Can 'Boardwalk Empire' make Atlantic City matter again?
A still from Boardwalk Empire. Courtesy HBO.
9:17 am Sep. 13, 2010
"You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days," Lou, an aging small-time gangster played by Burt Lancaster, says wistfully in Louis Malle's 1981 masterpiece “Atlantic City.” He is recalling the pulsating days of Prohibition, when a local political boss named Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, whose reach extended to the State House and beyond, strolled on the Boardwalk in the company of Al Capone. "Now it's all so goddamn legal."
Terence Winter, the Emmy Award-winning writer of “The Sopranos” and Martin Scorsese were equally seduced by the 1920s Atlantic City described by Nelson C. Johnson in Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, and they have created an HBO series based on the book, lavishing painstaking research and a hyperventilated rollout on a project with a can’t-miss pedigree.
HBO isn’t betting the entire house, but it is making an enormous investment—$18 million for the first episode alone, which Scorsese decided to direct himself—in the prime-time series “Boardwalk Empire” in what it hopes will be the spiritual and economic successor to “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” In addition, the cable network plans to spend almost $10 million on a promotional campaign, having formed partnerships with Bloomingdale’s, Caesar’s Atlantic City and its parent company, Harrah’s Entertainment, and Canadian Club whisky.
In “Boardwalk Empire,” which Winter envisions as a long-running series, Nucky Thompson is the city treasurer in title but absolute ruler in fact, deriving his power from a community eager to share in the fruits of prostitution, illegal gambling and bootlegging. The character is based on Nucky Johnson, the Atlantic County treasurer from 1911 until his conviction for income tax evasion in 1941. He was the boss of a Republican machine that he inherited, fine-tuned and passed on to the next generation of corrupt political leaders.
Johnson hand-picked a shrewd triumvirate to succeed him—one that I would come to know as a reporter fresh out of college in 1970—led by State Senator Frank S. “Hap” Farley, whose quarter century in the State Senate made him one of the most powerful people in New Jersey. On the night Farley lost re-election in 1971, bringing an end to the reign of the Atlantic County Republican machine, he wagged his finger, locked me in his gaze, and blamed the press for his defeat. Though I was pleased, I knew that several of my predecessors at The Press of Atlantic City had done the spade work, and I was reaping the rewards.
And there was Paul “Skinny” D’Amato —the beloved owner of the famed 500 Club, who teamed up Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, and hosted Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra and scores of other cultural icons of the day.
Part of my education about the odd ways of Atlantic City was gained in the early morning hours during a long winter, when the bar—like the surrounding streets—was deserted. Skinny sat at a table describing the Atlantic City netherworld past and present while drinking an omnipresent cup of coffee; a cigarette would always be burning, and for hours he would flick at a book of matches that he was twirling while balancing it between his index finger and the table.
To a young reporter, the mix was intoxicating and far removed from the Atlantic City I had come to know as a kid on a rolling chair with his grandmother in the 1950s, or hanging out in the ‘60s in front of Hi Hat Joes, a refreshment stand on the Boardwalk in the Chelsea section, where crowds of predominantly Jewish kids from Philadelphia would gather every summer night.
Winter said he was tempted to do his series on Atlantic City in the 1950s and on Skinny— who was tapped by Sinatra to run his ill-fated Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe—but said that the ‘50s felt too close to Tony Soprano. “It would have seemed like Tony’s dad,” he said in an interview.
In the series, Steve Buscemi (who had worked with Winter on “The Sopranos”) plays Nucky, equal parts racketeer and dapper politician, who oversaw a Prohibition-era Atlantic City that provided a changing post-World War One nation with liquor, prostitutes, nightclubs showgirls— a Las Vegas before there was a Las Vegas. And the birthplace of organized crime, where in May 1929 Johnson gathered Capone, Meyer Lansky and other crime family bosses to form their thing.
For present-day Atlantic City, whose hotels and casinos are reeling from a national economy on life support and fresh gambling competition in neighboring states, the “Boardwalk Empire” bonanza could not have come at a better time. True to form, the town—like an aging hooker getting a second glance—is tingling with anticipation. Atlantic City should be “thinking now of the marketing potential” and “seize the national spotlight,” the editorial page editor of The Press of Atlantic City urged in a blog post.
You almost can’t blame them. Here’s how their good fortune came about. The book, researched and written by Johnson, a local lawyer and politician who today is a state Superior Court judge (and no relation to Nucky), was passed on by several publishing houses until his second agent found a small publisher, Plexus Publishing Inc. of Medford, N.J., to take it on. The first run was 2,000 copies, and a subsequent one was 10,000. But with fortune smiling on the small South Jersey company, John Bryans, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Plexus, said 80,000 copies updated with photographs from the series are on the way in anticipation of what is hoped will be a blockbuster series.
(In an odd twist, given Atlantic City and New Jersey’s intermittent attention to the law, Bryans said the state recently ordered the author to refrain from giving interviews about the book or the series until it is determined whether his activities will violate the state’s code of judicial ethics.)
