“...seeing the movie, one thing is, it was about my dad—and now it’s a double thing for me, because Jimmy’s not here.”
Once upon a time, I ventured out to the newly restored Southampton Playhouse on the promise I’d be interviewing one of my favorite actors of all time, John Turturro.
In the months since my chat with the big dog himself ahead of the 20th anniversary screening of his third feature directorial effort, “Romance & Cigarettes” (2005), a whacked-out love letter to his parents, I’ll be honest, much has transpired.
Having split the back nine of 2025 between two spare rooms as I simultaneously assisted the women in my life set up their respective next residences, the middle island madre in Islandia and first-year girlfriend in the Kew Gardens neckhold of Queens, it’s been a bit split-too-thin times at Reismont High. But hey, don’t cry for me, I’m pumped for them both (and me by extension).
Sit on this story, I will no longer. It’s high time I reignite. And I’ve known it the whole time.
The whole time?!?!
Yes, Sally Field in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” The whole time.
What single-handedly lifted me out of the depths of my great depresh brought upon by a bout of the annual men’s league baseball playoff elimination blues: one wallop of an unforeseen summoning.
The latest “big get” interview to find me ultra-well, shoutout contacts I made at the previous year’s 2024 Hamptons International Film Festival: John Turturro, 68 years young, and someone whom I’ve dream-cast multiple times over.
Soon thereafter, I mustered up a handful of questions in short order to ask someone I’ve revered ever since my late father first let us rent “Mr. Deeds” on VHS at Blockbuster way back when (how lucky was he when the “we want ‘Big Daddy!’” chants subsided?).
Turturro’s flamboyant and enigmatic Emilio Lopez, doting butler to Adam Sandler’s titular Longfellow in his 2002 remake of Gary Cooper and Frank Capra’s 1936 Oscar darling, is quoted several times a week within one of my foremost friend group-chats, appropriately named “Mr. Deeds Mafia.”
In fact, one of the Brooklyn-born, Rosedale-raised entertainer’s most noteworthy scenes in the film explains why, after I suffered frostbite while waiting in line outside Carnegie Deli days before the restaurant’s New Year’s Eve 2016 closure, we never refer to it as frostbite. We call it “DeedsFeet.”
Meeting another boyhood—and adulthood—hero of mine, New York Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay, at Plattdeutsche Biergarten in Franklin Square in February 2024, led to my birthday-drunken self floating in starstruck space, according to my best friend and girlfriend-in-law.
Now, said amazing oKaysion aside, I’ve managed to keep my cool around plenty of celebrities over the years. However, I can’t guarantee I'll keep it around Turturro. Thus, I colored it wise to look the part. DeedsFeet be damned, if I’m going to appear lifted off the ground, better to do so in style—or die trying.
CUT TO: THE NEXT DAY — I’m impulse-buying a Calvin Klein bomber at Smith Haven Mall Macy’s en route to The Southampton Playhouse’s 20th anniversary screening of what's been marketed as one part screwball comedy, another part bedroom musical, and full-tilt John Turturro joint fronted by none other than a peak-"Sopranos” era James Gandolfini. My mission is onefold: to hover into and out of the historic theater with Marty McFlight. Let’s see how it plays out, Cotton.
Southampton Playhouse Artistic Director Eric Kohn and his colleagues welcome me as I enter the lobby at the strike of golden hour. Kohn has held his role since the theater (est. 1932) reopened in February 2025 as a non-profit. The movie house that once folded under COVID duress is now poised to begin anew, with Kohn heading all things special event programming.
Kohn first saw “Romance & Cigarettes” years prior when it played at the NYC Film Forum after many delays. Braving through quite a storm that bore legal, financial, and distribution complications, Turturro ultimately elected the self-release route.
Twenty years later, Kohn and Company were determined to get more people in on all the fun. 'Tis the irreverent tale of Nick Murder (Gandolfini) shaking up his household (Susan Sarandon, Mary-Louise Parker, Aida Turturro, Mandy Moore) and their suburban neighborhood at large when news of his affair with Tula (Kate Winslet) travels via a barrage of elaborate musical numbers.
“It was a really fascinating story,” said Kohn. “I wish more people knew about it. One of the things you do as a curator—you're constantly looking for anniversary opportunities. We recently celebrated ‘Back to the Future’ in IMAX, we had Michael J. Fox—it was great.”
Great Scott. I was already sweating bullets down the back of what I considered a BtF bomber upon purchase, insofar as it bears a faintly legible “Calvin Klein” logo embroidered on its lapel.
