Revisiting the Prohibition Era (Ext. Interview with Terence Winter of Boardwalk Empire)

Welcome to another Bonus Episode of SNAFU! On Season 2, we discovered an eerie plot to poison the nation's alcohol; the government's last ditch effort to quell consumption and protect Prohibition. For color commentary, Ed brought in the preeminent producer, writer and showrunner, Terence Winter - the man behind HBO's Boardwalk Empire. With a heavy dose of wit and New York flare, Terry and Ed touch upon the fashion, ideologies and mishaps of the 1920s, whilst peeking behind the curtain of Hollywood productions. Enjoy Ed's conversation with Terry Winter and we'll be back with new episodes next Wednesday. Subscribe to the SNAFU YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod http://www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod Buy the SNAFU book: www.snafu-book.com See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:34Speaker 06

  Hello and good day. This, of course, is Ed. On this lovely morning, I'm going to bring you back to one of our favorite bonus episodes from season three of Snafu, Formula Six. I had the incredible pleasure of sitting down with Terence Winter, the creator, writer, and executive producer of the amazing and epic TV show, Boardwalk Empire. Terry did a ton of research on the prohibition era. So we got to actually compare notes and even teach each other a thing or two about those good old bootlegging days. We also talked about our very different entries into Hollywood and Terry's story is insane.

• 2:17Speaker 06

  He essentially conned his way into showbiz. It's a wild story. He's also the brilliant mind behind the show Tulsa King and the great Scorsese movie, The Wolf of Wall Street. It was an absolute honor and delight to connect with Terry. I loved his story, his grit and his humor, and I think you will too. So keep listening and we'll be back with your regularly scheduled programming next week.

• 2:50Speaker 06

  Hey there, I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, Season 3, Formula 6. How Prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people. Welcome to another bonus episode. You may recall in these bonus episodes, I bring in a guest and just have a great interview. So after spending this season unraveling prohibition, I wanted to talk to someone who knows this era inside and out, someone who could give us a whole new layer of historical context, color and detail. So who better than

• 3:30Speaker 06

  the guy who actually built it, or at least rebuilt it on TV? Enter Terence Winter, the brilliant creator of HBO's Boardwalk Empire. He joins me for a fascinating deep dive into prohibition's gangsters, corrupt officials, and of course, its completely bonkers policies. We talk about his unlikely journey from Brooklyn to Hollywood, including the wild story of how he invented a fake talent agency to get his foot in the door, and how he stumbled upon the real life Nucky Johnson, the inspiration for his lead character, Nucky Thompson. I also ask him whether Formula 6 was ever on

• 4:09Speaker 06

  his radar and dig into some of the not entirely coincidental parallels between his fictionalized characters and the real people we covered this season. And honestly, just as a fellow showbiz guy, I had a blast nerding out with him. Because who doesn't love a peek behind the curtain of a great TV show? So settle in, grab a stiff drink, preferably non-poisoned, and enjoy my conversation with Terence Winter.

• 4:49Speaker 07

  Hey, it's so good to meet you, man.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  You too. It's so, so great to meet you.

• 4:53Speaker 07

  Honestly, I didn't know you were a history guy.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  You know, there's such a cool overlap of this season of Snafu, which is all about prohibition. And we'll get into some of the really surprising things that I learned and researched for this season that might even be surprising to you as an expert on prohibition because of your incredible series Boardwalk empire. But let's start a little more broadly, so our listeners can get to know you a little bit better. Where are you from originally? What was your sort of path to Hollywood writer?

• 5:31Speaker 07

  I grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn, which is an area that I usually have to describe by its proximity to other neighborhoods in Brooklyn that people have heard of. You may have heard of Sheepshead Bay, which actually was an integral neighborhood in terms of prohibition, because boats used to come right in there. And that's kind of near Coney Island. So, you know, basically, blue collar family, blue collar neighborhood. I actually studied to be an auto mechanic in high school, and that didn't stick. I took a detour into the deli business, eventually figured out that I needed to go to college, eventually went to law school, practiced law for two years, hated it. And then my deep, dark secret was I had always wanted to be a sitcom writer, which was something that, you know, on the East Coast in the 70s,

• 6:15Speaker 07

  you dare not tell your friends that you wanted to go to Hollywood and be anything.

• 6:20Speaker 06

  I had a similar thing. And growing up in Georgia, I harbored these deep aspirations from a very young age, but I knew I could never tell anyone.

• 6:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, you'd get your ass kicked.

• 6:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, you'd either get beat up, or they would just crush your dreams.

• 6:35Speaker 07

  Absolutely, which is what friends are for. Can I curse on this?

• 6:40Speaker 06

  Hell, yes, or fuck, yes.

• 6:41Speaker 07

  Okay, good, because it's very difficult for me to talk without. Yeah, I do hold the record for the most uses of the word fuck in a movie, Wolf of Wall Street, which I'm very proud of. So it's very hard for me to have a conversation, so that'll slip out occasionally.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  Good.

• 6:54Speaker 07

  Anyway, once I came out of the closet as a writer, I just said, I'm moving to LA, and I'm gonna figure this out. I showed up here in 1991, and I just kinda plunged in, and I started out, you know, attempting to be a sitcom writer, and then eventually just morphed into drama that kinda had comedy in it. So I just got incredibly lucky, and still lucky to be doing that kinda stuff.

• 7:15Speaker 06

  So, growing up in Brooklyn, and then heading off to law school, did you then become a lawyer in Brooklyn? Did you stay sort of in the...

