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Empire builder

  HBO are pulling out all the stops for their new series, the 1920s-set Boardwalk Empire, starring Steve Buscemi. The feature-length pilot episode was directed by Martin Scorsese and is said to have cost over $18 million, with the first series overall running to over $70 million. Jazz Age-era Atlantic City was recreated to exacting detail on a huge set in Brooklyn, and it seems no expense has been spared in evoking the look and feel of the 1920s, down to the last detail. It’s clear that HBO are hoping Boardwalk Empire will be the next Sopranos or The Wire, a huge, complex, involving series that draws the viewer in and hooks them for multiple episodes. Perhaps taking a leaf from AMC’s book, Boardwalk Empire appears to be trying to recreate an entire era and mindset in the same way the much-loved Mad Men does for the early 1960s.

The show revolves around the chief treasurer of Atlantic City, Enoch ‘Nucky’ Thompson (loosely based on the real-life Nucky Johnson) and his role as the public face of respectable Prohibition-era temperance – a face built on his private criminal empire that keeps the city, in his words, ‘wet as a mermaid’s twat’ (You gotta love flapper-era obscenity). The pilot episode was an epic combination of classic gangster themes, beautifully exact period detail and intense characterisation and was pretty much a movie in itself. The question is; can Boardwalk Empire live up to its own expectations?

I haven’t yet managed to get into The Wire – not for lack of interest, more that it seems too huge to embark on – but I’m a fan of both shows that Boardwalk Empire can be said to be referencing: The Sopranos and Mad Men (and, to a lesser extent, Rome). The twelve years of Prohibition are a fascinating and oddly ignored period of American history. From the very moment alcohol was outlawed in 1920, it not only remained widely available, but was even more intensely sought out than it was before. The criminal empires of such legendary figures of Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano and Al Capone (all of whom appear in Boardwalk Empire) were built on illegal alcohol, and set in motion the terrifying, compelling gangster world that in some ways defined 20th-century America. Boardwalk Empire depicts the beginning of a world that the real-life Tony Soprano caught the drug-addled tail-end of. Not only that, but the 1920s were a period of intense social change in America and worldwide – women finally got the vote in all states, the First World War challenged the myth of loyalty to king and nation and black people began to place their stake in society and culture in a major way with the emigrations from the South and the development of jazz. This was a period when films about homosexuality were being freely made in Weimar Germany and even the relatively prudish United States was infinitely more liberated in its popular culture than it would be after the Hollywood Production Code.

So does Boardwalk Empire do this febrile period in history justice? Rather like the epic times it’s set in, it tends to succeed and fail on grandiose terms. Firstly, I have to comment on the ear-wrenching horror that is Kelly MacDonald’s attempt at an Irish accent. It probably isn’t the most dramatic failure of the series, but it is certainly the most audible. MacDonald plays an Irish immigrant named Margaret Schroeder, whose abusive husband comes to a sticky end in the pilot and whose subtly combative relationship with Nucky Thompson is the key dramatic fulcrum of the early episodes. Margaret is an interesting character; almost impossibly meek and virginal in early episodes; she reveals a will of steel and appealing sense of wickedness as the series unfolds. But that accent! Imagine Julia Roberts in Far and Away and you’re halfway there. Considering MacDonald is Scottish and a talented actor, one would expect her to do better. However a radio interview I caught once with an accent coach may provide an explanation, not only for MacDonald’s accent, but for all the hideous ‘brogues’ that are inflicted upon viewers of US movies and TV. According to the coach, when an American actor is taught an ‘Irish’ accent, s/he is encouraged to speak in a ridiculous ‘begorrah’ voice because apparently American viewers cannot tell the difference between an average Irish voice and an English one, and cannot understand a genuinely thick Irish accent. I’m inclined to believe this, if only because it explains why otherwise competent actors seem to consistently fall so spectacularly at the hurdle of the brogue. Left to her own devices, I’m confident Kelly MacDonald could sound convincingly Irish, but since HBO’s audiences are largely from the States (except for those who watch its programmes from various dubious streaming sources….ahem) she has been instructed to speak like Chris O’Donnell in Circle of Friends. The theory is backed up by the fact that not a single review of the show on Slate, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine and any number of US blogs has commented on her accent. Terrifyingly, she must sound genuinely Irish to them!

