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Bawdy new HBO series focuses on the New York sex industry that once defined 42nd Street
Bawdy new HBO series ‘The Deuce’ focuses on the New York sex industry that once defined 42nd Street.
In a crowded warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn, the men are wearing garish leisure suits and ties as wide as dinner napkins, while the women affect a look that might be called Woodstock-a-Go-Go. They are all part of an acid flashback to the early 1970s, courtesy of The Deuce, an HBO series about the New York sex industry that once defined 42nd Street. The scene being shot has Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an astute prostitute with aspirations, and Marty Hodas (Saul Stein), the real-life King of the Peeps, knowledgeably discussing what predilections are the most lucrative. The counting of endless quarters in an adjacent room underscores the economic opportunities.
Monitoring the shoot from a closet-size room downstairs, the show’s two creators, David Simon and George Pelecanos, begin to deconstruct Stein’s delivery of a particular line. Does he come off as leering? Dismissive?
“I want him to be genuinely, ‘You get it, you’re smart’,” Pelecanos says.
So they do another take. And another.
The moment encapsulates a central challenge: to explore the repercussions of a business dependent upon the sale of the flesh through storytelling that never slips into preachy puritanism or flat-out pornography. Also at play is a heightened awareness of how women are portrayed in culture, reflected in criticism of HBO shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld for what some say is the gratuitous female nudity and violence against women.
Now here comes a show about New York’s sex trade that can neither soft-pedal the brutal realities nor exploit the exploitation.
“If you allude to this in ways that clean it up, you’re not dealing with the fact that not only was labour marginalised and misused, but that the product itself was the labourer,” Simon says. “Human beings were the product.”
HBO has a lot riding on The Deuce, which makes its debut today with a cast led by Gyllenhaal and James Franco. The premium cable network needs an attention-getting hit to replace the departing Game of Thrones. Its previous New York ‘70s offering, Vinyl, was a scratch, cancelled after one season.
Simon and Pelecanos, longtime collaborators on standardsetting televised narratives, initially had no interest in developing a series around 42nd Street, believing that there was little left to be said. Simon, a former newspaper reporter, has created and nurtured several enduring series, most notably the HBO drama The Wire, which explored Baltimore through its illegal drug trade. Pelecanos, a prolific novelist known for his detective fiction, worked with Simon on The Wire and another HBO series, Treme, which focused on New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But Marc Henry Johnson, an assistant locations manager on Treme, encouraged them to meet a man he knew in New York — a man with stories.
The two writers figured a quick hello-and-goodbye would suffice. That is, until the man, whose name they declined to reveal, began to vividly resurrect the pioneering days along the Deuce, when he and his twin brother became mob fronts for bars and massage parlours in the demimonde of Midtown.
“The characters were so rich, and that’s what it all comes down to,” Pelecanos recalled. “We just said we have to do this.”
They returned to hear more insider dope about a pivotal moment in American cultural history, when various factors, including changes in the legal definition of obscenity, transformed the sex business into a billion-dollar enterprise. Once a wink-wink commodity kept behind the counter in paper bags, it was now front and centre in Times Square, the garish crossroads of the world.
To be fair, the Deuce was never exactly demure. Its “naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty” nature was celebrated at least as early as 1932 in the Al Dubin and Harry Warren song 42nd Street.
But Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia eventually closed down the burlesque houses, the dawn of hypnotising television came soon after, and the district’s theatres devolved into porn palaces, their marquees challenging goofy adolescents like me to decode a film title’s lusty pun.
By the mid-70s, dozens of sex-related businesses dominated the seedy bottom of Times Square, reflecting an era of free expression and a city in crisis, its fiscal problems deepening, its crime rate rising. And this man spinning stories for Pelecanos and Simon had been in the mix of it all.
They were especially intrigued by how often he deftly sidestepped any responsibility for a coldblooded business that financially benefited a few at the expense of many. He even recommended a theme song for the show, which he would not live to see: New York, New York.
Their Virgil into this seamy world spoke frankly of the human toll. If the writers asked whatever happened to soand-so, Simon said, “The answer was never ‘She married a podiatrist, moved to Scarsdale and had two kids’.”
Simon and Pelecanos recognised the storytelling potential of those days, and the opportunity to examine so much: the moral implications of economic models, the misogyny, the artistic contributions to music and sensibility, the sexual repression and liberation, the advent of Aids, the sex-video business shifting to the West Coast, the impact of forever-accessible porn on human interaction and intimacy.
One night in October, I watched preparations for a scene from the first season’s last episode. The Village East Cinema on Second Avenue in the East Village had been transformed into the World Theater on West 49th Street, as part of a reenactment of the premiere in 1972 of the groundbreaking adult film Deep Throat. Milling about were actors in all manner of rayon and polyester; parked along the avenue were the boxy and sporty wheels of the ‘70s.
Leaning against a Ford Galaxie 500, I recalled a conversation with Simon about the challenges of telling a fictional story that is deeply embedded in fact. A story, say, about the imagined denizens of a place so outlandish that it, too, seems made up.
“Some of it happened,” Simon said. “Some of it didn’t happen. Some of it might have happened. But all of it could have happened.
“That’s the only rule. All of it could have happened.”
All of this could have happened along the Deuce. And it did.