey Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal. “We have CNBC, which is in 400 million homes worldwide. And Sci Fi. Business is universal. And science fiction is such a well-known global genre.”
NBC Universal, which is owned by General Electric (80 percent) and Vivendi (20 percent), will start a Sci Fi channel in Russia this month, and it plans to have 23 to 25 channels in international markets by the end of next year. (It now has 12.)
“We are now what MTV was 10 years ago, or what ESPN was 10 years ago,” said Mr. Howe, who joined Sci Fi six years ago after 15 years at the BBC. “We can own sci-fi as a category globally.”
Each international channel is dubbed in the local language and the programming is tailored to local tastes. (Mr. Howe said Germans like “action, blood and guts,” while viewers in France and Britain want programming that is “more thoughtful.”) Among the countries on Sci Fi’s list for expansion this year and next are Turkey, South Africa, Romania, Hungary and Portugal.
Domestically, the channel has been riding original hits like “Battlestar Galactica” and the reality show “Ghost Hunters,” both No. 1 among cable networks on their nights, Friday and Wednesday, respectively, in April in the 25-to-54 demographic. The network has drawn more women by making subtle tweaks to marketing and programming. In marketing materials for “Battlestar Galactica,” for example, there are no spaceships, and the story lines try to create more of a balance between action and emotion.
The Sci Fi Channel’s growth can also be partly explained by the network’s distancing itself from traditional stereotypes of science fiction.
“There were a lot of misperceptions that Sci Fi was for men, that it was for young men and that it was for geeky young men,” said Bonnie Hammer, the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment, which oversees Sci Fi. “We had to broaden the channel to change the misconceptions of the genre.”
One of the shows that did this was Steven Spielberg’s “Taken,” a miniseries shown for two weeks in 2002 that dominated those nights in the ratings. While the series “literally put Sci Fi on the map,” Ms. Hammer said, it also exemplified the network’s notion of the genre with its main characters as human beings living on earth, not aliens on some far-off planet.
The network’s more expansive definition of science fiction does not sit well with some purists.
“Generally speaking, the feeling within the science fiction community is that a lot of the shows on the Sci Fi Channel are watered-down versions of the real thing,” said Michael Capobianco, the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Mr. Capobianco said the success of science fiction on television and at the movies has not been matched by similar success for writers.
“One of the things we’ve discussed is, ‘Should our books resemble the media works that are out there?’ ” he said. “Should they be dumbed down or watered down to appeal to a wider audience?”
A frequent discussion at NBC Universal is whether to water it down even more and do away with the “Sci Fi” name altogether. Among the new names that have been considered are “SCF” and “The Imagination Channel.”
“We always come back to, we are not going to change the name because with the fragmentation of media, there’s a real advantage of having that signpost,” said Mr. Howe. “We just have to manage the downside.”
Q: We've all read the numerous interviews with you and others on the subtext in the series. The common response always seemed to be "Whatever the characters do on their own time is their own business - we'll leave it up to the imagination of the audience." i.e. everyone could interpret it as they saw fit, because you guys were writing about warlords and ancient gods.
But there's been this lingering rumor (in some internet fan circles, anyway) that what was said in interviews may not have been true - that on set, and in story conferences, it was a foregone conclusion that the characters were being written, acted, and directed as lovers, even if specific love scenes or references to them were never filmed. So was that the case? In story conferences, was it ever discussed that X and G specifically were lovers in a literal 20th/21st century way (i.e. not "they love each other" or other ambiguous lines?)
To your knowledge, did the directors ever specifically direct the actresses to portray the characters that way, or did you or any of the writers specifically write that into any treatment or script, or did the actresses ever say "I'm playing the role specifically this way, regardless of the dialogue? Or was it intentionally left as an unanswered question?
Sears, on 05/12/05 at 8:04 PM:
First, the answer no, not the answer to were they/werent they, but the answer to your question: It was left as an unanswered question. Always.
Now, the details. First, I wasnt on the set, so I cant vouch for that on a word for word basis. But when the subtext started to take on a life of its own, we were aware of it and we certainly enabled it. But we thought more along the lines of what can we give that will be subjectively interpretational without stating anything as fact to violate interpretations? As you can see from that convoluted statement, it wasnt something that was easily done. But no matter how each individual writer wrote the characters (and we were all pretty distinct in that) we all had to write in a way so as to not violate the interpretational rules.
There were many times when things were written into the scripts that were subtle, but we knew Okay, theyll get that. Then there were other times when someone on the set, or Lucy or Renee, would give a reading or take on a line that would do the same thing. But it was never overt and never intended to be overt. And, by the way, that goes for the shippers side. We never wanted to violate their interpretations any more than the subbers. Now, to certain extents, you can argue back and forth about whether we were consistent about that, but I think we put enough out there that worked for people. The amazing thing is that we were able to do it at all. That it is still being debated to this day means that we walked that line pretty well. Not perfectly, but better than most.
