HBO's 'Boardwalk Empire' sets Jersey scene - in Brooklyn
By Alan Sepinwall/The Star-Ledger
November 18, 2009, 6:45AM
boardwalk-empire-set-night.jpgThe Atlantic City set of HBO's upcoming "Boardwalk Empire."
HBO’s next set of New Jersey wiseguys will be conducting business out of a parking lot in Brooklyn.
boardwalk-empire-steve-buscemi.jpgView full sizeSteve 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.
boardwalk-empire-set-day.jpgView full sizeThe "Boardwalk Empire" set.
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.
boardwalk-empire-michael-kenneth-williams.jpgView full sizeMichael Kenneth Williams as Chalky White
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.”
