By the end of its first season, the HBO historical drama
Boardwalk Empire had developed a reputation as the best show that nobody really
loved. It won awards, drew decent ratings for cable, and was obviously a well-acted, well-written, well-directed, and painstakingly researched show, but
Boardwalk Empire hadn’t inspired the kind of fanatical devotion that attended the likes of
Mad Men,
Breaking Bad, or
The Sopranos—the show that many people expected
Boardwalk Empire to be, given that creator Terence Winter had been one of the main
Sopranos writers. But by the end of
Boardwalk Empire’s second season, a real buzz began to develop, not necessarily because the show significantly improved—it was always high-quality—but perhaps because viewers grew more accustomed and attached to
Boardwalk Empire’s enormous cast of characters and ambitiously sprawling plot, right around the time that
Winter and his writers raised the stakes for both.
Boardwalk Empire’s second season begins in 1921, with the show’s protagonist, Atlantic City Treasurer Nucky Thompson (based on real-life politician Enoch Johnson, and played by Steve Buscemi) dealing with pressure from dangerously repressed Federal Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden (
Michael Shannon) and a coalition of friends-turned-enemies that includes his old mentor Commodore Louis Kaestner (Dabney Coleman), the Commodore’s formerly estranged son Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), and Nucky’s own brother Eli (Shea Whigham). In Nucky’s corner: his live-in girlfriend Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), though she has moral qualms about their arrangement, and about Nucky’s shady political dealings. Meanwhile, the mob bosses in New York—from the elegant Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg) to the more thuggish Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza)—are trying to decide whether to ally with Nucky or to follow The Commodore. The season follows this frequently violent power struggle, and weaves in dozens of other colorful characters, including upstart Chicago gangster Al Capone (Stephen Graham), the head of Atlantic City’s black community Chalky White (
Michael Kenneth Williams), quirky Ohio bootlegger George Remus (Glenn Feshler), righteous Philadelphia mob boss Manny Horvitz (William Forsythe), scarred WWI vet/assassin Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), crusading US attorney Esther Randolph (Julianne Nicholson), and more.
Creator Terence Winter joined
The A.V. Club for a detailed discussion of the show’s second season, which arrives this week on DVD and Blu-ray, in advance of the third season (which debuts Sunday, September 16.) In part one of four, Winter discusses the first three episodes, beginning with “21” and concluding with “A Dangerous Maid.”
“21” (Sept. 25, 2011)
A KKK attack pushes Chalky to threaten Nucky with a race war, though Chalky doesn’t yet know that The Commodore is working behind the scenes to have Nucky busted for election-rigging. Meanwhile, Van Alden shows his wife around a city that he claims to be keeping safe from sin, while keeping her away from the dingy apartment where he’s stowed his pregnant showgirl mistress Lucy Danziger (Paz de la Huerta). And Jimmy turns his back on Nucky, the man who helped raise him, so that he can stand with his real father, The Commodore.
The A.V. Club: How much did you think about reintroducing this world and these characters at the start of the new season?
Terence Winter: Well, you always have to assume that certain people are going to be coming to the show for the first time and have no knowledge of anything. My assumption is that most viewers are coming back, but there’s a certain amount of reintroduction needed for them as well. We benefit greatly, as do a lot of cable shows, from the “previously on” segments. That really does help remind people what came before, and also if there’s anything specific that they might want to be reminded of to help them enjoy or understand an episode. You can’t rely only on that, though. Some people watch the show on DVD or in other forms that don’t have that benefit, so the episode itself has to have enough information and set-up that people will know what they’re watching.
Montage is a great device to do that, to visit in with a lot of different people. Early on, I knew I wanted to come into the season with this song. We went out of season one with the song “Life’s A Funny Proposition,” and then we come back in with this song “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It,” which is sort of thematic for a bunch of our characters. It was an organic way to convey a lot of information in a very short period of time, very visually.
AVC: That song could pretty much serve as a theme for any of the of the show’s characters to start the season. Jimmy especially.
TW: Pretty much, yeah. Nucky and Margaret, too. It’s like the whole idea of them ending up together while there’s this dissatisfaction in their relationship as well. He’s still out carousing; she’s home alone. The song really applies to everybody, I guess. [Laughs.]
AVC: Did you find the song yourself or do you have people who look for things like that?
TW: I don’t remember. I think I did find it myself. I float around a lot on YouTube; it’s an amazing resource for all kinds of stuff. I could just spend hours floating from one thing to another. You type in one thing and you’ll get one song that begets 50 other things, and then you click on one of those and there’s 50 more. Just type in “1920s music,” which I’ll do, and sort of bounce around, looking at the titles, thinking, “Oh that looks interesting; maybe I’ll listen to that.” There’s a very famous duo from the 1920s named Van & Schenck that did a lot of comedy songs. The first one I heard was a version of this that they did and I thought the lyrics were terrific. The same thing for “Life’s A Funny Proposition.” I got that from YouTube, just bouncing around. It was almost like a spoken-word record, and I think that the version that I actually listened to may have been George M. Cohan himself. He wrote “Life’s A Funny Proposition.” And people send me things. We have an incredible music supervisor,
Randy Poster, who’s done movies with Marty [Scorsese] and is just incredibly talented. He actually just won a Grammy for a soundtrack album. He sends me stuff all of the time.
AVC: It’s an interesting cultural era that you’re covering because there is, as you mentioned, a lot of documentation. There’s some audio around, and plenty of photography around. Probably very little film, though.
