(1) AND THE AWARD GOES TO...
(2) YOUNG AMERICANS 
(3) SURPRISINGLY WICKES?
(4) NO JOKING MATTER
(5) SPIES LIKE US?   
(6) BLUE OVER “BLUE” 
----------------------------------------------------------------
(1) AND THE AWARD GOES TO...

While watching this year’s Emmy Awards, I came to the realization that maybe 
if we ignore them they will go away. “Them” refers to “The Sopranos,” the 
show that over the past couple years, dominated the morning-after headlines 
for their across-the-board victories at the Emmy Awards. This year, the HBO 
show did take away a few statuettes, but didn’t grab the headlines as it has 
done in the recent past. The show’s main competitors in terms of hauling away 
the hardware were the superbly written and acted “West Wing,” and “Everybody 
Loves Raymond,” the CBS sitcom starring comic Ray Romano in which the 
fictional family just happens to be Italian American. Raymond is not a 
sweatpants-wearing mobster, but a nice-guy sportswriter, who has a nice, if 
quirky, family (wife, kids, parents, police officer brother) that he is very 
close to and who are a big part of his life. Maybe the buzz surrounding “The 
Sopranos” is finally wearing off. The show didn’t come in as an also-ran 
because people in Hollywood now agree with the many Italians who are offended 
by the show, but because there are shows on TV that are better than it. It 
certainly is easier to cheer for something (“Raymond”) than against 
something (“The Sopranos”). Doris Roberts, who plays Raymond’s mother, 
delighted the crowd with her award acceptance speech, and Patricia Heaton, 
who plays his wife, turned her acceptance speech into a “Thank You” to those 
in the U.S. armed forces. I can’t tell you what James Gandolfini said during 
his acceptance speech for Best Actor (c’mon, better than Martin Sheen? No 
way!) because he wasn’t there to accept his award. Yeah, big tough guy. Big 
Mafia boss guy. Yeah, don’t mess with him, unless of course you’re somewhere 
that he’s afraid to go to. Now, I don’t know the real reason why Gandolfini 
wasn’t at the Emmys, but his absence made him look like a big coward. (There 
were a few “winners” who didn’t bother to show up. Do they really think they 
are so important that the Taliban would put a “hit” on a Hollywood awards 
ceremony?) Maybe, just maybe, it’s because he has grown disgusted with being 
glamorized and idolized for playing the part of a brutal thug, as he 
commented a few months back. In any case, I’d like to believe that maybe, 
finally, the tide is turning against “The Sopranos,” and maybe people are 
finally getting tired of their act.  

(2)YOUNG AMERICANS 

“Greedy,” “Sneaky,” “Violent” and “Hairy.” Those are the words that some 
college students associate with Italian Americans. Can it be because of what 
they see on TV and in the movies? Perhaps. Those answers came from Purdue 
University professor Ben Lawton’s students. As part of his course on “The 
Mafia and the Movies: The Social Construction of the Image of Italians and 
Italian Americans by the Media,” Lawton surveyed 40 students throughout the 
Purdue community on their thoughts about Italians and the way they see them 
in popular culture. The point of the survey was to determine if “Mafia movies 
and television shows such as ‘The Sopranos’ affect the image of Italians and 
Italian Americans.” While far from scientific, it turns out that what 
students there, whether or not they were of Italian heritage, think of 
Italians and Italian Americans is far from good. The respondents were evenly 
split between male and female and 15 percent of the men and 20 percent of the 
women had some sort of Italian background. Only two percent had never seen a 
movie that presented Italians as members of an organized crime operation. 
Does this affect their perception of Italians? Well, when asked to name “the 
first famous Italian off the top of your head,” 24 percent of the 
non-Italians named Robert DeNiro, 16 percent named Joe Pesci and 15 percent 
named a character from “The Godfather.” The only non-fictional, 
non-Mafia-related Italian that these college students could name was 
Mussolini (3 percent). By the way, Mussolini was also the one the students of 
Italian heritage first named (43 percent). 

When asked if they were “fascinated by the Mafia lifestyle,” 90 percent of 
the men said yes, while 35 percent of the women gave that same response. 
Asked if Americans in general were fascinated by the Mafia, 98 percent of the 
students replied “yes.” When asked to name three things that came to mind 
when thinking of Italian-Americans, non-Italians gave replies such as 
“Mafia,” “Sopranos,” “greedy,” “sneaky,” “violent,” “accents,” “New 
York” and “hairy.” Oh, they also mentioned, more than once, “good food” and 
“suits,” but the negative words were mentioned much more often. 

When given room to add additional comments, the students said things such as 
“Who doesn’t like watching ‘Goodfellas?’” and “Hell yeah, I wanna be in 
the Mafia. Who doesn’t?” And therein lies the fascination with this “Mafia” 
lifestyle. 