• 7:25Speaker 07

  I was a lawyer in Manhattan. I, you know, I, my only ambition as a kid was I wanted to be rich, because we were not. And the only two jobs I knew that could make you rich were doctor and lawyer. The doctor was out. And I remember there was a quote by Benjamin Franklin, and he said, "Pour thy purse into thy head, and no man can take it from you." And you know what? Get an education, basically, and no one can ever steal it.

• 7:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a beautiful quote. I like that.

• 7:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, I love that. So I took creative writing, and eventually I stumbled onto journalism. And, you know, again, you know, my ambition was to make money. That was what a good job was. The concept of liking your job was something, you know, you just wanna make money. So lawyer was the thing. So I had another professor, journalism professor, named Jerry Schwartz, who was a managing editor at The Associated Press. And he, I asked him to write me a recommendation for law school. And he did. He wrote me this glowing recommendation. He gave it to me in a manila envelope, and he said, "There's another letter in there for you personally." And that letter said, "Please don't go to law school, please be a writer." And I was like, holy shit, this is the second adult who's told me I am a good writer.

• 8:29Speaker 06

  Good thing you didn't submit that letter to the law school.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  By accident.

• 8:35Speaker 07

  It might have saved me a lot of time. Meanwhile, all my friends who became auto mechanics were making a fortune. And they all thought I was the biggest idiot in the world. Joe College, you know, I'm already now in the whole student loan wise from NYU. And I was like, all right, there's only one way forward, and that's to law school. So I did that, went at night, worked for Merrill Lynch during the day as the legal assistant to one of the lawyers who counseled the trading people. And graduated, got a job at a big Manhattan law firm, passed the New York bar, the Connecticut bar. And my first week there, I realized I had made a grave, grave error. I hated it. I didn't, I just couldn't give a shit about any of it.

• 9:18Speaker 07

  Within about a week and a half, I was sneaking out during the day, going to movies, bookstores. I just, two years in, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I just didn't want to go there. So it was really, you know, it was very, you know, really.

• 9:30Speaker 06

  Were you making good money there?

• 9:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, it was great. I had everything I thought I wanted. I had an assistant, I had an office, I had a diploma written in Latin. I was like, holy shit, look at me, I'm a lawyer.

• 9:40Speaker 06

  And was that, did you go to NYU law school also?

• 9:43Speaker 07

  No, I went to St. John's Law School, which is the Harvard of Queens.

• 9:46Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  And I was in the top 5% of the bottom third of my class. So I was very proud of that. Again, it was like, I wasn't even thinking in terms of, are you happy?

• 9:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 07

  And, you know, it was, I was like, I was like 29 at this point. And I had that moment, like, okay, you were gonna either jump out a window in 10 years from the depression of working somewhere you just don't like, and you'd never be good at this because you don't like it. What do you want to do when you wake up in the morning? And I was like, all right, well, maybe I'll be a salesman, you know, because I liked it bullshit. And then I was like, all right. And then there's a little voice that said, come on, it's not salesman, what is it? And I was like, all right, well, an ad copywriter, maybe I could do that. And then even the voice was like, come on, go deeper. And then it was finally, I want to go to fucking Hollywood and write sitcoms. And. Once I said that out loud, it was like everything changed.

• 10:39Speaker 07

  But then I thought, alright, well, I remember this bit in Mr. Saturday Night with Billy Crystal, where he talked about the idea of you're either living room funny, or you're really funny. You know, you can be funny with your friends, and yeah, hey, I'm the funniest guy in the group. Can you do that for real? And I thought, alright, well, I think I can. And I thought the fastest way to figure this out is write my own material and do stand-up. And if I can get people to laugh, then I'm legit.

• 11:06Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 11:06Speaker 07

  I wasn't particularly interested in being a stand-up, but I wanted to see, am I crazy, or am I funny, or I really am funny? So, for a couple of months, right around that time, I was doing stand-up at Catch a Rising Star.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  And this is what year?

• 11:17Speaker 07

  Comic Strip, 90, 1990.

• 11:20Speaker 06

  1990, wow, what a great time in those clubs.

• 11:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, and it was interesting, too, because it was like this young woman named Sarah Silverman.

• 11:29Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 11:29Speaker 07

  Holy shit, Chris Rock was still around. You know, these were the real deal, you know? And I was doing open mics and watching these people, and going, oh, man, you know? Like, a young Sarah Silverman was just great, to see that, and then to watch her career after that was great.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 11:43Speaker 07

  You know, I did okay. You know, I'd get on at 2:00 in the morning to three people, and it's, okay, I said something, they laughed, great, that worked, this worked, that. And then, once I've said, okay, I'm not crazy, then I was like, alright, I'm doing this.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  So, you stopped doing stand-up, and then dove in? That's so interesting, that crucible of stand-up was your sort of testing ground. And it was, I had a similar, similar path. I knew that I wanted to work in comedy, and to me, stand-up was sort of like, alright, if you're serious, you know, get into it. And I got right into that same circuit you were in, but like, the next sort of timeframe. So, I started in about 97, 98. And I love, I still relish my years in the New York City stand-up scene.

• 12:32Speaker 07

  And for anybody who's never done it, I mean, you know, it's funny, if you think like, they say like, one of the biggest fears people have is speaking in public.

• 12:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 07

  Speaking in public with the agenda of also trying to get people to laugh?

• 12:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 07

  Is like, and it's funny, you do a bit, or you say a joke, and people don't laugh, it's like getting punched in the face.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 07

  It is like, there's no sound louder than people not laughing.

