[Richard Pryor on Fire]

I heard they actully shot a scene where Tony does get wacked, but they decided to leave it open so discussions, just like this fun and informative one we are having at this very moment could happen.

[Fred Cracklin]

The original B-Side to "Don't Stop Believin'" was "Natural Thing." Many record companies, did, at one time, press 45s that had two A-Sides for oldies radio and jukebox play. For example, Warner Brothers called their series "Back to Back Hits." Columbia (Journey's label) did something similar, but "Who's Crying Now" is the "B-Side" one sees to "Don't Stop Believin'" in jukeboxes.

I'd say it's a good chance that they made the jukebox placard specifically for the final scene which lends significance to the "Any Way You Want It" theory.

Other song titles were "Who Will You Run To" & "Magic Man" by Heart and
"I've Gotta Be Me" & "A Lonely Place" by Tony Bennett.

Also, on the subject of The Sopranos music, I think there's two different soundtrack cds out. Wonder if there'll be a third.

[jon boy]

never really got into the sopranos so cant say that i am really bothered. i never understood what all the fuss was about. enlighten me.

[evollove]

^ Sopranos is a show that never looked down on its audience. It's highly dramatic, very funny, and we come to care for characters we also despise, creating a tense emotional experience. The plots are thicker than most movies and it looks as good, if not better, than most movies. It's a show that you can watch two or three times and pick out subtlties that even the most observant watcher may have missed. Anyone who watches it simply expecting a mob story will be dissapointed: the show is more about cultural transference, the weight of history, American politics/economics, and, of course, family.

Fans also dig the literary/filmic allusions, symbolism, dream sequences, references to topical debates. And it takes chances in the story telling that almost always pay off. We're constantly suprised, yet also satisfied.

So, the fuss? For me, I guess it's one of the only shows where I have never, ever said: "Gee, that was kinda stupid."

(I could post on this show forever.)

[atari 2600]

Entertainment Weekly has an exclusive excerpt of David Chase's "The Sopranos: The Complete Book" due to hit shelves the day before Halloween.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20152845,00.html

reprinted here
Exclusive Excerpt
'Sopranos' Creator Takes on Angry Fans

An interview from ''The Sopranos: The Complete Book'': ''They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly,'' says David Chase of viewers unsatisfied by his ending for Tony

 

THE LAST SUPPER? ''Whatever else happens, people are going to have to stop and eat,'' says David Chase

EDITOR'S NOTE: Still haunted by The Sopranos' cut-to-black finale four months later? Here, in this exclusive excerpt from The Sopranos: The Complete Book (out Oct. 30), series creator David Chase opens up to interviewer Brett Martin about the choices he made for the controversial send-off.
Were you at all surprised by the reaction to the final episode?
DAVID CHASE: No. We knew there would be people who would be perplexed by it and shut their minds to it. This just felt like the right ending.
Did you expect people to be so pissed off?
We didn't expect them to be that pissed for that long. It's one thing to be deeply involved with a television show. It's another to be so involved that all you do is sit on a couch and watch it. It seemed that those people were just looking for an excuse to be pissed off. There was a war going on that week and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings.
If you were expecting plot twists like Furio coming back from Italy to whack Tony and marry Carmela, you were obviously barking up the wrong tree.
There was so much more to say than could have been conveyed by an image of Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head. Or, on the other side, taking over the New York mob. The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people's alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ''justice.'' They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly. But these people have always wanted blood. Maybe they would have been happy if Tony had killed twelve other people. Or twenty-five people. Or, who knows, if he had blown up Penn Station. The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years.
You know there were many people who thought the end was brilliant.
Sure. But I must say that even people who liked it misinterpreted it, to a certain extent. This wasn't really about ''leaving the door open.'' There was nothing definite about what happened, but there was a clean trend on view — a definite sense of what Tony and Carmela's future looks like. Whether it happened that night or some other night doesn't really matter.
Have you heard the elaborate theories about what really happened? Like the one that says you were re-creating The Last Supper?
The interesting thing is that, if you're creative, there may be things at work that you're not even aware of: things you learned in school, patterns you've internalized. I had no intention of using The Last Supper, but who knows if, subconsciously, it just came out. If people want to sit there figuring this stuff out, I think that's just great. Most of them, most of us, should have done this kind of thing in high school English class and didn't.
Are they wasting their time? Is there a puzzle to be solved?
There are no esoteric clues in there. No Da Vinci Code. Everything that pertains to that episode was in that episode. And it was in the episode before that and the one before that and seasons before this one and so on. There had been indications of what the end is like. Remember when Jerry Toricano was killed? Silvio was not aware that the gun had been fired until after Jerry was on his way down to the floor. That's the way things happen: It's already going on by the time you even notice it.
Are you saying...?
I'm not saying anything. And I'm not trying to be coy. It's just that I think that to explain it would diminish it.
Why do you think people are so intent on getting an answer?
DAVID CHASE: I remember I would tell my kid and her cousins bedtime stories. Sometimes I would want to get back to the grown-ups and have a drink, so I would say something like, ''And they were driving down the road and that's it. Story over.'' They would always scream, ''Wait a minute! That's no ending!'' Apparently that need for finality exists in human beings. But we're not children anymore. Especially watching a show like The Sopranos that's got sex and violence.
You've said that you knew what the final scene would be for several years before it happened. What was the seed of the idea?
As I recall, it was just that Tony and his family would be in a diner having dinner and a guy would come in. Pretty much what you saw.
So you just had to get them to the diner?
Yeah. But it's not that difficult. Whatever else happens, people are going to have to stop and eat.
Was Journey there from the beginning?
I had thought about using ''Don't Stop Believin''' a couple times over the course of the series in a background way, but I had forgotten about it until my nephew sent me a mix tape with the song on it. I knew it would be controversial, because Journey has a reputation that most people wouldn't associate with our show.
Did you consider other songs?
When we were scouting locations, I actually took several songs in the van and played them for the crew. I'd never done that before. When the Journey song came on, everybody went, ''Oh no! Jesus, David, what are you thinking?'' But then they started to say, ''You know what? This is kind of good. This is a great f---ing song!''
What about the black screen?
Originally, I didn't want any credits at all. I just wanted the black screen to go the length of the credits — all the way to the HBO whoosh sound. But the Director's Guild wouldn't give us a waiver.
Did you think of it as a prank — people thinking their TVs had gone out?
I saw some items in the press that said, ''This was a huge 'f--- you' to the audience.'' That we were s---ting in the audience's face. Why would we want to do that? Why would we entertain people for eight years only to give them the finger? We don't have contempt for the audience. In fact, I think The Sopranos is the only show that actually gave the audience credit for having some intelligence and attention span. We always operated as though people don't need to be spoon-fed every single thing — that their instincts and feelings and humanity will tell them what's going on.
It seems part of what upsets people is your ruthlessness. The idea that nothing ever changes or gets better.
I disagree. People have said that the Soprano family's whole life goes in the toilet in the last episode. That the parents' whole twisted lifestyle is visited on the children. And that's true — to a certain extent. But look at it: A.J.'s not going to become a citizen-soldier or join the Peace Corps to try to help the world; he'll probably be a low-level movie producer. But he's not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not become a pediatrician or even a lawyer, but she's not going to be a housewife-whore like her mother. She'll learn to operate in the world in a way that Carmela never did. It's not ideal. It's not what the parents dreamed of. But it's better than it was. Tiny, little bits of progress — that's how it works.
Do you believe life has an arc? Or is it just a bunch of stuff that happens?
Is there a pupose, you mean? Everything I have to say about that is in the show. Go look at Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. It's all there: Life seems to have no purpose but we have to go on behaving as though it does. We have to go on behaving toward each other like people who would love.
So, it's still worth trying?
Of course. What else are you going to do? Watch TV? (Interview by Brett Martin. Excerpted from The Sopranos: The Complete Book, Time Inc. Home Entertainment, out next week.)

