The Watch - George Pelecanos, Cocreator of 'The Deuce,' on Capturing the Grittiness of New York in the '70s (Ep. 181)

Episode Date: August 31, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald are joined by one of their favorite writers, George Pelecanos ('The Wire,' 'Treme'), to discuss his latest project, HBO’s 'The Deuce,’ which he cocreated with David Simon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at The Ringer.com, and joining me in the studio, he just got out of a Times Square screening of the conformist. It's Andy Greenwald. I prefer the old Times Square, man.

Oh, who doesn't? Who doesn't? Literally, I don't. No, I actually, literally, I do. You prefer it? I would rather get an STD than go to an M&M store. That's a great point. I would just avoid both of them. Okay.

Andy's here. We are talking about the Deuce, the new prestige drama on HBO. Prestige. But Chris, this one's really good. No, man. This, look, you know what? I was talking with Fantasy a couple weeks, like, week or two ago when I had seen the episode and I was telling him, I was like, dude, the Deuce is good.

And he was like, I need it to be good. I think a lot of people feel that way. I think people were looking for like a real, real good television show. They want to sync in. That has good actors and good story and it's interesting. And I know that sounds really stupid. but it's not. It's not reductive.

It's really true. That was my feeling when I watched this too. You and I love David Simon's shows. We love The Wire. You and I love our guest today, George Pelicanos, as a writer, a crime novelist,

and as a co-conspirator with David Simon. This show, I'm not saying it's better than the things they've done before, but this one is alive in a way that the other ones weren't. It is alive in a more traditional,

like, entertaining way. It is just as serious in many times, but this show, maybe it's Michelle McLaren directing it. Maybe it's the fact that it's kind of about sex. Maybe it's about New York City. Maybe it's George Pelicanos, and we talked to him about this in the interview, bringing some, like, pulp sensibility to it. But this show is just so well done, so rich,

so fun to watch, even when the subject matter isn't, that it is just a joy. I mean, there were a lot of red flags coming into it, one of which being James Franco playing twins. James Franco playing twins. Just like, first of all, first rule of fight club, no twins. But guess what? That's my fight club. Second rule of fight club, if the twins are there, don't let him get played by James Franco. Third rule with a mustache. And I, in this conversation we're about to, you're about to hear from George Pelicados.

You and I kind of like, we're like, that was scary for us. And he and the two of us, this guy's just like on his Ratso Rizzo right now. Like he is incredible in this show. Yeah, and it's, it's just one of those things where Franco showed up to work and to act and to just play this part.

And all the cast did from, from Maggie Gyllenhaal to Method Man to, It's a large ensemble. Look, here's the thing. The premiere episode of The Deuce, the extra long premiere episode, we're putting this up now because it's available now. The show officially premieres on Sunday.

And we could not pass up an opportunity to talk to someone who is so instrumental in our creative or artistic or our family lives. A couple notes on George Pelicanos. One of our favorite writers, a writer that we were already friends that brought us closer together. DC crime novelist. We tore through every one of his books almost at the same case. I know you're tired.

Give me the 101. There's a couple of distinct periods of Pelicanos. Sure. Pelicanos, basically a self-made writer in a lot of ways. I think he was working as a shoe salesman when he wrote his first book. His earliest books, you and I have a real, real soft spot for. These are books called A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River where the Dead Men go.

These are a very first person, really grimy. A lot of listening to the replacements while doing jump ropes to jumping rope to sweat out last night's whiskey, which, you know, at a certain point in your 20s, when you're reading the book, written by a guy in his 20s, it kind of sinks up. All of it except for the...

I never jumped rope. Yeah, exactly. He sort of has distanced himself from these books, but I love him. His next series were about a... I think he used the term salt and pepper, accidental crime fighting duo,

Marcus Clay and Demetri Karris. He wrote a series of books where these two friends, one black, one white, grow up with D.C. The 70s book, King Sucker Man, amazing. The 80s book, The Sweet Forever, is our Double Down Book Club this month, and I really hope

people check it out. He takes it up to the 90s, and then there's a flashback, a period piece book called The Big Blowdown. Then, yeah, another series, and then, you know, he keeps writing these great books. He's gotten more serious as his subject matter has gotten more serious. And we'll throw up some tweets about, you know, which ones in his Uber we recommend. Probably worth mentioning. I had met George. George had been on the podcast.

