The Steve Buscemi characterization of Nucky Thompson in the HBO show Boardwalk Empire is a lesser man than his print counterpart, Nucky
"Johnson" in the pages of the novel, "Low Light." Both characters are
ambitious, shrewd, and when it suits their purpose, either magnanimous
or mean. But readers of Low Light get an entirely different picture than
viewers of the TV show.

1. The medium vs. the message. Prose and film stimulate different kinds of imagination. In my novel, Nucky
is a tall well-dressed gentleman, a dance floor smoothy, and backroom
persuader. Just those few phrases triggered an image in your head
of a dignified person who acts with restraint. The less a writer says,
the more the reader imagines. I limited description of Nucky to his
dialog (always grammatical and slightly old fashioned), a handful of
incidents, some retold by verbally challenged people, and few
adjectives. The result is that the reader puts flesh on these skeletal
scraps and builds the character himself.

2. The Message: Blood flows from many people in many places in the first episode of the TV
show. Although Nucky does not pull any triggers, scenes with his image
bracket all of the violent action. By association, therefore, the viewer
will think of Nucky as violent. My guess is that the estimable writers
of the TV show will never put a gun in Nucky's hand, but it won't make
any difference. The subplot of TV's Boardwalk Empire, what's shown in
trailers and what's shown as the "solution" to problems the authors
raise is consistent: Violence Pays. In my book, brains and and integrity
win.

3. No matter how gifted the actor, a viewer cannot fully separate a portrayal and a portrayer. Nor can stereotypes be banished.
Heroes are handsome, tall, and strong. The adage 'handsome is as
handsome does' sounds cute, but is not true. Viewers assume handsome
characters will do the handsome deeds, not the other way around. Indeed,
we want the tall and handsome characters to do the right things,
because we all want to have our stereotypes validated. Mr. Buscemi,
whose features are captivating, whose eyes say far more than most
actor's mouths ever will, has a serious challenge in giving his Nucky
the gravitas and heroism viewers crave.

Whether you saw the pilot episode of the HBO miniseries 'Boardwalk Empire,' whether you liked it or not, you probably did not escape the multi-million dollar marketing campaign that surrounded the airing of the pilot episode on September 19th. The enormous sums that Martin Scorsese and HBO are spending compel me, to look for clues about how to create such a product with such lucrative potential. What you may not know is that the 'Boardwalk Empire' property was not fiction, but a history book. What did Scorsese and the HBO execs see in an obscure book written by a judge who sits on the Atlantic County New Jersey bench?

In 2002 Nelson Johnson persuaded an English company, Plexus, to publish 'Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City." Some of the book's appeal can be deduced from the subtitle, but the strongest reasons are not quite as obvious. I've read the book and think I know what compelled the big boys to reach into their pockets.

1. CHARACTER: The real Enoch "Nucky" Johnson was known nationally as the Czar of the Ritz, a vice lord and political boss of such power that he was able to exert absolute control of the Las Vegas of the Jazz Age and leverage that influence to the election of Senators and Presidents. Nucky was both a kingmaker and a crook. What makes him so compelling is that he was charismatic AND corrupt. Great fictional characters are contradictory; resolving those contradictions is what good characterization is all about.
2. NOSTALGIA: The old boardwalks were midways, the coastal equivalents of state fairs. Every American has childhood memories of those places. Because we experienced them as children, our memories of them are vivid and magical. When we write description, we try to tap people's memories. Places like the Boardwalk of Atlantic City are so deeply embedded in our memories and so closely associated with pleasure, that they are irresistibly compelling background for any story.
3. POWER: The heroes and villains we invent control their worlds. A story about how such power works is always compelling because readers and viewers, in reality, control very small spheres of influence. But the need for control is gene-deep. The greater a character's ability to change reality, the more appealing the character.