It’s a credit to MacDonald’s acting skills that Margaret is an interesting character despite her voice being less pleasant to listen to than nails on a blackboard. But she’s taken a while to establish herself, which leads into one of the other problems of the series – the use of lazy shorthand in defining some of the female characters. The other woman in Nucky’s life is the cartoonishly slutty Lucy, who is ‘acted’ by Paz de la Huerta as some weird combination of a sleep-walking crack whore and an extra from ‘Chicago’. She’s an utterly ridiculous character, and seems to exist purely to be the whore to Margaret’s madonna, even though Margaret develops into a far more complex character than her Temperance League goody-two-shoes persona in the pilot. There’s plenty of scenes involving Nucky and his ‘business associates’ living it up with good-time girls, but these don’t feel gratuitous in the way scenes involving Lucy do. She might as well have big red arrows pointing at her saying ‘Scarlet Woman!’. Other characters are written in a subtle and intelligent way, so there’s no excuse for this nonsense. Another female character, the mother of Nucky’s young protégé-turned-bad, Jimmy Darmody, is well-acted by Gretchen Mol but horribly miscast. Anne Bancroft as a woman who could be Dustin Hoffman’s mother in The Graduate is more plausible casting than Mol as Jillian Darmody. As the reviewer Paul Martinovic on Den of Geek has been saying: ‘And, as for Gretchen Mol, the only interest I have in her character is once more getting the answer to this question: just how did you give birth when you were nine years old?’. Unlike Martinovic, I think that Jillian is an interesting character, but her appearance compared to her ‘son’ is as jarring as Margaret’s accent. It yet again seems to confirm 21st-century TV’s mortal fear of casting a woman over 40 in a leading role.

These are the two most glaring problems in the show, but when they are laid aside, there’s a lot to like. Chiefly Steve Buscemi, in his first TV leading role, who pulls the show together as the enigmatic, subtle and nattily-dressed Nucky Thompson. Nucky, as Jimmy Darmody puts it, is trying to be ‘half a gangster’ – living the high life on the proceeds of bribery and kickbacks, supplying Atlantic City with booze through deals with Italian gangsters, but trying to keep his hands clean and his head above the murderous violence that Prohibition is helping to engender. Nucky is the go-to man in Atlantic City when anyone has a problem, yet despite his double life he hasn’t lost his true human side; as the show unfolds his complex nature becomes apparent. It helps that Steve Buscemi is such a compelling actor – he packs more narrative into a single glance than most would with reams of dialogue. This is the biggest leading role he has taken on to date, and it’s great to see him finally shaking off the constraints of being a ‘character actor’.

The opening episode shows Nucky’s tendency to try and have his cake and eat it, as he strikes a deal to provide Arnold Rothstein with oceans of booze, only for Jimmy and Rothstein’s driver, one Al Capone, to secretly plot the hijacking and robbery of the consignment. The smoothly-planned operation goes awry and ends in bloodshed. To protect his reputation, Nucky arranges for Margaret’s husband to be framed and killed (helped by his knowledge that he beats her), the booze to be dumped and pays Jimmy off to make himself scarce. This leads Jimmy to set up camp with Al in Chicago. Despite Nucky’s attempts at damage-limitation Rothstein doesn’t take kindly to being deprived of his end of the deal, and the incident sets in motion a slow-burning feud between Nucky and Rothstein and his crew of thugs, including Lucky Luciano. The action moves between Atlantic City, New York and Chicago, as the family tree of the big gangs is traced and their evolution explained. A recurring theme is the shock experienced by the nineteenth-century surviving gang bosses, mostly of Irish, Greek and Jewish extraction, at the levels of random violence used by the new, mostly Italian generation – embodied in the person of Al Capone, played with a scary viciousness by English actor Stephen Graham. African-Americans feature too – one of Nucky’s bootlegging associates is the grimly commanding Chalky White, played by Michael K. Williams of The Wire fame.