I interviewed him five years ago. We did mention, but not on the mic. It was just because he had a new book out. Some of his Spiro Lucas books. He worked on Tramey, though. He did work on Tramay. You and I went to see him read from at a Barnes & Noble in Chelsea

about 13 years ago for his book, Drama City. We had a plan. We had a plan. We were going to like... So in The Suite Forever, the Sweet Forever is about... It's set for the most part during March Madness. We saw George Reed during March Madness. Yes, it was March 10 years ago.

Yeah, something like that. And me and Andy, like, you know, you shoot your shot. And so we thought he's going to see these two young whippersnappers. I think we had some people in tow with us. And we were like, we don't look at crazy people. We'll just say to George Pelicanos, accomplished crime novelists. Like, like, man, you want to kick this like farm stand.

And let's go out to like watch these basketball games, man. And like hang out. Do a little next trip action? The effect, I think to him was that we were speaking to him like he was Ethan Hawking. We were at Denzel Washington. And we were like, do you like getting wet? Yeah. And we definitely did that thing at book reading.

where you like hang out. Which is like cool and like lovely but we were just like let everybody else gets their shit signed and then we're gonna go like chase the night. And he was just like I'm gonna go back to my hotel. He's like I'm gonna have a $9.00. And he handled it in a way that let us know

we were not the first white boys to think of this. And that he was a grown up now. Yes. Which I hope we are now too. And to his credit that night when I had him signed my copy of Drama City I was like I have to say I have a novel coming out

and you're a huge influence on it, which is true. Not as good as his books by any measure, but I was reading a lot of his books when I wrote it. And he was so gracious. He wrote, in my book, Good luck with the novel. A few months later, he blurbed it. Damn.

Why would he do that? A kind guy. Anyway, he came here straight from the airport. He flew out for TCA. He was a little tired. You might hear a little bit in his voice, but he was so game to talk about this with us. We love him.

We love the show. We love the fact that he has the keys to the car on the show in a way he didn't before. He was always, you know, a lieutenant helping David Simon. This is all. They're partners in this. But there's a lot more of him in the show. A lot of Richard Price, a lot of David Simon, a lot of George Pelicanos.

And I'll tell you what, when we started this podcast, you know, I think we, you and I, like, you're always going to have like an attachment to what you're doing at a certain point in beginnings. But Andy and I started this podcast at the very beginning of Downton Abbey. So you could say the Golden Age of Television. For sure. No, we were, when we started this podcast, Breaking Bad was still on. Madman was still on.

I think The Pranus just ended. Downabby was beginning. There was just like... Downabby was beginning. No, but I just mean like, it was a very exciting time in television. We talked a lot about Downabby in that first episode. Oh. This show, the deuce, takes me back to that time.

Yeah. This tapestry of characters, this like, I don't know what the next scene is going to be. So much of television now is so formulaic. So much of it is... I don't know. I know that there's parts of this show that you feel like you might be familiar with, but the depth of knowledge about the subject matter, the depth of empathy for the characters.

Every character, every single character. From pimps to hustlers to cops. Just everybody. There's not a single archetype in this show. There's just empathy. You don't always need to reinvent the wheel because you know what wheels do? They roll.

There you go, man. Let's talk to George Pelicanos. Let's bounce. So we're extremely excited to be joined by one of, I can say our favorite writers, a person who we've talked about many times and now we've summoned him like Beetlejuice here into the room with us,

George Pelicanos, welcome. Thank you. Reading your books for almost as long as you and I have been friends, right? Yes. Yeah. So almost the last 20 years, yeah. We've been tearing through them together every time. And we're very excited to have you here to talk about the Deuce, the new show on HBO

premiering. Help me out, September 10th. September 10th. But when we're putting this pot up, we're recording in July, we're going to put this pot up at the end of August because the premiere episode will be available to HBO subscribers on go and now. and potentially on demand. Yeah, and August. I don't know the exact date.

So this is a show about Times Square in the 1970s that you created with David Simon, who you worked with on The Wire and Trame. Right. I guess the first question is probably an obvious one you're going to have to answer a lot. You're a D.C. guy. Your books are D.C.

Baltimore, just up 95 a little bit, but now you've taken the car even further up the road to New York. How's that feel? It's sort of fun to go to these places and kind of get out of the car and walk around and figure out what's going on. It's not that different than what I do at home. And that's what I did in New Orleans. I'd never been there. But I kind of fell in love with it as soon as I got there.

