It’s safe to say — and, in fact, we’ve absolutely said it before, pretty recently actually — there’s nothing (political satire, poetry, fiction, art) which James Franco won’t try with enviable joie de vivre and subsequently boldly-if-misguidedly fail to pull off. It’s in that vein that it should hardly be surprising Franco is down to play identical twins in the forthcoming ’70s porn drama The Deuce: think about the unholy prolificness of mono-Franco and imagine the torrent of contributions we’d get with hi-fidelity Franco-in-stereo. (Just think about that absolutely-necessary time Straight James Franco interviewed Gay James Franco!)
Funnily enough, though, very few of the actor-cum-absolutely anything’s are ever entirely bad news: his recent book announcement had the saving grace of being about Lana Del Rey, his poor onscreen adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was, at least, an adaptation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
The Deuce seems to be no different in that respect. Franco might be the face(s) of the operation, but the show itself is the brainchild of The Wire-creator David Simon and is described as "the story of New York City twins embroiled in the 1970s Times Square pornography scene and all the mob and drug-related complications that accompany that particular environment." This translates roughly as: yes James Franco will be playing twins in the porn industry, and it’s an HBO show so there’ll definitely be a fair showing of skin, but — unlike his turn in The Interview — it’s not just going to be some kind of wild dick-joke rampage.
While Simon had originally been wary of the project, “I don’t wanna make a porn show. … I’m married with kids and lawn furniture. I don’t want to go there, man. That’s dark”, darkness clearly won-out and, as ever, “Porn, prostitution, pimps, the Mob, after-hours nightlife, institutional corruption, and New York in its Wild West heyday” prevailed.
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