Former Wichitan Jason Bailey’s latest book, “Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend,” is out Tuesday, April 29, via Abrams Press.
Bailey, who made a number of films in Wichita in the late 1990s and early 2000s, began his career writing for defunct Wichita weeklies “F5” and “Wichita City Paper.” (Full disclosure: We were colleagues at both those publications and as managing editor at “Wichita City Paper,” I was often the first to see Bailey’s prose each week; something I then cherished and now miss.)
By the time the latter was established, in 2006, he was living in New York City and further establishing himself with an increasingly impressive series of bylines, including “The New York Times,” “Rolling Stone” and “Slate.”
Along the way, he’s authored books on Richard Pryor and Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and, in 2021, “Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It.” He also serves as editor-in-chief of the film website “Crooked Marque” and host of the podcast “Guide For The Film Fanatic” with another former Wichitan, Mike Hull.
In the pages of “Gandolfini,” all the hallmarks of Bailey’s writing are present -- a voice that is conversational and rich with gentle authority, capable of carrying the reader between wide margins of time in sweeping, compact and breathtaking sentences that are consistent with the best storytelling, whether in fiction or biography.
Now based in the Bronx, Bailey recently spoke with KMUW about the writing of “Gandolfini” and what he discovered in the process.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I assume you had some kind of relationship with James Gandolfini’s work, that you’d been thinking about it and him for some time.
I’ve always had a tremendous amount of affection and interest in Mr. Gandolfini and his work. One of the little pleasures of work when you do the job that I do is that sometimes you spot somebody very early and sort of put a pin in them: “That person’s going to be huge!” You sort of watch their career with some satisfaction that, number one, they’re out there and doing good work and, number two, you feel a little bit like a soothsayer. That’s happened to me a few times, and he definitely was one of them.
I went to Northrock 6 opening weekend to see “True Romance” in the fall of 1993, primarily as a Quentin Tarantino fan as most guys who were in their 20s working at a video store wanting to be filmmakers in 1993 were. But I came out of that opening weekend screening saying, “Who is this guy?” and really keeping an eye on him over the next few years as he carved out this niche as a character actor. [That’s] sort of all he wanted to be, all he fancied himself to be.
I was watching him, and he would pop up in “Crimson Tide” or “Get Shorty” or something and I was, like, “Hey! There’s that guy! There’s that James Gandolfini guy!” Come late ’98, HBO starts running ads for “The Sopranos” and all of my friends are [saying], “Oh yeah! HBO! Gangster show!” I was, like, “James Gandolfini show! Yay!”
[Laughs.]
That’s what I thought of it as, “The James Gandolfini Show.” It is that moment of smug satisfaction when everyone else is catching up to an actor that you have your eye on. “Yeah, welcome to the party everybody!” I was very much with him from then on as he became this sort of phenomenon.
I was fascinated then as there got to be a little bit of publicity out there about him, I was sort of fascinated by the person that he seemed to be. Even then [there were stories] that were getting out about how entirely different he was in terms of personality, obviously in terms of disposition, but even in terms of his speaking voice. When he very rarely did an interview in those early days, you would hear this clipped, nasal voice that would come out and you’d be, like, “That doesn’t sound like Tony Soprano.” So, I was fascinated by that. I was fascinated by that dichotomy between this persona and this character and who the real guy seemed to be. I remained fascinated by that throughout the entirety of writing this thing.
I was trying to remember when I first saw him and it occurred to me that it had to be “True Romance,” but the first time I remember seeing him was in “8mm,” which may not be the greatest film.
It’s not.
But he’s good in it.
Yeah.
One of those actors who shows up.
Very much so. I was aware of that quality at the time, the quality of the work that he was bringing no matter how good or bad the film around him. I was certainly aware of that at the time as these movies were coming out because this is very much the pocket in which I saw every new release. What I always do when I’m working on a book is do a chronological watch/re-watch of all their work. That’s kind of the first thing that I do because those are the bones that you’re building around. It’s really striking when you go back and watch everything that, number one, no matter how crappy the movie, he’s always great in it. He’s never sloppy, he’s never lazy, he’s never phoning it in. Number two is that he was that strong coming out of the gate. It’s not like there are five early movies where he’s bad.
“True Romance” was his fourth movie and that’s fierce. Even the stuff before that he’s always bringing something interesting. There’s always a little jolt of electricity when he walks into a scene.
I’ve been reading your work for a long time. You have a specific authorial voice but with each of the books you have a voice that corresponds to the work. How did you find the voice for this one?
