Screenwriting Tips and Articles
By Michael Ferris
Screenwriting Tip - Write A Great Opening Scene
It's tough with today's spec market. Help yourself out with a great opening scene. It doesn't matter if it's a drama or a comedy or a thriller, have the opening be gripping, or intriguing, or mysterious, or exciting, or all four. A great opening scene will get you a lot of leeway when it comes to how long an industry player will sit down to read your script. If you keep the scenes consistently great, you might achieve that rarity of all rarities – an agent who reads a script from cover to cover.
It's tough with today's spec market. Help yourself out with a great opening scene. It doesn't matter if it's a drama or a comedy or a thriller, have the opening be gripping, or intriguing, or mysterious, or exciting, or all four. A great opening scene will get you a lot of leeway when it comes to how long an industry player will sit down to read your script. If you keep the scenes consistently great, you might achieve that rarity of all rarities – an agent who reads a script from cover to cover.
How to Make Your Script POP (Using Characters and Story World)
By Michael Ferris
By Michael Ferris
After a long conversation with an agent friend of mine, he gave me the age-old lament "all the scripts I've been reading are crap". He reminisced about past scripts, ones that "really grabbed you by the balls – and I'm not talking action scripts either". Of course, because he was talking to me, he recounted the first time he read Travis Beacham's script THE GLOAMING (later to be renamed KILLING ON CARNIVAL ROW when it sold to New Line).
I thought a lot about that conversation, and after going back and reading Travis' first script, I understood both what we was saying, and what other writers could do to emulate that same "hairs standing up on the back of the neck" feeling that reading a fantastic script can give you.
It's the same feeling Hollywood had when they read JUNO, where the dialogue POPPED off the page.
It's the same feeling they got reading Zach Helm's scripts, whose whimsical description, action lines, and plot turns POPPED off the page (unfortunately though, they didn't translate so well to the screen).
It's the same feeling they got reading THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, which for a long time was at the top of many people's "best scripts that have never been made" list.
Regardless of what happened after the script became a movie, the common theme here is that these scripts POPPED off the page. They grabbed you by the scruff of your neck with their writing, and didn't let you go until they were done with you.
In many cases, they launched careers – which is what you guys want, right? So let's talk about two key elements that you can incorporate into your scripts that will give the industry that same "goose bumps" feeling.
STORY WORLD
Too often, writers believe that, unless a story is science fiction or fantasy, they don't need to worry about building a unique or compelling story world. Nothing could be further from the truth -- audiences adore being thrust into unique but everyday worlds they would otherwise not encounter -- so really work to make your story world more vividly described.
It doesn't matter if your movie takes place in an intergalactic space empire, modern day Los Angeles, or a motel in Iowa – you need to make the setting and world, time and place, POP off the page.
Even if it's Suburbia, USA it need to not only FEEL like a unique and interesting place, but one that puts on emphasis on WHY this place for THIS movie.
To take the Suburbia, USA example to its extreme, think about EDWARD SCISSORHANDS. It used the homogenized suburbia and put it through a colorful prism in order to contrast with the dark, foreboding feel of Edward's home on the hill.
I thought a lot about that conversation, and after going back and reading Travis' first script, I understood both what we was saying, and what other writers could do to emulate that same "hairs standing up on the back of the neck" feeling that reading a fantastic script can give you.
It's the same feeling Hollywood had when they read JUNO, where the dialogue POPPED off the page.
It's the same feeling they got reading Zach Helm's scripts, whose whimsical description, action lines, and plot turns POPPED off the page (unfortunately though, they didn't translate so well to the screen).
It's the same feeling they got reading THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, which for a long time was at the top of many people's "best scripts that have never been made" list.
Regardless of what happened after the script became a movie, the common theme here is that these scripts POPPED off the page. They grabbed you by the scruff of your neck with their writing, and didn't let you go until they were done with you.
In many cases, they launched careers – which is what you guys want, right? So let's talk about two key elements that you can incorporate into your scripts that will give the industry that same "goose bumps" feeling.
STORY WORLD
Too often, writers believe that, unless a story is science fiction or fantasy, they don't need to worry about building a unique or compelling story world. Nothing could be further from the truth -- audiences adore being thrust into unique but everyday worlds they would otherwise not encounter -- so really work to make your story world more vividly described.
It doesn't matter if your movie takes place in an intergalactic space empire, modern day Los Angeles, or a motel in Iowa – you need to make the setting and world, time and place, POP off the page.
Even if it's Suburbia, USA it need to not only FEEL like a unique and interesting place, but one that puts on emphasis on WHY this place for THIS movie.
To take the Suburbia, USA example to its extreme, think about EDWARD SCISSORHANDS. It used the homogenized suburbia and put it through a colorful prism in order to contrast with the dark, foreboding feel of Edward's home on the hill.
Versus:
Thematically, it fits so perfectly – the arrival of this seemingly dark character into this cheery, colorful suburban neighborhood is what it needed to "wake up" from its dream. It also took the classic "Beauty and the Beast" story and turned it on its head – bringing the beast to the village, rather than the other way around. But most importantly, the setting (suburbia) popped off the page (and screen) because it was unique, interesting, and answered the question of "why here?" perfectly.
When choosing a setting, or when going back through an already written script – ask yourself "why this time and place?". If there isn't a definitive, absolute answer as to why you've set your story where you have, then your story world will be lacking, and it will be reflected on the page.
Let's say you have a definitive, absolute answer as to "why here and now?". Great. Now ask yourself "is it on the page?". This is extremely important – as writers we know everything there is to know about our stories, characters, and scripts – it's all in our heads, after all. But for the convenience of all the people not living in our heads, are all of those things showing up on the page?
Another sign of great writing is how your setting is so well drawn, that it almost becomes another character to the story. Think about how in the movie DRIVE, Los Angeles is portrayed in this almost noir-ish 80's vibe, and the city at night almost becomes a character that The Driver interacts with.
In GAME OF THRONES, various settings in Westeros are like characters, and even come to represent the entire population of the people who live in them. THE WALL defines The Rangers. King's Landing and its people signify wealth, The Iron Islands (2nd season) are just as strong and immovable as its people.
Getting to this point with your settings, whether it's on the tapestry of a fantasy or sci-fi script, or on the streets of a gritty New York, or a laid back Los Angeles, or a small town called Fargo – is all about BRINGING IT TO LIFE.
In keeping with the spirit of things, here are a couple examples from Travis Beacham's script, THE GLOAMING:
When choosing a setting, or when going back through an already written script – ask yourself "why this time and place?". If there isn't a definitive, absolute answer as to why you've set your story where you have, then your story world will be lacking, and it will be reflected on the page.
Let's say you have a definitive, absolute answer as to "why here and now?". Great. Now ask yourself "is it on the page?". This is extremely important – as writers we know everything there is to know about our stories, characters, and scripts – it's all in our heads, after all. But for the convenience of all the people not living in our heads, are all of those things showing up on the page?
Another sign of great writing is how your setting is so well drawn, that it almost becomes another character to the story. Think about how in the movie DRIVE, Los Angeles is portrayed in this almost noir-ish 80's vibe, and the city at night almost becomes a character that The Driver interacts with.
In GAME OF THRONES, various settings in Westeros are like characters, and even come to represent the entire population of the people who live in them. THE WALL defines The Rangers. King's Landing and its people signify wealth, The Iron Islands (2nd season) are just as strong and immovable as its people.
Getting to this point with your settings, whether it's on the tapestry of a fantasy or sci-fi script, or on the streets of a gritty New York, or a laid back Los Angeles, or a small town called Fargo – is all about BRINGING IT TO LIFE.
In keeping with the spirit of things, here are a couple examples from Travis Beacham's script, THE GLOAMING:
If you've never heard of KILLING ON CARNIVAL ROW (original title THE GLOAMING), it's about serial killer that preys on faeries in a dark, Victorian steam punk thriller. It's fantastic, and hopefully it actually gets made.
But, let's look at the scene excerpt. First, notice how the little details not only set up where we are very quickly, but we can SEE it in our mind, can HEAR it (the LAUGHING schoolboys), and can smell it (for anyone whose stood next to a flock of pigeons). Also notice how quickly the scene is set. Quick, short action lines. Economy of words. That's a basic scene setting on. Here is one of my favorites, and should be pretty self explanatory:
But, let's look at the scene excerpt. First, notice how the little details not only set up where we are very quickly, but we can SEE it in our mind, can HEAR it (the LAUGHING schoolboys), and can smell it (for anyone whose stood next to a flock of pigeons). Also notice how quickly the scene is set. Quick, short action lines. Economy of words. That's a basic scene setting on. Here is one of my favorites, and should be pretty self explanatory:
I want to also mention that this is the only time we see this kind of creature in the entire movie. In the scene that follows, it's a short Q and A to get some information. No different than any good cop show. But it's amazing to read (and hopefully to watch) because of the SETTING. Because of the CHARACTERS. Because of the writing and creativity and above all – economy of words. Imagine if someone had told you to write a scene where you introduce a fantastical creature that looks like a seal, and then a woman comes out of its mouth whole. Would you have been able to describe it in 3 lines or less? Would you have been able to keep the story moving despite needing to take the time out to introduce a brand new SPECIES? I know I wouldn't.
So, an extreme example to be sure – but it illustrates perfectly what a well written, unique, perfectly fitting setting can look like.
So, here are some questions you need to think about when writing, and/or rewriting your script to make sure the story world is popping off the page:
Why did you choose this setting?
What are some characteristics of the setting that stand out?
What are some of the sounds we hear? What is happening in the background? What are some tertiary things we might see out of the corner of our eye, if we were paying attention?
How does the scenery change and develop over the time?
What are the Landmarks of the place?
You need to feed all of the senses of the reader, to depict a clear setting and location. You may not describe every little thing (in fact, you shouldn't), but if you can convey a little interesting detail here, or a unique detail there, you will quickly build a unique story world.
What is it that makes your setting easily identifiable as YOURS? This doesn't even have to be on a national scale (like setting it at the Washington monument, or the pyramids of giza), but when we see it, either in our heads or on the page, we immediately associate it with your movie/script. Think of the TV series THE MISFITS (hulu). When I see that skyline of concrete low income housing, I think of the show and the characters and all the emotions the show brings out of me. If you can write a movie that makes an executive ACTUALLY remember it, just because of the story world, that's huge.
SCENES
Now that you've started thinking about interesting landmarks or unique locations of where you've decided to set your movie, think about this on the scene level. Does this scene have to be in a restaurant? Does that scene have to be in a bedroom? The more you can get your characters out into the world, interacting with it and within it, the more your script and story world comes ALIVE.
Even if characters have to be inside a restaurant, or some other "boring" location, be specific about where that scene takes place, and what that setting feels like, so that the reader can feel like they're in this setting with these characters.
Simple exercise: imagine you've set a script in modern day Los Angeles – think of all the landmarks of the city – the Getty, the observatory, the La Brea tar pits, or other places that are unique to Los Angeles. Put a "dinner scene" there. What does that do? Unless your script is about cooking, it forces you to cut out all the BS, and focus the scene on JUST the information you need to move the story forward and give the characters depth.
So all of those are just a few questions to ask yourself when building your story world in order to make it POP. Now let's talk about characters.
CHARACTERS
While great dialogue with unique voices is a major force behind making your characters POP (as I've written about in the past), one very simple change you can make to your writing (or rewriting) that will help them pop off the page even more is using this simple tip:
Reveal a bit about your characters through a quirky or unique piece of action that speaks volumes about who they are.
"What does that even mean?" you say. "I'm not writing an indie film, there's no need for any quirkiness here!" you say. Well, bear with me.
One example I like to use that sets up a character very quickly (almost effortlessly) in the audience's mind was in the movie UNFAITHFUL, with Diane Lane and Richard Gere. As you may already know, that movie is about an average, suburban housewife who meets a mysterious man and has an affair. Since she's the protagonist, and she's the one doing the cheating, it's a highwire act because we have to LIKE her, we have to SYMPATHIZE with her, and we have to root for her – an adulterous wife. So how do you pull that off?
In the opening, there's a scene where Diane Lane is doing the laundry, helping her son get off to school, etc. After she sees her son off to the bus, she passes by a table with a chewed up piece of gum sticking to it. Instead of being disgusted, or angry that her young son left it there, she simply pops it into her mouth and goes about her day cleaning the house.
In a movie where she ultimately cheats on her husband, this little moment in the beginning humanized her, made her real – like a real mom with real faults and real reactions to the gross things kids leave around the house. It was such a small detail, but so perfect and spoke volumes – these are the kinds of small details that can bring a character to life quickly.
In a format where you have so little time to set up characters, these small details can be all the difference – whether in the strength of the material, or how it's received.
One last thing to think about, along the same lines as having small character details - when you integrate character development into the sequence of action – what a character is DOING, that's how cut down on and eliminate exposition. Keeping things moving, keeping characters DOING, while revealing bits about these characters in the process of WHAT they are doing – helps you write better dialogue and create memorable, CINEMATIC characters.
So whether you're writing a new script, or going through an existing script, find all the little ways you can enhance your setting, enhance your scene work, and enhance your characters and make them POP off the page.
So, an extreme example to be sure – but it illustrates perfectly what a well written, unique, perfectly fitting setting can look like.
So, here are some questions you need to think about when writing, and/or rewriting your script to make sure the story world is popping off the page:
Why did you choose this setting?
What are some characteristics of the setting that stand out?
What are some of the sounds we hear? What is happening in the background? What are some tertiary things we might see out of the corner of our eye, if we were paying attention?
How does the scenery change and develop over the time?
What are the Landmarks of the place?
You need to feed all of the senses of the reader, to depict a clear setting and location. You may not describe every little thing (in fact, you shouldn't), but if you can convey a little interesting detail here, or a unique detail there, you will quickly build a unique story world.
What is it that makes your setting easily identifiable as YOURS? This doesn't even have to be on a national scale (like setting it at the Washington monument, or the pyramids of giza), but when we see it, either in our heads or on the page, we immediately associate it with your movie/script. Think of the TV series THE MISFITS (hulu). When I see that skyline of concrete low income housing, I think of the show and the characters and all the emotions the show brings out of me. If you can write a movie that makes an executive ACTUALLY remember it, just because of the story world, that's huge.
SCENES
Now that you've started thinking about interesting landmarks or unique locations of where you've decided to set your movie, think about this on the scene level. Does this scene have to be in a restaurant? Does that scene have to be in a bedroom? The more you can get your characters out into the world, interacting with it and within it, the more your script and story world comes ALIVE.
Even if characters have to be inside a restaurant, or some other "boring" location, be specific about where that scene takes place, and what that setting feels like, so that the reader can feel like they're in this setting with these characters.
Simple exercise: imagine you've set a script in modern day Los Angeles – think of all the landmarks of the city – the Getty, the observatory, the La Brea tar pits, or other places that are unique to Los Angeles. Put a "dinner scene" there. What does that do? Unless your script is about cooking, it forces you to cut out all the BS, and focus the scene on JUST the information you need to move the story forward and give the characters depth.
So all of those are just a few questions to ask yourself when building your story world in order to make it POP. Now let's talk about characters.
CHARACTERS
While great dialogue with unique voices is a major force behind making your characters POP (as I've written about in the past), one very simple change you can make to your writing (or rewriting) that will help them pop off the page even more is using this simple tip:
Reveal a bit about your characters through a quirky or unique piece of action that speaks volumes about who they are.
"What does that even mean?" you say. "I'm not writing an indie film, there's no need for any quirkiness here!" you say. Well, bear with me.
One example I like to use that sets up a character very quickly (almost effortlessly) in the audience's mind was in the movie UNFAITHFUL, with Diane Lane and Richard Gere. As you may already know, that movie is about an average, suburban housewife who meets a mysterious man and has an affair. Since she's the protagonist, and she's the one doing the cheating, it's a highwire act because we have to LIKE her, we have to SYMPATHIZE with her, and we have to root for her – an adulterous wife. So how do you pull that off?
In the opening, there's a scene where Diane Lane is doing the laundry, helping her son get off to school, etc. After she sees her son off to the bus, she passes by a table with a chewed up piece of gum sticking to it. Instead of being disgusted, or angry that her young son left it there, she simply pops it into her mouth and goes about her day cleaning the house.
In a movie where she ultimately cheats on her husband, this little moment in the beginning humanized her, made her real – like a real mom with real faults and real reactions to the gross things kids leave around the house. It was such a small detail, but so perfect and spoke volumes – these are the kinds of small details that can bring a character to life quickly.
In a format where you have so little time to set up characters, these small details can be all the difference – whether in the strength of the material, or how it's received.
One last thing to think about, along the same lines as having small character details - when you integrate character development into the sequence of action – what a character is DOING, that's how cut down on and eliminate exposition. Keeping things moving, keeping characters DOING, while revealing bits about these characters in the process of WHAT they are doing – helps you write better dialogue and create memorable, CINEMATIC characters.
So whether you're writing a new script, or going through an existing script, find all the little ways you can enhance your setting, enhance your scene work, and enhance your characters and make them POP off the page.
"New Girl"
SPEC WRITING ROAD MAP
By Guy Jackson and Michael Ferris
Sample New Girl script:
http://www.zen134237.zen.co.uk/New_Girl_1x01_-_Pilot.pdf
Movie Magic® Screenwriter template:
http://support.screenplay.com/filestore/templates/mmsw6/New/TV/New%20Girl.def
SERIES OVERVIEW AND CONCEIT:
“NEW GIRL” is a half-hour sitcom on Fox. It concerns the upbeat, fun-loving, flighty, schoolteacher Jess, who after a bad break-up opted to move into a loft with three guys. Nick is a law-school dropout, Winston is a former Latvian basketball player, and Schmidt is working a dead-end corporate job, and though much of the series’ friendly conflict derives from Jess driving the boys up the wall, Jess is also their light, their saving grace. Many of the episodes have an underlying theme of Jess setting fire to, and burning down, the male characters’ doldrums, by plunging into disasters that somehow go okay in the end.
Jess also has a close friend, Cece, a hardworking, mysterious model who spent the first season in a quiet flirtation and then a passionate secret relationship with Schmidt. The pair was eventually found out, and broke up.
The series is a massive hit, and cutting edge in terms of youth, freshness, and joie de vivre, and is at its best when it tends toward the surreal, offbeat, and heightened forms of comedy. In one episode Jess initiated an afterschool bell band for troubled high schoolers, literally a band playing hand bells. At first her roommates were driven mad, but Winston, the competitive former basketball player, picked up the bells and immediately was an expert, and led the bell band to a performance of Survivor’s perennial hit “Eye Of The Tiger” before a crowd of ten in the local park. That sort of surreality. That sort of quirk. That sort of oddball-ness.
Also the series relies heavily on Embarrassment with a capital E, and while most comedy does as much to some extent, the undercurrent of embarrassment throughout “NEW GIRL” episodes is a constant river. The characters are embarrassing themselves, or embarrassed of their paths, or withholding embarrassment, or trying to conceal something so as not to be embarrassed (as in the first series’ thread of Cece and Schmidt’s secret romance). You can never go wrong writing up something embarrassing for the characters to experience. In the best example of this, late in the first season Jess went back to her ex-boyfriend Paul for a one-night-stand, found out he had a new girlfriend, and when all had been revealed, Jess had to stand there and watch Paul and the new girlfriend cry and cry and then watch Paul ask the new girlfriend to marry him in the sappiest fashion possible.
In a related theme, nudity often pops up, characters frequently appearing in their underwear.
A motif of Roommate Vs. Roommate also crops up a lot, for example with Nick and Schmidt having a bravura, episode long battle (see below) and Schmidt and Winston having a slap fight in a grocery store and Schmidt coming to a point of smashing a cabinet that Jess brought in off the street. Another of the series’ best aspects is when a comic moment goes for it with a heavy duty, knockdown, drag out roommate fight.
There’s also a refugee status afforded to every character of the series. Jess has fled to the loft from a bad break-up, Nick is fleeing his sense of failure, Schmidt tries to put a brave face on it but he toils in a soul-sucking, demeaning job, Winston’s bizarre history as a Latvian basketball player puts him out of sync with the world, and Cece is too smart for her modeling career and the usual breed of men her beauty snags her.
The plotting is light, and unlike “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”, a prospective spec-writer doesn’t have to fret over stepping into an endlessly tangled plot continuing from show to show to show. Know that Jess and Nick seem to have an underlying sexual tension, know about Cece and Schmidt’s arc-ing relationship, and know that Winston was a former basketball player now at wit’s end as to what to do with himself but pursuing rebuilding a relationship with former booty call Shelby. And then know the characters (see below) and you’re in a pole position to tackle a spec. The series is 90% episodic, in other words, and an entirely self-contained episode is a fine thing.
PLOTTING OVERVIEW:
Episodes of “NEW GIRL” wield A, B, C plots, but many episode exhibit a unique pattern of letting both the A and B plot be evolving, and the C plot be either a continuance or a completely surreal story or a note of character (for example, one episode’s subplot involved simply watching Winston fail at being an office temp, and so we understood a note of his character). As with writing any spec of any episode of any TV series, a writer should attempt to match themes amongst the plots.
For example: one episode began it’s A plot with Jess helping out a bullied kid in school, putting him in front of the class to play backup piano while she sang an anti-bullying song. This resulted in the class bullies filming and editing the video into a mockery of Jess, thereby evolving the plot from Jess preventing bullying to being bullied herself. In her anger she broke a robot arm science project of the bullies’ leader girl, and had to fess up when the robot arm didn’t work at the school science fair, thereby evolving the plot from Jess being bullied to Jess being the bully. As disasters always do in “NEW GIRL”, this one turned out alright when Jess’ boss Tanya congratulated Jess on finally becoming a real teacher and hating the kids.
Meanwhile, the same episode’s B plot also evolved. First Nick received a cactus plant from his traveling girlfriend, which he assumed was a gift designed to test whether he could take care something, anything, i.e. the easiest plant to take care of. Nick failed, and wound up with a broken cactus stuck together with popsicle sticks. Then he decided the gift was a break-up gift, and when his girlfriend came back from her trip she did indeed break up with him. The plot both evolved from a simple present from a girlfriend to the end of their relationship, with the cactus as a metaphor for all kinds of different things. Also the plot thematically linked to the A plot, with Jess breaking the robot arm through hapless carelessness and Nick doing the same to the cactus.
The C plot of the same episode concerned Cece and Schmidt continuing their passionate hookups and trying to hide the same, matching the themes hapless struggles and relationships.
One more example of a particular great evolving A plot: in one episode an exploding toilet revealed Nick to be the fix-it man of the house, but a surreal, haphazard, jury-rigging fix it man with elaborate, Rube Goldberg ways of unclogging the sink, fixing leaks in the roof, etc. (The B roll contained a hilarious moment of Nick drilling a hole in the middle of a puddle on the roof, thereby draining the puddle into the ceiling, and uttering ‘Fixed!’.) Schmidt took eternal issue with this DIY behavior, and demanded a plumber be called, then paid for a plumber out of his own pocket. The plot then evolved when Nick flew into a rage and he and Schmidt had a bracing, screaming argument about which things in the apartment belonged to whom, and the plot then evolved again to a discussion of how Nick was a failure in life, which brought back around in a circle to Nick being a failure as a fix-it man. As in any screenwriting, if you can take a plot around in a full circle, you’re golden.
“NEW GIRL” also uses B Roll footage, the slang term for footage that usually flashes back into the characters’ deep pasts. Most often in the B Roll we come to understand how Jess has a long history of doing whatever it is she’s doing currently, or else the B Roll references the obese childhood/young adulthood of both Jess and Schmidt.
PLOT SKELETON:
Going even barer with the bones, here’s the ‘average’ skeleton for an episode, an average based on five typical “NEW GIRL” episodes broken up beat-by-beat.
COLD OPEN/TEASER
1. 1st beat of A story or
2. Non-sequitar mini-sketch.
OPENING TITLES
ACT 1
1. If not in the Cold Open/Teaser, immediately have the 1st beat of A story.
A. Use B Roll footage to capture any exposition
2. Introduce B story.
3. 2nd beat of A story
A. Story can spin in new direction
4. 2nd beat of B story
5. 3rd beat of A story
6. 3rd beat of B story
7. 1st beat of C story
8. Cliffhanging 4th beat of A story
COMMERCIAL BREAK
ACT II
1. Resolve cliffhanger of A story/5th beat
2. 4th beat of B story
3. 6th beat of A story
A. Story can spin in a new direction
4. 2nd beat of C story
5. B story cliffhanger (5th beat)
6. A story cliffhanger (7th beat)
COMMERCIAL BREAK
ACT III
1. Wrap up C story (withholding A story, drawing out cliffhanger)
2. Wrap up B story
3. Wrap up A story
COMMERCIAL BREAK
(Note that oftentimes there’s no commercial break here, and the credits will begin rolling, and a typical “NEW GIRL” episode will therefore sort of wander into its tag.)
TAG
Epilogue of A story, (8th beat)
Note that (of course) the A story has more beats than the B story which has more beats than the C story.
CHARACTER BREAKDOWNS:
MAJOR CHARACTERS:
JESS (ZOOEY DESCHANEL):
Like Amy Poehler’s character in “PARKS & RECREATION”, Jess is infinitely optimistic, a force of nature in her vibrancy. She has to be, as she’s an elementary school teacher, who sometimes seems to range upward and work with older students. (An episode with a science fair depicted her with a classroom full of 10-12-year-olds but another episode had her working with high school kids on a ‘bell band’.) Jess is the definition of quirk, the definition of effervescent, and plenty of friendly conflict is derived from the way she drives her three roommates nuts with endless earnestness and constant tripping of the light fantastic.
Jess is always awkward, as well, and a great way to tackle her character in a spec is to dump her in the most awkward situation possible and let her squirm. Jess usually squirms with outright weirdness; in an extreme example, when attempting to have sex with her boyfriend Paul she throttled him, and the move quickly turned from playful erotic asphyxiation to ‘wow, she’s really accidentally strangling him’. In lesser extremes, Jess will break into quasi-songs when she’s nervous, singing her answers to an uncomfortable question or painted-into-corner conversation.
The term ‘adorkable’ was coined from this series, but Jess’ heart is in the right place, so in writing your spec don’t get caught in a cutesiness trap, make sure Jess comes from a place of honest earnestness. In one episode Schmidt couldn’t rent a party bus for his birthday, so Jess went to great lengths to rent a school bus and outfit it with a stripper pole, and even though it was male stripper who showed up, all went well.
Jess’ heart is so in the right place she’ll often go astray: in one brilliant, shining, great moment of character revealing dialogue, Cece told her: “Jess, you could form an emotional attachment to a shoe.” And Jess replied. “Oh, one shoe? How sad.”
Jess talks like a Native American when she’s angry.
Or her goodly heart will bring her to meddling where she shouldn’t: in another terrific episode, when things went awry with the apartment, Jess befriended the creepy, crusty landlord, much to her roommates’ chagrin, and the landlord wound up hanging out, drinking beers with Nick and Jess, and then ultimately voicing that he was nervous about their impending ménage a trois.
Obscure Character Note: Jess has ‘too-good’ peripheral vision and that justifies her constant distractedness.
Representative Dialogue:
“Who do I speak to re: getting something removed from the Internet?”
NICK MILLER (JAKE M. JOHNSON):
A bartender aching with a sense of failure, Nick dropped out of law school and had himself a terrible break-up with Caroline, such a bad break-up that Nick made a video for his future self to tell his future self never to get back together with Caroline, a video shown to him when he decided to get back together with Caroline in the penultimate episode.
Nick is a jury-rigger of a repairman, he doesn’t like his hair touched, he was once aptly, perfectly described by Jess as “cute in that sort of scruffy P.I. way”. Nick has a weak back. He sweats a lot. He’s always wearing a five o’clock shadow.
