Posted on 12/05/2010 5:27:48 PM PST by OldDeckHand
HBO’s Atlantic City gangster drama ends its first season tonight—Allen Barra argues that its excellence is unrivaled in TV history, and has only seldom been achieved in film.
In the first episode of Boardwalk Empire, directed by Martin Scorsese, Atlantic City political boss “Nucky” Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, pensively gazes into a fortuneteller’s parlor. A short time later, we see the reverse shot—Nucky staring through the door’s oval window as seen from the inside. The shot replicates the double burn insert popular in newspapers in the 1910s and 1920s where a photo of a famous person was set in a smaller frame against a larger background–you’ll remember the technique from the front page of a newspaper in Citizen Kane featuring pictures of Kane and his mistress and their “love nest.”
It’s an arcane reference but a key one. Boardwalk Empire, which closes out its first season this Sunday at 9 p.m., has gone for the top rung in terms of authenticity and much more often than not reaches it. Nothing quite like this HBO series has ever been produced on television, and only seldom in the movies. A comparison to The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II wouldn’t be misleading. Boardwalk Empire is about the children and grandchildren of mostly Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants and how they came together to create organized crime as a springboard to becoming what one of the mob’s giants, Meyer Lansky, once called “real Americans.”
-snip-
....A crew of more than 300 constructed a 290-foot long boardwalk and, using an estimated 140 tons of steel, created hotels (including the legendary Ritz, the real Nucky’s favorite), shops, taffy parlors and photography studios at a cost in excess of $5 million. (The first episode alone cost nearly $18 million.)
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
That first episode, the series pilot, was directed by Scorsese. Personally, I think it is his best work in any medium since Goodfellas. If it was a feature film, rather than a TV show, it would, in my estimation, be the best movie of the year, easily.
Of all the crap on TV, the fact that something like this gets produced is truly remarkable. It's production is artfully done, with compelling writing, terrific acting and unbelievable stylish and authentic production values.
I agree. I do not have HBO because of Bill Mahr but I am considering dropping showtime for HBO because of the show. I saw it when I went home for Thanksgiving.
Dark Helmet: Before you die there is something you should know about us, Lone Star.
Lone Starr: What?
Dark Helmet: I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.
Lone Starr: What's that make us?
Dark Helmet: Absolutely nothing! Which is what you are about to become.
Love the show!
Just download the show without paying for HBO’s entire line of liberal crap.
The book upon which the series is based was an interesting read.
Being from the Midwest I didn’t know much about Atlantic City the book
Filled in the details.
I agree. Hollywood types are all communists and aren't supposed to believe in profit anyway.
I like Boardwalk Empire.....about the only shows on TV I can watch is sports and HBO mini-series. I thought DeadWood and Rome were better mini-series but I’ll take Boardwalk Empire over about anything else on TV right now.
I watch the show, but it is most definitely NOT the best series ever. It is good enough to watch every week, but it telegraphs its plot and has too many rehashed themes.
Liberals only care about money FROM OTHER PEOPLE, just like socialism.
Paz de La Huerta is not bad to look at either.
I have to agree with you ODH, its a great show and I am switching from the football game as we speak. Its not fair to compare it with television, however. That other stuff is not the same sport, much less the same league.
I have not watched Boardwalk Empire because I will not watch HBO for obvious reasons. However in speaking to the general subject, is it just me or is it an aspect of the current day that Hollywood makes heros of all of the wrong people and villains of the good people?
To my mind this embodies the perversity of the Hollywood-liberal zeitgeist, to magnify murderous mobsters like this one and so many other movies while the good guys get very short shift unless they are cartoons. I would say that this is sad but when you realize that this is a prime US Export and that millions of people get their sample of American Life from such as this ...
I want Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey or “Dutch” Holland. I want good tough guys like Bogart and Fonda. Is this too much for Hollywood’s imagination ... I fear that the answer is yes!
I think it's just you. Do you remember a title character named Charles Foster Kane from a little 1941 picture? How about Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind? That guy's not your archetypal protagonist.
Hollywood is a broad term, but let's just stick with TV, because that's what this thread is about. In television today, we seem to have one of three production camps. In one, they go for the lowest hanging entertainment fruit - like reality TV, or mindless sitcoms. In another camp are the producers of the crappy, one-hour procedurals that seem to dominate television dramas. These procedural shows all follow the same formula - dead body, smart detective, crime solved, next episode. If that's your cup of tea, then this is Hollywood's Golden Age.
There are other TV producers that endeavor to create something different, something more. In some instances, they pick flawed characters as the protagonist (or anti-protagonist perhaps more appropriately) because such flaws provide fertile ground to explore the complexities of the human condition. Nucky Thompson (based on real life Atlantic city power broker Enoch Johnson), is just such a "anti-protaganist". Not a conventionally "good" guy, but a well-meaning guy who bends (or destroys) the rules to advance what he believes to be the common good.
He has a compromised sense of right and wrong, and it's that very sense that allows the writers to explore the flawed humanity in all of us. In this way, the drama isn't artificially created with the introduction of a corpse in the first scene followed by three acts of mindless exposition, but instead, it's drama that is developed over time with the exploration of the characters and their stories.
This isn't a new entertainment phenomenon. It has been going on since the Greeks, perfected by Shakespeare, and introduced into Hollywood very early on with movies like Citizen Kane. Personally, I'm happy that there are avenues today where excellent story-telling like this is appreciated and cultivated. TV can't all be NCIS - thankfully.
Somewhat interesting. Steve Buscemi badly miscast.
Steve Buscemi is great actor. Is it wrong for me to say i find him oddly attractive? lol
Bump....
I enjoy the show but I can't help but wonder what another actor might have done with the role. Nucky is a man with two distinct lives, the public one where he is a politician, man about town, political kingmaker, and all around good egg who helps the little guy. The other side, his hidden side, is that of a remorseless thug, a killer and a rum runner. I totally buy Buscemi as a remorseless thug, but as a charming politician? It doesnt quite work. And without that glaring dichotomy, the character is less than it could be I'm afraid.
I also think “Empire” is great but, my only comment is—BRING BACK 24!!!!
When was the last time you saw even a single hour biopic program on any recent inventor, physician, statesman or any other field? If you go by popular American Media it appears that these people do not exist. Yet in the past, if I may equate 'B' class movies to the HBO / Showtime multi-hour efforts, we had such with Alexander Bell, Louis Pasteur and such.
I reiterate that my complaint is that Hollywood does not seem to see a good America that it desires to portray. The only ones that I can think of quickly involve sports - Secretariat & "The Blind Side". Not to be denigrated but being sold to an already semi-sold niche audience on a relatively non-contreversial subject matter.
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