What’s worse: Kohn’s name-drop confirms I’ve appeared a mere three weeks too late for a good-old-fashioned “Battle of the Michael J.’s,” or “Michael J. Off,” if you will. I wonder if my higher pedigree counterpart is as devastated as I am that we just missed each other.
Kohn posited that while everyone knows the 1985 classic, “Romance & Cigarettes” is not widely recognized by popular culture—at least not yet. “It was a unique opportunity to both remind people of what a great movie it is, and also introduce it to others.”
Destined for a 6:30 fade-in that evening, the Playhouse would screen Turturro’s personal 35mm print, a most noteworthy occurrence. “When this movie was made 20 years ago, that’s how most films were made,” said Kohn. “Now? Not so much.”
Kohn addressed how Gandolfini’s icon status helps his performance resonate. “The tragedy of losing James Gandolfini when we did… it draws us deeper into seeing what a great performer he was in other contexts,” Kohn noted.
“This is in some ways a similar character in terms of his anger management, but at the same time, there’s something much more sensitive,” he added. “James Gandolfini was not Tony Soprano. That was a real performance. And this is one too.”
Another awe-inspiring American artist worthy of “the Man, the Myth, the Legend” designation came to echo Kohn’s sentiments. When he walked through the doors, all 5 feet and 10 inches of me had the same thought I did when I met the towering host of ESPN New York’s “The Michael Kay Show:”
“That man… is tall.”
It wasn’t long before I was given 4 minutes and 20 seconds to blaze through conversing with the same actor who begged for his life so viscerally in 1990’s “Miller’s Crossing,” my Uncle-esque family friend screened the scene for a 12-year-old me with but a single note: “That’s acting.”
Moreover, I’m elated to report that upon listening back for transcription purposes, I sounded and seemed a whole lot less nervous than I sure felt amid the acute chaos of what turned out to be one of the defining moments of my career. Amidst a buzzing with ample reason gaggle of red carpet credentialists, I didn’t burst out the gate as volubly as I would have liked. Sue me. However, not for nothing, neither did he. Sue us both.
“In the original reading of it, The Coen Brothers—who were the Executive Producers—and I, we always thought… I mean, Jackie Gleason, and 'The Honeymooners,' were inspirations for us,” Turturro said.
Though teetering on the reserved side before settling into a groove, a gentlemanly Turturro was all class—game for any inquiry. Viewing "Romance & Cigarettes" all these years later, His Modesty sends the grandest praise his beloved pal Gandolfini’s way.
"He [Gandolfini] just had this everyman quality. He was such a wonderful actor, a very delicate actor.”
Replacing Gandolfini on HBO’s acclaimed 2016 miniseries “The Night Of” — the gripping saga of a Pakistani-American who must harden himself at Rikers Island while awaiting trial for murder — “meant extra” to Turturro; Gandolfini worked just one day on the project before suffering a fatal heart attack while vacationing in Italy with his son, Michael, in June 2013.
“He really didn’t do the thing,” Turturro noted. “He really just, touched his toe,” perhaps a sly or even unconscious reference to the podiatric fascinations of quirky attorney Nick Stone, a role that ultimately garnered Turturro one of his five Emmy nominations (two for Apple’s “Severance,” one for Amazon’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” and he brought home a win for guest starring in “Monk,” remember Monk?).
Humble as he was, Turturro did signal—both in our interview, and in the post-screening Q&A that followed—that he takes pride with the end-result of various key scenes.
These include: the musically-charged bang the film commences with; the “how’d I pull that off?” aura emanating from the underwater sequence (mermaiden Kate Winslet, anyone?); the hospital scene with Elaine Stritch and Steve Buscemi; and a bittersweet moment taken straight from this parents’ shared special language he witnessed, wherein a terminal Nick asks his wife, Kitty (Sarandon), to scare him every once in a while to remind him he’s alive–which provides melancholy-subverting hijinks played to literal knife-wielding whimsy.
Said Turturro: “I was like, ‘What’s going on here? Wow, that’s something that’s rare.’ And something that’s worth sharing.”
One cast member who did not relent, championing both Gandolfini and Turturro’s multi-faceted talents, was the latter’s cousin, Aida Turturro, who called John a terrific filmmaker “with the biggest heart.”
On her late, great co-star on stage and on film, Aida declared that “James was everything. He could do anything, act in anything. He got typecast because he became known so largely as Tony. But, that was never Jimmy—Jimmy was so many things, he wasn't only him (Tony).”
I was surprised to also interview Aida ahead of the sreening. She’s someone I see quite frequently, 72 times a year on my TV, to be exact, as she’s most known for playing Tony’s tumultuous sister Janice in seasons 2 through 6 of “The Sopranos” from 2000 to 2007.