In a lot of ways, it was similar to Washington. This is the first period thing I've done. Right. Which is different still. It's hard enough to figure New York out in the present and then to go back. And, you know, but we worked on this for a long time. I mean, this has been three or four years now. I think you alluded to it.

You were nice enough to come on a podcast with me about five years ago. Yeah. And I think you alluded to a project you were working on, which this may have been it. Yeah, we were talking about it. And so we've had a lot of time to research. and we used consultants in sort of every aspect of this. So we had former porn stars and porn directors, police, feminists, activists, all these people that were there in the maelstrom, you know, and we picked their brains. But it's a responsibility to a lot of people remember Times Square in the 70s, you know what I mean?

So you're not going to pull the wall over anybody's eyes. You've got to get it right. Yeah. And then there's also the, it's not even if you don't, if you remember it or not, it takes on this sort of cultural. Mythic quality. Yeah. This whole where it's like even if you weren't there, you sort of have an idea.

If somebody says Times Square in the 70s, you have these ideas about what's going on there. Was there like a historical moment or a historical figure that was the sort of trigger to investigate this story for you guys? Yeah. We were a guy named Mark Henry Johnson who had worked. for us as a location manager in New Orleans brought this a man to us

who had been mobbed up in a bar in the 70s in Times Square in a bar. He had a twin brother. His brother was near to well. DeGenerate gambler, all that stuff. And then, you know, this guy did such a good job and he was honest

with the money, which was very unusual, that they kept giving him more responsibility. And it, Then he became, he was running massage parlors and they had, they had their hands in, you know, the live sex shows, all this stuff. And, but the thing was is that his bar was a place where this was also very unusual because this is a guy from Bay Ridge in the 60s, rough and tumble, you know, Italian guy. But he was really, even when you talk to him, he was very, his attitude was living. wouldn't let live. Like he didn't care who came into his bar. So it became a place where a lot of freaks washed up on the front doorstep, you know. And you had, you know, you had transgender

people. You had all kinds of people that weren't really welcome in other places. And then the downtown crowd started coming up, the art, pre-punk art crowd. And his girlfriend, who was running the bar, sort of took it over and invited all those people in and they were putting art up on the walls and it was a real interesting place. And, you know, it was mafia owned. There's a great line in the, and I think it's in the pilot where one of the pimps is like,

what happened in this place? This is my after-hours cocktails. It's like it's not safe for pimps anymore because it's become so popular. But all this is what, it reminds me of what you said a moment ago, George, about like the maelstrom, because one of the things that is most fascinating about the show you've made

and really most appealing about it is that all the different strands, the hookers, the pimps, the journalists, the strivers from Brooklyn, they all know each other. They all cross over. It's a small world. There's that amazing scene in the second episode. I don't think this is a spoiler, but it just speaks to the relationship between the prostitutes and the police when they all order Chinese food together. These are people who know each other. And there's a, I don't know if respect is the word or tolerance or acceptance, but there's a there's a feeling of community that is not. That is surprising, I guess, for a show that deals with such serious subject matter. Yeah, there's certainly all in it together. And Vincent even lived in an SRO right there. He didn't want to be anywhere else.

It was fun. You know, that's the thing that gets left out of the conversation about all the degradation of Times Square and everything, was people were having fun. And even in the early days at the dawn of porn, as we know it, it wasn't so much like a porn actress, you know, a diva or something like that going to do these movies. It was maybe a couple would say, let's go down. They're shooting blues. Let's go down there and smoke some joints and do it. We'll have sex on camera.

Right. It was all new. Yeah. You know. Yeah, I'm happy to hear you say the word fun. I want people who are about to tune in to understand that one of the great things about the Deuce is that it does have a sense of excitement and fun in addition to all the subject matter that you're handling. And, you know, I...

There's a feeling especially in the first episode where it's like an alternative title for the show could have been night people, because they all seem to have this sort of affinity for like avoiding the dawn. You know, you don't want to get caught by the dawn. They're out. But, you know, the cops, even once they're off duty, you can tell they're, like, kind of loving it being out. I loved that part of it. I loved that also, you know, and we can talk more about this, but really captures the quality that New York has to that you could just, that anything can happen on any given night. You know, that idea of just sort of bumping into somebody and your life could change in some way.

