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"FacebookPinterest\n\n I have said it many times: If and when I have grandchildren, I will tell them that I saw Michael Jordan play basketball, Jacques Pepin make an omelet, and James Gandolfini act.\n\n Anybody who has ever been on a TV or movie set knows there is no place more guaranteed to exterminate any sense of romance about TV and the movies. Not so when Gandolfini was shooting, say, an ordinary family dinner scene of The Sopranos. Every take, and there were always dozens, would be just a little bit different. Every line delivery bringing up another subtle shade or variation of the character he had so come to embody. And each time, you could tell, required a return journey into that character as real and visceral as the plate of spaghetti and braciole he would dig into again and again and again. It was hypnotizing. It was exhausting.\n\n It is not too much of a stretch to say that if Gandolfini had not gotten the role of Tony Soprano\u2014as, by all rights of all television rules ever written, he shouldn't have\u2014and attacked it with such gusto, television would not be what it is today. Without an actor capable of finding Tony's melancholy, his soulfulness, his absurdity and his rage, the era of TV antiheroes may never have found its foothold. In interviews, which he did his very best to avoid, the actor would often fall back on some version of \"I'm just a dumb, fat guy from Jersey.\" \"That's bullshit,\" David Chase once told me, with an affectionate chuckle. \"Jim knows damned well what he's doing. He knows.\"\n\n We can't know, certainly not yet and maybe not ever, to what extent the strain of work contributed to Gandolfini's death yesterday. The following story\u2014which was already on stands when the news broke\u2014suggests what a struggle it could be for him. The best piece of evidence for his legacy may be that the people for whom his fits and absences made life most difficult were the same people, to a man and woman, who regarded him with the most compassion and admiration. They forgave him and they loved him.\u2014Brett Martin\n\n\n\n One cold winter's evening in January 2002, Tony Soprano went missing and a small portion of the universe ground to a halt.\n\n It was not completely out of the blue. Ever since The Sopranos had debuted in 1999, turning Tony\u2014anxiety-prone dad, New Jersey mobster, suburban seeker of meaning\u2014into a millennial pop-culture icon, the character's frustration, volatility, and anger had often been indistinguishable from those qualities of James Gandolfini, the actor who brought them to life. It was a punishing role, requiring not only vast amounts of nightly memorization and long days under hot lights, but also a daily descent into Tony's psyche\u2014at the best of times, a worrisome place to dwell; at the worst, ugly, violent, and sociopathic.\n\n Some actors\u2014notably Edie Falco, who played Tony's wife, Carmela Soprano\u2014are capable of plumbing such depths without getting in over their heads. Blessed with a near photographic memory, Falco could show up for work, memorize her lines, play the most emotionally devastating of scenes, and then return happily to her trailer to join her regular companion, Marley, a gentle yellow Lab mix.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Star James Gandolfini and creator david Chase transformed cable TV into an art form.\n\n Not so Gandolfini, for whom playing Tony Soprano would always require to some extent being Tony Soprano. Crew members grew accustomed to hearing grunts and curses coming from his trailer as he worked up to the emotional pitch of a scene by, say, destroying a boom-box radio. An intelligent and intuitive actor, Gandolfini understood this dynamic and used it to his advantage; the heavy bathrobe that became Tony's signature, transforming him into a kind of domestic bear, was murder under the lights in midsummer, but Gandolfini insisted on wearing it between takes. Other times, though, simulated misery became indistinguishable from the real thing\u2014on set and off. In papers related to a divorce filing at the end of 2002, Gandolfini's wife described increasingly serious issues with drugs and alcohol, as well as arguments during which the actor would repeatedly punch himself in the face out of frustration. To anybody who had witnessed the actor's self-directed rage as he struggled to remember lines in front of the camera\u2014he would berate himself in disgust, curse, smack the back of his own head\u2014it was a plausible scenario.