• 12:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, they say-

• 12:54Speaker 07

  When you think they're going to.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  Let's say you're like a string quartet, or like even a great professor at a university giving a lecture. Most performers will get up in front of an audience, and the audience actually wants them to succeed.

• 13:11Speaker 07

  Right.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  Not true in comedy clubs. A lot of audience members in a comedy club want you to bomb. They want, they want to feel the train wreck. They're there to see the just car crash. But wow, that's, that's awesome. Okay, so then, then Hollywood, and you just moved out.

• 13:30Speaker 07

  I just moved out. I did not know a soul. I literally sold everything I had. I was not in a relationship at the time, and I just showed up here on May 8th, 1991. I got a room in a horrible SRO hotel. It was actually in MacArthur Park. And now I was like, all right, I have to figure out. So, I went down to the Writers Guild, and this was just complete luck. They had a list of new agents, or young agents, who were actually looking for clients. And on that list was a guy I went to law school with, who sat four seats away from me.

• 14:03Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 14:04Speaker 07

  And his name was Doug Viviani. He's not an agent, so don't call him. But I called him, and I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Are you an agent?" He goes, "No, I'm a real estate attorney, and a client of mine wrote a book on real estate, and I used the fee to get bonded as an agent, but I don't know anything about being an agent." I said, "Well, congratulations, you're my agent." He said, "What are you talking about? I'm in LA. I'm writing, I'm trying to be a writer, I need an agent." I said, "So, I'm gonna create the Doug Viviani Agency, out of a mailbox, etc., and we're gonna get letterhead and a phone mail, and I'm gonna submit my work under your letterhead, and if I get anything, you get 10%, like an agent." And he said, "Great." So, that's what I did.

• 14:38Speaker 06

  So, you were your own agent?

• 14:40Speaker 07

  I was my own agent.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  He was just the sort of like nominal agent?

• 14:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, he was, he was like, you know, the guy on Charlie's Angels.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  Oh, God.

• 14:46Speaker 07

  So, I did that, and I photocopied all my scripts, and this is back, you know, this is now like 1992. When you could do this, I would just pull up to the Warner Brothers lot, for example, and say, "Yeah, I'm the messenger from the Doug Viviani Agency. I have some scripts I need to drop off." And I just hit every sitcom office in LA, and there was like 30 of them at the time. And I addressed, you know, here's my scripts. ...to the showrunner, from an agent, and now at least my scripts are in the building where theoretically if lightning struck, I could at least have a shot.

• 15:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 07

  And I don't know, about a week or so into it, I got a, there's a phone message on the Doug Viviani voicemail line. And it's a woman, she said, "Yeah, hi, my name is Winifred Hervey-Stalworth, I'm the executive producer of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I read Terry Winter's stuff, I'm interested in having him in maybe to pitch." So I said, "Oh, my God." So I called Doug in New York, and it was a Friday, he was gone for the weekend. I was like, "Ah, shit, I gotta wait till Monday now." And I was like, "You know what? Doug doesn't really know anything about being an agent. I'll just be Doug." And I called her back and I said, "Yeah, hi, Doug Viviani."

• 15:45Speaker 06

  This is so Donald Trump of you.

• 15:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, John Barron calling. So, yeah, and I have no idea what agents did or said. The only agent I ever saw was Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family, and he didn't seem to do much. But I figured, you know what, let me just, I'm just gonna wing it. And she said, "Yeah, yeah, we read his stuff, he's really, you know, talented." I said, "Oh, he's, kid's amazing." So she said, "Does he have like one more teenage oriented script? Because you know, Fresh Prince is kind of a teenage show." I said, "Yeah, he just finished an incredible episode of The Wonder Years, but I don't have a copy of it. I won't have it until..." So I'm trying to calculate in my head, "How long is it gonna take you to write a Wonder Years episode?" So it was Friday, I go, "I can get it to you two mon, late Tuesday afternoon if that works." She goes, "Yeah, fine, great."

• 16:28Speaker 07

  So hung up the phone and cranked out a Wonder Years episode, went in, gave it in. Now he's the messenger, I was the lawyer, it was everybody.

• 16:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 07

  And they had me in to pitch an idea, and that was, that became my foot in the door. I sold them on an idea that ultimately never went anywhere. But that was my first shot, and a little after I got into a thing called the Warner Brothers Sitcom Writers Workshop, which they used to do, they would take 15 people from a pool of hundreds around the country and then put you through a program. At the end of it, they called me in, they said, "We have an interesting situation. We have a show we think you'd be great for, it's not a sitcom, and this isn't a reflection of your sitcom writing, it's a drama that has comedy in it." And I said, "Well, why me?" And they said, "Well, it's about a blue collar guy who's a lawyer who works for a big stuffy law firm. Do you think you could do that?" And I was like, "If I don't get this fucking job..." I said, "Yes."

• 17:16Speaker 07

  Basically my life story. So yeah, and that was my actual first staff job. It was a show called The Great Defender with Michael Rispoli, Peter Kraus, Richard Kiley, who was Manu La Mancha. And thank God that I've been working ever since that show.

• 17:31Speaker 06

  Wow. Incredible. Incredible story. There's a thread here, which is grit and moxie and a sort of never seeing an obstacle as an obstacle, but yeah, but it's just something to work around. And

• 17:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, especially with this. I was not taking no for an answer.

• 17:53Speaker 06

  So where do you, where do you think that came from growing up? Like, were you a scrappy kid in Brooklyn?

