Deuce explores New York’s Times Square in 1970s
NEW YORK — You don’t have to look far to find a New Yorker who beefs about what 42nd Street has become.
That stretch between Eighth Avenue and Broadway just off Times Square: It’s now a frothy family friendly cauldron of theatres, eateries and other tourist draws that many natives denounce as “Disneyfied.”
By any description, it’s a stunning transformation from the urban slag of peep shows, gin mills and massage parlours known as “the Deuce” back in 1971 — the time and place in which a magnificent new HBO drama series, The Deuce, is immersed. (Its eight-episode season premieres Sunday at 9 p.m.)
For devotees of The Wire and Treme, nothing more need be said about The Deuce than it was co-created by David Simon and George Pelecanos, who can lay claim to those extraordinary dramas. Pelecanos’ shorthand for his new series: “the rise and fall of Times Square.”
This first season tracks the rise of the flesh trade from what was then called “smut” to today’s billion-dollar industry whose wares are just a cellphone call away. From its first scenes, The Deuce gets under your skin.
As on The Wire (set in Baltimore) and Treme (New Orleans), this new series populates its chosen world with a rich spectrum of characters, ranging from pimps and prostitutes and drug dealers to mobsters and dirty cops and even a New York University dropout-turned-barmaid.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a defiantly entrepreneurial hooker who sees adult films as her ticket to success and James Franco tackles twin roles as identical twins: Vincent, a high-minded bar owner who fronts for the mob, and Frankie, a trouble-courting cad.
The denizens of the Deuce trace intertwined narratives that unspool in matter-of-fact yet lyrical fashion, all set against an exactingly re-created Big Apple of nearly a half-century ago.
Perhaps no one is more knocked out by this productiondesign wizardry than Franco.
“You watch all the old [Martin] Scorsese and Sidney Lumet films that I love from that era, and all they had to do was put their cameras where they wanted and it was fine,” he says. “But not only did we have to set up all the shots, we also had to make up everything you see in the frame.”
On top of that were his dual roles, which include scenes where, with cinematic fluency, he interacts with himself in the same frame. It’s no small trick.
“I go in usually as Vincent first,” explains Franco, “just because of the way the makeup and the hair worked, even though I would have rather done Frankie first, since he’s the more extroverted one. And then I’d do Frankie. And each time, the actor playing opposite me” — a placeholder in the two-shot — “would remember what I did with the other brother from when we rehearsed, so he could do it himself.”
All that, plus in two of the episodes, Franco is also directing himself.