\n\n It did not help that the naturally shy Gandolfini was suddenly one of the most recognizable men in America\u2014especially in New York and New Jersey, where the show filmed and where the sight of him walking down the street with, say, a cigar was guaranteed to seed confusion in those already inclined to shout the names of fictional characters at real human beings. Unlike Falco, who could slip off Carmela's French-tipped nails, throw on a baseball cap, and disappear in a crowd, Gandolfini\u2014six feet tall, upwards of 250 pounds\u2014had no place to hide.\n\n All of which had begun to take its toll. By the winter of 2002, Gandolfini's sudden refusals to work had become a semiregular occurrence. His fits were passive-aggressive: He would claim to be sick, refuse to leave his TriBeCa apartment, or simply not show up. The next day, inevitably, he would feel so wretched about his behavior and the massive logistic disruptions it had caused\u2014akin to turning an aircraft carrier on a dime\u2014that he would treat cast and crew to extravagant gifts. \"All of a sudden there'd be a sushi chef at lunch,\" one crew member remembered. \"Or we'd all get massages.\" It had come to be understood by all involved as part of the price of doing business, the trade-off for getting the remarkably intense, fully inhabited Tony Soprano that Gandolfini offered.\n\n So when the actor failed to show up for a 6 p.m. call at Westchester County Airport to shoot the final appearance of the character Furio Giunta, a night shoot involving a helicopter, few panicked. \"Nobody was particularly sad to go home at nine thirty on a Friday night,\" says Terence Winter, the writer-producer on set that evening. \"You know, 'It's just money.' I mean, it was a ton of money\u2014we shut down a fucking airport.\"\n\n Over the next twelve hours, it would become clear that this time was different. This time, Gandolfini was just gone.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n The boss, at work.\n\n The operation that came to a halt that evening was a massive one. The Sopranos had spread out to occupy most of two floors of Silvercup Studios, a steel-and-brick onetime bread factory in Long Island City, Queens. Downstairs, the production filmed on four of Silvercup's huge stages, including the ominously named Stage X, on which sat an endlessly reconfigurable, almost life-size model of the Soprano family's New Jersey McMansion. The view of the family's backyard\u2014brick patio and swimming pool, practically synonymous with suburban ennui\u2014lay rolled up on an enormous translucent curtain that could be wheeled behind the ersatz kitchen windows and backlit when needed.\n\n A small army of craftsmen was employed in fabricating these details, and their work added up to as rich and fleshed-out a universe as had ever existed on TV: upwards of 200 people, plus a whole other team of post-production crew stationed in Los Angeles. Dailies were shuttled back and forth between the coasts under a fake company name to foil spies anxious to spoil feverishly anticipated plot points. What had started three years earlier as an oddball, what-do-we-have-to-lose experiment for a network still best known for rerunning Hollywood movies had become a huge bureaucratic institution.\n\n More than that, to be at Silvercup at that moment was to stand at the center of a television revolution. Soon the dial would begin to fill with Tony Sopranos. Within three months, a bald, stocky, flawed but charismatic boss\u2014this time of a band of rogue cops instead of Mafiosi\u2014would make his first appearance, on FX's The Shield. Mere months after that, on The Wire, viewers would be introduced to a collection of Baltimore citizens that included an alcoholic, narcissistic police officer, a ruthless drug lord, and a gay, homicidal stickup boy. In the wings lurked such creatures as Deadwood's Al Swearengen, as cretinous a character as would ever appear on television, much less in the role of protagonist; Mad Men's Don Draper, that charming, enigmatic vault of secrets and shifting identities; and Breaking Bad's Walter White, whose journey was from a milquetoast high school chemistry teacher into a monster with a meth empire.\n\n These were characters that conventional wisdom had once insisted Americans would never allow into their living rooms: unhappy, morally compromised, complicated, deeply human. These fictional men played a seductive game with the viewers, daring them to emotionally invest in, even root for, even love, a gamut of criminals whose crimes would come to include everything from adultery and polygamy (Mad Men and Big Love) to vampirism and serial murder (True Blood and Dexter). From the time Tony Soprano waded into his pool to welcome a flock of wayward ducks in The Sopranos pilot, it had been clear that viewers were willing to be seduced.