“I hate to say it, but before TV people spoke better and were better read than we are,” Terence Winter tells the New York Times. “They were probably more literate.” What Winter, who along with Martin Scorsese, is an executive producer of HBO’s upcoming Broadway Empire, is referring to is, “Books, of all things, are prominent props in Boardwalk Empire. One of the characters is reading a novel by Henry James; another keeps a copy of Sinclair Lewis with him.”
In the trailer for the 12-part series set in 1920 Atlantic City, Nucky Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, proposes a toast “to those beautiful, ignorant bastards” in Washington who passed alcohol prohibition. “We’ve got a product a fella’s gotta have,” Thompson says in another clip and talks about the price of his product exploding.
Broadway Empire will depict what Mark Thornton explained in The Economics of Prohibition,
prohibition results in more, not less, crime and corruption. The black markets that result from prohibitions represent institutionalized criminal exchanges. These criminal exchanges, or victimless crimes, often involve violent criminal acts. Prohibitions have also been associated with organized crime and gangs. Violence is used in black markets and criminal organizations to enforce contracts, maintain market share, and defend sales territory. The crime and violence that occurred during the late 1920s and early 1930s was a major reason for the repeal of Prohibition