He’s a careless sort, unable to take care of something so simple as a cactus, and also a failure at growing tomato plants, in the episode where he tried to go abstinent and grow tomato plants. He’s the inventor of bro juice, which is apparently drinking out of a big jug. He’s afraid of sharks and blueberries.
He doesn’t believe in washing towels, much to Schmidt’s chagrin when it was found out Nick was using Schmidt’s towel. Nick’s reasoning in this is that when you step out of the shower you’re clean, and that the towel washes you, you don’t wash the towel. This type of logic is classic of Nick.
Representative Dialogue:
“Smiling is a sign of weakness.”
“People are the worst.”
WINSTON BISHOP (LAMORNE MORRIS):
Winston is an oddball, maladjusted from a strange (and in keeping with the series, surreal) past in which he was shipped to Latvia after high school to play on a Latvian basketball team. As some sort of basketball celebrity, Winston squandered his education and relationships, using his current girlfriend Shelby as a booty call back in the day. Throughout the first season Winston’s been recovering his dignity, un-stunting his growth, and regaining self-respect and sense of place, as well as making up with the ill-used Shelby, being romantic and generous.
Winston has a fiercely competitive streak and a sort of wild temper that accompanies it, as in the ‘bell band’ episode when he snapped at Jess’ pupils for failing to properly play Eye Of The Tiger. But Winston’s always sweet in the end, and he likes the band Sister Sister. He’s afraid of the dark. He’s afraid of thunder. He sleeps on Saturdays. He once had a horrible van, but it fell apart in a gas station.
He once had a temp job which he tried and failed to make a game of, and then got himself fired. He then got a job at a radio station, being the P.A. for local radio host Joe Napoli, who does some sort of nebulous talk show. Winston was a fan until starting the job, whereupon he reaped abuse from Napoli and was given signals to flee by Napoli’s co-host, Kareem Abdul-Jabar. After standing up for himself, though, Winston won over Joe Napoli, and in the tail end of the season became a sort of stern babysitter to the man.
SCHMIDT (MAX GREENFIELD):
The womanizer of the group, Schmidt recovered from his fat childhood and college years (often depicted in flashback) to become a buffed-up womanizer. He has his own phraseology, calls ‘ketchup’ ‘ketch’, and is most often the one who has to put money in the loft’s Douchebag Jar. He wears drinking moccassins. He calls his watch ‘his other timepiece’. He has a walking cape. He can’t calm down. He’s OCD.
Schmidt works a dead-end, soul-sucking, unspecific corporate job at the equally unspecific Associate Strategies. It’s also a humiliating job, with Schmidt having to repeatedly play Santa Claus in only his underwear for the office Christmas party.
Schmidt is rich, supporting the rest of his roommates and the loft, and unscrupulous, but in the end of the day he can be fantastically sweet, as in the moment when he found out Cece might be pregnant, and immediately fell to his knees and put his ear to her stomach and said: “We made a baby?”
CECE (HANNAH SIMONE)
The demure model, soft inside but with an ass-kicking facet when she needs it, Cece’s character is probably the most perfectly realized, for the way the writers have made her a woman of infinite mystery, just as a model should be.
She started the series going out with a loser boyfriend who ate a lot of mushrooms and even fed mushrooms to his cat, but Schmidt’s infinite sweetness won her over. He had a perfume made for her, a scent with her name on it, and even though it smelled terrible, it was the winning strike.
Physically fit without effort (as evidenced in one episode where she easily ran a 5K charity race, then had to go back and help Jess across the finish line), Cece also often shows an infinite wisdom, an enigmatic knowledge of all things, as when she easily handles the tantrums and emotional roller coasters of the rest of the characters. There’s been hints of a tumultuous family life, but she loves her grandmother, whom she once took Schmidt to visit, in the grandmother’s nursing home.
In writing for Cece it’s best to let her hang back until other characters give themselves just enough rope to hang themselves, and then let her step in with something wise. But she’s not incapable of emotional breakdowns her own self, mind, when it really matters, as it did when she finally decided she was in love with Schmidt.
MINOR CHARACTERS:
There aren’t a lot of recurring minor characters in the first season of “NEW GIRL”, and its unknown if any of the following characters, except for the landlord, will even be back for the second season. But here are the most important appearances from the first season.
RUSSELL (DERMOT MULRONEY):
“Passion’s overrated.” Was Russell’s fatal line, the utterance that caused Jess to dump him. He is the wealthy father of one of her students, and met her when her car broke down while she was on her way to his office to yell at him on behalf of the proletariat. But Russell wound up being a cool cat, and wanted Jess’ mellowness in his otherwise hectic life.
The two worked on a relationship for several episodes, Jess even go so far as to babysit Russell’s daughter and try and make nice with Russell’s ex-wife. But when Jess saw the fire of Russell’s failed marriage, she decided she wanted passion, to which Russell answered the above.
PAUL (JUSTIN LONG):
A hideous slow-crier and the music teacher at Jess’ school, he and Jess dated for a couple episodes, found themselves awkward about sex and everything else, and found that Paul couldn’t fit in whatsoever with the coolness of Nick, Schmidt, and Winston, and so the relationship ended. After her breakup with Russell, however, Jess went back to Paul for a one-night stand, thereby interrupting Paul’s engagement to the ‘Asian Jess’. But Jess realized she was actually the ‘Caucasian Jess’ and got Paul and his fiancé back together.
CAROLINE (MARY ELIZABETH ELLIS):
Nick’s ball-busting ex-girlfriend, who provided him with a honey trap until he was almost lured away from his roommates and sparks with Jess.
TANYA (RACHEL HARRIS):
Jess’ hardcore boss, who was defined when she congratulated Jess on breaking a pupil’s science project, paraphrasing: “Now you’re a real teacher. You hate kids.”
SHELBY (KALI HAWK):
Winston’s girlfriend, who used to be his sex object, but Winston has been gradually making it up to her, and they now have an loving relationship.
JOE NAPOLI (PHIL HENDRIE):
Winston’s gigantic, obese, Hawaiian-shirt wearing radio show boss, once demanding but so child-like Winston gained the upperhand, and now is a babysitting P.A.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
At season’s end Schmidt had ended his relationship with Cece due on jealousy over her modeling, but look for their back-and-forth to continue. Winston and Shelby had fallen in love again and Winston had become a success at his radio show P.A. job. Nick tried to move back in with his ex, Caroline, but after a night in the desert with his friends he’s back in the loft. Jess broke up with Russell.
The romantic comedy vibe driving Nick and Jess together got pretty obvious toward the first season’s end. When Jess decided to break up with Russell because she wanted passion and fire, she immediately returned home to a knockdown fight with Nick. In the desert (after Nick drove his moving van there instead of moving in with Caroline) Nick and Jess clutched each other and faced down a coyote. But fair warning: romantic leads in any series getting together is a difficult chore, and leads to major turning points in series, so it’s a fair guess Nick and Jess won’t get together next season, and there’ll continue to be a subtext of ‘Oh, they’re perfect for one another!’
WORLD & SETTING:
Much of the series takes place within the loft apartment, somewhere in downtown Los Angeles, but much of L.A. is seen in the show, with Griffith Park and Venice Beach putting in appearances. Note that the bathroom of the loft apartment is quite strange, it’s very much a public bathroom in a bar, with two urinals and a stall.
GOD IS IN THE DETAILS:
These are teeny tiny details of the series you might want to exploit in a spec.
- There’s a Douchebag Jar in the living room, wherein people put money if they say or do something douchebag-ish.
- When drunk, everyone in the loft engages in a game of “True American”, a game with no rules which involves shouting out random facts and not touching the floor, hopping from piece of furniture to piece of furniture, or couch pillow to couch pillow. Anything goes in a depiction of this game, and the object of the game is whatever it is.
Stereotyping the characters with their own characterization. This is what always makes writing for any television series (but especially comedies) stale. Jess is not quirky for quirky’s sake, her quirkiness always comes from and relates back to the stories that are happening to her. In an episode where she decided to have sex with her then-boyfriend Paul, for example, she decided to buy a stringy spiderweb piece of lingerie, and an endless physical gag resulted from her faffing and fiddling with getting on and taking off the lingerie. But it didn’t come from nowhere. The writer didn’t have Jess appear in a lingerie store and wackily, quirkily try the lingerie on.
When you watch episodes, always note and fawn over the surreal aspects of the series, and when you have an organic story based in reality, let yourself take it to those heights. Once Jess showed up at Cece’s apartment, which is full of Cece’s 10 roommate models, and one anonymous model was crying on the couch. “What’s wrong with her?” asked Jess. “She fell on a cookie.” Cece promptly answered. A perfect exchange, based in reality and heightened without being overly adorkable.
"HELL ON WHEELS"
SPEC WRITING ROAD MAP
By Guy Jackson and Michael Ferris
Sample HELL ON WHEELS script:
http://www.zen134237.zen.co.uk/Hell_on_Wheels_1x01_-_Pilot.pdf
Movie Magic® Screenwriter template:
http://support.screenplay.com/filestore/templates/mmsw6/New/TV/Hell%20on%20Wheels.def
SERIES OVERVIEW AND CONCEIT:
"HELL ON WHEELS" is a series on AMC created by Joe and Tony Gayton. Each episode runs about 45 minutes. The title of the series comes from the filthy, mobile tent town at the head of the evolving Transcontinental Railway, circa the American West of the 1860s.
At the series' beginning the opening title appeared:
"1865. The war is over. Lincoln is dead. The nation is an open wound".
By this dictum the series announced it would reveal character under the duress of history. By no means does "HELL ON WHEELS" simply recite history, ticking off lists of events. When a character mentions, say, the horror of Andersonville prison, or 'Bleeding Kansas', it's because a character was there, in those events, and emotionally affected.
Like "BOARDWALK EMPIRE", "HELL ON WHEELS" reveals conflicted historical reasoning behind certain formerly noble moments, or at least puts that reasoning up for debate. And so we have the ideas that the Native Americans became 'savages' only because of the Transcontinental Railroad and Manifest Destiny, and that the settlement of the American West was based on corrupted money.
The newly freed slaves are also a large part of the picture here, and "HELL ON WHEELS" makes known every inch of their struggle, right down to the detail that they're only being paid half as much as the other railroad workers. The Freedmen are also always set to work 'in the cut', digging the actual trench through which the railway will run, while explosive crews work several miles ahead, softening the earth and the way forward. During the series The Freedmen were also the first to be set forward as the Native American raids on the train increased in ferocity, though their first steps are being taken toward civil rights, as the Freedmen demanded to be armed while riding point.
There is also a strong immigrant presence in the show, depicting how the railway was not only built on the backs of freed slaves, but also by the toil of Irish immigrants running from the famine in their land, Swedish immigrants seeking fortune, German immigrants, French Haitians, etc.
Speaking of 'in the cut' above, the technical aspects of the building of the Transcontinental Railway come much into play. There were no planes to fly overhead, and so surveyors were vital, compassing the way across the land, as they blindly pushed forth across the prairies and into the Rocky Mountains. In one terrific scene in the second season, a bridge is built across a chasm, and the viewer thinks: "Wow, those guys really did that, and they sure as heck knew their math."
The corruption comes into play here, as well; in an early episode a winding track is decided on because the company gets paid by the mile. The spine of the first season also involved a looming deadline wherein the railway had to make a certain 40 mile mark to continue to be funded by the government.
Spiritually the railway is vaunted as Manifest Destiny, and there's preachers and prostitutes to lend carnival color to this 'Westward Ho!' side of the story. The Native Americans in one episode, after a vision of a steam-belching beast coming across their plains, came to negotiate with the railway builders, and they saw the town of Hell On Wheels for a filthy settlement, full of dying animals, mud, prostitution, gambling, fighting, drinking.
Finally there is the tension between the former Union Soldiers and the former Confederate Soldiers, and Cullen (see below) takes the brunt of this per the series, being called 'Johnny Reb' and a 'Grayback' more often than not.
CHARACTER BREAKDOWNS:
MAJOR CHARACTERS:
CULLEN BOHANNEN (ANSON MOUNT):
A former farmer, a former Confederate soldier, Cullen came home from the war to find his wife raped and hung on his back porch, to find his son and servant burned to death, and as much was depicted in shards of flashbacks, in bits and pieces of exposition. Cullen detected up the names of the squad of Union soldiers who'd done the deed, and began wending a path of vengeance that provided some of the spine to "HELL ON WHEELS" ' first season.
In the first episode Cullen shot a man in a church confessional, thereby illustrating Cullen's intent to walk in the valley of the shadow of death, thereby illustrating Cullen's irreligious path. By the end of the first episode, Cullen had signed on to work on the railroad, to ride along with the town of Hell On Wheels, and Cullen had a hand in killing his boss on the job, one Captain Daniel Johnson, another man involved with the murder of Cullen's wife and son. Cullen took Johnson's job, becoming Foreman, and discovering a photo in Johnson's possessions that would lead Cullen to the rest of guilty squad.
Cullen's murderous inner rage is accompanied by a teeny tiny spot of a soft center. He can't hold his liquor, a physical illustration of that soft center that constantly comes up. Cullen also capitulated to his wife once upon a time, freeing his slaves a year before the Civil War and waging them for their labor.
Cullen didn't actually kill Captain Johnson, however, it was his on-again-off-again friend Elam (see below) who cut the Captain's throat just before the Captain could gun down Cullen. Cullen didn't rat Elam out, but instead took the rap with Hell On Wheels' head of security, The Swede (see below).
Cullen then escaped being hung and negotiated with Durant (see below) for Captain Johnson's job as Foreman, convincing Durant that he (Cullen) was a former soldier and that building the railroad was fighting a war. Cullen promised he'd lay the 40 miles of track needed to make the deadline imposed by the U.S. government.
Once given the job of Foreman, Cullen flaked a little, setting off in pursuit of one Sergeant Harper, the supposed last remaining man he needed to kill to avenge his wife. Yet Harper escaped, and eluded Cullen for the remainder of the first season. When Cullen finally caught up with Harper at series' end (The Swede brought Harper back to Hell On Wheels to testify against Cullen) and killed him, Harper hinted there was another man for Cullen to find and that he (Harper) wasn't present at Cullen's wife and son's deaths.
Meanwhile, Cullen enjoyed a push-pull relationship with Elam; they accidentally conspired over Captain Johnson's death, but then had a wagered fistfight to settle tensions between the blacks and the Irish in the train's labor camp.
Cullen enjoys the same sort of relationship with The Swede, though the Swede is much more of a villain. The Swede began the series hunting down Cullen for the killing of Johnson, then sided with Cullen against O'Toole (see below) then once Cullen continued to usurp The Swede's authority, and the kickbacks The Swede received for protection of Hell On Wheels, The Swede tried to get Cullen arrested for the murder of Johnson. But Cullen killed The Swede's witness, Harper, while The Swede was tarred and feathered for grifting the populace too much as Head Of Security, and he was run out of Hell On Wheels.
Cullen's relationship with railroad owner Durant has been equally contentious. Durant placed incredible trust in Cullen, and was well pleased indeed when Cullen brought Lily Bell (the dead railway surveyor's wife) to Hell On Wheels safe and sound, along with her surveyor maps of the Rocky Mountains (see below). Durant was also pretty pleased when Cullen managed a rout of the Cheyenne tribe about to attack the railway line. But Cullen's apparent sexual tension with Lily Bell, whom Durant eventually took up with, or at least Lily Bell's desire for Cullen, dispensed with all Durant's goodwill, and Durant stood by while The Swede tried to rid Hell On Wheels of Cullen at the first season's end.
When writing for Cullen keep in mind that his motives can be mysterious, mercurial, and he'll always surprise by doing the right thing, such as saving Elam from hanging and teaching Elam how to shoot, and he'll always stand and fight, such as when he had the boxing match with Elam, or saved the payroll from being stolen by his former confederates, a rogue band of former Confederates.
Cullen's stone coldness extends to everyone. At one point in the beginning of the second season he was faced with a railroad sentry being tortured to death by Native Americans on a hilltop, and to drive the Native Americans away he shot the near-dead railroad sentry, in front of the rest of the railroad men. He began the second season, as well, by having stolen the railroad payroll and ridden off, and only Durant saved him from hanging, bringing him back to act as head of security.
Cullen did smile once, however, when teaching the freedmen how to load a rifle and a man dropped a round. And Cullen is just plain awesome. Cullen was at his best when he reassembled a six-shooter to gun down a train robber, while the train robber fumbled to reassemble his gun much the same, and Cullen coolly out-assembled the man, and gunned him down.
Representative Dialogue: "It ain't fun, but they seem to need killing."
THOMAS 'DOC' DURANT (COLM MEANEY):
The corrupt Irish owner of the Union Pacific railroad, Durant often exhibits more fairness toward the men under him, even fondness, than he does for the U.S. government, the entity he's constantly grifting. The U.S. Government is personified by one Senator Crane (see below), introduced along with Durant when Durant bribed him with railroad bonds.
Early in the series Durant ordered his builders to build a winding railroad to get more government funds. He's that sort. Durant also once upon a time smuggled cotton during the Civil War. In a particular episode, in an illumination of American history, Durant egged a Chicago Tribune reporter to heighten the drama of an Indian Massacre to turn public opinion against "the savages", so the railway building would smooth out with the government sending more troops to rout the Native Americans.
Like Cullen, Durant lost his wife under mysterious circumstances, and when Lily Bell came into his life, after the killing of her surveyor husband Robert, Durant gradually fell for her. Though Lily's heart often went out to Durant, and though he treated her with utmost gentility, she still was falling for Cullen by the first season's end, and once Durant was wounded and out of the picture, she was gone with Cullen by the middle of the second season.
When writing for Durant, remember that he's a gentleman in the purest sense of the word, but he's also the catalyst for the building of a nation, and as such his gentlemen façade conceals a cold-blooded businessman who'll stop at nothing, as they say…
ELAM FERGUSON (COMMON):
Elam, an eternally angry freed slave, loved the taste of Cullen's revenge, feeling it as revenge against white men, and Elam was the actual killer of Captain Johnson in the first episode, though Cullen took the rap.
Elam smolders across the breadth of the series, forever furious in the aftermath of slavery, forever ready to throw his life away fighting down the white man, as he almost did on several occasions contending with O'Toole (see below). Elam is the personification of rage against the institution of slavery, but goes far beyond political correctness and tokenhood with the depths of that rage.
Elam doesn't but rarely drink, as he once mentioned killing a man while drunk. But in the second season, when he became Head Of Security and worked more closely with Durant, his fellow Freedmen began to see him as the 'house slave', sucking up to the white man, and this frission between his worlds turned Elam to the bottle.
Elam spent a good portion of the first season in a sweet romance with the tattooed prostitute Eva. In each other they saw a wounded soul, with Eva's wound in physical evidence, and Elam's wound interior. At first Eva would have nothing to do with Elam, but felt for him when O'Toole and the Irish laughed Elam out of the whorehouse. Eva and Elam got together, and when their relationship was found out Elam was nearly hanged, then rescued by Cullen.
Elam tries his best to be Cullen's friend, but Cullen's opaque nature has kept Elam at arm's length, and even brought the two to blows in their boxing episode. The fight was a bit of a draw, by the way, as Elam was given a glove with a pepper wrapped in it, and hence knocked Cullen out.
When Eva rejoined Hell On Wheels at the beginning of the second season she immediately goaded Elam into killing a German who had raped and murdered one of Eva's prostitute friends. Eva and Elam soon struck up their affair again, and Elam impregnated Eva, then refused her because he was afeared of the storm a mixed race baby would bring. But Elam decided on being a father, and at this point Eva needs to choose between Elam and O'Toole.
Cullen has several times saved Elam's ass, and this creates a funny tension between them, as when Elam realized same former Confederates were going to rob the payroll, then instituted a gun battle against the robbers, but then got pinned down and had to be rescued by Cullen.
Representative Dialogue: "No Indian ever bloodied my back."
THE SWEDE (CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL):
An accountant before the Civil War, The Swede was imprisoned in Andersonville, where he apparently saw such sights (a fellow prisoner tried to eat him) that he had to invent a new moral compass for himself, based on his screwy theory of "Immoral Mathematics". It's a theory of how to be evil and good at the same time, basically.
Dressed always in sleek blackness that shows off his towering height, The Swede for awhile stalked Hell On Wheels like some sort of evil Madeline. For the entirety of the first season he ruled the roost as Head Of Security, and grifted the entrepreneurs of Hell On Wheels for protection money, especially the prostitutes and The Magic Lantern Show run by the McGinnes brothers (see below). He finally received his comeuppance in a tarring and feathering, and was exiled from Hell On Wheels at the first season's end.
Utterly fastidious, The Swede will most often be seen sorting things. He has a vocal overflow and often makes a tiny grunt to end a sentence. He liked a particular slide from The Magic Lantern Show, a slide of an idyllic Ireland scene, so much so he took it as payment in one of his griftings.
Returning to Hell On Wheels with the second season, The Swede immediately began work as an undertaker, but his skittering plans lay in the diabolical turning of the town against Cullen and Durant. He got under the skin of Reverend Cole and then agitated the Germans to try and slaughter the McGinness Brothers over the murder of the German blacksmith who killed a prostitute and was in turn killed by Elam. Mickey McGinnes accidentally bragged about the killing, and nearly took the rap.
The German thing didn't upend Hell On Wheels the way The Swede hoped, but he soon revealed that after his tarring and feathering he'd fallen in the a rogue tribe of Cheyenne, and he revealed to Reverend Cole his gunrunning to these Native Americans. Then The Swede egged Reverend Cole into thinking the world was at an end, and taking Durant hostage. The Swede then went completely Native, and showed up in Hell On Wheels covered in clay with a shaved head. Only to be hired by Lily Bell to fix the railroads books after Durant's wounding. Indeed, The Swede is an agent of chaos and himself a character of chaos.
The Swede has gone from trying to hang Cullen for the murder of Daniel Johnson, to fighting alongside Cullen against O'Toole's gang, to encouraging O'Toole to lynch Elam, to again palling with Cullen, to again trying to get Cullen jailed, and so on and so forth. Like many of the relationships in Hell On Wheels, The Swede can be trying to kill you in the morning and sharing a bottle with you in the evening.
LILY BELL (DOMINIQUE MCELLIGOT):
Escaping slaughter at the hands of a rogue band of Cheyenne at the series' beginning, Lily Bell lost the love of her life, her devoted husband Robert Bell. A renowned surveyor, Robert was working to find a way through the Rocky Mountains for the railroad, but just prior to his death had a falling out with Durant.
Lily struggled across the prairie and was dually rescued by Joseph Black Moon (see below) and Cullen, landing in Hell On Wheels. For a time she hid the survey maps from Durant, as he cooed and cared for her, finally giving them up and, though at first spurning Durant's love, by the beginning of the second season had fallen in with him. A surveyor in her own right, Lily assumed the role of partner in the railroad.
Prior to that though, during most of the first season, before giving in to Durant, Lily doggedly tried to live in the Hell On Wheels camp, befriending Eva and beginning a long, slow pine for Cullen.
Lily is a firebrand, not only surviving the initial massacre by killing a man twice her size, but when she returned to Chicago for a memorial for Robert, and came up against Robert's spinster sister, she slapped the woman for badmouthing her survival. So though Lily didn't turn out to have the stuff to live in the squalor of the Hell On Wheels camp, she only returned to the relative comfort of Durant's sleeper car, and loved the Westward life too much to leave the prairies.
After Durant was wounded in an attempted robbery of the payroll, and shipped off to Chicago for surgery, Lily found herself running the railroad in its entirety, and found herself with the opportunity to at last get it on with Cullen, and by the tail end of the second season the two were in mid-tempestuous relationship.
HANNAH DURANT (VIRGINIA MADSEN):
"HELL ON WHEELS" certainly scored a great coup roping in the brilliant actress Virginia Madsen to take on the role of Durant's diabolical wife. Hannah arrived at the very tail end of the second season and hasn't had much time to wreak havoc. But we know that she's got Durant whipped, that she's got plans to oust Lily from the inner circle of the railway building over Lily's involvement with Durant, and that she may have plans to oust Cullen as well, unless he can tow the line. Even though Hannah hasn't yet done much, Virginia Madsen's depth and breadth of acting immediately alerts us that Hannah's going to be a terrible force to be reckoned with and a major character.
SEAN MCGINNES (BEN ESLER):
With his brother Mickey (see below), Sean arrived in Hell On Wheels to co-operate the Magic Lantern show, a slide show in a tent (the days before movies, right?) that sported pictures of the Irish homeland. Though at first the sentimental Irish workmen kept the tent busy, the money soon was going to prostitutes and whores, and Sean and Mickey had trouble making their protection payments to The Swede.
So they worked around that, betting all they could on Cullen losing his boxing match with Elam, and then fixing the fight against Cullen. With their new monies Sean and Mickey traded up to early pornography, bare women's backsides and such like.
Sean is the brain of the brothers' operation. Once when Durant visited their tent, when it still bequeathed pictures of Ireland, Sean regaled Durant with how much of a hero he was to the Irish.
In the second season the McGinnes brothers found themselves tumbling into the violence of the West, first mercilessly chopping up and feeding to the pigs a German blacksmith who tried to torture them to death when he though Mickey was to blame for the death of his friend. Then the brothers were given guns to help stop the big payroll robbery and despite their protests they pumped one of the robbers so full of lead that he could've been used as a pencil. For lack of a better metaphor.
Sean slowly is falling for Ruth (see below) the prim daughter of the late Reverend Cole, and he wrangled the monies to buy her a plot for a church in one of the settlements springing up along the railway.
MICKEY MCGINNES (PHIL BURKE):
The more impulsive of the brothers, Mickey foolishly began the second season by taking responsibility for the murder of Schmidt, landing him and Sean in line for hanging. But when they escaped hanging, and killed the German butcher rather violently (again, chopped him up and fed him to his own pigs), Mickey began to also relish the bloodiness of the West.
During a gunfight where they were recruited to help stop a gang of robbers from stealing the payroll, Sean and Mickey both expressed great reluctance to kill, but as with their murder of the German butcher, once they started shooting a man they shot him and shot him and shot him and shot him until he was so full of lead he could've been used to anchor a boat. Have we been over this?
Mickey fell for one of the prostitutes but saw her gunned down in that same gunfight, and now seems to just be turning worse and worse. The pornographic slides for the Magic Lantern Show were his idea, by the way, when his attempt to charge men for peeping in the women's shower failed.
JOSEPH BLACK MOON (EDDIE SPEARS):
Assimilated into white culture as a Christian before the first season began, Joseph was adopted by the Reverend Cole as a son. But the initial massacre, in which the surveyor Robert Bell was killed, which Lily Bell survived, it was led by Joseph's brother and a band of rogue Cheyenne. Joseph was the first to come to Lily's rescue (later aided by Cullen), and then was hidden by Reverend Cole when Hell On Wheels' anger toward the savages was at its fullest.
Like the McGinnes brothers, like the screenwriting maxim A Hero Does Something In The End He Would Never Do In The Beginning, Joseph has progressed to a violent Western archetype. He joined a raid on the Cheyenne rogues and killed his own brother, and then in the midst of the second series killed the Reverend Cole, when the Reverend went ape and tried to stop the advance of Manifest Destiny. Joseph blatantly tries to walk a route of peace and quiet, and yet his capacity to kill keeps arising in the worst sort of way.
Joseph also made an attempt at peace, bringing his chieftain father (with the help of Reverend Cole) to an armistice with Durant, but Durant wound up laughing at the Cheyenne, scoffing at their nervousness over the railroad, telling the Cheyenne that the railroad was coming like it or not.