\n\n In the most maligned of mediums, there had suddenly opened a window in which it would be possible to create great art. And a generation of ambitious, complicated, hungry writers stood ready to seize the opportunity.\n\n In the hands of these all-powerful, all-knowing showrunners, television became nothing less than the dominant art form of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the equivalent of what the Big Novel had been to the 1960s and the \"American New Wave\" cinema had been to the 1970s. TV is now the place you go to see artists grappling with the big questions of late-stage, decadent American capitalism: family and work, sex and violence, addiction and warfare. And it was with The Sopranos that the era of the new auteurs of TV began.\n\n\n\n One man, sitting in his office on the fourth floor of Silvercup, had a characteristically complicated set of reactions to Gandolfini's disappearance. On a personal level, David Chase, The Sopranos' creator and showrunner, was concerned for his star's safety. Professionally, he was some combination of resigned and fatalistic. It was, he always said, a precondition of making The Sopranos that he be prepared for it to end at any moment\u2014either by Chase himself walking away or the show being canceled, which was, after all, the fate of all but the rarest series. Here, then, was the inevitable, albeit in slightly more dramatic costume.\n\n Chase's pessimism was at once the honest product of decades in the network-TV trenches and of his natural temperament. For all The Sopranos' accomplishments, its ecutive producer was at best ambivalent about his career in television, at worst as tormented as Gandolfini. Chase had grown up worshipping Film with a capital F. His heroes were the auteurs of the European New Wave and the 1970s American filmmakers inspired by them: Fellini, Godard, Coppola, Scorsese. These men were mavericks, artists who sacrificed the easy path to realize their vision on-screen. Television was for sellouts and hacks, and his career, as Chase saw it, was a long succession of unfortunate successes\u2014from early stints on Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Rockford Files to jobs writing the prestigious network shows I'll Fly Away and Northern Exposure, to a series of increasingly lucrative but never produced pilots and other false starts. Each had dragged him deeper and deeper into the business. Chase had come, he tells me, to believe that he'd made a grave karmic error.\n\n \"I began to think that I was not going to succeed in movies because I wasn't sacrificing enough. I wasn't willing to quit, to get off that nipple, the weekly salary, the nice house in Santa Monica. I wasn't willing to do the artistic thing, cut myself off and live the freelance life,\" he says.\n\n Yet any of the directors Chase idolized would have killed for a fraction of the godlike powers over an ever expanding universe that he ercised from his office overlooking the Queensboro Bridge's off-ramp. Since its debut, the scale and scope of The Sopranos had multiplied in every way. The money involved was heady. The number of shooting days for each script\u2014which is the surest measure of cost\u2014had swelled from a standard seven or eight to first ten, then twelve, then eventually as many as twenty, not counting reshoots, which could often take up several more days. The production had already traveled to Italy for one episode. No piece of music was off-limits, no matter the licensing fee. Chase had begun spending more and more of his downtime near the Atlantic coast of France, where he would eventually buy a house. He would edit from there, buying time on a satellite uplink to communicate with the rest of postproduction, nine time zones away. Cast and crew lunches often included lobster tail or prime steak. There appeared to be no checks on the size and costs of the show.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n The Sopranos awards total: twenty-one emmys, five Golden Globes, and two peabodys.\n\n \"When we got there, we were awestruck,\" says writer Andrew Schneider, who joined in season six with his wife, Diane Frolov. \"TV was always about saving money, but HBO was paying for these lavish parties, big night shoots, things you would have censored yourself from writing before because you could never afford it. In normal television, you take out walk-ups, you take out night shoots. It takes a long time to light a street. Here you could have a quarter page saying, 'Character walks down the sidewalk and enters the house. And it's night. And it's raining.' You were free.