Interview

'I try to land on society's fault lines'

The man behind such popular shows as The Wire and Treme defines his TV work and explains the thinking behind his upcoming new series, The Deuce

A

s well as en­ter­tain­ment, is there a jour­nal­is­tic el­e­ment to your work?
I would be very care­ful not to char­ac­terise it as jour­nal­ism, es­pe­cially when I am doing a se­ries, which is when I get to make stuff up. And there has been a bit too much of that in real jour­nal­ism. It's hard for peo­ple to dis­tin­guish be­tween the two in some ways; some peo­ple in jour­nal­ism have trou­ble, sadly. I have too much re­spect for what jour­nal­ism should be to claim any part of that for what is es­sen­tially drama. But, the last thing I want to do is just to make en­ter­tain­ment. I trained as a jour­nal­ist; I'm not one now, but I want to en­gage the same ar­gu­ment, the same de­bates. So, my pur­poses are the same, but I am very clear that it is not the same form.
Your shows are about se­ri­ous sub­jects: drugs, war, pol­i­tics. What is it they have in com­mon that at­tracts you?
They are usu­ally the fault lines for a so­ci­ety. I try to land in those places where the ar­gu­ment is most im­por­tant. I come from a place where there are re­ally two Amer­i­cas. So, where the haves and have-nots bang up against each other, that's prob­a­bly a place where there's a story worth telling. Peace and war, and you have Gen­er­a­tion Kill. I look to land on a fault line, and a big enough fault line that it mat­ters.
What's the fault line for The Deuce, your new se­ries?
It's about the rise of the sex in­dus­try, which of course be­came a multi-bil­lion dol­lar re­al­ity in the last quar­ter of the 20th cen­tury. In my coun­try, a lot goes back to Man­hat­tan in the early ‘70s, when Times Square was a no-man's land. I'll be mor­ti­fied if all we do is make a show about porn. But there's a story in there about the rise of an in­dus­try, which was il­le­gal, in a back room, in a paper bag, under the shelf, and then out in the open. There were all these peo­ple who gained, lost, ex­ploited, were ex­ploited, so it's a show about cap­i­tal­ism, about mar­ket forces and about labour, and money and profit. There's a para­ble there for mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism that I find pow­er­ful, if we ex­e­cute it well. Maybe we won't, maybe we'll get four episodes in and re­alise we've cre­ated some­thing awful.
Your track record is good.
Maybe this is the one that kills us dead; I don't know. But right now I think we have a smart take on it. We shot the pilot and HBO looked at it and said yes. So, we have seven more hours to film over this sum­mer and fall.
What are the dos and don'ts of pitch­ing to stu­dios?
Well, I keep get­ting turned down for stuff that is less ob­vi­ously com­mer­cial. I hate to re­in­force this but one thing I know about my in­dus­try is that cer­tain cur­ren­cies work: vi­o­lence works, sex works, com­edy al­ways works. That is the triad of sure­fire TV fran­chise cur­rency, and to me it is a lit­tle bit sad be­cause there are more things under heaven and earth. I just came off doing a show which I cared about that is ef­fec­tively about cul­ture. It was an ar­gu­ment for the Amer­i­can city and mul­ti­c­ul­tra­l­ism, but I couldn't put a gun in every­body's hand. I put a trom­bone in Wen­dell Pierce's hand but that doesn't have the same cur­rency. You can have all the care­ful plot­ting in the world, you can have it mean what it's sup­posed to mean, you can make the ar­gu­ments, you can make the char­ac­ters as human as all care will allow, and peo­ple will still look at it and say “noth­ing hap­pened”.
So you're tak­ing a risk with The Deuce, in case peo­ple just watch for naked bod­ies.
