Posted by
Rosario T. Calabria on August 8, 2010 at 9:59 pm
When HBO does television, they do it big (after all…”It’s not TV, it’s HBO”). However, this is really, really big.
Variety reports that the pilot episode of Boardwalk Empire , directed by Martin Scorsese, cost a massive $18 million (with tax breaks–so the actual cost was even higher).
“I kept thinking ‘This is pointless. How can we possibly afford a boardwalk, or an empire?’?” Writer Terence Winter recalls. “We can’t call it ‘Boardwalk Empire’ and not see a boardwalk.”
Winter, a longtime writer-producer on “The Sopranos,” worried that even with Martin Scorsese as a producer, the project was too ambitious for the smallscreen. Winter had found in his research that the boardwalk back then amounted to “Times Square on the ocean.” Such scope seemed impossible to reproduce authentically for a TV series. Continue reading TCA 2010: HBO says Boardwalk Empire pilot cost $18M