Is there an inverse  correlation between money spent on marketing and the quality of the product? HBO is spending many millions of dollars to attract people to their miniseries, but I have the feeling that some of that expense is to compensate for intrinsic problems with the show.
 
First, a disclaimer. My opinion is highly suspect because  I researched and and wrote about the miniseries' main character, "Nucky Thompson," for my my novel, "Low Light," and formed ideas that are unique to my head.  My Nucky couldn't possibly be the same  as Winters/Scorsese/Buscemi's.  Nor could their cinematic depiction of the Jazz Age zeitgeist be the same  as the world I show my readers in the novel.

There are aspects of the TV series that I like a lot, particularly the art direction and cinematography. It's a gorgeous show. But...

Buscemi is an Everyman, perhaps the best in his generation of actors. But I do not find him convincing as a backroom manipulator and  power broker. Steve Buscemi, as engaging as he may be, does not have the gravitas required in a character like Nucky.

Mr. Scorsese's  "Streets of New York" appeal to violence is wearing very thin, it seems gimmicky to me.  My suspicion is that too many HBO viewers, the demographic that loved the Sopranos,  will find the gore in Boardwalk Empire gratuitous and off-putting.  In other words, I think it unlikely that Boardwalk Empire will capture the same audience as Sopranos. Samuel Dashiell Hammett offered useful advice to writers about bringing in a character with a gun whenever they feel that they're losing reader interest.  But it's a fine line that depends a lot on the audience/reader.  How much overlap is there between the HBO audience and  the Spike TV audience?

I do not have the focus group data that HBO has access to.  Perhaps that's part of the problem. Somehow, the pilot episode seemed formulaic, as if the writers sensed problems with earlier versions of the show and tinkered too much with the editing until they achieved some kind of focus group magic number. 

The historical moment was, indeed, a time when the rivulets of popular culture were starting to merge into the torrent that became our consumer age.  The show does a good job of showing this by salting the scenes in public spaces with billboards.  But there was a whole lot more going on.  The characters in Boardwalk Empire do not seem to be deep enough  or smart enough to serve as the dramatic mirrors who can believably reflect the parallels between Prohibition and The War on Drugs, The Red Menace and Radical Jihad, European immigration and Central American immigration, and how adoption of the telephone, radio and automobiles foreshadowed our contemporary efforts to adjust to the technologies of the 21st Century.

Is the show enjoyable? Yes. Will it attract a fanatical following of discriminating viewers who value subtlety over glitz? Probably not. 

Folks who enjoy Boardwalk Empire will like the novel Low Light even better.  Sales of my  novel “Low Light” seem to be picking up as interest in Jazz Age Atlantic City is being generated by the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.”My historical crime story relates a fictional but plausible plot by Nucky Johnson, the political Boss and Vice Lord of Atlantic City, to blackmail J. Edgar Hoover at a time when the FBI was being formed into the legal force that we know today. One of the great puzzles of 20th Century American history is why Hoover denied that there was such a thing as Organized Crime in America until late in the 1960s. Hoover maintained that criminals were too dumb to organize, that The Mafia was a sensationalized myth invented to sell newspapers and movies. Low Light offers an explanation for Hoover’s astonishing blind spot.

Nucky Johnson, called Nucky “Thompson” on the TV show, is a featured character in Low Light along with a rich mix of Jazz Age personalities as experienced by the Everyman narrator who’s promised a terrific business opportunity to take blackmail pictures of the young Hoover, a rising power in Washington politics who’s rumored to have some bizarre sexual preferences.
I have been encouraged by the five-star ratings and rave reviews being written about  Low Light by readers who’ve purchased the book on Amazon. It’s just possible that this unique work of historical fiction will become a genuine best seller. 

The anti-Muslim attitudes being ginned up by our own American xenophobes is downright frightening.  This is not your typical issue-of-the-moment, forgotten-tomorrow TV news bullshit.  Group attitudes are being shaped that can have generational consequences. It's as loathsome as the way the "Arab Street" is whipped into a frenzy  by the radical mullahs, or as the Antisemitism of  the 19th Century European that culminated in Nazism.   What makes our brand of this ancient motivator so much more distasteful is that it is being promulgated by people who are doing it cynically - for TV ratings and Republican votes.