I love that. And yet the ending of the pilot brings you back down to, you elementally. This is also a really dangerous place. And some of these people can be pretty bad. Let's talk about that balance because I've seen your creative partner in this and other projects, David Simon, making jokes before everyone else does about how, you know, here comes Simon to ruin porn for everyone. Because, you know, the Wire and Trame have had incredibly funny at times, but he has a reputation for being, you know, journalistic and very serious about the subject matter. I wondered what your role in navigating the subject matter was with him and with the rest of the creative team you had put together. Because your books are serious as well, but they've also at times embraced genre more openly.

I know we were going to bring up King's Sucker Man at one point. We were inevitably going to bring it up in this conversation. But you have that streak in you. Oh, yeah, absolutely, proudly, you know. Yeah. And David has sort of a grasp of the bigger. issues in the bigger picture than I do. I'm more, I get down into the details.

So I'll give you an example is the scene with the pimps in the, in, in, in, uh, in, uh, Port Authority in the beginning, watching the girls go by and talking about it. That's a great scene. Well, I wrote that scene originally and all that stuff about, you know, look at that onion and all that stuff. And I'd rather like Manoward all that. That was all me, right? And then David got a hold of it and he put the stuff in about Nixon.

He comes Nixon. Yeah. Vietnam. You know, he'd, he brought it. He blew it up into something bigger. Yeah. And it would have been a good scene without him getting in there. But he made it something else that has a little more resonance.

You know what I mean? But that seems like a very healthy partnership thing. You need both. You need Nixon and The Onion. I think so. I was actually – this is a good way of bringing this up. So you're reunited prices involved in this show. But there's also a lot of the production and creative team of these previous shows,

like Alex Fogle and the casting artist Dickerson. and shooting some of these up, directing some of these episodes. But I was curious about how the writing process has changed from working on the wire to working on Tramade to doing this show. Because it, unlike most pilots, seems to have its voice down from the first 30 seconds. You're just like, you're immediately brought into this world. Everybody's voice is distinctive. I think actually the time when I first noticed that is when the two Franco characters first

talk to each other. oh man, this thing is really, they just put oil on this pan. And I was wondering, like, if you could talk a little bit about process and how that's changed over the years for you guys. Well, I would say the wire had a pretty high level of testosterone in that room. And it was, there was a lot of, there was a lot of argument, and some of it got heated and so on. But it was basically we had occasionally we had women in there that were, you know, but for the most part it was a men's world in there. And it was a murderous row of writers.

We've talked about this before. It was you and Simon and Richard Price and Dennis Lane was there one year. Yep. Ed Burns. Ed Burns, not bad. Former cop. Yep. Baltimore Cop.

So we knew from Jump that on this one that we needed a different kind of complexion. of the room. And so we went out to two female novelists that we like a lot, Megan Abbott and Lisa Lutz. I'm glad you mentioned them because speaking about Murder is Roe again. It's unbelievable. Yeah. And we got Richard back, who, Richard's the guy who wrote the Chinese food scene with the prostitute and police because that's a real thing. I mean, that's where Richard's invaluable because he's been there since the 60s, you know, in New York. One of his most, I think, overlooked books is Ladies' Man, which is just this world. I love that book.

It's a terrific book. People check that book out. And if you like New York Night Live, Lush Life is probably the best modern book about it. Yeah, Lush Life is a good book. And then we have gay writers, too, because we have a gay character that we're going to follow and that. We're going to go downtown with them and stuff like that. And I didn't – David and I didn't feel really qualified to get deep into that character. So we really made an effort this time to have everybody represented.

And, you know, I think you guys haven't gotten to the episode yet, but the episodes that the women wrote were really good and different, too. You know, they have a different tone to them. It's exciting to hear you talk about individual writer's contributions because, you know, one thing of this autore era of television is that there's the name at the top and that name rewrites everything. And then if you worked on the show, you worked on it. what you did is often lost.

