When the brains behind The Wire, David Simon and George Pelecanos, announced in 2015 that their next show, The Deuce, would cover the pre-gentrified Times Square of the 1970s and 1980s, viewers knew to expect the same level of atmosphere and attention to detail that Simon gave Baltimore. To tackle that challenge, the two turned to Production Designer Scott Dougan, whose credits include Selma and Bridge of Spies. Four years later, as the show prepares to roll its final credits on Monday night, Dougan tells us how he recreated the lost period—hint: inactive Flickr accounts proved crucial—and how travelers can still find the old Times Square feeling today.
Typically with a historical piece you can still shoot in the area, but The Deuce is set in Times Square in the 1970s and 1980s, which is a far cry from how it looks today. How did you set about recreating it?
It was one big Rubik's cube, with challenge after challenge. The first step was to look for the core images from the period, that we knew would provoke a certain reaction in the viewer. In season one, for example, you see Frankie Martino [played by James Franco] crossing the street with those iconic Gordon's Gin and Winston's cigarette man billboards in the background. You just know you're in 1970s New York City. Then as time went on, and the porn industry was pushed out to make way for new theaters, the show's increasing marquees symbolize that change.
What about the storefronts themselves? Presumably they changed every decade too.
That's the next step. After gathering the mood of the period, we dug down into the particulars. Our researcher was at the New York Public Library's archives and found elevations of 42nd Street—a very rare discovery, which told us the exact height of all the buildings in the period. But that only gets you so far, because you need to know what's happening on the street. For that, we mined photographers from the period: Meryl Meisler, Jill Freedman, Nan Goldin. Then once we hit 1985, when the area was welcoming its first tourists, I trawled old Flickr accounts of people who visited.
Which real-life locations are you particularly proud of recreating?
On the corner of 8th and 42nd, there was an old peep show theatre called Show World. We called ours Showland and built an entire exterior for it in season one with a huge new marquee. Then in the opening scene of season three, the characters are walking and look back towards the construction of the Marriott Times Square—we researched and built that marquee, too.
Do any still exist?
The most interesting thing to see in Times Square right now, while you still can, is that same Show World theatre. Despite all the changes, it was fully functional until a year ago. It's now being converted and you can look into the old building. It's amazing.
There must be few places on the planet that have seen more change in the last few decades.
It's remarkable. But if you go to Times Square and stand there for an hour, and just watch the people, I promise you'll begin to notice some of the same people are still there. It's a wild thing to watch the tourists pass by, and then realize that across from you suddenly is a real native New Yorker.
You obviously couldn't film in Times Square. Where was the set?
The third, and craziest part of our process, is finding where you can make the thing. David Simon and George Pelecanos care so much that it wouldn't have ever made sense for us to make a green screen. That meant we had to find a location that, like the area at the time, had all commercial real estate on the ground floor and was on a completely flat street that had four lanes of traffic, which is really difficult to find in New York City. We found it on Amsterdam Avenue, at 163rd Street on the border of Harlem and Washington Heights. We use that same strip for both 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, it's one of the secrets of our show!
So it was all plain sailing from there?
Not at all. We still needed to build all the canopies, with the huge challenge that we couldn't leave them there, because in episodic television you don't shoot it all at once. So every time we'd go to Amsterdam Avenue we'd take this huge marquee piece, and hang it off a bunch of fire escapes. It's the most complicated thing I've ever done.
Did any locations not want to be involved with the show's adult themes?
Yes. No-one cared about the show's contents, but they cared about the specific scene we'd be shooting in their building. Some wouldn't want to become a porn store, or a theatre production with nudity. But for the most part New York City is so, so open about those things.
Lastly, what's a location on Monday night's episode that viewers can look out for?
I don't want to give away a huge spoiler. All I will say is that perhaps they shouldn't look out for familiar locations, but instead a very, very new location.