• 17:57Speaker 07

  I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I grew up, I was 13, I started working for a butcher shop that was owned by Paul Castellano, who's the head of the Gambino family. When I was 16, I worked in an illegal card game run out of a synagogue in our neighborhood that was run by a guy named Roy DeMayo, who's the subject of a book called Murder Machine. He and his crew in the early 80s killed more people than the Iraqi army at the time, I think was the, the statistic. He had a bar in my neighborhood. So by osmosis, I just kind of knew those guys. I also just became fascinated with crime and criminals. Actually, somebody asked me this, like, what was the first thing? And it sounds quaint now, but it was the movie Oliver. I loved the idea of being part of that gang

• 18:39Speaker 07

  of pickpockets that was like, so I wanted to be the, I wanted to be the artful dodger. I was like, that looks so cool to me. And right around that time, I read, Abbie Hoffman had this book called Steal This Book,

• 18:49Speaker 06

  Of course, yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 07

  Which was my bible. And it was the first time of like, oh wow, you can scam shit. And then The Sting came out and I was like, oh my God, I'm using your brain to psych people out and get what you want. And I just became fascinated with the idea of using psychology or human nature to sort of, you know, get my way through the world. And I just sort of, yeah, became that guy and that kid, you know, who was always, even to this day, my initial instinct, if I'm presented with a problem, I always think of what's the way to scam my way through this. And I go, yeah, you can just pay it. You can Pay the bill. You don't need to do this.

• 19:28Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 19:29Speaker 07

  But that's right where I go. What lie do I tell to get? And I go, you're, that's you from when you're 15 years old.

• 19:36Speaker 06

  But wow.

• 19:36Speaker 07

  It was so ingrained.

• 19:38Speaker 06

  Well, that's a pretty good transition point for us. Cause you had a kind of exposure to that criminal element in Brooklyn. Is that what made you such a perfect candidate for one of your biggest staff jobs at The Sopranos there?

• 19:54Speaker 07

  I think so, yeah. When I, when I saw that pilot, uh, my agent at the time sent it to me. And, you know, like most people, I thought, opera? What is this? And I don't even think I finished watching it and I was, I was like trembling. I was like, I know these guys. I know these people. I know how they talk and how they think. I called him up and said, you gotta get me on this show.

• 20:14Speaker 06

  So the real life mob life was not for you. It was not something that, that even attracted you from a sort of like romantic or exotic sense, which I think is, draws a lot of people into that space. But the fictional mob space was right where you felt at home.

• 20:34Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, that I love, I love that stuff. And, um,

• 20:38Speaker 06

  It's like all the fun of, of the mafia with none of the danger.

• 20:42Speaker 07

  It's like I say, why people ride roller coasters. It's like you feel like you're about to die, but you're not actually going to die. How exhilarating.

• 20:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 07

  So writing about it, you know, was much preferable for me.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  All right. I could go on for hours. Uh, I love hearing about your career and all the machinations and steps you took. It's my favorite thing is just learning about how people got where they wanted to be. And you, you have an incredible story, but let's turn the page and get into kind of where you and I actually have this interesting overlap, which is in our, our shared fascination with the prohibition era. I think most people assume they know what prohibition is. Liquor was made illegal. It was a big mistake. There was a bunch of mobsters and Tommy guns. And then it got repealed.

• 21:32Speaker 06

  You made this incredible show, Boardwalk Empire. What drew you to prohibition in the first place? I mean, I could make an obvious leap from The Sopranos to prohibition-era gangsters being the overlap, but was there anything about that era in particular that felt so ripe for storytelling?

• 21:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I was given a book by HBO called Boardwalk Empire about the history of Atlantic City. And they said, maybe there's a TV series in here. I said, OK, the history of Atlantic City, that sounds great. But on the way out the door, they said, oh, Martin Scorsese is attached to that book. And I was like, oh, OK, well, that's a different story. I will find the TV series in here.

• 22:17Speaker 06

  You're right.

• 22:18Speaker 07

  So I started reading, and there was a chapter about this guy named Nucky Johnson, who I later fictionalized as Nucky Thompson. But Nucky was the corrupt treasurer of Atlantic City during the prohibition era, where, you know, you have a corrupt politician in charge of a city on the eastern seaboard where all the alcohol comes through. And suddenly overnight, he was friends with Lucky Luciano and Arnold Rothstein and Al Capone and everybody else. And I went, this is the series, this guy, this era. And I was like, I love the 20s, you know, that snappy, fast-talking 1920s stuff. I've always been fascinated with that kind of dialogue. The era, you know, was also interesting to me, too, is that even though it's 100 years ago, it still felt modern. People dressed in suits, they went out to restaurants, they talked on the telephone, they drove in cars.

• 23:03Speaker 07

  You know, it still felt cool, it still felt like accessible. It wasn't like 10 years earlier would have felt like, you know, Downton Abbey, but this was modern. You know, you could wear some of those clothes today. And I said, wow, this is such a great setup. And it's really not really been explored in TV or film. So when I went to meet, I'll call him Marty, because I know him, and I know it sounds douchey, but that's his name. When I went to meet Marty, when I went to meet Mr. Scorsese, and believe me, that's what I called him initially, he was like, oh, this is great, I've never done anything in this era before. So once he gave me the blessing, you know, we were off to the races, and then, you know, the real work started. They had to, you know, we had a protagonist who was like 50 years old in 1920. So I was like, okay, so he was born in 1870.

