I wrote in today’s edition of The Record about the experiences of 50 or so tourists who took a 4 1/2 hour bus ride all over North Jersey on Saturday, catching up on “Sopranos” sites (story also in the blog post below).
I believe the full list of countries represented on the tour was Hungary, Sweden, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Australia, but I may have missed one (is “The Sopranos” not popular in Asia, does anyone know?). And I should mention that the Meadowlands gets in on the tour via Pizzaland in North Arlington and a whole swath of Kearny being visited.
Since I’m getting inquiries, I’ll recommend you visit www.onlocationtours.com for more details on the weekly event.
Anyway, I’d like to throw in a couple of my own “Sopranos” experiences – growing up with one of the actors and my own short-lived movie career:
The sleepy Rockland County, N.Y. hamlet where I grew up 15 miles north of Manhattan had no shortage of Italian-Americans – on my 20-house block alone we had Mike “Pec,” Mike “Caz,” and Mike “Scar” (plus an Irish “Mike Con.”)
And on the other side of town there was Mike Rispoli, whose family owned the only hardware store in town. He always struck me as a truly tough kid – 13 going on 30, as they say. I don’t remember him playing as much sports as the rest of us, but then, he didn’t seem like the type for child’s play. And that’s in spite of such red hair of the type you don’t tend to find on tough guys.
[Footnote: It occurs to me that because Rispoli is a year older, and he went to public school while I went to Catholic school, he may not even remember me - and if so, perhaps only as one of those Irish twin brothers who lived in that Italian-leaning part of town. I suspect most of us better remember the kids who were older than us than those who were younger.]
He also had a ‘wise guy’ cadence when he spoke – one that has served him well throughout a successful film and television career. Rispoli probably should have gotten a Supporting Actor nomination for portraying Sandra Bullock’s landlord in the 1995 movie “While You Were Sleeping,’ for instance. You also would remember him from the 1998 movie “Rounders” and from a handful of episodes in the “Law and Order” series – and countless other roles.
I can’t find a link to the article on nj.com from the other day, but former HBO executive Chris Albrecht noted there that the last men standing for the Tony Soprano role were James Gandolfini – and Michael Rispoli.
“Rispoli was great,” Albrecht said in the story. “He was funnier than Jimmy, just because of the normal rhythms that he had. And we talked about it, and David [Chase, the show's producer] said, ‘It’s a very different show if you put Rispoli in it or Jimmy in it, but the show I envisioned is the show that’s got Jimmy in it. It’s a much darker show with Jimmy in it.’ I think we sat with that for a moment. ‘Dark’ is not really a word you ever want to go for in television, but the other one was ‘more real.’ So we cast Jimmy.”
It’s true that Rispoli could be funny, even with the tough persona. Actually, it seemed like everyone in town was funny, relatively speaking. People still say I’m funny, too, but there were funnier guys in my neighborhood than me.
Anyway, Gandolfini gets the starring role, and Rispoli winds up portraying Jackie Aprile, Sr. in a handful of episodes from the show.
Rispoli’s character dies of cancer. The name of that episode is… wait for it…. “Meadowlands.”
So I write about the Meadowlands, and Rispoli’s character dies in the “Meadowlands” episode. I write about a “Sopranos” tour, while Rispoli appears in “The Sopranos.”
Meanwhile, a few years back, I was interviewed for a documentary about New Jersey corruption. The producer was Steve Kalafer, who for almost a decade tried to bring a minor league baseball team called the Bergen Cliff Hawks to…. the Meadowlands.
The name of the documentary was… “Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption Part One.”
The documentary came out in October 2010, to tepid reviews. You can find a link to those reviews in my blog post at the time.
The film’s narrator was Tony Darrow, who played “Larry Boy Barese” in… “The Sopranos.” (You may remember that his first appearance in the series comes as he nominates Tony Soprano to be the new leader upon the death of .. Michael Rispoli’s character in… the “Meadowlands” episode.)
Most of my footage occurs late in the documentary as I try to explain the unrelated Meadowlands sagas Xanadu and EnCap. At the documentary premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, I was pleased to get laughs from the crowd of 1000 for my deadpan-take recounting of the Xanadu exterior going up and turning out to be “green…. and blue… and yellow…. and red… and orange.. and…’
I guess it helps to grow up in a funny neighborhood. One guest came up to me at the after-party at Patsy’s and said I’d be perfect for the cast of “Boardwalk Empire.”
Another said I distinctly reminded him of a wise-ass Baltimore Sun reporter character in “The Wire.”
I’ve never seen either show, so not sure what to make of that.
But Rispoli was the real actor in town, and he’s not going to be getting competition from me.
Then again, my character (me) – unlike his – gets to still be alive at the end of my “Meadowlands” melodrama.
