In the comments of "The Long, Dark Process of Creating HBO's 'The Night Of,'" a commenter asserted that HBO's "The Deuce," David Simon's in-production series on porn in 1970's New York City starring James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal, "began" as a show I pitched to HBO.
This is an amusing idea, but, as far as I know, not the case. Last year, I wrote about a series that I'd pitched as a potential HBO project to Stephen Levinson by way of Ari Emanuel several years ago, which I described as a "21st century 'Boogie Nights,'" but, as I stated in the post, "[I]t never went anywhere."
Still, this random reinventing of the story is amusing, although, you know, incorrect. It's too bad, though, that my idea has yet to see the light of day. I look forward to seeing Simon's show, but everybody knows that men can't write about porn--not honestly, anyway. Their dicks get in the way. Only women get how it really works.
In any case, here's the incorrect comment that the commenter commented on The A.V. Club:
The show began as Susannah Breslin pitching HBO a 'porn drama . . . akin to a 21st century “Boogie Nights”' that got tabled once James Franco was pulled into the discussion and started talking about the show HE wanted to make.
I'm glad Simon is working on this now but there was pretty much nobody more qualified to tell such a story than Breslin, and it sucks that her spin got rejected in favor of the more commercial one. She would have made something more disgusting, depressing and unique (and the fact that the story is set in the 70s and based on real life just means people will throw even more criticisms at it for ripping off Boogie Nights. )
Support the arts! Buy a digital copy of THE TUMOR, a "masterpiece of short fiction" by me, Susannah Breslin.
