Bonus video! So the director of THE EXCORCIST walks into a gay leather bar...
It's 1978 and director William Friedkin needs to do a little research, so he strips down to a jockstrap and walks into The Ramrod with a friend who's carrying a concealed revolver. In this week's bonus video, I have the weird story of how Friedkin found himself nearly nude and surrounded by orgiastic queer pleasures in New York's meatpacking district.
Plus! Some tantalizing details about a background actor who appears in the movie Cruising for approximately one second, and whose career touches on everything from Mame to adult films.
Backup link in case the video embed doesn't work: https://youtu.be/6r285iRFouc
Comments (11)
Fantastic topic! Cruising is a mess of a movie, but a fascinating one. I don’t know how you can possibly fit this into the video, but Friedkin directed the EPIC video to Self Esteem by Laura Brannigan. That video is bonkers and well worth a watch. I assume you’re gonna talk about James Franco’s Interior Leather Bar? I still don’t know why that vanity project exists but it does! I read the Cruising book years ago and I remember thinking it was okay. The only scene I truly remember is the lead character looking at his butt in the mirror and wondering why gay men would find it attractive.
You know, I'm not planning to touch on the Franco project in the main video, but I think it'll make a good bonus video.
BDSM is a fascinating sub-culture both within Straight and Queer communities and while most people think it all has to do with pain, it's actually much more tied to willful submission and assuming of power. I'm sure it can be a pretty heady experience to completely submit everything about yourself to another person for a time, and just as intoxicating an experience to accept that power over another person. It's not something that I would ever be brave enough to do though, I have problems trusting someone else to pick up my lunch order, let alone trusting someone to tie me up. There is a much higher percentage of people who have at least dabbled in this type of play than I think most other people realize though. I get why Friedkin was shocked walking into a gay leather bar and just seeing all manner of gay BDSM play at once, but if he had been able to honestly question all of his straight family, friends and acquaintances, I'm sure he would have just as surprised how many of them enjoy some light bondage or a not so light spanking within their own bedrooms....
I'm very much into the BDSM scene as well as the fetish and cruise bar scenes, and it's definitely all things where a *lot* more people are into it than you think. To be honest, the stuff he describes in that memoir bit that Matt read out is still relatively tame in what can go on, but it's still bizarre when you first go to these places in the modern day, let alone what it must have been like in the 70s when there was way less exposure of these things. So I'm not surprised it shocked him. Submission is definitely an interesting type of psychological play, and it does require a tonne of trust. Unfortunately a lot of people are way too trusting which leads to bad situations, and there's way too many people who say they know what they're doing, but then does everything in a really unsafe way. I can only imagine how much unsafe stuff was happening behind closed doors back then for people who weren't a part of the various BDSM scenes.
I love your work! I am curious, though. YouTube still has a say if you are doing Patreon-only content? What about Vimeo.
Unfortunately Vimeo doesn't work with Patreon anymore! (We went through a whole migration awhile back to get everything off Vimeo and onto YouTube.) Patreon just started allowing video uploads, so I'm going to look into that for the future -- Patreon's content policies might be restrictive as well.
I don't know what kind of a person William Friedkin was IRL, and I kind of don't want to know because I love hearing him spill the tea so much. Like you said, it doesn't even matter if half the stuff he said was made-up, he was so hilarious and entertaining (and he didn't hold back about actors he didn't like). My favorite clip is him talking about Tommy Lee Jones & Benicio Del Toro, and their different "approaches" toward portraying a character: https://youtu.be/G8pXQUPBh7A?si=O9121qzzpAR9XDWL
You need to add two more on screen corrections at 4:45 and 4:50 where you refer to Kurt as Justin lol. I saw 'Cruising' in the theater with friends and at one violent point my friend literally started to hyperventilate and had to leave. If I recall, it seemed like Friedkin seemed to be trying to create the gay kink version of 'Looking For Mr. Goodbar' after its commercial success. I didn't find the movie to be very good. It seemed to me like the protests and backlash were not because the movie was inaccurate but because it showed a side of queer culture that was outside the mainstream and could set back the social gains that were starting to be made. That it would support the arguments that all gays are perverts.
Oh my God even after I clarified that there's probably no relation I kept mixing them up
Great video, Matt. I've long been fascinated by Cruising and watched much content about the film and its production including your videos. However, I've never actually seen the film! I have a feeling it could be a bit of a letdown after all the hours of critiques I've consumed over the years
I do think it's at least an INTERESTING film, in part because the performances are legitimately really great. But I wouldn't say it's a spellbinder like The Exorcist.