Franco is double trouble in compelling ‘The Deuce’
“The Deuce,” HBO’s compelling new drama about the birth of pornography culture in America, flashes back to New York City, circa 1971, when Times Square was teeming with adult movie houses, dive bars, prostitutes, drug dealers, pimps and gangsters. It’s so seedy that viewers may find themselves wondering if they’re up to date on their tetanus shots.
Into this decadent neighborhood steps James Franco, an actor raised during a different era, 3,000 miles away in Palo Alto. But, in some ways, he feels right at home.
“Growing up, I loved those films set in New York during the ’ 70s. So what could be better?” he said. “I’ve seen them so many times, but I went back and re-watched ‘ Taxi Driver,’ ‘ Mean Streets,’ ‘ Serpico’ and ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ for some research. It was really exciting for me to enter that world.”
“The Deuce,” named for a term once used to describe a stretch of 42nd Street, was created by David Simon and George Pelecanos, the masterminds behind “The Wire,” one of television’s most hallowed landmark shows. It’s an eight- episode drama series that explores the rise of the porn industry from the point where, as Simon said, “it went from being an under-the- counter paper-bag product” to booming mainstream entertainment.
But it’s also a show less concerned with the actual porn than with the social ills it spawned: Misogyny, crime, drug abuse and political and police corruption.
“The product is really human flesh. It’s objectified women,” Simon said . “And in making it into a billion- dollar industry, there’s something really telling about who gets paid, who gets left out, who gets betrayed, who achieves some degree of agency and who doesn’t. ... If we’ve made something that is purely titillating, then damn us.”
Franco heads an extraordinary cast that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal as a
fiercely independent prostitute. Taking on a dual challenge, Franco plays Vincent and Frankie Martino, twin brothers who fall in with the mob. Vincent is an enterprising bartender who recognizes the market opportunity for X-rated films. Frankie is a freeloading gambler in debt up to his neck.
He inhabits both guys with plenty of charisma.
“By playing twins, I sort of got to do everything as an actor,” Franco explained. “Vincent is more the leading man. He’s a character who’s emotional ly grounded; somebody the audience can sympathize with and un- derstand. Frankie, on the other hand, gets to do all the crazy stuff. It’s like I got to play the Harvey Keith role in ‘ Mean Streets’ and the Robert De Niro role in ‘ Mean Streets.’”
The Vincent character is based on a real man who had a twin brother and ran a melting-pot bar in New York that heartily welcomed everyone, including cops, pimps, hookers, gays and transvestites. The man, whose actual name isn’t used in the series, shared his insider tales with Si- mon and Pelecanos and apparently played a key role in convincing them that there was a viable series in the material.
“I never got to meet him. He passed away right before we shot the pilot,” Franco said. “Even before David and George met him, I guess he had 90 hours of recordings he did on his own in his living room, just dreaming about one day meeting someone like the creator of ‘ The Wire’ to tell his story. And it worked out.”
It also worked out for Franco, who, for several years, had expressed an interest in collaborating with Simon and tapping into the creative renaissance going on in television.
“I’ve been a big fan of David Simon and ‘ The Wire’ for a while. That show was so amazing. It was Dickensian,” he said. “And I like what’s going on in TV right now; the idea of long-form storytelling and how a lot of these new shows feel like a long movie, or a visual novel.
“I’m in the part of my career where I’m trying to narrow things down. I did a bunch of different things in recent years. Now, I’m just trying to zero in on a few quality projects.”
“The Deuce” not only gave Franco the opportunity to play two characters in an era he finds fascinating, he also spent some time in the director’s chair for the third and seventh episodes. As such, he became swept up in the show’s fanatical attention to detail; something that wasn’t always easy to achieve in contemporary New York.
“When ( Martin) Scorsese was directing ‘ Taxi Driver,’ he could simply go down to 42nd Street and put the camera wherever he wanted,” he said. “But we can’t do that, because it’s all Disneyfied now.”
That forced “The Deuce” crew to take over two blocks in Washington Heights and dress it as best they could to resemble 1971 New York, complete with cars and costumes of the era and, of course, plenty of filth.
“The set designers would actually collect garbage,” Franco said. “And every corner we went to, they would throw garbage out.”