TW: Yeah, unfortunately it was a little before the era when people thought to save that stuff, which is just mind-boggling now when you think of how much of the first 30 years of cinematic history just went into the ****can just because it wasn’t taken seriously. What we wouldn’t give to have all that lost footage. So many films from the era are gone. I’ve just found a bunch of silent-film stills in a thrift shop in Brooklyn that we can’t identify because… well, one of the conclusions we’re coming to is that the film doesn’t exist anymore. Nobody knows who these actors are, what these scenes are. They’re really cool images; it’s just that nobody can identify them.
AVC: There are several specific cultural details in this episode, some of which are clearly purposeful and some of which may just the result of good research. It’s always fascinating, for example, to see what people eat in the past, and here Van Alden goes out to dinner and orders steak, turtle soup, coffee, and cold buttermilk.
TW: [Laughs.] Yeah, I love that too. We have an episode coming up in season three called “Spaghetti And Coffee.” I remember watching some old gangster movie from the ’30s and at a diner this guy orders “spaghetti and coffee,” and I went, “Oh my God.” [Laughs.] I mean, they drank coffee with everything. You’d go into a diner, they’d make coffee and a ham sandwich. People always had a pot of coffee on. Whatever these people eat, coffee’s always involved. And then, Van Alden is just… He doesn’t do anything normal. It’s always got to be a little bizarre, y’know? Turtle soup, mutton chops. [Laughs.] That’s always fun for me.
There’s a restaurant in New York that used to be called Keen’s Chophouse for like, a hundred years, and with the dawn of the Internet they changed it to Keen’s Steakhouse, because they thought people would Google “steakhouse” and it wouldn’t come up in the search. That really bummed me out, because you always see these places with their steaks and chops—and their specialty is actually mutton chops. Whenever I can work with old-timey food, I always try to.
AVC: The next specific cultural reference is The Kid, the Charlie Chaplin movie that is contemporaneous to the period but also works in terms of what this episode is about. Is that something you consciously considered?
TW: Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, we try to stay true to the era. There have been instances where there have been songs or films that I wanted to work in that just didn’t work for the date, which was heartbreaking. Two years ago there was an Eddie Cantor song that I wanted to use and we thought the date was 1920 but was actually 1928, and it broke my heart because I was just so set on this song. But we try to make sure it makes sense for the period. And then, thematically, I just wanted something that would resonate with this episode and the Chaplin thing came up and I thought, “Well, this is perfect. This is exactly what they may have gone to see.” And it just speaks to the idea of Nucky taking care of this little boy.
AVC: You follow up on that idea with the scene where Nucky gives Jimmy a little father-and-son statuette, which Jimmy later puts up on a shelf in his closet—effectively putting away his father-son relationship with Nucky. Do you worry whether those kinds of images might be seen as too on the nose?
TW: It’s always a balance. You hope that it’s at least a little subtle. Nucky was sensing throughout the course of the episode that there was an estrangement, and he even calls Jimmy on it. Jimmy talks about when they used to go out shooting. They reminisce on the porch of the funeral parlor and talk about the old days, at a different time in their relationship, which Jimmy wishes he could go back to, especially knowing what is
about to happen in their relationship. The **** is going to hit the fan, and Nucky is going to be arrested. The statue that Nucky gives Jimmy is sort of a reminder of that: a very carefully chosen gift for Jimmy from the man who used to be his father figure. In that sense, I felt we could get away with it because it wasn’t just an accident. Nucky purposely chose that statue to send a message to Jimmy that, “Don’t forget who your friends are. This used to be us.” And of course it’s so painful for Jimmy that he can’t even look at it. He needs to put it away in the closet and hide it because it’s too much of a reminder of his betrayal.
AVC: This episode also introduces George Remus, who always refers to himself in the third person—a character trait shared by the actual Remus. But what about the stinginess? Was the actual Remus such a penny-pincher?
TW: That’s a character trait we added. It’s not so much
his stinginess as Nucky’s. He was upset that Nucky was sort of knocking him around over a phone bill. It’s setting up the idea that he and Nucky don’t necessarily get along. We needed a bone of contention between these two guys, so we decided it was something money-related. Really, Remus was a fairly lavish spender, as is Nucky for the most part; but you know, we all have our quirks. I love the idea that these two men who’ve got millions of dollars have a relationship that’s affected by something so petty as, “You charged me for a phone bill when I came as your guest.” This is a long-standing grudge between these two guys and it’s just based on nothing. Just nonsense.
AVC: And they’re about to drive three or four different cities to war over it.
TW: Absolutely, exactly. Probably bigger things have happened for a lot less.
AVC: Going into the second season, where there any things in particular that you were looking to improve?
TW: Well, obviously—or maybe not obviously—we were really happy with how this first season turned out. I mean, the first season of any show is a crapshoot, in the sense of wondering how much the audience is connecting to the show, how much they’re understanding, which storylines they like or don’t like, etc. Not that any of that necessarily affects how we do the show, but you’re really sort of inventing this thing from the ground, just hoping it makes sense, y’know? [Laughs.] That said, by the end of the first season, we were really happy with the template of the show, the tone of the show. We were also in a unique situation because we essentially took over the show from Martin Scorsese, who wasn’t going to be continuing to be a part of the show after directing the pilot. It was really up to Tim and Pat and me to continue to replicate what Marty had established visually every week, so that had its own set of challenges.
To answer your question though, I wouldn’t say so much “improve.” We wanted to continue what we had laid out in season one, in terms of the types of stories we were telling and the way we were telling them. We don’t really do a lot of stand-alone episodes. It’s obviously a huge canvas and a huge cast and a lot of interweaving storylines, and we were happy we pulled it off in season one to our satisfaction, and seemingly to the audience’s as well. Season two has its own sets of challenges, because you’ve laid the groundwork and introduced everybody, and now you’ve got to continue the stories you’ve set up, and also you can start digging deeper into all the characters.