So it's nice to hear it because you, you know, you and David have such a tradition of bringing in strong voices to let them do what they do best. I hope so. I mean, I don't really, you know, I'm not all in on that theory about the author. It's super collaborative. And we try to, it's true that when you watch a season of any television, it should sound like it was written by one person. person for cohesion purposes and continuity of voice and so on. But we try to give everybody enough space

to put their personality into it. And I think you'll see it. You know, you'll know, if you've read Richard or Megan or Lisa's books, you'll see their personality in their episodes. One more thing about the idea of how television is being made now. I'm very curious your perspective on it

because after watching the pilot and watching the second episode, I was all in, but it felt there was something surprising about the show. There are a lot of things that are surprising about what we're seeing, but I realized it felt almost old-fashioned, and I mean this in the best possible way, that what your show did so brilliantly in the pilot is just say, here's a world, here's some characters in it, welcome, basically,

and, you know, there's more to come. So much of TV now is, you know, like movies made for the poster. There is, from right from the beginning, there's a question that's going to be answered. There's a crime that needs to be event. You know, they're, that you have that momentum and that sort of an attempt to get the audience in and running with you. I love that you didn't do that. It feels so open-ended and exciting for that reason. Yeah, I mean, you're usually encouraged to have some, like, a big, oh-shit moment in the pilot.

Right, the bag of money. Yeah. And we, and, you know, it helps that we've been at HBO for 15, 20 years. They know what we do. They have some, they have some faith in us, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, we kind of avoid those tropes if we can. But, you know, I'm pretty confident people are going to stay with us just because it's good. Yeah, I'm glad you said that. You're right. I mean, you know, one of the things the show does have going for it is that not only the across-the-board level of performance, but it has some star power. And I have to admit, like, you know, when it first got announced, I go up and down.

with Franco depending, you know, on the role. But I was like, I was sincerely blown away. This is something that could very easily go wrong. It was the, I'm playing my own twin. And I also was just so, I think, surprised by how immersed he seemed in it. Because he's somebody who has this public persona of almost like a performance artist. And he just seemed like a 70s New York character actor all of a sudden. It was so great to see him act.

Just like, just waiting for a subway and smoking a cigarette. Smoking a lot of cigarettes. Yeah, he's a full-blown man in this thing. Yeah. Where he's been, you know, a lot of people are expecting the stoner or something like that. He surprised us in that way. Look, none of us were sure with each other. You know what I mean?

We hadn't really, in previous shows we've done, we didn't, they weren't headlined by big movie stars. So we, you know, we had to think about that. But also, you're asking. You know, Maggie Gyllenhaal, for example, had to have a lot of faith in us because we asked her do a lot of things that are really exposing herself, not just in terms of the nudity, but the acts, you know, what she's actually being asked to do. And, but how do you, you know, the thing I kept asking is, what's it like for a woman to sleep with eight guys that she's repulsed by different guys every night, you know? Like, so we had to show it. You know, we had to show with that, we had to take her down to the bottom before we could start lifting her up again.

And she, she trusted, you know, she had to trust us. And that was, that was, and all the actresses did. I mean, they, we, our partner, Nina Noble, had meetings with all the women before we shot each episode. You know, if we were asking them to do something, Nina would have a nudity meeting with them and tell them. And then, you know, when we got in the editing room, there was a lot of talk about, you know, can you take a few seconds off of that? We're lingering too long on her breasts. You know what I mean? Like, we were conscious of we're not trying to turn anybody on in the audience, you know what I mean?

Yeah. And it's a real fine line. You can't do a story about porn without showing it what you're talking about. And yet, you don't want to titillate anybody because, look, frankly, you don't have to subscribe to HBO to, to watch porn, you can get it free on your laptop. You know, that's not what this is. Yeah. So it was a lot of tricky navigation on this one.

Yeah, I've heard from people who have visited the sets of porn films. They say there's nothing more boring than downtime on a porn set, you know. And so there's something, it's a very tricky line to walk, but something I think you've managed to pull off where... And it comes up again, again, in the dialogue that sex work is work before it's sex. Yeah. And that's a recurring theme in it. So when we see people nude, it's almost like it becomes seeing. them in a doctor in their scrubs. This is their work, right? And projecting that from the

beginning, that must have been, that must have required a lot of, you mentioned four or five years of development. There must have been a lot of conversations about that very thing, about tone. Yeah. And in the writer's room as well, before anything was written, we talked about that. In getting back to James with the twins, we deliberately didn't make them look too different. They both have moustaches. Their haircuts are very similar. James did all that. He differentiated them in his acting.