The viewer I fear most is the guy who takes off his clothes and sits down in front of the TV on 10 o'clock on a Sun­day night and waits for The Deuce to come on. I don't want to make a show for that guy. I want to use the cin­e­matog­ra­phy and the story, and the show's pur­poses and how we pre­sent them, to thwart that. I don't want to make porn just to make porn. So, we're think­ing a lot about that, we're think­ing frame-to-frame and try­ing to be care­ful. To their credit, HBO is think­ing along the same lines. They've been pitched any num­ber of ideas about the sex in­dus­try in the past 20 years, but this is the first they took the pilot for. Whether we ex­e­cute it or not is an­other thing.
The US ap­pears to be a con­tra­dic­tion be­tween progress and and pu­ri­tan.
We are as pruri­ent as peo­ple can be and yet pu­ri­tan, all in the same breath. And the trick of the show is to land it some­where be­tween the two. I don't want to sneer at peo­ple who were ef­fec­tively the pi­o­neers of this new and dis­turb­ing yet ul­ti­mately suc­cess­ful in­dus­try. They al­ready paid one price and the last thing they need is some­one look­ing back 40 years and sneer­ing at them. I don't want to do that, I don't want to be pu­ri­tan. But I don't want to make porn.
I read you wanted to make a show about the Abra­ham Lin­coln Bat­tal­ion in the Span­ish Civil War. Are we ever going to see that show?
I could not get any­body in­ter­ested. If you know the story, you know how per­fect it is as a nar­ra­tive. To me it is a les­son about the lim­its of ide­ol­ogy, how human be­ings have to live and en­dure in a com­pli­cated mid­dle ground. War re­duces every­thing, and it was mod­ern war being ex­pe­ri­enced for the first time. It was a dry-run for what was about to come with World War II. It was also ex­pe­ri­enced by peo­ple who ar­rived in Spain be­liev­ing cer­tain things, many of whom left still be­liev­ing those things, but there was a reck­on­ing to be made about what war can and can­not ac­com­plish. There is a ter­ri­ble beauty, to quote Yeats, that was born here from 1937 to 1939 that our his­tory has lost track of. Many were com­mu­nists and they were all of the left, so our na­tional his­tory doesn't recog­nise them, and very pur­pose­fully didn't recog­nise them. Our gov­ern­ment called them ‘pre­ma­ture anti-fas­cists' and mar­gin­alised them.
But they were he­roes…
To peo­ple who knew what they did, they should have been he­roes, and they were on the right side of his­tory, clearly. But their con­nec­tion to the NKVD and to Stalin and the In­ter­na­tionale was such that when they tried to en­list after Pearl Har­bour they were ei­ther stamped as un­de­sir­able, de­spite hav­ing com­bat ex­pe­ri­ence and being will­ing to fight for their coun­try. In­stead of mak­ing them all NCOs, they were ei­ther mar­gin­alised and told they couldn't join the armed forces, or were taken on as pri­vates and sent to guard jeeps in Alaska. And then the coun­try not sid­ing with de­mo­c­ra­tic Spain was a griev­ous tragedy. At the same time there were ex­cesses on the Re­pub­li­can side, and so it's a com­pli­cated story. Some came into it think­ing one thing about why they were here and left think­ing dif­fer­ently about war, while oth­ers were en­er­gised from meet­ing Span­ish peo­ple and re­al­is­ing what was at stake. It's a beau­ti­ful story, but it's a hard sell.

From journalism to television

Neil Stokes/Gemma Busquets

The TV series writer and producer began his career working as a journalist on the Baltimore Sun newspaper in the early 1980s. In 1991 he published the book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which was the basis for the NBC series, Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99), with Simon acting as writer and producer. However, Simon truly burst on to the TV series scene with his critically acclaimed show The Wire (2002–2008). He also adapted the non-fiction book Generation Kill for HBO, and then for the same studio, Treme, which aired for four seasons. Simon most recently wrote the miniseries, Show Me a Hero, with journalist William F. Zorzi, while in August 2015 HBO commissioned pilots for The Deuce, about the New York porn industry in the 1970s, which is about to start filming.

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