The easiest thing in the world to sell is hatred - it feels so good and costs so little.  Hatred comes naturally. Despite what Rogers and Hammerstein said, it does not have to be carefully taught. Hatred is a natural emotion that children must be taught to unlearn. As social animals, it's critical that we learn to distinguish "us" from "them."  The linkage between loving people like ourselves and hating people who are different is a natural, almost inevitable, human trait that can be neutralized only by thoughtful empathy. 

Maintenance of civilization itself requires a constant, conscious effort on the part of those in a position to influence general opinion to craft messages designed to allow people to see "the others" as human beings like themselves. Leaders who do not display such empathy, who do the opposite by portraying those who are not just like us as dangerous, are laying the tinder for the bonfires of  war.  

COOL IT!  

The HBO mini series, Boardwalk Empire, is about to air. I'm intrigued by the fact that the setting and characters are the same as those in my first book, Low Light.  I think  Atlantic City in the 1920s and the character of Nucky, the Boss of the town, are a rich mine of material.

The second book was supposed to be finished by now.  I had more than my share of beginner's luck with Low Light.  Writing that book was relatively easy because it offered a simple answer to a real puzzle about our country's history - why didn't the FBI go after organized crime until the '60s?  It was pretty easy to invent a blackmail plot against J. Edgar Hoover.  

I thought the second book was going to be easy because of the amazing transformation Atlantic City underwent during the Second World War.  Where I floundered was in finding a compelling piece of history with which to involve the Rubins.  I went down a deep, dark hole following Nazi atrocities - which were, of course, of great concern to the Rubins.   They had living relatives in Central Europe.  I spent months researching "The Final Solution" so that I could write a compelling story about how an American family would have behaved if they learned of it before the death camps were liberated.  I gave that up when I realized that writing about the topic depressed the hell out of me.  The writing had become sad, tortured.  I have fun writing, but the joy went out of the project the more I learned.  After writing daily for almost a year, after revising the narrative voice, after revising the plot,  I gave it up.

So, Book Two is a more traditional mystery -thriller.  Lot's more fun for me and, I hope, for readers..  I hope to finish it this summer.  I've come up with a way the German's might have used one og Book One's villains, the hateful DeWease, in a plot to sabotage the USS Wisconsin on her trip down the Delaware after her commissioning.  The Rubins help investigators discover the plot and try to thwart it before it's too late to keep the vital waterway open.  If they fail, a Nazi secret agent will all but choke off  the flow of fuel to troops in Europe and the Pacific.  

Charles Ashbacher wrote: "A joy to read"  "This book passes that test"

Amos Lasson wrote: "This is one of those books that you cannot put down... I predict that this will be a big book so get it while you can. There is lots to read here and even more to think about."

The two-edged sword of new media publishing: 

On the positive side, the author retains all the rights to the finished work.  I don't have to ask anyone's permission before making marketing, sales, or distribution decisions.  My share of the ales revenue is higher.

Negatives are that I have to make the decisions and do all of the sales, marketing and distribution myself.  It is way too time-consuming and distracting for someone who is trying to maintain enough mental momentum to write a real novel.  If anyone gives a damn about seeing Book 2, Letter From Ungvar, do me a favor and send this URL out to as many people as you think might be interested. 

I don't Tweet, I don't Facebook  - I try to write.  Help!

Hoover denied that there was a formally organized confederation of criminal enterprises.  Journalists knew he was wrong. because the gangsters boasted to them about it.  He rarely went after gangsters.  Why?   
Hoover might have been blackmailed to look the other way.  That's the premise of Low Light.  But, as I'll discuss in future blogs, he may have had other reasons..