I think the thing that I liked about it is that there were many times that we were able to put things in that were totally missed by one segment (because in their world, it had no context) but completely embraced by the other segment (because it was extremely relevant to theirs). DAY IN THE LIFE is a great example. But there are many others.
......................
My Questions to Rob Tapert:
Q: There have been a thousand rumors over the years which you can put to rest right now if you choose. Writers, directors and actors come and go on episodic tv, and it seems like you had very good fortune to keep many of the same ones for a fairly long time. Were there ever any staffers (or cast members) that left because of any conflict or difference of opinion on thematic content of the show, and/or because of audience perceptions of their work?
A: Nope
Lucy didn't get along with one director but he didn't come back because he went on to other things.
What were the rumors?
Q: You and others have said that the "Are they or aren't they?" question was not what the show was about, and that you wanted to keep it ambiguous and open to anyone's imagination. Yet there remain lingering rumors that behind closed doors, it was decided at some point that yes X and G were lovers, but that this should not be openly portrayed because of issues with the studio execs, advertisers, segments of the audience, etc. Was it a "don't ask, don't tell" decision, or do you still feel that the question was never answered, and still open to individual interpretation?
A: For the writers and for Lucy and Renee, it was not important to us to sexually define the characters. I understand for fans why this is important. Thus we tried to give everyone enough of what they wanted or needed to help the characters bring empowerment into their own life.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As the actors end their roles in "The Sopranos," a program that made many of them household names and faces, some worry about being typecast while others fear they might have trouble working again.
Take Dominic Chianese, the 76-year-old who plays Uncle Junior, for example. He knows he has been typecast just by the things that keep happening to him. He's not worried about working because he can always sing Italian love songs for a living.
Recently, he was sitting in a Mongolian restaurant in New York City and two Mongolians came over.
"They started teasing, and said 'you know your show is teaching people in Mongolia how to be criminals."'
And to add insult to injury, pretty much everywhere Chianese goes, people think he is the actual Uncle Junior, who, in the show, is now demented and, frankly, was never very nice to start with.
"They like the old bugger, I don't know why, but they do. He's falling apart, I feel so sorry for him. My health is fine but that would be real funny if I really had dementia. 'You do a great job there Dominic. How do you do that?' What? What are you talking about?"'
Chianese and other actors on the show say filming the last nine episodes of an extended sixth season on cable channel HBO has taken an emotional toll.
'EMOTIONAL ITALIANS'
The new episodes start on Sunday and continue on until early June, when, bada bing, it will all be over -- just as it was for so many other beloved TV series, including "M*A*S*H," "All in the Family" and "Seinfeld."
Brought together by the show's creator, David Chase, in 1999, they created a unique television ensemble. Almost all had strong Italian-American profiles, whether they were Italian or not and many had not received the kind of recognition they would get when "The Sopranos" swung into gear becoming a critical and ratings success.
Actors like James Gandolfini, who plays the conflicted mob boss Tony Soprano, hit instant stardom even though his character morally corrupts those he comes into contact with.
The question for him is whether he will be able to find the kind of textured roles that tap into his extraordinary power as an actor. The same may hold true for Edie Falco, who plays his wife Carmela on the show.
In various interviews, she has talked of leaving "The Sopranos" as a new beginning but then she said she immediately thinks she will have to sell all her possessions to make ends meet.
Chianese told Reuters recently that mood on the set has been hard.
"Everybody feels it coming to an end. But I know we'll all stay together somehow, stay in touch. But there is a feeling of sadness. You can tell ... everybody's emotional. They don't talk too much about it, but you can tell."
Falco agrees. In an interview with Reuters, she said, "We're pretty darn close, and things are getting a little heavy. For a bunch of emotional Italians, we're definitely feeling it."
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - He is a fat, balding, heavy-breathing man with an explosive temper and a reptilian gaze. Starting on Sunday and lasting nine weeks, Americans are going to be on tenterhooks, wondering if he will live or die.
He is, of course, mob boss Tony Soprano, the first of a new breed of anti-hero to dominate the U.S. television screen, a character whose corrupt, sometimes murderous deeds have failed to stop a large part of America from adoring him.
Now everyone wants to know, as "The Sopranos" heads into its final nine episodes after six acclaimed seasons on cable channel HBO, whether Tony gets whacked or whisked into the witness protection program.
Will Tony, the conflicted head of a northern New Jersey crime family, get the last laugh, or will the state, federal and local law enforcement agencies pursuing him all these years come out on top?
One hallmark of the show has been that it is often hard to tell the good guys from the bad ones. And as far as honor among thieves is concerned, forget about it.
Tony, played by James Gandolfini, inhabits a world where he can trust no one, not even his own mother, who in collusion with an uncle once tried to have him killed. They failed, and Tony thought seriously about killing mom.
Media scholar Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television, said Tony Soprano's persona as a "lovable, huggable murderer" helped him cultivate a huge following.
"This was a show that demonstrated how novelistic and how sophisticated television could be," Thompson said. "It is not only about bad guys, it's about people who are at the heart, horribly, morally corrupted individuals. But at the same time, they were presented in a way where we really could identify with them."
