Skip to main content

A First Look at How Tony Soprano Became Tony Soprano: Watch the New Trailer for The Many Saints of Newark

When The Sopranos drew to a close fourteen years ago, its ambiguous yet somehow definitive final scene hardly promised a continuation of the New Jersey mafia saga. Since then, fans have had to make do with reflections, histories, and exegeses, up to and including re-watch podcasts hosted by the actors themselves. As time has passed the show has only drawn higher and higher acclaim, which can’t be said about every product of the ongoing “golden age of television drama” The Sopranos got started. A return to the well was perhaps inevitable, and indeed has just been announced: The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film co-written by David Chase, the creator credited with contributing to the original series a significant portion of its genius.

Onscreen, The Sopranos drew its power from one Soprano above all: local mob boss Tony Soprano, as portrayed by James Gandolfini in what has been ranked among the greatest screen acting achievements of all time. Whether or not Tony survived that final scene, Gandolfini died in 2013, and ever since it has been impossible to imagine any other actor portraying the character — or at least portraying the character in a modern-day setting.

Telling the story of a Tony Soprano in his youth, with a young actor necessarily playing him, has remained a viable proposition. Into that role, for the 1960s and 70s-set The Many Saints of Newark, has stepped Gandolfini’s real-life son Michael.

For the then-20-year-old Michael Gandolfini, taking over his father’s role had to be a daunting prospect, especially since he’d never seen The Sopranos before. At least one binge-watch of the series (among other rigorous forms of preparation) later, he delivered the performance of which you can take a first look in The Many Saints of Newark‘s new trailer above. “As rival gangs try to wrest control from the DiMeo crime family in the race-torn city of Newark,” Consequence Film’s Ben Kaye writes of its story, the young Anthony Soprano, a promising but indifferent student with an eye on college, “gets swept up in the violence and crime by his uncle Dickie Moltisanti.” As Sopranos fans know full well, “Anthony becomes the feared mob head Tony Soprano and treats Dickie’s son, Christopher, as his protégé.” Evidently, an antihero of Tony’s stature is made, not born.

Related Content:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopranos

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopranos with the Talking Sopranos Podcast, Hosted by Michael Imperioli & Steve Schirripa

David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Sopranos‘ Final Scene

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Is “the Greatest Acting Achievement Ever Committed to the Screen”: A Video Essay

The Nine Minute Sopranos

James Gandolfini Shows Kinder, Softer, Gentler Side on Sesame Street (2002)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

A First Look at How Tony Soprano Became Tony Soprano: Watch the New Trailer for The Many Saints of Newark is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3x6JvGV
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune

When Bob Dylan released his 2001 album  Love and Theft , he lifted the title from a  book of the same name by Eric Lott , who studied 19th century American popular music’s musical thefts and contemptuous impersonations. The ambivalence in the title was there, too: musicians of all colors routinely and lovingly stole from each other while developing the jazz and blues traditions that grew into rock and roll. When British invasion bands introduced their version of the blues, it only seemed natural that they would continue the tradition, picking up riffs, licks, and lyrics where they found them, and getting a little slippery about the origins of songs. This was, after all, the music’s history. In truth, most UK blues rockers who picked up other people’s songs changed them completely or credited their authors when it came time to make records. This may not have been tradition but it was ethical business practice. Fans of Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, now listen to their...
Post a Comment
Read more