![]() 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. 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 onboard shortly thereafter, however, and produced a pilot. 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. Following that is a section from later in the book that recounts, in the words of Gandolfini’s collaborators, how the late star grappled with his fame.Īlthough 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. ![]() The first chronicles the cultural impact of The Sopranos and the ways in which the series catapulted a relatively little-known character actor to a level of celebrity few reach. What about the very notion of being the first successful pay television network? Or, most obvious, original series programming, which revitalized episodic shows that had been widely considered stale, even moribund.īeyond all that, is there a single image, figure, or frontage that can instantly symbolize HBO to the world? Of the many contenders for top trope, one surely emerges: the fascinating, cherubic, contrarian image of James Gandolfini, dominating and irresistible star of HBO’s crown jewel, The Sopranos.īelow are two excerpts from my new book Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers. Or sports: HBO lifted boxing off the canvas and let it live once more, long after it was pronounced dead. Perhaps the disruptive and transformational work HBO did in documentaries, or maybe movies - either producing its own spectacles or having a major impact on the financing of others. Will it be technology? HBO utilized satellite transmission before either ESPN or the Turner networks did. When I set out to chronicle a book-of-record on the 49-year history of HBO, I was met with a multitude of choices to make - especially when searching for a “spine” to hold it all together. Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs.Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by Fred Conrad/The New York Times/Redux and HBO Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement. The aftermath was no less traumatic―families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors’ needs―revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. ![]() Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community.
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