Instead of bringing the show to commercial broadcast television, series creator and guiding light David Chase struck a deal with HBO to carry the program. Its runaway success helped give HBO new clout in the industry and raised the bar creatively for television as a whole.
As a subscription-based channel free of the advertising and regulatory constraints facing commercial television, HBO could let "The Sopranos" indulge in sexually frank scenes and profanity, with Tony uttering such bon mots as: "You don't shit where you eat. And you really don't shit where I eat."
That line was chosen by Fred R. Shapiro, editor of "The Yale Book of Quotations," as one of the 10 best lines from the program. Another was Tony's line, "I won't pay. I know too much about extortion."
NO MESSAGE
Terence Winter, a writer and producer on the series, said the show was not intended to convey any message about corruption, morality or family values, even though almost every episode is a study in moral corruption.
"Art asks questions. It doesn't give answers," he said in a recent interview. "We don't feel and we're not beholden by any kind of pressure from anywhere to wrap stories up in a neat bow or to explain things or to necessarily have a moral at the end of the day.
"Certain people think Tony lives a very glamorous life. And certain people think, 'I wouldn't want to be Tony Soprano for all the money in the world.' We don't take a position. ... We just sort of present the characters for who they are."
As far as Winter is concerned, the more uncertainty about how the series ends, the better.
"We are so sworn to secrecy. And truth is, the audience really doesn't want to know, they think they want to know. They don't. You want to see it go down and enjoy whatever happens."
Sopranos Tunes Up for Swan Song
by Gina Serpe
Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:32:28 PM PDT
It's the beginning of the end for Tony Soprano—whether that's just the TV end or the end end remains to be seen...and, in some corners, wagered upon.
Backed by heavy anticipation, The Sopranos final nine-episode run kicks off on HBO Sunday, bringing to a close eight years and six seasons of the mob family drama. And heading into its swan song, the most anticipated question of all is what fate will befall the small screen don.
As the second half of the extended final season is ready to roll, the show's cast and crew remain mum on whether James Gandolfini's don will go out with a bang or simply a bada-boom.
In an interview with NPR several years ago, creator David Chase made it clear that the end was not only nigh for Tony Soprano, but that it was already decided upon.
"The gangster movie is a long American tradition," he said. "But they've all been, except for The Godfather trilogy…it's usually the rise and fall. It's been that way since the beginning. The criminal rises from the gutter, has his moment of glory, and then goes down and pays for his crime in a hail of bullets. That's usually the template."
It's a sentiment Tony Soprano himself agrees with, when questioned in Sunday's premiere episode on his take on the life span of a mob boss.
"My estimate? Historically?" he says. "Eighty percent of the time it ends in the can like Johnny Sack, or on the embalming table at Cozarelli's...No risk, no reward."
The online oddsmakers at bodog.com seem to agree. The gaming site is taking wagers on whether Tony will survive, and the line favors him sleeping with the fishes before the end of the season. The site is also taking bets on which main character will be offed first: Johnny Sack (1-to-1), Uncle Junior (3-to-1), Christopher (4-to-1), Paulie Walnuts (4-to-1) and Phil Leotardo (6-to-1) are the current favorites to join Big Pussy, Adriana, Ralphie, Vito, et al. in the so-called "whacked pack," while Tony (10-to-1), A.J. (13-to-1), Dr. Melfi (14-to-1), Meadow (18-to-1) and Carmela (20-to-1) should be sticking around for at least a few episodes.
In any case, the last go-round opens with Tony celebrating his 47th birthday with wife Carmela (Edie Falco), sister Janice (Aida Turturro) and several other family members in their upstate New York vacation home as trouble brews back in New Jersey. Tony's rivals are plotting and the feds are busy building their case against him, which sets up the a story line that could see him enter the witness protection program.
Back for the season opener is rival mob boss Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), who has recovered from his heart attack, but not his beef with Tony. Johnny Sack (Vince Curatola), who's suffering from terminal lung cancer, continues to languish in prison. The question of succession remains unanswered and Christopher (Michael Imperioli) is finishing work on his gangster slasher flick, something, in a wink to Sopranos fans, Tony praises.
"One hundred years from now, we're dead and gone, people will be watching this f---ing thing," he says.
People will also be watching this thing now, though how many remains unclear.
While the Sopranos continues to be considered one of the best dramas on television, its audience has dwindled in recent years.
The show hit its ratings peak during its fourth season, averaging a series-high 11 million viewer. Last season, The Sopranos averaged closer to 8.5 million, which is still a hit by anyone's standards, especially pay-cable.
Sunday's season premiere of The Sopranos marks the first fresh hour we've been able to spend with this HBO Mob classic since June. Keeping track of the families isn't easy from week to week, let alone with months in between. USA TODAY offers this quick guide to where the characters were and where they are now.
Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini)
Much of Tony's life has been consumed by a continuing skirmish between his Jersey family (the DiMeos) and the New York Lupertazzi Mob. For now, a fragile peace holds, established when Tony visited the Lupertazzi's de facto boss, Phil Leotardo, while Phil was recovering from a heart attack. The attack, perhaps, reminded Tony of his own fragile grip on mortality as he continues to recover from a near-fatal gunshot and prepares to celebrate his 47th birthday. At least when he's feeling anxious, he can still turn to Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), as he has from the start.
Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco)
Carmela is still struggling to sell her spec house and still obsessing over the missing — well, OK, dead — Adriana. There has been a change in Carm, though. Tony's brush with death has brought Carmela closer to her husband and forced her to be more honest with herself about Tony's business and anger problems.
A.J. Soprano (Robert Iler)
Tony's lost little boy has lost another job and failed in his attempt to kill Uncle Junior at the psychiatric hospital. Now, though, he seems deeply invested in a new relationship. He's dating Blanca, a Puerto Rican woman 10 years his senior with a child and a sharp tongue, which she uses to criticize a family that doesn't take kindly to criticism.
Meadow Soprano (Jamie-Lynn Sigler)
A perpetual student who is, it often seems, discussed more than seen, Meadow is back from California. She is minus fiancé Finn, but she's still studying, this time to get into medical school.
Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli)
Tony's nephew and Carm's cousin, Christopher is married and has a baby he's about to christen. He continues to fight his various addictions, sometimes more strenuously than others. And he continues to toy with outside ventures, such as his Mob-funded film, Cleaver, a slasher flick with a central villain (Daniel Baldwin) who looks and acts suspiciously like Tony. That's a premiere party you don't want to miss.
Janice Soprano Baccalieri (Aida Turturro)
Tony's sister is planning her brother's birthday party at the family's lakeside retreat, where she's in residence with husband Bobby and daughter Nica. Marriage and motherhood have not made Janice any less passive-aggressive, nor have they tempered a penchant for playing games that's going to cause no end of trouble.
Silvio and Paulie (Steven Van Zandt and Tony Sirico)
Still loyal; still alive. Those are rare accomplishments for a DiMeo henchman.
Johnny "Sack" Sacramoni (Vince Curatola)
Many of Tony's current problems can be traced to the decline of former Lupertazzi boss Johnny Sack, an ally who promoted peace between and within the two families. Johnny, however, lost his hold on his job when he was sent to jail, and he may now lose his hold on his life.
Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent)
The heart attack that inspired Tony's peace overtures still hampers Phil, who has stepped away from active control of the family and is considering retirement. His detachment has led to a power struggle that once again threatens to shatter into open war if Phil's own unabated anger over the murder of his younger brother doesn't start the blood flowing first.
Masterful 'Sopranos': Past weighs heavily as final act opens
The Sopranos * 1/2(out of four)
HBO, Sunday, 9 ET/PT
'SOPRANOS' FINAL ACT
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
In no show is the present more infused with the past — or in fear of the future — than The Sopranos.
Past sins and slights haunt every action and character in this unassailable TV classic, which returns Sunday for a final nine-episode run. So brilliantly and intricately is the show played and designed, you can almost feel the weight of prior transgressions pressing in on Tony and Carm — James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, whose performances separately and as a couple have been equaled but never exceeded.
Yet that realistic insistence that past be prologue is a problem as well as a pleasure for The Sopranos. Seldom has a story been richer, and never has a show arrived with higher expectations or with more self-inflicted pressures — which is the cost of keeping people hanging for pretty near three years to see how the story ends.
And the wait is not over. The two episodes that open the final run are, as Sopranos episodes tend to be, masterful examples of the TV art — tense, terrifically acted, carefully observed one-hour plays that delve ever more deeply into the characters while pushing the story slightly forward. They set the concluding mood and the theme, that of family issues coming to a head. But they don't do much to move us toward the conclusion, and that may not sit well with viewers who have clamored, if not for the end, at least for the end to begin.
Still, Tony clearly feels some end approaching, as his oncoming 47th birthday has left him pondering his legacy and his mortality. He has cobbled together a peace agreement with the New York Mob, but it's no more stable than his family — as reflected by a chillingly amusing game of Monopoly that Tony and Carm play with Janice (Aida Turturro) and Bobby (Steven R. Schirripa). These are people, we are continually reminded, who believe in all the rules except the ones that would constrain them.
As always, humor, violence and sheer genius abound here, from the seamless way Gandolfini moves from confession to recrimination, to the way the show conveys the disorienting shock of violence through sights and sounds that disorient us. There is no glamour in The Sopranos view of the Mob, only an unrelenting, unaware, thuggish brutality.
Yet like the characters themselves, the story has been stretched to the breaking point. It seems clear The Sopranos would have done better, and been better, had it moved to its conclusion more quickly rather than lingering on stories last spring that began to challenge viewers' interest and affection.
