Video industry trade magazine Video Business has a new report (registration required) about how HBO is promoting their TV-on-DVD releases with various ad campaigns. Along the way, the magazine dropped the following line about upcoming plans for DVDs of The Sopranos:
…the fifth season of The Sopranos will be released in the fourth quarter of 2005, shortly before that series returns for a sixth season in early 2006.
That’s a long wait from the 4th Season DVD set, which at the time of this writing has been on the market for well over a year now. The stated schedule is entirely in keeping with HBO’s normal plans of releasing the previous season on DVD just in time to promote the new season. The problem is, it doesn’t work as well when the show takes a year-long hiatus. I would like to be the first to point out to HBO that this stinks: I’d like to have my copy of The Sopranos - The Complete 5th Season now, please!
“Sopranos” star Jamie-Lynn DiScala - who just signed with an offshore gambling company to raise awareness and money to fight eating disorders - abruptly ended the relationship yesterday after a casino exec called her “fat, then scrawny,” in a press release.
Dennis Rose, senior vice president of the Trinidad-based multibillion-dollar Casino Fortune, didn’t stop there.
In his announcement of the deal - which Lowdown brought to DiScala’s attention - Rose cracked: “Why did we hire her? Mainly because she was fat, then scrawny, and finally found a way to control her eating disorder.” Read the rest of this entry »
IT was an offer the charity could not refuse.
James Gandolfini, the television Mafia boss, has donated a sketch to be sold at an anonymous auction to help a children’s hospital in Scotland.
The sketch by the American actor, who plays gangster Tony Soprano in the critically-acclaimed award-winning show The Sopranos, is going
on sale for £250 in a fund-raising venture for the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh.
Bidders for the doodle of a dog are supposed to be unaware of the artist’s identity until they have handed over the money to the Sick Kids Friends Foundation charity.
However, Gandolfini, who lives in Greenwich Village in New York, left a huge clue by signing his sketch.
It is part of a collection of paintings given by well-known artists such as Quentin Blake, Ethel Walker and Barbara Rae and going on sale at Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh. All will be sold for a fixed price of £250. The actor’s donation came about after he was contacted by Alasdair Nichol, the Edinburgh-born US representative of the auctioneers.
He said yesterday: “I know of the great work that the Sick Kids Friends Foundation do from my days in Edinburgh and I asked James Gandolfini if he would contribute something for the sale. I’m not sure of its artistic value but it is a one-off opportunity for someone to buy a unique piece of art”.
Gandolfini, 43, is a graduate of the famous Actors Studio in New York.
IT was an offer the charity could not refuse.
James Gandolfini, the television Mafia boss, has donated a sketch to be sold at an anonymous auction to help a children’s hospital in Scotland.
The sketch by the American actor, who plays gangster Tony Soprano in the critically-acclaimed award-winning show The Sopranos, is going
on sale for £250 in a fund-raising venture for the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh.
Bidders for the doodle of a dog are supposed to be unaware of the artist’s identity until they have handed over the money to the Sick Kids Friends Foundation charity.
Read the rest of this entry »
AMERICAN drama series The Sopranos was today named the best thing on British TV… by broadcast chiefs responsible for ordering home-grown shows.
Despite filling up the schedules with shows like I’m A Celebrity, Wife Swap and Hell’s Kitchen, more than a quarter of the most powerful people in the industry HATE reality TV shows.
A poll of 50 leading figures in TV and radio voted the hard-hitting US crime family drama as the top show on television, ahead of anything produced by programme makers in this country.
The result will be seen as a damning verdict on the relentless diet of soaps and reality TV shows which fill the schedules but are deemed ratings winners. AMERICAN drama series The Sopranos was today named the best thing on British TV… by broadcast chiefs responsible for ordering home-grown shows.
Despite filling up the schedules with shows like I’m A Celebrity, Wife Swap and Hell’s Kitchen, more than a quarter of the most powerful people in the industry HATE reality TV shows.
A poll of 50 leading figures in TV and radio voted the hard-hitting US crime family drama as the top show on television, ahead of anything produced by programme makers in this country.
The result will be seen as a damning verdict on the relentless diet of soaps and reality TV shows which fill the schedules but are deemed ratings winners. AMERICAN drama series The Sopranos was today named the best thing on British TV… by broadcast chiefs responsible for ordering home-grown shows.
Despite filling up the schedules with shows like I’m A Celebrity, Wife Swap and Hell’s Kitchen, more than a quarter of the most powerful people in the industry HATE reality TV shows.
A poll of 50 leading figures in TV and radio voted the hard-hitting US crime family drama as the top show on television, ahead of anything produced by programme makers in this country.
The result will be seen as a damning verdict on the relentless diet of soaps and reality TV shows which fill the schedules but are deemed ratings winners.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ — James Gandolfini and Tony Sirico of the Emmy award-winning HBO drama, “The Sopranos” are on a USO/Armed Forces Entertainment (AFE) tour to “meet and greet” troops serving in the Persian Gulf region. They are signing autographs, posing for pictures, visiting job posts and watching movies with the troops.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20031119/USO )
Starring as series lead Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini began acting in New York Theater and made his Broadway debut in 1992 alongside Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” A New Jersey native, Gandolfini has more than 20 movies to his credit and has appeared in “The Mexican,” “Eight Millimeter,” “A Civil Action,” “Get Shorty” and “True Romance.” Most recently, he completed filming “Romance & Cigarettes,” a feature film directed by John Turturro, with Joel and Ethan Coen producing. Gandolfini also appeared with USO tour veteran Ben Affleck in Mike Mitchell’s “Surviving Christmas.”