• 23:48Speaker 07

  So God, what books did he read? What was his pop culture references? What was happening in 1920? There's the war, World War I just ended. He had all these guys coming home. Women just got the right to vote. Prohibition itself. What were the movies? So it was like a ton of research, you know? Also, how did people actually talk? I'm sure they didn't all say 23 skidoo every five minutes. Do the Charleston was like every time you ever see anything in the 20s? Everybody's doing the fucking Charleston. I was like, did they do, is there any other songs written between 1920 and 1930? And it's funny. I mean, I wanted to do a thing where, you know, it was like that Nucky at some point says, if I hear the Charleston one more time, I'm going to kill somebody. And it actually didn't come out till 1924 anyway. So we didn't even touch on it until way late.

• 24:33Speaker 07

  But, um, yeah, it was just sort of, once I started doing the research, it was just fascinating. Not, not just all the other stuff, but the prohibition stuff itself was so eye opening in terms of the history of how it, how it even came to be. And then what a disaster it became, you know? The, the single biggest thing that made criminals millionaires overnight. And it was like outlawing turkey sandwiches. It was like, most people didn't give, like, wait, what? I've been drinking beer my whole life. Now I can't do it? Fuck you. I'm going to keep doing this. And just so many failed, um, consequences of that law.

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• 26:40Speaker 05

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• 27:24Speaker 05

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• 28:06Speaker 06

  It is truly a wild moment in American history, the sort of moral panic on one hand. And then there's the anti-German sentiment kind of like flaring up and then that gives the teetotalers ammunition to

• 28:22Speaker 07

  Go after the brewers.

• 28:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, to go after all these German brewers.

• 28:24Speaker 07

  It was a perfect storm. I mean, yeah, you're at war with Germany and now suddenly, you know, coleslaw is liberty cabbage and hamburgers are liberty sandwiches. And I mean, I think half the brewers got shut down. And I got where it came from. You know, there were, it was alcoholism was devastating. You know, the cliche is the dad, you know, got paid on Friday and then you didn't see him and spent all his money at the bar and, you know, and your family went death to this in days before social programs or even before AA was a thing, I guess. So there was a real, it was a real problem.

• 29:01Speaker 06

  So Nucky Thompson is a character that was played by Steve Buscemi. How close to the real Nucky Johnson was he?

• 29:12Speaker 07

  Not at all.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Not at all.

• 29:13Speaker 07

  If we were to cast the real, we were to cast somebody who looked like Nucky Johnson, Jim Gandolfini would have actually been perfect. Nucky was a big, burly, bald-headed guy.

• 29:23Speaker 06

  So I feel like Steve Buscemi's casting was such a stroke of genius for Boardwalk Empire because it is against type and in a way that, you know, can this guy who's sort of a slight build, not an intimidating presence, and whose face to me just has a sort of kind of warmth and sadness and a sort of tenderness, can this guy carry a mob show? Tell me a little bit about why Steve Buscemi was so perfect for Boardwalk Empire.

• 29:57Speaker 07

  You know, it started with Marty. You know, we said, all right, who are we going to get to do this? And, you know, I said, well, this is what the real guy looked like. And Marty said, well, no one's ever heard of this guy, which is also funny because when I went down to do my research in Atlantic City, the real Nucky between like 1910 and 1930 was hands down the most powerful guy in Atlantic City. Everybody knew him. Nothing moved without Nucky. And when I went down initially and talked to old timers and people, ever hear of Nucky Johnson? No, never. Never heard of him, never heard of him. After the show, oh yeah, Nucky, my uncle worked for Nucky. Suddenly, everybody knew who he was, but nobody knew who this guy was. So Marty, you know, very, you know, correctly said, it doesn't matter, we can cast anybody. And then he just said, well, who, let's, let's just name actors we like. And

• 30:38Speaker 06

  Ed Helms.

• 30:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, Ed Helms was not available.

• 30:41Speaker 06

  Not available.

• 30:43Speaker 07

  And I said, well, Steve Buscemi. I always, I always loved Steve. And he goes, oh, I love Steve Buscemi. And we rattled off a couple of other names. And then he's like, all right, whatever. And a couple of days later, Marty called me up. He said, I can't stop thinking about Steve for this. And I said, yeah, me too. I said, isn't that crazy? I said, he says, yeah, yeah. And it's funny, even Steve, when I called him, he knew he was in the running. And when I called him to tell him he got the role, I said, Steve, you know, we're, we're really excited. We, we want to offer you this role. And he said, hey, look, you know, it was really just an honor to be considered. And I said, Steve, no, I'm give, we're giving you the role. And he's like, what? He goes, I've been preparing myself for two weeks to not get this. I didn't even hear you. I didn't even let that register. I said, yeah, no, you got it. We're doing this. And he's like, holy shit. And then,

• 31:28Speaker 07

  of course, you know, he went on, you know, I think he won the Screen Actors Guild a couple of times in a row, and Emmy nominations, and, you know, people just loved him. He totally sold it and pulled it off, obviously. He's Steve Buscemi.

• 31:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, he is. I would imagine, you know, your collaboration as a showrunner with the wardrobe department, and the production design department, and the props department, was so fun on a project like this, and so cool. And then, of course, your music team, both the score and, you know, your needle drops in the, throughout the, the episodes. What, what are some things that stood out to you in that, in that research process that were either surprising, or especially exciting or fun to think about and, and write about? And were there things that came up in

• 32:14Speaker 07

  So much.

• 32:14Speaker 06

  In that process that, that inspired moments in the show?

• 32:18Speaker 07

  I like loved like the all the wardrobe stuff, the hair stuff. One of the things I I loved was a little detail that in somewhere in 1916, the Gillette Company invented the safety razor. Up until that point, men shaved themselves with a straight razor. So facial hair was a big thing. So a lot of guys had beards and mutton chops and all these crazy. Everybody had facial hair up until 1917. Suddenly that was the the safety razor came out. So young people started looking at facial hair as, oh, yeah, that's your dad. That's your grandpa. So we somewhere around season two, I would start seeing young people with mustaches in the crowd of extras or on the show.

