For David Chase, the future is lined with LSD.
Alongside his previously announced limited series about the CIA’s MKUltra program, “The Sopranos” creator is also developing a feature that juxtaposes the agency’s efforts to weaponize LSD with the triumphant rollout of the polio vaccine. Set in the 1950s and inspired by a true story shared by one of Chase’s friends, the untitled film follows a family connected to both worlds. Chase will write and direct.
Meanwhile, the showrunner is still breaking story for his HBO limited series based on John Lisle’s “Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra.” For now, Chase has been working alone, though he told TheWrap he’s eager to bring on a collaborator, particularly given what he calls the source material’s “embarrassment of riches.”
“There’s so much to the whole MKUltra story, so many wild people,” Chase said at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. “I don’t mean people high on LSD — I mean the scientists themselves. It doesn’t stop. I’m trying to pare it down to what the story should be, because every time another book comes out, or another paragraph, I think, ‘Well, that’s got to be in it too!’” Both the limited series and the feature — which, he reveals, has become his chief priority — stem from Chase’s own youthful experiences with psychedelics.
“I took LSD when I was younger, and I never forgot it,” he explains. “I’d say it was a life-changing experience, although I couldn’t tell you exactly how. This is going to sound stupid, but at age 18 or 19, I just became convinced there were other levels of existence— that this isn’t all there is.”
The acclaimed showrunner was on hand at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for a wide-ranging conversation on the changing face of television. Having worked through network TV’s heyday, the rise of prestige cable and the boom-and-bust cycle of Peak TV, Chase says he’s identified one enduring constant: “Motherfucking money.”
“That’s the deal,” he continues. “That’s America. Is anybody happy? We have a document that says we’re entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Is anybody pursuing that?”
When “The Sopranos” premiered in 1999, it was one of that year’s many deeply influential works to evoke the End of History’s summertime blues. Alongside “The Matrix,” “Fight Club” and “American Beauty,” the landmark HBO drama captured a pervasive sense of anomie at the heart of middle-class American life, though each ultimately took that shared premise in strikingly different directions.
“I just had the feeling that something was wrong,” Chase said of the late-Clinton-era malaise that inspired the landmark series — and that he still feels today. “I think there’s some kind of connection between where Tony Soprano was and where we are now — that insatiability, that itch that can’t be scratched. The idea that material objects and money will make you feel better. I wasn’t setting out to preach, just writing how I felt.”
If anything, Chase believes that underlying rot has only become more deeply institutionalized.
“We now have a president who’s been convicted of a felony,” he says. “I mean, ‘The Sopranos’ followed some guy living in New Jersey. He wasn’t the president, and he was never convicted. Now we have a president who has been!”
That the president and many of his hangers-on might fit right in at Satriale’s or the Bada Bing is hardly lost on a creator whose caustic worldview has always been belied by a deep curiosity for human connection.
“The characters were realistic,” said Chase. “As foolish, misguided, angry and self-pitying as they were, they were kind of like the American community.”
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