While Tony Soprano famously felt that “ ‘remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation,” the television and film industries seem to believe the exact opposite given the rash of reboots and remakes trying to recapture that “remember when” magic.
Now Tony’s creator David Chase is joining the crowd, with Deadline reporting on Thursday that New Line has purchased the screenplay for a film prequel to “The Sopranos” TV series.
The script, cowritten with sometime “Sopranos” scribe Lawrence Konner, is titled “The Many Saints of Newark.”
Chase, 72, has flirted for years with the idea of revisiting his hit HBO series, which ran six seasons from 1999 to 2007. In November 2014, while discussing the series Blu-ray release, Chase told The Associated Press that a prequel “intrigues” him, and that one possible focus would be Newark in the “late ’60s, early ’70s, about all the racial animosity, or the beginning, the really true beginning of the flood of drugs.”
Deadline’s exclusive reporting confirmed that the prequel will indeed be centered around the Newark riots in the 1960s. There was no word on casting for the film.
