David Chase Reveals More 'Sopranos' Prequel Movie Details
What was Tony Soprano like as a kid? We'll find out in "The Many Saints of Newark," the prequel feature film to the iconic HBO series "The Sopranos."
Series creator David Chase teased some new details to Deadline, including the fact that the prequel will feature a young Tony. The movie is set during the Newark riots in the 1960s, when African Americans and Italian Americans clashed.
“I was interested in Newark and life in Newark at that time,” Chase told Deadline. “I used to go to down there every Saturday night for dinner with my grandparents. But the thing that interested me most was Tony’s boyhood. I was interested in exploring that.”
He added, "The movie will deal with the tensions between the blacks and whites at the time, and Tony Soprano will be part of this, but as a kid."
Mostly, though, the film focuses on Tony's uncle, Dickie Moltisanti (played by Alessandro Nivola), a mob soldier who eventually dies in the '70s at the hands of a crooked cop.
And much later, in the series, his son, Christopher (Michael Imperioli) murders that cop in revenge.
Dickie is part of the mob in the "good old days" that Tony often reflected on in the show. “The mafia was very polished at that time, how they dressed and what they did,” Chase noted. “Those traditions were followed more loosely in the series. These weren’t guys who wore tracksuits, back then.”