• 33:03Speaker 07

  And I mentioned it to our hair person a few times, and I mentioned it to our extras casting person. I said, do not send me any young men with facial hair. And it kept popping up, and it started to drive me crazy. So I actually got the yearbook from Princeton University of 1922. And I went into the hair department, and I said, find me one man in this book with facial hair. And there was not one college student that had a mustache or a beard in 1922. I said, that's the level of accuracy we need to have here. And I did, I had the A plus team of every department had hair, makeup, wardrobe, music.

• 33:36Speaker 06

  It shows.

• 33:37Speaker 07

  Production, production, design, just crazy details.

• 33:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, you can tell.

• 33:41Speaker 07

  You know, like wardrobe is like, you know, drives me crazy. If you see a show set in 1920, everybody's dressed like it's 1920. You know, I don't know about you, but I I've, you know, I have guest jeans from the 90s probably that I still have. Actually, my wife has called me on shit like that a couple of times, like, you've got to, you know, you got to get rid of it. So not everybody dresses like it's 2024. Most people don't. You know, if you're really hip and maybe you're in New York or LA, maybe you do, but you sure don't. And if you're a working class guy in Atlantic City, you dress like it's 1893.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 07

  You know, so I needed them. We needed a smattering of that. And everybody took such pride in it, too. I remember even once a big debate about a chain link fence. You know, I didn't even bring it up, but our production designer, he said, you know, we had a chain link fence somewhere. And he said, before you say anything, yes, they had chain link fences in 1920. They're invented in 1905. I think, OK, take it easy. He goes, I didn't know myself, and I had to check this out. But yeah, they had chain link fences back then. So yeah, like stuff like that.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Ah, I love that. And it just informs all the. The actors on the set, it gives them all these, these kind of anchors and reference points to latch on to. So, most prohibition crime stories center around the male bootleggers. But Boardwalk features a lot of extremely unique and morally gray and enterprising female characters. Margaret Thompson, Gillian Darmody, being a couple of standouts. What was the inspiration for those incredible characters?

• 35:09Speaker 07

  In the book Boardwalk Empire, Nelson Johnson fictionalized a meeting between the real Nucky and a woman from the neighborhood who came to ask to get her husband a job. And he said, this is the kind of thing Nucky would do. You know, people worked in the hotel business in the summer months, it was great, but during the winter, people were out of work, and if your husband drank and didn't have money, you know, you were going without food. So, he talked about a little fictional encounter between a neighborhood woman, Nucky, and Nucky would give her $50 to tide her over for the month, whatever. And I said, that's interesting, that's an interesting relationship. I wonder who that is? Who is that woman? And then I, you know, I just took it from there. Like, okay, what if, what

• 35:52Speaker 07

  if he's interested romantically, and what if her husband is a creep, and he beats her up, and Nucky gets rid of him, and where does that go? So, that became Margaret. Gillian Darmody just came, you know, I knew Jimmy Darmody was coming home from World War I. And this was, again, one of those happy or not happy accidents of prohibition. World War I ended, and you had a lot of disenfranchised soldiers coming home after horrific experiences overseas. And I think most Americans, even to this day, have no idea how incredibly brutal World War I was. Trench warfare, and just absolutely just horrific, guys living up to their, up to their waists in filth and rat-infested water, and, you know, just shooting at each other, and they didn't even know why they were there. But it was really

• 36:37Speaker 07

  horrible. So, a lot of these guys came home-

• 36:39Speaker 06

  And chemical warfare.

• 36:40Speaker 07

  Oh, chemical, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and a lot of guys came home, and our character on the show, Richard Harrow, who was the guy with the half- The mask, you know, played by Jack Houston. That was the first time that, you know, battlefield medicine got to the point where you could keep people alive. And well, because it was trench warfare, there were so many, then inordinate amount of facial injuries. Guys would poke their heads up from a trench and boom, get half of their face blown off. Normally, you know, 20 years earlier, you're dead. But now battlefield medicine got to the point where you could keep those people alive. So those guys were coming home alive. So thousands of guys are coming home with facial injuries. Literally like half your face blown off or your jaw blown off. And then they had to get

• 37:25Speaker 07

  into society. So there was an artist in New England, a woman who was a sculptor, who thought, I wonder if I could do like a half mask to match their face. So these guys could at least go out in public or go out at night. And that's where that character came from. But again, it was just these little details in the research.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  There's another formidable female character in Boardwalk Empire, Assistant Attorney General Esther Randolph, who attempts to prosecute Nucky. Now, she's presumably based on the real world Mabel Walker Willibrand.

• 37:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, who fascinating character.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we talked a lot about her in Snafu. I'm just curious, kind of what your research brought to light, what excited you about her as a character. She's such a mess of contradictions.

• 38:13Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, the one thing I loved is that when prohibition ended, she went to work for a wine company. And even like, she wasn't averse to having a drink herself. But it's like, once she became like, okay, you know, I'm doing this. She was really staunchly trying to enforce those laws. And of course, her bosses were just unbelievably corrupt. Harry Darty, Warren Harding, that whole administration was just like, you know, you can't. And that's another thing that just surprised me about the era. You know, again, it's, you know, the idea of corrupt politicians. These guys were selling shit right out of the White House. I mean, you literally, you know, there were bootleggers who were showing up at the Capitol with suitcases full of stuff, selling it, you know, selling their stuff to congresspeople. And like, you could buy anything you wanted from Harry Darty.

