Martin Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire

[tommyboy81]

Figured the title would get your attention. Yep HBO and Martin Scorsese are putting out a HBO series called Boardwalk Empire. Saw a little preview on HBO about it. It's suppose to come out sometime next year
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A bustling little city by the seashore, totally dependent upon money spent by tourists, Atlantic City’s popularity rose in the early 20th century and peaked during Prohibition. The resort’s singular purpose of providing a good time to its visitors—whether lawful or not—demanded a single mentality to rule the town. Success of the local economy was the only ideology, and critics and do-gooders weren’t tolerated.

By 1900, a political juggernaut, funded by payoffs from gambling rooms, bars, and brothels, was firmly entrenched. For the next 70 years, Atlantic City was dominated by a partnership comprised of local politicians and racketeers. This unique alliance reached full bloom in the person of Enoch “Nucky” Johnson—the second of three bosses to head the Republican machine that dominated city politics and society.

In Boardwalk Empire, Nucky Johnson, Louis “the Commodore” Kuehnle, Frank “Hap” Farley, and Atlantic City itself spring to life in all their garish splendor. Author Nelson Johnson traces “AC” from its humble beginnings as Jonathan Pitney’s seaside health resort, through the notorious backroom politics and power struggles, to the city’s astonishing rebirth as an entertainment and gambling mecca where just about anything goes.

Boardwalk Empire is a colorful, irresistible history of a unique city and culture. Here is proof positive that truth is stranger—and more compelling—than fiction.

Here's the site in which I got the info
http://boardwalkempire.com/

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The following updated cast list includes a number of new and exciting additions, roughly in the announced order. Note that Plexus Publishing, Inc. is not involved in the production of Boardwalk Empire on HBO except as publisher of the book on which it is based and accepts no responsibility for errors or omissions in regard to any of the following details, which are subject to change without notice.

■Steve Buscemi starring as Nucky Johnson
■Kelly Macdonald as Margaret, an enterprising Irish immigrant
■Michael Pitt as Jimmy Darmody, an ambitious punk in Nucky’s gang
■Michael Shannon as federal agent Van Alden
■Stephen Graham as Al Capone
■Vincent Piazza as Lucky Luciano
■Aleksa Palladino as Angela Darmody, Jimmy’s wife
■Paul Sparks as a bootlegging funeral director
■Shea Whigham as Eli Johnson, a corrupt county sheriff
■Anthony Laciura as Louis Kessel
■Charisma Carpenter in an as-yet unnamed role
■Ann Marie Seall as Babette

[bluRazor]

sounds good.

[saprano]

The title sure did get my attention.

I'll watch anything he makes. woody allen to.

[tommyboy81]

here's alittle more story on the series
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/i..._sets_jer.html
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HBO’s next set of New Jersey wiseguys will be conducting business out of a parking lot in Brooklyn.



Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson“Boardwalk Empire,” which debuts sometime next year, deals with gangsters in Atlantic City at the dawn of Prohibition in the 1920s. (Steve Buscemi plays a character based on famed Atlantic City fixer Nucky Johnson.) It comes from both Martin Scorsese (who directed the pilot) and key “Sopranos” producer Terence Winter. But where Winter’s old boss, David Chase, insisted on filming Jersey exteriors in the Garden State whenever possible, “Boardwalk Empire” has recreated the classic Atlantic City boardwalk in Greenpoint.

Winter and his team — including a host of fellow “Sopranos” alums like director Tim Van Patten and production designer Bob Shaw — initially wanted to follow tradition and find a Jersey location.

The real Atlantic City boardwalk is too built up and modern to be usable, but Van Patten says, “Asbury Park was very tempting. Existing architecture on the water.”

In the end, production wound up in New York because the state provided a 15 percent larger tax break, and because the depressed real estate market gave them a good lease price on an undeveloped Greenpoint lot.