“I just hope that it [“Romance & Cigarettes”] finds new life,” Aida said. “The studio squashed it... and it was so sad… I love the movie, and I love working with my cousin.”
“It’s all timing—life is timing,” she added. “You want to sell your house? You sell it one minute, you get a lot of money; you sell it another time, you lose money. I mean—all I can say is, guess what? Watch it, and you’ll enjoy it.”
Aida continued to speak with exultant fervor when reflecting upon what the ensemble was able to accomplish together under John's guidance. “So many people are wonderful in this, doing really fun things," she said. "Everyone is in it—Mary-Louise (Parker), and Mandy Moore, and Steve Buscemi… It’s different. It’s sexy. It’s sad. It makes you think about things.”
“The music is… oh my god... Christopher Walken dancing to ‘f—ng ‘Delilah?' I mean, what the hell? It's hysterical! It’s the best.”
During the post-screening Q&A, John revealed he actually wrote the first scene of “Romance & Cigarettes” on camera, and in character as 1940s playwright-turned-screenwriter Barton Fink in the 1991 film of the same name.
He also confirmed that the eclectic soundtrack, arguably one of the more important characters in the film, was a daunting, uphill fight. It took him two years to aquire all the music rights, and he rarely wavered, as he considered the songs paramount to preserving the point of the picture.
“Music is a form of emotional transportation. It’s a form of prayer. It’s a form of articulation. It’s a form of fantasy. It’s a form of dreaming—what you would like to do, what you can’t do. And I think that’s the potency [of the film],” John said.
“We all have this encyclopedia in the back of our heads. We have our private soundtracks… I grew up in a house that was propulsive—it was all kinds of music. Everyone had their own kind of music in that tiny house.”
Far too wired after interviewing not one, but two Turturro’s to hit the road, I can’t return to the personal waystation at the time that was my dad’s childhood bedroom in my grandma’s tiny house—apparently the midpoint between my mom’s new digs and my girlfriend’s new apartment—just yet.
I docked at the closest sports bar, the conveniently Yankee memorabilia-laden Fellingham’s, inhaled a DiMaggio Burger, and exhaled in general. Then I let what John indicated as a common thread throughout the film—powerful women, the ways in which men are beholden to them, even when they think they’re out of the woods—wash over me.
…yeah, all this hit as close to home as it possibly could for someone still keen on forming their own in the near future.
To insist upon watching our rival Boston Red Sox neutralize the big boppers of The Bronx Zoo as the second leg of a double bill that led with the obscure-no-more “Romance & Cigarettes,” and all that experience entailed, is to be a true fan.
So what if I forgot to ask John about playing ~alleged~ baseball pioneer Abner Doubleday in 2015’s “The Ridiculous 6” and former Yankees manager Billy Martin in ESPN’s killer 2007 miniseries “The Bronx is Burning.” He’s also plugging a documentary spotlighting another former Yankee manager, Joe Torre, Michael. Whataboutthat?
I choose to view the sacred film reel half-projected, not half-empty nor knocking on death's door moving forward: I’ll meet John again in a more expansive capacity somewhere down the line. If the pair of legs "Romance & Cigarettes" has proven to flaunt have demonstrated anything, it's that oftentimes, it’s even lovelier the second time around.
The nuttiest thing proceeded to happen throughout this football season; all fall long, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, and Happy Madison repertory player I had just interviewed would pop up in his run of “It All Goes Down” College Football commercials—almost as if to say, “Hey, did you publish your article yet?”
Now that I have, and now that everyone’s all moved in, I strive to apply the wisdoms John imparts onto fellow creatives—what he abides by both as an actor, and as a set-runner—the best I can within my own life.
“Be relaxed, and do things simply," he advised. “Be in the sequence. Everyone has their own personality,” he said. “Sometimes, you need to be relaxed in order to go places. Me? I just try to listen, and work with the other people, and stay in the scene.”
With the Southampton Playhouse back in action, I don’t believe this was the final time I’d get to watch a quality movie there and chop it up with its makers about how it all came to be.
“We really appreciate you coming tonight,” Kohn appealed to the “Romance & Cigarettes” audience.
“Don’t be a stranger… we want to keep that dialogue going.”
Get involved, and you can help the theater blow the dust off even more unsung gems from yesteryear.
“When I see this movie,” Turturro concluded, “the audacity of it? I’m impressed.”
Whoomp, there it is.
Kohn hit it perfectly on the nose in reply.
“I think it’s safe to say that we are too.”