"The Deuce" - HBO Series with James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal

It sounds like they are borrowing some of Georgina Spelvin's life. She was hired to cater the porn shoot for The Devil In Miss Jones and was asked to read lines with the male lead. The producer liked her line reading so much that he offered her title role! She was not a prostitute, she was a Broadway chorus member who had done a couple of "nudie cutie" films. From her Wikipedia article:

She began her professional career as a chorus girl in New York City and was featured in the Broadway productions of Cabaret, Guys and Dolls, Sweet Charity, and The Pajama Game.[3][4] She also worked in theater as a choreographer, director, and lighting technician in a number of musicals.[5] She made her first movie, The Twilight Girls, a softcore lesbian film, in 1957.[3]
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I'd love for the director to find at least a couple of cameo roles for some of the actors from that era. Ron Jeremy could have played that fake filmmaker.

 

"Mouth of DEATH"
---sounds like a title of a porno, to me!

 

We've been enjoying it so far. Having lived in New York since 1981, Times Square then was still a cesspool, but today's Disney-fied, fast-food, chain store version is actually scarier in some ways.
George Pelecanos is a great writer. If you aren't familiar with his novels, try King Suckerman- brutal redneck drug dealers v. soul brothers set in the '70s.
The series prompted me to look for a serious history of the NY porno industry- there was one, not confined to NY entitled "The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Industry." Any others that are NY-centric and cover the mob ties, the distribution, etc.?
That institutional linoleum, smoke everywhere, garbage everywhere, mustachioed male in polyester pants look certainly sets the tone. Remember the "Dry Look"?
Music supervision is pretty good too.
(I passed on Vinyl, never watched an episode, assumed I wouldn't be happy with it, and gather it failed for good reason).
This one might have "legs" but it isn't fast paced in the way post-Breaking Bad audiences sometimes want. (And it does seem predictable, but hell, isn't life predictable?).
Glad they made it.

 

On last night's episode, someone said "Breck girl"!
Even in the '80's, I remember that!
There was a girl in school that we used to call 'the Breck girl'!

 

I didn't catch that. A few folks were complaining about understanding the dialog. I think the center channel/dialog is mixed too low, at least for how my home theatre system is calibrated--some of the "street" language is easy to me, some is clearly specific to the Times Square/street/pimp/ho culture that I'm not attuned to, despite having been a NY'er for 36 years.

 

I think it was the girl who's reading Dickens, who called the college girl who now waitressing at Franco's bar that, in the bathroom.

 

Ah. I like her presence on the screen. Don't think I've seen her before. Some of the faces are very familiar.

 

Did anyone answer your question? My impression was, if a prostitute had recently been arrested (say within the past 48 hours) and had the paperwork to prove it, they didn't have to go back "to the clink." I guess it's meant to show that the process was very pro forma- not really trying to eliminate prostitution in the area- but simply cycling through the steps- keep the numbers up for the cops, not harass the "girls" too much, since they had to make a living.

 

Sure, but the cops are fining them. They're not so much interested in harassing them as demanding their cut. The police are exploiting them just as much as the pimps. If they actually got them off the street, their revenue would go down. That's counterproductive.

 

Good point. But, still different than the "dirty" vice cop who wants a take from the bar for "protection," no? In other words, those fines aren't going directly into the arresting officers pockets.
PS: to amplify on your point, it's systemic corruption, rather than individual corruption.

 

Yeah, it was answered back on page 3 right after I asked it.

Not sure I'd call it corruption. They're issuing citations that come with a fine for breaking a law. That is what the police are supposed to be doing. What is corruption (most likely) is the cops being told from above not to issue any citations to hookers in a specific area, presumably because somebody above the beat cops is receiving some sort of benefit. We haven't seen all the details of this yet, but presumably will. All we've seen is a few of the cops expressing surprise at how a specific area was designated "hands off".

 

Also fair. The system isn't designed to stop the "crime" but to feed off of it. The 'hands off" designation is, as you point out, more likely the result of someone getting a benefit at a higher political level.
So, we have cops sharing Chinese take-out with the prostitutes, both just working their jobs. The corruption, as you indicate, is often higher up the food chain --but for that vice cop looking for protection money, who you might consider to be "middle management" among the working class side-not the executive suite with the mayor, police chief and cronies (which we really haven't seen yet).

 

Maggie Gyllanhall said a lot of this is based on the career of Candida Royalle , and that she spoke to Annie Sprinkle for background info

 

Yes, exactly.

 

Didn't "Linda Lovelace" renounce the porn industry and call Deep Throat "filmed rape" or something like that? It wasn't all "fun" for every woman involved, so let's not whitewash it as some seem to want to do.

 

Neither the show nor any of the commenters hear have done any "whitewashing".

 

Right, I know the show's not whitewashing, but I've seen one poster consistently claim the show is painting too negative a picture of the 70s porn industry, and that all the girls were "having fun" (paraphrasing).

 

I've just seen the 3rd episode, and will keep following this thread to make up my mind about continuing.

Maggie is indeed an unbelievably talented actor. The way she's able to convey strength, vulnerability, grace, sexiness, innocence...I could go on and on. She won a Golden Globe for The Honourable Woman:

The Honourable Woman (TV Mini-Series 2014– ) - IMDb

 

As usual for Simon, he manages to incorporate reality into his storytelling. Pretty sure it was on HBO, a special by Ice T on the reality of pimping and that world. As you can imagine, it showed that it's more than simply a choice of lifestyle. The behavior of Simon's pimps dovetails perfectly with what I saw in that special.

 

I really liked last night's episode. It actually had a fair amount of humor in it that the previous episodes seemed to lack.

 

By today's standards of dress and behavior the pimps look a little ludicrous- but I remember people in the '80s with the full super fly look.
My wife had been part of an organization that brought young Soviet dancers to the US to perform. They had a "handler," no doubt KGB or whatever. As part of a group (I went too), we visited the Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear a battle of the choirs, and then went to Sylvia's for soul food. As I was standing outside having a smoke with the handler- I was smoking a Sputnik or whatever, and he was smoking one of my American cigarettes, a dude pulls up (in a Rolls if memory serves), fully tricked out, and gets out wearing the full costume--
The Soviet turns to me--raising an eyebrow-- and I said, 'probably women, drugs, whatever." He nodded as if he understood. I learned much later that it was probably the husband of the owner of Sylvia's-- he was into the full look.
Today, you are more likely to be assaulted by a person wearing a Cookie Monster suit on 42nd Street. How times have changed.

 

This show is going to be over in a heartbeat. And I don't know how they can resolve any plotlines in that time, because there's so many. Some of these scenes are only a few seconds long. I've read that Simon only wants to do 3 seasons.

 

Linda was in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend Chuck Traynor, but not one person who was involved in Deep Throat agreed with her claim that she was being forced to do anything. Watch the documentary Inside Deep Throat. They said they would come up with some excuse to send Traynor to pick up more film stock, and once he was off the set, Linda was happy to shoot the scenes.

 

I remember her line of "female friendly" porn films, the "Femme" series which avoided the more graphical closeups and included a lot more build up in scenes and much more attractive male actors.

 

As I said, I knew people who were in those films.

One was Jody Maxwell, from my home town of Kansas City. Her dad was my dad's boss, and she decided to do porn after seeing Gerard Damiano speak at UMKC at a "morality summit." (Believe it or not, some of us have lived really strange lives and had family friends who were porn stars.) Every film Jody did was her own choice, and she was having fun. OK, it's a sample size of one, but as far as I can tell, the only person who claims to have been forced to perform in a mainstream porn film was Linda Lovelace. None of the actors or crew said her claims were credible.