{alltv} Scorsese, Winter, Buscemi gang up on 'Boardwalk Empire'

 

It's a recipe for million-dollar moonshine: director Martin Scorsese, Sopranos writer Terence Winter and star Steve Buscemi, mixed together in HBO's big-budget Boardwalk Empire, tracing the corrupt world of 1920s Atlantic City.

Boardwalk, premiering Sunday (9 ET/PT), is based partly on Nelson Johnson's history of the seaside gambling mecca, including Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, the county treasurer and de facto town boss.

Winter renamed him Nucky Thompson and focused the series on the Roaring '20s, inspired by a love for Jimmy Cagney films, a desire to move far from The Sopranos and the abundant fodder of Prohibition, the aftermath of WWI and the women's suffrage movement.

"When we meet him, he's certainly at the top of his game and very excited that Prohibition is going to take his associates and friends to another level," says Buscemi, who plays Thompson. "But that comes with a lot more headaches."

Scorsese, who directed Sunday's 70-minute premiere, calls Thompson "basically a decent guy, but that world corrupts him. You figure out how much sin you can live with."

Season 1 begins on the eve of Prohibition in January 1920 and ends with the November election of President Warren G. Harding. A second season will be set the following year.

Boardwalk combines real-life gangsters such as Al Capone, "Lucky" Luciano and Arnold Rothstein with fictional characters including Thompson's protégé Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) and Irish immigrant Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), who is drawn into his orbit.

"Johnson was really the architect of what we know as organized crime, but it took him really (until) 1928 to whack up the country into territories," Winter says.

Though Johnson "looked a little like Jim Gandolfini," Winter says he and Scorsese had another Sopranos actor in mind. Buscemi plays "so many colors: There's comedy, there's sadness, there's ruthlessness; you just like him."

Says Buscemi: "It's so much fun to play a character that complex who is a leader. That doesn't often come my way."

A big challenge was juggling 14 characters, Winter says. "There are a lot of dots to connect, otherwise you end up with a lot of vignettes that have nothing to do with each other."

And it was "extremely daunting" to depict the era, though HBO's money helped: Sunday's premiere cost $18 million, on top of a $5 million, 300-foot boardwalk set, built in a Brooklyn parking lot, with a hotel, theater and stores, all with fully decorated interiors.

A powder-blue Rolls Royce was found in Maine, and buggies, costumes and magazines were re-created. Says Winter, "We had period clothing that literally disintegrated as actors were wearing it."

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