For now, he has a deal at Paramount and is working on writing and directing his own project. Nothing is in production yet, but he's got three stories in mind -- one about rock 'n' roll, another about the movies and a third about acting.
"I've said this a million times," he said. "But I've always wanted to do movies."
That's what he strove for with "The Sopranos" -- cinema-quality storytelling. The genesis of each season would entail Chase "going away" alone to develop story arcs -- then returning to the writers room to hash out each episode.
"We'd throw out a lot of what I did, actually," said Chase. "But each week we would ask ourselves, 'What's the movie we're trying to make this week?' Because that's what we were trying to do -- make 13 small features every season, and that's why for me from the very beginning the continuing story aspects were less of an interest to me than the stand-alone episodes."
Like most writing rooms, the one for "The Sopranos" could be torturous. Chase could be stern and impatient with writers who didn't completely "get" the ethos of Tony Soprano. There was a core creative group for much of the series -- Terence Winter, Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess perhaps most notable among them -- but there were many writers who came and went.
"I wasn't running a writing school for professional writers," said Chase. Still, the room was not always business, and could be highly social. "I miss the writers room," said Chase. "So much of it was aimless chatter. It was funny and self-revealing, a kind of group therapy, but very often the ideas would come out of that."
'Like Beatlemania'
Whatever the formula, it made HBO -- and it drew more than a few comparisons to Shakespeare and Dickens.
"It was like Beatlemania," said Chase, who on the same day HBO greenlighted "The Sopranos" was also offered to be the show runner on the Fox sci-fi crime program "Millennium." "I'd never really been in a position like that; I couldn't believe it."
Even with a little distance now, he isn't sure why the show hit a cultural bull's-eye.
"I don't know," he said. "But here's my guess, my official guess -- I think there were two reasons. James Gandolfini was so compelling to watch. And also it's because the audience really didn't know what was going to happen next."
Like, for instance, after the finale's last 10 seconds.
--
martin.miller@latimes.com
