Loose Planking: A Stroll Through the Boardwalk Empire

I’ve been fascinated by the history of Prohibition and organized crime since I was a lad. Like many Baby Boomsters, this interest was sparked by the old black-and-white TV cop show The Untouchables, which ran from 1959 to 1963.

Starring Robert Stack as real-life Treasury agent Eliot Ness, The Untouchables (available on DVD) was the Miami Vice and The Sopranos of its day. It’s a little creaky now and has as much to do with factual Prohibition history as Fess Parker does with Davy Crockett. Still, it stands up thanks to its elaborate production, flashy direction, brassy Nelson Riddle score, chewy dialogue, booming gun battles, and gallery of great character performances. Its best episodes rise to the level of high-flying noir movies.

And so, I was all moonshine for the 2010 premiere of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Boardwalk Empire tells the Prohibition story through the splashy lens of Atlantic City, New Jersey, the forerunner of Las Vegas and still one of America’s biggest entertainment and gambling oases . . .  and a major center of criminal activity during the 1920s. It’s about to start its second season this Sunday. On the one hand, I will be there. On the other hand, though . . . .

The first season of Boardwalk Empire sure promised much, considering it was created by Terence Winter, a writer and producer of The Sopranos. Its first episode was directed by the unbeatable Martin Scorsese, who set the look and tone of the show for its first 11-episode season.

The promise was mostly kept. It’s a very very good show. Still, as I dutifully and closely watched every episode, sometimes twice, the wick at the top of my spine felt damp, rarely flaring to life. A Vegas jackpot’s worth of money and effort has been poured into this show . . . but all that effort there are some barren spots that are worth pondering.

Great as it looks, Boardwalk Empire sports too much spit and shine. For all its period precision, the show feels sleek, slick, and mannered in a familiar HBO way. It holds me at arm's length, never pulls me into its world, out of my modern-day living room and into that time (as I am by the great, grungy, and lamented Deadwood). It’s like standing before a museum diorama: The details are perfect, but there’s an artificial cleanliness , similar to a 1950s Douglas Sirk Hollywood movie, not my favorite genre. For all the verisimilitude, it still feels like being enacted on a very pricey, fussed-over soundstage. No grit, little mud, and even less life. No whiff of sea air, or of sand hissing across the boardwalk, catching in my collar and shoes.

Another problem lies with its casting. Nucky Johnson, the real-life treasurer and unelected boss of Atlantic City during the Dry Days and beyond, was, by some accounts I've read, a looming block of radiant power, as men like him often are--the kind of guy who can open a door with his stare. In two photos I've seen, he looks like a perfect main street Babbitt, a well-fed, Anglo-Rotarian who loomed over that age as much as Al Capone.

Also, the historical Nucky Johnson, in another sense, resembles, well, fictional Tony Soprano. This put the producers in an understandable dilemma: No way would they cast James Gandolfini, nor did they--or we--want The Road to the Sopranos: The Prohibition Prequel.

A further digression please: When it comes to fictional narratives of historic events, I'm no absolutist for accuracy. While it's great when an historical fiction captures an era's spirit or its everyday details, a movie, TV series or novel, has to conjure its own world, completely and unashamedly. If you really manage to convince me in your movie that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Martian cabal led by Herman Munster, well, hats off then (though I wouldn't try if I were you, Ed Wood fanboy).  If art has a "job," it's to enhance life by making the impossible or unlikely, possible and likely. Making a carbon copy of history doesn't make it art, or even good. If you want real history, non-fiction remains your best bet.

Returning to my point: Boardwalk's producers faced a casting problem, and to solve it, they drove as far as away from Tony Soprano and the historic Nucky Johnson as possible . . . and cast Steve Buscemi as Atlantic City's kingpin, renaming him Nucky Thompson.

This is absolutely no knock on Steve Buscemi. For over 25 years, he's been a beloved and honored character actor, etching superb portrayals of snaggle-toothed guttersnipes and sweaty losers, making him a downtown, back-alley Warren Oates or Strother Martin, no mean compliment from me or anyone.