“Ourselves Alone” (Oct. 2, 2011)
Jimmy Darmody visits New York, where Lucky and Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) pitch him on the idea of distributing heroin in Atlantic City. Nucky and Chalky both end up in jail, but while Nucky gets sprung, Chalky has to stew, and finds himself challenged by political agitator Dunn Purnsley (Erik LaRay Harvey). But Nucky doesn’t have it much easier, as he returns to his home only to get hassled by visiting Sinn Féin representative John McGarrigle (Ted Rooney), who demands money for the cause and in exchange loans Nucky his rakish enforcer Owen Slater (Charlie Cox).
AVC: The title is a rough translation of “Sinn Féin,” correct?
TW: Yeah, that’s where we came up with that.
AVC: Obviously titles are not arbitrary on this show. At what point in the development of an episode do you come up with them?
TW: It’s always different. Sometimes before we even start writing, once we have an outline and we know what the episode’s about, the episode title pops out. Other times, we’re about to lock the episode, it’s edited, and I still don’t have a title, and we’re wracking our brains. This show in particular has been easier for me to come up with titles for episodes for some reason. Sometimes it’s a reference to something somebody’s watching, or reading. “21” was the year that the show takes place. Sometimes in the writers’ room, someone says something and we think, “Gosh that would be a good title,” and sometimes that sticks.
AVC: Was the IRA actually involved in the politics of Atlantic City?
TW: Well, they certainly were on fundraising missions throughout the United States, so we felt comfortable surmising that they very possibly headed to Atlantic City to raise money there, especially among prominent Irish-Americans who may have been sympathetic to the cause and could write a big check. So Nucky would serve as maybe one of those guys. And we had already set up in season one that there was this big St. Patrick’s Day dinner, and that there were definitely people in the city that were very pro-Ireland, and might be apt to give money.
AVC: The way the character John McGarrigle is introduced is very telling. He delivers this almost hectoring lecture about his need for money, which is an odd tone to strike: shaming somebody and begging at the same time.
TW: That’s just a way to broaden the character rather than having him be straight down the middle. On the one hand he has this almost open disdain for America and Americans, even though he knows that he needs them very much. Seeing him play against Margaret was really fun. That episode and that character were really created almost completely by [writer] Howard Korder. He did a terrific job.
AVC: The scene ends with him taking a drink, after earlier shunning the idea of drinking alcohol, which is something that happens again and again in this season: this sort of hypocrisy, where people take very stern public stances and then in private just do their own thing.
TW: Y’know, it’s really hard to live by these sort of manufactured, somewhat arbitrary laws. It’s almost doomed to failure. Prohibition, as Ken Burns pointed out in his documentary, made criminals out of ordinary people. Suddenly things were against the law that most people had been doing all their lives, and were going to continue to do. Suddenly everybody was breaking the law. You’ve got to take this public stance that’s against your private beliefs. It’s like premarital sex. These absolutes are just doomed to fail, y’know? You’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you say, “I will never do X.”
The great tragedy of Van Alden’s life is that the poor guy, he lusts. He has feelings. He’s petty, he’s angry, he wants to drink, he wants to sleep with some girl he meets, and he’s just so tormented over all these very human emotions that it just sort of unravels the guy.
AVC: The Burns documentary you mentioned ran right before season two started. Do you think that it was a help toBoardwalk Empire, raising awareness?
TW: It definitely brought us publicity. And him as well. We actually did a joint publicity luncheon right before both of our shows came on the air, season two and his documentary, within weeks of each other. But it was just a really happy accident. His thing was in development long before even ours was, and we were working completely unaware of each other. I think we were probably done with season one when I heard that he was working on a prohibition documentary. As it turned out, a lot of the stuff in our season two happened to big parts of Ken Burns’
Prohibition. George Remus, for one. And our Esther Randolph character is based on
Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Just incredible things that looked like we lifted right out of their documentary, when our film was already in the can by the time we were even aware that this thing existed.
AVC: Nucky makes a joke to the press in this episode about Trenton, which is a big part of his public persona: cracking stale jokes. Are these jokes historically researched?
TW: Not necessarily. I mean, a lot of them are old cornball jokes. It’s challenging sometimes, because a lot of them are corny and flat. They’re funny because they’re not funny. It’s a creative decision to say, “I know by modern standards this isn’t funny, but this is the type of joke someone would tell.” You’re sort of laughing at it, not with it. But to give these guys a more modern sense of humor would feel phony to me. We’ve written things that sound more like a contemporary take on the situation, and you get wary of it sometimes. It feels too modern. So in a way, a lot of Nucky’s jokes and humor fit the period.
AVC: There are two strong setpieces at the center of the episode—Jimmy meeting with the New York gangs and Chalky in prison—that might’ve been even stronger if they’d each been one long sequence, rather than being cut up and woven into the rest of the episode. At any point during the writing and editing process did you think, “Maybe we should just stay in one place until this one story is done?”
TW: We do think about things like that, but I mean, the rhythm just doesn’t really work very well when we’ve tried it. And a lot of this is just done my gut. I’m watching and I’m feeling like I haven’t seen Margaret in a while, or haven’t seen Nucky in a while. As much as you’re engaged with a particular storyline, it just starts to feel like the balance is off. I’m sure it could be done, it’s just really a question of whether or not ultimately I feel or [director] Tim Van Patten feels or Howard Korder feels that it’s working. For us, the better balance is to cut back and forth between storylines. Some episodes of
The Sopranos that we did leant themselves more to what you’re describing. “Pine Barrens” would’ve been a good example, having these guys out lost in the snow. You could stay a long time with them. But even in that episode, we cut back and forth to Tony, and you know, there’s a Meadow storyline as well.