Joseph's battle over whether to assimilate or not came to a head over the appearance of Ruth (see below) the Reverend Cole's devout daughter, but their romance was cut short when it was adjudged they were engaged in incest. The Reverend at first sanctioned the relationship, even seeming to behead a cavalry officer to allow it to happen, but in the long run he drove a wedge of deep dark guilt between Ruth and Joseph. But Joseph remains Ruth's faithful servant, and killed the Reverend to save her, which she strangely understood.
EVA (ROBIN MCLEAVY):
Once upon a time kidnapped by Native Americans, Eva was branded with a prominent, startling chin tattoo, which marked her as a slave. This was perhaps the catalyst for Elam being attracted to her, that and her prostitution marking her as a slave of a sense. One episode noted how little prostitutes were regarded when the German blacksmith Elam murdered was being generally allowed to get away with his murder of Eva's fellow prostitute.
Elam and Eva enjoyed a tempestuous affair until it was discovered by O'Toole (see below) and his gang they were sleeping together, and Elam was nearly hung.
When the tables were turned and O'Toole and his gang gunned down, Elam and Eva seem to come apart at the seams. By the end of the first season Elam refused Eva's invitation to a settled life, and so Eva was ready to marry and settle down with O'Toole (after he came back from the grave a much nicer man, see below) but another Indian massacre routed them back to Hell On Wheels.
Eva then became pregnant when she re-struck her affair with Elam, but Elam turning his back on a mixed race child for the pain it would bring them revealed his true fear of them being together being the trouble a mixed race couple would always invite. At this point in the second series, Elam has decided to give fatherhood a whirl after all, while O'Toole also plans to stick by Eva no matter whose child she's carrying, and Eva has yet to make a choice between the men.
Eva is a bit of a gormless character, more of a sounding board to Elam's inner/outer struggle against the cold fact of his race in a racist land, a land wounded and of course mistakenly blameful over what freeing Elam and his brethren did to it. Eva, of a sense, wouldn't exist as a whole character without Elam.
HENRI (ANDREW MOODI):
Seeing only in passing thus far, Henri is the black servant of Durant, a man of obvious refinement whose French accent probably means he's an escapee of French Haiti (where the sugarcane plantations were the slavery norm) or a former resident of New Orleans or both. Henri's largest moment in the first season was a moment of poignant singing for Lily's entertainment.
RUTH (KASHA KROPINSKI):
The ardent, devout daughter of Reverend Cole, Ruth is no nonsense in the eyes of the Lord. She turned up out of the clear blue toward the tail end of the first season, reminding Cole of his raging past as an abusive drunken father. But Ruth was determined to have a relationship with Cole, and he obviously loved her in his spiritually twisted way, having killed a cavalry man who was trying to hunt down her beau, Joseph Black Moon.
Ruth swooned for Joseph Black Moon after he came back from killing his own brother, though she at first paid a lot of lip service to the Native Americans being 'inferiors' and 'savages' and so on.
But when the Reverend Cole finally adjudged the two getting together as tantamount to incest, Ruth's religion won over and she cooled her jets toward Joseph.
As of late Ruth seems to have struck the fancy of Sean McGinnes, who helped her secure money to build a church in one of the settlements that's sprung up along the railway.
Ruth hasn't had much time to become a character of terrific consequence as she arrived quite late in the first season, but her generally icy reaction to her father's death in the middle of the second season ("he got what he wanted", to paraphrase) shows that she's nigh-nun-like in her devotion, and what the Lord brings goes.
Representative Dialogue: "Was your mother a Christian? <No> Then how can she be with God?"
MR. O'TOOLE (DUNCAN OLLERENSHAW):
The high point of the first season for O'Toole was getting shot through the head by Elam and surviving. O'Toole was prior to this lobotomy a dastardly cuss, always after Eva and always ready to kill Elam. But when Cullen rescued Elam from his hanging by O'Toole's lynch mob, Elam and Cullen escaped to the woods, where they stood down O'Toole's men.
O'Toole came back from the wilderness after a few episodes, surprised as anyone that he'd lived, and he resolved himself as a better man. He settled down with Eva, who spurned Elam's rambling ways, but their settlement was short-lived (via another raid by the Native Americans) and they rejoined Hell On Wheels at the beginning of the second season. Upon finding out Eva was pregnant with another man's baby (we assume O'Toole knew it was Elam's) O'Toole at first left Eva, then came back and swore fealty.
He's somewhat returned to his dastardly cuss ways, picking fights with the Freedmen on the line. But when Cullen pulled a dirty trick and brought in a load of scab workers after O'Toole and the Irish refused to plunge the road ahead into Native American-heavy territory, O'Toole and the Freedmen teamed up to beat the scabs up and drive them off.
And O'Toole and Cullen shared a moment of true friendship after succeeding over the building of a treacherous bridge. Mind that (to restate) O'Toole's gang was gunned down by Elam and Cullen after Elam's attempted hanging. This handshake between Cullen and O'Toole then, during the building of the bridge, was truly touching and remarkable, for it was one of the only times we've seen Cullen smile (up until he got together with Lily) and it denoted the interesting, mercurial path of O'Toole's character from enemy to friend to enemy to friend and so on.
In fact, O'Toole's shifting sands are a microcosm of what happens throughout the series, much the same as Cullen and Elam's relationship, Cullen and The Swede's relationship, and so on, you just never know who's going to be shooting at you one day and working by your side to tame the land the next.
SENATOR JORDAN CRANE (James D. Hopkins):
A minor milquetoast senator who keeps getting screwed over by Cullen, Jordan Crane has only been seen on a handful of occasions. He pops in to take kickbacks from Cullen, then tried to have Cullen indicted for bribery, then failing that went back to taking kickbacks. Crane generally represents the misty forces of the United States Government, which haunts the background of the railroad's endeavor, but exhibits a laissez-faire approach in this stage of the series.
DEPARTED CHARACTERS:
DANIEL JOHNSON (TED LEVINE):
The series shot itself in the foot just a little bit by casting such an accomplished actor as Ted Levine. He turned in a brilliant performance as the man who brought Cullen's path of revenge to an intersection with Hell On Wheels. Formerly the Foreman of the workers, Johnson drank with Cullen and then was killed by Elam (with Cullen's help) at the end of the first episode. So far, none of the acting in the remainder of the series, though terrific, has quite been able to reach the impossible standards Ted Levine set. Eep. Of course this is only this writer's opinion.
Anyway, Johnson's death reverberates throughout the series, constantly haunting Cullen, much like the first death in the first episode of "BOARDWALK EMPIRE" reverberated all the way to the end of the second season. Cullen's nearly been hung on a couple occasions over the murder, even though it was Elam who actually committed the act, and the wobbly friendship between Elam and Cullen began on Johnson's killing.
REVEREND COLE (TOM NOONAN):
"I'm no angel," was one of the Reverend Cole's first lines, and beings as how the character was played by Tom Noonan, it was only a matter of time before Reverend Cole's dark side came out. But then again, granted Tom Noonan was playing Reverend Cole, it also took a surprising amount of episodes before said dark side came out.
Anyway, Cole's dark side came out in a big way, with Reverend Cole lurching sideways into deep dark alcoholism with the appearance of his daughter and a reminder of his John Brown-following days, and then going ahead and all of a sudden beheading a U.S. Cavalry man who came hunting Joseph Black Moon. Reverend Cole hid Joseph Black Moon when the Irish came hunting him earlier as well, but Cole's defense of Black Moon stepped up a notch when Black Moon struck up a fancy with Cole's daughter, the prim Ruth.
But Cole started in sincerity, opening up his church tent as close as possible to Hell On Wheels' prostitute's tent, kindly stroking the hair of a sardonic prostitute as his first gesture of the first season. Cole hid Cullen when Cullen fled arrest at the hands of The Swede over the murder of Captain Johnson, and Cole made several attempts to convert Cullen to Christianity. Cole didn't find success there, but he did convert Joseph Black Moon, his proudest moment, and Joseph Black Moon tried his best to carry The Word back to the Cheyenne.
With the beginning of the second season Cole had lost his church to Ruth, who took up with Joseph.
Cole was a carpenter as well, working with his hands to build his altar and pews, but once he chopped the head of the U.S. Cavalry officer, he needed use the same carpentry to build a coffin. From then on, Cole was subsiding on a different wavelength, in which his typical lines ran: "Choose hate, it's so much easier."
Finally, Cole went mad, first plunging into the mentioned bottomless drinking, then being manipulated by The Swede into thinking some sort of Apocalypse loomed over the railroad versus the Native Americans. When The Swede gave the Native Americans some guns, Cole led a few braves in capturing Durant's train car (again, Durant was wounded in a gun battle and being taken to Chicago for surgery). In the resulting stand off, Joseph and Ruth were called in to negotiate and Joseph stabbed Cole to death, with Ruth's blessing.
Almost certainly Cole's ghost will continue to haunt Joseph and Ruth and their relationship. And The Swede marked himself as a master manipulator off the back of Cole's doom.
PLOTTING OVERVIEW AND SKELETON:
Because of "HELL ON WHEELS" internally episodic structure, it's fairly easy to track a plot skeleton for a typical episode, and such can be done with the sound off. Simply watch an episode, note the different plots you saw, and then watch the episode again, ticking off hash marks each time there's a scene beat for those plots. It's a great way to discover structure of television shows like "BOARDWALK EMPIRE", "HELL ON WHEELS", or "HOMELAND", shows with internally episodic structure, where each change of scene denotes a change of plotline.
With an A, B, C plot filling every episode, the building of the railroad and the trials and tribulations inherent there is forever present as a continuing 'spinal' plot.
Because Hell On Wheels is a small town, it's a sure bet that your plots should intersect in theme or story, but again with each switch of a scene you'll be hitting a beat of one plot or another. This is as compared to a TV series like "VEEP" where plots are so compressed that from one dialogue line to the next the plots might be switching.
Going even barer with the bones, let's break down one of the best episodes of "HELL ON WHEELS". Season 2, Episode 8, (entitled "THE LORD'S DAY") in terms of A, B, C, etc. plotting.
Of course we know the A plot for having the most scene beats, the B plot for having the second-most scene beats, the C plot for having the third-most scene beats…
In this episode the A, B, C plot all hinge and revolve around love triangles, or in the case of Mickey and Sean, their brotherly love being triangulated by Ruth. Or we could also sort of say 'love quadrangles', because of Hannah Durant and Joseph Black Moon. We could name the plots in this episode thus:
A Plot: The Durants return, and there's trouble with the love triangle of Cullen, Durant, and Lily, with the added angle of Mrs. Hannah Durant.
B Plot: The love triangle of Elam, O'Toole, and Eva.
C Plot: The love triangle of Mickey and Sean's brotherly love being interrupted by Ruth, and then Joseph Black Moon adding an extra angle.
D Plot: The Swede plays his diabolical role as the force of anarchy in the town of Hell On Wheels.
PLOT SKELETON
PROLOGUE
1st beat of A plot/1st beat of B plot:
Cullen and O'Toole tinker with the steam engine, a moment which denotes the character of the budding friendship between the two men whereas in the first season they nearly killed each other.
(B) O'Toole voices his turmoil over Eva being torn between himself and Elam.
(A) Lily rides up, says that Durant is returning from Chicago, indicating the love triangle between herself, Cullen, and Durant might also be an issue.
Serving as a prologue, this first scene beat of the show always holds some ominous storm on the horizon for the characters.
OPENING TITLES
COMMERCIAL BREAK
2nd beat of B plot: Elam tinkers with building his cabin by the river, a homestead that he hopes Eva will join him in. His friend Soames arrives to lend a hand. Note that though it might seem "Elam Builds A Cabin" might be the plot here, the cabin is only a symbol of Elam wanting to homestead with Eva.
1st beat of C plot: Having started as managers of the saloon, Mickey and Sean argue over money. Sean needs the money to buy Ruth her church's land parcel. Mickey is drinking and gambling their shared funds away.
2nd beat of A plot: Durant returns, thanking Eva for nursing him with a healthy pay envelope and promising 'if you ever need anything for yourself and child…' Durant then takes a slug of opium, something he immediately seems to need due on the presence of his wife, Hannah, whom he cheated on for some time with Lily, of course. Like the cabin Elam is building, the opium has subtext, it's not a plot called Durant Is Hooked On Opium. The machinations of building the railway that rear up in the A plot of this episode are also not a Building The Railway Plot, but instead entirely subtexted by the true A plot, that of the love triangle nee quadrangle of Durant, Hannah, Cullen, and Lily.
3rd beat of A plot: Hannah, Durant's wife, is introduced, when Lily is shocked to find The Swede helping her sort Durant's ledgers, Lily's former job.
2nd beat of A plot Part 2: Directly continuing from the previous scene, and therefore a 'part 2' of this beat, Durant has a tripped-out walk to the railway office thanks to the opium. He tellingly hides from his wife as she leaves the railway office. He's worried she's chatting with Lily, with whom Durant of course had an affair.
COMMERCIAL BREAK (which you can think of as an ACT BREAK, noting the 'cliffhanger' question left hanging with the previous scene, to wit: "Uh oh, what's up with Durant being afraid of his own wife?")
4th beat of A plot: Convenient to the affair of Lily and Cullen, Durant asks Cullen to bring Lily to dinner with the Durants as his 'escort', so Hannah Durant will think Cullen and Lily are together—which they are.
3rd beat of B plot: Elam expresses worry over Eva's coming baby to Soames as they tinker with Elam's cabin, and Soames calms Elam with the idea fatherhood will do him proud.
4th beat of B plot: Eva and O'Toole have dinner (contemporary flavor note: they open this chat with Eva saying 'They had buildings 8 stories tall in Chicago!') and O'Toole again expresses his turmoil over whether Eva's baby is going to come out mulatto.
5th beat of A plot Part 1: Cullen and Lily arrive for dinner with the Durants.
1st beat of D plot: The Swede messes with the railway's steam engine, assuring something will go wrong with the upcoming raising of the bridge.
5th beat of A Plot Part 2: Cullen matches the refinement of Hannah Durant by wielding his knife and fork like a gentleman and knowing some trivia about a rich railway family.
5th beat of A Plot Part 3: Tension mounts between Hannah and Lily, and we suspect Lily's going to be forced out of the inner circle at the crux of building the railway, forced from her lead surveyor position.
6th beat of A Plot: Cullen escorts Hannah to her tent (she and Durant sleep apart because of Durant's wounds), and she indicates they have a promising future ahead as long as Cullen doesn't align himself with Lily.
COMMERCIAL BREAK/ACT BREAK
7th beat of A plot: Lily is shut out of a meeting with the Durants, as they forcefully tell Cullen to finish the bridge over the gorge and get the railway moving.
2nd beat of C plot: Sean asks Ruth to marry him, but she's taken aback, asks if he didn't give her the money for the church with strings attached. She refuses him.
2nd beat of D plot: As a support of the bridge is raised, The Swede's meddling with the steam engine pays off with a disastrous cable break, with the support falling, and several men being wounded.
5th beat of B plot: The wounded return to camp, and a worried Eva greets O'Toole with a hearty hug, which Elam sees, is chagrined over.
8th beat of A plot: The Durants scold Cullen over the accident, further indicating he's not cutting it as Foreman. It's not just Lily they're going to get rid of, seems.
3rd beat of C plot: Joseph returns, having converted from Christianity back to his Cheyenne roots. He has words with Ruth, telling her he's seen the White Spirit and that Hell On Wheels is a town of evil, wherein she is going to die. Mickey sees this conversation.
3rd beat of D plot: Cullen finds a Norwegian penny in the pressure valve of the steam engine, to which O'Toole voices 'The Swede wanted us to find out'.
9th beat of A plot: Lily demands she not be pushed out based on Durant's previous promise, but Durant asks her 'How does Cullen know about the mileage shortfall?' and 'Did you lay with him?' and indicates she's nearly through.
4th beat of C plot: Mickey and Sean's growing violent tendencies erupt (a note of their characters' arc, as they've been seen to go from being very nice boys to quite violent in the course of the series) in a fight over money, with Mickey mocking Sean's love for Ruth, telling Sean she's been seen with Joseph.
10th beat of A plot/6th beat of B plot: Durant tears up Elam's land deed, but Elam faces him down, saying he'll build his cabin, and Durant gives in to Elam's stand as a Freedman, and asks Elam to sit down, in order to make him an offer. Elam's cabin, again, is not about Elam's cabin but about Elam homesteading with Eva, and therefore a beat of the B plot, and Durant is making Elam the job offer not because of the job, but because he has to get rid of Cullen and Lily, and therefore it's a beat of the A plot. Subtext!
11th beat of A plot: Hannah ever-so-sweetly kicks Lily out of Lily's private train car.
COMMERCIAL BREAK/ACT BREAK
12th beat of A plot: Cullen gives up his train car to Lily, expresses that they can't live together because there's no telling about Durant's jealousy.
5th beat of C plot: Sean menaces Ruth, whining at her for talking to Joseph.
4th beat of D plot: Since being ousted from Hell On Wheels, The Swede has been living in the trash heap outside of town, and Cullen burns down The Swede's tent.
13th beat of A plot: Cullen goes to bunk down with Elam in Elam's unfinished cabin. Elam mentions Durant might want him (Elam) to take Cullen's job as Foreman. This is also a note of the continuing, strengthening friendship of these two men.
WORLD & SETTING:
"The nation is an open wound." Don't forget that when writing for "HELL ON WHEELS". Racism against the African-Americans and Native Americans is at its very worst, and life is extremely cheap for both groups of minorities. Though no Chinese-Americans have been seen yet in the series, they're working on the railway line coming from California. We'll come back to this point in a moment.
The Irish are fairing a little better, but they're still subject to ethnic scorn, and they've fled a terrible famine and racism in their homeland. Swiss and German folk do okay in America, but this country is still an unmixed melting pot, and everyone is more definitely identified by the race or ethnicity than the mix we have today.
And then add to this mix the Civil War, and half the country hating and killing the other half for the last four years in the most horrible sort of way, mechanized warfare that mounted staggering casualties and bloodbaths and horrors. Remember that all the men in the series have just emerged in one way or another from an absolutely, thoroughly traumatic war, and though they don't have the acronym on their lips they all surely suffer from PTSD.
Keep in mind that though everyone is on the open prairie and America is still fresh and new and you can drink from a brook without a water tablet. But medicine is rudimentary, an open wound out on the plains can go septic and kill you, a wound can get a limb amputated, consumption and tuberculosis and smallpox will happily strike you down. When the Cheyenne came to Hell On Wheels to negotiate with Durant, they took especial note of how filthy the Western lifestyle is, and the streets of Hell On Wheels are composed by mud, and if you don't lay boards on the bottom of your tent you'll get trenchfoot.
Language is flowery in this era, in a wonderful, eloquent way, since all that anyone had to communicate with was letters, and all that anyone had to read was Bibles. To get a great feel for language in this era, dig up some Civil War letters on the Internet, or because this Road Map For Specs is only a study guide, and not all of the research you should do, take the time to go through the ten hours of the excellent Ken Burns series "THE CIVIL WAR", which is full of eloquently spoken correspondence.
Finally, remember that Hell On Wheels, the travelling town itself, is a microcosm of early America, with its rudimentary economy and bevy of entrepreneurs and can-do spirit, but also with its restlessness, its relentless push forward.
GOD IS IN THE DETAILS…
In one of it's more interesting details, and a detail that no one draws much attention to at all because it's so 'assumed', that this show exploits Early American Alcoholism as a back drop. Both Cullen and Elam have fallen prey to getting stuck in the whiskey tent, and when Reverend Cole fell out with God and his daughter and Joseph he took to the bottle so as to become utterly incapacitated. Even Durant revealed too much of himself to Lily during a moment of high spirits. Whereas The Swede and Lily noticeably don't drink.
So think about how these were the early days of alcoholism in America, and how alcoholism really hadn't been invented yet, not in the Alcoholics Anonymous (which came about in the 1900s after the Suffrage Movement and the Volstead Act tried to get America to quit drinking altogether) sense of the word. Like the quality of emotional disconnect throughout the series, people didn't quite, not quite, not at the very end of the day, understand the nature of alcoholism. And so they tumble into it as casually as falling in a hole. Furthermore, the West has not yet been won, and so drunks are not yet sedentary as no one is yet settled, and so they'll spend the night with a bottle in order to kill men in the morning. See also Clint Eastwood's be-all, end-all anti-Western "UNFORGIVEN", which partially purports the Wild West's most noted, ballyhooed gunslingers as men who were only drunk enough to not be nervous and to not mind what they were doing.
One quick note elaborating on what was mentioned above: Chinese workgangs were NOT used in the building of this part of the Transcontinental Railway. The Railway was built in 2 parts, and the Chinese "coolies" were on the workgang coming from the West. There's been silly criticism leveled at "HELL ON WHEELS", but it's very much historically accurate, and certainly accurate with the Irish and Freedman work gangs on this part of the railway.
Especially remember this when spec'ing for "HELL ON WHEELS": everyone's a little bit anti-social. These are not civilized times, so for characters to do inexplicable things or suddenly turn to God to murder and back to God is a-okay. Mostly when spec'ing you don't want to rock the boat of a show too much, but this is probably the one series where you can throw an outlandish choice in. It's an era when people were trying their best to figure out how to be civilized while living a near-animal existence, so when Cullen suddenly steals the payroll at the end of the first season or Lily suddenly has moved in with Durant or Cole reveals himself as a stone-cold killer or the McGinness brothers suddenly slaughter the butcher and feed him to his own pigs, these things aren't radical or unmotivated, they're typical. Be predictably unpredictable.
"HELL ON WHEELS" is a series on AMC created by Joe and Tony Gayton. Each episode runs about 45 minutes. The title of the series comes from the filthy, mobile tent town at the head of the evolving Transcontinental Railway, circa the American West of the 1860s.
At the series' beginning the opening title appeared:
"1865. The war is over. Lincoln is dead. The nation is an open wound".
By this dictum the series announced it would reveal character under the duress of history. By no means does "HELL ON WHEELS" simply recite history, ticking off lists of events. When a character mentions, say, the horror of Andersonville prison, or 'Bleeding Kansas', it's because a character was there, in those events, and emotionally affected.
Like "BOARDWALK EMPIRE", "HELL ON WHEELS" reveals conflicted historical reasoning behind certain formerly noble moments, or at least puts that reasoning up for debate. And so we have the ideas that the Native Americans became 'savages' only because of the Transcontinental Railroad and Manifest Destiny, and that the settlement of the American West was based on corrupted money.
The newly freed slaves are also a large part of the picture here, and "HELL ON WHEELS" makes known every inch of their struggle, right down to the detail that they're only being paid half as much as the other railroad workers. The Freedmen are also always set to work 'in the cut', digging the actual trench through which the railway will run, while explosive crews work several miles ahead, softening the earth and the way forward. During the series The Freedmen were also the first to be set forward as the Native American raids on the train increased in ferocity, though their first steps are being taken toward civil rights, as the Freedmen demanded to be armed while riding point.
There is also a strong immigrant presence in the show, depicting how the railway was not only built on the backs of freed slaves, but also by the toil of Irish immigrants running from the famine in their land, Swedish immigrants seeking fortune, German immigrants, French Haitians, etc.
Speaking of 'in the cut' above, the technical aspects of the building of the Transcontinental Railway come much into play. There were no planes to fly overhead, and so surveyors were vital, compassing the way across the land, as they blindly pushed forth across the prairies and into the Rocky Mountains. In one terrific scene in the second season, a bridge is built across a chasm, and the viewer thinks: "Wow, those guys really did that, and they sure as heck knew their math."
The corruption comes into play here, as well; in an early episode a winding track is decided on because the company gets paid by the mile. The spine of the first season also involved a looming deadline wherein the railway had to make a certain 40 mile mark to continue to be funded by the government.
Spiritually the railway is vaunted as Manifest Destiny, and there's preachers and prostitutes to lend carnival color to this 'Westward Ho!' side of the story. The Native Americans in one episode, after a vision of a steam-belching beast coming across their plains, came to negotiate with the railway builders, and they saw the town of Hell On Wheels for a filthy settlement, full of dying animals, mud, prostitution, gambling, fighting, drinking.
Finally there is the tension between the former Union Soldiers and the former Confederate Soldiers, and Cullen (see below) takes the brunt of this per the series, being called 'Johnny Reb' and a 'Grayback' more often than not.
CHARACTER BREAKDOWNS:
MAJOR CHARACTERS:
CULLEN BOHANNEN (ANSON MOUNT):
A former farmer, a former Confederate soldier, Cullen came home from the war to find his wife raped and hung on his back porch, to find his son and servant burned to death, and as much was depicted in shards of flashbacks, in bits and pieces of exposition. Cullen detected up the names of the squad of Union soldiers who'd done the deed, and began wending a path of vengeance that provided some of the spine to "HELL ON WHEELS" ' first season.
In the first episode Cullen shot a man in a church confessional, thereby illustrating Cullen's intent to walk in the valley of the shadow of death, thereby illustrating Cullen's irreligious path. By the end of the first episode, Cullen had signed on to work on the railroad, to ride along with the town of Hell On Wheels, and Cullen had a hand in killing his boss on the job, one Captain Daniel Johnson, another man involved with the murder of Cullen's wife and son. Cullen took Johnson's job, becoming Foreman, and discovering a photo in Johnson's possessions that would lead Cullen to the rest of guilty squad.
Cullen's murderous inner rage is accompanied by a teeny tiny spot of a soft center. He can't hold his liquor, a physical illustration of that soft center that constantly comes up. Cullen also capitulated to his wife once upon a time, freeing his slaves a year before the Civil War and waging them for their labor.
Cullen didn't actually kill Captain Johnson, however, it was his on-again-off-again friend Elam (see below) who cut the Captain's throat just before the Captain could gun down Cullen. Cullen didn't rat Elam out, but instead took the rap with Hell On Wheels' head of security, The Swede (see below).
Cullen then escaped being hung and negotiated with Durant (see below) for Captain Johnson's job as Foreman, convincing Durant that he (Cullen) was a former soldier and that building the railroad was fighting a war. Cullen promised he'd lay the 40 miles of track needed to make the deadline imposed by the U.S. government.
Once given the job of Foreman, Cullen flaked a little, setting off in pursuit of one Sergeant Harper, the supposed last remaining man he needed to kill to avenge his wife. Yet Harper escaped, and eluded Cullen for the remainder of the first season. When Cullen finally caught up with Harper at series' end (The Swede brought Harper back to Hell On Wheels to testify against Cullen) and killed him, Harper hinted there was another man for Cullen to find and that he (Harper) wasn't present at Cullen's wife and son's deaths.
Meanwhile, Cullen enjoyed a push-pull relationship with Elam; they accidentally conspired over Captain Johnson's death, but then had a wagered fistfight to settle tensions between the blacks and the Irish in the train's labor camp.
Cullen enjoys the same sort of relationship with The Swede, though the Swede is much more of a villain. The Swede began the series hunting down Cullen for the killing of Johnson, then sided with Cullen against O'Toole (see below) then once Cullen continued to usurp The Swede's authority, and the kickbacks The Swede received for protection of Hell On Wheels, The Swede tried to get Cullen arrested for the murder of Johnson. But Cullen killed The Swede's witness, Harper, while The Swede was tarred and feathered for grifting the populace too much as Head Of Security, and he was run out of Hell On Wheels.
Cullen's relationship with railroad owner Durant has been equally contentious. Durant placed incredible trust in Cullen, and was well pleased indeed when Cullen brought Lily Bell (the dead railway surveyor's wife) to Hell On Wheels safe and sound, along with her surveyor maps of the Rocky Mountains (see below). Durant was also pretty pleased when Cullen managed a rout of the Cheyenne tribe about to attack the railway line. But Cullen's apparent sexual tension with Lily Bell, whom Durant eventually took up with, or at least Lily Bell's desire for Cullen, dispensed with all Durant's goodwill, and Durant stood by while The Swede tried to rid Hell On Wheels of Cullen at the first season's end.