\" In a world in which every shot on every page corresponds to a significant expenditure, there might be no greater indication of the power Chase had consolidated than that he occasionally shot alternate scenes\u2014New York mobster Phil Leotardo shooting Tony, instead of Uncle Junior, at the start of season six, for instance\u2014to throw off potential plot leakers.\n\n Matthew Weiner, who joined the show for season five and would later create Mad Men, says, \"We were exorcising David's demons. Do you know how many decisions were based on some meeting when he was on Northern Exposure, or Rockford, or Kolchak, or some other show you've never heard of where he worked for three years and somebody told him, 'You can't do that'?\"\n\n Chase, for instance, banned \"walk and talks\"\u2014in which two characters, in the frame together, exchange information while heading toward their next destination\u2014because it was a common network money-saving technique. \"Sometimes you'd be in this amazing location and we'd say, 'Can't they just walk down the highway? You've got this strip club on one side, an abattoir over there. We can see it all!' \" says Weiner. \"And he'd say\"\u2014with withering sarcasm\u2014\"'Yeah. Let's lay some track and walk backward and get out of here by four.' I just knew it was some ecutive at Universal that he was punching in the face, thirty years later.\" (Weiner has never shied from expressing his gratitude and admiration for Chase, his showrunning mentor. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that another supposed Chase pet peeve was shots that showed the backs of actors' heads. And that the first shot of Mad Men\u2014indeed, its iconic logo\u2014was the back of Don Draper's head.)\n\n In the halls of Silvercup, Chase's name and its power were so often invoked, usually in whispers, that he came to seem like an unseen, all-knowing deity. It had long been a familiar truism that \"in TV, the writer is king,\" accustomed to power and influence unheard of in the director-dominated film industry. Now that power, derived primarily from television's hellish pace and insatiable appetite for content, would be wedded to the creative freedom of TV's new rules. And the men who seized that role\u2014and they were mostly men: Chase, David Simon of The Wire, Alan Ball of Six Feet Under, David Milch of Deadwood, Shawn Ryan of The Shield, and later Mad Men's Weiner, Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan, and others\u2014would prove to be characters almost as vivid as the fictional men anchoring their shows.\n\n Being writers, they were not necessarily men to whom you would have automatically thought it prudent to hand near total control of a multimillion-dollar corporate operation. Indeed, the TV revolution is in many respects a story of writers asked to act in very unwriterly ways: to become collaborators, managers, businessmen, celebrities in their own right, all in exchange for the opportunity to take advantage of a unique historical moment. If that occasionally led to behavior that was imperious, idiosyncratic, domineering, or just plain strange, it could perhaps be understood. \"The thing you've got to remember is there's a lot of pressure to deal with when you're running one of these shows,\" the late Henry Bromell, a longtime TV writer and sometime showrunner himself, told me. \"You'd probably be better off with a Harvard jock CEO-type guy. But that's not what you got, you got writers. So they react to pressure the way most people do; they internalize it or they subvert it. They lash out at their nanny or whatever.\"\n\n Or as another television veteran puts it, \"This isn't like publishing some lunatic's novel or letting him direct a movie. This is handing a lunatic a division of General Motors.\"\n\n\n\n For his part, David Chase was weighed down by doubt. His show had become an out-and-out cultural phenomenon, watched by 10 million people per week (huge for premium cable). Still, he worried about those viewers he felt just didn't get it, who tuned in each week just hoping to see \"big Tony Soprano take some guy's head and bang it against a wall like a cantaloupe.