Flapper Culture Quotes

'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 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.

What's really interesting is when you get a brand-new wave that has no connection to anything else. It always reflects society. The flappers would cut the dresses and make them looser, they smoked, their hair was short. It was a rebellion against the corset and the Edwardian era.

1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.

The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.

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.

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 fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

Bootleggers were romanticized by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Gatsby is a bootlegger. And they were not thought of as evil criminals in the newspapers, either. There was a certain amount of affection for them.

I would quite like to have been a 1920s writer.

I think back, when I saw The Great Gatsby, the film, my grandfather probably helped supply all the alcohol to all these Southampton parties, back then.

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.

The world of the flapper - live free, wild and young - that energy is intoxicating. It's nice to inject that into the more controlled 'Downton' way of living.

In such novels as This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald depicts the spirit of the hour which is usually about 4 a.m. His suave young men, always commuting between Princeton and The Plaza in Stutz Bearcats never sat still for long. It was too uncomfortable, with a large flask in the hip pocket.

There is no way I'd have wanted to live in the Twenties. It was really crap for women.

Mother's interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

I don't think today's younger audience... would even know what 1920s musicals were like.

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart.

The '20s are a very interesting period to me.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties - with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby,' and the pre-Code films - as a party I had somehow managed to miss. After World War Two, I expected something similar, a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up, I knew we were in big trouble.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

The Prohibition era is so vividly depicted in 'Lawless.' John Hillcoat does a remarkable job of rooting his film in such a tangible reality.