But as for playing a man with his mitts on the levers of power; who can move others to corruption, murder and mayhem, with equal parts charm and menace . . . well, as one Buscemi fan put it to me, he is so not that guy. He is not Nucky Thompson. He's Nucky's expendable sidekick. The kind of loser at whom Bruce Gordon as Frank Nitti in The Untouchables series would famously bellow "You're DEAD!"

For all his talent and dedication, Steve Buscemi hasn't the kind of wattage or weight to play a man of power and respect. His small frame is not to blame. (James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, two height-challenged powder kegs from Hollywood's Golden Era, would have flung Buscemi to Mars by his ear . . . and, of course, in real history, there's Napoleon to consider.) For me, Buscemi lacks that dominating glow, that mask of command.

(As for whom I would cast as Nucky Thompson, William Hurt springs easily to mind)

Other casting problems nibble the edges of Boardwalk Empire. Michael Kenneth Williams, the indelible and magnificent Omar from The Wire, wasn't given much to do in the first season as the cleverly named Chalky White, and I hope they fix that this season. In the same way that Nucky's suit seems too hang too big on Steve Buscemi, Chalky's wardrobe seems too small for the estimable Mr. Williams.

The role of Al Capone also appears under-cast. Like Buscemi as Thompson, Stephen Graham, a British actor who made a credible Baby Face Nelson in Michael Mann's boring Dillinger movie, seems too small of stature and presence, too recessive to play a blunderbuss like Al Capone.

Again, it's not a matter of historical nitpicking. Character actor Neville Brand played Capone in The Untouchables series and, while looking nothing like the real man, credibly portrayed the coarse brutality of a gang boss. (If you want to see a real casting error, you must simply stop your life to watch rail-thin Waspy Jason Robards play Capone in Roger Corman's quite historically accurate but flat-footed The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.) Like everyone in Boardwalk Empire, Graham is an excellent actor doing good work, except I can't see him ever conquering the entire city of Chicago. At least not the way Capone did.

So, I'll stop my whining. And I'll stick with this show 'til the last shot is fired, the last gangster falls, and the smoke clears away. There's still much to like and the way they re-weave the historical narrative (the fall of Arnold Rothstein; the apprenticeship and rise of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky) fascinate me no end. It can never be 100-percent accurate, but it could well have happened that way.

Best of all is Michael Shannon as the homicidal, borderline crazy--but fictional, we hope--Treasury agent Nelson Van Alden. Shannon’s blockish head and dark cave eyes reveal a cramped, seething, coppered soul, possibly the most dangerous man in Boardwalk Empire’s universe. He embodies all the cultural conflicts that Prohibition brought to the surface: the clash between insane, cold-hearted idealism and messy human existence, the struggle between how we believe we should be and what we really are. He's as much a creation of that terrible law as the gangsters who rose to power. No wonder Prohibition failed so miserably. One look at Van Alden might well have caused the real Eliot Ness to blanch and hurry out of the Treasury Department employment office, never to be heard from again.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield


(Re-edited 9/26/11; 10/7/11)

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his novel Butchertown, a 1920's gangster shoot-em-up. Not enough for ya? He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

The Butchertown Chronicles: How a Writer Reads

I’m unable to find the exact quote, but I recall John Updike once saying that one of the problems with being a prolific, practicing book writer—paid or not, I’ll add—is the little time it leaves for pleasure reading.

I'm learning this well. With my Prohibition gangland saga Butchertown well under way, my own pleasure reading is a mere half-hour or so before bed, or during flights of insomnia.  Ramsey Campbell's Creatures of the Pool (really fine so far) won’t be finished for several weeks, and I likely won’t close Vladimir Nabokov’s The Enchanter (an early run at Lolita) until October. Other books purr from the shelves, waving their paws like needy kittens as I pass by. Apologies to John le Carre, Michael Innes, Georges Simenon, and The Skylark, an early version of A Dark Matter by Peter Straub. The hard galloping and brightly blazing gunfire of Luke Short's and Loren Estleman's frontier tales remain in our garage in their 21st-century storage containers (until, maybe, an upcoming vacation in Colorado).

