The first female president of Union's student body and the 1983 winner of the Bailey Cup, Ilene Landress is now a producer on the hit television show “The Sopranos.”
Ilene Landress '83 admits that it's hard to explain what she does for a living.
“My best line is that my whole life my mother said, 'Get off the phone and stop watching TV.' Guess what? Now they pay me to talk on the phone and watch TV.”
Landress is a producer of HBO's smash hit, “The Sopranos,” a drama about the Mafia, family, and human nature. With a middle-aged Mafioso on Prozac as the protagonist, this show is more than your typical mobster series, and critics have hailed the show as “just plain brilliant,” “innovative and entertaining,” “thrillingly good,” and “the classiest TV phenomenon in years.”
Overseeing budgets and sets, location scouting and production design, wardrobe and casting, Landress makes the show happen, using a lot of the people skills she learned at Union when she “majored in committees.” She is, in short, a “sheepherder” on the show. “I tell the actors that they are the sheep, and I am the sheepherder,” she says. “They don't particularly like this.”
Her fingerprints are everywhere. She works closely with the creators of the show, reads scripts, and figures out how to make their ideas a reality. She's very involved in casting and works with nearly every cast and crewmember — from the parking assistants to the biggest stars. “I can't say that I know every name, but I have contact with all of them,” she says. “I am the one who tries to keep it together and keep people happy.”
What makes it a little more difficult to explain her job is the fact that the details depend on whether or not the production company is shooting the show. “The Sopranos” takes ten weeks for preproduction followed by twenty-four straight weeks of shooting. Once the cameras start, the crew shoots back-to-back episodes, breaking for ten hours between shooting days. “The first day of shooting on one episode is the first day of prep on the next episode,” she says. “It's like a treadmill. You never get to really enjoy the shooting because you are always prepping the next episode.”
The prep time before shooting involves hiring the crew, making deals, writing, and outlining the season. There are lots of meetings and scheduling — with production designers, location scouts, set builders, electricians — and Landress finds herself often peeking over the writers' shoulders, trying to determine where the show might go and what their needs might be.
“We are logistically challenged on 'The Sopranos,' ” she explains. The show's stages are in Long Island City at Silvercup Studios (usually there are two or three big sets for each season), but all exteriors are shot in New Jersey. So Landress spends a lot of time going back and forth between Queens and New Jersey.
“David (Chase, writer and creator of the show) is a real stickler for detail,” she says. “New Jersey is really one of the characters of the show. You can go out your back door in Queens and make believe you're in New Jersey, but David is really strict about not letting us do that. So if it says it is New Jersey, it really is New Jersey. At the beginning I used to try to convince him of places in Queens that could be New Jersey, but I learned I wasn't going to win that battle. You don't mess with success. It's worked, so you don't question it too much.”
Breaking into the business
Landress broke into film watching parking spots.
“I was interested in show business, but I never even took a film course at Union,” she says. After graduation, (she was a combined biology and psychology major), she earned a master's in nutrition from Columbia's School of Physicians and Surgeons. She then applied to medical school, but immediately deferred.
“I knew I either had a year to figure out how to get a job in the movie business or I was going to end up in medical school.” Within a few days, she had a job as a production assistant for Crocodile Dundee, watching parking spots and running errands. “I did what everybody did. I was very naive about the whole thing,” she says. She saw a company filming on the street, volunteered to work for free for a couple of days, and soon was hired.
Landress went on to work on “a bunch of movies no one would have heard of,” and then worked on the television series “The Equalizer” in 1986 and 1987, on the pilot of “Law and Order” in 1988, and on Stanley and Iris, starring Jane Fonda and Robert DeNiro. “I've worked with the biggest stars on the worst films they've ever made … that they'd most like to forget,” she says.
But as soon as she broke into the movie business, she was hooked. As Hanna Schygulla, star of The Marriage of Maria Braun, told her, “The movie business is like a disease.” “It's true,” says Landress. “You either get hooked on it and like it or you just say, 'this is ridiculous' and leave.” The twelve- to sixteen-hour days are tough, she says, but she loves it.
To gain more experience in movie production, she chose to specialize in accounting — even though she hadn't taken an accounting class. “Everybody in the movie business kept talking about the budget like it was brain surgery,” she says. “What you learn when you start working in accounting is that the budget is no big deal, but it's the big secret of movies and television. I figured that if I worked as an assistant accountant, I would find out where the secrets were.”
