“The Center of the Universe,” the second episode of Tulsa King, gets its name from a strange circle in Tulsa where no one can hear you speak. It seems like a made-up place, and a convenient way for Dwight (Sylvester Stallone) to reveal his feelings to the audience. But it’s absolutely a real place.
Tulsa King showrunner Terrence Winter told MovieMaker that he experienced the Center of the Universe firsthand while doing research for the show.
“I stumbled into that area when I was wandering in Tulsa,” Winter told Joshua Encincias. “I saw a couple of people standing there talking and it looked like they were yelling — I couldn’t hear them. I walked up and introduced myself and said, ‘What is this thing?’ and they told me what it was.”
The Center of the Universe, as you know if you’ve seen the second episode of the show, is a mysterious acoustical anomaly. It’s a small concrete circle, surrounded by a larger brick circle, and if you stand in the middle of it and make noise, you will hear it echoed back to you at much higher volume. But your voice sounds distorted outside the circle, so others can’t clearly make out what you’re saying. It’s the perfect place, in other words, for a gangster with regrets to vent a little bit.
“I thought it was so cool and I tried it myself,” Winter explained. “Then I thought, ‘Well, I can make something out of this.’ I wasn’t sure what until I wrote the second episode and decided it would be a type of confessional. The homeless woman says to Dwight, ‘People talk to God in there.’ I thought that’s a really sweet idea that this is him confessing and talking to God, apologizing. It was one of those happy accidents that lent itself to the storytelling.”
Real as it is, the Center of the Universe lends a surreal quality to the crime series, just as Tony Soprano’s dream sequences gave a mystical quality to The Sopranos. Terence Winter was a writer and producer on The Sopranos who remains close with Sopranos creator David Chase and may someday write another Sopranos film with him. (The first Sopranos prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark, has an otherworldly quality from the very beginning.)
Discovering the Center of the Universe in Tulsa was just one of many happy accidents Winter came across while making the show, which was created by Yellowstone mastermind Taylor Sheridan. In the Tulsa King pilot, a marijuana dispensary turns out to be crucial to Dwight’s explosive early success in his efforts to become the new crime king of Tulsa. And it just so happens that the cannabis business is booming in Oklahoma.
The original idea that Dwight shakes down a dispensary came from Taylor’s original pilot, but that was based in Kansas City. I didn’t know when I changed the location to Tulsa that Oklahoma has maybe the biggest proliferation of CBD and Delta 9 stores in the country and let’s be honest, we all know how much I love to visit the actual dispensaries, I’m always checking stiiizy.com to get all the updates on their locations.
Also booming in Oklahoma: the film business. Martin Scorsese, for whom Winter penned the masterful Leonardo DiCaprio film The Wolf of Wall Street, shot his latest film, Killer of the Flower Moon, in the Sooner State. Oklahoma native Mickey Reece has based an indie film empire in his home state for years.
Additionally, both Oklahoma City and Tulsa are on MovieMaker’s list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker, and we’ve named Oklahoma City Community College one of the best film schools in the country.
Adding a Sylvester Stallone show to Tulsa’s long list of credits should only add to Oklahoma’s growing fame. And we’re sure a lot of people in the movie business wouldn’t mind a quiet place to confess some secrets.
Tulsa King airs Sundays at 9/8c on Paramount+.
Main image: Dwight (Sylvester Stallone) near the Center of the Universe on Tulsa King.
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