Street life
HBO’S new series, The Deuce, explores New York’s sex industry in and around 42nd Street in the 1970s. Dan Barry talks to the creative team, including star Maggie Gyllenhaal and writer David Simon, about the compelling stories that emerged when fact met fi
Maggie Gyllenhaal talks about her TV series The Deuce, set in New York’s sex industry in the 1970s
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 reallife 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 cupboard-sized 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 flatout pornography. Also at play is a heightened awareness of how women are portrayed in culture, reflected in Maggie Gyllenhaal in New York, main; writer David Simon, above 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 softpedal 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 in the US on 10 September, and will be shown in the UK on Sky Atlantic in October, 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 standard-setting 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. (In an unrelated matter, Johnson was recently sentenced to a year and a day in prison for his role in a woman’s fatal overdose in 2015.)
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.
At one point his visitors interrupted him to take a walk and catch their breath.
“The characters were so rich, and that’s what it all comes down to,” Pelecanos recalls. “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 H 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 – on annual trips to some Radio City Music Hall froth – to decode a film title’s lusty pun.
By the mid-’70s, dozens of sexrelated 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.
“In other words, he had a very romanticised view of his life,” Pelecanos says. “He never really felt responsible for the attrition around him.”
Their journey into this seamy world spoke frankly of the human toll. If the writers asked whatever happened to so-andso, “The answer was never ‘She married a podiatrist, moved to Scarsdale and had two kids,’” says Simon. Let us pause here. The Times Square of today may be a Disney dystopia, a soul-crushing slice of Midtown where musty Elmo costumes go to die. But the fashionable yearning for the seamier Times Square of yore is to wish for the return of live sex shows, peep-show stalls in constant need of cleaning, men beating women on the street, rampant drug use and underage prostitution. Yes, those were the days. 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.
But in taking on New York and the Deuce, the co-creators recognised that among the many pitfalls to avoid was any lapse into what Simon calls “the boys’ version of the sex industry.” He says that the writers, directors and actors engaged in intense, scene-by-scene discussions during the shooting of the first season’s eight episodes. Gay and trans writers contributed to the teleplays, women directed four of the episodes, and Gyllenhaal, one of the producers, shared her notes on scripts and edits of episodes.
Despite the concerns about prurience, Gyllenhaal says that she saw multilayered opportunities in the subject matter. If people are somehow aroused by the matter-offact portrayal of the porn business, she says, how will they feel when also exposed to the complicated back stories of those who may have just turned them on? Someone, for example, like Candy: a single mother, a daughter, a sister.
“Then all of a sudden you’re both feeling and thinking at the same time,” she says. “If we create something that is both things at once, then I think it gets people involved viscerally in the show.” Yet another hurdle facing The
Deuce was the need to entice an audience into caring about people whose everyday travails tend not to pull at the heartstrings: a predatory pimp, say, or an amoral manager of a mobbed-up massage parlour. True, the writers had a few real-life characters to work with, including Matthew Ianiello, aka Matty the Horse, a high-ranking Mafioso who controlled what prosecutors called a “smut cartel” in Times Square. There was also the aforementioned Marty Hodas, whose peep-show success required his lackeys to lug trunks filled with quarters to a bank at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue.
But most characters were conjured through the alchemy of fact and imagination. Pimps bedecked in the royal attire of the street. Freshfaced women stepping off longdistance buses at the Port Authority. A conscientious but compromised police officer – played by Lawrence Gilliard Jr – wondering about some vague downtown threat called the Knapp Commission (a panel investigating police corruption). A determined reporter, a gay bartender, a sex-film “director” – all making choices in an unfolding story fraught with foreboding, as the planned three-year programme chronicles the changing nature of the sex business through the ‘70s and into the ominous ‘80s.
Franco, who directed two of the first season’s episodes, assumes double acting duty as well. He plays Vincent Martino, an ambitious bartender based on the man who had spun enticing tales of the Deuce, and his twin, Frankie, who shares none of his brother’s reservations about working in the sex trade for the mob.
Simon acknowledges that having twin characters, portrayed by the same actor, might seem like some Janus-faced conceit, but this was fact.
“It would have been a wilful walking
away to make it a single character,” he says. “So once we locked into that, we said, ‘Let’s play that. That’s interesting.’”
Then there is Candy. An independent on the street whose son lives with her parents in the suburbs, she recognises the opportunity for women like her to share more fully in the profits. And she goes for it.
To prepare for the role, Gyllenhaal talked to retired prostitutes and porn actresses about the life, including the requisite skill of dissociation. She also read books like Porno Star ,bythe adult film actress Tina Russell, who died at 32 of complications related to alcoholism.
She says she wanted to capture Candy’s resolve to prevail in a man’s world and be in charge of her own desires. In one scene, stemming from a suggestion by Gyllenhaal, Candy develops a relationship in her private life. She and her new boyfriend have sex, but she doesn’t reach climax. So she masturbates.
“It was interesting to think about misogyny from the point of view of a prostitute,” Gyllenhaal says. “And not just misogyny, but femininity, in terms of sexuality, in terms of art, in terms of money, in terms of intelligence.”
The most consequential character may be the city itself, a New York two generations removed, which the creators and their team have captured through spot-on dialogue, time-specific set designs and atmospherics evoking The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham
One Two Three. No bike shares, no artisanal coffee, no sushi; you took the damned subway, you drank bad deli coffee – and if you wanted fresh tuna, you went down to the pungent Fulton Fish Market before dawn.
In The Deuce, cigarette smoke clouds the diner. Someone cracks wise about Mayor John V Lindsay’s presidential ambition. Here, a reference to Ali Macgraw; there, to Angela Davis. And that neon Schaefer sign behind the bar promotes beer, not irony.
One night in October last year, 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 re-enactment of the premiere in 1972 of the groundbreaking adult film Deep Throat. Crew members hung posters trumpeting The Very Best X Film Ever Made, according to the venerable Screw magazine. 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 recall 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 says. “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. n
“The characters were so rich, and that’s what it all comes down to. We just said we have to do this”