As an accountant, Landress worked on the film Quiz Show and then moved into production for the film The Perez Family in Florida, Up Close and Personal. In 1995, she was a production manager/associate producer on the pilot “Dear Diary,” which was produced by Dreamworks Television for ABC. Though it wasn't picked up by the network, “Dear Diary” did win an Academy Award as a short film. She continued at Dreamworks Television as a production executive on the television show “Spin City” during its first year.
Then came “The Sopranos.”
Landress had just finished working on “Spin City” when she received a call from HBO asking about her availability. Exhausted and headed to Europe for a vacation, she didn't send a resume. A few days later, HBO called back to say that it found an old resume. Finally, she agreed to look at a script. “I thought that it was going to be run-of-the-mill TV,” she says. “I just wasn't interested. But they sent me the script and I read the script for the pilot episode, and I thought, 'Oh my God, this is really good.'”
She flew to Los Angeles to meet with Chase and was offered the job.
When she took the position, the show had not yet been cast. With such a great script, there was pressure to cast it well. Casting is difficult in television, she explains, especially because you have to convince people to sign on for five or six years, and casting for “The Sopranos” was especially demanding — Chase wanted actors from the East Coat and “as Italian as possible.”
By August 1997, the show was cast, and HBO picked up the show in December 1997 (originally written for Twentieth Century Fox, “The Sopranos” was passed up by Fox and the other major networks before HBO took a chance). “It was a big commitment for HBO,” Landress says. “They hadn't done anything like this before. It was definitely a risk for them.”
But the risk quickly paid off, as “The Sopranos” became the most-talked-about show on television. “I knew that it was really good,” Landress says. “But something being really good and something being a smash hit almost never happens in television, because usually something really good gets homogenized and pasteurized. The beauty of HBO is that they hire filmmakers like David and let them do their thing.
“I knew that the writing was amazing, and I knew that we did a really good job casting it, but you never know if it is going to be accepted by people,” she continues. “Rumor goes that 'The Sopranos' initially tested really well with women and smart people. At a network, if something tests well with women and smart people, you can pretty much be sure that it is never going to be on the air. But for HBO, that was OK. “
The media surge
The media surge surrounding the show was immense, and by the second season Landress had added helping HBO handle the deluge of publicity on the set to her day-to-day responsibilities.
“The first season we really toiled in obscurity,” she says. “We shot the show, but it hadn't been on the air yet; nobody knew what it was. I got a couple of calls a day from the outside world and David Chase got a couple of calls from the outside world. The second season, we were just bombarded.”
Much of her job became time management, but it was nearly impossible not to let the hype infiltrate the set. “The publicity thing does become pretty hyped up,” she says. “We do a lot of it, but we are trying to be selective. People are doing these stories like 'What's The Sopranos' favorite food?' You want to be nice to everybody, and our actors want to fulfill all of the requests, but you can't. There are not enough hours in the day to do everything.
“You still have to shoot the show everyday,” she points out. “All we wanted to do was make our little show. Everybody wants a story about how Lorraine Bracco and Edie Falco don't get along, but Edie and Lorraine don't even work on the same days, and when they do, they really like each other. And they want to know if Jim Gandolfini is a good guy, but Jim is a great guy.”
And then there were the award shows, when the media scrutiny intensified. Last year “The Sopranos” won four Emmys (Edie Falco for best actress, David Chase for best screenplay, casting directors for best casting, and editor on the pilot for best editing), but didn't win for best drama (“The Practice” did). “The Sopranos” did win the Golden Globe for best drama, however.
Naturally, Landress had more fun at the Golden Globes than at the Emmys, and it's clear that the loss to “The Practice” is still a little painful. “When we lost the Emmy, all of our actors kind of turned into their characters. Everybody got sort of hostile. It's a little overwhelming. The Golden Globes were really fun because we won.”
“The Sopranos” has also won numerous other awards, including dominating the Directors' Guild Awards and the Screen Actors Guild, a Peabody Award, and the Television Critics' Association Award. This year, “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing” were nominated for eighteen Emmys each.
“Basically, we all have a good time doing the show, and that's what the cast and the producers want to put out there — that's it's great to win an award and we're very thankful for it, but at the same time it is really fun to do the work and it's really great that people like it.
“My lawyer said to me a couple of weeks ago, 'Enjoy it now because it's never going to be this good again.' That's really depressing,” she says. But she realizes it is an important lesson. At lunch this summer with Lorraine Bracco, Landress says that she was complaining about being burnt out — about needing a vacation on a desert island where no one has seen “The Sopranos” — and Bracco reminded her, “Come on, we're having fun. This is good. This is really good. Enjoy this.”
“So yes, this is the best job I've ever had,” she says.