HBO’s best chance to solidify its appointment-TV crown for years to come rests firmly in the hands of a fast-talking ex-Brooklynite who studied to be a car mechanic and scammed his way into Hollywood by creating a phony agency to represent him.
Terry Winter, the creator and showrunner of the highly anticipated “Boardwalk Empire,” which premieres Sept. 19, is a former lieutenant to David Chase on “The Sopranos,” where he won two Emmys as writer and executive producer and was nominated for six more. He spoke with Eric Estrin about how he got into NYU without a clue, why he once chose being a doorman over journalism and how pretending to be a messenger boy and an agent helped him open the door to a new career.
I came to writing in a really circuitous manner. I had grown up in Brooklyn and had gone to a vocational high school, where I studied auto mechanics; so the idea of ever becoming a writer for a living was something that was completely alien to me.
I was really not prepped for college at all; I had never intended to go and didn’t even take the SAT’s. But a few years out of high school I changed my mind-- I was in Greenwich Village, and I was on the campus of NYU, and I thought, well, this is a college; I’ll go here. It’s the God’s honest truth. I went into NYU and got a brochure, and that was pretty much the extent of my college research.
It became pretty apparent early on that my auto-mechanics degree was not gonna cut it in terms of getting into this college. But then I thought, well, if I took a major nobody else wanted, maybe I could eliminate my competition and get in that way. So I looked at the list of the most obscure majors they offered, and one was medieval history. I thought, well, who could be competing for this, so I said that that’s what I wanted to do.
A few weeks later I got a call from somebody at NYU, and they said, we have your application, and you have an auto-mechanics degree and you want to study medieval history -- how did that happen?
I said, well, I’ve always been a fan of the Knights of the Round Table, and I think this is something I might like to do. And suddenly I was in NYU, without really having any idea of how to be a student. I was determined to get out of there in four years, so I went to school full-time during the day and worked full-time as a doorman at night. My education was fully financed by student loans.
I didn’t even know at the time that NYU taught courses in film and television. I didn’t know that world existed. But I did like to write, so I started taking journalism classes.