Kids who are faced with four or more years of studying to get a decent job in 
a business world where job security is tenuous at best, see these movies and 
TV shows that feature guys who obviously didn’t study much and may not have 
even finished high school, hangin’ out, sipping espresso, pulling a thick wad 
of bills from their track suits, occasionally beating some guy’s head in, 
then having his pick of exotic dancers or women of loose morals, and they’re 
attracted to the picture they see. It’s a bit like the youngster who has to 
walk every day past the corner the neighborhood drug dealer works, with the 
knowledge that even if that guy on the corner does nothing more than keep his 
eyes open for the cops, he’s pulling in hundreds of dollars, tax free, every 
day. That kid who courageously walks to school every day may wonder what the 
point of going to school and studying may be when he could much more easily 
make money on that street corner, but the guy who stands on the corner while 
the other kids are in school is also the one who gets shot when someone 
doesn’t get what they want, or when some other dispute takes place. In the 
same way, the college students who are fascinated by the Mafia lifestyle 
don’t see the Mob guy getting a bullet in his head or spending time in a most 
unglamorous jail cell for any one of a number of offenses. 

But then again, do these college students not see their fellow students who 
are of Italian descent? Are all of their fellow students whose names end in 
vowels “greedy, sneaky, hairy and violent”? I doubt it. So whose fault is it 
if this is what they believe? Yes, the popular portrayals of Italians are 
overwhelmingly negative, but I would hope that these intelligent young people 
could distinguish between fiction and the real world. Now that’s what the 
Mafia movie and TV show apologists tell us. But then again, if the only 
picture that people see of us is a bad one, eventually they’ll start to 
believe it.  

(3) SURPRISINGLY WICKES? 

There are celebrities known as “A-list” types who earn tens of millions of 
dollars for every movie they make or concert they sing in or season of 
baseball they play. Those celebrities whose names are familiar but who may 
not always get top billing, are “B-list” types. Former child stars and 
people who have become famous at some point in their lives, but not for long 
are relegated to the “C-list,” or worse, if there is such a place. It is 
from these lower realms of celebritydom that Wickes Furniture gets the stars 
of their commercials. The people who peddle Wickes’ furniture are those like 
Fabio, Don Novello (aka “Father Guido Sarducci”), Dr. Ruth Westheimer, 
Charro and second-tier cast members from “The Sopranos.” I admit that I 
don’t know the name of his character because the show is evil, and because I 
really don’t pay much attention to the characters’ names on “The Sopranos.” 
I’m sure he has a very amusing mob nickname, but the actor is one of the fat 
guys whose pants more often than not have elastic waists. He appears in the 
Wickes commercials saying things like, “I like Italian leather — you got a 
problem with that?” and commenting that the deals are so good there that he 
wonders if the furniture “fell off a truck.” Now he’d be just another idiot 
polluting our airwaves for four or five seconds at a time, and wouldn’t be 
worth writing about, if he had just acted like the fictional criminal he 
plays on TV, but he has to make the Italian connection and drag the rest of 
us through the mud with him. When all of the ingredients; the tough 
guy-mobster pose, the “Italian leather” comment and the “fell off a truck” 
remarks are put together, it only perpetuates the notion that we’re all at 
heart a bunch of oafs who are “sneaky,” “violent” and “greedy.”  

(4) NO JOKING MATTER 

The bad news is that he doesn’t think that “The Sopranos” is that bad. But 
the good news is that comedian Paul Tompkins, appearing on the Conan O’Brien 
show on Nov. 6, started off a joke by saying that some Italian Americans are 
offended by the portrayals of Italians on “The Sopranos.” He said that he is 
half-Italian (on his mother’s side) and he isn’t offended by “The 
Sopranos.” What he is offended by, he said, is The Olive Garden commercials, 
in which relatives of Italian Americans come to the United States to visit, 
and the first thing they want to do is visit The Olive Garden. He likened it 
to a commercial that would feature a Chinese family, saying that they honor 
their ancestors by dining at the Panda Express. The impressions he did of the 
fictional characters on both (actual and imagined) commercials was funny, as 
was Tompkins’ joke as a whole. Hey, he may not be on the bandwagon, and Olive 
Garden may not be evil, but the important thing to note is that more 
Americans learned, while watching Conan, that there are things about “The 
Sopranos” (other than Gandolfini beating out Sheen and Rob Lowe for a Best 
Actor Emmy) that offend us.

(5) SPIES LIKE US? 

Robert Rodriguez is a movie director who has often put his Mexican heritage 
at the forefront of his films. He has directed Western-style movies, 
urban-oriented films, thrillers and at least one film directed at a pre-teen 
audience. He has directed films about Mexicans, ones that starred Mexicans, 
and films that starred non-Mexicans and which did not revolve around a 
Mexican theme. His latest feature, called “Spy Kids,” has recently been 
released on video and it’s quite a revelatory experience. The movie is about 
a mother and father, played by Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino, who are 
former spies, but have since settled down for a typical life of driving their 
two grammar school children around in the minivan. From what I’ve heard, the 
movie is a pretty big hit with its target audience, and the adults who’ve 
seen it don’t think it’s bad, either. 