It was tough. It was really tough. When Jamison [Stoltz] at Abrahms Press came to me with the idea of writing a biography, top-to-bottom, beginning-to-end, cradle-to-grave biography, I was nervous about it because it was something I’d never done before and wasn’t something I was sure I knew how to do. Part of that is a question of authorial voice. Because I am a film critic first, all of the books that I’ve written to date have a big piece carved out for that approach, for a critical approach.
It's not that there’s not a place for that here, there is a paragraph or two attached to most performances to talk about what made them special, to talk about what made them unique within the body of the work, but that’s certainly not the main job of the book, to be a sort of critical guide to the films and television work of James Gandolfini. It’s about him as a person.
I think that in a great biography you have to try to appropriate or understand or adopt the voice of the subject. Voice all comes down to the subject ultimately. With this it’s tricky. My friend David Itzkoff wrote a biography of Robin Williams. With Robin Williams, there’s so much material out there. There’s so many interviews. You really can get a very clear sense of at least a public persona and that gives you sort of a starting point in terms of voice and approach.
With Jim, there’s so little material of him out there being Jim. There are a couple of profiles. There’s one hour-long “Inside The Actor’s Studio” interview because he didn’t like doing interviews. He didn’t like doing press, he didn’t like putting that person into peoples’ heads when they were watching him work. But he also just didn’t enjoy the process of sitting for an interview.
That made it very tricky to find the right sort of approach because you want to honor them and their personality and who they were as a person. But if that’s the mystery you’re trying to solve then it’s hard to do that.
For me, ultimately, what I came to [was this]: First of all, I read a couple of really distinctive and well-written unauthorized biographies sort of as a guidepost. The main one that proved really helpful was Nick Tosches’ Dean Martin Biography [“Dino”]. It is much more freewheeling about its approach, but that is a book that I felt like gave me permission to do whatever instinctually made sense, and that I could try things as a writer that I didn’t immediately think of when I thought of biography writing.
That was really key. The other part of it was something that [author and journalist] Mark Harris told me very early on. I look to Mark very much as a guru. I’ve always said that Mark Harris is who I want to be when I grow up. He’s been very kind and generous and supportive with his time in terms of guidance. I feel like his Mike Nichols biography [“Mike Nichols: A Life”] is one of the great showbiz biographies of our time because I felt like I came away feeling like I knew that guy. When the book ended and Mike Nichols died, I felt a sense of loss because I felt like I had gotten to know him over those 300, 400 pages.
I went to Mark when I started on this and said, “How do you do that? What are the tricks?” We talked, and he gave me some. He said, “There will come a point when you’re writing that you will feel like you know the subject well enough to call them by their first name. When you reach that point, you’ll know it, and you’re going to be fine.”
I found that to be very true. There was a certain point where I had read enough of the material, I had immersed myself in the work enough, I had talked to enough people who knew him and worked with him that that invisible border had been crossed, and I felt OK to write it and be comfortable about it.
I think of biography like this: It’s about building relationships. You’re not seeking salacious details, but you are seeking those things that are going to make your subject human. That takes patience and trust. How do you go about building that with the people you talk to?
For me, the key to really successfully interviewing these folks is to come completely prepared in terms of background information, research, watching the work. They will sense right away if you don’t know what you’re talking about and if you do. There’s just a sense of authority and knowledge that you will convey in the approach that you’re taking and the kind of questions that you’re asking, that they’re not surface level, press junket questions but things that you formulated based on reading everything that’s already out there, listening to everyone who is already out there, and talking to other people before them who have given you that thumbs up.
I don’t know how other writers approach it, but the thing for me that I always do, because it is within my control, is to have done all of that work first. That has occasionally bitten me in the behind when I’ve done all of that research, then gone to do interviews and it turns out that I’m not going to be able to get the interviews that I need.
Sometimes that’s just research that you’ve done and hopefully you’ll need later. If you come out of the gate and your first question is, “What was it like to work on ‘The Sopranos’?” then you’re not going to get good stuff from that subject. But if your first question out of the gate is, “I read an interview that you gave in 2002 to ‘Rolling Stone’ where you said, ‘Berp-be-duh. Do you agree with that now?’” If you’re coming at it with that kind of deep knowledge then they will know, “OK, I gotta give this guy more than what’s already out there.” In most cases they did.
At the beginning of the book you write about how after Gandolfini died, the press referred to him as Tony Soprano. It was a reminder that every actor wants that career-defining role, but they don’t want that role to define them.
