David Chase, the creator of the landmark HBO series The Sopranos, has cut a deal to return to the cab;e network with a series about the history of the American film industry. The show, Ribbon of Dreams--the title comes from a line of Orson Welles's, who once used it as a definition of what a movie is--will begin in 1913 and, borrowing a gimmick from the HBO series Rome, chart history as seen through the eyes of a pair of fictitious characters, "one a cowboy with some violence in his past, the other a mechanical engineer", and their own offspring. The characters will be introduced as working for pioneering director D. W. Griffith; as the series progresses through the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day, there are plans to work in such figures as John Wayne, John Ford, Bette Davis, and Raoul Walsh. Brad Grey, who served as executive producer of The Sopranos and is now CEO of Paramount Pictures, will executive produce Ribbon of Dreams as well.
"It gives me pleasure to think of working, together with Brad, with HBO again," Chase says. "These are all people who, obviously, occupy a special place in my heart." HBO could say the same thing; The Sopranos, which was praised by TV critics (and not just TV critics) as the kind of thing that took television to a new creative level, was instrumental in making HBO an essential part of the zeitgeist and making people feel that they had to subscribe to the channel to be plugged into what was going on. Despite this, Chase, an old-school TV writer with credits on such cult series as The Rockford Files, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Almost Grown, and I'll Fly Away (as well as the occasional episode of The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo--even geniuses have to eat), was known to tell interviewers that, in his mind, movies were still the big time and to muse about making a Sopranos movie. A TV series about the movies is probably a more promising bet, especially since HBO is likely to give Chase considerable leeway on his first project for them since The Sopranos wrapped two years ago. "We couldn’t be more excited," HBO's co-president Richard Pleper says, "to be back in business with the master."