And we wanted him to. I mean, that was a challenge for him, but we laid it down and he brought it, man. I wanted to ask also about, since we're talking about the sex work, the pimps on the show. The actors, the portrayal. I mean, you've got Method Man an incredible wig. You've got Tariq from the roots, giving that monologue we're talking about at the beginning. He's terrific. Talk about a balancing act

because these are outsized personalities were drawn to them. You know, they get some of the best lines, certainly the best wardrobe. Yeah. Best cars. Best cars.

Yeah, best cars parked on the street, by the way. Great spots. That was the part of it. That's the only thing that took me out of it, to be honest, was that Cadillac parked by the Port Authority. But yeah,

but there's the violence. And there's something lurking at the heart of it. And you have an actor, Gary Carr, who I don't think I've seen before. who I think might be the breakout star, at least of the first five episodes. Right, and I had to look that out. I was shocked.

He's an incredible performer. Yeah, he's great. I think one thing we're really proud of is that every one of those pimps has a different personality. Yeah. They're humans, you know what I mean? And we always say, like, they might be bad guys, but they don't know it, you know? And if you read Pimp by Iceberg Slim, the whole book is him rationalizing who he is. You know, my dad was cuckolded by my mom and I'm never going to let a woman treat me, you know, all that stuff.

He never admits to doing anything wrong or having a personality flaw. And that's the way these guys were too. They're like, you know, bitch needs have a man to hold her money, you know. It just makes sense. Right. Hey, guys, let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Audible. Audible content includes an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy,

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I think it's in towards the end of the first episode, is whenever Glory meets with candy for the first time on the street. And she's like, you know, I wanted to come get some tips from you guys. There's this great shot. I think it's Michelle McLaren directed the first episode. In the background, Marquis is the conformist. and I love the New York as like this collision point of high and low culture, especially Times Square.

Speaking of like high and low, because it's a Bertolucci movie sitting next to, you know, shoot them up, probably, you know, proto exploitation movie or whatever. And little Baltimore, you get John Waters on the marquee early on too. Did you ever visit New York at that time and have that kind of that experience of feeling like so intellectually stimulated while also so viscerally stimulated, obviously? I didn't start going to New York until I began publishing novels. Really?

Yeah. So I had no experience with that city. I'm 100% D.C. But all that stuff with the mash-up of the movies is, and I made sure that they're all real pairings. You know, we went back and... Oh, that's all really played. That's great. Yeah, and they played together on the same bill.

And John's film, I guess, was Mondo Trascha, was playing in New York at the time. And, you know, if I kept an eye on that stuff, like Leone had this film, Ducky Sucker, James Coburn, and it was out. But somebody, I guess they looked it up wrong or something, and they made the posters for it, a fistful of dynamite, which was the re-release a few years later when they were, United Artists was trying to make some money off this disaster and make it look like a new film.

and we shot it. I had to get it out of the, I had to get it out because I knew it was wrong. I mean, you can't do that. Yeah, that kind of stuff will just drive you nuts every time you see it, probably. One thing I'm noticing in the early going of the show is that obviously there's the log line.

You know, this is about Times Square, this is about a changing era, about the sex industry. But that's also just setting. You know, I think in a way, the shows that you've worked on with David, a lot of them are about the old ways,

dying out and something replacing them and who gets to take advantage of that, who gets taken advantage of. There's always that culture clash and that collision. There's a scene in the second episode where the mobsters are like, you know, someone needs to clean this place up. And I, you know, one of the joys of watching the show is you think, well,

if someone told them that Disney would be the people that did it, you know, it would be another 25 years. What thinking do you guys do in the room big picture like that? You know, obviously the wire had a point of view right from the beginning. This show is exciting to me, because it is both entertaining and free form, but you do have those large societal shifting things at play

just by nature of what you've chosen to tell us. Well, we know where we're going, and from the beginning we knew that it hasn't really been discussed in the press, but next year will be, next season will be a different era. And we're telling a big story about the rise and fall of Times Square. Oh, that's exciting. We're going to get to the 80s and everything that happened then.

