David Chase has returned with his first work since “The Sopranos” went black.
The director premiered his debut film, “Not Fade Away,” at the New York Film Festival on Friday ahead of its red carpet gala Saturday. The ’60s rock ‘n’ roll drama is his long-awaited follow-up to the venerated HBO mob drama he created and produced for six seasons.
The film is set around a suburban teenager (John Magaro) in New Jersey whose garage band aspires to be the next Rolling Stones, an ambition at odds with his traditional Italian father (former “Sopranos” star James Gandolfini).
In a press conference at Lincoln Center, Chase called the film, soundtracked by his favorite rock songs, “a compilation album.”
“In ‘The Sopranos,’ one of my favorite parts of that — or maybe my favorite part of that whole thing — was putting the picture and the sound together, putting the music in,” Chase said. “I wanted to continue that. I missed that once I was gone.”
The film, which Paramount Vantage will release on Dec. 21, is about the revolutionary advent of rock ‘n’ roll, told not through its famous players but, as Chase said, from “the backstage” perspective — the regular suburban kids inspired and moved by its spirit.
“I don’t want to get into this thing, like I’m bragging about the ’60s,” he said. “But the one thing I have to say: The music was great. … Music was, at the time, a way into everything, at least for me and for a lot of people I knew, too. That’s the way I first learned about art and poetry and fashion, humor, film. It all came from there.”
The 67-year-old Chase has long aspired to make a feature film. His “Sopranos,” which concluded in 2007, was imbued with movie-like storytelling that significantly raised the bar for television drama. “Not Fade Away,” while of very different and more tender substance, shares many unmistakable elements of “The Sopranos,” particularly the familiar swirl of family tension, pop culture, philosophy and suburban life.
Though Chase said the film is very personal to him, he insisted it wasn’t autobiographical. Chase, like the main character, played drums as a youngster, but he refused to even label himself and his friends “a band.”
“I never even bought a set of drums,” said Chase. “I played on cardboard boxes and stuff. We never got out of the basement.”
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More