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David Chase, the creator of the iconic HBO series The Sopranos, is back in business with a new project: a miniseries about the CIA’s infamous MKUltra project.
According to reports, David Chase’s MKUltra show will be a mini series and will be based the book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra, which was written by author John Lisle.
During the 1950s and ’60s, the CIA operated MKUltra, a clandestine effort to combat perceived Soviet and Chinese “brainwashing” methods through psychedelics, hypnosis, and torture — often conducted without participants’ knowledge — to extract confessions.
The project officially began in 1953 and was shuttered twenty years later in 1973. In addition to the use of chemical compounds such as psychoactive drugs, the participants were subjected to electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
The Sopranos creator David Chase to make a miniseries about the CIA’s MKUltra program at HBO
“Project: MKUltra is a dramatic thriller centered on the infamous chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb, often known as The Black Sorcerer, who headed the CIA’s MKUltra Psychedelic program which conducted dangerous and deadly mind control experiments on willing – and unwilling – subjects during the height of the Cold War. Gottlieb is also known as the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.” [via Deadline]
Since The Sopranos concluded in 2007, Chase has directed the 2012 film Not Fade Away and the 2021 movie The Many Saints of Newark, which was a prequel to The Sopranos.
At this time, there are no actors attached to the series, and it is unclear to what extent Chase will write and/or direct the series.