[m1rr0r dash]

favorite onion headline ever

James Gandolfini Shot By Closure-Seeking Fan

 

NEW YORK—Actor James Gandolfini, best known for his portrayal of mob kingpin Tony Soprano on the hit HBO show The Sopranos, was shot to death Tuesday in a Greenwich Village restaurant by a fan unable to accept the open-ended conclusion of the series finale that aired earlier this month.

According to police reports, 28-year-old marketing research assistant Louis Bowen walked into the small Italian restaurant Occhiuto's at approximately 7:40 p.m. and headed directly toward Gandolfini's table. Bowen then drew a snub-nosed .38 revolver from his jacket and shot Gandolfini point-blank in the head three times before dropping the gun and calmly exiting the eatery.

Bowen was apprehended two blocks away by two NYPD officers and reportedly put up no resistance.

"I couldn't let it just hang," Bowen told police in a post-arrest confession released to the media. "Eight years of my life, and a fucking artsy cut to black? It was eating me up inside."

In his statement, Bowen also used the word "betrayal" to describe the series's resolution, which he was convinced set up a climactic death for the sociopathic mafia don. The realization that Soprano's brutal life of constant fear and anxiety would have no real end slowly drove the obsessed Bowen over the edge.

"I had to tie up the loose ends, I just had to," Bowen said. "I'm positive this is exactly how [creator and executive producer] David Chase wanted fans to interpret the ending."

NYPD spokesman Charles Krann expressed regret over the Gandolfini slaying, saying that law enforcement "should have known this was coming," considering the heavy foreshadowing of impending doom in The Sopranos' final season and the lack of payoff.

"The symbolism and dialogue clearly conveyed an ominous sense of death and decay," Krann said. "Particularly the scene in the second-to-last episode where Tony and his brother-in-law talk about death. So for Bowen, murdering the actor brought a kind of justice."

"It probably would have all been different had there been a realistic chance of a Sopranos movie," Krann added.

Gandolfini's murder comes in the wake of several recent attempts on the actor's life following the airing of the series finale, which included a car bomb that exploded when he remote-started his car, and an attempted garroting while he rode in the front seat of a cab. Though the star is mourned by millions, many expressed relief that Tony Soprano's saga is definitively over.

"Thank God it finally happened," said Lenox Hill Hospital general surgery resident David Kinsky, who was sitting at a table adjacent to Gandolfini's at the time of the murder. "I just knew that was how the story was meant to end. After the finale, I was so anxious and depressed I could hardly sleep."

Yet other eyewitnesses characterized Gandolfini's death as "predictable," "cheap," and "devoid of imagination."

"I'm an intelligent person—I didn't need to be spoon-fed an ending like this," Occhiuto's bartender Kim Romano said. "The killer obviously didn't get that the finale was meant to show Tony doomed to live out his violent gangland existence in an infinite, monotonous loop. Like the Journey song at the end said, 'It goes on and on and on and on.'"

Ironically, far from satisfactorily resolving the fate of Tony Soprano, Gandolfini's brutal slaying will most likely only intensify the controversy among fans, and will serve as prime water-cooler discussion material for days, if not weeks, to come.

In a late-night City Hall press conference, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg refused to comment on the killing.

"No, no, don't tell me what happened," said Bloomberg, hastily plugging his ears. "I TiVo'ed the last six episodes but I've been too busy to watch them. No spoilers, please."

[Tokolosh]

For a second there, you almost had me.