What appeals to me in The Deuce is some of the same things that made me interested in The Wire, which is there seems to be a theme here around markets and capitalism and labour. This is a moment, 1971, of something that was under the counter: then brown paper bags suddenly became legal, pornography. And it was really the birth of an industry which is now a multi-billion dollar American standard. And these people were the pioneers at a moment where there really were no rules, then suddenly there was a legal industry that was allowed to exist.
David SimonThat's what we were interested in: how power and money ran itself, much more so than 'drugs are bad, drugs are good.' That seems to me a simple moral equation and one you don't have to spend 60 hours of television examining. And I think the same thing is true with how we approached pornography or prostitution. Prostitution's been around since the Bible, and pornography's been around since about 15 minutes after the French guy invented the first camera.
David SimonI'm making a lot of money. I should be paying a lot more taxes. I'm not paying taxes at a rate that is even close to what people were paying under Eisenhower. Do people think America wasn't ascendant and wasn't an upwardly mobile society under Eisenhower in the '50s? Nobody was looking at the country then and thinking to themselves, "We're taxing ourselves into oblivion." Yet there isn't a politician with balls enough to tell that truth because the whole system has been muddied by the rich. It's been purchased.
David SimonIn the wake of Katrina, what you're witnessing and what we are very careful to depict is a form of patriotism.
David SimonI don't consider myself to be a crusader of any sort. I was bystander to a certain number of newspaper crusades. They end badly, in terms of being either fraudulent or by inspiring legislations that makes things worse. So, I regard myself as someone coming to the campfire with the truest possible narrative he can acquire.
David SimonWith more than 80 percent of Americans living in metropolitan areas, there are still demagogues who want to run down the idea of multiculturalism, of urbanity, being the only future we have. We either live or die based on how we live in cities, and our society is either going to be great or not based on how we perform as creatures of the city.
David Simon