But no matter what state “Boardwalk Empire” was filmed in, the boardwalk set that Shaw and his team constructed — and which reporters got to tour on Monday afternoon — is among the more impressive exteriors ever built for a TV series. (The town on “Deadwood” and the whole of “Rome” are the only ones I can think of that come close.)

The boardwalk isn’t an exact recreation of the real thing circa 1920, but Winter describes it as “historically accurate in that the architecture is what the architecture of the period looked like ... it’s an amalgam of what was there.”

Nucky Johnson, for instance, lived in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which was a plain brick building. Buscemi’s character (named Nucky Thompson, so Winter won’t have to be completely bound by history) also will live in the Ritz, but the show’s version is modeled on the more ornate Glenham hotel of the period.

The set features more than a dozen storefronts and other exteriors, including the Ritz, Fralinger’s Salt Water Taffy, a fortune teller’s space and a hospital-turned-tourist-destination where people could look at premature babies in incubators for a 25-cent admission.

Buscemi is the only “Sopranos” veteran in the cast — other actors include Dabney Coleman, Kelly Macdonald, Michael Pitt, Michael Shannon and Michael K. Williams from “The Wire” — because Winter wanted to help distinguish the two series. For the same reason, he chose to write about Nucky’s era when HBO brought him a copy of Nelson Johnson’s “Boardwalk Empire” book, which takes a more sweeping look at Atlantic City history.

“The Skinny D’Amato years of the 1950s started to feel too close to ‘The Sopranos,’ ” he says. “I worried, ‘This is going to feel like Tony’s dad’s show.”

Skinny’s Atlantic City would have been simpler to recreate than Nucky’s, but the production team was excited by the challenge of going back almost 90 years.

Though the boardwalk sits on pillars above several tons of trucked-in sand, the Atlantic Ocean and part of the skyline will be created through visual effects. The Empire State Building looms in the background of the arcade set at the end of the boardwalk, but can be digitally erased if it turns up in a shot.

Advances in digital effects make a show like this possible. When Winter was writing the script, he would describe lavish backdrops and scenes with dozens, if not hundreds, of extras, never expecting to be able to pull it off on a TV budget.

“Then I saw (the HBO miniseries) ‘John Adams,’ ” he says, “and there’s Paul Giamatti going to Versailles,” and he realized technology allowed for the scope he and Scorsese wanted.

Still, “this would have been a lot cheaper if (Nucky’s) office had been two blocks off the boardwalk,” Van Patten admits.

As with any period piece, the intermingling of past and present can be disorienting.

The extras wander around in heavy wool and argyle, yet stop to pose for digital pictures with each other. A crew member with a walkie-talkie takes a catnap under the boardwalk, briefly creating the illusion of the Atlantic City of a different era.

Some of the storefront sets are big enough to film scenes inside, but most interior filming is done at a nearby studio.

“Building sets is just fine,” says Shaw (who also designed the original “Mad Men” sets, including the Sterling Cooper offices), “but location shooting is sheer terror” because of modern architecture, cars and other things they have to shoot around or else hide digitally. “If a script mentions someone’s home, you live in fear of the day when we have to show them walking out the front door.”

Scorsese filmed the pilot months ago. Van Patten is simultaneously directing the next two episodes right now, and production of the first season (the pilot, plus 11 additional episodes) will continue for months, going right through the winter on a location next to the East River and its winds.

“I believe this is the first outdoor set built in New York City since the 1920s, or possibly the teens,” says Shaw. “Give us time, maybe we’ll find out why the movie business was wise to move out to California.”

[tommyboy81]

Rumor is Scorsese is directing the Pilot.

[Offender_Mullet]

Great news! "The Master" is back to gangsters.

[Decado]

I'm really glad to see HBO getting back to shows with interesting premises and settings. Hopefully this show and A Game of Thrones won't share the same fate as Deadwood, Carnivale and Rome :|

[DMC86X]

It looks like this will be another epic HBO mafia drama. Im deffinately renewing my subscription to HBO for this!!

[SquidPuppet]

Tommy, is this a series, or a miniseries?

