'Boardwalk' begins literally on the first day of Prohibition, which I think was a wonderful way to start - to have the story kind of come out of this massive historical phenomenon. And the more I researched the '20s, the more I discovered just how interesting it was.
I find early jazz to be the most revolutionary music of its time.
I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.
In the Bay Area, there was a resurgence of Dixieland jazz in the '40s - there was the Frisco Jazz Band, and Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.
My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.
I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.
Jazz, and the history of jazz, is the history of America.
Out of the ashes of the Great War came the freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing halt with the Crash of '29 - triggering the Great Depression and the New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for another, greater war.
I enjoy how women dressed in the 1920s with the shimmering jewels and rich feathers.
It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age.
1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
I love songs, Patty Larkin, Sharon Stone, Mae West, and Marilyn Monroe.
We used to play the Savoy Ballroom, and we always had a boogie tune in the set. Bands like Tommy Dorsey used to do a little boogie woogie. The big bands.
I love that period, between the '20s and the '60s. I love doing period pieces, and those eras are my favorite period in time, music wise, and the elegance and the way of being.
Fitzgerald coined the phrase the 'Jazz Age,' and now we're living in the Hip-Hop Age.
The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.
I connected very much with all the work of Joan Crawford because she started as a flapper. She used to dance and sing and she was very cute. She had something that was so different from what she is at the end of her life and she started in the silent movies and then went into the talkies.
I wanted to be Langston Hughes.
I'm really fascinated with anything that takes place between the 1920s up through the 1960s. In some ways it feels familiar, and in other ways it feels like it's from another planet.
The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.
I know absolutely nothing about the 20th Century.
The first paid gig? It was back home in Terre Haute, Indiana, back in 1925, '26, when I was going to high school and working in a speakeasy.
Dancing in speakeasies was a job, and none of us knew for sure who were gangsters. No one told us, so how could we know? My mother used to come and take me home. We thought nothing of walking home together at two in the morning.
Art Tatum was a genius.
