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First three seasons are boxed with behind-the-scenes ba-da-bing

Friday, September 13, 2002

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Actor Michael Imperioli played Annabella Sciorra's brother in Spike Lee's 1991 movie "Jungle Fever" about an interracial affair.

In a third-season episode of "The Sopranos" titled "The Telltale Moozadell," Tony Soprano watches the movie "It's a Gift" with star W.C. Fields, a favorite of series creator David Chase.

When a New Jersey assemblyman vetoed the show's use of an Orange County location for the "Pine Barrens" episode, he did everyone a favor by forcing them into upstate New York where it unexpectedly snowed, making the plight of the lost mobsters all the more desperate and photogenic.

And a poker-game shootout in the "Amour Fou" episode was the biggest gunfight the series had ever filmed. The director had only four to five hours to supervise a scene that would have taken a feature film days to shoot.

Those are among the things I learned while watching the boxed DVD set, "The Sopranos: The Complete Third Season"

Opening the gold foil box that cradles a sleeve with the four discs is like unwrapping a box of Godiva chocolates. It's all very fancy for a TV show about a mobster who's in "waste management," but if you're paying anywhere from $70 to almost $100, you deserve a little dazzle for your dough.

The set from HBO Video has a suggested retail price of $99.98, but you can find it for less. And you can always rent the episodes if you don't want to make that sort of investment.

"The Complete Third Season" has 13 episodes of the series starring James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano; Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano; Lorraine Bracco as therapist Jennifer Melfi; Michael Imperioli as Tony's loose-cannon nephew, Christopher; and Dominic Chianese as Tony's uncle, Junior. Playing the children of Tony and Carmela are Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Robert Iler.

The DVD set has three audio commentaries: Imperioli talks about episode 9, "The Telltale Moozadell," which he wrote; actor Steve Buscemi rambles about episode 11, "Pine Barrens," which he directed; and series creator David Chase discusses episode 12, "Amour Fou."

Although you can understand and appreciate the episodes without the chatter, it does illuminate the small details. Imperioli, for instance, says a 42nd Street restaurant mentioned by the character Jackie Aprile Jr. is a place where the writer once worked as a waiter. In the "Pine Barrens" episode, when Imperioli slips and falls in the snow, it looks authentic because the actor unexpectedly took a spill. And Chase says the series is "all about people who made a deal with the devil."

The bonus features -- stingy for such a pricey set -- also include a "behind-the-scenes featurette" hosted by onetime MTV VJ Karen Duffy. She wanders around Silvercup Studios where many of the interiors are filmed and flatters Imperioli, chats with the actor who plays the ponytailed Furio (when strangers tell him he's mean, he says "Thank you very much") and allows Gandolfini to pay tribute to the late Nancy Marchand, who played his mother.

It is a "featurette" of maybe five minutes that seems like HBO filler. Extras also include a long list of awards and nominations, presented as text on the screen, and a roster of the cast and filmmakers.

But "Sopranos" newcomers or veterans probably aren't buying or renting the boxed set for the extras. They want the episodes, including the third-season finale that first aired 16 months ago. If nothing else, you may want to watch that show, so you're ready for the long-awaited start of season four, which TV Editor Rob Owen reviews elsewhere in the Weekend Mag.

Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632.