Atlantic City revels in an HBO spotlight

ATLANTIC CITY - Always willing to be reinvented, this seaside resort officially hitched its rolling chair to the retro glamour of HBO on Thursday night, playing host to a red-carpet premiere of the 1920s Boardwalk Empire series, a show set - though not filmed - in Atlantic City.

The Hollywood-style fuss on the Boardwalk - 14 stars of the show, including Paz de la Huerta, drinking champagne and showing a long tattooed leg, posed in front of a vintage Rolls-Royce used in the show - drew a gaggle of photographers not seen perhaps since Miss America.

"That guy there?" said rolling-chair operator Brent Rivers, pointing at veteran HBO actor Michael K. Williams, who plays Chalky White. "That's Omar from The Wire."

The red carpet was laid out upstairs in a Caesars lounge. Neither Steve Buscemi, who plays lead character Nucky Thompson, nor director Martin Scorsese was there.

"It's so great to see a real ocean vs. a CGI [digitized] ocean," said Vincent Piazza, who plays a young Lucky Luciano in the series, referring to the green-screened ocean in Brooklyn, N.Y., used for the re-created Boardwalk.

Casino and tourism marketers, meanwhile, were heralding a new era of prominence for the town, a return to the romanticized swagger and liberation of prohibition A.C. (though presumably not the bloody roadside killings in blueberry country featured in the premiere, set for 9 p.m. Sunday).

Never mind that the show's Nucky Thompson, based on the real-life Nucky Johnson, is a corrupt, two-faced city treasurer who embraces illegal liquor running and big-city gangsters - in fact, he invites them to dine at the old Brighton Hotel. Never mind the whores and the rotgut.

Like a Hail Mary pass from 90 years ago, beleaguered Atlantic City is embracing the highly touted HBO epic with its patented marketing-shall-save-us fervor. They want a piece of a loud and lewd era that emphasized parties, boozing, broads, and nightlife, an era of eye-popping innovations such as storefront incubator babies on the Boardwalk.

What Seinfeld and Sex and the City did for New York, Boardwalk Empire shall do for Atlantic City.

"We'll have a Nucky tour," said Jeff Vassar, head of the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority. "There's probably a group of people out there who think Atlantic City started in 1978."

Fittingly, the town did what HBO's flappers and gentlemen do so impressively on the eve of Prohibition: They threw a 1920s-style party with plenty of Canadian Club, which they likely did not have to unload under cover of night, as on the show.

At the Pier at Caesars (its recently defaulted status an unwelcome reminder of the town's economic straits), there were Grappa shooters and Lobster Newburg, a dish with almost as much history in this town as the ocean.

Asked about all the gore and blood in the show (more than the actual history of that era, though it resonates with the current sagas of drug-dealing and violence), Vassar added: "I can't imagine they're going to shoot 'em up for the entire season." (Did we mention the lynching?)

Anyway, there are Boardwalk Empire-themed hotel deals (1,920 rooms offered at $19.20 a night at all the Harrah's properties, sold out), and Prohibition-era restaurant gimmicks ($19.20 prix fixe meals, with retro Canadian Club cocktails at places like the Knife & Fork, which was a speakeasy during that time). The city is hosting a viewing party Sunday night at Caesars, with a storytelling session at 7 p.m.

One person missing out a bit is Nelson Johnson, the author of the book that inspired the series, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City. John B. Bryans, his editor at Plexus Publishing, which has printed 85,000 new copies of the book, said Johnson, a state judge in Atlantic County, had been barred from promoting the book while Superior Court decides whether that violates the judicial code of conduct. Party poopers.