Still, though that may not be an unreasonable demand, it is in essence a pointless one. David Chase, the driving force behind the show, moves at his own pace and weaves the story as he sees fit. He has willingly traded popularity for artistic integrity, a bargain he has been able to make because the art has so often been impeccable.
Barring some drastic change of heart on Chase's part, Tony's story is now written and done and neither praise nor complaint can alter the direction Chase has chosen.
So for now, perhaps, the wisest course is to put aside concerns and wishes for how the show should end and allow it to play out as Chase intends. Cherish the past, embrace the present and let the future take care of itself.
Family reunions can be fraught with conflict and drama, but here's one we'll really miss: After three reprieves, The Sopranos ends its eight-year run with nine final episodes that begin Sunday (9 ET/PT).
With them, the series leaves behind a rich legacy: It transformed television with its complex characters, elliptical storytelling and steadfast refusal to neatly tie up loose ends. It tested viewers' patience and rewarded their loyalty.
It sparked a wave of gritty cable series and led broadcast networks to enviously take notice and (unsuccessfully) build shows around evil men (NBC's Kingpin, CBS' Smith) even as they lost viewers.
And it helped transform HBO from a premium channel watched mostly for boxing, soft-core porn and films into a cultural touchstone.
Fan Josh Simmons of Pawleys Island, S.C., calls it simply "the greatest show of all time." Jeff Comfort of South Bend, Ind., says its depth has earned it a place among TV's biggest gems. "The Sopranos will be regarded as television literature to be watched, studied, and enjoyed as the incredible piece of work that it is," he says.
Creator David Chase, modest in discussing the show's influence, says: "People always ask me how the show changed television, and I don't really believe we have. Our primary goal was to do episodes where you couldn't figure out where things were going; we tried to make it that every episode people couldn't predict."
A 'Dickensian novel'
But when the series began in 1999, the very idea of a crime boss as TV star was anathema to networks, which stuck on the formula of likable, advertiser-friendly heroes whom viewers could root for.
"There never had been a true anti-hero at the center of a show until The Sopranos came along," says John Landgraf, president of the FX cable network. And the show "proved it can work not only as excellent television but as commercial entertainment." The Sopranos' audience peaked at more than 13 million viewers in 2002, a solid number for any major network but unheard of for a pay channel that reaches just one in three homes.
And unlike other soapy sagas, the series was structured as "a series of chapters in a long Dickensian novel," Landgraf says, that would casually abandon unresolved plotlines and abruptly revisit themes years later "using a novelistic structure to observe truths about the human condition. It all adds up to one large literary piece."
Though The Sopranos is ostensibly about a middle-aged Mafia boss navigating the twin demands of his family and his "family," at its best the show speaks universal truths about loyalty and frailty.
Says Museum of Television and Radio curator Ron Simon, "The show was able to create a professional and personal world for Tony Soprano which reflected what it was like to be a middle manager in 20th-century America."
TV historian Tim Brooks says The Sopranos' biggest influence was on Hollywood, where it heightened the "dismemberment quotient" of other prime-time series, led by CSI, which premiered 18 months later. Simon concurs that the show, despite airing on a pay-cable channel with no content restrictions, "loosened the reins" for others.
Basic cable steps in
FX was the biggest beneficiary. The network's stable of original programming is a direct descendant of The Sopranos' success, and its former executives — now the top programmers at NBC and Fox — often said FX's goal was to be seen as the HBO of basic cable. The Shield, with its murderous cop; Rescue Me, centered on an alcoholic, wife-abusing fireman; and Nip/Tuck, with its lying, cheating plastic surgeons, all owed a debt to Tony's crew in their raw explicitness.
Even the more rigidly censored broadcast networks spawned flawed heroes such as Fox's Dr. House and virtually every character on Lost — each of whom, it has been revealed, committed murder or some other sin before being stranded on the island.
The Mob hit's effect was keenly felt at HBO itself. Arriving in January 1999, seven months after Sex and the City, "The Sopranos made us famous," HBO chairman Chris Albrecht says. "Before, we were something people had but didn't pay a lot of attention to. But this showed us as players in this medium in a way we hadn't been perceived before. It was a real turning point and a tremendous calling card for other people to come and want to do business with us."
It was also a nice piece of business. Despite a huge price tag — the show now costs about $10 million an hour, nearly four times the price of a typical network drama — the series has become a cash cow. HBO has so far sold 3 million DVD sets and peddled cleaned-up reruns to cable's A&E network for a record-setting $2.5 million an episode in a deal worth more than $200 million.
But the well will soon dry up, and HBO has yet to even approach The Sopranos' success with any new show that has come since.
"It's way more difficult, but not impossible" to achieve, Albrecht says. "When Sopranos went on the air, there were probably six networks making series; there's dozens now" as basic-cable networks, and creatively revived rival Showtime, have siphoned viewers.
This summer, HBO plans a record four Sunday series, including the returning Big Love, about a polygamous family, and the new John From Cincinnati, a drama about a mystical surfer. And the network may expand to a second night.
