Dream come true:
Post-sopranos, David Chase creates a new type of hero
David Chase now has the clout to make the move to film,
As odd as it sounds from the creator of The Sopranos, David Chase says he “couldn’t get arrested.”
For the better part of three decades, Chase wanted to make a feature film based on his coming-of-age experience in the suburbs of New York, but until he recreated the television template with the darkly themed tales of Tony Soprano, no one cared.
“I wrote many, many, many a script and they never got made,” says Chase, a man who cut his teeth on weekly series such as Night Stalker, The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure until he acquired enough clout to make his feature dreams come true.
“I could not get arrested, as they say. Nothing started to click movie-wise for me. All the scripts were either too dark or too this or too that. Their appetite for me didn’t start to get whetted until The Sopranos, and once they see you are someone who can make a billion dollars, they let you do anything. That’s all it comes down to.”
Now making the press rounds for Friday’s wide release of Not Fade Away, his nostalgia-drenched dramatic debut about one young man’s quest for love and acceptance via rock ’n’ roll, Chase says he’s still not that comfortable talking about himself.
“You don’t have to do this in TV,” he says, referring to the endless marketing and promotion that goes along with a bid to capture opening weekend receipts.
“As a kid I was very shy, and one of the reasons why I wanted to be in show business was to lose that and stand out. So I like (doing interviews) in a sense. But I wasn’t very good at it at first … I have had to work at it.”
So far, so good, because Chase comes from a generation that doesn’t mind paying its dues and toiling in the background for years before finding the limelight. It’s part of his Middle American backbone, and it informs just about everything he’s created, from the blackened threads of Tony Soprano’s business deals to the muted shades of Douglas (John Magaro), the central character in Not Fade Away.
Chase says Douglas is loosely based on himself: He played drums in a band, he upset his father when he grew his hair long, and he embraced his more creative side over machismo tradition.
“The early version (of this script) wasn’t the same movie at all. It all goes back 20-25 years ago, and it was about two guys who had been in a garage band and meet up as adults again. One guy is still 15 years old and the other guy isn’t,” he says.