• 38:59Speaker 07

  And his guy Jess Smith, and just another fascinating relationship.

• 39:02Speaker 06

  And George Cassidy is a character that is a real-life bootlegger who actually had an office in the Capitol Building where he was distributing liquors to congresspeople.

• 39:15Speaker 07

  Right.

• 39:16Speaker 06

  That's very similar to your character Gaston Means in Boardwalk Empire, who was kind of a supplier to high-level folks.

• 39:25Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, and a real guy. Yeah, I mean, the more we would research this, the more incredible it became. You know, another detail, too, Al Capone's brother, one of his brothers, was moved out to the West and became a sheriff, and he was like a cowboy sheriff who would arrest bootleggers.

• 39:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 07

  And we're like, we've got to get this on the show, and we could never work it in, but it's like, just these little odds and ends, you're like, holy shit, this actually was real.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  It's so cool to hear you touch on these things that we also dig into in Snafu, and some of these strange and more obscure connections.

• 39:59Speaker 07

  Or George Remus, too, another one, like, one of the craziest stories here, like, incredibly successful defense attorney becomes like the biggest bootlegger ever, and then loses everything, goes to jail, and then his wife completely steals all of his money with, in conjunction with a federal agent who she has an affair with, and then he gets out of jail and then murders her, and then is found not guilty by reason of insanity, he represented himself, and with a temporary insanity plea. And it's like, if I made that up, you'd go, come on, and this absolutely all happened.

• 40:35Speaker 06

  And Willibrand prosecuted him, and he's part of what led to the federal government taxing illegal liquor.

• 40:43Speaker 07

  Right.

• 40:44Speaker 06

  Which is just another insane layer to all of this.

• 40:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, why would you think you would have to do that? But yeah, I mean, I guess it's the same principle now, like, you go, okay, well, I don't care how you earned your money, even if it's illegal, you have to still have to pay taxes on it.

• 40:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:57Speaker 07

  And that's, I guess, how they get, you know, they get Al Capone, you know, for tax evasion, it's like, I know you said you were a furniture salesman, but you've got a million dollars here, so, okay.

• 41:13Speaker 03

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• 41:37Speaker 04

  Being a receptionist is one of the hardest jobs out there. You have to be an expert for hundreds of people every day, and you have to do a million things at once. No wonder more small businesses are saving costs by outsourcing their front desk. But replacing them with an AI answering service? That's one giant step in the wrong direction. We're Ruby, and we believe in the lost art of the overachieving receptionist. We answer every call live. We schedule, take messages, call to confirm details, and so much more. Because only a human can connect with another human. And instead of turning our back on AI, we customized our own.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  Automating tasks, pulling up relevant information instantly, and so much more. So we can spend all of our time making connections. Experience Ruby for yourself right now. Call 866 GET Ruby or visit ruby.com. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with IBM's Ana Paula Acees about what digital sovereignty actually means in the age of AI. AI now moves from somebody operating a system to the technology actually making decisions. So you have to have a much better visibility of what AI is touching, data it is accessing, and where.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Hear the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:10Speaker 06

  I just was gonna kind of bring it back to this overarching theme throughout that era of hypocrisy. Sometimes it's kind of buried and sometimes it's just outrageous and flagrant, like we discussed, George Cassidy and these bootleggers supplying the lawmakers who are passing the laws of prohibition with alcohol. I'm curious if you hit on in your research, are you familiar with Formula Six? I am not. Yeah, so one of the things we get into in this season of Snap Fu is this really staggering realization that for a long time, the government was putting additives into

• 43:55Speaker 06

  industrial alcohol to prevent people from drinking it. And these were things that made industrial alcohol, this process was called denaturing. Right. And it made alcohol incredibly yucky to imbibe, but it also made people a bit sick, just enough to keep people from drinking it. And that was going on for decades before prohibition. Industrial alcohol had a lot of uses, obviously. Then during prohibition, Formula Six emerges. And in order to try to dissuade people from drinking alcohol, they start adding real poison to alcohol in levels sufficient to kill people. Wow.

• 44:39Speaker 06

  We get into the really remarkable story of the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, Charles Norris and Alexander Getler, who kind of pieced this together by examining the corpses of a lot of people dying and starting to see patterns of different chemicals and poisonings, and also, at the same time, revolutionizing chemistry in the service of toxicology and medical examination as a practice. These were relatively new at the time, and Alexander Getler is credited with really kind of inventing a lot of processes to figure out what chemicals...

• 45:17Speaker 06

  Were in dead bodies or in human tissue. Anyway, it's just wild what they start to piece together.

• 45:25Speaker 07

  I have to assume formulas two through five were varying degrees of how bad is this gonna be? Like why, yeah, Formula Four is like diarrhea, that's not enough. We gotta really get like, you know, you know, but blisters, nah, let's like.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  Formula Five knocks you out for like a week.

• 45:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:43Speaker 06

  Formula Six, you're dead.

• 45:45Speaker 07

  You're not drinking anymore. So, yeah, I was very aware of the fact that bootleggers would incorporate, sometime it got to the point where they'd mix turpentine, they'd mix wood alcohol, you know, all of which, you know, into their shitty, you know, uh, you know, home manufactured stuff. And that was killing people, making people blind.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 46:03Speaker 07

  There was a rash of people who went blind. I think it was in New York City, like 18 people over the course of a weekend who all drank the same bootleg alcohol. I'm wondering now if, if was that some of the stuff that the government was actually now sneaking into the criminal, like how were people getting government poisoned liquor?