To some extent, The Sopranos' success made the show its own victim, as a whirlwind of hype and obsession split viewers into camps: those lured by mobsters and mayhem, and others who appreciated the drama of an upper-middle-class, suburban New Jersey family coping with many of the same issues that they were: aging parents, wayward children, midlife crises.
Awaiting the next whacking
Ratings fell as gaps between seasons grew longer. And the bloodlust camp grew restless with the domestic drama, devoting obsessive attention to a parlor game of predicting which character would get "whacked" next.
After the second season closed with the seaborne execution of FBI informant Big Pussy, "People started treating it like it was Survivor: 'Who's going to die?', as if every season someone had to go," says Michael Imperioli, who plays Soprano lieutenant Christopher Moltisanti. "So everything got compared to that, and you'd hear there's not enough blood, there's not enough killing, and that was never the object of the show."
Still, The Sopranos continued to earn praise. It won 18 Emmys, including best drama in 2004. Chase planned to end the show after Season 4 but extended it three times because there were stories left to tell. (Huge paydays for top producers and actors didn't hurt.)
Though he mapped out how the series would end a few years ago, he kept going because "I never finished out the (Uncle) Junior story. There were things I wanted to do with Janice … Tony and A.J. … Meadow. We saw them as young children, and I wanted to finish out their story as young adults, to see how it all turned out for them."
Though shooting ends this month, the bullets will fly until June 10, when The Sopranos breathes its last. Except for star James Gandolfini, cast members are as sorry as fans to see it go.
"I'm profoundly sad, surprisingly so," three-time Emmy winner Edie Falco says. "You live this character for 10 years. As pretend as it may be, it starts to get under your skin."
But some die-hards will never let the show's memory be whacked. "I will forever be a fan," Simmons says. "I love this show and everything about it, and my living room, which is covered in framed Sopranos posters and memorabilia, will make sure that the show will never end for me."
Chase says he's "honored that people feel that way." And aside from a glint of doubt when he wrote the final episode, he doesn't regret the latest — and final — decision to end the series.
"The show business saying is, 'keep 'em wanting more.' I'm just glad they do."
The Sopranos gang hangs out in front of the fictional meat store Satriale's. The building will be torn down after the series finale this spring.
By Janet Frankston Lorin, Associated Press Writer
KEARNY, N.J. — When the pig is on the roof, people know The Sopranos are not far behind.
The life-size pig sits on an old boarded-up building that will soon come to life as Satriale's, a fictional pork store where Tony Soprano and his Jersey crew hang out on HBO's acclaimed mob drama.
As the show begins its final season on April 8, scores of Jersey businesses and residents are preparing for life without the cast and crew they have encountered over the past eight years.
The show is mostly filmed at a New York City soundstage, but many scenes are shot in the Garden State to provide a real Jersey feel. Most towns and business owners welcome The Sopranos— they get to watch the filming, snap photos of the actors and even earn some money.
Many scenes have been shot in Kearny, a working-class town across the Passaic River from Newark and about nine miles west of Manhattan. Residents have learned to recognize hints that a shoot is imminent.
"When you see those signs going up on the poles when you drive down Kearny Avenue, then you know it's getting close," Kearny Mayor Alberto Santos said, referring to the fliers advising residents that streets will be closed. "And when the pig goes on the roof, you know it's really close."
And when The Sopranos are in town, you do what they say — for a price.
The Irish-American Association, which occupies the building next to Satriale's, takes down its Irish flag and flies an Italian flag during filming. The association has been paid $20,000 in rental fees over the years, said Richard Dunleavy, past vice president. The town of Kearny has collected permit fees of $76,650.
"I'm sorry this will be the last season," Dunleavy said. "They will be missed."
The end of the show also will mean a different look for various Sopranos locales. The Satriale's building will be torn down and replaced with condos and a parking garage. In nearby Lodi, the Satin Dolls strip club, better known as the Bada Bing, will be renovated.
"It's an old building," said Satin Dolls general manager Nick D'Urso. "We like to keep up with current trends and keep a fresh face on the nightclub."
While Kearny is a regular spot, scouts were always looking for sites across Jersey to illustrate the scripts, said Regina Heyman, the show's location manager and a Jersey girl who grew up in Montclair. She said show creator David Chase is "avid about wanting it to be authentic. He grew up there. He wrote it for there."
The show employs four full-time scouts who drive around the state, sometimes for days, before finding a restaurant, office building or home to match what the writers dreamed up.
Scouts looked at 25 houses before they found Janet Cole's 121-year-old home, which was used for an episode in which Tony dreams he's gone to heaven and is visited by his dead cousin, played by Steve Buscemi.
"We weren't really sure if we wanted to do it and it would depend on the content of that particular episode," said Cole, who hadn't seen the show and watched DVDs to get a better sense of it. The family agreed, and had a great time watching the overnight shoot.
Other locations weren't as hard to find, such as a retirement community in West Orange called Green Hill. It became the setting for Green Grove, a fictional retirement community where Tony's mother, Livia, lived early on in the series and emerged again last season.