When writing for Cullen keep in mind that his motives can be mysterious, mercurial, and he'll always surprise by doing the right thing, such as saving Elam from hanging and teaching Elam how to shoot, and he'll always stand and fight, such as when he had the boxing match with Elam, or saved the payroll from being stolen by his former confederates, a rogue band of former Confederates.
Cullen's stone coldness extends to everyone. At one point in the beginning of the second season he was faced with a railroad sentry being tortured to death by Native Americans on a hilltop, and to drive the Native Americans away he shot the near-dead railroad sentry, in front of the rest of the railroad men. He began the second season, as well, by having stolen the railroad payroll and ridden off, and only Durant saved him from hanging, bringing him back to act as head of security.
Cullen did smile once, however, when teaching the freedmen how to load a rifle and a man dropped a round. And Cullen is just plain awesome. Cullen was at his best when he reassembled a six-shooter to gun down a train robber, while the train robber fumbled to reassemble his gun much the same, and Cullen coolly out-assembled the man, and gunned him down.
Representative Dialogue: "It ain't fun, but they seem to need killing."
THOMAS 'DOC' DURANT (COLM MEANEY):
The corrupt Irish owner of the Union Pacific railroad, Durant often exhibits more fairness toward the men under him, even fondness, than he does for the U.S. government, the entity he's constantly grifting. The U.S. Government is personified by one Senator Crane (see below), introduced along with Durant when Durant bribed him with railroad bonds.
Early in the series Durant ordered his builders to build a winding railroad to get more government funds. He's that sort. Durant also once upon a time smuggled cotton during the Civil War. In a particular episode, in an illumination of American history, Durant egged a Chicago Tribune reporter to heighten the drama of an Indian Massacre to turn public opinion against "the savages", so the railway building would smooth out with the government sending more troops to rout the Native Americans.
Like Cullen, Durant lost his wife under mysterious circumstances, and when Lily Bell came into his life, after the killing of her surveyor husband Robert, Durant gradually fell for her. Though Lily's heart often went out to Durant, and though he treated her with utmost gentility, she still was falling for Cullen by the first season's end, and once Durant was wounded and out of the picture, she was gone with Cullen by the middle of the second season.
When writing for Durant, remember that he's a gentleman in the purest sense of the word, but he's also the catalyst for the building of a nation, and as such his gentlemen façade conceals a cold-blooded businessman who'll stop at nothing, as they say…
ELAM FERGUSON (COMMON):
Elam, an eternally angry freed slave, loved the taste of Cullen's revenge, feeling it as revenge against white men, and Elam was the actual killer of Captain Johnson in the first episode, though Cullen took the rap.
Elam smolders across the breadth of the series, forever furious in the aftermath of slavery, forever ready to throw his life away fighting down the white man, as he almost did on several occasions contending with O'Toole (see below). Elam is the personification of rage against the institution of slavery, but goes far beyond political correctness and tokenhood with the depths of that rage.
Elam doesn't but rarely drink, as he once mentioned killing a man while drunk. But in the second season, when he became Head Of Security and worked more closely with Durant, his fellow Freedmen began to see him as the 'house slave', sucking up to the white man, and this frission between his worlds turned Elam to the bottle.
Elam spent a good portion of the first season in a sweet romance with the tattooed prostitute Eva. In each other they saw a wounded soul, with Eva's wound in physical evidence, and Elam's wound interior. At first Eva would have nothing to do with Elam, but felt for him when O'Toole and the Irish laughed Elam out of the whorehouse. Eva and Elam got together, and when their relationship was found out Elam was nearly hanged, then rescued by Cullen.
Elam tries his best to be Cullen's friend, but Cullen's opaque nature has kept Elam at arm's length, and even brought the two to blows in their boxing episode. The fight was a bit of a draw, by the way, as Elam was given a glove with a pepper wrapped in it, and hence knocked Cullen out.
When Eva rejoined Hell On Wheels at the beginning of the second season she immediately goaded Elam into killing a German who had raped and murdered one of Eva's prostitute friends. Eva and Elam soon struck up their affair again, and Elam impregnated Eva, then refused her because he was afeared of the storm a mixed race baby would bring. But Elam decided on being a father, and at this point Eva needs to choose between Elam and O'Toole.
Cullen has several times saved Elam's ass, and this creates a funny tension between them, as when Elam realized same former Confederates were going to rob the payroll, then instituted a gun battle against the robbers, but then got pinned down and had to be rescued by Cullen.
Representative Dialogue: "No Indian ever bloodied my back."
THE SWEDE (CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL):
An accountant before the Civil War, The Swede was imprisoned in Andersonville, where he apparently saw such sights (a fellow prisoner tried to eat him) that he had to invent a new moral compass for himself, based on his screwy theory of "Immoral Mathematics". It's a theory of how to be evil and good at the same time, basically.
Dressed always in sleek blackness that shows off his towering height, The Swede for awhile stalked Hell On Wheels like some sort of evil Madeline. For the entirety of the first season he ruled the roost as Head Of Security, and grifted the entrepreneurs of Hell On Wheels for protection money, especially the prostitutes and The Magic Lantern Show run by the McGinnes brothers (see below). He finally received his comeuppance in a tarring and feathering, and was exiled from Hell On Wheels at the first season's end.
Utterly fastidious, The Swede will most often be seen sorting things. He has a vocal overflow and often makes a tiny grunt to end a sentence. He liked a particular slide from The Magic Lantern Show, a slide of an idyllic Ireland scene, so much so he took it as payment in one of his griftings.
Returning to Hell On Wheels with the second season, The Swede immediately began work as an undertaker, but his skittering plans lay in the diabolical turning of the town against Cullen and Durant. He got under the skin of Reverend Cole and then agitated the Germans to try and slaughter the McGinness Brothers over the murder of the German blacksmith who killed a prostitute and was in turn killed by Elam. Mickey McGinnes accidentally bragged about the killing, and nearly took the rap.
The German thing didn't upend Hell On Wheels the way The Swede hoped, but he soon revealed that after his tarring and feathering he'd fallen in the a rogue tribe of Cheyenne, and he revealed to Reverend Cole his gunrunning to these Native Americans. Then The Swede egged Reverend Cole into thinking the world was at an end, and taking Durant hostage. The Swede then went completely Native, and showed up in Hell On Wheels covered in clay with a shaved head. Only to be hired by Lily Bell to fix the railroads books after Durant's wounding. Indeed, The Swede is an agent of chaos and himself a character of chaos.
The Swede has gone from trying to hang Cullen for the murder of Daniel Johnson, to fighting alongside Cullen against O'Toole's gang, to encouraging O'Toole to lynch Elam, to again palling with Cullen, to again trying to get Cullen jailed, and so on and so forth. Like many of the relationships in Hell On Wheels, The Swede can be trying to kill you in the morning and sharing a bottle with you in the evening.
LILY BELL (DOMINIQUE MCELLIGOT):
Escaping slaughter at the hands of a rogue band of Cheyenne at the series' beginning, Lily Bell lost the love of her life, her devoted husband Robert Bell. A renowned surveyor, Robert was working to find a way through the Rocky Mountains for the railroad, but just prior to his death had a falling out with Durant.
Lily struggled across the prairie and was dually rescued by Joseph Black Moon (see below) and Cullen, landing in Hell On Wheels. For a time she hid the survey maps from Durant, as he cooed and cared for her, finally giving them up and, though at first spurning Durant's love, by the beginning of the second season had fallen in with him. A surveyor in her own right, Lily assumed the role of partner in the railroad.
Prior to that though, during most of the first season, before giving in to Durant, Lily doggedly tried to live in the Hell On Wheels camp, befriending Eva and beginning a long, slow pine for Cullen.
Lily is a firebrand, not only surviving the initial massacre by killing a man twice her size, but when she returned to Chicago for a memorial for Robert, and came up against Robert's spinster sister, she slapped the woman for badmouthing her survival. So though Lily didn't turn out to have the stuff to live in the squalor of the Hell On Wheels camp, she only returned to the relative comfort of Durant's sleeper car, and loved the Westward life too much to leave the prairies.
After Durant was wounded in an attempted robbery of the payroll, and shipped off to Chicago for surgery, Lily found herself running the railroad in its entirety, and found herself with the opportunity to at last get it on with Cullen, and by the tail end of the second season the two were in mid-tempestuous relationship.
HANNAH DURANT (VIRGINIA MADSEN):
"HELL ON WHEELS" certainly scored a great coup roping in the brilliant actress Virginia Madsen to take on the role of Durant's diabolical wife. Hannah arrived at the very tail end of the second season and hasn't had much time to wreak havoc. But we know that she's got Durant whipped, that she's got plans to oust Lily from the inner circle of the railway building over Lily's involvement with Durant, and that she may have plans to oust Cullen as well, unless he can tow the line. Even though Hannah hasn't yet done much, Virginia Madsen's depth and breadth of acting immediately alerts us that Hannah's going to be a terrible force to be reckoned with and a major character.
SEAN MCGINNES (BEN ESLER):
With his brother Mickey (see below), Sean arrived in Hell On Wheels to co-operate the Magic Lantern show, a slide show in a tent (the days before movies, right?) that sported pictures of the Irish homeland. Though at first the sentimental Irish workmen kept the tent busy, the money soon was going to prostitutes and whores, and Sean and Mickey had trouble making their protection payments to The Swede.
So they worked around that, betting all they could on Cullen losing his boxing match with Elam, and then fixing the fight against Cullen. With their new monies Sean and Mickey traded up to early pornography, bare women's backsides and such like.
Sean is the brain of the brothers' operation. Once when Durant visited their tent, when it still bequeathed pictures of Ireland, Sean regaled Durant with how much of a hero he was to the Irish.
In the second season the McGinnes brothers found themselves tumbling into the violence of the West, first mercilessly chopping up and feeding to the pigs a German blacksmith who tried to torture them to death when he though Mickey was to blame for the death of his friend. Then the brothers were given guns to help stop the big payroll robbery and despite their protests they pumped one of the robbers so full of lead that he could've been used as a pencil. For lack of a better metaphor.
Sean slowly is falling for Ruth (see below) the prim daughter of the late Reverend Cole, and he wrangled the monies to buy her a plot for a church in one of the settlements springing up along the railway.
MICKEY MCGINNES (PHIL BURKE):
The more impulsive of the brothers, Mickey foolishly began the second season by taking responsibility for the murder of Schmidt, landing him and Sean in line for hanging. But when they escaped hanging, and killed the German butcher rather violently (again, chopped him up and fed him to his own pigs), Mickey began to also relish the bloodiness of the West.
During a gunfight where they were recruited to help stop a gang of robbers from stealing the payroll, Sean and Mickey both expressed great reluctance to kill, but as with their murder of the German butcher, once they started shooting a man they shot him and shot him and shot him and shot him until he was so full of lead he could've been used to anchor a boat. Have we been over this?
Mickey fell for one of the prostitutes but saw her gunned down in that same gunfight, and now seems to just be turning worse and worse. The pornographic slides for the Magic Lantern Show were his idea, by the way, when his attempt to charge men for peeping in the women's shower failed.
JOSEPH BLACK MOON (EDDIE SPEARS):
Assimilated into white culture as a Christian before the first season began, Joseph was adopted by the Reverend Cole as a son. But the initial massacre, in which the surveyor Robert Bell was killed, which Lily Bell survived, it was led by Joseph's brother and a band of rogue Cheyenne. Joseph was the first to come to Lily's rescue (later aided by Cullen), and then was hidden by Reverend Cole when Hell On Wheels' anger toward the savages was at its fullest.
Like the McGinnes brothers, like the screenwriting maxim A Hero Does Something In The End He Would Never Do In The Beginning, Joseph has progressed to a violent Western archetype. He joined a raid on the Cheyenne rogues and killed his own brother, and then in the midst of the second series killed the Reverend Cole, when the Reverend went ape and tried to stop the advance of Manifest Destiny. Joseph blatantly tries to walk a route of peace and quiet, and yet his capacity to kill keeps arising in the worst sort of way.
Joseph also made an attempt at peace, bringing his chieftain father (with the help of Reverend Cole) to an armistice with Durant, but Durant wound up laughing at the Cheyenne, scoffing at their nervousness over the railroad, telling the Cheyenne that the railroad was coming like it or not.
Joseph's battle over whether to assimilate or not came to a head over the appearance of Ruth (see below) the Reverend Cole's devout daughter, but their romance was cut short when it was adjudged they were engaged in incest. The Reverend at first sanctioned the relationship, even seeming to behead a cavalry officer to allow it to happen, but in the long run he drove a wedge of deep dark guilt between Ruth and Joseph. But Joseph remains Ruth's faithful servant, and killed the Reverend to save her, which she strangely understood.
EVA (ROBIN MCLEAVY):
Once upon a time kidnapped by Native Americans, Eva was branded with a prominent, startling chin tattoo, which marked her as a slave. This was perhaps the catalyst for Elam being attracted to her, that and her prostitution marking her as a slave of a sense. One episode noted how little prostitutes were regarded when the German blacksmith Elam murdered was being generally allowed to get away with his murder of Eva's fellow prostitute.
Elam and Eva enjoyed a tempestuous affair until it was discovered by O'Toole (see below) and his gang they were sleeping together, and Elam was nearly hung.
When the tables were turned and O'Toole and his gang gunned down, Elam and Eva seem to come apart at the seams. By the end of the first season Elam refused Eva's invitation to a settled life, and so Eva was ready to marry and settle down with O'Toole (after he came back from the grave a much nicer man, see below) but another Indian massacre routed them back to Hell On Wheels.
Eva then became pregnant when she re-struck her affair with Elam, but Elam turning his back on a mixed race child for the pain it would bring them revealed his true fear of them being together being the trouble a mixed race couple would always invite. At this point in the second series, Elam has decided to give fatherhood a whirl after all, while O'Toole also plans to stick by Eva no matter whose child she's carrying, and Eva has yet to make a choice between the men.
Eva is a bit of a gormless character, more of a sounding board to Elam's inner/outer struggle against the cold fact of his race in a racist land, a land wounded and of course mistakenly blameful over what freeing Elam and his brethren did to it. Eva, of a sense, wouldn't exist as a whole character without Elam.
HENRI (ANDREW MOODI):
Seeing only in passing thus far, Henri is the black servant of Durant, a man of obvious refinement whose French accent probably means he's an escapee of French Haiti (where the sugarcane plantations were the slavery norm) or a former resident of New Orleans or both. Henri's largest moment in the first season was a moment of poignant singing for Lily's entertainment.
RUTH (KASHA KROPINSKI):
The ardent, devout daughter of Reverend Cole, Ruth is no nonsense in the eyes of the Lord. She turned up out of the clear blue toward the tail end of the first season, reminding Cole of his raging past as an abusive drunken father. But Ruth was determined to have a relationship with Cole, and he obviously loved her in his spiritually twisted way, having killed a cavalry man who was trying to hunt down her beau, Joseph Black Moon.
Ruth swooned for Joseph Black Moon after he came back from killing his own brother, though she at first paid a lot of lip service to the Native Americans being 'inferiors' and 'savages' and so on.
But when the Reverend Cole finally adjudged the two getting together as tantamount to incest, Ruth's religion won over and she cooled her jets toward Joseph.
As of late Ruth seems to have struck the fancy of Sean McGinnes, who helped her secure money to build a church in one of the settlements that's sprung up along the railway.
Ruth hasn't had much time to become a character of terrific consequence as she arrived quite late in the first season, but her generally icy reaction to her father's death in the middle of the second season ("he got what he wanted", to paraphrase) shows that she's nigh-nun-like in her devotion, and what the Lord brings goes.
Representative Dialogue: "Was your mother a Christian? <No> Then how can she be with God?"
MR. O'TOOLE (DUNCAN OLLERENSHAW):
The high point of the first season for O'Toole was getting shot through the head by Elam and surviving. O'Toole was prior to this lobotomy a dastardly cuss, always after Eva and always ready to kill Elam. But when Cullen rescued Elam from his hanging by O'Toole's lynch mob, Elam and Cullen escaped to the woods, where they stood down O'Toole's men.
O'Toole came back from the wilderness after a few episodes, surprised as anyone that he'd lived, and he resolved himself as a better man. He settled down with Eva, who spurned Elam's rambling ways, but their settlement was short-lived (via another raid by the Native Americans) and they rejoined Hell On Wheels at the beginning of the second season. Upon finding out Eva was pregnant with another man's baby (we assume O'Toole knew it was Elam's) O'Toole at first left Eva, then came back and swore fealty.
He's somewhat returned to his dastardly cuss ways, picking fights with the Freedmen on the line. But when Cullen pulled a dirty trick and brought in a load of scab workers after O'Toole and the Irish refused to plunge the road ahead into Native American-heavy territory, O'Toole and the Freedmen teamed up to beat the scabs up and drive them off.
And O'Toole and Cullen shared a moment of true friendship after succeeding over the building of a treacherous bridge. Mind that (to restate) O'Toole's gang was gunned down by Elam and Cullen after Elam's attempted hanging. This handshake between Cullen and O'Toole then, during the building of the bridge, was truly touching and remarkable, for it was one of the only times we've seen Cullen smile (up until he got together with Lily) and it denoted the interesting, mercurial path of O'Toole's character from enemy to friend to enemy to friend and so on.
In fact, O'Toole's shifting sands are a microcosm of what happens throughout the series, much the same as Cullen and Elam's relationship, Cullen and The Swede's relationship, and so on, you just never know who's going to be shooting at you one day and working by your side to tame the land the next.
SENATOR JORDAN CRANE (James D. Hopkins):
A minor milquetoast senator who keeps getting screwed over by Cullen, Jordan Crane has only been seen on a handful of occasions. He pops in to take kickbacks from Cullen, then tried to have Cullen indicted for bribery, then failing that went back to taking kickbacks. Crane generally represents the misty forces of the United States Government, which haunts the background of the railroad's endeavor, but exhibits a laissez-faire approach in this stage of the series.
DEPARTED CHARACTERS:
DANIEL JOHNSON (TED LEVINE):
The series shot itself in the foot just a little bit by casting such an accomplished actor as Ted Levine. He turned in a brilliant performance as the man who brought Cullen's path of revenge to an intersection with Hell On Wheels. Formerly the Foreman of the workers, Johnson drank with Cullen and then was killed by Elam (with Cullen's help) at the end of the first episode. So far, none of the acting in the remainder of the series, though terrific, has quite been able to reach the impossible standards Ted Levine set. Eep. Of course this is only this writer's opinion.
Anyway, Johnson's death reverberates throughout the series, constantly haunting Cullen, much like the first death in the first episode of "BOARDWALK EMPIRE" reverberated all the way to the end of the second season. Cullen's nearly been hung on a couple occasions over the murder, even though it was Elam who actually committed the act, and the wobbly friendship between Elam and Cullen began on Johnson's killing.
REVEREND COLE (TOM NOONAN):
"I'm no angel," was one of the Reverend Cole's first lines, and beings as how the character was played by Tom Noonan, it was only a matter of time before Reverend Cole's dark side came out. But then again, granted Tom Noonan was playing Reverend Cole, it also took a surprising amount of episodes before said dark side came out.
Anyway, Cole's dark side came out in a big way, with Reverend Cole lurching sideways into deep dark alcoholism with the appearance of his daughter and a reminder of his John Brown-following days, and then going ahead and all of a sudden beheading a U.S. Cavalry man who came hunting Joseph Black Moon. Reverend Cole hid Joseph Black Moon when the Irish came hunting him earlier as well, but Cole's defense of Black Moon stepped up a notch when Black Moon struck up a fancy with Cole's daughter, the prim Ruth.
But Cole started in sincerity, opening up his church tent as close as possible to Hell On Wheels' prostitute's tent, kindly stroking the hair of a sardonic prostitute as his first gesture of the first season. Cole hid Cullen when Cullen fled arrest at the hands of The Swede over the murder of Captain Johnson, and Cole made several attempts to convert Cullen to Christianity. Cole didn't find success there, but he did convert Joseph Black Moon, his proudest moment, and Joseph Black Moon tried his best to carry The Word back to the Cheyenne.
With the beginning of the second season Cole had lost his church to Ruth, who took up with Joseph.
Cole was a carpenter as well, working with his hands to build his altar and pews, but once he chopped the head of the U.S. Cavalry officer, he needed use the same carpentry to build a coffin. From then on, Cole was subsiding on a different wavelength, in which his typical lines ran: "Choose hate, it's so much easier."
Finally, Cole went mad, first plunging into the mentioned bottomless drinking, then being manipulated by The Swede into thinking some sort of Apocalypse loomed over the railroad versus the Native Americans. When The Swede gave the Native Americans some guns, Cole led a few braves in capturing Durant's train car (again, Durant was wounded in a gun battle and being taken to Chicago for surgery). In the resulting stand off, Joseph and Ruth were called in to negotiate and Joseph stabbed Cole to death, with Ruth's blessing.
Almost certainly Cole's ghost will continue to haunt Joseph and Ruth and their relationship. And The Swede marked himself as a master manipulator off the back of Cole's doom.
PLOTTING OVERVIEW AND SKELETON:
Because of "HELL ON WHEELS" internally episodic structure, it's fairly easy to track a plot skeleton for a typical episode, and such can be done with the sound off. Simply watch an episode, note the different plots you saw, and then watch the episode again, ticking off hash marks each time there's a scene beat for those plots. It's a great way to discover structure of television shows like "BOARDWALK EMPIRE", "HELL ON WHEELS", or "HOMELAND", shows with internally episodic structure, where each change of scene denotes a change of plotline.
With an A, B, C plot filling every episode, the building of the railroad and the trials and tribulations inherent there is forever present as a continuing 'spinal' plot.
Because Hell On Wheels is a small town, it's a sure bet that your plots should intersect in theme or story, but again with each switch of a scene you'll be hitting a beat of one plot or another. This is as compared to a TV series like "VEEP" where plots are so compressed that from one dialogue line to the next the plots might be switching.
Going even barer with the bones, let's break down one of the best episodes of "HELL ON WHEELS". Season 2, Episode 8, (entitled "THE LORD'S DAY") in terms of A, B, C, etc. plotting.
Of course we know the A plot for having the most scene beats, the B plot for having the second-most scene beats, the C plot for having the third-most scene beats…
In this episode the A, B, C plot all hinge and revolve around love triangles, or in the case of Mickey and Sean, their brotherly love being triangulated by Ruth. Or we could also sort of say 'love quadrangles', because of Hannah Durant and Joseph Black Moon. We could name the plots in this episode thus:
A Plot: The Durants return, and there's trouble with the love triangle of Cullen, Durant, and Lily, with the added angle of Mrs. Hannah Durant.
B Plot: The love triangle of Elam, O'Toole, and Eva.
C Plot: The love triangle of Mickey and Sean's brotherly love being interrupted by Ruth, and then Joseph Black Moon adding an extra angle.
D Plot: The Swede plays his diabolical role as the force of anarchy in the town of Hell On Wheels.
PLOT SKELETON
PROLOGUE
1st beat of A plot/1st beat of B plot:
Cullen and O'Toole tinker with the steam engine, a moment which denotes the character of the budding friendship between the two men whereas in the first season they nearly killed each other.
(B) O'Toole voices his turmoil over Eva being torn between himself and Elam.
(A) Lily rides up, says that Durant is returning from Chicago, indicating the love triangle between herself, Cullen, and Durant might also be an issue.
Serving as a prologue, this first scene beat of the show always holds some ominous storm on the horizon for the characters.
OPENING TITLES
COMMERCIAL BREAK
2nd beat of B plot: Elam tinkers with building his cabin by the river, a homestead that he hopes Eva will join him in. His friend Soames arrives to lend a hand. Note that though it might seem "Elam Builds A Cabin" might be the plot here, the cabin is only a symbol of Elam wanting to homestead with Eva.
1st beat of C plot: Having started as managers of the saloon, Mickey and Sean argue over money. Sean needs the money to buy Ruth her church's land parcel. Mickey is drinking and gambling their shared funds away.
2nd beat of A plot: Durant returns, thanking Eva for nursing him with a healthy pay envelope and promising 'if you ever need anything for yourself and child…' Durant then takes a slug of opium, something he immediately seems to need due on the presence of his wife, Hannah, whom he cheated on for some time with Lily, of course. Like the cabin Elam is building, the opium has subtext, it's not a plot called Durant Is Hooked On Opium. The machinations of building the railway that rear up in the A plot of this episode are also not a Building The Railway Plot, but instead entirely subtexted by the true A plot, that of the love triangle nee quadrangle of Durant, Hannah, Cullen, and Lily.
3rd beat of A plot: Hannah, Durant's wife, is introduced, when Lily is shocked to find The Swede helping her sort Durant's ledgers, Lily's former job.
2nd beat of A plot Part 2: Directly continuing from the previous scene, and therefore a 'part 2' of this beat, Durant has a tripped-out walk to the railway office thanks to the opium. He tellingly hides from his wife as she leaves the railway office. He's worried she's chatting with Lily, with whom Durant of course had an affair.
COMMERCIAL BREAK (which you can think of as an ACT BREAK, noting the 'cliffhanger' question left hanging with the previous scene, to wit: "Uh oh, what's up with Durant being afraid of his own wife?")
4th beat of A plot: Convenient to the affair of Lily and Cullen, Durant asks Cullen to bring Lily to dinner with the Durants as his 'escort', so Hannah Durant will think Cullen and Lily are together—which they are.
3rd beat of B plot: Elam expresses worry over Eva's coming baby to Soames as they tinker with Elam's cabin, and Soames calms Elam with the idea fatherhood will do him proud.
4th beat of B plot: Eva and O'Toole have dinner (contemporary flavor note: they open this chat with Eva saying 'They had buildings 8 stories tall in Chicago!') and O'Toole again expresses his turmoil over whether Eva's baby is going to come out mulatto.
5th beat of A plot Part 1: Cullen and Lily arrive for dinner with the Durants.
1st beat of D plot: The Swede messes with the railway's steam engine, assuring something will go wrong with the upcoming raising of the bridge.
5th beat of A Plot Part 2: Cullen matches the refinement of Hannah Durant by wielding his knife and fork like a gentleman and knowing some trivia about a rich railway family.
5th beat of A Plot Part 3: Tension mounts between Hannah and Lily, and we suspect Lily's going to be forced out of the inner circle at the crux of building the railway, forced from her lead surveyor position.
6th beat of A Plot: Cullen escorts Hannah to her tent (she and Durant sleep apart because of Durant's wounds), and she indicates they have a promising future ahead as long as Cullen doesn't align himself with Lily.
COMMERCIAL BREAK/ACT BREAK
7th beat of A plot: Lily is shut out of a meeting with the Durants, as they forcefully tell Cullen to finish the bridge over the gorge and get the railway moving.
2nd beat of C plot: Sean asks Ruth to marry him, but she's taken aback, asks if he didn't give her the money for the church with strings attached. She refuses him.
2nd beat of D plot: As a support of the bridge is raised, The Swede's meddling with the steam engine pays off with a disastrous cable break, with the support falling, and several men being wounded.
5th beat of B plot: The wounded return to camp, and a worried Eva greets O'Toole with a hearty hug, which Elam sees, is chagrined over.
8th beat of A plot: The Durants scold Cullen over the accident, further indicating he's not cutting it as Foreman. It's not just Lily they're going to get rid of, seems.