• 46:20Speaker 06

  There was a drink called Derail because it was an alcohol that was used in, in the industrial railroad industry. And it was, uh, and it was making people terribly sick. That was basically bootleggers just using industrial alcohol to enhance their product.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, formaldehyde too, is when we actually did that on the show, actually showing somebody using it. Anything, and it's interesting too, like this is the, people don't realize, like the advent of the mixed drink came because of prohibition, because the bootleg alcohol was so vile, they had to start mixing it with fruit juices and stuff. So, all the stuff that we know today, you know, up until prohibition, it was, you know, straight whiskey, beer, you know, it was just straight alcohol, wasn't, you know, and you do, you just drank it to get drunk quickly, I guess. I don't know, there's a lot of sipping going on, but it was, you know, suddenly all the drinks that you hear about today, you know, are, you know, come from the, the need to make this stuff

• 47:18Speaker 07

  palatable. And, you know, what, what killed me too, is I, I love the details, the lengths bootleggers would go to in terms of. Creating false labels, getting the bottle, filling it up with alcohol. There was one which detail that blew my mind that they would create a whole false crate of alcohol, put them in fishing nets, like bunch of them, and then take the fishing nets and dunk it in the water, leave it in seawater for a couple of hours and come out. You know, you dumped this big fishing net full of crates that say Johnny Walker or whatever it was, and there's still seaweed on it. And you go, nobody would ever think you faked this, but the lengths they would go to to make stuff that was fake look real. You go, wow. I mean, and that appealed to the con man in me.

• 48:02Speaker 07

  I go, wow, what a brilliant little touch. You can still smell the saltwater. It's obviously came out of off a boat in the ocean. It's like, no, this is made in some guy's garage.

• 48:10Speaker 06

  That's no different than you calling up Paramount pretending to be your own agent.

• 48:15Speaker 07

  None at all, not at all. But yeah, it's like, wow, that's, that's, you know, and that's, I think, what people don't realize that criminals, 24 hours a day, is people thinking about how to do this shit. You know, it's pretty, pretty incredible. And even the hypocrisy too, and thinking like, as you were talking, you know, the whole, the Catholic Church, you know, sacrificial wine. Suddenly, they had unbelievable demand for sacrificial wine. And the Jewish churches, suddenly, you know, everybody was a rabbi that, because there was an exclusion, like you could do it for religious things. Or doctors, how many doctors writing prescriptions?

• 48:51Speaker 06

  We're running low on Manischewitz.

• 48:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 06

  We just need another, need another order.

• 48:55Speaker 07

  And then selling it out your back door, and how many, you know, neighborhood people had stills in their kitchen. You know, you could make, you know, extra money by, you know, you'd have guys, like entire tenement buildings, everybody had a little still. And, you know, you could make an extra 20 bucks a week in 1920. That was a fortune. That was your grocery money, I'm assuming, or more. And, you know, local gangsters would just come around and pick everything up and sell it. And this went on for years. And again, you know, all unintended consequences of this. And again, back to me, back to what the point I made before about this making millionaires out of criminals overnight. This is how organized crime infiltrated legitimate business. They needed a place to put all that money. And it's like, great, let's buy trucking companies, which they initially did to. Transport all this stuff, then it was like, you know, let's buy warehouses, let's buy

• 49:40Speaker 07

  real estate, let's get into other things. And this, over that 12-year period, enabled them to infiltrate every other area of American life.

• 49:49Speaker 06

  It's almost like the scale of the stupidity of prohibition as a law is commensurate with the scale of how much organized crime then penetrated American society.

• 50:10Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  In other words, the fallout of prohibition is commensurate with the stupidity of it in the first place.

• 50:17Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, up until prohibition, most organized crime was gambling, prostitution, extortion, things of that nature that were, I guess, lucrative, but not, this was just a windfall that they couldn't have even possibly predicted. And I mean, I guess, yeah, I'm certainly not the first person to make the observation that the drug business today is exactly the same thing.

• 50:41Speaker 06

  Well, I can't help thinking that there is a really cool prequel to Boardwalk Empire in the story of the New York City medical examiners who uncovered some of this insane, you know, because they're right at the interface of law and crime, basically.

• 51:01Speaker 07

  Right.

• 51:02Speaker 06

  Because they're examining the, the coroner's job was just to rubber stamp all of the police misconduct. And, you know, the police were just, you know, they'd kill somebody that they didn't like, or because they were in some crime lord's pocket. Ah, this was a suicide, even though he's got like six gunshots to the back of his head. But then Charles Norris came in, really turned things around, and Alexander Gettler turned out to be quite a genius of chemistry and put it to good use. It is an incredible story. We're recording this interview before season three of Snafu actually comes out, so I really can't wait for you to hear it.

• 51:44Speaker 07

  No, I mean, there's so many details you brought up that I hadn't heard of, and it's, again, it's just endlessly fascinating.

• 51:49Speaker 06

  Well, Terence Winter, this has been an absolutely delightful, very enlightening conversation. Thank you so much for jumping on Snafu with us.

• 51:57Speaker 07

  Absolutely, my pleasure. It's so fun to do. I can't wait to hear season three.

• 52:01Speaker 06

  Awesome. Thank you so much.

• 52:03Speaker 07

  Thanks so much, Ed. Take care.

• 52:08Speaker 06

  Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canny, and Kelsey Albright. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapali and Akemini Ekpo. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Our associate producer, Tori Smith, edited this episode.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  Editing, music, and sound design by Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Our amazing theme music is by Dan Rosato. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Rizak.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.