\" And despite highbrow acclaim\u2014a screening of the series at New York's Museum of Modern Art and gushing comparisons from The New York Times to nineteenth-century novels of Zola and Balzac\u2014he worried that the show's success did nothing to change the fact that he'd sold out by being in television at all. Chase worried that even HBO, for which the value of The Sopranos had been incalculable, didn't give him enough respect; at the end of each season, he complained, the network waited an inordinate amount of time to commit to the next.The job was all-consuming. \"David would come in in the morning and say, about some script problem, 'I think I fid it. I was in the shower this morning...' And I'd think, 'How come he's always in the shower when he thinks about this stuff?' \" says Weiner. \"Then I got the job and realized, 'Oh, my God, you're always thinking about it!' \"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n At the funeral of... [editor's note: this spoiler was removed for readers who still, somehow, haven't seen the show.]\n\n As Peter Biskind observed in a Vanity Fair article, Chase had good reason to understand something Tony Soprano himself said upon being elevated to boss: \"All due respect, you got no fucking idea what it's like to be number one. Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fucking thing. It's too much to deal with, almost. And in the end you're completely alone with it all.\"\n\n The massive job was made possible at least in part by creating a world in which other people managed the rest of his life. When the show became a success, Chase moved into the penthouse of the Fitzpatrick Manhattan hotel on Lexington Avenue, with the hotel staff at his disposal. He dined at the same restaurant several times a week, alternating periods at Daniel and Caf\u00E9 Boulud. (The ease of getting restaurant reservations, he said later, only half joking, was one of the major reasons to keep extending The Sopranos' run.) At work, he withdrew behind levels of gatekeepers. Chase's assistant learned to institute a \"five-minute rule\" whenever bad news was delivered: the amount of time needed for the desk-kicking and yelling to stop and a more rational response to commence. Not that there was a lot of bad news. \"Nobody said no to David. Ever,\" she says. \"Except Jim [Gandolfini]. And even he said no only by not showing up.\"\n\n \"I've met a lot of tough guys in my life,\" Tony Sirico, the actor-savant who played Paulie \"Walnuts\" Gualtieri and who, years earlier, had spent a stretch in prison, once told longtime Sopranos writer Robin Green. \"But when I see David, I step back.\"\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n At the show's height, no expense was spared: lobster dinners on set, night shoots, Steve Buscemi.\n\n Nowhere was that toughness and single-mindedness more pronounced than in the writers' room\u2014a hotbed of complicated emotions and tendentious negotiation for even the most well-adjusted writers. On the one hand, Chase loved the camaraderie of the room: the bullshitting, the storytelling, the procrastination. On the other, he was ambivalent about how useful it was.\n\n \"Other people have good ideas. And they're hard to come by. But in another sense, they're a dime a dozen,\" he tells me. \"Turning an idea into an episode\u2014that's the grunt work. The organization can rest for a day or so, secure in the notion that we've got an idea. But eventually the showrunner's the one who has to look at his watch and say, 'How do we fill up forty-two minutes?' We can all sit around and decide we want to make a Louis XIV table, but eventually somebody has to do the carving.\"\n\n Writers in a David Chase writers' room learned to be sensitive to the boss's moods\u2014and that there was small margin of error.\n\n \"David always made it clear, you know, 'I'm not running a writing school here.' Either you got it or you didn't,\" says Terence Winter. \"People used to say, 'I don't think David likes me.' I'd say, 'You know how I know David likes you? You're still here. If he doesn't like you, you'll be the first to know. And you will be gone.' \"\n\n More than one writer learned that lesson, perhaps none more dramatically than Todd Kessler. Kessler was only 26 when he joined the staff in season two. He'd been working on NBC's Providence; the network once gave a perfectly serious note suggesting that each episode endeavor to feature a litter of puppies. When Chase offered him a chance to write an audition script for The Sopranos, Kessler jumped.\n\n That script\u2014\"D-Girl,\" revolving around Christopher Moltisanti, Tony's nephew, and his foray into screenwriting\u2014installed Kessler as the house wunderkind. Chase flattered him, asking for advice and reassurance. \"He leads with his insecurity,\" Kessler says. \"I remember him asking, 'I don't know. Do we have a show here?' I'm 26 years old, giving him a pep talk. It pulled me in. Bonded me with him.