With a sigh, I pass by the novels of Ron Hansen and Martin Cruz Smith on bookstore shelves. And gosh, those undoubtedly absorbing histories of the Crimean War, the Comanche wars of the American Southwest, and the scintillating, winking Holes by Nicholson Baker sure look swell (or swell-ing in the case of Mr. Baker) . . .  but with the exception of Nabokov-related material, a question floats by with every book I encounter: Will this help Butchertown be a better book?

As for the books I'm employing in my task, they number about a dozen so far, mostly lined up on my desk, all orbiting, at various distances, around one topic—Prohibition in 1920s California. In my imagination, though, they make a rickety, raggedly built tower. It's clear, from gazing up at its ramparts, old reading habits won't do here. At my usual pace, poring over every page of that stack would take me, at ballpark estimate, two years. That kind of time I don’t care to take.

Normally, I read like an anxious Boy Scout as my Inner Scoutmaster glares balefully over my shoulder. (“Yes, but are you reading EVERY COMMA!? Recite the fourth paragraph in the Ulysses in Night Town chapter! NOW NOW NOW!” While perhaps useful for the weaving poetic narrative of The Gift, this really is an inefficient method for most other books, especially nonfiction. No matter how hard I try, the memory-sponge can only hold so much information before it becomes saturated and anything useful leaks away.

And so I must take the shortcuts, teach myself to scan and skip, with notebook and sticky flags handy. I've already spent hours with old newspapers and will spend more. Information is what I need: bits, blocks, and strands of detail, to tuck and weave into my tale, and the world through which it winds. That and nothing else. Even with genuinely good books—some of which I'll write about in coming months—pleasure must trail behind business. First homework. Then I can go out and roam alone through Liverpudlian sewers.

And what about the Internet, that sticky repository that stretches like pi (you know . . .  infinitely) Where All Knowledge Shimmers Under My Fingertips. Aside from a few sites, I've found little so far, and I have an ominous sense I won’t find much more (except links to more books). The Internet may be as wide as the ocean, but when it comes to the depth of research that's required, at least for Butchertown's time and place, the tops of my shoes remain dry.

For depth, coherence, and focus, books and paper still rule. During a two-hour visit to the California Historical Society in downtown San Francisco the other day,  I scanned a section—just a section—of The Prohibition Movement in California–1848 to 1933 by Gilman M. Ostrander, which, in turn, pointed me to a forgotten novel by Prohibitionist Upton Sinclair, The Wet Parade. That may well be a bad book, but it would be a good idea to get my eyes in it, somehow, at least for a few pages.

I learned more from those two hours than I have from a dozen hours of web surfing.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield


(Re-edited 9/19/11)

Photo by Author.

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Side Door To Italy, Whistling on Horseback

 Not Enough of Italy

[This week, the good folks at the Red Room asked its members to write about Italy. Having nothing to say about the anniversary of 9/11 that isn’t being better said elsewhere, plus an odd perspective on the requested topic, I happily acceded.]

I love Italy. I've never been there, know only enough Italian to order pizza, and the way household economics are calculated, my wife and I are not likely to visit there anytime soon.

But I love Italy, anyway, like a distant lover. Hello Italia, from across both seas, digital and global!

I was not brought up to love Italy. When I was a boy in southern New York State in the early 1960s, a goal-line kick up the Hudson from the City, Italians were, within my family, spoken of dismissively. (Then again, so was most everyone else on two legs). Italian jokes commonly circulated around the schoolyard and on the bus. (Later, when I moved to Wisconsin, the exact same jokes returned as Polish jokes. In California, a few of them reappear as blond jokes; this leads to interesting notions about the mutability of ethnic humor, a subject I'm sure has been explored by sifting academic minds).