As soon as you said, like the post-punk and art, I was excited. I always wanted someone to do that show, so you guys might do it. Well, we'll always have that flavor in there, whatever's going on at the time, you know. But next year, we're still going up the hill. We'll be in the really mad, mad time of the late 70s when everything's just sort of like just got completely bonkers there. And then, of course, you know, a lot of things happened in the 80s, AIDS came to town, which was the big. the big thing. Cots shut down the bathhouses and film became video and the porn industry moved out west to the San Fernando Valley. This is exciting. You mentioned the beginning that you hadn't

done a period piece before. What, having done it now, I mean, the logistics of it are just Georgia. I mean, I don't know how you guys did it because you're filming a lot of garbage. A lot of garbage, a lot of cars. Yeah, we had to age all that garbage too. What in your mind having done it now? What are the advantages of telling a story through a lens like that? But also, obviously, what are the disadvantages? And I imagine most of them are production-based. It was just, I mean, the advantages that we were excited to do it.

And you know how I am about the 70s, and I've been wanted to do something like this for a long time. So that was great. I got Curtis Mayfield into the opening credits. Yeah, it's a nice touch. You know, the disadvantages that's really. really hard. It's hard to shoot New York anyway. But to try, so we couldn't, there is no Times Square anymore. So we had to go up to Amsterdam and around 164th. And we dressed the first floor of a street, doubled for 8th Avenue because it was wide enough to be two-way up there.

And 42nd and 8th. And then everything above that is, so we built the, we built the Marquise, movie marquees, but everything above that is CGI. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because I was wondering, is you guys aren't doing just like an establishing shot and then going to an interior. It's like, they're just like these nice long, like spend some time on the curve. It's exciting. One thing

people never talk about enough is that Mad Men never went outside. It's all interiors. It's all interiors. It actually helps with the claustrophobia of the show, but then you're like, well, boy, that saved them. You know, the one thing, I had actually a time period question. I know we don't want to keep you too long, but I would imagine that there's

lot of things that you can double check in terms of, okay, this movie theater is playing this. How hard is it to replicate patterns of dialogue, slang? Things like that. Obviously, you remember it from your childhood or whatever. But, you know, how did people talk in New York that was different than in D.C.? Because I think that a lot of slang didn't have the cross-city transportation that it does now because of social media. Although you got a half-smoke into this show. You did get a half-smoking.

That was a little D.C. in there. But, yeah, I was wondering about, like, how do you check how a pimp talk? in Times Square in 1971. It's a good question. I mean, we, we, one of the reasons we, we thought about, we talked about shooting this somewhere else that we could do it cheaper and you could go to Cleveland and make it look like New York, you know. But we, the big thing was the actors.

And it's very hard to duplicate that, the New York, not just the accents, but the inflections. But also, we had enough actors that, um, could come to us and say that's not how somebody said that in New York back in the day. You know, we got, you have to be real diligent, I think, and not assume anything. Because it is very different coming to where I came from. I don't, I don't just write it. I talk to people.

Yeah. And listen, you know what I mean? And hopefully we get it right. Before we let you go, we have to talk books a little bit. This show has dominated your life. You've made this show. It's been incredible. Do you have a new book as well?

I feel terrible asking you this because you've been busy enough. No, I'm happy to this because I had, for a couple of years, I haven't written a book working on this. And then we wrapped and we finished post at the end of December. And I just bore down and I wrote a book in the first quarter of this year. Good for you. Wow. And it's coming out next year. It's called The Man Who Came Uptown.

That's exciting. Another DC novel. But I feel great about the fact that I wrote a book. What was it like getting that muscle going again? It wasn't hard. Because a lot of it deals with being in the DC jail, and it's about a DC, we have a library in the DC jail. And I do reading programs down there with the different units like the 50 and older guys and stuff like that. So I had a lot of material like up here.

Yeah. And so it wasn't hard to get into it. Because I was noticed, and when we spoke a few years ago, you had this Bureau of Lucas books had just come out. And you talked about spending a lot more time on set. And then I think the last thing that came out was the martini shot. Which is about being on a set. Which was a little bit of both. And I was curious which half of the brain was going to win out for a while.

But I'm glad the books are coming back as well. That's a tough balance to do. You know, look, I probably have 10 more years in this business. And then I'm not going to retire. I'm just going to write books into my death whenever that is. Well, hopefully not for a long time. I asked you this last time, I have to ask again, is there any movement on TV projects from other characters?

Is there, why can't we get our next to Fano show? Yeah, we're sweet forever, man. We want it so badly. You know, I just had a meeting with my agents about that, and we're going to try and get going on it again. I really want to do Hard Revolution. Yeah. I wondered which one you would pick.