A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Tony Sirico plays superstitious and hot- tempered Paulie Walnuts on the popular drama. Before landing the role on “The Sopranos,” Sirico appeared on several television shows including “Cosby,” “Miami Vice,” “Kojak” and “Baretta.” Also familiar to film fans, he has appeared in “Mickey Blue Eyes,” “It Had To Be You,” “Mighty Aphrodite,” “Bullets Over Broadway” and “Goodfellas,” as well as 30 other feature films. Read the rest of this entry »
WONDERING how you’ll make it ’til March 2006, when the sixth season of “The Sopranos” finally gets going? Relax. The city is all mobbed up already.
There’s Edie Falco brandishing a gun in Broadway’s “‘night Mother,” Michael Imperioli and John Ventimiglia (Christopher Molitisanti and Artie Bucco) pairing up in “Ponies,” and Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior) waxing paternal in Woody Allen’s “A Second Hand Memory,” all off-Broadway.
And while Furio may have fled for good, Federico Castelluccio is showing his paintings - including the $125,000 work pictured above - at a gallery on the Upper East Side.
If anyone’s surprised by this surfeit of “Sopranos,” it’s not the people who play them.
“All of us were doing stuff before ‘The Sopranos,’ and a lot of us started in theater,” says Imperioli, who waited tables before Christopher made him a made man.
A former “Soprano” sang yesterday — fingering Peter Gotti as the head of the Gambino crime family.
Mob turncoat Anthony Rotondo, an ex-captain in the real-life family that inspired “The Sopranos,” said that on two key occasions, Gotti was introduced to him as the man running the Gambinos.
“Who was the Gambino family boss on the street at the time of your arrest” in 1999, asked prosecutor Michael McGovern.
“Peter Gotti,” Rotondo replied.
Rotondo, 47, who has a business degree from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, was a capo in New Jersey’s DeCavalcante crime family, which was used as the model for “The Sopranos” HBO hit show.
Now cooperating with the feds, he testified at the Manhattan federal court trial of Gotti and co-defendant Thomas “Huck” Carbonaro, who are accused of trying to murder mob snitch Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano.
Sopranos starlet Jamie-Lynn DiScala is a busy girl. With the hit HBO series set to start its final season in 2006, she’s making moves to set up new film and TV projects.
DiScala recently completed the teen thriller Dark Ride, which has just been picked up by Lions Gate. The film, according to the Hollywood Reporter, is set a decade after two young girls are brutally murdered as their killer escapes from a mental institution and returns to his familiar killing ground, the theme park attraction “Dark Ride.” The man’s victims this time are a group of college kids on a road trip that leads them to the ride.
Craig Singer directed the flick from a script he co-wrote with Robert Dean Klein.
DiScala has also just set up a new TV project with UPN. She’ll star in a TV adaptation of the popular Sex and the City-esque website Vivian Lives. The site chronicles the daily adventures of Vivian Livingston, a fictional twenty-something career woman in New York, created by Sherrie Krantz, who also has penned three books based on her cyber alter ego.
– Brian Linder
Despite the fact that Mario Puzo sleeps with the fishes and has been been doing so since 1999, this week brings us a brand-new novel set in the rich, bloody, curiously seductive world of the original, pre-Sopranos gangsters, the Corleone family. Just when we thought we were out — say it with me — they pull us back in.
The Godfather Returns (Random House; 430 pages), by the non-Sicilian Mark Winegardner, is not precisely a sequel; it’s interleaved into the gaps between the three movies. We rejoin Michael Corleone still struggling to take the family business legitimate while ignoring the slow collapse of his marriage. For reasons that are never very clear, Michael tries and fails to assassinate an ambitious Corleone street soldier named Nick Geraci, who then becomes his rival and nemesis. As plots go, it’s a little thin, and Winegardner doesn’t have much of a feel for Michael. Al Pacino played him as a tragic Mafia genius, a dormant volcano of repressed emotion, but here he’s just an icy, hypercompetent sociopath.
November 15, 2004 — Reputed real-life “Sopranos” mobster Anthony “Marshmallow” Mannarino is toast — he was sentenced to 57 months in the slammer for obstructing justice by tipping off gangster buddies about a federal probe.
The feds charged that Mannarino is a soldier in the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family — the one considered the model for HBO’s hit show “The Sopranos.”
The family’s alleged don, John Riggi, is in federal prison on racketeering charges, and many of his capos have been arrested, reducing the family’s influence in organized crime to almost none, sources say.
Mannarino, 59, admitted he leaked grand-jury secrets from a mole in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office to mob bosses before they were about to be taken down by the feds in November 1999.
Within days of the names being released, FBI agents arrested 39 DeCavalcante family members in a bust that crushed the family.
Mannarino lawyer Vivian Shevitz had District Judge Michael Mukasey and prosecutors scratching their heads during her client’s sentencing hearing in Manhattan federal court.
In pleading for leniency, Shevitz claimed Mannarino is really a Marshmallow “mensch” — a Vietnam veteran who retired from the mob years ago when he moved to Florida.
“Retired?” Judge Mukasey asked.
“Yes,” Shevitz said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Hillebrecht scoffed at that assertion, saying Mannarino was a DeCavalcante member until he was indicted.
“There’s really no such thing,” Hillebrecht said of retiring from the mob. “He was active and current up until December of 1999.”
But Shevitz said Mannarino doesn’t deserve hefty punishment for “speaking words here.”
Judge Mukasey disagreed and shot down Mannarino’s request for bail pending his appeal. He reports to prison on Nov. 30.
