The Sopranos Swipe

Every year or so, a new Sopranos fan tweets or starts a Reddit thread to discuss the show’s most mystifying moment. It’s not an unexpected character revelation or a shocking plot twist. It’s an editing choice at the end of one scene in the middle of an episode. It lasts only a few seconds; it’s not even the episode’s parting shot.

The most common fan reaction is confusion: “Thought it was a streaming error. Not a good glitch like a dream sequence.” “Was this an editing mistake? A subtle motif? Why does this happen?!?!” “It was straight out of an early 2000’s teen comedy where the opening shot freeze frames on a character doing something ridiculous and the voiceover says, ‘You’re probably wondering how I got here.’” Occasionally, you’ll find somebody full of admiration (“Such a hilariously blatant parody of sitcom television”), but the emotions mostly range from incredulity to hostility. The moment is discussed so often that people complain that it’s discussed so often. “I can’t have this conversation again,” one redditor said in a thread with 76 comments including “If I had a nickel for every time this post comes up since I subbed, I’d have a private jet on 24-hour standby.” They’re vexed.

The controversial edit happens in “Cold Cuts,” the tenth episode of The Sopranos’s fifth season, written by regular Sopranos screenwriters Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess and directed by Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode). Overall, the 2004 episode is a fairly conventional entry in the HBO series. It contains three interlocking, standard-for-the-mob-show stories: one involving Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his sister Janice (Aida Turturro), who are forced to acknowledge the family’s anger-management issues after Janice is caught on-camera beating a woman at a child’s soccer match; one involving Tony’s cousins Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi) and Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), who dispose of long-buried bodies at an uncle’s farm and deal with their edgy relationship to Tony; and one involving Tony and his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), who have been separated all season and are just now drifting back together.

Earlier in the season, Carmela has a brief fling with her son’s guidance counselor, Robert Wegler (David Strathairn). The relationship ends after Wegler accuses her of using sex to “strong-arm” him into pressuring his colleagues to go easy on A.J. (Robert Iler), who is at risk of flunking out. In “Cold Cuts,” Carmela runs into Wegler again while visiting the school and has an awkward exchange, during which she blurts out “I’m going back to my husband.” The scene cuts to a reverse angle of Carmela walking away from Wegler and ramps down into super–slow motion, ending with a freeze-frame. The freeze-frame emphasizes Carmela’s almost stricken, What did I just blurt out and why? expression as well as Wegler’s equally baffled face in the background behind her. Then, even more striking, there’s a wipe transition — like something out of a film by Akira Kurosawa or George Lucas — that takes us to Tony B., his uncle, and Christopher chilling lakeside at the uncle’s farm, like a Star Wars film suddenly revealing the existence of a Norman Rockwell planet.

There isn’t much like this cut in the show’s 86-episode run. Chase and his collaborators didn’t exactly shy away from “big swing” flourishes, such as the scene that runs backward at the start of season two’s “Proshai, Livushka.” But the majority of the time, they just used old-school filmmaking techniques: covering conversations with a mix of wide shots and shot–reverse shot configurations; filming violence with a blend of long takes, quick-cut static images, and shots in which the camera is on rails or a wheeled dolly (making the action look more elegant than it would if whip zooms or a jerky handheld camera had been used); and getting out of scenes with a straight or hard cut rather than a dissolve or some other more elaborate effect. Sopranos fans have been preoccupied with other postproduction choices (hello, CGI Livia), but none has been obsessed over like this one. In other words, the slow-mo–freeze-frame–wipe in “Cold Cuts” is the Tony riding a horse indoors of Sopranos transitions.

In his commentary on the season-five DVD set, Figgis remarks upon the cut briefly: “That’s a really interesting transition, and it wasn’t the way I’d expected the scene to look at the end.” But he doesn’t offer an origin story. When Alan Sepinwall and I asked Chase about the transition for our book The Sopranos Sessions, he couldn’t remember much about it, so we didn’t include his comments in our finished manuscript. There’s no authoritative backstory anywhere else.

