Culturetopia: Golden Age Edition

NPR's best arts and cultural stories of the week are now alive, well and living in handy streaming and downloadable form. Today's Culturetopia includes an insider’s look at the making of HBO’s epic new series Boardwalk Empire, from creator Terence Winter and star Steve Buscemi. They discuss, among other things, how their previous experience working on The Sopranos helped them envision the rollicking, rude world of Prohibition-era Atlantic City.

One of my favorite guest hosts, Robert Smith, talks with actors Amy Ryan and Phillip Seymour Hoffman about how their new movie, Jack Goes Boating, depicts a real New York City romance—not one of iconic locations and ridiculously fabulous apartments, but where the people are a little schlubby (gasp!) and the relationship is actually deeper than the main characters’ closets.

As The World Turns was hardly real, but the long-running soap exerted fantastic power over the imagination of its fans, including Lara Pellegrinelli, who bids a heartfelt good-bye to actress Ellen Fulton who appeared on the show for fifty years.

Another farewell to the world-renowned hip-hop record shop Fat Beats. It dispensed vinyl to DJS, producers and fans at locations in New York and Los Angeles during hip-hop’s golden age, and to many of them, the store's closing means the end of an era.

Finally, a look (okay, it’s my look) at how a new generation of directors cope with filming dramas where the action unfolds online. The only thing less boring than watching paint dry, notes one interviewee, is watching people type on their laptops. So, download the podcast here and go outside.

(Or listen below, if you’d prefer.)