David Chase was raised on gangster films and imaginary worlds. An only child in a New Jersey Italian-American family, he quickly developed two unique penchants: one for Saturday matinees and the other for making up stories. This later led to his taking a filmmaking course at the School of Visual Arts in New York where he discovered an insatiable desire to be part of the medium. Slouching toward show business as a rock n’ roll drummer, Chase hung up his sticks and bought a Super 8 camera. Finding that he wanted a more formal training process, he went to study in the graduate film program at Stanford University. It was at Stanford that Chase discovered his talent for writing and the joy of needing merely paper and pen rather than cameras, film stock and technical equipment. After graduation, he set aside his interest in motion pictures in order to write for several popular television shows. He quickly received attention for his risk-taking, psychologically intense writing. From 1976 through 1980, he was a writer and producer of The Rockford Files, which won the 1976 Emmy for Best Drama. He went on to write and produce the acclaimed ABC movie of the week, Off the Minnesota Strip, which garnered Chase the Emmy for Outstanding Writing and the WGA Award. Chase’s first chance to direct arrived with the 80’s incarnation of the classic, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, when he helmed an episode he wrote. Next, he wrote, directed and executive produced the critically acclaimed short-lived series Almost Grown. In 1991, Chase joined the team of I’ll Fly Away. He wrote, directed and executive produced episodes with John Falsey and Josh Brand for two highly lauded seasons of the daring Civil Rights-era dramatic series.  Heading due north from the locale of I’ll Fly Away, Chase segued into two seasons of producing Northern Exposure, the beloved series about a New York doctor in the Alaskan outback. But it is with The Sopranos that Chase really comes into his own. Inspired by William Wellman’s The Public Enemy during his New Jersey boyhood, Chase is fascinated by the world of the contemporary mobster—a world as much about the indelible, often comical, influence of Scorsese and Coppola films on real life wise guys as it is about the old Italian ways.  In The Sopranos, he merges Mafia mythology with the realities of impossible mothers, marital difficulties, rebellious children and a world that sometimes can seem a whole lot more manageable on Prozac.

(2006)