"I think the inspiration for Green Grove came because David Chase had his mom at Green Hill awhile ago when it first started," said Toni Davis, Green Hill's executive director.
When the scouts needed a conference room with a view of downtown Newark for an office scene, they eventually found attorney Kevin Marino, who was thrilled.
"They shot one scene and so much effort went into it," he said. "You really get a sense that a lot of hours go into just a few minutes."
There's a familiar aftermath at a half-dozen other sites around northern New Jersey where the show has filmed: photos of the actors and tales of invasion by dozens of cast and crewmembers.
They spent a day at Clear Eyes RX in Wayne, which fronted as an optical store owned by Ginny Sack's brother. Co-owner Fred Siwiec was surprised at how many technicians came in to change all the light bulbs, take measurements and hang their own posters for the merchandise.
"It was amazing to watch," he said, standing in front of photos of himself and Paulie. The business was compensated $6,000, he said.
The scouts eventually found Nori Sushi in Wayne for a scene where Carmela and Tony dine. Heyman said the script called for a specific look, and the restaurant also had to hold 75 people.
"There were plenty that didn't fit the bill of being in a strip mall," she said. "Once you find (the right place), the layout doesn't always work. A lot of sushi restaurants are small."
The show's work on location also has led to friendship and hospitality. Members of the Irish-American Association, the building next to the pork store in Kearny, have shared drinks with the cast and crew. But Dunleavy has yet to score an autograph from James Gandolfini, who plays Tony.
"Getting to Tony is like getting a meeting with the pope," he said. "So I just left him alone and hope to get my picture with him before he finishes up this job."
NEW YORK — Robert Iler doesn't recall much about that summer in 1997, when at age 12 the former Pizza Hut pitchman won the role of a mobster's bratty son in the pilot episode of an edgy new cable drama.
"I just remember not wanting to be there. I wanted to be hanging out with my friends," Iler says.
Excitement built, even as veteran co-stars cautioned him that the odds were against the show ever becoming a series. "This is probably the last time you'll see any of us," he was told by Tony Sirico, who plays hot-tempered lieutenant Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri.
Ten years later, the cast of The Sopranos finally is preparing to say goodbye. Production is set to end on HBO's biggest hit — and one of TV's seminal series — just as nine final episodes begin airing April 8.
But not before the ties between Iler's Anthony Jr. ("A.J.") and Mob boss dad Tony take center stage, James Gandolfini, 45, and Iler, 22, reveal in their only joint interview, at a sprawling sports and studio complex on Manhattan's West Side.
"The relationship between A.J. and the parents is a very big part of the season," Gandolfini says. In burying the series after eight years and 86 episodes, creator David Chase explores the generational divide and the strange pull of the Mob "family" on the Soprano family, the heart of the series.
Last season, wayward teen A.J. dropped out of a local college, got fired from Blockbuster for stealing and was eager to stab his great-uncle Junior in retaliation for an attack that left Tony hospitalized in critical condition. In doing so, A.J. would have thrust himself into the mobster's life of crime.
For all the bravado, "Tony as a 19-year-old would have eaten A.J. as a 19-year-old alive, would've taken his lunch money," says Gandolfini, quoting a description by Sopranos writer/producer Terence Winter.
But as a parent, Tony has changed his tune.
"In the scene where he was going to go stab Uncle Junior, maybe in a different world Tony's father would have encouraged behavior like that, whereas Tony's like: 'You make me want to cry. You can't do this. I don't want you to do this for a living,' " Gandolfini says. "And (Tony) says to him, 'You're a good guy. You're a nice guy. You're not cut out for this kind of (stuff).' "
Do the actors bring any of their own upbringing to their TV personas? "I'm sure we do. My father used to swat me on the back of the head occasionally, which I did to him on the show," Gandolfini says, gesturing to Iler. "My father used to call me gogoots, which I didn't even tell David, and he wrote it into the show. I think it means eggplant." (Actually it's a squash, but colloquially it's an affectionate term for a stupid person.)
"His family is very old-world Italian, like mine," he says.
An unusually reflective Gandolfini speaks of a generational divide, calling Tony and his wife, Carmela, a different breed from his notoriously cold and psychologically abusive mother, Livia, as played by the late Nancy Marchand.
"We're better parents, but I don't think that's necessarily good in a way," Gandolfini says.
"Because we've become dependent?" Iler asks.
"Yeah, maybe," Gandolfini responds. "One way to look at it is they're going to toughen up when they have to. Another way to look at it is if you give them (grief) right away, they're used to it."
Which could just as easily apply off-screen.
The show's aura of authenticity also provides eerie parallels for the actors, who prefer not to discuss them. Iler pleaded guilty to robbery and drug possession in an incident in 2001; Gandolfini was in the midst of a messy divorce just as Tony and Carmela separated on-screen late in 2002.
"The show has a lot of real-life situations, not TV situations, so it's bound to happen in real life, too. And that can get a little weird," Gandolfini allows.
