‘The Sopranos’ Creator David Chase on Making a Movie About LSD Alongside MKUltra Series and Being Concerned About ‘Censorship’ Under Trump
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- David Chase is independently writing and directing a film about LSD centered on a young woman who is a college DJ — his first directorial effort since 2012's "Not Fade Away."
- Chase is developing HBO's "Project: MKUltra," based on John Lisle's book about CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the agency's Cold War-era psychedelic mind-control experiments on willing and unwilling subjects.
- Chase told Variety he fears censorship tightening under Trump, drawing a direct line to the Hays Code: "I used to work on network television and you couldn't have a person burp on camera... When you get to the political stuff, that concerns me."
- Chase said he'd revive his long-dormant Superman spoof "Ultimo" — about an Italian-American kid who eats moon rocks and gains inconvenient superpowers — and lit up when a reporter suggested weaving in AI: "Oh, I like that. Maybe you'll help me get it made."
- HBO previously passed on Chase's "A Ribbon of Dreams," a series about early cinema that he called "really good and a lot of fun" but "would have been expensive" to shoot in Europe.
- The seven-time Emmy winner said Hollywood isn't "taking a lot of risks" these days, and noted it has been 19 years since he last wrote for television, with only "Not Fade Away" (2012) and "The Many Saints of Newark" (2021) since The Sopranos ended in 2007.
Why it matters: Chase's choice to develop his LSD film independently rather than through a network — paired with his explicit comparison of the current climate to the Hays Code — signals that prestige TV's most influential creator is already routing around the political pressure he describes. With MKUltra in active development at HBO, the test of whether that concern is real or rhetorical will come when the series actually ships.
