Dogmatic

Start saving those pennies kiddies! Due Nov. 11, just in time for the holiday gift season, it weighs in at 10 pounds, with 86 episodes on 28 DVDs(!!!) Three CDs of soundtrack music. And two discs of bonus material, including 16 “lost” scenes, an interview of creator David Chase by Alec Baldwin, roundtable discussions with writers and stars and Sopranos spoofs from ‘The Simpsons’, ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Mad TV’. There’s also a panel discussion from the Paley Center for Media among “Whacked Sopranos” actors reflecting on their regrettable but necessary exits.

But it won’t come cheap: The suggested list price is $399.99US, $100 more than the complete ‘Sex and the City’.

“It’s really the biggest DVD gift set we have released to date, and that means both physically and metaphorically,” says Sofia Chang, the channel’s senior VP of DVD marketing. HBO is promising a huge marketing push for the release.

“We put a lot of work into it,” creator David Chase tells USA TODAY. He conducted interviews for the extras early this year, about seven months after the surprising (and anticlimactic) finale aired on HBO.

Chase discusses with Baldwin his childhood, his early career and the show’s history. And there’s much discussion about the controversial final episode, which ended abruptly, midscene, as the Soprano family enjoyed a quiet meal in a diner.

Scenes rescued from the editing-room floor include Tony kissing Dr. Melfi in her office; Big Pussy being interrogated after a drug arrest; and Meadow visiting her ailing grandmother, Livia, in the hospital, where Janice falsely claims Tony tried to kill Livia, instead of the other way around.

Chase says he was surprised when he looked back how few filmed scenes he had left. He says most were cut because they “in some way emotionally hold up the show or derail it” or were “overexplaining” things when viewers “have an instinctive sense of what’s going on.”

Now Sopranos fans can only dream of a movie, given the box-office success of Sex and Chase’s recently signed deal with Paramount Pictures, run by Sopranos producer Brad Grey.

“I’m not anxious to do one; I’m not looking to do one,” Chase says. Never mind that star James Gandolfini has said he has moved on from Tony. “What I really don’t want to give is the impression I’m being coy.” The finale “makes it problematic to continue the story; I’m not interested in going forward.” So any movie would go backward, set midway through the series’ run.

“If something great came along, we might consider doing it,” Chase says. “But we don’t have people in rooms trying to come up with ideas.”

Stars and writers of HBO’s top series reflected on its history in two “Suppers With The Sopranos” filmed this year at an Italian restaurant in New York, along with a separate interview with creator David Chase by actor/fan Alec Baldwin, for November’s DVD set. USA TODAY’s Gary Levin offers highlights.

* In Season 1, producers toyed with the idea of having Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) write a book on her experiences with Tony (James Gandolfini), which would have been turned into a show-within-the-show starring Anthony LaPaglia (Without a Trace) - the first choice to play Tony in the show’s first incarnation as a potential Fox series.

* Dominic Chianese, who played Uncle Junior, says he keeps Junior’s oversized black glasses next to his home computer, by a photo of his mother. But during filming, he could never see clearly out of them, and crewmembers nicknamed him “Mr. Magoo” and “Mummyhead.”

* Chase predicts the future for Soprano kids A.J. (Robert Iler) and Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler): “He’s not going to be much of anything, but he’s not going to be a killer,” he says. And Meadow is “going to have a career of some kind.” So as parents, maybe Tony and Carmela “both did a good job.”

* Steve Van Zandt, who went from Bruce Springsteen bandmate to actor (and back), says he had one condition for playing Silvio: “Promise me I get to kill somebody. I don’t know what this acting thing’s about, but it should be getting something to do you couldn’t do in life.” He got his wish, but the most trying was his off-camera shooting of Adriana: “That was really difficult.”

* Chase reflects on Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri’s never-changing gray-hued hairstyle, the work of Tony Sirico, the actor who played him. “Tony would never let anybody work with his hair; our hair people could never touch him,” Chase says. “He would get up at 5 in the morning at his house (to style it). In the third season, (Paulie) was having a nightmare, and his hair was supposed to be messed up. He didn’t want it to happen; he really fought it.”

* Edie Falco was the last actor cast for the pilot; she showed up wearing in-line skates to audition for the role of Carmela at a midtown Manhattan hotel, days before the episode began filming. Falco didn’t feel as if she fit the part of an Italian housewife, but producers did: After more than 100 actresses were turned down, she was offered the part the next day, without ever meeting future TV husband Gandolfini.

* Chase reacts to fan outrage over the series finale and its abrupt, elliptical ending that left Tony’s future uncertain. “I thought there’d be a reaction. What I didn’t like was the number of people who wanted to see him dead. They really wanted to see his brains splattered across the restaurant. They wanted Tony Soprano’s head exploded like a cantaloupe.”

* An unremarked feature of that final scene in the diner: “I forgot to put on Carmela’s rings,” says Falco, who had a bad cold that day. “Ten years on that show, and I have never not put those rings on. I was sure this was going to come up on some website. I’m surprised I didn’t hear from somebody that it had some significance that I was not aware of.”

* Van Zandt had the misfortune of being booked on a nationally syndicated radio show the morning after the finale aired. “I was getting slaughtered by the entire country,” he says. “But I got a chance to say, ‘Guess what, folks? You were disappointed because it wasn’t your ending. But it’s a compliment to the show, because that means you were emotionally engaged.’ ”

* Producers shot fake endings to the series to throw off spoilers and removed the final pages from the script given to the crew, several of whom complimented Chase on what they thought was the actual ending: a quiet scene of Tony raking leaves that appeared near the end of the episode. Writer Matthew Weiner recalls one scene featured Adriana, apparently in a dream, and another had Phil Leotardo shooting Tony through a window. (Actor Frank Vincent replied, “Why am I doing this?” Weiner recalls.) In yet another, a disembodied hand did the dirty job. Others were still confounded: “I got the real script and assumed you were hiding 15 pages,” director Alan Taylor told Chase.

* Chase talked about his family background from time to time, but few Sopranos fans realize how close an approximation the series was to his own. An only child of a hardware-store owner and a phone-book proofreader, Chase grew up in Clifton, N.J., and counted Twilight Zone, Maverick and Jackie Gleason among his favorite shows. Mom was “a handful,” he tells Baldwin, and clearly was the model for Livia. When she won the part, an already ailing Nancy Marchand asked him, “I trust this creature I’m portraying is dead.” (Livia dies early in Season 3.) “Everybody in the show is annoyed,” Chase says. “Without the profanity and without the violence and sexuality, that’s a fairly good representation of family,” he says.

* An early classic episode shows Tony killing a man while visiting colleges with Meadow. Then-HBO chief Chris Albrecht complained to Chase: “You can’t show Tony killing someone in the fourth episode,” the producer recalls. “I said, ‘Unless this guy kills somebody, he’s not a Mob boss worth talking about.’ ” The compromise was to make the murder victim less sympathetic, to show why he deserved to die.

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