But the truly interesting thing about “Spy Kids” is that, little by little, 
we find out that the family is of Mexican heritage and that heritage is an 
important, vital part of their lives. From Antonio Banderas’ accent, to his 
daughter’s ability to open secret doors by saying her full and very long 
non-Anglo name, to casual uses of Spanish phrases, the family’s Latino nature 
is always present in the picture and is one very important ingredient in 
their makeup. Kids, as well as adults, watching “Spy Kids,” undoubtedly come 
away from the film thinking, “Boy, this family is pretty cool,” while also 
realizing, in the back of their minds, “and they’re Mexican, too.” It is 
obviously important to Rodriguez that the movie-going public be presented 
with wholesome, positive portrayals of Mexican Americans, but he doesn’t make 
a Mexican movie, he makes a movie with protagonists that everyone can root 
for, and who just happen to be of Mexican heritage.

Watching “Spy Kids” and its story of an ordinary family who do super-human 
feats in thwarting evil made me think that if we were to put together a 
comparable Italian-American cast, we would come up with Ray Romano’s 
television family. The only problem with this, though, is imagining it is the 
closest we’ll come to seeing a movie about a family of good guy and gal spies 
who happen to be Italian American, because those who are in the position to 
make such movies don’t seem interested in making them. Every time anyone 
dares to criticize the content of “The Sopranos,” David Chase’s lackeys 
stress the fact that he happened to be born to an Italian-American woman. So? 
Rodriguez has proven that he can make movies that have Mexican characters in 
a variety of roles, and they have been put in shoot ’em ups, thrillers, 
indies, and family-friendly films. What has Chase done? Nothing beyond the 
very limited scope of “The Sopranos.” And what about our other directors, 
such as Scorcese and Coppola? It’s been decades since either of these two 
heavy hitters has done a film where the Italian characters were the good 
guys. What do we get when an Italian character is put in a kids’ action 
movie? Super Mario. I’m not saying that films with positive portrayals of 
Italian Americans haven’t been made recently (Stanley Tucci’s “Big Night” 
is one exception), but more often than not, when they get a shot at directing 
or writing the screenplay for a new film, Italian-American directors peg the 
Italians as the bad guys. 

At least on television, we have some good characters (“Raymond”) to balance 
out the bad (“Sopranos”). If only what we were treated to on the big screen 
were as balanced. 

(6) BLUE OVER “BLUE” 

One place on television where we are not treated to a balanced portrayal of 
Italian Americans is on “NYPD Blue.” It’s remarkable that, season after 
season, new characters are introduced; police officers, detectives, bad guys, 
crime victims, and astonishingly, the only ones who seem even remotely 
Italian are, you guessed it, the bad guys. There hasn’t been an 
Italian-American good guy on “Blue” since the days when Paul Sorvino was 
part of “Law and Order.” Nicholas Turturro played a good detective for a 
couple seasons, but his character was Hispanic, not Italian. If you just came 
to earth from outer space and were dropped in front of a television set, 
you’d think that the only Italians in New York were mobsters and guys running 
nudie bars (who are undoubtedly mob-connected in “Blue”). 

So, it was with rapt attention that I watched the big two-hour season 
premiere of “NYPD Blue” last month. I won’t deny that the show still pulls 
me in and holds me there for its entirety, but it seems that yet again we 
will have another season of no new Italian-American characters. Oh wait, 
there was the guy who was sleeping with the drug-dealer’s girlfriend: He had 
a vaguely Italian-sounding name. And oh, there was the guy who owned the 
nudie bar, who had Sipowicz’s partner killed last season: He had an 
Italian-sounding surname and he was mob-connected, so he must be an Italian. 
So nice to see we’re being included so quickly into the new season. 

JIM SCALZITTI'S  "Media Watch" column, will highlight OFFENSES against the 
Italian-American community. Jim would be interested in receiving Emails 
detailing information regarding such Offenses at << jscalz@earthlink.net >>. 

BILL DAL CERRO'S  "Sempre Avanti" will highlight ACTIVISM in RESPONSE 
to those Infractions. Likewise, Bill would be interested in receiving Emails 
detailing information regarding such Activism Response at 
<<bdcerro@yahoo.com>>. 

PAUL BASILE is requesting information any existing Italian-American 
antidefamation WEB  SITES, so that Paul can add it to his Resource List.
He can be reached at << FraNoiNews >>. PLEASE do not send Paul
Anti Defamation information. He is drowning in Emails as it is! 
That information is to be directed to either Jim or Bill. 

Please add the above Names and Email Addresses to your "ADDRESS BOOK". 

By two seperate ANNOTICO Reports I will be sending those two Columns.