AVC: “Pine Barrens” gets cited sometimes as an example of a bottle episode, but it’s not.
TW: Yeah, not at all, actually. It’s got a lot of other stuff going on. I always wanted to do a bottle episode on
The Sopranos where everybody gets stuck at the Bing in a big storm and starts reminiscing. Usually bottle episodes are like the clip shows where someone goes, “Oh, do you remember the time… ?” and then they show the clip from whenever. But I’d want all the things they’d reminisce about to be things we’d never seen before. As if they were reminiscing episodes that never existed.
AVC: Community did that, actually.
TW: Oh, they did? Oh, that’s great! That’s awesome, I’m glad that somebody did; it’s a good idea.
“A Dangerous Maid” (Oct. 9, 2011)
A depressed Lucy gets a cheering visit from her old pal Eddie Cantor (Stephen DeRosa), while Margaret gets news from a detective agency about the whereabouts of her Irish relatives. And Nucky and The Commodore wage their cold war on multiple fronts, trying to lock down business alliances and present at least the illusion of power. Finally, the two men meet, by accident, at Babette’s Supper Club, where they have a public shouting match.
AVC: The title comes from a musical by George and Ira Gershwin. How did you find that particular piece?
TW: Well, we knew we wanted a play that may have been in Atlantic City, or about to begin on Broadway. A lot of times they would do trial runs in other cities, Atlantic City being one of them. So in the research, that was one of the titles we came up with. I believe it might have been our writer Itamar Moses who found that.
AVC: And you bring Eddie Cantor back from season one. How did you decide to portray Cantor as you did, because the Cantor in this episode appears to be always in a performing mode, even when he’s just chatting casually with Lucy?
TW: We read a lot about him. We also watched
The Eddie Cantor Story, which is like, this Technicolor biopic from the ’50s, and is just hilarious for all the wrong reasons. Eddie Cantor said himself that it bears absolutely no resemblance to his actual life. But for the most part, from what we’ve been able to tell, he was very much “on” all the time. He is kind of performing for Lucy. He’s trying to cheer her up. He’s kind of that guy. I think as the series goes on, I would like to see more of him, a more human side, in the sense of seeing him dropping the act a little bit. He actually, in the crash of ’29, lost everything from what I understand, and had to I think solicit money from his friends in Hollywood to stay afloat for a couple of years. And he had been absolutely one of the most successful performers ever, up to that point. He really got wiped out.
AVC: We see Lucy nude and pregnant in this episode. Was that a prosthetic or a digital effect?
TW: A bit of both. She wore a prosthetic belly and we cleaned it up a little around the edges with some digital technology. But she looks great. I mean, it’s just incredible. I’m still amazed at
what we can do on a computer. It’s just mind-blowing. I mean, Harrow’s face being first and foremost. It’s just astounding. Or even the extension of our boardwalk set, which if you’ve ever seen pictures of what our set looks like, it’s a 300-foot set built in a parking lot in Brooklyn, and suddenly after the computers are done you’ve got the Atlantic Ocean and the thing goes on as far as the eye can see. We go from that down to something as simple as just getting rid of the seams on a prosthetic pregnant belly.
AVC: You probably couldn’t do this show maybe even 10 years ago.
TW: Yeah, I mean, the special effects have really made the difference from being able to do this and not do it. When I wrote the pilot, I actually thought, “This is impossible. There’s no way we could ever afford to build Atlantic City circa 1920, this whole boardwalk empire. You have to see the boardwalk.” Then I was watching
John Adams on HBO, and they did a behind-the-scenes segment and I saw what they did. I couldn’t believe what was possible with CGI. They showed these before-and-after shots and I thought, “Wow, we might actually be able to pull this off.” We hired the same company, and here we are.
AVC: There’s a very tender scene between Margaret and Nucky late in this episode, where she’s in bed and he comes home and is getting ready for bed. The moment really makes their relationship seem genuine, and not just one of convenience, as it was before.
TW: Right. It was really nice to finally see them as a couple. We wanted to explore what was behind their initial attraction. It was a really strong moment for her at the end of episode two when she steals the ledger back for him, and is sort of really protective of him. Then this episode, we internally used to refer to it as “How Nucky Got His Groove Back.” You come into it and he’s really depressed. The world is closing in, all the people closest to him are against him, and there’s this tremendous ****-storm, and the little thing that gets him going again is The Commodore getting the last lobster when Margaret, his girl, wanted the lobster. That’s the thing that finally gets him able to stand up and fight for himself: protecting her, in a way. That gets him re-energized again, y’know, “**** these guys.” [Laughs.]
AVC: Knowing that you’re building to that scene at Babette’s, in the writers’ room do you say, “Okay, we need a scene between Margaret and Nucky earlier in the episode, to establish their relationship?”
TW: Again, it’s sort of like making soup. You put the outline together, and then with the episode it’s a little bit of adding a dash of this and a dash of that. The scene you’re describing, we’re also setting up the idea of her family being in New York, and her already being a little depressed. So there’s a little bit of setting up that story, and also starting to give Nucky the ammunition he needs. He comes into the scene, Margaret is clearly sad, something is bothering her. He tells her he’s taking her out to dinner, and then another disappointment is heaped upon her and that’s the scene that finally… y’know. So we were constantly building toward it in a way, reinforcing that ending and also giving her a legitimate reason to be upset, that would then actually set up a later storyline. She’s upset about her siblings, who she hasn’t seen in years.
AVC: The scene at Babette’s with Nucky and The Commodore and the lobster is one of the key scenes of the series. Some viewers at the start of season one were expectingBoardwalk Empire to be more like The Sopranos, in that it would be more about criminals killing each other. And this particular scene establishes that it’s not so much about crime as it is about politics. This is a political war, not a gang war, and that means the characters can’t just start shooting each other.
