How The Deuce Turned Its Lens on a Female Porn Auteur

As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fairs HWD team is once again diving deep into how some of this seasons greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.

THE SCENE: THE DEUCE SEASON 1, EPISODE 8

In its first-season finale, HBOs The Deuce offers an unlikely spark of optimism—and a glimpse of womens liberation—where youd least expect it: in the middle of the emerging porn industry. Whirling darkly through the garbage-strewn streets of early 70s New York, the freshman season of this drama meticulously re-enacted a transitional moment in the wild, pre-gentrified underworld.

“Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets,” Travis Bickle famously prophesied in Taxi Driver, referring to the parade of “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies” sashaying along 42nd Street and other sordid Manhattan thoroughfares. The genius of The Deuce, created by David Simon and George Pelecanos, is the way it humanizes the very people that Bickle scorned as abject trash, finding slivers of dignity and tenderness in the most dead-eyed prostitute or ice-hearted pimp. Like Simons The Wire, The Deuce also offers a panoramic view of a system whose every level is connected in a seamy web of corruption and exploitation.

Eileen “Candy” Merrell (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a single mother and staunchly independent sex worker whose unusual insistence on operating without a pimp leaves her vulnerable to violence. Gyllenhaal gives a startling and intricate performance as a woman who is beaten down yet wide awake, ready to pounce on any possibility of upward mobility. Over the course of the season, Candy has quietly insinuated herself into the burgeoning business of the porn film: shes starred in some movies and served as a kind of unofficial assistant to director Harvey Wasserman (David Krumholtz). When Harveys car breaks down en route to a shoot, Candy takes over as impromptu director.

This unexpected ascent of Candy to the status of skin-flick auteur points toward a fascinating—if seemingly improbable—feminist story line threading through the shows forthcoming second season.

HOW IT CAME TOGETHER

The Deuces creators always planned to have Candy end up in the porn biz, but Gyllenhaal said that Simon and Pelecanos originally had more of a producer role in mind for her. Gyllenhaal—who is a producer of The Deuce, as well as one of its stars—had something else in mind. “As we worked together, and as we sort of considered each episode as it came together, it became really clear to me that she was a director,” she said. Theres a scene in the shows second episode, where Candy is acting in her first movie, and “Shes got like three people on her. Everybodys naked . . . But shes way more interested in the light than she is in the sex. Its sort of like a birth of an artist!”

The realization that this thing she does for a living—sex—can be transformed and controlled by putting a frame around it energizes Candy.

“Once shes been woken up to that, she cant go back to sleep,” Gyllenhaal continued, excited at the memory. “This woman is a director—and shes a director in a world that had like no space for a woman to be doing this . . . It takes until like literally the last 10 minutes of the last episode until she gets what she wants.”

Written by Simon and Pelecanos, the finale was directed by Michelle MacLaren, who set the seriess bruised, seedy visual tone in its pilot. MacLaren called the duos script remarkably layered: “You have to pay attention to nuance, and take the time to understand [that] this isnt a scene about how a pornos shot. This is a scene about a character who is evolving, becoming a storyteller, who is embracing an opportunity . . . And who is, for the first time in this world, being taken seriously.”

Although it was daytime in the world of The Deuce, the shoot actually took place under huge deadline pressure at 4 A.M. Gyllenhaal said it lent the whole experience an exhausted but “kind of magical, trippy feeling.” The scene was technically tricky: Candy is directing a porn cliché (a workman penetrating a housewife bent over a kitchen table) when she has what MacLaren called an “aha moment.” Since she is catering to male desire, Candy realizes that the camera should be seeing the action from the mans point of view. “We need [his] dick to take us in . . . If you start on her pussy, youve got no story!”

That meant MacLaren herself had to figure out where to place her cameras in order to capture this perspectival flip. “Maggie really becomes the character, and in the moment, shes very spontaneous,” MacLaren said. “Her reaction when shes watching it, and shes trying to figure out somethings not right . . . She looks just like I do when Im shooting a scene and I suddenly go, Oh, wait a minute—thats not the way to do the shot!”

Gyllenhaal admitted that playing Candy did actually lead her to start thinking like a director, and she took great inspiration from watching MacLaren—“her camera placement, the lenses, what it was that she was doing.” At one point, when Candy is directing novice actress Darlene (Dominique Fishback), she goes up and whispers a note in her ear—a method Gyllenhaal picked up from MacLaren. Since then, Gyllenhaal has been shadowing directors during some Season 2 episodes, and said shes adapting a book for a movie shed like to direct one day.

Wry meta-commentary also runs through the scene. When Harvey belatedly arrives on set and overhears Candy making sophisticated decisions about camera perspective, he marvels that her ideas could be straight out of Hitchcock/Truffaut, a collection of interviews between the two directors highly revered by cinephiles. In a sense, Harvey is intellectualizing and articulating the voyeuristic male gaze that Candy grasps intuitively, having catered to it her entire working life. She has no time for his “Hitchcock-Truffle” theories, though; she just wants to get on with the work. “Theyre having this very serious conversation about filmmaking, and, meanwhile, these people are in the background having sex,” said MacLaren. “I absolutely framed it that way because to [Candy and Harvey] . . . this is no big deal.” Its just their everyday life.

Nina K. Noble, an executive producer on the show, said that they learned to closely plan and choreograph any porn shoots depicted. “A lot of it is just being very structured and sort of methodical in the way we go about things. Were very open in the way that we discuss sex positions and body parts and all kinds of things,” she said. “We didnt want to shy away from the reality, but we also didnt want to be alluring at any point . . . in those porn scenes.”

Future episodes of The Deuce will be exploring what pornography might look like through a womans eyes, added Noble. Real-life porn directors, including the late Candida Royalle, inspired writers to explore that topic further. “The films that Candy is interested in doing are different from the films that the male directors are interested in,” Noble said. “Whether theres a market for that or not is another conversation, and something we explore further during Season 2.” She added that Candys own perspective as an artist and a person comes through in little ways, like how she treats her performers. At one point in the series, Candy orders food for her actors because, “She feels theyll perform better if they eat. Shes looking out for them.”

Earlier in the episode, before she takes charge of the porn shoot, Candy is sitting at the makeup mirror, trying to convince Darlene to take off her cartoonish wig and show herself to the camera. MacLaren found herself very moved by this intimate conversation between the two women, as people scurry around behind them. “Life is going on, and theyre making a choice that they probably would rather not have to choose,” she said, “but its the best of the options available.”

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