![]() In frustration, I went down to the Writers Guild and they happened to have a list of agents who would take unsolicited scripts. First, I called a million agents and I couldn’t get anybody. You can’t get a job without an agent and you can’t get an agent without a job, so how the fuck does anybody ever do anything? It’s like nobody knows. Terry: The Hollywood conundrum is, okay, you got to get an agent. You come back from the commercial, he talks to the guy over the backyard fence, gets some advice, then uses that advice to solve the problem. There’s a cold open, in the first scene the problem is introduced, the problem gets exacerbated right before the commercial. I’d go, “Oh, okay, this is how they tell a Home Improvement story. I would take six or eight episodes of Home Improvement, watch what happened, write down each scene, and I have a blueprint. Terry: I always make this analogy: it’s like kids who grow up and they want to be engineers, they take radios apart and put them back together again. Steve: And these weren’t getting produced or anything, you were just doing this to basically learn to write? I ended up writing a Doogie Howser script, a Frasier, Mad About You, Seinfeld, Cheers, Home Improvement. Terry: Generally the wisdom is, or was at least, that you needed to write for shows that were on the air. The spec scripts that you wrote, Terry, were they original, or were they scripts for shows that already existed? Michael Imperioli: For those who don’t know, in this case a spec is a sample script of an existing TV show. I was home by five thirty and I started writing sitcom specs. I got a job at Unocal, the oil company, where they didn’t know I was actually a lawyer. I actually took my law degree off my résumé because I just wanted a nine-to-five job and people would see my law degree and say I was overqualified. Rented a car and checked into this fleabag hotel on MacArthur Park. Terry: Showed up like a country bumpkin, did not know anything. Steve: You go to law school, you get the degree, you’re at a big law firm, and you just pack up and move to L.A.? I was never involved with any of these guys, but the osmosis of how they thought, how they talked, how they acted, it seeped into me. I also worked at a card game run by Roy DeMeo, which if you read the book Murder Machine, that’s the DeMeo crew. I actually worked in a butcher shop owned by Paul Castellano. The Ciel Rouge parties were infamous: Sometimes we’d lock the doors at 4:00 a.m. Tony Sirico greets me in his own inimitable way at a surprise party for my birthday at Ciel Rouge, a bar my wife and I owned in Chelsea when the show began. Plus, I worked in a neighborhood where I rubbed elbows with a lot of guys, including Tony Sirico, in real life, who at that time was known as Junior Sirico. Abbott and Costello, The Honeymooners, the Bowery Boys, and all the classic Warner Bros. Like everybody I knew, I watched a billion hours of TV as a kid. What do you want to do when you wake up in the morning?” The deep dark secret was, I wanted to be a writer. I finally got to the point where I said, “All right, forget about the money and the diploma written in Latin and everything else. Slogged my way through.įinally I got a job in a big Manhattan firm and literally within two days, I realized I had made a grave, grave error. I wanted to make money, and the two jobs I knew that made money were doctor and lawyer. Anyway, I’d push back those fleeting thoughts I had about it. They would’ve thrown me in the creek, in Gerritsen Beach. If I would’ve told my friends, “I want to be a screenwriter,” they would’ve beat the shit out of me. The idea of being a TV writer or a screenwriter was just so off my radar. Terry: I grew up in Brooklyn, it was a very blue-collar area. Steve: You started out as an attorney, but somehow you morphed into this incredible executive producer and writer. So when you see a writer with those titles, it’s kind of like they’ve become a made man in the writers’ room.) He also was one of the creators of Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl, and wrote The Wolf of Wall Street for Scorsese. (We should probably take a second to explain, since a lot of people ask us all the time: writers would usually be the “producer on set” and work with the director to help make sure the script was shot as intended.Īt some point, some of their titles would be elevated to “executive producer” or “co-executive producer” as kind of an indication of seniority. He wound up winning two Emmys for writing, and two more as an executive producer of the show. As we said, he wrote “Pine Barrens,” which was a huge fan favorite. Among the twenty-five episodes he wrote were some of my favorites. One of the incredible writers on The Sopranos was Terry Winter. ![]()
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