TW: Actually, in going through the possibilities for season two, we said, “All right, all these people are conspiring to bring Nucky down, and Jimmy’s got this friend who can put a bullet in a person from a mile away. Why don’t they just kill him?” [Laughs.] Well, that’s it for season two! So obviously it can’t just be, “We’re going to shoot you,” then, “We’re going to shoot back,” etc. It’s got to be something deeper. Because Nucky is involved in politics, and because of the history that we had set up with The Commodore having gone away for election-rigging—which was actually
based in reality as well—we thought, “Ah, this is great.” It’s an election year, so this is a political coup, and not a shot has to be fired. It actually worked out for Jimmy, too, who’s a little on the fence about wanting to go with this plan in the first place. It’s a lot easier to rationalize. “Well, Nucky gets sent to jail; no harm really. He’ll get out. He’ll be fine.” For our purposes, dramatically, it gives a lot more to do than just, “We shoot you.” That kind of thing gets boring really quickly.
Check back tomorrow for part two, which will cover episodes four through six, from “What Does The Bee Do?” to “The Age Of Reason.”
“What Does The Bee Do?” (Oct. 16, 2011)
Richard takes off his tin mask and allows his scarred face to be sketched by his buddy Jimmy’s artsy wife Angela (Aleksa Palladino), while Jimmy’s showgirl mother Gillian (Gretchen Mol) performs a sexy dance for The Commodore, right before he’s stricken with a stroke. Chalky has an uncomfortable dinner party with his daughter’s cultured, light-skinned boyfriend. While at a wild party at the Ritz, Nucky’s lawyer gets the idea to push his client’s election-rigging case to the federal level, where Nucky’s White House connections may be able to help. Jimmy makes promises he can’t keep to Manny Horvitz, a butcher with a rigid code of business ethics. And Agent Clarkson (Joel Brady) investigates what Agent Van Alden is doing with all the agency’s confiscated bootlegger money, and gets himself blown up in the process.
The A.V. Club: This is the first episode of the season that didn’t air on the same night as a new Breaking Bad.
Terence Winter: I was not aware of that. That was probably good for us.
AVC: It seemed that interest in Boardwalk Empire kind of built throughout the course of the season, maybe because people who had been watching Breaking Bad went looking for another smart, violent show to watch on Sunday night.
TW: Yeah, very possibly.
AVC: Is that something you pay attention to? The numbers?
TW: Not really. I mean, only if they’re dramatically different. But for the most part, they’re pretty steady. Things get so skewed by, y’know, a football game or the Grammy awards or any number of things. You could drive yourself crazy if you try to figure it out. For us, the end-of-the-week number is more important, and as long as essentially the same number of people are watching every week, however it racks up in terms of
when it’s airing is fine. I mean, my own viewing habits are… I don’t think I ever watch
anything when it’s actually airing. [Laughs.] So, just using myself as a barometer. It doesn’t mean I’m any less interested in the thing I’m watching; it’s just that I don’t have the time to sit down and do it when it’s on.
AVC: Do you try to keep up with the big shows that are on the air right now?
TW: I try, but I’m so far behind, it’s just pointless. Everything I watch is at least a year old. I did, for some reason, watch
Downton Abbey. Well, I know what the reason is: My wife watched it. [Laughs.] And I was even still behind on that, but we did end up watching the whole thing. But yeah, for the most part I’m catching up with things on TiVo. I remember years ago, coming in to work talking about
The X-Files, and people were like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “It’s a great show! It’s really cool!” And they were like, “Yeah, five years ago.” [Laughs.]
AVC: “What Does The Bee Do?” has a nifty visual motif: the half-face. There’s Richard of course, but also Agent Clarkson getting half of his face blown off at the end of the episode, and the episode actually begins with The Commodore suffering a stroke and half of his face being paralyzed. Was this intended?
TW: If I wanted to seem like we were better filmmakers, I would say that it was a motif, but honestly, no. [Laughs.] That was a coincidence. But maybe there are no such things as coincidences and we are all geniuses and it was a motif. It had not occurred to any of us while we were doing the show, though.
AVC: The Commodore was ill through most of season one, and then just when he seems strong again at the start of season two, he gets incapacitated again. When you’re working with an actor as accomplished as Dabney Coleman, is he fine with the idea that he’s going to be difficult to understand and practically immobile for the better part of two years?
TW: [Laughs.] He was really excited to play it. He thought it was great. He loved the idea that he was so weak and had formally been this robust guy. And his favorite thing was being slapped by Gillian. [Laughs.] I mean, he thought that was awesome. He’s been tough guys and he’s been ******* bosses and all those things, but from an actor’s perspective, this is something that is different for him and comes with its own sets of challenges, and he was totally on board with it.
AVC: The scene with Gillian’s striptease at the beginning of the episode is very sexy, and then you have a scene later at the Ritz with lots of half-naked people around. This is the first episode of this season that could be described as “risqué,” whereas in season one, you had a lot more nudity. Was there a conscious effort to tone it down?
TW: We’re conscious of it occasionally, but really, it’s what’s organic to the episode. A lot of the nudity in season one involved Lucy, which was organic to her character, while in this season because of her pregnancy and her situation, it didn’t really lend herself to that—although we managed to see her naked and pregnant a few times. [Laughs.] I never really look at an episode and go, “We need more **** and *** in here. Let’s come up with a scene where we get somebody to walk through naked.” Y’know, it is a show about gangsters and showgirls—and prostitutes on occasion—and you’re going to see those people naked sometimes.