\"\n\n Kessler threw himself into the show, staying on unpaid at the end of the season to watch the shooting of the finale, which he'd co-written. After that, he said, Chase allowed him to come to Los Angeles to sit in on two months of editing, asking him not to mention it to the other writers. He became close with the Chase family, often going out to dinner with them. Kessler's agent, who happened to also represent Chase, told him that Chase was considering the possibility of someday handing the show off to another writer and that he, Kessler, was being groomed.\n\n Chase dismisses that idea outright, saying he had never thought about handing the show over to anybody. In fact, he says, he had been growing increasingly unhappy with Kessler's work as the writers reconvened for season three. \"He had written a really good episode, and then it seemed to me that it was declining after that,\" Chase says. \"Some people understand this completely strange, bizarre mind-set of organized crime. Some people don't.\"\n\n On July 21, 2000, at about 8:30 a.m., the nominations for that year's Emmys were announced. They included one for Chase and Kessler as the writers of \"Funhouse,\" the season-two finale. Chase had written the first thirty pages: Tony's long fever dream, occasioned by a bout of food poisoning and punctuated with graphic bathroom sound effects, in which his subconscious reveals what he's known for a long time but refused to acknowledge, that his deputy, Big Pussy, is a rat. Kessler wrote the second half, in which Pussy paid with his life, meeting a watery end.\n\n As Kessler remembers it, he spent the next ten minutes fielding congratulatory phone calls. Then came one from Chase's assistant, saying that Chase wanted to see him in the office. When Kessler arrived, Chase closed the door and sat down.\n\n \"I guess the timing isn't great,\" he said, \"but I think I need to end this relationship.\"\n\n Kessler, astonished, asked what he meant. \"I think you've lost the voice of the show,\" Chase said.\n\n \"David, the last thing we wrote was nominated for an Emmy, less than an hour ago,\" Kessler said. \"If you felt this way, why didn't you say something?\"\n\n Chase considered this. \"I guess you're right,\" he said finally. \"Do you want a second chance?\" Kessler, more confused than ever, said yes. \"Well, I need to think about it,\" Chase said, showing him the door.\n\n Kessler left work and went to see his brother, Glenn, an actor and writer, at the SoHo apartment they shared: \"As soon as I started to tell him what happened, I burst into tears. Like the embarrassing, childlike crying where you can't catch your breath. The show had been my entire life.\" As he sat there, sobbing, a call came from Chase.\n\n \"He was asking my advice on writing a scene. Like, would Tony say this or something else. No mention of what had just happened,\" Kessler says. Two days later, Chase told him that he'd get his second chance, but that his next script had better come in \"production ready,\" with no need of revision. Given Chase's way of working\u2014and really any showrunner's\u2014this was as definitive a death sentence as a fish in the mail. Sure enough, several months later\u2014and after the two had lost the Emmy to The West Wing\u2014Kessler was summoned once again to Chase's office. This time it was definitive.\n\n \"I've never seen people get fired so fast. You walk into David's office and ten seconds later the door opens and you have your shit in a box. He does not mince words,\" Winter says. This time, he didn't even see that much. Winter called Kessler a week later, wondering if he was sick, since he hadn't been showing up for work. Chase had failed to mention the dismissal.\n\n A few years later, Kessler wrote the pilot for a new series of his own, to appear on FX. Rather than assume an autocratic role, he would share the duties of showrunner with his brother, Glenn, and a writer named Daniel Zelman. The series ran for five seasons and won four Emmys. The plot revolved around a terrible boss\u2014brilliant but manipulative, vain, imperious, unpredictable\u2014and a young, talented, but impressionable employee who finds herself seduced, repelled, and ultimately both matured and corrupted by coming into her orbit. It was, he said, based in no small part on his experiences working on The Sopranos. The show was called Damages.