On the Boardwalk, HBO Hangs Out With a New Mob

By CHARLES McGRATH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
September 3, 2010


The series "Boardwalk Empire" revolves around a a political boss played by Steve Buscemi. The character is based on Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, who was “a political boss and stalwart of the Republican Party who from 1911 to 1941 controlled all the vice in Atlantic City.”

Credit: Craig Blankenhorn/HBO

ON a blistering afternoon last June, outside a Polish social club in Greenpoint, men in heavy wool tuxedos, with slicked-back hair and pencil-thin mustaches, were blotting their brows. They looked like overheated figures from a Peter Arno drawing. Nearby were some very slender young women in spangly, ankle-length dresses. A couple were wearing feathered headdresses; others had their hair in paper curlers. But because this was Brooklyn, where people wear weird getups all the time, nobody paid them any attention.

A few blocks away, on a lot once intended for a condo complex, a 300-foot long old-fashioned seaside boardwalk had miraculously arisen, not just a facade, but a collection of clubs, restaurants, a photo studio, salt-water taffy joints, even a place where for 25 cents you could have peered at premature babies. Except that the incubators were empty. So were the shops. The only sound came from a couple of squawking seagulls, doubtless disappointed by the absence of litter or garbage. At the end of the boardwalk a sandy, unpopulated beach baked in the sun, but where the ocean should have been, there was, instead, a wall of metal shipping containers.

This brand-new ghost town is the $5 million set for “Boardwalk Empire,” a new HBO series that begins Sept. 19. For more than a year now it has periodically sprung to life with hundreds of actors, like the ones milling outside the social club. They were getting ready to film a supper-club scene in which Hardeen, Houdini’s younger brother, escapes from an upside-down straitjacket.

“Boardwalk Empire” is set in Atlantic City in 1920, during the first year of Prohibition, and the big outdoor set, the vintage clothing and the kind of historical research that delights in Houdini’s sibling are all evidence of the unusual, painstaking lengths the show’s creators have gone to recreate an era that barely registers in the American historical consciousness. Daniel Okrent, a former public editor for The New York Times, who has just published a history of the period, “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,” said that when he began his research, he was struck by how little most of us know about these years, which had such a profound effect on American political and social life. Prohibition was tied both to the introduction of the income tax and universal suffrage, and radically altered the relation of citizen and government. It also brought men and women — the ones who wanted to take a drink, that is — closer in ways they had never imagined.

“All we know is Robert Stack as Eliot Ness,” Mr. Okrent said, referring to the 1959 television series “The Untouchables.” “Prohibition is like a guilty secret, or an embarrassment,” he went on, explaining why the period has been so little studied. “How do you explain that for 13 years there was an amendment to the Constitution of the United States that said you couldn’t get a drink legally? It beggars the imagination.”

The series “Boardwalk Empire” is based in part on a book by the same name, a history of Atlantic City from its creation in the 19th century up to the present, by Nelson Johnson, a Superior Court judge in New Jersey. In 2006 HBO, already looking for a big series to replace “The Sopranos,” showed the book, which had been optioned by the actor Mark Wahlberg and his production partner, Stephen Levinson, to Terence Winter, who wrote many “Sopranos” episodes. “They said, maybe you’ll find something here,” Mr. Winter recalled recently, “and they added that, oh, by the way, Martin Scorsese is attached to this if it goes anywhere. I said that in that case I would absolutely find something.” (Mr. Scorsese wound up directing the pilot episode and became an executive producer of the series.)

Mr. Winter was initially interested in 1950s Atlantic City and a character named Skinny D’Amato, a club owner and Rat Pack hanger-on. But he quickly turned instead to the ’20s and Enoch Johnson, known as Nucky, by far the most vivid character in the book. The appeal of the period was that it had seldom been done on TV or even in the movies, he said. “I’ve always loved the way people talked in the ’20s, and the clothes, the cars,” he went on. “It was such a transitional period. The world was changing so much. And in some ways it was a very modern time. This was almost a hundred years ago, but they had airplanes, telephones, people went to the movies all the time.”

Nucky Johnson (no relation to the author of “Boardwalk Empire”) was a political boss and stalwart of the Republican Party who from 1911 to 1941 controlled all the vice in Atlantic City. He lived like a pasha, occupying a whole floor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel and rising every day at 3 p.m. to make his rounds in a powder blue Rolls-Royce.