AVC: That’s a topic that comes up a lot when people talk about HBO shows—that the nudity is “gratuitous.”
TW: Those charges have been leveled at us, and again, particularly with Lucy. But there’s a scene with Lucy and Margaret at the dress shop in season one where she forces Margaret to dress her and gets naked in front of Margaret, and y’know, that’s not at all gratuitous. This is all this woman has. This is her power: her body. And she’s trying to intimidate Margaret, basically saying, “Look at me. Look at this. You will never have this. You can’t compete with this.” She tries to give Margaret an assessment of herself. Margaret of course won’t have it, but that’s who Lucy is. That’s how she uses her powers. So, to hear people call that “gratuitous,” to me, that’s not understanding what the scene is about.
AVC: This episode also introduces Manny Horvitz, who plays a major role for the rest of the season, and presumably will continue on into season three. He’s not specifically based on any one historical figure, is he?
TW: No, he’s our own invention.
AVC: Why Manny Horvitz, and not his major rival in Philadelphia, Waxey Gordon, whois historical?
TW: Well, Gordon was, for the most part, a bootlegger, and I don’t know that Waxey was as crazy-violent as we wanted to make Manny. The other thing too is that I try to veer away from real historical characters as much as I can, because you’re sort of beholden to their reality. Waxey Gordon had a trajectory that may or may not fit with where I might want to take a fictional character. And I’m always worried that the audience is thinking ahead of the story. When
Deadwood was on the air, once I realized that all these characters were based on real people, the first thing I did was Google everybody. [Laughs.] And then I knew everything about all these characters and it kind of ruined the show for me because whenever Al Swearengen would get into trouble, I’d say, “Well, I know this guy doesn’t die until the 20th century, so he’s going to be okay.” And then I said, “****, I shouldn’t know that. And I bet David Milch doesn’t want me to know that.”
So when we started this, I changed Nucky’s last name from Johnson to Thompson, because I didn’t want people saying, “Oh, Nucky never did that. Nucky never killed anybody. Nucky never…” whatever. So our Nucky, he’s based on Nucky Johnson clearly, but he’s not Nucky Johnson. He’s our own guy. Obviously, Capone, Luciano, Rothstein, these guys you can’t **** with in terms of their history. We all know what happens to them. But I can give them relationships with fictional people, so long as it makes sense and is true to the spirit of who they were. Manny is a good example. It could’ve been Waxey Gordon, but then I inherit all of the stuff from Waxey Gordon and that might not really work for me. This guy is a clean slate, and can be whatever we want him to be.
AVC: If you Google “George Remus,” that guy has a very interesting story—
TW: Oh yeah, he could be a series unto himself. It’s incredible, really. What a character.
AVC: —and as with Remus and the phone bill, you’ve done some interesting things with Arnold Rothstein. In this particular episode, you have the scene where he’s practicing saying Nucky’s name before he picks up the phone, so that he’ll sound confident and in charge; and you also have him eating apple bread to soothe his poor digestion. So it’s possible to create a character within a historical context.
TW: Yeah, to humanize them by giving them certain traits, or just to peel back the layer of who these people are. That’s one of the great things you’ll get out of a series as it continues. You get to spend more and more time. You get to give half a page to Rothstein and his wife, just to see somebody as powerful and as in control as Rothstein clear his throat and practice saying what he’s going to say, so you go, “Oh ****, this guy is insecure, like everybody.” The real Rothstein apparently subsisted almost exclusively on cake and milk. Like, he just ate cake all day. [Laughs.] I had his wife chastise him for just a little moment, to show the family side of this guy.
AVC: One possible historical inaccuracy in this episode, though: Jimmy makes a reference to buying Creamsicles, which may not have existed in 1921, according to the Internet.
TW: I thought we had… damn. [Laughs.] If I’m remembering correctly, I think we came up with that the
Popsicle had been introduced at the right time, and I think I just said, “Close enough. I’m going to run with that, and see if anyone calls us on it.” And of course you did, so we may be busted.
AVC: This sort of thing is obviously not that important, but at the same time, presumably you don’t want to create something so anachronistic that people are taken out of the reality of the show.
TW: Well, it’s funny, sometimes we can’t even decide, because there are things that existed back then that
seem anachronistic. Like, they had wire-mesh fencing. I remember one time on-set, our set designer had put this wire-mesh fence, and I said, “God, it just looks too modern.” We just ended up taking it out, because even though it existed, it was one of those things that was just visually jarring. It just feels like 1965 to me. Even expressions… you have a hard time believing some of the things people said back then that feel modern.
AVC: Nucky says “jerking off” at one point in one of the episodes, which is an example of that.
TW: I think he said “jacking off,” but sure, either one, yeah. We do have a researcher who calls us on every little thing, and I’d say we have a pretty high percentage of accuracy.
“Gimcrack And Bunkum” (Oct. 23, 2011)
Memorial Day in Atlantic City brings fresh corpses. Eli, unnerved that Jimmy and Gillian have taken charge in the wake of The Commodore’s stroke, sheepishly comes to Nucky for help, but the two of them start punching each other instead, and Eli lets his residual rage spill over later as he beats one of his business partners to death. Jimmy gets a stern talking-to from the city’s elder statesmen—including the mysterious Leander Whitlock (Dominic Chianese)—and Jimmy gets even by scalping one particularly impertinent old man. Richard, however, escapes the grave when he’s interrupted by a hunting dog while in the middle of preparing to shoot himself.
AVC: This is one of the bloodier episodes of this season.
TW: [Laughs.] A real crowd-pleaser.
AVC: Much like with the nudity, do you have any discussions in the writers’ room along the lines of, “Okay, at this point in this season, we need a little violence?”