Yeah. And I have written it. It went somewhere and then it didn't get made. And now I'm going to try to get it back and take it somewhere else. And that's a period piece as well. Yeah, but I would insist. I wouldn't do it anywhere but D.C. So, I mean, it's sort of a goal of mine to get the film business going in Washington to get a little industry going there before,

if I can leave that one thing behind it. That would be really cool. Yeah. Because there's not very much, right? If anything, I think even Veeb was in Baltimore for a while, which isn't the same thing. And then they even they came out here. Right. Even the Americans, which is supposed to be set. It's in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is very disconcerting.

Well, it's all about the tax credits, you know? Right. And I think when we shot the pilot of this, there were 40 productions happening simultaneously in New York. Yeah. You know. It's a ton. Right. It's great for New York.

And if you're a crew person and you get on a show like Law & Order, you can not only give birth to your children, but send them to college. Yeah. And I'd like to do that for people in Washington, man. What did you, how do you feel about New York now, having spent time in and writing the stories? Because one thing that's so cool about that, we keep referring to it, these writers' rooms that you've put together for these shows, I think a Price is a New York guy. Simon's a Baltimore guy. LaHane was a Boston guy.

You're a D.C. guy. But in some level, and we love books by, we talk about them on our show a lot. We love books by all of you. The language of cities seems to have some. there's a common aspect to it of the perspective that you have. You're looking at the street first. You're giving people dignity on a level

that they often aren't given. Was that your way into New York? Into writing the story? Yeah, I think the shows are all linked in that respect. They're an examination of a city and why things happen the way they do. And I'm real interested in that.

So when I got to New York, I was ready to live it, you know, and the first thing I did was I learned the subway system because I was really interested in that. You have our condolences. Yeah, you got to watch it. I moved just in time, I think. They're about to close the L train for a year, I think.

But even though people complain about it, I think the subway system is pretty great, man. It was the best, yeah. I miss it out here. I sent you guys 20 minutes in the wrong direction, because I don't understand driving anymore. We should let you go. Last thing before we do, Chris and I, on the

podcast, we have a book club where we ask our listeners to read a book and we all do it together. I think Sweet Forever is coming up in our book club. Oh, yeah? Yeah. How do you feel about that? I don't know how you've, you know, you've written so many books since then. Your writing has changed a lot. Right.

That's a, that's a, I mean, it's a, it's now a period novel. Like Washington, that Washington doesn't, is just anymore. I think I think about that book a lot during this time of year just because of the bias, the limb-bice thing. That framed it, yeah. Yeah. And just be coming out of it. of the draft and everything.

Well, I mean, the Coke thing was at its raging peak, but you'd be surprised how many people quit using Coke because Glenn Baies's death, like a lot of people did. And it's a tragedy, you know. But it was in that time when everything was falling apart in Washington. So it's probably, I mean, I'd be interested to know what people think of it because it's a really dark novel, probably one of the darkest novels I've written. in a time that warranted a novel like that.

But I would never write that book today. Interesting. Yeah. Because you've changed or the city has changed? The city's changed so much that it would be like a dilettante talking about things that he didn't really feel anymore. It's interesting as a fan of the books to think about what has changed the most. Because Nick St.fano's D.C. is very different from Spiro Lucas's D.C. Yeah.

But D.C. has changed, but you've changed as well. your point of view about the world and the city as well. Which do you think has changed more in the intervening years? You were the city? I think the city. You know, I was single when I first started writing and then I got married, then I had a family. I raised a family. My kids are in their 20s. All that stuff changes you. But it's not anywhere near the magnitude of the change that I've seen in Washington. Yeah. It's just incredible. Yeah. You know, and I go back to the riots in the 60s.

When I was a little kid, I saw everything burned down, you know? And then there was, there was 25, 30 years of nothing, like just tumbleweeds blown across the street. And now it's one of the richest cities in America. Yeah. Yeah. And also, when I was growing up, D.C. was 80% black. Now it's less than 50%. Yeah.

So the entire character of the city has changed. And there's a lot of good things have come with that, too. There's more jobs and, you know, all of that sort of thing. But we lost a lot, too. Well, I hope people, we're going to have people check it out, and we'll let you know, maybe you can come back on and answer some reader questions. If I'm out here, I'll come on. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on, and congratulations on the show.

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