[tommyboy81]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

Tommy, is this a series, or a miniseries?

From what I've heard its a series. I'll confirm it when I hear something. Or see it.

[tommyboy81]

It's a Series

Trying to find everything I can so if these are the same as I posted earlier then sorry.

http://www.hbo.com/news/

Tricky Timing
Martin Scorsese has had a lot of experience depicting mobsters in various eras. But even for the master, creating a giant 1920s seashore on the riverbank of Brooklyn makes for a pretty ambitious start to the new HBO series 'Boardwalk Empire.' Production designer Bob Shaw — who also worked on 'The Sopranos' — describes the never-ending battle against anachronism like this: "Building sets is just fine, but location shooting is sheer terror. If a script mentions someone's home, you live in fear of the day when we have to show them walking out the front door." There are other reasons to dread the great outdoors as well — especially when you're shooting on the windy East River in the middle of January. "I believe this is the first outdoor set built in New York City since the 1920s, or possibly the teens. Give us time, maybe we'll find out why the movie business was wise to move out to California." (photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage.com


http://www.hbo.com/news/archives/2007_03_09.html

Good Fellas
Martin Scorsese is reteaming with Mark Wahlberg — but not for a 'Departed' sequel (yet). The two have signed on to develop (as executive producers) a series for HBO about Atlantic City. Based on the book 'Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City' by Nelson Johnson, the series will follow the birth and growth of Atlantic City — from seaside resort to gambling mecca, and all the backroom struggles that entails. (photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com)

http://www.hbo.com/news/archives/2009_11_20.html

It's Bottoms Up for Buscemi
Steve Buscemi is headed back to Jersey, but this time he'll be playing a gangster circa 1920, rather than Tony Soprano's ill-fated cousin. Buscemi is currently filming the role of Enoch "Nucky" Johnson in HBO's new series 'Boardwalk Empire,' about Atlantic City during Prohibition. Nucky is based on a real person, but has been fictionalized by creator Terence Winter who describes him as AC's "beloved treasurer. He was the guy who really ran everything....He went from being a corrupt politician who basically engaged in low-level election rigging, to the big leagues of alcohol," says Winter. "The world changed completely." (photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)

[Gamma_Winstead]

I'm going to get HBO just for this.

[tommyboy81]

new trailer.

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/i...e_trailer.html

[WyldeMan45]

HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Cost $50 Million: How They Gonna Make It Back?

Ever since David Chase blacked out Tony Soprano's life mid-meal, HBO has been searching for the next Sopranos—a search rendered more desperate after AMC found it. So now, HBO is on the hunt for the next Mad Men, and it looks like it might have found it in Boardwalk Empire, a Sopranos/Mad Men mash-up that effectively cribs from both gangster and period genres. The first promo teaser hit the web yesterday, and it looks like the most cinematic show HBO has done to date. It all makes sense, since Martin Scorsese directed the pilot and will have a major creative role in the series' genesis. This morning, Page Six ran an item pricing the pilot episode at $50 million, easily making it HBO's most expensive show ever. Even in Movieland, that's a fairly hefty price tag. You'd have your marquee stars, maybe some CG, and a major marketing push. But in television terms, Empire probably needs to be a Sopranos-size phenomenon to ever recoup that kind of investment.

Set at the dawn of Prohibition, Boardwalk Empire follows Atlantic City’s birth and the gangsters, bootleggers, and rum-runners who spawned it. Steve Buscemi stars as the gangster Nucky Johnson, and Gretchen Mol, Michael Shannon, and Michael Pitt also appear. With Scorsese behind the camera, and Sopranos scribe Terence Winter as creator, the show’s pedigree is unrivaled. HBO has already proven it can do crime better than anyone in entertainment, and it has the luxury of a post-Mad Men TV landscape, with everyone just eating up that show’s period details.