3rd beat of C plot: Joseph returns, having converted from Christianity back to his Cheyenne roots. He has words with Ruth, telling her he's seen the White Spirit and that Hell On Wheels is a town of evil, wherein she is going to die. Mickey sees this conversation.
3rd beat of D plot: Cullen finds a Norwegian penny in the pressure valve of the steam engine, to which O'Toole voices 'The Swede wanted us to find out'.
9th beat of A plot: Lily demands she not be pushed out based on Durant's previous promise, but Durant asks her 'How does Cullen know about the mileage shortfall?' and 'Did you lay with him?' and indicates she's nearly through.
4th beat of C plot: Mickey and Sean's growing violent tendencies erupt (a note of their characters' arc, as they've been seen to go from being very nice boys to quite violent in the course of the series) in a fight over money, with Mickey mocking Sean's love for Ruth, telling Sean she's been seen with Joseph.
10th beat of A plot/6th beat of B plot: Durant tears up Elam's land deed, but Elam faces him down, saying he'll build his cabin, and Durant gives in to Elam's stand as a Freedman, and asks Elam to sit down, in order to make him an offer. Elam's cabin, again, is not about Elam's cabin but about Elam homesteading with Eva, and therefore a beat of the B plot, and Durant is making Elam the job offer not because of the job, but because he has to get rid of Cullen and Lily, and therefore it's a beat of the A plot. Subtext!
11th beat of A plot: Hannah ever-so-sweetly kicks Lily out of Lily's private train car.
COMMERCIAL BREAK/ACT BREAK
12th beat of A plot: Cullen gives up his train car to Lily, expresses that they can't live together because there's no telling about Durant's jealousy.
5th beat of C plot: Sean menaces Ruth, whining at her for talking to Joseph.
4th beat of D plot: Since being ousted from Hell On Wheels, The Swede has been living in the trash heap outside of town, and Cullen burns down The Swede's tent.
13th beat of A plot: Cullen goes to bunk down with Elam in Elam's unfinished cabin. Elam mentions Durant might want him (Elam) to take Cullen's job as Foreman. This is also a note of the continuing, strengthening friendship of these two men.
WORLD & SETTING:
"The nation is an open wound." Don't forget that when writing for "HELL ON WHEELS". Racism against the African-Americans and Native Americans is at its very worst, and life is extremely cheap for both groups of minorities. Though no Chinese-Americans have been seen yet in the series, they're working on the railway line coming from California. We'll come back to this point in a moment.
The Irish are fairing a little better, but they're still subject to ethnic scorn, and they've fled a terrible famine and racism in their homeland. Swiss and German folk do okay in America, but this country is still an unmixed melting pot, and everyone is more definitely identified by the race or ethnicity than the mix we have today.
And then add to this mix the Civil War, and half the country hating and killing the other half for the last four years in the most horrible sort of way, mechanized warfare that mounted staggering casualties and bloodbaths and horrors. Remember that all the men in the series have just emerged in one way or another from an absolutely, thoroughly traumatic war, and though they don't have the acronym on their lips they all surely suffer from PTSD.
Keep in mind that though everyone is on the open prairie and America is still fresh and new and you can drink from a brook without a water tablet. But medicine is rudimentary, an open wound out on the plains can go septic and kill you, a wound can get a limb amputated, consumption and tuberculosis and smallpox will happily strike you down. When the Cheyenne came to Hell On Wheels to negotiate with Durant, they took especial note of how filthy the Western lifestyle is, and the streets of Hell On Wheels are composed by mud, and if you don't lay boards on the bottom of your tent you'll get trenchfoot.
Language is flowery in this era, in a wonderful, eloquent way, since all that anyone had to communicate with was letters, and all that anyone had to read was Bibles. To get a great feel for language in this era, dig up some Civil War letters on the Internet, or because this Road Map For Specs is only a study guide, and not all of the research you should do, take the time to go through the ten hours of the excellent Ken Burns series "THE CIVIL WAR", which is full of eloquently spoken correspondence.
Finally, remember that Hell On Wheels, the travelling town itself, is a microcosm of early America, with its rudimentary economy and bevy of entrepreneurs and can-do spirit, but also with its restlessness, its relentless push forward.
GOD IS IN THE DETAILS…
In one of it's more interesting details, and a detail that no one draws much attention to at all because it's so 'assumed', that this show exploits Early American Alcoholism as a back drop. Both Cullen and Elam have fallen prey to getting stuck in the whiskey tent, and when Reverend Cole fell out with God and his daughter and Joseph he took to the bottle so as to become utterly incapacitated. Even Durant revealed too much of himself to Lily during a moment of high spirits. Whereas The Swede and Lily noticeably don't drink.
So think about how these were the early days of alcoholism in America, and how alcoholism really hadn't been invented yet, not in the Alcoholics Anonymous (which came about in the 1900s after the Suffrage Movement and the Volstead Act tried to get America to quit drinking altogether) sense of the word. Like the quality of emotional disconnect throughout the series, people didn't quite, not quite, not at the very end of the day, understand the nature of alcoholism. And so they tumble into it as casually as falling in a hole. Furthermore, the West has not yet been won, and so drunks are not yet sedentary as no one is yet settled, and so they'll spend the night with a bottle in order to kill men in the morning. See also Clint Eastwood's be-all, end-all anti-Western "UNFORGIVEN", which partially purports the Wild West's most noted, ballyhooed gunslingers as men who were only drunk enough to not be nervous and to not mind what they were doing.
One quick note elaborating on what was mentioned above: Chinese workgangs were NOT used in the building of this part of the Transcontinental Railway. The Railway was built in 2 parts, and the Chinese "coolies" were on the workgang coming from the West. There's been silly criticism leveled at "HELL ON WHEELS", but it's very much historically accurate, and certainly accurate with the Irish and Freedman work gangs on this part of the railway.
Especially remember this when spec'ing for "HELL ON WHEELS": everyone's a little bit anti-social. These are not civilized times, so for characters to do inexplicable things or suddenly turn to God to murder and back to God is a-okay. Mostly when spec'ing you don't want to rock the boat of a show too much, but this is probably the one series where you can throw an outlandish choice in. It's an era when people were trying their best to figure out how to be civilized while living a near-animal existence, so when Cullen suddenly steals the payroll at the end of the first season or Lily suddenly has moved in with Durant or Cole reveals himself as a stone-cold killer or the McGinness brothers suddenly slaughter the butcher and feed him to his own pigs, these things aren't radical or unmotivated, they're typical. Be predictably unpredictable.
Boardwalk Empire SPEC WRITING ROAD MAP
By Guy Jackson and Michael Ferris
(Click here to download a Movie Magic Screenwriter format template for Boardwalk Empire and a link to a sample script)
We continue our series for a show that just got picked up for a 4th season, Boardwalk Empire. This one will be around for several years, and while it’s not as close to my heart as, say, GAME OF THRONES, this show is much more spec friendly, as it’s not bogged down in the rigidness of source material like GAME OF THRONES is. It’s also widely considered a pretty solid serialized show to spec by agents and managers in the industry.
This article is intended as a full on instruction manual on how to write a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” spec, along with tactics for how to write a spec. In the course of the article, we’ll obviously reveal many details of the series, so it goes without saying that this contains dozens of spoilers. If you’ve already seen the series, however, this road map should work equally well as a consolidation of the series’ history and a freshly analytical voice regarding the series’ facets.
Also, this essay uses much repetition of events, not by accident but to hammer home and continually reiterate a holistic understanding of the series’ history.
While character and plot and series history are important for the writing of a spec (thus, why they are covered ad naseum upfront), the real meat and potatoes of this article, the “fun stuff”, is the absolutely detailed Episode Breakdown, which, like a coroner’s scalpel, reveals each layer of an episode to such a degree that you will be able to easily structure your own episode using our formula.
So, without further ado….
SERIES OVERVIEW AND CONCEIT:
“BOARDWALK EMPIRE” is an epic HBO series, set in Atlantic City during prohibition. It was originally adapted from a book by Nelson Johnson entitled Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, And Corruption Of Atlantic City. The central character of the show, Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, is based on real-life Atlantic City kingpin Enoch L. Johnson. Of course, all this real life stuff should never stand in the way of a good story in a good spec.
A hot tip for writing for this show, though: do some research. Dig around the internet and find some interesting gangland tale or cultural fact of the series’ era, then alter and transpose it into your spec. The show is very much ‘of its time’, in that it loves to reference the period.
By far one of the most interesting characters in “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” is Richard Harrow, the wounded WWI veteran with half of a prosthetic face. So much story mileage has been gained in a dozen storylines from the simple fact of Richard Harrow’s prosthesis and shell-shocked demeanor, and all it took was for a writer to espy a picture of a grievously (and interestingly) wounded WWI vet.
Another thing to keep in mind is the coldness of not only the series itself, but also the people of the era. Always remember there just wasn’t as much peace, love, and understanding in the world as there is now. Blacks and whites were separate but equal. You might be married to someone in Illinois and only see them once a month because they worked in Atlantic City. There weren’t many roads on which to road trip to other places and see what was on the other side of the hill. A generation of young men had just finished dying in WWI and another generation was poised to die in WWII. Smacking around a child was fairly acceptable. Women were largely regarded as chattle. So as you read through the characters below, keep these coldnesses, this archness, this aloofness of the series in mind. Sure, we have a multitude of problems and disconnects in the society of today, but back then people really, really, really hadn’t learned to love one another much at all.
Which is not to say there’s no emotional center to be found in the show. Arguably the heart of the show is Margaret Schroeder, whose mercurial emotional state provides the series with a soulful, human backbone. And Family with a capital F is repeated as a theme in nearly every episode. Even the coldest, most sociopathic gangster in the show has a family or a friendship keeping him at least somewhat human and empathetic.
On a related note, no one in the show, save maybe Nucky Thompson, is safe. A prime example is Owen Sleater, Nucky’s bodyguard and driver, who had one-time sex with Margaret Schroeder, and so while Owen is perfectly competent and faithful he could also get gunned down at any moment. Hence the accumulated deaths, especially surprising deaths like that of Angela Darmody, not to mention the average of one death per episode, makes one jumpy for all the characters.
Finally, note that the show haunts itself. Almost every killing, every wrongdoing, has come back to haunt the living in some fashion or another. By way of shining example: in the show’s first episode, Nucky ordered Hans Schroeder, the abusive husband of Margaret Schroeder, bumped off. And all the way in the final episode of the second season, the murder was finally pinned on someone, and became the big issue between Nucky and his brother Eli. When writing a spec, concern yourself with ‘the sins of the past’ at least once.
Season One of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” concerned Nucky’s rise to prominence as a gangster, from the first days of Prohibition to him settling up with the gangsters of New York and Chicago to create a loose trifecta. The season kicked off when Jimmy Darmody, Nucky’s right hand man, teamed up with Al Capone in what was known as The Canadian Club heist, wherein a shipment of liquor was stolen and four New York gangsters accidentally gunned down.
Season Two concerned Jimmy Darmody’s betrayal, he began as Nucky’s right-hand man and bodyguard but owed fealty to his own father, The Commodore (the gangster city boss in his dotage who built Atlantic City), and so attempted a coup of Nucky’s empire.
CHARACTER BREAKDOWNS:
MAJOR CHARACTERS:
“NUCKY” ENOCH THOMPSON (STEVE BUSCEMI):
Surprisingly, Nucky Thompson is the most reliable, staid, unchanging character in “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”. Though his moral code and thought process is buried deep, you can always count on Nucky to behave in a nigh-predictable fashion. When Nucky finally kills Jimmy Darmody in the end of the second series, it’s both shocking and expected; it’s also the only thing that Nucky can do in keeping with Nucky. In this way Nucky provides the show’s dark moral compass.
If Nucky underwent any change over the first two seasons of the show, it was only that he became a killer his own self. One of the writers for the show noted this in an interview, to paraphrase and explicate: in the first episode of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” Prohibition is about to become law, and Nucky has set himself up as Atlantic City treasurer to receive kickbacks and graft from the pending illegal liquor trade. But after performing a heist on his behalf, Jimmy Darmody (see below, in the Dead Characters section) told Nucky “You can’t be half a gangster.” And in the end of the second season Nucky finally got blood on his hands, fulfilling Jimmy’s prophecy.
Nucky often mentions a wife who died of consumption, but in a candid moment with Margaret he told her the real story, that a few days after the birth of his baby, Nucky came home after being away on business to find the child had been dead for days, and that his wife had gone mad, continuing to nurse the corpse. Soon after the baby was buried, his wife committed suicide.
Nucky is thus obsessed with babies, haunting the window of an incubator shop on the Atlantic City boardwalk, in part helping Margaret Schroeder and then falling for her later down the line because she was at first pregnant and has two darling children. He also ordered Margaret’s husband Hans killed after a thorough beating from the husband caused her a miscarriage.
Children and the love of a devoted woman and family ties are Nucky’s only soft spot however; he even spared his brother Eli after Eli joined The Commodore’s attempted coup and gave his okay to an assassination attempt on Nucky, then denied it.
Nucky had a love/hate relationship with his own father, Ethan, of which Eli was a gray part; the father seemed to hate Nucky and love Eli, but then scoffed at Eli attempting to make a speech, and rooted for Nucky when Nucky was under indictment.
Eli took care of the father, Ethan, when he was dying. When they moved Ethan from his house Nucky gave the house to his most loyal associate, Damian Fleming, to renovate, but after the renovation was done Nucky came to visit and burned the house to the ground, traumatizing young Teddy Schroeder (Margaret’s son) into an interest in arson.
Another telltale moment regarding Nucky: when Jimmy Darmody executed and then flubbed a robbery of Arnold Rothstein (the New York kingpin) in the first episode, Nucky demanded $3000 in penance. Jimmy had to wipe out his savings and steal back a necklace he bought for his mother to get the money, and then Nucky simply dropped the money wad on a handy roulette wheel and lost it all, completing Jimmy’s life lesson.
Make sure Nucky only acts in self-interest, make sure he only acts to take care of his own business, and make sure 99% of his moments of warmth are reserved for his closest family, and you should be okay.
MARGARET SCHROEDER (KELLY MCDONALD):
A fascinating, mercurial character, Margaret began the series as a meek member of the Woman’s Temperance League, itself a significant piece of the Woman’s Sufferage movement. She saw a speech by Nucky about the evils of alcohol, and came to him for help, thereby igniting their complicated relationship.
Margaret was married to raging alcoholic Hans Schroeder, with two children and another one on the way, but in the first episode she miscarried after a beating from Hans. Nucky found out about this, brought Margaret flowers in the hospital, and had her husband dumped in the ocean.
Nucky soon got Margaret a job in Madame Jeunet’s boutique dress shop on the boardwalk, where Margaret continued in her traumatized meekness, until bumping heads with Nucky’s clotheshorse girlfriend Lucy caused her to quit. In the process Margaret stole a slip to wear for a meeting with Nucky, and when Nucky didn’t meet her Margaret tore up the slip.
From that point Margaret made a beeline for picking up Nucky, going to the point of ratting out a beer garage and getting his St. Patrick’s party busted to draw his attention. Once they got together Nucky then moved Margaret and her children into a hotel, but when she found out it was a hotel loaded with concubines for city officials she wore Nucky out, broke up with him, and got him to tell her the story of the death of his child. And then came back to him.
By the end of the second season Margaret and her children came to live with Nucky in a mansion. After Jimmy Darmody turned on Nucky, Nucky got a new bodyguard in the person of Owen Slater, and in a torrid moment of afternoon delight, Margaret and Owen had it off.
Margaret ultimately came to symbolize Hidden Power, holding depths of power she’s only beginning to exercise and suspect. In one episode, Nucky goaded Margaret into making a speech during the election cycle, and she roused and riled the crowd, and secured Nucky the woman’s vote.
But Margaret also has a decidedly weak or easily-swayed side. In the final episodes of the second season her daughter Emily came down with polio, which distressed Margaret to the point of turning to the church. There Father Ed Brennan got her charitable spirit up, and she gave tithes and gave tithes and gave tithes to disastrous result. Nucky had to sign over a swath of valuable New Jersey land that will surround the future highway into Atlantic City, sign it over to Margaret so it wouldn’t have been lost if he’d gone to jail (he was under indictment in the second season), and Margaret wound up signing over the land to Father Brennan’s church.
Margaret has a shadowy family history, and keep in mind the above note in the first section about the coldness of the time. She hadn’t seen her brother or met his children, and upon finally hunting them down in the Bowery, and though she enjoyed meeting her nieces, she felt no real family ties, and found her charity reviled. Margaret tries hard, in other words, but her impulsiveness, her hidden wells of power, and her own tendencies to self-interest often get in her way.
AGENT NELSON VAN ALDEN (MICHAEL SHANNON):
Just as ever-changing and mercurial as Margaret is Van Alden, as he’s most commonly called, the chilly, aloof, no-nonsense, firebrand Federal Agent in dogged pursuit of Nucky Thompson. Defying expectations of such a role, however, Van Alden constantly wavers in his mission, most often when his shambles of a personal life, his questionable psyche, or his blind sense of vengeance catch up with him. Van Alden is a religious zealot,as well, given to reciting Bible verses, and once even revealing himself to be a flagellant, in that late in the night he fashions a whip and lashes his scarred back.
He’s a divorced man as of the end of the second season, but while his marriage was on display it was a severe, austere thing characterized by a letter he wrote to his repressed, suffocated wife in an early episode, a one line letter reminding her to pour water on the pipes against freezing. They lived apart, Van Alden in Atlantic City and Rose Van Alden in an unnamed small town, and Rose would come to visit for silent dinners and dull-as-dishwater boardwalk tours. Their relationship only saw one flash of passion, when in a restaurant Rose got bothered by the waiter’s secret offer of alcohol, and Van Alden then polished off the dinner by giving Rose a brooch (“But Nelson, you don’t believe in gifts,” she said.) and then busting the restaurant with a storm of Federal Agents.
But severity and austerity are watchwords with Van Alden, and a favorite editing trick of the series is to cut from Nucky’s lavish, colorful, ribald, high times lifestyle to Van Alden’s icy, hardscrabble existence.
Van Alden has gone downhill throughout the course of the series. He revealed a psychosis of some sort when he kidnapped a dying witness to Jimmy Darmody’s Canadian Club heist, then tortured the man to death for information. His wife wanted to have an operation to help her conjure a baby, but Nelson turned her down. Then Nelson got a mysterious wild hair toward Margaret and came after her in a weird, psychosexual interrogation scene. He then got drunk, hooked up with Nucky’s ex-girlfriend Lucy, and got her pregnant.
Van Alden’s one-time partner, Agent Sebso, was hired by Nucky to assassinate the one remaining witness to Jimmy Darmody’s Canadian Club heist, and Van Alden gradually festered suspicion, until he accidentally drowned Agent Sebso at an African-American riverside baptism ceremony. No one reported the manslaughter until Van Alden was about to testify against Nucky, and Nucky’s manservant surprised everyone by admitting his presence at the baptism. There was an attempt to arrest Van Alden, but he made a break for it.
Backing up to having gotten Lucy pregnant: Van Alden cut a deal with her to stay in his apartment for nine months, hidden away, and be the surrogate for the child, who he planned to give to his wife. This resulted in a prisoner situation, in which Lucy went quite mad and once almost killed herself, and was only assuaged by the delivery of a record player. While Van Alden was away one day, Lucy had the baby, coinciding with a surprise visit from Rose Van Alden. Rose understandably didn’t understand Van Alden was trying to hatch a baby for her, and stormed off, soon after sending him divorce papers. Lucy vanished, and Van Alden was left with the baby and a Swedish maid he hired. When he went on the lamb for the manslaughter of Agent Sebso, he wound up in Cicero, Illinois with this maid.
One more thing about Van Alden: when Jimmy Darmody went on the run and hid out in Chicago after the Canadian Club heist, Jimmy was sending money back to his wife, Angela, and Van Alden (whose office was relegated to the Post Office) intercepted the letters, accumulating the money in a drawer. Finally, though, Van Alden broke down and sent all the money to Angela anonymously, revealing that somewhere in his dark and tortured soul Van Alden has a heart.
This is a lot of history, but it’s good to know everything about this character, who maintained an unmoving stone-face throughout all the above (except when he flew into fire-and-brimstone rages). The best way to write for Van Alden: come up with the worst possible position for a religious zealot to be in, and put him there.
Representative Dialogue: “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Roll down your sleeves, put on your coat, bring Mrs. Schroeder a chair, go outside, and guard the entrance.”
NOTE: MAJOR CHARACTERS ARE ALPHABETICAL BY FIRST NAME FROM HERE
AL CAPONE (STEPHEN GRAHAM):
Starting out as a driver and bodyguard and right hand man to Johnny Torrio, who took over the Chicago mob scene when Big Jim Colosimo died in the second episode, Capone is here presented as a man on his way up. He began as a wisecracking, hot-tempered sociopath, quick to kill, fascinated by nice clothes as such that he made Jimmy Darmody buy a new suit. He and Jimmy were friends, and they got together for the Canadian Club heist that screwed Arnold Rothstein in the first episode. Capone took in Jimmy when Jimmy had to flee to Chicago, and for a time the two worked together under Torrio. When Jimmy tried on his coup of Nucky’s empire, Al Capone worked with him to get liquor shipped into Atlantic City.
Capone has a deaf son, and perhaps because of the boy, and after an upbraiding from Torrio, Capine ‘grew up’, quit with being a wiseacre and a goof off who blew operations with a hasty temper, and started tending toward kingliness, making his way to a leadership position. In this manner he follows the Shakespeare version of Henry V.
ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN (MICHAEL STUHLBARG):
Like Mickey Doyle (see below), Arnold Rothstein is another minor character whose shadow looms large. He’s the boss of the New York mob scene, a cold, vengeful, strange man. He and Nucky often come to blows but make things up to one another, forgiving slights (Jimmy’s Canadian Club heist, the D’Alessios attempt on Nucky’s life) that would get lesser men in their organizations killed.
Arnold is always impeccably dressed and neat as a pin. He’s spent almost two seasons fighting off an indictment in the Black Sox scandal, meaning the World Series where the White Sox were paid to throw the game. Arnold lent Nucky his lawyer, Bill Fallon, when Nucky was also under indictment.
CHALKY WHITE (MICHAEL KENNETH WILLIAMS):
The African-American boozemaker (note that African-American is a modern phrase, of course, and blacks in “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” are referred to as ‘coloreds’, ‘Negros’, and in unfriendly terms ‘coons’ and ‘darkies’) who took over Mickey Doyle’s (see Mickey Doyle below) booze-making business with Nucky’s blessing. In his second appearance, Chalky stood down a KKK Dragon, cutting off the Dragon’s fingers with a bolt cutter from Chalky’s carpenter father’s collection, Chalky’s father having been once upon a time lynched.
The KKK came along to shoot up the warehouse where Chalky was running the booze-making business. Four of Chalky’s workers were killed, but Chalky fired off a shot and went to jail for killing one of the KKK. During his time there, he met his new right hand man, Dunn Pernsley.
In addition to making liquor for Nucky, Chalky rounds up the black vote for the elections. He also ignited a short-lived strike which brought a bit of chaos to the Atlantic City boardwalk in the midst of Nucky’s indictment, and because it was subdued by Eli’s deputies in a slambang riot.
Chalky was unhappy that he didn’t get to bring the KKK killers to justice, as Nucky wouldn’t allow it during an election, but Jimmy Darmody and Richard Harrow, in trying to work around Nucky, rounded the killers up and brought them to Chalky.
Chalky is an understandly and constantly tense man, and his relationship with Nucky, though the two are loyal and compassionate with one another, seems forever on the verge of exploding.
Representative Dialogue: “I ain’t building no bookcase.”
EDDIE KESSLER (ANTHONY LACIURA):
Though there’s not much to be said for him, there’s nothing minor about Eddie Kessler, Nucky’s everpresent butler, who appears in most every scene with Nucky. He lurks about, takes Nucky’s abuse, and even once saved Nucky’s life. He owes Nucky everything, as Nucky saved him from deportation during World War I. An impeccable fellow, Eddie gets things done and done right, even though Nucky will yell at him pointlessly for non-mistakes.
ELIAS ‘ELI’ THOMPSON (SHEA WHIGHAM):
Nucky’s brother, resentful of Nucky’s status, he’s been shot working for Nucky, been humiliated multiple times whilst working for Nucky, including once when he tried to make a speech during St. Patrick’s day and only served to rile up the assembled Atlantic City Irishmen against one another.
Eli liked Ethan Thompson, he and Nucky’s father, more than Nucky did, and cared for Ethan until the man’s death.
When Nucky replaced Eli with Deputy Hallorann (see Deputy Hallorann below) Eli teamed up with the Commodore and Jimmy Darmody to unseat Nucky, but that coup crumbled, and Nucky spared Eli, shooting Jimmy as the coup’s scapegoat.
When writing for Eli keep in mind that he always takes the weakest choice, and that any move of strength will backfire on him.
GILLIAN DARMODY (GRETCHEN MOL):
Jimmy Darmody’s rambunctious, licentious, force-of-nature mother. She gave birth to Jimmy at the age of 13, and hence is still up for being a showgirl. Jimmy’s father is The Commodore, and Gillian was pimped to him by Nucky. After The Commodore had a stroke, Gillian took the opportunity to beat the man in his helplessness.
Speaking of Shakespeare, Gillian takes turns at being Macbeth’s wife (after a fashion), urging killings and wrongdoings, but she’s also quite Oedipal, constantly flirting with her own son, and once telling Jimmy’s wife Angela: “When he was a baby and I changed his diaper, I used to kiss his little winkie.” A bizarre quote, but at the end of the second season it was revealed Gillian and Jimmy once had sex in a drunken frenzy during Jimmy’s time at Princeton. This incestual act, coupled with the early pregnancy of Angela, drove Jimmy into enlisting for World War I.
Again, Gillian is a force-of-nature, and there’s no doubt she’ll be seeking vengeance for the death of Jimmy in the third season.
JOHNNY TORRIO (GREG ANTONACCI):
The leader of the Chicago mob, and Al Capone’s direct boss. Johnny is strictly a business man, and rarely gets blood on his hands, though the death of Big Jim Colissimo, the previous don in Chicago, was highly questionable.
Johnny mostly comes off as a stern father figure who doesn’t brook any grab-ass.
“LUCKY” LUCIANO (VINCENT PIAZZA):
Like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano has yet to rise to his legend in the course of the times “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” depicts. Though harboring a mostly minor role, Lucky came into prominence when he was sent to Atlantic City to kill Jimmy Darmody after the Canadian Club heist, and wound up in a long-running tryst with Gillian Darmody, Jimmy’s mother. The tryst did Lucky well, as he’d just gotten over gonorrhea and was having trouble getting lead in his pencil, and something in Gillian brought out the animal in him. But when Jimmy returned, Gillian sent Lucky packing back to New York at gunpoint.
Lucky pays fealty to Arnold Rothstein (the New York kingpin), and mostly works out of New York, with Meyer Lansky as his partner.
LUCY DANZIGER (PAZ DE LA HUERTA):
The squeaky-voiced, dim-witted, shallow, superficial paramour of Nucky, a clothes horse who taunted Margaret by trying on slips when Margaret worked in Madame Jeunet’s boutique. Nucky dumped Lucy for Margaret, and Lucy was next seen sleeping with Agent Van Alden, getting pregnant by him, having his surrogate child. Then she vanished, presumably upon being paid for the child.