Michael Pitt, an actor I’d never heard of before, is a revelation as Jimmy Darmody. Some blogs have unkindly intimated that he’s the ‘poor man’s diCaprio’, but while he shares some of the same intense qualities as Leonardo, he is more than able to make the role his own. Jimmy is a war veteran who’s had his humanity blunted by the horrors of Verdun, yet his fierce intelligence and philosophical nature have saved him from the depraved depths the other Chicago gangsters he works with sink to. He is exacting in his revenge, but knows that as an Irish-American he will always be an outsider with the Italians, and needs, like Nucky, to decide once and for all if he is ‘fully a gangster’. As an aside, the various ethnicities cheerfully use now-unacceptable derogatory terms to refer to each other – terms like ‘dumb Mick’, ‘fucking kike’ and ‘filthy Hun’ abound.

The anti-gangster is as alarming and unappealing as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano at their worst. Nelson van Aldren, Fed agent and head of the anti-Prohibition drive in Atlantic City, is a man so repressed as to be barely human. He recites Bible passages while torturing a man for information, and whips himself rather than admit to his passion for Margaret. Van Aldren is on a mission: to gather enough evidence to bring down Nucky Thompson, and will stop at nothing to get it. He could be cartoonish but Michael Shannon imbues the character with a surprising humanity, as well as being possessed of the most compelling voice I’ve heard in a long time. The unhealthy puritanism that drove much of Prohibition is personified in van Aldren, but at the same time the show avoids simplifying the issue – Prohibition was not inspired merely by prudes, but by many who genuinely believed banning alcohol would help working-class people rise out of the terrible conditions they suffered in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was a popular cause with suffragettes too, who had valid reason to believe that alcohol made more women’s lives a misery than men’s. This aspect of the movement perhaps explains why the independent-thinking Margaret becomes involved in the Women’s Temperance League in the first place. These women were not just the schoolmistress-y prudes of popular cliché, but fighters for the good cause.

There are endless other narrative threads in this programme, but they can’t all be contained in one blog post! Boardwalk Empire is not perfect – it suffers occasionally from heavy-handedness and there are a few too many characters and stories running simultaneously – but the richness of the plotting and acting makes up for this. Its production values are glossily gorgeous too, only let down by the rather obviously CGI-generated ocean in the boardwalk scenes. Like Mad Men, it succeeds in evoking the period with little, well-observed details. The full ferment of the early 1920s, the period where the 19th and 20th centuries clashed resoundingly, is called up in the clothes, conversation and rooms of the characters.

One of the best episodes so far is ‘Nights in Ballygran’ where the self-delusions and sentimentality of Irish-Americans is brilliantly exposed. The spectre of a largely imaginary Ireland looms heavily over the lives of many of the characters, informing actions and lifestyles that would be unrecognisable ‘back home’. Yet some of the attendees at Nucky Thompson’s St Patrick’s Day dinner reminded me unnervingly of the sickenly complacent Fianna Fail TDs that have recently been exposed for the criminals they are. That’s the kind of programme Boardwalk Empire is – by holding up a mirror to the past, it tells us a lot about the present.

More thoughts on this: while Norman is blatantly obnoxious, this take isnt too far from what most beatles writers conclude which as well as being stupid is such a missed opportunity, like we have never had a big splash doorstop biography of Ringo and we *should*, bc evidence suggests he was a lot more complex and troubled than everyone assumes.

There's Maureen's reference to his insecurity and suicide attempt (!), his random disappearance on tour after allegedly expressing suicidal feelings, his decades of alcoholism & the toll that took, and also maybe his detachment in GB isn't wisdom but disassociation??

Like he is happy now and got over the worst of his demons but just bc he was the calmest member externally doesnt mean he wasnt troubled, even traumatised. And just bc he didnt write songs doesnt mean he wasnt creative - remember the experimental home movies he was too shy to show ppl? What about his father that Hunter Davies tracked down who never reached out even after fame? How did Richie feel about him? I've never seen this addressed!

His is a unique perspective as a person who genuinely came from nothing, and as a late arrival to JPG, and it makes me mad that hardly any writers seem interested in exploring his psyche in depth.

fuckkkkkkk offffffffffff

"He looks around, around

He sees angels in the architecture

Spinning in infinity"

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fuckkkkkkk offffffffffff

I was looking through editions of my local newspaper for mentions of The Beatles and I thought this piece in the Bristol Evening Post was so interesting that I typed the whole thing out. I'm such a sucker for these early-ish interviews when they're all still so chatty and relatively excited by the fame and money.