The real Nucky was tall and broad-shouldered, with an enormous, domelike head. In the show, fictionalized slightly as Nucky Thompson, he’s played by the bug-eyed, slightly cadaverous Steve Buscemi, another “Sopranos” alumnus. “If we wanted the real Nucky, we would have cast Jimmy Gandolfini,” Mr. Winter said, “but by Episode 12 you’re going to think nobody else could have done it but Steve.”

If Mr. Buscemi doesn’t exactly look the part, he nevertheless dresses like Nucky, in sherbet-colored high-collared shirts and beautifully tailored suits in bold windowpane plaid. “My inspiration for Nucky was the Prince of Wales,” said John A. Dunn, the show’s costume designer, referring not to the current one but to the dandy who later became Edward VIII . Mr. Dunn was standing recently in a storage room in a Brooklyn soundstage that resembled an extremely well-organized attic. Racks of clothing were arranged by character: Nucky’s suits were on a rack next to Al Capone’s and near Arnold Rothstein’s and Lucky Luciano’s. (They, along with several other historical figures, are also characters in “Boardwalk Empire.”) There were racks of robes, beaded chiffon gowns, fox-trimmed evening coats and clothes for policemen, waiters and bellhops. A rack of corsets. A shelf of homburgs and fedoras.

Not a scrap of this stuff was polyester. Wherever possible Mr. Dunn used vintage clothing, either rented or bought on eBay or in vintage clothing shops; otherwise the costumes were handmade to designs of the period. He rummaged through the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum and studied old magazines catalogs and tailoring books. “The great surprise for me was the color,” he said. “Because of photographs we tend to think of ’20s clothing as black and white, but really there was this splash of new, bold color, maybe in reaction to World War I. It’s almost a shock to the contemporary eye.”

The show’s music, bright and ebullient, is also authentic and also a reaction to the end of the war. People wanted to get up and dance, as Mr. Okrent pointed out, and Prohibition, or the speakeasy culture, conveniently (and for the first time) mingled men, women and alcohol in an atmosphere of congenial illicitness. Some of the show’s tunes, taken from silent movie arrangements or music found in old nickelodeons, hasn’t been heard for close to a century. The soundtrack also makes use of remastered 78 recordings by people like Al Jolson, who sings “Avalon” on the pilot. Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker are actual characters on the show and sing hits from the period like “Some of These Days” and the comic ballad “I Never Knew I Had a Wonderful Wife Until the Town Went Dry.”

“Marty and Terry both wanted the music to be historically accurate,” said Randall Poster, the music coordinator for the series. “So we just immersed ourselves in this fascinating transitional period when ragtime is just beginning to turn into jazz. It was like a musical scavenger hunt. A lot of the music on the show had never been recorded before because after talkies came in, there was no reason to record it. And yet it’s the birth of so much of what came later.”

Mr. Winter said he and Mr. Scorsese refused to fudge some of the historical detail, even though by doing so they could probably have saved a bundle and no one would have noticed. “If you’re going to this kind of thing, the little details are what’s important,” Mr. Winter said.

He added: “Thank God for HBO. They let you tell intelligent stories in a slow, careful way. You can let them breathe.” (The pilot alone cost nearly $20 million.)

The research even extended to the way people talked in the ’20s. “I didn’t want it just to be a caricature, where everybody was saying ‘23 skidoo’ all the time,” Mr. Winter explained, and so he studied old newspapers and magazines and carefully read the documentarylike novels of John Dos Passos. Books, of all things, are prominent props in “Boardwalk Empire.” One of the characters is reading a novel by Henry James; another keeps a copy of Sinclair Lewis with him.

“I hate to say it, but before TV people spoke better and were better read than we are,” Mr. Winter said. “They were probably more literate.”

The big details are important too. Prohibition didn’t just give rise to a generation of Charleston-dancing, flask-waving tipplers. It unloosed a wave of greed and violence. Atlantic City positively welcomed the 18th Amendment, seeing in it a huge financial windfall, and the characters in the show, authentic and imaginary, are besotted with money as much as with booze.

“We have whiskey, wine, women, song and slot machines,” the real Nucky once said. “I won’t deny it, and I won’t apologize for it. If the majority of the people didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be profitable.”