Last month, we heard that David Simon was hard at work on a new series titled The Deuce, all about the rise of the porn industry in Times Square from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s. The pilot for the show, cowritten with the great George Pelecanos, has now been picked up by HBO. But that's not the most scintillating new detail to emerge—it's the fact that James Franco will star in the series as twin brothers.
According to Variety, the project is partly inspired "by the career of twin brothers who were players in the Times Square world and became fronts for mob control of the volatile and lucrative sex industry." Franco will play both twin brothers. Will one be named Franco? We can only hope not, because everything about this project sounds very promising, including the fact that the pilot (and perhaps the whole series) will be directed by the towering Michelle MacLaren, and author Richard Price (also a former Wire scribe) is working on scripts as well.
“We’re interested in what it means when profit is the primary metric for what we call society,” Simon commented about the show. “In that sense, this story is intended as neither prurient nor puritan. It’s about a product, and those human beings who created, sold, profited from and suffered with that product."
In addition to The Deuce, HBO also picked up a second pilot from Simon, which is being co-produced by esteemed journalist Carl Bernstein. The untitled Capitol Hill project is described as "a modern-day examination of partisanship and the influence of money on national governance." That project will go into production next year after The Deuce.
You can check out photos of 1970s Times Square here, and 1980s Times Square here.