Source: The Bristol Evening Post, 10 November 1964 (they played a concert in the city that day).

Transcript below the cut...

A distant volley of screams penetrated the quiet upstairs foyer of the theatre.  

“Oops, here we go,” said a middle-aged reporter.  “They’re here.  Can somebody tell me which one is which?”

The television men switched on their lights, the photographers squinted through their viewfinders and the journalists juggled with notebooks and pencils.

“I know one of them’s called Ringo,” said the middle aged reporter.  “Could somebody point him out?”

There was a clatter of feet on the stairs, and the Beatles appeared in single file through a doorway, grinning all over their faces, and made straight for the bar.

Everybody instantly forgot all their pungent, searching questions they had been thinking up for weeks, and started firing away with fairly idiotic queries like: “How do you feel?” and “What are you doing these days?”

The television people grabbed John and Paul, who happened to be in the front, and I grabbed George, who started telling me about his new airgun.

“I spend my spare time shooting potatoes off trees in the garden,” said George. “I started with bits of cardboard on the clothesline, but cardboard doesn’t do anything very spectacular when you hit it.  So now I balance spuds on the trees and blast them to bits.”

A television man sneaked up behind me and shoved a microphone in between me and George. George clinked his glass on it and shouted “Cheers” down the mike.

“What are you going to do when the Beatles finish?” asked the television man.

“I’m going to be an engine driver,” said George.  “If they won’t let me have a train, I’ll drive a fire engine.”

Ringo, meanwhile, had retired to a corner for a quiet smoke.

The middle-aged journalist was busy interviewing Paul, whom he thought was Ringo. 

 “Press conferences can be quite a laugh,” said Ringo.  “Have a ciggie.”

We lit our ciggies and talked about Ringo’s New Image.

“Since the film, people seem to notice me a bit more,” said Ringo.  “They used to talk to the others and leave me out because I was supposed to be the quiet one.  Actually I can be quite noisy.  I used to feel rather out of it, but I feel like a proper Beatle now.  It’s amazing though how many people still can’t tell us apart.  Reporters still ask me, “How are you, John?”

The Beatles’ road manager, Neil Aspinall, came over and led Ringo off to have his picture taken.  The Aspinall rescued Paul from a bunch of reporters and the Beatles wandered off to inspect the stage in the A.B.C. theatre.

On stage, Paul was doodling on an electronic organ, and Ringo was doing a violent drum duet with the drummer of one of their supporting groups.

Neil Aspinall had promised me half an hour in the Beatles’ dressing room - the pop equivalent of a pass to the Kremlin.

“I can’t disturb the others for a minute,” he said, “but John’s upstairs.  You can start with him.”

John was chatting with two old school friends from Liverpool.  In the corner of the dressing room a TV set was showing a children’s programme with the sound turned off.

John jumped up, shook hands, and insisted on me taking his armchair. “You look as if you need it, Rog,” he said.

We talked about the allegations that the Beatles are slipping.

“Last year,” said John. “Beatlemania was news. Now No Beatlemania is news. The press have gone to town on the places where there have only been a couple of hundred kids outside of theatres instead of a couple of thousand.  They haven’t bothered to report things like Leeds, where there were 15 of the kids on the stage at one point.”

“Last year that would have been news.  It doesn’t bother us.  We’re sold out pretty well everywhere.  Can you think of another group that is filling halls at the moment? The Stones aren’t.  Maybe we should have done this tour earlier.  We all wanted to do England again before America this year. But Brian said no. And what Eppy says goes. He literally plans our careers.”

“I think we’re better organised now, anyway.  The police are marvellous.  They get us stowed away in the theatres before the kids come out of school, so obviously there aren’t so many riotous scenes.”

The idea of the Beatles breaking up still seems unthinkable. But I asked John if they ever considered adding any extra musicians.