In 2006, HBO passed the book along to Winter and asked him to look it over, nonchalantly adding that if he was interested then Scorcese also wanted in. It was not a hard choice for Winter, a Brooklyn guy who said that Scorcese is “somebody I idolize” and that his movie Taxi Driver drew him into the film business in the first place.
Winter says that in the period drama, “we try to be as historically accurate as possible”— from the herringbone-patterned wooden Boardwalk to the vintage musical scoring to the material in just about every stitch of clothing. That is, even though the 300-foot stretch of Boardwalk and elaborate sets replicating slices of Atlantic City, Chicago and New York, which cost another $5 million to erect, are situated in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.
Initially, Winter and his associates—including the director Tim Patten and production designer Bob Shaw, who also worked on “The Sopranos”—wanted to film in Atlantic City, but the years had had their way with the resort, and there was very little left there to work with. Asbury Park, an even more tired shore town, was also considered. But in the end New York made the most sense, because of a 15 percent tax break on the land as well as the convenience for the cast and crew.
Of course, Atlantic City, always looking for a quick buck, is poised to take full advantage of its latest flirtation with notoriety. As the author says in the book’s prologue, Atlantic City has a “long-time knack at promoting itself beyond its true worth.” To kick things off, Caesar’s, no stranger to excess, plans to host a premier on Thursday (Sept. 16) and a viewing party three days later when the first of this season’s 12 episodes is broadcast.
In Atlantic City, the excitement is palpable. Gambling profits have shrunk almost 30 percent since 2006, and six of the city’s 11 operating casinos have been through bankruptcy or restructuring in the last year. Moreover, the companies that had hoped to expand or renovate after witnessing the success of the newest and glitziest hotel, the Borgata, were forced to postpone the work when business fell off.
In one of the most devastating setbacks, the Pinnacle Entertainment company shelved its plans to build a $1.5 billion casino-resort after imploding a hotel and leaving a 19-acre prairie on the boardwalk, and Morgan Stanley pulled its $1.2 billion stake in a $2.6 billion project, the Revel casino, leaving a partly finished colossus that one powerful state senator said "looks like it's dead."
The problem is, New Jersey can ill afford to have Atlantic City go the way of, say, Camden or Trenton or Newark or Paterson. According to a study conducted by Rutgers University and released last month by the Casino Association of New Jersey, the casino industry supports more than 100,000 jobs, or about 2 percent of the 5.2 million estimated jobs in the state, and generates nearly $12 billion in spending and $4.2 billion in payroll earnings annually.
“From our estimation, Atlantic City is the fourth- or fifth-largest destination stop in the country, after Las Vegas, New York and Disney World,” Michael Lair, a Rutgers professor who was the lead researcher of the study, said when it was released. “This can’t be underestimated and must be underlined.”
In July, Atlantic City’s deteriorating circumstances and importance to New Jersey’s overall economy led Chris Christie to announce his intentions to turn around the town’s sagging fortunes. The Republican governor proposed establishing a state-run tourism district to oversee policing as well as develop the famous Boardwalk—which currently has more gaps in its storefronts than the mouth of a cavity-ravaged crack addict—the aging casinos that tower over it and the drug- and prostitute infested streets nearby.
Now the fate of Christie’s plan is in the hands of the New Jersey legislature, not a reassuring prospect for a city and an industry that needed to be rescued yesterday.
Of course, that has led to the question: to whom should Atlantic City try to appeal, vacationing middle-class families crammed into their S.U.V.’s or young married couples and singles looking for action at the tables and elsewhere? Should there be water parks or water beds? Snow White costumes or G strings?
Some Atlantic City watchers dismiss the notion of catering to family vacationers, and point out that such nearby shore resorts as Ocean City, which is even dry, Long Beach Island or the Wildwoods as well as any number of smaller beach communities already have a lock on the kiddie crowd.
Better to return to its roots, they say. Lower the drinking age. Raise the skirts. Set aside a topless area.
As Jim Perskie, the deputy editorial page editor of The Press of Atlantic City, wrote in a recent blog post: “Atlantic City was built on the idea of flouting the law and societal norms. Bootlegging, speakeasies, illegal gambling, prostitution—that’s what built Atlantic City.”
Of course, Perskie then splashed cold water on the notion of a revved-up—or retro, take your choice—Atlantic City. “That kind of approach is impossible these days. Even a watered-down version of that kind of Atlantic City is unlikely, no matter how good an idea it might be.”
Shortly before Resorts International first opened its doors to waiting throngs who had come to gamble in May 1978, Governor Brendan Byrne, whose unwavering boosterism helped a dying Atlantic City get back on its feet, warned organized crime, “Keep your filthy hands off Atlantic City.”
Maybe he should have told them to come on down. Look what it did for Nucky.
Homepage image of Atlantic City skyline via Brian G. Wilson at flickr.com.