TW: No, it’s just the way it rolled out. We didn’t look at the first four and say, “This feels soft. We need something wild.” It was just that as things heated up for Eli and Jimmy, both of them had to wrest control of their own lives, and this is how it ended up. Eli came apart at the seams, and Jimmy needed to make a very dramatic statement.
AVC: You have all of these dead people popping up on Memorial Day, a day to honor the dead. You use holidays very purposely throughout the run of the show. Is there a storytelling advantage to that?
TW: Well, it’s a good way of grounding the show in a season, or a particular month. It also provides a good framework for an episode. I mean, it’s always been interesting for me to see how people celebrated holidays way back when, but it’s also a good clothesline on which to hang events, and a good excuse for characters to get together. It’s a good excuse to have parties, which are always fun on the show. And if it happens to be organic to things that are happening, then it works even better. I mean, Memorial Day’s great, because Jimmy’s a veteran, and also they were beginning construction on the Atlantic City war memorial at that time. So we thought this would be a great way to introduce that, and see the beginnings of it, and also this dedication and this statue force all of our characters who have been avoiding each other into the same space, because of political reasons. All of these people have to confront each other, whether they want to do that or not.
AVC: This is a great Richard Harrow episode: one of his biggest moments in this season, as he goes off to the woods to kill himself. Given the kind of show this is, and given that you’re on cable, you don’t have necessarily the same strictures that you have on the broadcast channels, not just in terms of content, but also in terms of the storytelling. In other words, there’s a real possibility that you could have killed Richard in this episode, which must be a real gift to you as a storyteller, knowing that you can bring the audience up to a point where they honestly do not know whether a character is going to survive.
TW: Well, at the end of the season they’re
really not going to know. [Laughs.] But, yeah, that is true. And we certainly considered it. Everything’s on the table, for sure.
AVC: This is the first big episode for Dominic Chianese, whom you previously worked with on The Sopranos, where he played Uncle Junior. It’s interesting, though, that you have him quietly in the background of some of the earlier episodes, almost unrecognizable.
TW: He speaks very briefly in episode two, as Eli’s hanging up the phone after calling up Nucky and saying, “How does it feel to be alone?” Dominic gives a toast in Latin. He is hard to recognize without those Uncle Junior glasses, though. He’s almost a high-school teacher. He can play Clark Kent and Superman; it’s really incredible.
We brought him in earlier just to have him inhabit the world. It always bugs me as a viewer when suddenly there’s something new that’s supposed to have been a major presence in the other characters’ lives for years. It’s like some bad sitcom. “Oh, it’s time for my weekly band practice!” Y’know, the band that you’ve never known the characters had for the six prior years of the show. [Laughs.] And now you just have to accept this, like, “Oh yeah, they do this every week, we’ve just never shown you. The same goes with introducing a character. It’s always better to pepper, for me. I love to see somebody peppered in a few episodes, if you know in advance they’re going to come up later.
We did that, actually, with the Russian who gets lost in the woods in
The Sopranos. This whole episode was about this guy who worked for the Russian gangsters, so I remember I lobbied David Chase. We were filming a scene a couple of episodes prior where Tony visits the Russian mob boss, and I said, “Can we put the Russian who gets lost in the woods in that scene, just to see him?” Just for the audience to go, “Ooooh, okay…
that guy.” We saw him sweeping the floor in that episode, just so people would know that this guy was in this world beforehand, and now there’s a situation involving him.
Same thing with Dominic. He doesn’t just pop up. You see him for the first time in “21,” at the funeral parlor, where Jimmy goes off to talk to him. I wanted to start layering him then so that when he does become more regular, then maybe you’ve noticed him, maybe not, but if you go back and watch the whole season, you go, “Oh yeah, he’s there.”
AVC: Having Steve Buscemi as your lead allows you to spin some wonderful comic moments out of nothing, and a primary example of that comes in this episode, where he rolls his eyes while putting on a little golfing hat.
TW: [Laughs.] Yeah, I remember at first, when he came home from the golfing match and had the fight with Eli, I scripted that he was still wearing his golfing clothes, and Steve called me out and goes, “Why am I still wearing my golfing clothes? Wouldn’t I change at the club?” I said, “Well yeah, y’know, maybe you didn’t?” And we went back on forth on this until finally I said, “I just want to see you in the golfing outfit.” [Laughs.] Being honest. I said, “I just want to see you get into a fight wearing those knickers.” He laughed about it, and afterwards I said, “You’re right, this is absurd, we’ll see you at the golf club and that’s enough.” But yeah, it’s just a silly costume, and Steve is such a natural comedian, he totally knows what’s funny. He got it.
AVC: There’s another example from the previous episode, where Nucky’s talking with Margaret about the plan to make his case federal, and he says, “I violated the Mann Act!” with such gusto and pride.
TW: [Laughs.] Yeah, exactly. I mean, he’s so funny. He totally understands. Certain actors just know where the joke is.
AVC: In The A.V. Club’s review of this episode, I mentioned the audience’s desire for blood, and that “murder diffuses drama,” meaning that it’s more tense when characters have to live alongside the people that are making their lives uncomfortable. What would you say to that?
TW: I would agree. I don’t know if murder diffuses drama all the time, but certainly too much of it gets really boring. I remember back on
The Sopranos it was like, “When is Tony going to whack somebody?” And it’s like, “Is that all you guys want to see? Really? Tony bashes some guy on the head with his bat?” The difference between what makes a good episode or a bad episode for a large portion of the audience is whether or not somebody got splattered with blood or bashed somebody in the head with a tire-iron. Even going into this episode, we knew that a large portion of the audience was going to love it because it’s so violent, which is sad in a way, because the episode is so strong dramatically. The Harrow storyline in the woods, for example, was really poignant and interesting to us, but Eli beating a guy to death with a wrench, and him and Nucky brawling, and then of course the scalping at the end was what a lot of people focused on. But it depends on the circumstance. Certainly a well-placed murder can be very dramatic, as I hoped we achieved in our finale. But having to negotiate your way around people who you would
like to murder can also be dramatic as well.