\n\n\n\n Chase's memory of the Kessler incident isn't nearly as dramatic as Kessler's. \"It's never good to be fired,\" he tells me. \"Maybe there's no such thing as amicable. But it didn't appear to me I was cold when I did it. Although, look at the message: It probably can't come through very nicely.\" About the unfortunate timing around the Emmy nomination, he says, \"It's hard for me to picture getting the news the nominations came out and then telling him, by the way, you're fired. I guess I'm capable of such thoughtlessness, but it's hard for me to picture.\" When told Kessler's version, complete with its overtones of Freud and betrayal, he says drily, \"I might have had more on my mind than he did.\"\n\n With The Sopranos a half decade gone and the revolution it started all but institutionalized, Chase sits in the study of his apartment in a historic building on the Upper East Side. An array of Emmys and other awards takes up two full windowsills behind him. He had finally completed his first feature film\u2014a music-filled New Jersey coming-of-age story called Not Fade Away.\n\n One of the pleasures of the movie had been working again with James Gandolfini, who had survived Tony Soprano to go on to a varied career on film and stage. It had been an artistically challenging experience, Chase says. With The Sopranos, he was accustomed to a certain way of telling stories. \"I had gotten used to the idea that things could be taken back and fid. Or that we could go take a little excursion, check out Patsy Parisi's wife or something. I thought I had cut all that out, but I really hadn't. The script was too discursive. So we had a lot of film that had to be cut,\" he says.\n\n He could not see ever returning to a TV series\u2014\"What are the chances I could do it as well?\" he asks\u2014but wouldn't rule out something Sopranos-related on film: Not a sequel that would clarify the series' famously enigmatic ending, but the idea of a prequel or following a tangential thread from the series had some appeal. \"Maybe Johnny Boy\"\u2014Tony's father\u2014\"and his period. That's interesting to me,\" he tells me. \"Or 'What was production like on Cleaver [Christopher's fictional pulp horror-mobster movie]?' \"\n\n Movies, Chase says, are still \"the cathedral,\" never mind that the modern movie-going venue is far more like a cheap parking garage. Television, for all he'd done on and for it, remains second-class. The most he would concede is this: \"Look, I can't argue with destiny. This is what happened. And I'm very lucky that as I lie on my deathbed I won't have to say, 'I accomplished nothing.' I did something, you know?\"\n\n It would have to do. Though in a generally triumphant story, this remains one small tragedy: that the Reluctant Moses of TV's revolution, the man who opened the door for so many to create so much in television, gloriously shame-free, could not, himself, ever fully enter the Promised Land.\n\n\n\n But back in those tense winter days of 2002, long before The Sopranos' legacy was set in stone, Gandolfini's absence was becoming increasingly worrisome.\n\n The production team had already performed all the acrobatics it could, shooting those few scenes that could be done without its star. The whole operation had been nervously treading water for days; many began to expect the worst\u2014that the pressure, the substances, and the emotional turmoil had pushed Gandolfini over the edge.\n\n Terence Winter, driving into work, heard a newscaster report, \"Sad news from Hollywood today...,\" and his heart stopped. \"It was some drummer for a band,\" Winter says. \"But I thought, 'Holy shit! He's dead.' \"\n\n Sooner or later, the press, hungry for The Sopranos gossip at the best of times, would get hold of the story, and the upper echelon of producers at Silvercup and at HBO began to prepare a damage-control strategy.\n\n Then, on day four, the main number in the show's production office rang. It was Gandolfini calling, from a beauty salon in Brooklyn. To the surprise of the owner, the actor had wandered in off the street, asking to use the phone. He called the only number he could remember, and he asked the production assistant who answered to put someone on who could send a car to take him home.\n\n Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent. Adapted from Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution, from \"The Sopranos\" and \"The Wire\" to \"Mad Men\" and \"Breaking Bad\" (The Penguin Press), in bookstores July 3."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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