LOS ANGELES – Its pilot episode is the most expensive ever made – and Martin Scorsese is directing it. Tom Shone catches up with HBO’s lavish new crime epic, starting soon on Sky Atlantic.
“This was where it all happened,” Terence Winter says. “The birth place of organised crime in this country.” The Emmy-winning writer-director is standing in the middle of what used to be a disused car lot in Brooklyn. Now, after three months of furious work by an army of set builders, it is a 300ft recreation of the Atlantic City boardwalk circa 1920.
Stretching into the distance are tattoo parlours, nightclubs, sherbet-hued shops peddling palm readings, postcards and saltwater taffy; above them period-perfect billboards advertise Gillette and Chesterfield cigarettes. On the other side of the walkway, wrought-iron railings look out onto a beach of trucked-in sand; a pier juts out and ends abruptly at the foot of a giant blue screen, on which the show’s editors will digitally insert footage of the Atlantic Ocean.
The set, which cost $3 million to construct, is the centerpiece of the lavish new crime drama ‘Boardwalk Empire’, which HBO is hoping will replace ‘The Sopranos’ as its flagship show. Employing 300 crew members, 225 actors and 1,000 extras, and shot over 200 days, twice what a standard network drama would take, it traces the fortunes of Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, a corrupt political boss played by Steve Buscemi.
“Half gangster, half politician”, he never declared more than $5,000 in income, effectively running Atlantic City from the eighth floor of the Ritz-Carlton, raking in money from the illegal liquor trade. The series kicks off with a dinner on the eve of Prohibition, at which Nucky toasts “the distinguished gentlemen of our nation’s Congress – those beautiful, ignorant bastards”.
And if you think he sounds like something out of a Martin Scorsese movie, then well done: so did Scorsese, who directed the first episode. Initial reports in the New York Post estimated the price of the first episode at $50 million, making it “the most expensive pilot in history”; HBO said it cost $20million; people familiar with the budget put it closer to $30 million.
Scorsese is not the only director on the HBO bandwagon; in recent months Michael Mann, David Fincher and Jonathan Demme have all declared deals to direct television shows for HBO, thus proving that the cable channel has become a kind of breakaway republic from Hollywood – a fiefdom of talent unto itself. With movie studios too entranced with making movies about comic books and superheroes to make the kind of epics cinema used to excel at – The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America – the job has instead fallen to HBO, which, with series like Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, and now Boardwalk Empire, has become the place you go to see a mirror held up to America.
Already drawing excellent reviews, Boardwalk Empire looks set to become the must-see television event of the year.
