Tony Soprano

Life imitated art in a New Jersey courtroom earlier today when David Chase, the mind behind The Sopranos, testified in the state's federal court to defend his creative ownership of the HBO series.

Twelve years ago, it seems, he collaborated with a man named Robert Baer, a budding screenwriter and former prosecutor who set up meetings between Mr. Chase and mafia experts during a tour of the Garden State. Mr. Baer, in part, claims that he was not adequately paid for his services—assistance that may have led to the show’s foundational plot. Asserting ownership of the pilot’s core themes, Mr. Chase, a New Jersey native, told the judge that he has been fascinated with the mob ever since watching The Untouchables. (Whether he was referring to the 1959 TV series or the 1987 Brian De Palma feature film was not made clear.) As if quoting Tony Soprano, Mr. Baer said he declined payment from Mr. Chase several times in 1995, if only because the series’ creator assured him that he would “take care of him” in due time. Likewise, the screenwriter has called the hired helper “self-delusional” in legal papers. [AP]

Forrest "Frosty" Myers' iconic Soho sculpture "The Wall" is returning to its rightful home at 599 Broadway, after a lengthy argument with the building's landlord. We mirrored the picture because it looks totally cool. [Villager]

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Everyone is now so intoxicated with The Sopranos (including me) that the producers think they can do anything they want with us. It's not a good spot, for us or them.

Last night's season finale (which precedes a final season) offered one benediction after another, and just about every one felt unearned. The show played with the viewer. It hinted two or three times at climactic violence and each time delivered hugs-and-kisses instead. Notably, in the subplot where Christopher begins boinking the real estate agent whom his boss Tony Soprano had declared his interest in—then Christopher confesses the betrayal and his earlier lies about it to Tony without consequences. Or Tony squeezing his rival boss's hand in the hospital. On it went. The last scene was a happy united family at Christmas. In June.

I guess a drama is allowed to go on lofty jet-stream tangents when it has established the kind of success Sopranos has. (Seinfeld did it, and suffered.) Sopranos seems utterly removed from the reality that gave it life. Take the theme song of last night's show, the Stones' Moonlight Mile, a narcotic-delusion ballad. What's the connection? Maybe the producers used to get high on that, in college. But who can forgive them the greatest misrepresentation in the show: when a member of the federal organized crime task force in the US Attorney's office shows up at Tony's club to inform him that the Brooklyn family plans to knock off someone close to him, thus spurring Tony to reach out. Does that kind of thing happen? I doubt it. This feels like story heaven, the place stories go when they die.

Or maybe it's a dream sequence, with the producers (and writers, and actors) all snoozing on their laurels, resting up for what by every indication will be a bloodbath in the last real season. Then how will we feel about this false winter?

Watching the latest episode of the Sopranos (Wow, great!), I was reminded of the art lesson I quote from Muriel Spark in a recent entry—

Fiction is lies. And in order to do this you have got to have a very good sense of what is the truth. You can't do the art of deception, of deceiving people so they suspend disbelief, without having that sense very strongly indeed

Her principle is demonstrated by Tony's visits to the therapist. "My shrink," he calls her. Well, you cannot go to a therapist and be as otherwise degraded as Tony Soprano, you cannot believe in therapy and disbelieve in homosexuality, the big theme of the latest episode. It is utterly implausible. But who cares? The therapy sessions are artistically necessary: they yield up Tony's interior life in ways that this shrewd, grunting action figure would not otherwise allow us to see, they make him reflective and sympathetic, in short, make him a main character. So we all go willingly along with the lie.

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