“We’ve thought about it — yes,” said John. “We were once a five-strong group, before Stuart Sutcliffe died.  We’ve toyed with the idea of adding a piano or organ in the past. And for our last disc, we did think of bringing in an orchestra.  But we always rejected the idea in the end.  You see, for the kind of music we play, any more musicians would be superfluous.  I suppose we might have a couple of guest people on the odd occasion, but they wouldn’t be real Beatles.  I’d turn round at the end and say: “Ta very much to Arthur on the organ and Harry on the flute” and that would be that.  I just don’t think anyone else could fit in with us now. We’re a sort of closed shop, the four of us.  An outsider just wouldn’t be accepted, if you see what I mean.”

Before the Beatles’ Christmas show in London and the shooting of their next film — “which is going to be a bit madder than the last one” said John — they are taking a fortnight’s break.

“I’ll just stay home with the wife, Cynthia, and play records,” said John.

Home is his £20,000 Surrey country house, purchased in July as a retreat from the fans.

“Cyn and I are living on the second floor with the cooks and people,” said John. “The rest of the place is like a battlefield.  It’s swarming with electricians and plumbers and odd job men, all trying to get it straight for us before Christmas. I keep on bumping into these strange blokes on the stairs.  I haven’t a clue who they are, but Cyn seems to have them organised.  I’m not sticking my nose into that side of things, except to say vaguely how I want the house to look. Can’t even put a plug on myself.”

“The gardens? Well, there are an awful lot of them, I’ve seen a bloke sort of digging around the place. He smiles and waves, and I smile and wave back. I suppose he must be the gardener. His name is probably Fred.”

John said occasionally Beatle fans manage to find the house.

“They’re usually so exhausted by that time that they haven’t got the strength to actually battle their way in and pull my hair.  Though, the other morning when I was asleep, Cyn found some of them crawling up the stairs.”

Paul and George came in.  Paul sat on the windowsill and George read out an interview with P.J. Proby in a pop paper, in which Proby claimed to have been the first to introduce a certain sound to pop.

“He’s fantastic, isn’t he?” said Paul. “He really believes he’s the greatest. We must tell him some time.”

I asked Paul if he could think of anything which the Beatles hadn’t already been asked.

“There isn’t anything,” said Paul. “But we don’t mind answering the same questions all over again. We like talking to people.”

He enthused about his new Aston Martin. “I did 120 up the M1 and died of fright.”

And he talked about the Beatles futures.

“Whatever happens, I think John and I will carry on writing songs. And I think George, Ringo and I will all get married eventually. But not yet. We haven’t got time.”

Ringo came in with a musical paper carrying a feature article about Paul.

“Don’t like the picture,” said Paul. “They had a much better one of John last week.”

“It made me look like a fat idiot,” said John.

“Exactly,” said George.

A picture of the Beatles suddenly flashed on to the television screen.  

“Quick, turn up the sound, Rog,” said John.

“Don’t bother,” said George. “It’s only that ugly old Beatle lot. I thought they were all dead.”

"You must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey until you come where there are men living who know nothing of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple, who never have known-well-shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do. And I will tell you a very clear proof, and you cannot miss it. When, as you walk, some other wayfarer happens to meet you, and says you carry a winnow-fan on your bright shoulder, then you must plant your well-shaped oar in the ground, and render ceremonious sacrifice to the lord Poseidon, one ram and one bull, and a mounter of sows, a boar pig, and make your way home again and render holy hecatombs to the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven, all of them in order. Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of a sleek old age. Your people about you will be prosperous. All this is true that I tell you.” The Odyssey

I was enjoying the wackiness of the beautiful possibility podcast/blog; I didn't buy into the truly wild & sweeping claims she made about mclennon healing the world or whatever but I liked the mythopoetic themes and the sort of structured insanity of it. I also admired that she's insistent on doing serious mclennon research under her own name etc (although her wider theories are likely to put casual readers off, not to mention problems of confirmation bias in her approach etc).

With all that said, I've been totally put off by some recent episodes' parasocial insistence that paul is a little scared uwu baby that must be encouraged (by her?) to "tell his story", and indeed that he may be listening to the pod for just that purpose??

A chronic case of Too Much Fanfic brain, I fear.

the issue with 2:15 is thats already 4 pm

#ep14

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