“The Age Of Reason” (Oct. 30, 2011)
Margaret has to go to confession in preparation for her son Teddy’s confirmation, and Nucky’s worried that she’ll spill everything she knows about his business, when in fact she’s planning to tell the priest about her attraction to Nucky’s new bodyguard, Owen. Nucky entertains the impressionable U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute his now-federal case, but old enemies in Washington won’t let the case get buried. Jimmy learns from Leander that good business sense can accomplish more than violence, while Manny teaches the opposite lesson, by getting Jimmy to slaughter a traitor for him. And Lucy gives birth to Van Alden’s baby, while his guilt over multiple indiscretions leads him to confess his own sins to his wife.
AVC: At one point in this episode, Jimmy and Angela make note as they’re walking down the boardwalk that there are more radios around, and it seemed like in this season there was more diegetic music. Was the mention of the radios a way of explaining that?
TW: We wanted to start introducing the idea that suddenly music was everywhere. It’s always fascinating to me that up until the dawn of radio, you didn’t hear music unless somebody had a piano. You didn’t hear popular songs unless you happened to be in a club, or somebody got the sheet music to a song and you were lucky enough to go to a home where somebody had a piano and could play it. Now suddenly, everyone’s got access to all this stuff. You’re hearing music everywhere. The boardwalk is such a great place for sound design, too. It’s such a cacophony of noises, and as you pass different places you’ll hearing different noises, whether it’s a carnival barker or a calliope or just various sounds of tourists, the ocean, all that stuff. Now introduced into that, you’re starting to hear music, Victrolas, stuff from other people’s houses. In episode three, when Van Alden buys Lucy the Victrola, this is a big deal. This is like, almost a status symbol, or keeping up with the neighbors. They’ve got a Victrola; now we’ve got the same one. Initially, Van Alden is against it, and then later the new nanny is introduced and Van Alden is almost bragging about the Victrola, the newest model. [Laughs.] He’s succumbing to consumerism.
AVC: The credited writer on this episode is Bathsheba Doran. Should viewers presume that any credited writer wrote the script from start to finish, or is there a lot of re-working?
TW: There is usually a great deal of rewriting, depending on who wrote it. When a writer’s assigned an episode, they generally get credit regardless of how much is rewritten. But episodes are rewritten, sometimes almost completely, other times not at all. I don’t believe I’ve ever done anything more than light editing on any episode written by Howard Korder, and then varying degrees depending on other writers. Other showrunners have policies of taking partial credit depending on how much rewriting they do, but in general, whomever’s assigned the episode initially is credited as the writer. We all sit in a room together and work out the outlines, and then somebody will go off with that outline and write a script, and then I’ll generally take it over after the first draft, occasionally after a second draft. I’ll take it over and do a pass, or Howard will do a pass, and ultimately that’s what you see.
AVC: The reason I ask is that this episode advances two of the major intertwined themes of the season: religion and rules. You have Manny in this episode getting Jimmy to do this killing for him because the “meat” is not kosher, or “trayf,” and you have a nervous Nucky asking Margaret at one point, “How Catholic are you?” So when your writers are assigned an episode like this, with all these different characters and their different relationships to religion and rules and faith, is that something that is discussed before it goes to the writer, or does the writer come up with that herself? Or am I again, like the half-faces in “What Does The Bee Do?,” seeing something that’s not there?
TW: [Laughs.] No, no, that was there. The half-face is a visual motif that sort of happened by accident. But religion was really a big theme in this season, and we knew as the season progressed it was going to become pivotal, certainly for Margaret, going toward the later episodes. Rituals and rules—the rules we live by, and the rules we choose to accept or not accept—was very much a part of the fabric of the story as we outlined it in the writers’ room.
AVC: Nucky is developing his master plan to get back in power in this episode, and throughout this season he seems more on top of his business than he did at times in season one. One of the questions some viewers asked week after week in season one was whether Nucky is a shrewd, smart guy, or a very lucky guy, or just a ballsy guy? What would you say to that?
TW: I think he’s a little of all three. He is very smart. I don’t think you can get to be somebody in that position without being shrewd. Ballsy? Yeah, absolutely. Same thing. It’s a rough town, and I think you’ve got to have a little balls to do it. It’s also mixed in with a little greed as well. Nucky had a pretty good life right up to Prohibition. He was doing fine as a treasurer of this corrupt city on the ocean, and suddenly the game changed in a really dramatic way. You could make the argument that this might’ve been a good time to pack it in and retire. Nucky doubled down and said, “You know what? **** it. I can make millions here.” But at the cost of potentially losing his life, or where it ends up at the end of season two, with him crossing the line and becoming a murderer himself. There’s a lot going on with him.
AVC: He seems to have this attitude that if everyone could just do exactly as he wants them to, then everyone would be happy. But someone always comes along to **** it up.
TW: [Laughs.] Change is really inconvenient, really inconvenient.
AVC: This episode contains one of Nucky’s best lines in season two: “Remus can go **** himself.”
TW: [Laughs.] Right. Nucky throwing Remus’ verbal tic back at him.
AVC: You make good use throughout the season of that verbal tic.
TW: Well that’s the kind of thing… like, if we had made that up as a character trait, I would’ve been uncomfortable with it, but because it was real, I felt like we had the license to go to town.