Tom Fontana

Something like that.

I used to work as a PA on Oz, and Tom Fontana, who would crank out a bazillion scripts for that plus four other TV shows simultaneously, he was like, "No, I wake up at 5:00 every single morning, and I write for two hours no matter what." And I remember thinking, I was like, "But everybody went out after wrap last night.

We were out until, like, 11:00 or something, or 12:00 or something like..."

Mm-hmm.

It wasn't Edie's big break.

Before The Sopranos, Edie worked with Tom Fontana on the HBO series Oz, but it's safe to say the role of Carmela made her career.

TV Guide named The Sopranos the best television show in history.

I didn't have any sense of the gravity of what we were doing.

So that was quite a historic win for Texas, being in that situation.

I think it was the best win that that team has had since Vince Young beat USC, and I believe you and Tom Fontana were at that game at the Rose Bowl.

Yes, we were.

And I told my wife to try to give her some historical perspective.

And I had just come back from a summer while I was in school.

And they were filming Homicide Life on the Street, a Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana production in Baltimore.

And as you hear the siren, this is very similar to the show Homicide Life on the Street.

And they said, you know, we need a cellist to come on the set to teach Ned Beatty how to fake play the cello.

He had to show they played the Handel Halverson Passacaglia with her.

And it ended up being me playing the music on the show and trying to teach him how to not look horrible faking the cello.

because it was such an adventure with these actor types i got to know tom fontana and this whole crew of producers and subsequently moved to new york city uh went to school here in new york and um they contacted me and said, there's a new show of Breaking the Boundaries show called Oz that we're producing about a prison.

And we have got this core of characters, which included Ernie Hudson and Rita Moreno and, oh my gosh, lots of other people.

I think that would be a really interesting remake.

Interestingly, for this one, Barry Levinson, Robert De Niro, and Tom Fontana started developing a TV series for this as of 2017.

So almost a decade ago, they started developing a TV series that was going to be on HBO.

That's the last that anyone heard of it.

And I managed to convince...

Tom Fontana, Bruce Paltrow, and John Tinker, back when they were working together right off of St.

Elsewhere and just off of Tattinger's, to let me sort of sit in during one of their development seasons.

And this was probably a season or two too late for your book, but they produced two versions of the same show, one in LA and one in New York, about Washington presidential speechwriters.

One version starred Louis Black, Gladys Knight and Mary Beth Hurt was in another version with Rich Hall.

Remember Rich Hall from Snicklet's fame? The show, of course, never went anywhere.

At the end of the day, I presented this book to Bruce Paltrow and Tom Fontana, and they said it was the stupidest fucking decision of their careers to let me in.

They're myths.