And it was just as strange for the adolescent Iler. "I was going from being at home arguing with my mom to going to work and arguing with my (TV) mom," Edie Falco. "It was weird; it was a great experience. I'm thinking about it now, how much I'm going to miss it. I don't know if it's fully hit me. This is going to be the first time since I'm 12 years old that I'm going to be unemployed."
Alone among his castmates, Gandolfini is itching to get out, saying that though he'll miss the cast and crew, the intensity of playing Tony for so long has taken its toll. "It's like you take a sponge and you wring out the sponge and then, you know, it's empty. After a while you've been to too many of the same places, and it's time to explore something new."
HBO chairman Chris Albrecht understands the three-time Emmy winner's emotions as the series winds down. "No one has had to take a character on this length of a journey, on this depth of a journey, through as long a period," he says.
And like a proud papa, Gandolfini is impressed with Iler's blossoming in upcoming episodes. (He's forbidden from describing them because of Chase's notorious penchant for secrecy.) Iler, he says, has "done incredible work this year; some of the scenes shocked me. I really was taken aback about how powerful some of the stuff was. Wow."
And Iler, who grew up in an Irish family, says that "after working with these people for 10 years, a part of me has become almost like Italian. I see myself pick up Italian mannerisms, little sayings. When you grow up with an Irish family, you say 'Cheers' I guess, but now, whenever I'm with my friends, it's like, 'Cent'ann'." It started like a joke between me and my friends, but now it's what I say."
Gandolfini grins, noting that "95% of the people on the show are Italian, really Italian." So for him, "it wasn't that big a stretch. I have an Uncle Al who reminds me of Uncle Junior. The only difference is the Mob stuff."
As for The End —the long-awaited and much-speculated-about conclusion to the often-violent drama — the series' final scene was shot last week at an ice-cream parlor in Bloomfield, N.J. The filming attracted throngs of nostalgic onlookers, although other scenes remain to be filmed before the series wraps its production in mid-April.
Betting sites are laying odds on which regular characters get whacked before it's all over and which loose ends are tied up. On that front, don't count on too many, thanks to the unconventional interests of creator David Chase.
But after all that has come before, the series finale "makes sense," says Michael Imperioli, who plays Soprano deputy (and cousin) Christopher, though, like life, "it's never really cut-and-dried and clean."
Adds Falco, Tony's wife, Carmela: "It's as unpredictable as everything else in this show."
Fans continue to be frustrated specifically by Chase's refusal to revisit the whereabouts of Valery, the Russian mobster last seen in "Pine Barrens," a beloved third-season episode in which Christopher and Paulie get lost in the Jersey woods.
"David has a vision of what he wants to do; he's not going to do something to have a nice clean ending, to have the audience satisfied that the Russian guy" reappears, Gandolfini says.
As the cast finished the final "table read," a run-through in which actors read through the script, "we all kind of sat there," he says. "I think for five minutes nobody said anything. It just kind of felt satisfying. Nobody was like, 'Whaaaa?' "
The actor had higher expectations than anybody: "I didn't want it to go out like something I didn't like. And I should have known he wouldn't do that."
When it ends, Iler has nothing lined up yet, but he says, "I want to start working right away." Gandolfini, who starred in a few films during the Sopranos run, plans to take some time off; he also is producing an HBO documentary about American soldiers wounded in Iraq.
But he's no longer sentimental about Tony Soprano, the character with whom he'll be forever indelibly linked: "No more beatings for a while and no more yelling for a while will be good. But I don't know what else I'm going to (expletive) play."
NEW YORK — David Chase looks like a nice guy. The 61-year-old television writer and producer is slight, wry and direct. But with a mere phone call, he strikes fear in the heart of actors -- after all, his rap sheet is a mile long.
As creator and executive producer of the beloved, violent "Sopranos," Chase has sent character after character to his or her demise, held up for sacrifice to the gods of taut, uncompromising drama.
Five of the actors who were whacked by Chase in their previous fictional life on the HBO mob drama, sat down with their executioner Wednesday night at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.
Steve Buscemi (Tony Blundetto), Drea de Matteo (Adriana La Cerva), Vincent Pastore (Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero), David Proval (Richie Aprile) and Annabella Sciorra (Gloria Trillo) reflected on their fate in a panel discussion that also included "Sopranos" executive producer Terence Winter and was moderated by Bryant Gumbel.
"It's not a big deal to me," Chase stated flatly at the start. "These are not real people."
Their deaths came in a variety of ways: A shotgun blast on a country porch, offing in the woods, execution at sea, a bullet to the head over dinner and suicide off-screen -- all endings woven into the often-ugly fabric of New Jersey mob life depicted in "The Sopranos." The show, which began in 1999, starts its final season April 8.
The actors all said they have come to understand the reasons for their character's killings as befitting the show's grim reality.
"What are you going to do, put him in witness protection? That's NBC," said Pastore, whose character was discovered to be a police informant.
But while the deaths are obviously fictional, they can a