So last month when the perpetual “Cold Cuts” conversation resurfaced online, I asked Chase about the transition again. He said he didn’t personally have anything to do with it, though he was happy with the episode overall. He admitted that even though he was “a bit of a fascist” about making directors adhere to the house style (for instance, no camera movement in therapy scenes), he approved the slow-motion–freeze frame–wipe in “Cold Cuts” because “Mike was different. He had his own way of doing things. And by that point, we were in what, season five? By that time, I guess I was willing to look at more stuff. I probably went, Oh, thank God, this is a different transition. I don’t recall, though.”

If Chase still couldn’t remember how the “Cold Cuts” transition happened, maybe Figgis could. He was in London when I reached out to him. Talk about a good sport: He watched “Cold Cuts” again for the first time in years and consulted his copy of the shooting script (which contains storyboards he had drawn, quite the collector’s item) before sheepishly admitting he was “not much the wiser” as to why the transition appears where it does.

Figgis said he was proud to have directed what he considers “a very powerful episode” of the series but added, “I have to be really honest: Working for David Chase on The Sopranos is very much being a director for hire.” That’s true not only of The Sopranos — it has been true of almost all series television since the medium’s inception. Figgis imposed his own filmmaking sensibility on the script whenever possible, while accepting that even though episode directors got to approve the first cut, showrunners got the final cut.

After Figgis directed “Cold Cuts,” he returned to England and, after a few weeks, watched the first cut, which had been put together by Sidney Wolinsky (who edited 32 episodes of the show), via a secure screening link. Figgis noticed that the scenes were in a different order than the shooting script had indicated, but that’s what happens in editing. He offered a few notes, all minor. He liked the episode. He signed off.

The slo-mo–freeze frame–wipe was already in that first cut, Figgis said. The best he could do was to speculate that the combination of slow-motion and freeze-frame might have been an attempt by the editors “to preserve my shot of Carmela walking away from Wegler a little bit longer.” He said he was “pleased by that.”

“I’d love to take credit for my brilliance in breaking the mold of The Sopranos,” Figgis explained, “but I was not the one to break their mold. The editors came up with that, maybe as a result of my having pushed for a kind of elongation of that moment with them both facing the camera and her walking away. But that would be it.” He allowed that “maybe there was a conversation that occurred during that editing meeting,” prior to signing off on the first cut, that might have led to that unusual transition, but, he concluded, “I don’t remember.”

I got no indication from Figgis as to whether he thought the transition worked overall, though he made it clear he is aware that Sopranos fans consider it mystifying or just don’t like it. “It was such a long time ago,” he emphasized. “I just came in and directed the episode, and that was pretty much the end of it. So I guess I would have to say I’m pleased that people would still want to talk about it.”

Next, I went to Wolinsky, the episode’s editor, who watched the scene again too. “As far as that transition, I can’t tell you why we did it that way,” he said. He spoke to his assistant, who worked on The Sopranos with him 20 years ago, and “he also can’t remember,” Wolinsky said, adding, “It’s definitely an odd transition, and from looking at what’s there, I don’t see why it wouldn’t have worked as a straight cut. Maybe David asked for something unusual, or maybe we were gonna do a dissolve, but we suggested this instead. I’m not sure. I doubt it was written into the script because, although I don’t have a copy of the script for this one, I don’t remember anything that visually specific being written into a Sopranos script.”

He concluded, “I like wipes. I’m not wild about dissolves. Maybe I didn’t do a dissolve there because I didn’t think it would look good, and I said, ‘Why don’t we do a wipe instead?’ As for why we did the freeze-frame, I don’t know.”

The Sopranos is legendary for leaving some of its biggest questions unanswered: Did Ralphie burn down the stable in “Whoever Did This”? What happened to the Russian in “Pine Barrens”? Did Tony die after the cut to black that ends “Made in America”? For now, we can add another mystery: How did that transition end up in “Cold Cuts”? No one knows, not even Chase.

“Why on earth are people obsessed with this, do you think?” he threw back at me at the end of our conversation. “It seems like such a strange thing to wonder about of all the things, just one transition in one episode.”