Exactly. Well put.
That happens to him.
It does. It does. At some point, even if it’s just going on the remnants of your memories of the career, or it starts to occur to you as you’re watching more of the work, or reading more of what’s out there, certain themes and conflicts will occur to you. It’s very much like writing fiction. I’ve never written that much fiction. I’ve never written a novel; I’ve written a few short stories, but I think that is one aspect of this kind of writing that is very similar to that. When you’re writing a work of fiction, the first thing you’re figuring out is, “What are the conflicts?” because that’s what motivates the drama, that’s what motivates intention, that’s what motivates disappointment. Those sorts of big, thematic questions.
If you look at a life as a story that you’re trying to tell, that’s also something that you have to determine very early. What were the interior and exterior struggles of this life. I knew right away that that was a huge one. I could feel that tension in the career as it was happening. One of the first things that occurred to me as I was looking over the filmography and put it side-by-side with the seasons of “The Sopranos,” and what came after, you really see how every single decision is informed by that extremely iconic show and role.
Honestly, this is one of the places where talking to all of the managers and agents was a huge boon in terms of building up that theme. I talked to all of these people very late in the process. What happened there goes back to you earlier question about preparing: What can happen is that you do the interview, you get the material, and, then, at the end of the interview, the person says, “Oh, hey, have you to talked to [so-and-so]?” I ended up talking to every agent and manager that he had, back to the guy who got him into the room for “True Romance.”
The amount of insight that gave to the career is incalculable. They were affirming for me a lot of the things that I had always assumed. “On the first break from ‘The Sopranos,’ he does these three movies. This one feels like this is him playing as much against type as possible. This reminds me of the kind of character actor role he used to do, and this one is him doing a Tony Soprano character but with a twist.”
They would say, “Yep, those were the conversations we had,” or they would say, “No, he saw this one more as [something else]” and help me fill in those blanks. You’re right. In a big way, that was a question I wanted to tackle, but it wasn’t until very late in the game that I figured out how to do it with some sense of knowledge and insight.
I’ll ask a question that may be unanswerable: What do you think Gandolfini would be doing today?
I think it’s extremely telling that the second-to-last film that he made, one of the two films that was released posthumously, is this movie “Enough Said” by Nicole Holofcener, which is an independent romantic comedy drama with him and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, where for the first time really in his career he was playing a romantic leading man. A really sensitive soul. It’s maybe the performance that’s the furthest removed from Tony Soprano of the entire career and is also the performance that almost every person I talked to singled out as being as close to the real Jim Gandolfini as was ever captured on camera.
The bearded hippy, sort of Birkenstock-y dude who’s sort of affable and gentle. That was Jim. That was what everybody told me. It took a tremendous amount of poking and prodding and pulling to get him to be that sensitive and vulnerable onscreen. I talked to both Nicole Holofcener and Julia Louis-Dreyfus about that. He felt really naked up there when he was making that movie. I think the fact that it took that many years of acting to feel comfortable sharing that much of himself in a role, number one, makes the fact that we lost him right after all the more tragic, at least from the perspective of someone who watches and loves the work. But I think that’s also an indicator of the new places that he might have gone were he still with us.
The entertainment industry was about to go through profound changes. He died in 2013 and that’s the year that Netflix put out the first season of “House of Cards.” He went right as television was about to explode again. [He] had made a point of right when “The Sopranos” ended not wanting to do another show, wanting to do film work because nothing he could ever do on television would ever match that.
But he was working on a couple of TV projects when he passed. He had a development deal at HBO. I think we would have seen a career where there would have been at least one more show. In fact, he had shot the pilot for the series that became “The Night Of” on HBO. I think there could have been at least one more show that could have rivaled or at least approached “The Sopranos” in terms of popularity, quality and popular culture ubiquity.
What was one thing you found in writing the book that you weren’t expecting to find.
That’s a good question that is hard to answer. I was surprised to discover exactly how kind he was. It wasn’t even that I wasn’t aware. Stories would trick out every now and again. Mostly after he passed because the acts of generosity that he was responsible for, he was not doing for publicity or promotion or likes. This is something that Robert Eiler told me. He said, “Jim would have hated social media. Everybody’s just doing everything for likes. Doing things for likes is the opposite of what Jim was about.”
Some of the stories that I heard of personal kindness, of financial generosity, of just his support for people, no matter how long he’d known them, no matter how long it had been since he’d seen them, it was always a question of “What can I do to help?”
