Hasta La Creative!

Today we’re kicking off the Ad Age Summer Weekend Reader — a fresh post each Friday afternoon that serves up an in-depth read about media and/or marketing. Basically, great stuff we’re eager to share with you, with an emphasis on newly published articles that use stellar writing and compelling narrative to explain how our world really works. Think of them as smart reads for the beach or the train.

Our first pick is an article from July’s GQ, “The Night Tony Soprano Disappeared,” that is actually a book excerpt from “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution, from The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad,” in stores July 3 (but already available on Amazon). The issue of GQ was, eerily, already in print and on newsstands when James Gandolfini died last week.

Author Brett Martin, who spent plenty of time on the set of “The Sopranos” while working on his book, has added a brief forward to the online version of the excerpt to acknowledge Gandolfini’s death and put his legacy in context: “It is not too much of a stretch to say that if Gandolfini had not gotten the role of Tony Soprano — as, by all rights of all television rules ever written, he shouldn’t have — and attacked it with such gusto, television would not be what it is today. Without an actor capable of finding Tony’s melancholy, his soulfulness, his absurdity and his rage, the era of TV antiheroes may never have found its foothold.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com