But to put the $50 million price tag into perspective, the two-hour Lost pilot was the most expensive in ABC’s history, and it reportedly cost the network somewhere between $10 and $14 million. Page Six’s source does acknowledge that the rest of the series will drop in cost, “since they’ll reuse props, sets and costumes.” But in an age when many of us stream our shows online (especially our paid cable shows), it’s still a major risk. The last time HBO funneled this kind of cash into a show, it lasted just two seasons. That show was Rome, and HBO only spent $85 million for the first season (although the BBC did contribute $15 million). Although execs claimed that show’s two-season run as premeditated, insiders claim it was money that led to the fall of Rome, which Broadcasting & Cable called “notoriously expensive.” In the show’s afterlife, HBO has done everything they can to recoup their money spent by airing “sanitized” episodes of the show in Italy, ultimately angering that country’s audiences with its historical deviations.

However, HBO may not be modeling their expectations on The Sopranos, but another historical epic with a different legendary filmmaker as its driving promotional force. Band of Brothers was the ten-part, WWII miniseries that cost the network $125 million to produce, winning it six Emmy Awards and attracting some of the best ratings in network history. Of course, it had Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ names and imprint all over it, which might explain why it’s currently the 19th highest grossing DVD of all time. Boardwalk Empire was created by Terence Winter and is loosely based off Nelson Johnson’s book of the same name, but this is “Martin Scorsese’s new show.”

So what’s HBO spending all this money on? Back in November, Speakeasy payed a visit to the elaborate and minutely detailed Brooklyn set:

the built-from-scratch boardwalk set took three months to construct and features era-appropriate storefronts for fake businesses such as the Canton Tea Parlor (serving chop suey, of course), a spiffed-up Ritz Carlton, Babette’s Supper Club (where Thompson & Co ring in the start of Prohibition), and one of Winter’s favorites, a baby incubator display, which passersby could check out premature babies (”Come and see babies that weigh less than 3 lbs — 25 cents!”). Truckloads of sand were driven in to recreate the Atlantic City coastline, and a giant green screen (that’s actually blue) faces the length of the 300-foot boardwalk, which will allow the production team to digitally add in the ocean later.

Sounds expensive to us! The bottom line is, HBO probably wouldn’t be spending this kind of money on a show if it wasn’t going to be incredible (so far, only three episodes have been shot), and as we mentioned earlier, they’re desperate to take back the internet from Matthew Weiner and John Hamm. It’s been a while since HBO’s Sopranos/Six Feet Under/The Wire drama heyday, but if Boardwalk Empire lives up to its budget, the tides could be shifting. This can’t hurt, either.

[KubrickFan]

If those 50 million dollars are primarily the sets being build, doesn't that mean the rest of the episodes will be relatively cheaper? Since the sets have already been built?

[WyldeMan45]

Originally Posted by KubrickFan

If those 50 million dollars are primarily the sets being build, doesn't that mean the rest of the episodes will be relatively cheaper? Since the sets have already been built?

Yeah the article mentioned that, sets and props will just be reused so it'll be much cheaper for future episodes. I'd imagine the sand and CG ocean weren't cheap lol. The baby incubator seems the most interesting to me, that is crazy they treated them like a side show amusement back than. I'd never heard that before.

[WyldeMan45]

Here's a new promo, mostly the same footage as the first one, but this one has more dialogue. I am so pumped for this!!!

[Offender_Mullet]

When is this coming out?

[fatediesel]

Originally Posted by Offender_Mullet

When is this coming out?

Sometime this fall. A date hasn't been announced yet.

It's kind of funny how that article mentions that HBO is looking for the next Mad Men considering HBO passed on Mad Men.

[WyldeMan45]

Originally Posted by fatediesel

Sometime this fall. A date hasn't been announced yet.

It's kind of funny how that article mentions that HBO is looking for the next Mad Men considering HBO passed on Mad Men.

They passed? Well based on what I've seen of Mad Men, I passed on it too, lol. I don't see how Boardwalk is being compared to Mad Men It's more of a Sopranos vibe.