MANNY HOROVITZ (WILLIAM FORSYTHE):
Introduced to Jimmy by Mickey Doyle (see Mickey Doyle below), Manny is a Philadelphia butcher and crime boss who provided Jimmy Darmody with a lot of whiskey when Jimmy was attempting to lead a coup against Nucky. After Jimmy wound up owing him money Manny pursued the point until Jimmy tossed Mickey Doyle off a balcony, in front of Manny, to prove a point. Manny then survived an attempted assassination by Waxey Gordon, another Philadelphia crime boss. Ultimately, Manny fell in with Nucky, and conspired with him to bring Jimmy to the meeting wherein Jimmy was assassinated.
MEYER LANSKY (ANATOL YUSEF):
Like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Meyer Lansky has also not yet risen to legendary status, and like Mickey Doyle is a character very much in the shadows. He’s notable amongst the Major Characters only due on his name and continued presence. He has a strange ‘whippersnapper’ voice very cliché of old gangster movies. “What’re you, a wise guy?” wouldn’t sound strange coming out of his mouth.
MICKEY DOYLE (PAUL SPARKS):
Another extremely liquid character who remains forever in the shadows, and forever escapes doom. The fact he’s still alive is a miracle, as he’s changed sides almost as much as he’s been seen in the series. Though he’s almost faceless in the background, you can tell Mickey Doyle in an instant by his nervous, high-pitched giggle. His slipperiness is denoted literally by him changing his name to Mickey Doyle (from Mieczyslaw Kuzik, meaning he’s also changed ethnicities) before the series even began.
At first Mickey worked for Nucky as a brewer of cobbled liquor, bathtub gins and whiskeys and so on, but he was fired after Nelson Van Alden raided his warehouse. His job then fell to Chalky White. Fuming, Mickey went to help out Arnold Rothstein in New York, bringing the gang of D’Alessio Brothers (see below), who were meant to assassinate Nucky, but failed utterly, and went into hiding before being wiped out at the end of the second season. Mickey came back to Nucky before being sucked into that massacre, but then went off again with the Commodore, Jimmy Darmody, and Eli, as they attempted to take the city from Nucky. Then as that coup started to fall apart Mickey went right back to Nucky. When Nucky was being prosecuted and seemed up for indictment, however, Mickey tried to become a snitch for Nelson Van Alden, who brushed him off. Then Mickey buddied up with Manny Horovitz (see below), and went back into Nucky’s corner at the end of the second season. Obviously, Mickey is most loyal to himself. Perhaps that’s what Nucky appreciates about him.
OWEN SLEATER (CHARLIE COX):
A radical member of the Irish Republican Army and a former assistant to John McGarrigle, Owen became Nucky’s driver and bodyguard, once Jimmy’s position.
Owen is so radical in Irish politics he once brutally strangled a man who’d somehow spoken against the I.R.A. in a bar. Despite his smile, Owen’s as good a sociopath as all the rest.
When Nucky went to Ireland to trade weapons for whiskey, Owen saw to it that his former boss, John McGarrigle, died at the hands of the I.R.A., so that the trade could go as planned.
Owen is also a loverboy, having gotten together with Katy, Nucky’s housemaid, but juicier still he got together for a one afternoon stand with Margaret. This caused him to miss being with Nucky when an assassination attempt was made, and Nucky’s forever since suspected Owen and Margaret.
RICHARD HARROW (JACK HUSTON):
Grotesquely wounded in WWI, with half a prosthetic face, and befriended by Jimmy when the pair visited a VA hospital for psychiatric evaluations, Richard is a tortured soul with no trouble being an assassin. In one episode he contemplated suicide during the Memorial Day ceremonies, but was curtailed when he met fellow veterans doing some hardscrabble camping in the woods.
When he came to Atlantic City with Jimmy, Richard bummed around, staying at first with Nucky and Margaret, where he befriended Margaret after some initial friction with his face startling her children. A key revelation of Richard’s inner beauty came when, during a reading of The Wizard Of Oz, Margaret’s daughter Emily noted Richard was just like the Tin Woodsman, with his half-tin face.
After Richard moved in with Jimmy Darmody and his wife Angela, he had another revelation of inner beauty when Angela had him sit for a portrait. Angela was a painter (see Dead Characters below), and Richard much fell for her kindnesses, and due on his loyalty to both Jimmy and Angela, he’ll likely be hard-pressed for vengeance in the third season.
Sometimes, however, everyone’s charity and soft focus looks upon him seem to wear on Richard, and there are moments where we can wonder if he’s much loyal to anything or anyone. He certainly doesn’t seem to care what happens to his own self.
MINOR CHARACTERS (ALPHABETICAL BY FIRST NAME OR TITLE):
AGENT SAWICKI:
Faithful and dopey, with Agent Clarkson he co-replaced Agent Sebso after Van Alden manslaughtered Sebso. In one episode Agent Sawicki went with Agent Clarkson to a still that exploded and so was party to Agent Clarkson’s suffering burns that killed him.
BABBETTE (TRACY MIDDENDORF):
The platinum blonde hostess of Babette’s, a Moulin Rouge-esque saloon in the Ritz Carlton on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Babette’s often seen, and sometimes sings, but she is ornamental, and hasn’t had a hand in any of the plotting.
BILL FALLON (DAVID AARON BAKER):
Based on a real person and Nucky’s lawyer, recommended by Arnold Rothstein after he helped Rothstein avoid jail over the Black Sox Scandal. Fallon worked Nucky out of his indictment, bringing evidence of Agent Sebso’s manslaughter against Van Alden, and rounding the question of Hans Schroeder’s murder so that it was pinned on Deputy Halloran.
BOSS FRANK HAGUE (CHRIS MULKEY):
A Democrat and political operative, he helped engineer the highway deal which will bring a highway into Atlantic City.
CARL HEELY (NIC NOVICKI):
A midget performer seen now and then dressed as a leprechaun or wrestling, he once negotiated better pay for him and his fellow midgets before they were to appear as leprechauns for a St. Patrick’s Day bash.
DAMIAN FLEMING (VICTOR VERHAEGE):
An Atlantic City alderman and politician fiercely loyal to Nucky, Damian stuck by Nucky when all the aldermans fell in with Jimmy and the Commodore’s attempted coup. This is probably partially because Damian was given a house by Nucky. In the episode that returned to Nucky’s childhood, Nucky’s father had to be moved from the family home for caretaking with Eli, and Nucky gave Damian the house ‘so a real family could live in it’. After a total renovation, however, bad memories loomed too large for Nucky and he burned the house to the ground, and gave the shocked Damian money to buy a new one.
DEPUTY HALLORAN (ADAM MUCCI):
A lout who began the series as Eli Thompson’s right hand man, but then remained loyal to Nucky and became sheriff when Eli joined Jimmy and The Commodore’s coup. This loyalty was hardly rewarded, though, as Eli got his sheriff badge back and Halloran took the whole rap for the murder of Hans Schroeder (Margaret’s abusive husband).
DUNN PURNSLEY (ERIC LARAY HARVEY):
A bold, empowered African-American who tried it on with Chalky White when the two shared a jail cell together, all over Chalky’s copy of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. Dunn was badly beaten up, for the cell was full of men who owed Chalky one favor or another, but upon his release Dunn came to Chalky with hat in hand, and became Chalky’s right hand man.
Dunn then led the Atlantic City strike of the African-Americans, starting a riot in the kitchen of the Ritz Carlton.
EDWARD BADER (KEVIN O’ROURKE):
Nucky’s puppet choice for Mayor, a non-presence of man who only takes orders from Nucky.
EDDIE CANTOR (STEPHEN DEROSA):
A vaudeville dandy seen sporadically entertaining the crowd at Babette’s. A friend of Lucy Danziger’s, he brought her a script for a play she could appear in when she was pregnant and under lock and key with Van Alden.
ESTHER RANDOLPH (JULIANNE NICHOLSON):
A U.S. Attorney who came after Nucky Thompson when he was charged with election rigging, an indictment try which she juiced up with an attempt to pin the murder of Hans Schroeder on him. She was over the moon to get Van Alden’s file on Nucky, and was on the verge of getting Van Alden to testify when Van Alden’s manslaughter of Agent Sebso was found out. Her case further fell apart when Margaret Schroeder married Nucky and therefore couldn’t be called to testify against him.
FATHER ED BRENNAN (MICHAEL CUMPSTY):
The opportunistic, creepy priest who went right to work on Margaret’s sense of charity when Margaret told him of her daughter Emily’s polio.
He worked Margaret in a religious fervor until she was donating jewels his way, and in the final episode his brainwashing cued her to sign over a land deed to his church. The land, again, is the swath of land surrounding the new highway into Atlantic City, and it was of course highly valuable to Nucky.
GEORGE REMUS (GLENN FLESHLER):
The mob boss from Cinncinnati, a former lawyer, and a fleshy, obnoxious man, George Remus strangely speaks of himself only in the third person, much to the chagrin of Al Capone, who’s particularly wound up by this habit.
Al Capone and Jimmy Darmody tried to work with George Remus to bring liquor into Atlantic City, but Jimmy’s coup of Nucky’s empire fell apart soon after the deal was made.
HARRY DOHERTY (CHRISTOPHER MCDONALD):
With Nucky’s help, Doherty hid President Walter Harding’s mistress with Nucky, then became attorney general for this trick. Nucky brought Doherty delegates and helped get Harding elected, but Doherty didn’t return the favor when the Federal Government got involved in Nucky’s election rigging case.
JACK DEMPSEY (DEVIN HARJES):
Briefly seen when he fought a bout in Atlantic City, this is the famous boxer of the era, putting in a cameo.
KATY (HEATHER LIND):
The nosy maid of Nucky Thompson and Margaret Schroeder, Katy had an affair with Owen Sleater, then was angered to find out he’d spent an afternoon in Margaret’s company. She has a contentious relationship with Margaret.
LENORE WHITE (NATALIE WACHEN):
Chalky’s wife, a goodly, patient woman who seems to come from a more refined background.
LESTER WHITE (JUSTIIN DAVIS):
Chalky’s son, an aspiring doctor on his way to Morehouse.
MADAME ISABELLE JEUNET (ANNA KATARINA):
The stern French employer of Margaret, after Nucky got Margaret a job on the boardwalk. Madame Jeunet sold women’s lingerie, mostly it seemed to Lucy Danziger, when Lucy was the paramour of Nucky. Unfriendly and snooty with Margaret, Madame Jeunet received Margaret’s help at the end, when Margaret had quit and moved up into Nucky’s arms and Madame Jeunet’s shop was in trouble.
MRS. MCGARRY (DANA IVEY):
The strict, elder, no-nonsense leader of the temperance union, had a couple appearances as a mother figure to Margaret.
ROSE VAN ALDEN (ENID GRAHAM):
The dutiful, repressed, bitter, suffocated, crying-jag-prone wife of Nelson Van Alden; she’s barren and desperately wanted a baby, obviously to quash her loneliness for a husband who was never home. It’s uncertain whether she’s gone forever from the show, but as said above she did serve Nelson divorce papers after discovering he’d sired a baby with Lucy.
SENATOR WALTER EDGE (GEOFF PIERSON):
The embodiment of the Atlantic City land deal, he’s working with Nucky and City Boss Hague to build a highway into Atlantic City.
WAXEY GORDON (NICK SANDOW):
A Philadelphia crime boss who had a falling out with Manny Horvitz, and tried to have Manny killed at Jimmy Darmody’s behest.
KIDS:
TOMMY DARMODY (BRADY & CONOR NOON):
Jimmy’s young son, who’s been strictly ornamental, and is now under the charge of Gillian Darmody. He’s been much doted on by Jimmy, Angela, and Gillian.
EMILY SCHROEDER (LUCIE & JOSIE GALLINA):
Margaret’s daughter, stricken with polio in the second season.
TEDDY SCHROEDER (DECLAN & RORY MCTEAGUE):
Margaret’s son, who acquired a penchant for fire when he saw Nucky burn down the Thompson home. This possible arson tendency was inflated when he watched all of Emily’s possessions burned after she acquired polio. He was caught playing with matches in school, and then severely reprimanded, but his misbehavior continued when he pretended to have polio, per his jealousy over the fussing over his sister.
DEAD CHARACTERS:
“JIMMY” JAMES DARMODY (MICHAEL PITT):
Although he’s dead, Jimmy begs a synopsis, because there’s no doubt he’ll be haunting the third season of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”, as he was one of four major characters for the first two seasons, and if a teeny tiny little character like Hans Schroeder can ghost back after two seasons…
A decorated WWI veteran with a black cloud always overhanging him, a stomach problem, and half-a-degree from Princeton college, Jimmy let his ambitious nature get the better of him, or maybe it was just that he was doomed from the get go. His mother, Gillian, was prostituted to The Commodore at the age of 13. When Jimmy was at Princeton he met Angela, and impregnated her, then after drunkenly defending his mother’s honor by beating up a teacher (revealing a violent side) Jimmy had sex with his equally drunken mother. Later, Jimmy would kill The Commodore, completing his Oedipal cycle. (Gillian also exhibited a bit of Lady Macbeth, pushing and goading Jimmy to both kill The Commodore and never mind about the death of Angela.)
In the first season Jimmy had amounted to Nucky’s bodyguard, Nucky having been a party to Jimmy’s raising, and upon meeting Al Capone, Jimmy and Al hatched a plan to rob a shipment of Canadian Club whiskey on its way to Arnold Rothstein. The robbery went awry, with Jimmy and Al gunning four of Rothstein’s men down. The fallout caused Jimmy to flee to Chicago, where he helped Al Capone with the rise of Johnny Torrio. When the witnesses to the Canadian Club massacre were also bumped off, and the heat had passed, Jimmy returned to Nucky’s side.
But The Commodore recruited Jimmy and Nucky’s brother Eli for a coup, and the second season was about that coup failing, as one thing and then another went wrong for the usurpers. Jimmy made an especial mistake when he fell into debt with Manny Horvitz, who murdered his wife, Angela, and then Jimmy’s attempt to forgive and forget with Nucky also failed. He was assassinated on the beach, after he told Richard Harrow and Gillian he was going out to settle with Manny.
ANGELA DARMODY (ALEKSA PALLADINO):
The loving wife of Jimmy Darmody, and while he was away in the trenches of World War I she had his child and then fell for a woman, the wife of a boardwalk photographer, a couple that barely appeared and then disappeared. Angela almost ran away with this woman to Paris, but her reluctance to leave Jimmy made her late for the boat. Even after Jimmy fled to Chicago and came home months later, Angela loved him dearly, and welcomed his new friend, Richard Harrow.
Angela was a painter often compared to Mary Cassatt, and she once sat Richard Harrow for a portrait, winning his love.
Angela’s relationship with Gillian, Jimmy’s mother, was contentious and tense, as she could always sense Gillian’s huge hold on Jimmy.
She met another lover, Leslie, and when Manny Horvitz came to kill Jimmy toward the very end of the second season, he instead wound up gunning down both Angela and Leslie, whilst Jimmy was away on business.
HANS SCHROEDER (JOSEPH SIKORA):
Margaret Schroeder’s abusive drunk of a husband. After beating his wife into a miscarriage, Nucky had Hans picked up by Eli and Deputy Hallorann, and they took Hans out to sea, beat him to death, and dumped him in the ocean. His death was almost prosecuted upon Nucky, then Eli, then wound up being blamed on Deputy Hallorann, who went to jail for it in the end of the second season.
JOHN MCGARRIGLE (TED ROONEY):
A representative of Sinn Fein who sought pacifism and peace. He came to Atlantic City for a donation to Ireland, but when Nucky came to Ireland bearing an offer of guns for whiskey, McGarriggle turned up his nose, and was promptly killed by his own men.
COMMODORE LOUISE KAESTNER (DABNEY COLEMAN):
Once the town founder of Atlantic City, The Commodore began as a wise old guru to Nucky. But after recovering from a long arsenic poisoning at the hands of his maid, The Commodore attempted to use his son Jimmy to take over Atlantic City once more. The Commodore’s returned health was short-lived, and he had a stroke and fell under the questionable nursing abilities of Gillian Darmody. Finally, when Jimmy attacked Gillian after the death of Angela, The Commodore fought with Jimmy, and was stabbed to death.
AGENT SEBSO (ERIK WEINER):
A turncoat agent. While the partner of Van Alden he was paid off to kill a witness against Jimmy Darmody and Al Capone’s Canadian Club heist. He fell under the suspicion of Van Alden and eventually was accidentally drowned in a river by Van Alden during a baptism ceremony.
BIG JIM COLOSIMO:
Barely glimpsed in the first episode, Big Jim was promptly shot and killed in a cafe, but his crime boss shadow looms large over Chicago, Johnny Torrio, and Al Capone, and his name constantly pops up.
CHARLIE SHERIDAN:
A gangster killed by Jimmy Darmody and Al Capone when they were helping Johnny Torrio rise to power in Chicago, after the death of Big Jim Colosimo.
THE D’ALESSIO BROTHERS:
A passel of seven or eight brothers, interchangeable and unknowable, all of whom tried and failed to help Mickey Doyle gain control of Nucky’s operation, and they also tried and failed to help out Arnold Rothstein, but they were just too dumb a bunch. Mickey Doyle turned on them, then Arnold gave them up, and every one of them was assassinated in the end of the first season.
AGENT CLARKSON (JOEL BRADY):
Along with Agent Sawicki replaced Agent Sebso as Van Alden’s assistant. But Clarkson saw Van Alden’s funny behavior (while Van Alden was keeping the pregnant Lucy under lock and key) and thought Van Alden had become a liquor buy-off. So in investigating a still run by Jimmy Darmody, during Jimmy’s attempted coup, Agent Sawicki ran afoul of Owen Sleater’s bomb planting skills, and was savagely burned in the resulting conflagration. After giving Van Alden a scare (Van Alden thought a demon from Hell had come to haunt him for his sins of killing Sebso, drinking, getting Lucy pregnant, etc.) Sawicki died of his injuries.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
As the third season is breached, Nucky and his political empire are about to open the highway into Atlantic City. But Nucky’s deed to the land surrounding the potential road has been donated to Father Ed Brennan’s church by Margaret Schroeder.
Agent Van Alden has fled the charge of killing Agent Sebso, and is tucked away in Cicero, Illinois, but will be back somehow for the third season.
Jimmy Darmody has just been killed and Richard Harrow and Gillian Darmody will no doubt be on a path of vengeance. Part of Margaret signing away the land deed, as well, came from her realizing Nucky had gotten rid of Jimmy. Al Capone was also a great friend of Jimmy’s, and may be hot for payback as well.
PLOTTING AND PLOT SKELETON
What’s difficult about writing a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” spec, of course, is that one doesn’t know what the writers of the show have already decided about the arcs or trajectories of certain characters, and one is obliged to do guesswork as to whether certain characters will even be alive to use in a spec. Thus it’s advisable to simply self-contain your spec, and not worry too terribly much as to whether a plot will come from the past or continue into the future. Meaning you can use the history, but don’t try to finish something you saw started in an episode. And don’t do too much toward leaving your plots open-ended.
For example, one episode of Boardwalk Empire depicted Chalky White’s time in jail, where he was confronted by Dunn Pernsley over a copy of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. Though Chalky White was in jail for a crime that happened in a prior episode, and though Chalky White and Dunn Pernsley’s story continued in following episodes, their jailhouse confrontation was self-contained, with an inciting incident, conflict, climax, and resolution, and could’ve been removed from the series and put onstage as a one-act play.
That said, what’s easy about writing a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” episode is the series’ simple, episodic structure. One can actually fast forward through an episode and watch the plots go by beat-by-beat, unlike other shows where plots are much more intrinsic and meshed with one another. More on this in a moment.
Certainly it’s fine to use visual and thematic ties, and probably even wise, with a visual from one plot remarking upon a visual from the next plot. In the episode of the show we’re going to break down below, Nucky was shown to be shipping guns in a coffin, and then the next scene was of a detective investigating a funeral (albeit the funeral where the coffin Nucky was using supposedly belonged), and so the scenes were a good match with their visual tie of coffins, and so were placed alongside one another. Or the theme of one plot can match the theme of the next plot. Or another good trick used often is to have a voiceover from one plot reflect on another plot, with the voiceover illustrating that other plot or making that other plot ironic. Nucky Thompson might be giving a speech to the Woman’s Temperance League about the evils of alcohol, say, while his men are seen loading a truck with booze.
There are typically 5 simultaneous plots to an episode, one A plot, two B plots, and two C plots. In the ‘average’ episode (we’ll break down a great ‘average’ episode below) the A plot gets 7 scene beats (including beginning and ending the show) the B plots get five scene beats apiece, and the C plots get three scene beats apiece. The scene beats are, again, insular and episodic. Again, this is only ‘average’, and you’ll find episodes that of course differ.
But you can therefore safely and literally use the following template to outline your spec, this template still being a great ‘average’ of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” shows. (The two B plots have been noted as B1 and B2, as with the two C plots.) Then you can mix the template as necessary, if you want to match themes or visual ties or place one scene’s voiceover over another scene’s events. But of course be careful about not putting a C1 plot scene beat beside another C1 plot scene beat, for example. You’re hopping from plot to plot and back again.
And of course a C plot (for example) would weigh in with one beat for an inciting incident, one beat for a reversal (or turning point), and one beat for a climax (or resolution), whereas the A and B plots, with more middle beats, simply have that many more reversals.
Let’s also be extra clear by what we mean about B1, B2, C1, C2 plots. We’re simply counting the number of scene beats in each plot to decide which plot is which. This is particularly easy to do with “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”, because the episodes are usually internally episodic. Every time there’s a scene change, that likely means you’re switching plots. If you want to try counting scene beats at home, simply turn off the sound for a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” episode you’ve just finished watching, make a list of the different plots for that episode, and then rewatch the episode. Each time you see a new scene appear, make a hash mark beside the relevant plot. You’ll wind up with a list that looks like:
Nucky makes liquor connection 1111
Margaret’s daughter has polio 111
Jimmy makes connections 11
And from the number of hash marks we know that the plot with the most hash marks is the A plot, the second-most hash marks denotes the B plot, etc. In “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”s case, however, you’ll normally wind up with two B plots (B1, B2) because they have the same number of beats, and you’ll find you have two C plots (C1, C2) with the same number of beats. That’s where we’re getting the notation of C1, C2. Two C plots, same number of scene beats.
The following skeleton (or template, as we said above) is also broken up with line breaks by each beat of the A plot, another good way to keep yourself on track when outlining. But otherwise the line breaks don’t mean a thing. There are no commercial breaks in a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” episode.
OPENING TITLES
Scene 1: 1st beat of A plot:
Scene 2: 1st beat of B1 plot:
Scene 3: 1st beat of B2 plot:
Scene 4: 2nd beat of A plot:
Scene 5: 1st beat of C1 plot:
Scene 6: 2nd beat of B1 plot:
Scene 7: 1st beat of C2 plot:
Scene 8: 3rd beat of B1 plot:
Scene 9: 2nd beat of C1 plot:
Scene 10: 3rd beat of A plot:
Scene 11: 2nd beat of B2 plot:
Scene 12: 4th beat of B1 plot:
Scene 13: 4th beat of A plot:
Scene 14: 3rd beat of C1 plot:
Scene 15: 2nd beat of C2 plot:
Scene 16: 5th beat of A plot:
Scene 17: 3rd beat of B2 plot:
Scene 18: 3rd beat of C2 plot:
Scene 19: 6th beat of A plot:
Scene 20: 4th beat of B2 plot:
Scene 21: 5th beat of B1 plot:
Scene 22: 5th beat of B2 plot:
Scene 23: 7th beat of A plot:
CLOSING CREDITS
So let’s look at this skeleton/template again, now, overlaying it with actual scene descriptions from an actual episode. In this case we’re using a particularly rigidly structured example: Season 2, Episode 8, an episode entitled “BATTLE OF THE CENTURY”.
For our purposes we can give titles to the plots in this episode like so:
A plot: Nucky goes to Ireland, makes a guns for whiskey deal.
B1 plot: Emily gets polio.
B2 plot: Jimmy’s power becomes greater and more dangerous.
C1 plot: The U.S. Attorney investigates Nucky.
C2 plot: Dunn Pernsley kicks off an African-American strike.
OPENING TITLES
Scene 1: 1st beat of A plot: Nucky and Owen arrive in Ireland with a coffin purportedly containing Nucky’s deceased father.
Scene 2: 1st beat of B1 plot: Margaret finds Emily is ill when her daughter can’t get out of bed.
Scene 3: 1st beat of B2 plot: Jimmy meets with the strange George Remus, a potential liquor supplier from Ohio, and Jimmy and George make a deal. (This scene also contains a beat from a continuing spinal plot, a discussion of Jimmy owing money to Manny Horvitz)
Scene 4: 2nd beat of A plot: Nucky meets with John McGarrigle, offering him machine guns for the Irish war of independence in exchange for whiskey.
Scene 5: 1st beat of C1 plot: The assistant D.A. investigating Nucky notices Nucky’s not at his father’s funeral, though he’s just taken his father’s casket to Ireland.
Scene 6: 2nd beat of B1 plot: The doctor speculates that Emily has polio and must be put into quarantine.
Scene 7: 1st beat of C2 plot: Yelled at in the kitchen of the Ritz and fed ‘dog food’ for lunch, Dunn Pernsley begins to get grumpy with his African-American lot in life, then has a slight exchange of words with the Ritz’ manager.
Scene 8: 3rd beat of B1 plot: Margaret watches Emily get a horrifying spinal tap.
Scene 9: 2nd beat of C1 plot: In bed together, after some ideas on the Nucky case are kicked around, U.S. attorney Esther Randolph finds out from her assistant that Nucky wasn’t at his father’s funeral.
Scene 10: 3rd beat of A plot: Nucky shows off the Thompson machine guns (not named after him) to leaders of the I.R.A., but John McGarrigle shows up with news of a truce from England, and says he wants no more blood (meaning no more guns).
Scene 11: 2nd beat of B2 plot: Jimmy meets with Waxy Gordon, puts him onto the idea of attempting to assassinate Manny Horvitz.
Scene 12: 4th beat of B1 plot: Margaret disinfects the home by burning all Emily’s bedclothes and toys. (This also strikes a beat for a continuing minor spinal plot in the series, as her son Teddy watches the burning, and gets another little note of traumatic fire to contribute to his budding pyromania).
Scene 13: 4th beat of A plot: Nucky meets with a whiskey maker who can’t sell his whiskey because of the war with England, a whiskey maker who says he won’t go against the word of John McGarrigle, who wants a truce.
Scene 14: 3rd beat of C1 plot: Attorney Esther calls in Deputy Hallorann for questioning, asking him about the whereabouts of Nucky, and grilling him about his dealings with Nucky. (The scene also hits a beat in a major continuing spinal plot, the authorities discovering the whys and wherefores of the murder of Hans Schroeder, hoping to pin the murder on Nucky eventually).
Scene 15: 2nd beat of C2 plot: Dunn Pernsley meets with Chalky, hat in hand, making truce. Chalky, who’s cooking up an African-American strike, encourages Dunn’s rebellion at his Ritz job.
Scene 16: 5th beat of A plot: Nucky has dinner with John McGarrigle, and presses John on how the war with England is far from over, how he needs the machine guns. John turns Nucky down cold, basically calling him a warmonger. (This scene also hits a note on Owen’s character, when we find out Owen is thoroughly on Nucky’s team, and has decided against loyalty to John, his former boss).
Scene 17: 3rd beat of B2 plot: Jimmy’s cue to assassinate Manny fails, when Manny in turn kills the assassin.
Scene 18: 3rd beat of C2 plot: Dunn starts a strike in the kitchen of the Ritz, in the form of rousing all the workers to throw their lunches at the boss.
Scene 19: 6th beat of A plot: Nucky departs the company of John McGarrigle, just prior to John being gunned down by his own men. In the car on the way to his boat, Nucky’s told by the whiskey maker he met earlier that the whiskey- for-guns deal is on.
