Think The Deuce Is Too Crazy to Be Based on Real Life? Think Again

Updated on 9/28/2018 at 7:35 PM

David Simon and George Pelecanos's The Deuce is back for a second season of exploring the dark side of New York City's 42nd Street. Given the way the show mixes fact and fiction to create a complex picture of the '70s NYC sex work and porn scene, it's no wonder that people are unsure how much of The Deuce is a true story. The answer to that question is just as complicated as keeping up with the sprawling cast of characters led by stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Franco. Ultimately, the HBO series aims to tell a factual story with dramatic flair. Every character doesn't have a direct real-life counterpart for the audience to point to, but there are often a number of people inspiring the fascinating characters on the screen — the same goes for the places.

The Deuce is a unique series that drops fictional characters onto the gritty streets of 1977 New York in order to tell a story about the porn industry, mobsters, pimps, and the women who worked those dangerous streets. It's not all true, but the parts that are inspired by real people and events are so much stranger than fiction.

Vincent and Frankie, The Hi-Hat, and Club 366

Vincent and Frankie, the twins played by Franco, are based on an actual set of twins who were a part of the shadier side of New York City in the '70s. In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, series creators Simon and Pelecanos revealed that they met with an unnamed man whose vivid stories about his club, his involvement with the mob and the porn industry, and his brother brought the era alive for them. In turn, the man's tales inspired the show, even though he passed away before the premiere. Simon and Pelecanos noted that their source showed no sense of regret about his alleged involvement in seedy dealings. "In other words, he had a very romanticized view of his life. He never really felt responsible for the attrition around him," Pelecanos told the newspaper.
In 2017, Franco explained to Paste, "My character, Vincent, is based on an actual guy who had a twin brother. He had run this bar around the Times Square area that was very unusual because it was a melting pot of all areas of social levels. At the time, you certainly had gay bars and straight bars. But rarely did you have a bar where they would mix and they would mix with police officers and the Warhol crowd and trans customers."
The Hi-Hat bar, which is featured prominently in season one, is reportedly based on a real bar called Tin Pan Alley. Like the club depicted in the show, it was said to be a melting pot where people of all walks of life came together. The same is true of season two's Club 366, which also bears more than a passing resemblance to Studio 54. The series seemed to acknowledge the similarities in the second episode of season two when famed real-life Studio 54 patron Andy Warhol stops by.

Is Candy a real person?

Gyllenhaal's Candy is the show's focal point. A sex worker turned porn director, she's driven by ambition and a desire to make a better life for herself and her son. But is she based on a real person? Unlike Franco's twin characters, there's no single person who inspired Candy, but Simon told Paste that there are two women the character is based on. Simon told the outlet, "She's a mixture of about two people in specific, but other people mixed in. There was a Candy who was a part-time bartender at Vincent's bar who actually started as a prostitute/street walker and was a little bit actualized, a little bit, by the politics she heard in the bar from Vincent's girlfriend, but also had some preliminary involvement in the early days of porn."
The second inspiration for the character is Candida Royalle, a porn actress turned director whose career path mirrored Candy's trajectory so far. By the '80s, she had founded her own production company, Femme Productions, and she made adult films aimed at women and couples instead of satisfying the male gaze. She also had multiple magazine columns, much like Candy does at the start of season two.

Koch's Midtown Enforcement Project

Season two has introduced the beginning of Koch's Midtown Enforcement Project into the story via a governor liaison played by Luke Kirby. In 1977, new Mayor Ed Koch made it his mission to clean up New York's streets, particularly 42nd Street, also known as The Deuce. The Times Square area was notorious for its adult film theaters, peep shows, solicitation, and crime. Koch made it his priority to clean up the area, and in the process, he changed the nature of the city and the illegal business that was conducted on 42nd Street at the time. Seeing how the start of his project affects the characters in season two could lead to another major time jump for season three since the initiative didn't begin to show major results until the early '80s.