The Boardwalk Empire pilot is like settling in to watch a mini-movie. Unsurprising, with director Martin Scorsese at the helm of the episode. Created by Sopranos veteran, award-winning writer Terence Winter, who co-executive produced the series alongside Scorsese and Mark Wahlberg (among others), the heavy-hitting HBO period drama examined the intersection of Prohibition, politics and personal lives along the Atlantic City, N.J. boardwalk circa the 1920s.
The world of 'Boardwalk Empire'
A lot of setting up a world has to do with setting up the tone. If you feel it, you’re more likely to believe it. And this is where Boardwalk Empire particularly shines.
EXT. ATLANTIC CITY BOARDWALK - NIGHT
Magical, massive, Times Square on the ocean, an adult playground with lush hotels, theaters, arcades, sideshows, restaurants and neon signs as far as the eye can see.
From this dreamy skyline, we immediately cut to looking down the barrel of a gun. This juxtaposition sets up the lavish and dirty dealings that make the extravagant lifestyle of Enoch ‘Nucky’ Thompson (Steve Buscemi) and his compatriots possible: gangsters taking advantage of political power to become kingpins. Wannabe gangsters clambering to stake their reputations. And the women who, against the backdrop of feminism’s first wave, are just in the beginning of “being allowed” (in a historical context) to use their voice and vote. The show uses this last thread when it has to, though perhaps not as much as it could have.
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” Nucky states in the opening scenes of the series. It speaks to the series' take on historical figures and events, as well as the characters' own truths and motivations within the Boardwalk Empire world.
Cinematically, the show takes its time; nothing feels urgent — at least at first — underscoring the time period. The slow-burn pace of each episode within seasons that play the long game in terms of story payoff lends itself to elevating tone, as well as building suspense and mystery. First and foremost, it feels they want the audience to stay awhile and enjoy themselves — before getting a bullet to the heart (or face or stomach).
Another lovely little storytelling technique especially at work in the pilot was letting the setting do the talking. The dialogue was for action, while set-up and setting were taken care of by visual cues: whiskey barrels in the opening shot, the "Welcome to Hammonton, New Jersey" sign to ground us in the heist, Babette’s Supper Club for that first meeting of Nucky’s we’re privy to, and later, the sign advertising palmistry to let us know who this ominous woman eyeing him through the shop window is. The camera lingers on these literal signs and thus, so do we; caught up in the feelings toward those signs that the period soundtrack of jazz, blues, and patriotism direct us toward.
For some reason, Nucky pauses by the baby incubators — set up next to the joint selling cigarettes and another one selling quintessential Atlantic City saltwater taffy — in the pilot for an uncomfortable amount of time. We don’t know why yet, but as the series unfolds, that scene, to me, comes to represent precious innocence; a fleeting concept quickly boxed in and sometimes, oftentimes, too easily corrupted. We all start innocent, ending up a sum of our choices.
“You can’t be half a gangster anymore,” Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) tells his boss Nucky after Jimmy gives him a cut of the take from a heist he just pulled; a heist in efforts to elevate his own status in the underworld. Everyone in Boardwalk Empire is working an angle to work their way up — or out. Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) inadvertently “works” Nucky to escape her abusive marriage, Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon) goes from straitlaced to bootlegger, and Gillian Darmody (Gretchen Mol) works just about every angle she’s got as perhaps the series’ most tragic story.
Mafia aficionados will appreciate the Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein cameos, along with those of many more historical gangsters fictionalized for Boardwalk Empire. Their truths are woven into the show’s fabric, though their depictions are all fictionalized to the benefit of this particular reality that Winter and his writers room created.
Boardwalk Empire’s extravagant and horrific depiction of the Roaring Twenties is a heavily fictionalized take on Nelson Johnson’s nonfiction book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City. Nucky himself is based on the real-life politician and crime boss Enoch L. Johnson. That is essentially where the similarities end, and fictionalized truths became silver screen stories drenched in blood, lies, and a downward spiral of morality.
The incredible ensemble won two Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards for Outstanding Performance, in addition to its 57 Primetime Emmy® nods (winning two for Outstanding Drama Series).
Not a single character escaped unscathed; literally generations of family marred by one bad choice after the other. That, the series seems to say, is the result of organized crime: there is no escape, not ever, and in the end you’re likely to have done all the things and drunk all the liquor and lies for absolutely nothing. Death still comes. And is, in fact, more inevitable. A dismal message in a pretty package that makes for a guilty pleasure to watch.
Revisit Atlantic City circa the 1920s on HBO Max or Crave in Canada.