Scene 20: 4th beat of B2 plot: Jimmy, at a radio broadcast of a Jack Dempsey boxing match, finds he’s gaining fame and fortune in Atlantic City when people in the audience begin eyeing him.
Scene 21: 5th beat of B1 plot: Margaret mourns in the hospital over Emily as the nurses and doctors listen to the same boxing match. Unobserved, Margaret slips into the quarantine to stroke her daughter’s cheek. (Note that Margaret here gives hints of a continuing plot to come, her succumbing to a religious fervor over guilt over her Emily’s polio).
Scene 22: 5th beat of B2 plot: Jimmy and Richard find themselves indulged by a pair of loose women, again due on Jimmy’s growing fame.
Scene 23: 7th beat of A plot: About to board the ship back to America, Nucky and Owen put the McGarrigle shooting to rest, Nucky confirming Owen’s loyalty. Then Owen reads a telegram alerting Nucky to Emily’s polio, a great example of how to wind up an episode by tying a pair of plotlines together.
CLOSING CREDITS
WORLD & SETTING (or God Is In The Details):
It’s Atlantic City in the 1920s. That means everyone always has a cigarette in their mouth and a drink in their hand. Chesterfield cigarettes, most often. There’s just been incubators invented for babies. People say ‘a hundred clams’ or ‘Geez Louise!’
Fatty Arbuckle, John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks are stars of the silent cinema. But vaudeville is still in existence. People get their fortunes told at the local Palmistry. The Knights Of The Ku Klux Klan are on the rise and out in the open (if you call wearing sheets in the open).
People say ‘doll’ and ‘big cheese’ and they buy Vacuum Sweepers to clean their houses and they talk about oral sex as ‘The French Way’. They slander gays with insults like ‘he’s a powder puff’. They threaten people by saying ‘I’ll give you a haircut you’ll never forget.’ They make soda bread. They call kids ‘boychick’. Ponzi has just released his big scheme. People with Tourette’s Syndrome are simply lumped in with the rest of the ‘simpletons’.
Fascinatingly, it’s always noted that Prohibition and election rigging played a huge part in getting unions going, and getting women and blacks the right to vote. After all, if you could get women and blacks the right the vote, you can get them to vote for you, and due on their repression their votes are more easily bought.
White and black race relations are tense and terrible and ethnic relations amongst Irish and Italians and Jews are equally unstable.
There’s midget wrestling, Dale Carnegie is a household name, opium is about to be circumvented by heroin, cocaine is still used at the dentist, and gin is mixed in bathtubs. If you’re a woman you’re not meant to bare your shoulder, and you can get a ticket for wearing a swimsuit exposing your legs.
Meetings always happen amongst the gangsters with the right hand man present, and in your spec you never want to set a meeting in a boring old restaurant.
People sit in chairs, adjust their suit coats, and light a cigarette and pour a drink.
Everyone has only one good outfit unless they are as rich as Nucky.
This article is intended as a full on instruction manual on how to write a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” spec, along with tactics for how to write a spec. In the course of the article, we’ll obviously reveal many details of the series, so it goes without saying that this contains dozens of spoilers. If you’ve already seen the series, however, this road map should work equally well as a consolidation of the series’ history and a freshly analytical voice regarding the series’ facets.
Also, this essay uses much repetition of events, not by accident but to hammer home and continually reiterate a holistic understanding of the series’ history.
While character and plot and series history are important for the writing of a spec (thus, why they are covered ad naseum upfront), the real meat and potatoes of this article, the “fun stuff”, is the absolutely detailed Episode Breakdown, which, like a coroner’s scalpel, reveals each layer of an episode to such a degree that you will be able to easily structure your own episode using our formula.
So, without further ado….
SERIES OVERVIEW AND CONCEIT:
“BOARDWALK EMPIRE” is an epic HBO series, set in Atlantic City during prohibition. It was originally adapted from a book by Nelson Johnson entitled Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, And Corruption Of Atlantic City. The central character of the show, Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, is based on real-life Atlantic City kingpin Enoch L. Johnson. Of course, all this real life stuff should never stand in the way of a good story in a good spec.
A hot tip for writing for this show, though: do some research. Dig around the internet and find some interesting gangland tale or cultural fact of the series’ era, then alter and transpose it into your spec. The show is very much ‘of its time’, in that it loves to reference the period.
By far one of the most interesting characters in “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” is Richard Harrow, the wounded WWI veteran with half of a prosthetic face. So much story mileage has been gained in a dozen storylines from the simple fact of Richard Harrow’s prosthesis and shell-shocked demeanor, and all it took was for a writer to espy a picture of a grievously (and interestingly) wounded WWI vet.
Another thing to keep in mind is the coldness of not only the series itself, but also the people of the era. Always remember there just wasn’t as much peace, love, and understanding in the world as there is now. Blacks and whites were separate but equal. You might be married to someone in Illinois and only see them once a month because they worked in Atlantic City. There weren’t many roads on which to road trip to other places and see what was on the other side of the hill. A generation of young men had just finished dying in WWI and another generation was poised to die in WWII. Smacking around a child was fairly acceptable. Women were largely regarded as chattle. So as you read through the characters below, keep these coldnesses, this archness, this aloofness of the series in mind. Sure, we have a multitude of problems and disconnects in the society of today, but back then people really, really, really hadn’t learned to love one another much at all.
Which is not to say there’s no emotional center to be found in the show. Arguably the heart of the show is Margaret Schroeder, whose mercurial emotional state provides the series with a soulful, human backbone. And Family with a capital F is repeated as a theme in nearly every episode. Even the coldest, most sociopathic gangster in the show has a family or a friendship keeping him at least somewhat human and empathetic.
On a related note, no one in the show, save maybe Nucky Thompson, is safe. A prime example is Owen Sleater, Nucky’s bodyguard and driver, who had one-time sex with Margaret Schroeder, and so while Owen is perfectly competent and faithful he could also get gunned down at any moment. Hence the accumulated deaths, especially surprising deaths like that of Angela Darmody, not to mention the average of one death per episode, makes one jumpy for all the characters.
Finally, note that the show haunts itself. Almost every killing, every wrongdoing, has come back to haunt the living in some fashion or another. By way of shining example: in the show’s first episode, Nucky ordered Hans Schroeder, the abusive husband of Margaret Schroeder, bumped off. And all the way in the final episode of the second season, the murder was finally pinned on someone, and became the big issue between Nucky and his brother Eli. When writing a spec, concern yourself with ‘the sins of the past’ at least once.
Season One of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” concerned Nucky’s rise to prominence as a gangster, from the first days of Prohibition to him settling up with the gangsters of New York and Chicago to create a loose trifecta. The season kicked off when Jimmy Darmody, Nucky’s right hand man, teamed up with Al Capone in what was known as The Canadian Club heist, wherein a shipment of liquor was stolen and four New York gangsters accidentally gunned down.
Season Two concerned Jimmy Darmody’s betrayal, he began as Nucky’s right-hand man and bodyguard but owed fealty to his own father, The Commodore (the gangster city boss in his dotage who built Atlantic City), and so attempted a coup of Nucky’s empire.
CHARACTER BREAKDOWNS:
MAJOR CHARACTERS:
“NUCKY” ENOCH THOMPSON (STEVE BUSCEMI):
Surprisingly, Nucky Thompson is the most reliable, staid, unchanging character in “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”. Though his moral code and thought process is buried deep, you can always count on Nucky to behave in a nigh-predictable fashion. When Nucky finally kills Jimmy Darmody in the end of the second series, it’s both shocking and expected; it’s also the only thing that Nucky can do in keeping with Nucky. In this way Nucky provides the show’s dark moral compass.
If Nucky underwent any change over the first two seasons of the show, it was only that he became a killer his own self. One of the writers for the show noted this in an interview, to paraphrase and explicate: in the first episode of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” Prohibition is about to become law, and Nucky has set himself up as Atlantic City treasurer to receive kickbacks and graft from the pending illegal liquor trade. But after performing a heist on his behalf, Jimmy Darmody (see below, in the Dead Characters section) told Nucky “You can’t be half a gangster.” And in the end of the second season Nucky finally got blood on his hands, fulfilling Jimmy’s prophecy.
Nucky often mentions a wife who died of consumption, but in a candid moment with Margaret he told her the real story, that a few days after the birth of his baby, Nucky came home after being away on business to find the child had been dead for days, and that his wife had gone mad, continuing to nurse the corpse. Soon after the baby was buried, his wife committed suicide.
Nucky is thus obsessed with babies, haunting the window of an incubator shop on the Atlantic City boardwalk, in part helping Margaret Schroeder and then falling for her later down the line because she was at first pregnant and has two darling children. He also ordered Margaret’s husband Hans killed after a thorough beating from the husband caused her a miscarriage.
Children and the love of a devoted woman and family ties are Nucky’s only soft spot however; he even spared his brother Eli after Eli joined The Commodore’s attempted coup and gave his okay to an assassination attempt on Nucky, then denied it.
Nucky had a love/hate relationship with his own father, Ethan, of which Eli was a gray part; the father seemed to hate Nucky and love Eli, but then scoffed at Eli attempting to make a speech, and rooted for Nucky when Nucky was under indictment.
Eli took care of the father, Ethan, when he was dying. When they moved Ethan from his house Nucky gave the house to his most loyal associate, Damian Fleming, to renovate, but after the renovation was done Nucky came to visit and burned the house to the ground, traumatizing young Teddy Schroeder (Margaret’s son) into an interest in arson.
Another telltale moment regarding Nucky: when Jimmy Darmody executed and then flubbed a robbery of Arnold Rothstein (the New York kingpin) in the first episode, Nucky demanded $3000 in penance. Jimmy had to wipe out his savings and steal back a necklace he bought for his mother to get the money, and then Nucky simply dropped the money wad on a handy roulette wheel and lost it all, completing Jimmy’s life lesson.
Make sure Nucky only acts in self-interest, make sure he only acts to take care of his own business, and make sure 99% of his moments of warmth are reserved for his closest family, and you should be okay.
MARGARET SCHROEDER (KELLY MCDONALD):
A fascinating, mercurial character, Margaret began the series as a meek member of the Woman’s Temperance League, itself a significant piece of the Woman’s Sufferage movement. She saw a speech by Nucky about the evils of alcohol, and came to him for help, thereby igniting their complicated relationship.
Margaret was married to raging alcoholic Hans Schroeder, with two children and another one on the way, but in the first episode she miscarried after a beating from Hans. Nucky found out about this, brought Margaret flowers in the hospital, and had her husband dumped in the ocean.
Nucky soon got Margaret a job in Madame Jeunet’s boutique dress shop on the boardwalk, where Margaret continued in her traumatized meekness, until bumping heads with Nucky’s clotheshorse girlfriend Lucy caused her to quit. In the process Margaret stole a slip to wear for a meeting with Nucky, and when Nucky didn’t meet her Margaret tore up the slip.
From that point Margaret made a beeline for picking up Nucky, going to the point of ratting out a beer garage and getting his St. Patrick’s party busted to draw his attention. Once they got together Nucky then moved Margaret and her children into a hotel, but when she found out it was a hotel loaded with concubines for city officials she wore Nucky out, broke up with him, and got him to tell her the story of the death of his child. And then came back to him.
By the end of the second season Margaret and her children came to live with Nucky in a mansion. After Jimmy Darmody turned on Nucky, Nucky got a new bodyguard in the person of Owen Slater, and in a torrid moment of afternoon delight, Margaret and Owen had it off.
Margaret ultimately came to symbolize Hidden Power, holding depths of power she’s only beginning to exercise and suspect. In one episode, Nucky goaded Margaret into making a speech during the election cycle, and she roused and riled the crowd, and secured Nucky the woman’s vote.
But Margaret also has a decidedly weak or easily-swayed side. In the final episodes of the second season her daughter Emily came down with polio, which distressed Margaret to the point of turning to the church. There Father Ed Brennan got her charitable spirit up, and she gave tithes and gave tithes and gave tithes to disastrous result. Nucky had to sign over a swath of valuable New Jersey land that will surround the future highway into Atlantic City, sign it over to Margaret so it wouldn’t have been lost if he’d gone to jail (he was under indictment in the second season), and Margaret wound up signing over the land to Father Brennan’s church.
Margaret has a shadowy family history, and keep in mind the above note in the first section about the coldness of the time. She hadn’t seen her brother or met his children, and upon finally hunting them down in the Bowery, and though she enjoyed meeting her nieces, she felt no real family ties, and found her charity reviled. Margaret tries hard, in other words, but her impulsiveness, her hidden wells of power, and her own tendencies to self-interest often get in her way.
AGENT NELSON VAN ALDEN (MICHAEL SHANNON):
Just as ever-changing and mercurial as Margaret is Van Alden, as he’s most commonly called, the chilly, aloof, no-nonsense, firebrand Federal Agent in dogged pursuit of Nucky Thompson. Defying expectations of such a role, however, Van Alden constantly wavers in his mission, most often when his shambles of a personal life, his questionable psyche, or his blind sense of vengeance catch up with him. Van Alden is a religious zealot,as well, given to reciting Bible verses, and once even revealing himself to be a flagellant, in that late in the night he fashions a whip and lashes his scarred back.
He’s a divorced man as of the end of the second season, but while his marriage was on display it was a severe, austere thing characterized by a letter he wrote to his repressed, suffocated wife in an early episode, a one line letter reminding her to pour water on the pipes against freezing. They lived apart, Van Alden in Atlantic City and Rose Van Alden in an unnamed small town, and Rose would come to visit for silent dinners and dull-as-dishwater boardwalk tours. Their relationship only saw one flash of passion, when in a restaurant Rose got bothered by the waiter’s secret offer of alcohol, and Van Alden then polished off the dinner by giving Rose a brooch (“But Nelson, you don’t believe in gifts,” she said.) and then busting the restaurant with a storm of Federal Agents.
But severity and austerity are watchwords with Van Alden, and a favorite editing trick of the series is to cut from Nucky’s lavish, colorful, ribald, high times lifestyle to Van Alden’s icy, hardscrabble existence.
Van Alden has gone downhill throughout the course of the series. He revealed a psychosis of some sort when he kidnapped a dying witness to Jimmy Darmody’s Canadian Club heist, then tortured the man to death for information. His wife wanted to have an operation to help her conjure a baby, but Nelson turned her down. Then Nelson got a mysterious wild hair toward Margaret and came after her in a weird, psychosexual interrogation scene. He then got drunk, hooked up with Nucky’s ex-girlfriend Lucy, and got her pregnant.
Van Alden’s one-time partner, Agent Sebso, was hired by Nucky to assassinate the one remaining witness to Jimmy Darmody’s Canadian Club heist, and Van Alden gradually festered suspicion, until he accidentally drowned Agent Sebso at an African-American riverside baptism ceremony. No one reported the manslaughter until Van Alden was about to testify against Nucky, and Nucky’s manservant surprised everyone by admitting his presence at the baptism. There was an attempt to arrest Van Alden, but he made a break for it.
Backing up to having gotten Lucy pregnant: Van Alden cut a deal with her to stay in his apartment for nine months, hidden away, and be the surrogate for the child, who he planned to give to his wife. This resulted in a prisoner situation, in which Lucy went quite mad and once almost killed herself, and was only assuaged by the delivery of a record player. While Van Alden was away one day, Lucy had the baby, coinciding with a surprise visit from Rose Van Alden. Rose understandably didn’t understand Van Alden was trying to hatch a baby for her, and stormed off, soon after sending him divorce papers. Lucy vanished, and Van Alden was left with the baby and a Swedish maid he hired. When he went on the lamb for the manslaughter of Agent Sebso, he wound up in Cicero, Illinois with this maid.
One more thing about Van Alden: when Jimmy Darmody went on the run and hid out in Chicago after the Canadian Club heist, Jimmy was sending money back to his wife, Angela, and Van Alden (whose office was relegated to the Post Office) intercepted the letters, accumulating the money in a drawer. Finally, though, Van Alden broke down and sent all the money to Angela anonymously, revealing that somewhere in his dark and tortured soul Van Alden has a heart.
This is a lot of history, but it’s good to know everything about this character, who maintained an unmoving stone-face throughout all the above (except when he flew into fire-and-brimstone rages). The best way to write for Van Alden: come up with the worst possible position for a religious zealot to be in, and put him there.
Representative Dialogue: “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Roll down your sleeves, put on your coat, bring Mrs. Schroeder a chair, go outside, and guard the entrance.”
NOTE: MAJOR CHARACTERS ARE ALPHABETICAL BY FIRST NAME FROM HERE
AL CAPONE (STEPHEN GRAHAM):
Starting out as a driver and bodyguard and right hand man to Johnny Torrio, who took over the Chicago mob scene when Big Jim Colosimo died in the second episode, Capone is here presented as a man on his way up. He began as a wisecracking, hot-tempered sociopath, quick to kill, fascinated by nice clothes as such that he made Jimmy Darmody buy a new suit. He and Jimmy were friends, and they got together for the Canadian Club heist that screwed Arnold Rothstein in the first episode. Capone took in Jimmy when Jimmy had to flee to Chicago, and for a time the two worked together under Torrio. When Jimmy tried on his coup of Nucky’s empire, Al Capone worked with him to get liquor shipped into Atlantic City.
Capone has a deaf son, and perhaps because of the boy, and after an upbraiding from Torrio, Capine ‘grew up’, quit with being a wiseacre and a goof off who blew operations with a hasty temper, and started tending toward kingliness, making his way to a leadership position. In this manner he follows the Shakespeare version of Henry V.
ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN (MICHAEL STUHLBARG):
Like Mickey Doyle (see below), Arnold Rothstein is another minor character whose shadow looms large. He’s the boss of the New York mob scene, a cold, vengeful, strange man. He and Nucky often come to blows but make things up to one another, forgiving slights (Jimmy’s Canadian Club heist, the D’Alessios attempt on Nucky’s life) that would get lesser men in their organizations killed.
Arnold is always impeccably dressed and neat as a pin. He’s spent almost two seasons fighting off an indictment in the Black Sox scandal, meaning the World Series where the White Sox were paid to throw the game. Arnold lent Nucky his lawyer, Bill Fallon, when Nucky was also under indictment.
CHALKY WHITE (MICHAEL KENNETH WILLIAMS):
The African-American boozemaker (note that African-American is a modern phrase, of course, and blacks in “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” are referred to as ‘coloreds’, ‘Negros’, and in unfriendly terms ‘coons’ and ‘darkies’) who took over Mickey Doyle’s (see Mickey Doyle below) booze-making business with Nucky’s blessing. In his second appearance, Chalky stood down a KKK Dragon, cutting off the Dragon’s fingers with a bolt cutter from Chalky’s carpenter father’s collection, Chalky’s father having been once upon a time lynched.
The KKK came along to shoot up the warehouse where Chalky was running the booze-making business. Four of Chalky’s workers were killed, but Chalky fired off a shot and went to jail for killing one of the KKK. During his time there, he met his new right hand man, Dunn Pernsley.
In addition to making liquor for Nucky, Chalky rounds up the black vote for the elections. He also ignited a short-lived strike which brought a bit of chaos to the Atlantic City boardwalk in the midst of Nucky’s indictment, and because it was subdued by Eli’s deputies in a slambang riot.
Chalky was unhappy that he didn’t get to bring the KKK killers to justice, as Nucky wouldn’t allow it during an election, but Jimmy Darmody and Richard Harrow, in trying to work around Nucky, rounded the killers up and brought them to Chalky.
Chalky is an understandly and constantly tense man, and his relationship with Nucky, though the two are loyal and compassionate with one another, seems forever on the verge of exploding.
Representative Dialogue: “I ain’t building no bookcase.”
EDDIE KESSLER (ANTHONY LACIURA):
Though there’s not much to be said for him, there’s nothing minor about Eddie Kessler, Nucky’s everpresent butler, who appears in most every scene with Nucky. He lurks about, takes Nucky’s abuse, and even once saved Nucky’s life. He owes Nucky everything, as Nucky saved him from deportation during World War I. An impeccable fellow, Eddie gets things done and done right, even though Nucky will yell at him pointlessly for non-mistakes.
ELIAS ‘ELI’ THOMPSON (SHEA WHIGHAM):
Nucky’s brother, resentful of Nucky’s status, he’s been shot working for Nucky, been humiliated multiple times whilst working for Nucky, including once when he tried to make a speech during St. Patrick’s day and only served to rile up the assembled Atlantic City Irishmen against one another.
Eli liked Ethan Thompson, he and Nucky’s father, more than Nucky did, and cared for Ethan until the man’s death.
When Nucky replaced Eli with Deputy Hallorann (see Deputy Hallorann below) Eli teamed up with the Commodore and Jimmy Darmody to unseat Nucky, but that coup crumbled, and Nucky spared Eli, shooting Jimmy as the coup’s scapegoat.
When writing for Eli keep in mind that he always takes the weakest choice, and that any move of strength will backfire on him.
GILLIAN DARMODY (GRETCHEN MOL):
Jimmy Darmody’s rambunctious, licentious, force-of-nature mother. She gave birth to Jimmy at the age of 13, and hence is still up for being a showgirl. Jimmy’s father is The Commodore, and Gillian was pimped to him by Nucky. After The Commodore had a stroke, Gillian took the opportunity to beat the man in his helplessness.
Speaking of Shakespeare, Gillian takes turns at being Macbeth’s wife (after a fashion), urging killings and wrongdoings, but she’s also quite Oedipal, constantly flirting with her own son, and once telling Jimmy’s wife Angela: “When he was a baby and I changed his diaper, I used to kiss his little winkie.” A bizarre quote, but at the end of the second season it was revealed Gillian and Jimmy once had sex in a drunken frenzy during Jimmy’s time at Princeton. This incestual act, coupled with the early pregnancy of Angela, drove Jimmy into enlisting for World War I.
Again, Gillian is a force-of-nature, and there’s no doubt she’ll be seeking vengeance for the death of Jimmy in the third season.
JOHNNY TORRIO (GREG ANTONACCI):
The leader of the Chicago mob, and Al Capone’s direct boss. Johnny is strictly a business man, and rarely gets blood on his hands, though the death of Big Jim Colissimo, the previous don in Chicago, was highly questionable.
Johnny mostly comes off as a stern father figure who doesn’t brook any grab-ass.
“LUCKY” LUCIANO (VINCENT PIAZZA):
Like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano has yet to rise to his legend in the course of the times “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” depicts. Though harboring a mostly minor role, Lucky came into prominence when he was sent to Atlantic City to kill Jimmy Darmody after the Canadian Club heist, and wound up in a long-running tryst with Gillian Darmody, Jimmy’s mother. The tryst did Lucky well, as he’d just gotten over gonorrhea and was having trouble getting lead in his pencil, and something in Gillian brought out the animal in him. But when Jimmy returned, Gillian sent Lucky packing back to New York at gunpoint.
Lucky pays fealty to Arnold Rothstein (the New York kingpin), and mostly works out of New York, with Meyer Lansky as his partner.
LUCY DANZIGER (PAZ DE LA HUERTA):
The squeaky-voiced, dim-witted, shallow, superficial paramour of Nucky, a clothes horse who taunted Margaret by trying on slips when Margaret worked in Madame Jeunet’s boutique. Nucky dumped Lucy for Margaret, and Lucy was next seen sleeping with Agent Van Alden, getting pregnant by him, having his surrogate child. Then she vanished, presumably upon being paid for the child.
MANNY HOROVITZ (WILLIAM FORSYTHE):
Introduced to Jimmy by Mickey Doyle (see Mickey Doyle below), Manny is a Philadelphia butcher and crime boss who provided Jimmy Darmody with a lot of whiskey when Jimmy was attempting to lead a coup against Nucky. After Jimmy wound up owing him money Manny pursued the point until Jimmy tossed Mickey Doyle off a balcony, in front of Manny, to prove a point. Manny then survived an attempted assassination by Waxey Gordon, another Philadelphia crime boss. Ultimately, Manny fell in with Nucky, and conspired with him to bring Jimmy to the meeting wherein Jimmy was assassinated.
MEYER LANSKY (ANATOL YUSEF):
Like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Meyer Lansky has also not yet risen to legendary status, and like Mickey Doyle is a character very much in the shadows. He’s notable amongst the Major Characters only due on his name and continued presence. He has a strange ‘whippersnapper’ voice very cliché of old gangster movies. “What’re you, a wise guy?” wouldn’t sound strange coming out of his mouth.
MICKEY DOYLE (PAUL SPARKS):
Another extremely liquid character who remains forever in the shadows, and forever escapes doom. The fact he’s still alive is a miracle, as he’s changed sides almost as much as he’s been seen in the series. Though he’s almost faceless in the background, you can tell Mickey Doyle in an instant by his nervous, high-pitched giggle. His slipperiness is denoted literally by him changing his name to Mickey Doyle (from Mieczyslaw Kuzik, meaning he’s also changed ethnicities) before the series even began.
At first Mickey worked for Nucky as a brewer of cobbled liquor, bathtub gins and whiskeys and so on, but he was fired after Nelson Van Alden raided his warehouse. His job then fell to Chalky White. Fuming, Mickey went to help out Arnold Rothstein in New York, bringing the gang of D’Alessio Brothers (see below), who were meant to assassinate Nucky, but failed utterly, and went into hiding before being wiped out at the end of the second season. Mickey came back to Nucky before being sucked into that massacre, but then went off again with the Commodore, Jimmy Darmody, and Eli, as they attempted to take the city from Nucky. Then as that coup started to fall apart Mickey went right back to Nucky. When Nucky was being prosecuted and seemed up for indictment, however, Mickey tried to become a snitch for Nelson Van Alden, who brushed him off. Then Mickey buddied up with Manny Horovitz (see below), and went back into Nucky’s corner at the end of the second season. Obviously, Mickey is most loyal to himself. Perhaps that’s what Nucky appreciates about him.
OWEN SLEATER (CHARLIE COX):
A radical member of the Irish Republican Army and a former assistant to John McGarrigle, Owen became Nucky’s driver and bodyguard, once Jimmy’s position.
Owen is so radical in Irish politics he once brutally strangled a man who’d somehow spoken against the I.R.A. in a bar. Despite his smile, Owen’s as good a sociopath as all the rest.
When Nucky went to Ireland to trade weapons for whiskey, Owen saw to it that his former boss, John McGarrigle, died at the hands of the I.R.A., so that the trade could go as planned.
Owen is also a loverboy, having gotten together with Katy, Nucky’s housemaid, but juicier still he got together for a one afternoon stand with Margaret. This caused him to miss being with Nucky when an assassination attempt was made, and Nucky’s forever since suspected Owen and Margaret.
RICHARD HARROW (JACK HUSTON):
Grotesquely wounded in WWI, with half a prosthetic face, and befriended by Jimmy when the pair visited a VA hospital for psychiatric evaluations, Richard is a tortured soul with no trouble being an assassin. In one episode he contemplated suicide during the Memorial Day ceremonies, but was curtailed when he met fellow veterans doing some hardscrabble camping in the woods.
When he came to Atlantic City with Jimmy, Richard bummed around, staying at first with Nucky and Margaret, where he befriended Margaret after some initial friction with his face startling her children. A key revelation of Richard’s inner beauty came when, during a reading of The Wizard Of Oz, Margaret’s daughter Emily noted Richard was just like the Tin Woodsman, with his half-tin face.
After Richard moved in with Jimmy Darmody and his wife Angela, he had another revelation of inner beauty when Angela had him sit for a portrait. Angela was a painter (see Dead Characters below), and Richard much fell for her kindnesses, and due on his loyalty to both Jimmy and Angela, he’ll likely be hard-pressed for vengeance in the third season.
