Michael Imperioli is more than just a beloved actor who doesn’t love any bigots who watch his work. He’s also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed the 2009 indie Hungry Ghosts. And in 1999, he teamed up with his frequent collaborator Spike Lee to write Summer of Sam, about the New York City’s hellish summer season. It was a tough sell, even in the pre-franchise days, and it took some doing to get it off the ground. Indeed, Imperioli recently revealed that he went to some truly outside-the-box means to ensure it was made.
The erstwhile Christopher Moltisanti is one of the talking heads in the forthcoming documentary Ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel, which explores the storied Manhattan institution. In a clip shared with Variety, Imperioli talks about what would become his first produced screenplay.
“I had just begun writing Summer of Sam with Victor Colicchio — we wrote that script together,” Imperioli recalls. “I really wanted to get it made. So I met somebody who was living here who was a witch, who said she could help me get it made, but it wasn’t going to happen the way I thought it would. I was very ambitious at the time and wanted to get that made, so [I] resorted to tapping into otherworldly means to get it through the studio system.”
Imperioli does not go into details about the meet-up. But Summer of Sam got made, and with no less than Spike Lee at the helm, so maybe witches are real.
In another segment of the doc, Imperioli shares a second story about the supernatural lurking in the Chelsea Hotel.
“I saw a ghost here,” he remembers. “Some people may think that I’m insane and it’s bullsh*t or whatever. But I’m not the only person who has seen this apparition of a woman, apparently from the late 19th century, whose soon-to-be husband died on the Titanic. She came from upstate or something and was waiting for him here, and when she found out what happened to him, she killed herself.”
Imperioili survived the spectral encounter, ensuring that we’d see him not only on The Sopranos but, much later, on The White Lotus, too.
(Via Variety)