After my exile to the Midwest, my attitudes underwent a twist. In late 1967, this young stranger-in-town saw the classic Italian (or "spaghetti") western For a Few Dollars More at the Time Cinema in downtown Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Of all the striking merits of that then-despised movie, the most memorable to my mind was the lively, colorful, haunting, driving, inventive music score, written by a composer with the most exotic name I'd ever heard—Ennio Morricone.

Ennio Morricone instantly became my favorite musician, supplanting even The Beatles and Herb Alpert (no laughing, you with that 101 Strings collection you hide behind your Dylan albums whenever your hipster nephew pops by). Forty-five years later, with two hundred of his scores lining my CD shelf, he still is. (Hey, a man’s gotta have a hobby; and if you think I'm crazy, so is the rest of the planet.)

I did not suddenly tumble in love with all things Italian then. In the broad, flat middle of giant America in the pre-Internet, age, gaining awareness of anything beyond the Wisconsin state line was something of a chore. Cheese, beer and the Green Bay Packers, all that kept getting in the way. (I’d also say I'm more of a Europhile than Italo-phile.)

Over decades, my interest and pleasure in things Italian threaded lazily through my soul: the art of the Renaissance (especially Michelangelo); the rich, epic beauty of Italian cities, such as Florence; Italy’s grand colorful history, involving such figures as the Borgias, Machiavelli, and the Catholic Church, with the ritual, drama and intrigue played out under the magnificent heaven of their domes.

The rugged, sun-honeyed hills and mountains; the rich food and the exuberant face its people show the world. Italian filmmakers made many great films beyond the spaghetti westerns and continue to do so, lively compelling films.

On the dark and thrilling side, there's the history of Italian/Sicilian organized crime, and how it immigrated to America to plant its unique criminal subculture and how the Italian people still suffer from its poisonous shadow. Then there are coarse serio-comic antics of quasi-fascist Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. (If you think American politics is a grim circus these days, be glad we don't have Italy's.)

Aside from their sun-blasted surface details and desert landscapes (mostly filmed in Spain), those spaghetti westerns had little to do with the American West, in both myth and fact. Indeed, they weren't aimed at American audiences at all, and we were never meant to see them. Sergio Leone’s films, and the hundreds of other movies from that mash-up genre, were an indirect conversation among themselves and their audience—mostly moviegoers from Southern Italy—about Italian society and culture at the time. (A clue: note the absence or ineffectualness of the Catholic Church). They refashioned the surfaces and rituals of our myths as a way, in part, of looking at their own world.

From these films though--most of which are just as bad as the worst American B westerns--something of Italy’s flavor does filter through to us: the circus-like exuberance; the clownish, balletic violence, a combination of Punchinello show and low-budget opera; and, maybe most of all, a broad bright streak of individualism that’s so much like ours here in America. In that sense, it’s no wonder that some of the most ingenious, colorful and cock-eyed movies found an audience here.

Grazie mille, Maestro Morricone! Grazie mille, Italia!

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

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Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Lee Van Cleef, Paulie Walnuts Hair, and 15 Years of Online Writing (Part 1)

As of this writing, an essay I posted here in February 2011 about character actor Lee Van Cleef has received 255 unique page views, number one of all the 100-plus articles I’ve placed on Blogger since 2007.

Winner in the keyword search category: “Paulie Walnuts Hair.” Google this and you will find an article I posted some years back on the final episode of The Sopranos, where I praised the performance—and noted the hair styling—of Tony Sirico as Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri. This article ranks at number 9 in unique page views (100). From this, I conclude there are many middle-to-late-aged men (or their wives and girlfriends) in search of hair products and finding me on the roster.

I doubt most of these restless ones are reading it. They’re looking for hair-fashion advice and I’m too bald to offer any besides “Wear a good hat.”