Sometimes, however, everyone’s charity and soft focus looks upon him seem to wear on Richard, and there are moments where we can wonder if he’s much loyal to anything or anyone. He certainly doesn’t seem to care what happens to his own self.
MINOR CHARACTERS (ALPHABETICAL BY FIRST NAME OR TITLE):
AGENT SAWICKI:
Faithful and dopey, with Agent Clarkson he co-replaced Agent Sebso after Van Alden manslaughtered Sebso. In one episode Agent Sawicki went with Agent Clarkson to a still that exploded and so was party to Agent Clarkson’s suffering burns that killed him.
BABBETTE (TRACY MIDDENDORF):
The platinum blonde hostess of Babette’s, a Moulin Rouge-esque saloon in the Ritz Carlton on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Babette’s often seen, and sometimes sings, but she is ornamental, and hasn’t had a hand in any of the plotting.
BILL FALLON (DAVID AARON BAKER):
Based on a real person and Nucky’s lawyer, recommended by Arnold Rothstein after he helped Rothstein avoid jail over the Black Sox Scandal. Fallon worked Nucky out of his indictment, bringing evidence of Agent Sebso’s manslaughter against Van Alden, and rounding the question of Hans Schroeder’s murder so that it was pinned on Deputy Halloran.
BOSS FRANK HAGUE (CHRIS MULKEY):
A Democrat and political operative, he helped engineer the highway deal which will bring a highway into Atlantic City.
CARL HEELY (NIC NOVICKI):
A midget performer seen now and then dressed as a leprechaun or wrestling, he once negotiated better pay for him and his fellow midgets before they were to appear as leprechauns for a St. Patrick’s Day bash.
DAMIAN FLEMING (VICTOR VERHAEGE):
An Atlantic City alderman and politician fiercely loyal to Nucky, Damian stuck by Nucky when all the aldermans fell in with Jimmy and the Commodore’s attempted coup. This is probably partially because Damian was given a house by Nucky. In the episode that returned to Nucky’s childhood, Nucky’s father had to be moved from the family home for caretaking with Eli, and Nucky gave Damian the house ‘so a real family could live in it’. After a total renovation, however, bad memories loomed too large for Nucky and he burned the house to the ground, and gave the shocked Damian money to buy a new one.
DEPUTY HALLORAN (ADAM MUCCI):
A lout who began the series as Eli Thompson’s right hand man, but then remained loyal to Nucky and became sheriff when Eli joined Jimmy and The Commodore’s coup. This loyalty was hardly rewarded, though, as Eli got his sheriff badge back and Halloran took the whole rap for the murder of Hans Schroeder (Margaret’s abusive husband).
DUNN PURNSLEY (ERIC LARAY HARVEY):
A bold, empowered African-American who tried it on with Chalky White when the two shared a jail cell together, all over Chalky’s copy of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. Dunn was badly beaten up, for the cell was full of men who owed Chalky one favor or another, but upon his release Dunn came to Chalky with hat in hand, and became Chalky’s right hand man.
Dunn then led the Atlantic City strike of the African-Americans, starting a riot in the kitchen of the Ritz Carlton.
EDWARD BADER (KEVIN O’ROURKE):
Nucky’s puppet choice for Mayor, a non-presence of man who only takes orders from Nucky.
EDDIE CANTOR (STEPHEN DEROSA):
A vaudeville dandy seen sporadically entertaining the crowd at Babette’s. A friend of Lucy Danziger’s, he brought her a script for a play she could appear in when she was pregnant and under lock and key with Van Alden.
ESTHER RANDOLPH (JULIANNE NICHOLSON):
A U.S. Attorney who came after Nucky Thompson when he was charged with election rigging, an indictment try which she juiced up with an attempt to pin the murder of Hans Schroeder on him. She was over the moon to get Van Alden’s file on Nucky, and was on the verge of getting Van Alden to testify when Van Alden’s manslaughter of Agent Sebso was found out. Her case further fell apart when Margaret Schroeder married Nucky and therefore couldn’t be called to testify against him.
FATHER ED BRENNAN (MICHAEL CUMPSTY):
The opportunistic, creepy priest who went right to work on Margaret’s sense of charity when Margaret told him of her daughter Emily’s polio.
He worked Margaret in a religious fervor until she was donating jewels his way, and in the final episode his brainwashing cued her to sign over a land deed to his church. The land, again, is the swath of land surrounding the new highway into Atlantic City, and it was of course highly valuable to Nucky.
GEORGE REMUS (GLENN FLESHLER):
The mob boss from Cinncinnati, a former lawyer, and a fleshy, obnoxious man, George Remus strangely speaks of himself only in the third person, much to the chagrin of Al Capone, who’s particularly wound up by this habit.
Al Capone and Jimmy Darmody tried to work with George Remus to bring liquor into Atlantic City, but Jimmy’s coup of Nucky’s empire fell apart soon after the deal was made.
HARRY DOHERTY (CHRISTOPHER MCDONALD):
With Nucky’s help, Doherty hid President Walter Harding’s mistress with Nucky, then became attorney general for this trick. Nucky brought Doherty delegates and helped get Harding elected, but Doherty didn’t return the favor when the Federal Government got involved in Nucky’s election rigging case.
JACK DEMPSEY (DEVIN HARJES):
Briefly seen when he fought a bout in Atlantic City, this is the famous boxer of the era, putting in a cameo.
KATY (HEATHER LIND):
The nosy maid of Nucky Thompson and Margaret Schroeder, Katy had an affair with Owen Sleater, then was angered to find out he’d spent an afternoon in Margaret’s company. She has a contentious relationship with Margaret.
LENORE WHITE (NATALIE WACHEN):
Chalky’s wife, a goodly, patient woman who seems to come from a more refined background.
LESTER WHITE (JUSTIIN DAVIS):
Chalky’s son, an aspiring doctor on his way to Morehouse.
MADAME ISABELLE JEUNET (ANNA KATARINA):
The stern French employer of Margaret, after Nucky got Margaret a job on the boardwalk. Madame Jeunet sold women’s lingerie, mostly it seemed to Lucy Danziger, when Lucy was the paramour of Nucky. Unfriendly and snooty with Margaret, Madame Jeunet received Margaret’s help at the end, when Margaret had quit and moved up into Nucky’s arms and Madame Jeunet’s shop was in trouble.
MRS. MCGARRY (DANA IVEY):
The strict, elder, no-nonsense leader of the temperance union, had a couple appearances as a mother figure to Margaret.
ROSE VAN ALDEN (ENID GRAHAM):
The dutiful, repressed, bitter, suffocated, crying-jag-prone wife of Nelson Van Alden; she’s barren and desperately wanted a baby, obviously to quash her loneliness for a husband who was never home. It’s uncertain whether she’s gone forever from the show, but as said above she did serve Nelson divorce papers after discovering he’d sired a baby with Lucy.
SENATOR WALTER EDGE (GEOFF PIERSON):
The embodiment of the Atlantic City land deal, he’s working with Nucky and City Boss Hague to build a highway into Atlantic City.
WAXEY GORDON (NICK SANDOW):
A Philadelphia crime boss who had a falling out with Manny Horvitz, and tried to have Manny killed at Jimmy Darmody’s behest.
KIDS:
TOMMY DARMODY (BRADY & CONOR NOON):
Jimmy’s young son, who’s been strictly ornamental, and is now under the charge of Gillian Darmody. He’s been much doted on by Jimmy, Angela, and Gillian.
EMILY SCHROEDER (LUCIE & JOSIE GALLINA):
Margaret’s daughter, stricken with polio in the second season.
TEDDY SCHROEDER (DECLAN & RORY MCTEAGUE):
Margaret’s son, who acquired a penchant for fire when he saw Nucky burn down the Thompson home. This possible arson tendency was inflated when he watched all of Emily’s possessions burned after she acquired polio. He was caught playing with matches in school, and then severely reprimanded, but his misbehavior continued when he pretended to have polio, per his jealousy over the fussing over his sister.
DEAD CHARACTERS:
“JIMMY” JAMES DARMODY (MICHAEL PITT):
Although he’s dead, Jimmy begs a synopsis, because there’s no doubt he’ll be haunting the third season of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”, as he was one of four major characters for the first two seasons, and if a teeny tiny little character like Hans Schroeder can ghost back after two seasons…
A decorated WWI veteran with a black cloud always overhanging him, a stomach problem, and half-a-degree from Princeton college, Jimmy let his ambitious nature get the better of him, or maybe it was just that he was doomed from the get go. His mother, Gillian, was prostituted to The Commodore at the age of 13. When Jimmy was at Princeton he met Angela, and impregnated her, then after drunkenly defending his mother’s honor by beating up a teacher (revealing a violent side) Jimmy had sex with his equally drunken mother. Later, Jimmy would kill The Commodore, completing his Oedipal cycle. (Gillian also exhibited a bit of Lady Macbeth, pushing and goading Jimmy to both kill The Commodore and never mind about the death of Angela.)
In the first season Jimmy had amounted to Nucky’s bodyguard, Nucky having been a party to Jimmy’s raising, and upon meeting Al Capone, Jimmy and Al hatched a plan to rob a shipment of Canadian Club whiskey on its way to Arnold Rothstein. The robbery went awry, with Jimmy and Al gunning four of Rothstein’s men down. The fallout caused Jimmy to flee to Chicago, where he helped Al Capone with the rise of Johnny Torrio. When the witnesses to the Canadian Club massacre were also bumped off, and the heat had passed, Jimmy returned to Nucky’s side.
But The Commodore recruited Jimmy and Nucky’s brother Eli for a coup, and the second season was about that coup failing, as one thing and then another went wrong for the usurpers. Jimmy made an especial mistake when he fell into debt with Manny Horvitz, who murdered his wife, Angela, and then Jimmy’s attempt to forgive and forget with Nucky also failed. He was assassinated on the beach, after he told Richard Harrow and Gillian he was going out to settle with Manny.
ANGELA DARMODY (ALEKSA PALLADINO):
The loving wife of Jimmy Darmody, and while he was away in the trenches of World War I she had his child and then fell for a woman, the wife of a boardwalk photographer, a couple that barely appeared and then disappeared. Angela almost ran away with this woman to Paris, but her reluctance to leave Jimmy made her late for the boat. Even after Jimmy fled to Chicago and came home months later, Angela loved him dearly, and welcomed his new friend, Richard Harrow.
Angela was a painter often compared to Mary Cassatt, and she once sat Richard Harrow for a portrait, winning his love.
Angela’s relationship with Gillian, Jimmy’s mother, was contentious and tense, as she could always sense Gillian’s huge hold on Jimmy.
She met another lover, Leslie, and when Manny Horvitz came to kill Jimmy toward the very end of the second season, he instead wound up gunning down both Angela and Leslie, whilst Jimmy was away on business.
HANS SCHROEDER (JOSEPH SIKORA):
Margaret Schroeder’s abusive drunk of a husband. After beating his wife into a miscarriage, Nucky had Hans picked up by Eli and Deputy Hallorann, and they took Hans out to sea, beat him to death, and dumped him in the ocean. His death was almost prosecuted upon Nucky, then Eli, then wound up being blamed on Deputy Hallorann, who went to jail for it in the end of the second season.
JOHN MCGARRIGLE (TED ROONEY):
A representative of Sinn Fein who sought pacifism and peace. He came to Atlantic City for a donation to Ireland, but when Nucky came to Ireland bearing an offer of guns for whiskey, McGarriggle turned up his nose, and was promptly killed by his own men.
COMMODORE LOUISE KAESTNER (DABNEY COLEMAN):
Once the town founder of Atlantic City, The Commodore began as a wise old guru to Nucky. But after recovering from a long arsenic poisoning at the hands of his maid, The Commodore attempted to use his son Jimmy to take over Atlantic City once more. The Commodore’s returned health was short-lived, and he had a stroke and fell under the questionable nursing abilities of Gillian Darmody. Finally, when Jimmy attacked Gillian after the death of Angela, The Commodore fought with Jimmy, and was stabbed to death.
AGENT SEBSO (ERIK WEINER):
A turncoat agent. While the partner of Van Alden he was paid off to kill a witness against Jimmy Darmody and Al Capone’s Canadian Club heist. He fell under the suspicion of Van Alden and eventually was accidentally drowned in a river by Van Alden during a baptism ceremony.
BIG JIM COLOSIMO:
Barely glimpsed in the first episode, Big Jim was promptly shot and killed in a cafe, but his crime boss shadow looms large over Chicago, Johnny Torrio, and Al Capone, and his name constantly pops up.
CHARLIE SHERIDAN:
A gangster killed by Jimmy Darmody and Al Capone when they were helping Johnny Torrio rise to power in Chicago, after the death of Big Jim Colosimo.
THE D’ALESSIO BROTHERS:
A passel of seven or eight brothers, interchangeable and unknowable, all of whom tried and failed to help Mickey Doyle gain control of Nucky’s operation, and they also tried and failed to help out Arnold Rothstein, but they were just too dumb a bunch. Mickey Doyle turned on them, then Arnold gave them up, and every one of them was assassinated in the end of the first season.
AGENT CLARKSON (JOEL BRADY):
Along with Agent Sawicki replaced Agent Sebso as Van Alden’s assistant. But Clarkson saw Van Alden’s funny behavior (while Van Alden was keeping the pregnant Lucy under lock and key) and thought Van Alden had become a liquor buy-off. So in investigating a still run by Jimmy Darmody, during Jimmy’s attempted coup, Agent Sawicki ran afoul of Owen Sleater’s bomb planting skills, and was savagely burned in the resulting conflagration. After giving Van Alden a scare (Van Alden thought a demon from Hell had come to haunt him for his sins of killing Sebso, drinking, getting Lucy pregnant, etc.) Sawicki died of his injuries.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
As the third season is breached, Nucky and his political empire are about to open the highway into Atlantic City. But Nucky’s deed to the land surrounding the potential road has been donated to Father Ed Brennan’s church by Margaret Schroeder.
Agent Van Alden has fled the charge of killing Agent Sebso, and is tucked away in Cicero, Illinois, but will be back somehow for the third season.
Jimmy Darmody has just been killed and Richard Harrow and Gillian Darmody will no doubt be on a path of vengeance. Part of Margaret signing away the land deed, as well, came from her realizing Nucky had gotten rid of Jimmy. Al Capone was also a great friend of Jimmy’s, and may be hot for payback as well.
PLOTTING AND PLOT SKELETON
What’s difficult about writing a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” spec, of course, is that one doesn’t know what the writers of the show have already decided about the arcs or trajectories of certain characters, and one is obliged to do guesswork as to whether certain characters will even be alive to use in a spec. Thus it’s advisable to simply self-contain your spec, and not worry too terribly much as to whether a plot will come from the past or continue into the future. Meaning you can use the history, but don’t try to finish something you saw started in an episode. And don’t do too much toward leaving your plots open-ended.
For example, one episode of Boardwalk Empire depicted Chalky White’s time in jail, where he was confronted by Dunn Pernsley over a copy of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. Though Chalky White was in jail for a crime that happened in a prior episode, and though Chalky White and Dunn Pernsley’s story continued in following episodes, their jailhouse confrontation was self-contained, with an inciting incident, conflict, climax, and resolution, and could’ve been removed from the series and put onstage as a one-act play.
That said, what’s easy about writing a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” episode is the series’ simple, episodic structure. One can actually fast forward through an episode and watch the plots go by beat-by-beat, unlike other shows where plots are much more intrinsic and meshed with one another. More on this in a moment.
Certainly it’s fine to use visual and thematic ties, and probably even wise, with a visual from one plot remarking upon a visual from the next plot. In the episode of the show we’re going to break down below, Nucky was shown to be shipping guns in a coffin, and then the next scene was of a detective investigating a funeral (albeit the funeral where the coffin Nucky was using supposedly belonged), and so the scenes were a good match with their visual tie of coffins, and so were placed alongside one another. Or the theme of one plot can match the theme of the next plot. Or another good trick used often is to have a voiceover from one plot reflect on another plot, with the voiceover illustrating that other plot or making that other plot ironic. Nucky Thompson might be giving a speech to the Woman’s Temperance League about the evils of alcohol, say, while his men are seen loading a truck with booze.
There are typically 5 simultaneous plots to an episode, one A plot, two B plots, and two C plots. In the ‘average’ episode (we’ll break down a great ‘average’ episode below) the A plot gets 7 scene beats (including beginning and ending the show) the B plots get five scene beats apiece, and the C plots get three scene beats apiece. The scene beats are, again, insular and episodic. Again, this is only ‘average’, and you’ll find episodes that of course differ.
But you can therefore safely and literally use the following template to outline your spec, this template still being a great ‘average’ of “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” shows. (The two B plots have been noted as B1 and B2, as with the two C plots.) Then you can mix the template as necessary, if you want to match themes or visual ties or place one scene’s voiceover over another scene’s events. But of course be careful about not putting a C1 plot scene beat beside another C1 plot scene beat, for example. You’re hopping from plot to plot and back again.
And of course a C plot (for example) would weigh in with one beat for an inciting incident, one beat for a reversal (or turning point), and one beat for a climax (or resolution), whereas the A and B plots, with more middle beats, simply have that many more reversals.
Let’s also be extra clear by what we mean about B1, B2, C1, C2 plots. We’re simply counting the number of scene beats in each plot to decide which plot is which. This is particularly easy to do with “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”, because the episodes are usually internally episodic. Every time there’s a scene change, that likely means you’re switching plots. If you want to try counting scene beats at home, simply turn off the sound for a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” episode you’ve just finished watching, make a list of the different plots for that episode, and then rewatch the episode. Each time you see a new scene appear, make a hash mark beside the relevant plot. You’ll wind up with a list that looks like:
Nucky makes liquor connection 1111
Margaret’s daughter has polio 111
Jimmy makes connections 11
And from the number of hash marks we know that the plot with the most hash marks is the A plot, the second-most hash marks denotes the B plot, etc. In “BOARDWALK EMPIRE”s case, however, you’ll normally wind up with two B plots (B1, B2) because they have the same number of beats, and you’ll find you have two C plots (C1, C2) with the same number of beats. That’s where we’re getting the notation of C1, C2. Two C plots, same number of scene beats.
The following skeleton (or template, as we said above) is also broken up with line breaks by each beat of the A plot, another good way to keep yourself on track when outlining. But otherwise the line breaks don’t mean a thing. There are no commercial breaks in a “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” episode.
OPENING TITLES
Scene 1: 1st beat of A plot:
Scene 2: 1st beat of B1 plot:
Scene 3: 1st beat of B2 plot:
Scene 4: 2nd beat of A plot:
Scene 5: 1st beat of C1 plot:
Scene 6: 2nd beat of B1 plot:
Scene 7: 1st beat of C2 plot:
Scene 8: 3rd beat of B1 plot:
Scene 9: 2nd beat of C1 plot:
Scene 10: 3rd beat of A plot:
Scene 11: 2nd beat of B2 plot:
Scene 12: 4th beat of B1 plot:
Scene 13: 4th beat of A plot:
Scene 14: 3rd beat of C1 plot:
Scene 15: 2nd beat of C2 plot:
Scene 16: 5th beat of A plot:
Scene 17: 3rd beat of B2 plot:
Scene 18: 3rd beat of C2 plot:
Scene 19: 6th beat of A plot:
Scene 20: 4th beat of B2 plot:
Scene 21: 5th beat of B1 plot:
Scene 22: 5th beat of B2 plot:
Scene 23: 7th beat of A plot:
CLOSING CREDITS
So let’s look at this skeleton/template again, now, overlaying it with actual scene descriptions from an actual episode. In this case we’re using a particularly rigidly structured example: Season 2, Episode 8, an episode entitled “BATTLE OF THE CENTURY”.
For our purposes we can give titles to the plots in this episode like so:
A plot: Nucky goes to Ireland, makes a guns for whiskey deal.
B1 plot: Emily gets polio.
B2 plot: Jimmy’s power becomes greater and more dangerous.
C1 plot: The U.S. Attorney investigates Nucky.
C2 plot: Dunn Pernsley kicks off an African-American strike.
OPENING TITLES
Scene 1: 1st beat of A plot: Nucky and Owen arrive in Ireland with a coffin purportedly containing Nucky’s deceased father.
Scene 2: 1st beat of B1 plot: Margaret finds Emily is ill when her daughter can’t get out of bed.
Scene 3: 1st beat of B2 plot: Jimmy meets with the strange George Remus, a potential liquor supplier from Ohio, and Jimmy and George make a deal. (This scene also contains a beat from a continuing spinal plot, a discussion of Jimmy owing money to Manny Horvitz)
Scene 4: 2nd beat of A plot: Nucky meets with John McGarrigle, offering him machine guns for the Irish war of independence in exchange for whiskey.
Scene 5: 1st beat of C1 plot: The assistant D.A. investigating Nucky notices Nucky’s not at his father’s funeral, though he’s just taken his father’s casket to Ireland.
Scene 6: 2nd beat of B1 plot: The doctor speculates that Emily has polio and must be put into quarantine.
Scene 7: 1st beat of C2 plot: Yelled at in the kitchen of the Ritz and fed ‘dog food’ for lunch, Dunn Pernsley begins to get grumpy with his African-American lot in life, then has a slight exchange of words with the Ritz’ manager.
Scene 8: 3rd beat of B1 plot: Margaret watches Emily get a horrifying spinal tap.
Scene 9: 2nd beat of C1 plot: In bed together, after some ideas on the Nucky case are kicked around, U.S. attorney Esther Randolph finds out from her assistant that Nucky wasn’t at his father’s funeral.
Scene 10: 3rd beat of A plot: Nucky shows off the Thompson machine guns (not named after him) to leaders of the I.R.A., but John McGarrigle shows up with news of a truce from England, and says he wants no more blood (meaning no more guns).
Scene 11: 2nd beat of B2 plot: Jimmy meets with Waxy Gordon, puts him onto the idea of attempting to assassinate Manny Horvitz.
Scene 12: 4th beat of B1 plot: Margaret disinfects the home by burning all Emily’s bedclothes and toys. (This also strikes a beat for a continuing minor spinal plot in the series, as her son Teddy watches the burning, and gets another little note of traumatic fire to contribute to his budding pyromania).
Scene 13: 4th beat of A plot: Nucky meets with a whiskey maker who can’t sell his whiskey because of the war with England, a whiskey maker who says he won’t go against the word of John McGarrigle, who wants a truce.
Scene 14: 3rd beat of C1 plot: Attorney Esther calls in Deputy Hallorann for questioning, asking him about the whereabouts of Nucky, and grilling him about his dealings with Nucky. (The scene also hits a beat in a major continuing spinal plot, the authorities discovering the whys and wherefores of the murder of Hans Schroeder, hoping to pin the murder on Nucky eventually).
Scene 15: 2nd beat of C2 plot: Dunn Pernsley meets with Chalky, hat in hand, making truce. Chalky, who’s cooking up an African-American strike, encourages Dunn’s rebellion at his Ritz job.
Scene 16: 5th beat of A plot: Nucky has dinner with John McGarrigle, and presses John on how the war with England is far from over, how he needs the machine guns. John turns Nucky down cold, basically calling him a warmonger. (This scene also hits a note on Owen’s character, when we find out Owen is thoroughly on Nucky’s team, and has decided against loyalty to John, his former boss).
Scene 17: 3rd beat of B2 plot: Jimmy’s cue to assassinate Manny fails, when Manny in turn kills the assassin.
Scene 18: 3rd beat of C2 plot: Dunn starts a strike in the kitchen of the Ritz, in the form of rousing all the workers to throw their lunches at the boss.
Scene 19: 6th beat of A plot: Nucky departs the company of John McGarrigle, just prior to John being gunned down by his own men. In the car on the way to his boat, Nucky’s told by the whiskey maker he met earlier that the whiskey- for-guns deal is on.
Scene 20: 4th beat of B2 plot: Jimmy, at a radio broadcast of a Jack Dempsey boxing match, finds he’s gaining fame and fortune in Atlantic City when people in the audience begin eyeing him.
Scene 21: 5th beat of B1 plot: Margaret mourns in the hospital over Emily as the nurses and doctors listen to the same boxing match. Unobserved, Margaret slips into the quarantine to stroke her daughter’s cheek. (Note that Margaret here gives hints of a continuing plot to come, her succumbing to a religious fervor over guilt over her Emily’s polio).
Scene 22: 5th beat of B2 plot: Jimmy and Richard find themselves indulged by a pair of loose women, again due on Jimmy’s growing fame.
Scene 23: 7th beat of A plot: About to board the ship back to America, Nucky and Owen put the McGarrigle shooting to rest, Nucky confirming Owen’s loyalty. Then Owen reads a telegram alerting Nucky to Emily’s polio, a great example of how to wind up an episode by tying a pair of plotlines together.
CLOSING CREDITS
WORLD & SETTING (or God Is In The Details):
It’s Atlantic City in the 1920s. That means everyone always has a cigarette in their mouth and a drink in their hand. Chesterfield cigarettes, most often. There’s just been incubators invented for babies. People say ‘a hundred clams’ or ‘Geez Louise!’
Fatty Arbuckle, John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks are stars of the silent cinema. But vaudeville is still in existence. People get their fortunes told at the local Palmistry. The Knights Of The Ku Klux Klan are on the rise and out in the open (if you call wearing sheets in the open).
People say ‘doll’ and ‘big cheese’ and they buy Vacuum Sweepers to clean their houses and they talk about oral sex as ‘The French Way’. They slander gays with insults like ‘he’s a powder puff’. They threaten people by saying ‘I’ll give you a haircut you’ll never forget.’ They make soda bread. They call kids ‘boychick’. Ponzi has just released his big scheme. People with Tourette’s Syndrome are simply lumped in with the rest of the ‘simpletons’.
Fascinatingly, it’s always noted that Prohibition and election rigging played a huge part in getting unions going, and getting women and blacks the right to vote. After all, if you could get women and blacks the right the vote, you can get them to vote for you, and due on their repression their votes are more easily bought.
White and black race relations are tense and terrible and ethnic relations amongst Irish and Italians and Jews are equally unstable.
There’s midget wrestling, Dale Carnegie is a household name, opium is about to be circumvented by heroin, cocaine is still used at the dentist, and gin is mixed in bathtubs. If you’re a woman you’re not meant to bare your shoulder, and you can get a ticket for wearing a swimsuit exposing your legs.
Meetings always happen amongst the gangsters with the right hand man present, and in your spec you never want to set a meeting in a boring old restaurant.
People sit in chairs, adjust their suit coats, and light a cigarette and pour a drink.
Everyone has only one good outfit unless they are as rich as Nucky.
Movie Magic® Screenwriter Template for Parks and Recreation To download a Movie Magic Screenwriter template file for Boardwalk Empire, right click here: http://support.screenplay.com/filestore/templates/mmsw6/New/TV/Boardwalk%20Empire.def
For a list of available Movie Magic Screenwriter format templates for download, go to
http://support.screenplay.com/downloads/MMScreenwriter/Templates/index.php
SCRIPT SAMPLE: Here is a link to a Boardwalk Empire script online: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/splaylib/Screenplay-Boardwalk_Empire-Pilot.PDF
For a list of available Movie Magic Screenwriter format templates for download, go to
http://support.screenplay.com/downloads/MMScreenwriter/Templates/index.php
SCRIPT SAMPLE: Here is a link to a Boardwalk Empire script online: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/splaylib/Screenplay-Boardwalk_Empire-Pilot.PDF
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A former Hollywood Lit Manager, Michael started ScriptAWish.com as a way to help other writers get their foot in the door and has helped several writers sell their scripts (like Travis Beacham of PACIFIC RIM) and set up projects with producers like Academy Award Winner Arnold Kopelson. The mission of ScriptAWish.com is to help aspiring writers get their scripts into shape and then get their foot in the door.
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