When, on January 10, 1999, The Sopranos premiered with Gandolfini, then thirty-eight, in the plum role of Tony, the Soprano paterfamilias, the actor would soon find himself aglow in the brightest spotlight of his career. Casting Gandolfini turned out to be a stroke of brilliance. Nevertheless, Chase-who had earlier considered actor Michael Rispoli and musician Steven Van Zandt for the lead role (both men would end up in the series-as Jackie Aprile and Silvio Dante, respectively)-personally picked Gandolfini as his guy because he passed the real world test. Whether he was playing a ruthless mob henchman in True Romance or a bearded Southern stuntman in Get Shorty, his work had not been wildly auspicious or lavishly praised by critics. The Sopranos was ordered to series.Īt this point, the show’s leading man, James Gandolfini, was a little-known character actor who tended to disappear artfully into his roles-some of them, appropriate to his size, heavies. At HBO, where things were done differently, Albrecht and colleague Carolyn Strauss-fully supported by HBO CEO Jeff Bewkes-decided to go with their guts rather than succumb to the research. Most broadcast networks confronting such a meager reaction would likely have passed on the pilot then and there. After it was shot and edited, the pilot was test-marketed in several cities, to a tepid response. HBO came on board shortly thereafter, however, and produced a pilot.
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Then in its fourth season, The Sopranos was proving immensely popular with audiences and was in the process of becoming as much a watershed for television as Citizen Kane had been for motion pictures.Īnd yet the show that had come shockingly close to never existing in the first place was, at that moment, on the cusp of collapse.ĭavid Chase, auteur of the series, had originally written the pilot script for the Fox television network, but after a short flirtation Fox executives passed on the project, condemning it to turnaround, that limbo from which many a series or film has failed to return.
In the late spring of 2003, Albrecht played host there to more than a dozen invited friends and associates for an urgent meeting, one that concerned the pay network’s most important show, and one of the most celebrated dramas ever- The Sopranos. Read moreĪlthough Chris Albrecht owned a beautiful Mediterranean-style house in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, for his East Coast sojourns HBO rented its CEO a showpiece apartment in Midtown Manhattan’s Museum Towers, not far from Radio City Music Hall. Over the course of more than 750 interviews with key sources, Miller reveals how fraught HBO’s journey has been, capturing the drama and the comedy off-camera and inside boardrooms as HBO created and mobilized a daring new content universe, and, in doing so, reshaped storytelling and upended our entertainment lives forever. J.) to Zendaya, as well as every single living president of HBO-and hundreds of other major players. As he did to great acclaim with SNL in Live from New York with ESPN in Those Guys Have All the Fun and with talent agency CAA in Powerhouse, Miller continues his record of extraordinary access to the most important voices, this time speaking with talents ranging from Abrams (J.
In Tinderbox, award-winning journalist James Andrew Miller uncovers a bottomless trove of secrets and surprises, revealing new conflicts, insights, and analysis. By thinking big, trashing tired formulas, and killing off cliches long past their primes, HBO shook off the shackles of convention and led the way to a bolder world of content, opening the door to all that was new, original, and worthy of our attention. The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, The Wire, Succession…HBO has long been the home of epic shows, as well as the source for brilliant new movies, news-making documentaries, and controversial sports journalism. Tinderbox tells the exclusive, explosive, uninhibited true story of HBO and how it burst onto the American scene and screen to detonate a revolution and transform our relationship with television forever.
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