After 15 years of online writing, this is what this frustrated New Yorker writer has to show for it—that and nearly 7,000 page views on Blogger; plus over 23,000 on The Red Room, since 2007 (more on that nice space later); and over 2,000 on my Scrib’d page, since March 2011.

So, call me an old grizzled veteran of online writing—close your eyes and there’s Gabby Hayes, Arthur Hunnicutt, Walter Brennan, or Edmond O’Brien in The Wild Bunch. (Envision my gimpy leg, snaggled teeth, and tobacco-stained beard.)

My career, such as it is by cracky, might be blamed on Jon Carroll, legendary columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. Sometime in the late 1990s, I attended a talk he gave in San Francisco on essay and column writing.

I listened with happy attention throughout. And when he advised those of us who wanted his gig—or something like it—to start an e-mail column (pointing to another e-mail columnist who’d landed a job as a TV reviewer on a major newspaper), my ears fluttered like butterfly wings.

I rushed home and started writing immediately. I created an e-mail list of 20 people or so and sent out my first e-mail essay: a still-pretty-funny satire on an allegedly obsessive friendship between John Travolta and Quentin Tarantino. Among my first responses, one brusquely asked to be removed from the list. To this day, these rejections sting like a bee to the gut: I feel as though I’ve walked uninvited into someone’s living room and started belting out “Long Tall Sally.” My e-mail list eventually grew to 150 during this time, but now I keep the list small and discrete.

I needed a title for my new column. Impatiently, I grabbed “IMHO” (“In My Humble Opinion”). I never liked it and kept shaking my brain out for a better one. I wrote about 70 columns, at the rate of one a week, usually sent out on Sunday--the kind of smorgasbord you find here, except broader in scope. I simply wanted to write essays and articles like Jon Carroll, S.J. Perelman, and the sophisticated circus wagon of New Yorker writers—some funny, some serious; reviews of books, movies, and thoughts and things that happened to me, like how I got a driver’s license for the first time in 20 years.

Among the best were a still-hilarious take on pork barrel spending, which I rewrote a couple years back and posted here. My favorite—I think the most well received—was an insane riff on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal . . . but like a lot of satire, the humor is now dated, obscure, and local, like Gerald Ford jokes on Saturday Night Live reruns. That one will likely stay buried, laughter heard only in the memory.

Sometime in 1998, I joined Posthoc, the online magazine published by Susan MacTavish Best, and became a real editor and film critic. “IMHO” went in the back of the closet. For a year-and-half I immersed myself in my non-paying position as though it were paid. At last, I might gain entrance into the hallowed halls of great film critics, take a seat in the dark next to Pauline Kael and Ebert and Siskel.

At Posthoc, I wrote over 100 reviews and articles. I supervised a team of critics and hustled my way into dozens of studio-sponsored pre-screenings at the Variety Club and other venues. I sat next to critics like Wesley Morris, Michael Sragow, and Curious Man reader Richard Von Busack. (Only some of what my team and I wrote, however, remains available online.) I truly enjoyed my work and think I did a good job, especially for a beginner.

But toward the end, I found the job of film criticism tedious, especially when sitting through such gutter-thumpers as The Wild Wild West and Battleship Earth. I felt my long love affair with the movies dimming. The movies and I were both changing, and I concluded that maybe I wasn’t that good a critic.

Posthoc closed in 1999. I hustled for newspaper jobs for a time, but the door I hoped would open remained closed. I fought the idea of returning to e-mail columns—it felt like a step backward and down.

But eventually, I had to face a kind of reality. Silence was not an option.

(To be continued . . . .)

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

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Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark is available right NOW, published by Ambler House Publishing. It can be ordered in both paperback and e-book editions through your local independent bookstore, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Smashwords, and Scrib'd. His original comic screenplay Whackers  is now available in Kindle, Nook, iPad and on Scrib'd, also from Ambler House. Other material can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. Not enough for ya? He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.