{"id":251705,"date":"2026-06-02T01:50:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T01:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/251705\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T01:50:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T01:50:19","slug":"at-tribeca-a-new-look-at-an-80s-thriller-about-new-yorks-gay-underground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/251705\/","title":{"rendered":"At Tribeca, a New Look at an \u201980s Thriller About New York\u2019s Gay Underground"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the film \u201cCruising\u201d<\/a> opened on Feb. 15, 1980, almost nobody celebrated on Christopher Street, the gay enclave in the West Village.<\/p>\n

The film was a Hollywood thriller about the kind of gay men who had kinky sex at New York City S&M clubs like the Mineshaft<\/a> and the Anvil<\/a>. The director was William Friedkin, with \u201cThe French Connection,\u201d<\/a> \u201cThe Exorcist\u201d<\/a> and \u201cBoys in the Band,\u201d<\/a> a screen adaptation of a darkly camp play set during a gay birthday party, under his belt. It starred Al Pacino, an A-lister with multiple Oscar nominations, including for \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d<\/a> as a character who today might consider himself queer.<\/p>\n

\u201cCruising\u201d landed with an angry thud. Many gay men condemned its depiction of the city\u2019s leather community as a demimonde of violence and depravity. The film flopped at the box office and mostly received poor reviews; Vincent Canby, a critic for The New York Times, called it<\/a> a \u201chomosexual horror film.\u201d<\/p>\n

For people who loved Addison Verrill, a gay man whose murder<\/a> inspired \u201cCruising,\u201d it was a slap in the face.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s troubled legacy is the subject of\u201cMineshaft: The Cruising Murders,\u201d<\/a> a documentary that will debut<\/a> at the Tribeca Festival, which runs Wednesday through June 14.<\/p>\n

Schwarz, whose previous documentaries are mostly in a gay milieu \u2014 he profiled the actor Tab Hunter<\/a>, the drag maverick Divine<\/a> and the film historian Vito Russo<\/a> \u2014 said he spent almost 10 years making a movie about \u201cCruising\u201d because of his love-hate relationship with \u201cthis forbidden, creepy movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s this fascinating time capsule snapshot of New York and New York gay men at a very specific time that is long gone,\u201d said Schwarz, who was a 10-year-old in Bayside, Queens, when the film came out. \u201cI understand why people today still might find it icky, but I also love it.\u201d (\u201cCruising\u201d is available on several streaming platforms<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Pacino plays a straight New York City cop who goes undercover to investigate the grisly murders of gay men. The killing scenes still shock, not only because they are as graphic as anything at the grindhouse, but also because even 46 years later in the Grindr era when things feel safer, gay men still fear that a hookup can go horribly wrong.<\/p>\n

Many of the sexual situations looked straight out of an X-rated movie, and no wonder: Leathermen and gay porn stars were extras. By today\u2019s standards, though, \u201c\u2018Cruising\u2019 is a lot tamer than a lot of the stuff we see on \u2018American Horror Story,\u2019\u201d Schwarz said.<\/p>\n

More than a rewind, Schwarz\u2019s film is also an elegy for Verrill, a Variety reporter who was murdered<\/a> on Sept. 14, 1977, at his West Village apartment. His killing chilled gay New York, as did the still-unsolved deaths of six gay men<\/a> whose dismembered bodies were found in trash bags in the Hudson River around the same time.<\/p>\n

Eventually, Paul Bateson was convicted of killing Verrill, whom he had met earlier that night at the Mineshaft. (The film points out that in a macabre happenstance, Bateson is in a scene<\/a> with Linda Blair in \u201cThe Exorcist.\u201d) Bateson served 24 years in prison, and died in 2012.<\/p>\n

One of the people interviewed in \u201cMineshaft\u201d is Verrill\u2019s sister, Pamela Verrill Walker, who said she appreciated that Schwarz\u2019s film provided \u201ca much broader perspective\u201d on the making of \u201cCruising\u201d and on her brother\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

\u201cFriedkin attempted to monetize this sensational story about Addison\u2019s death but by doing so ignored the human tragedy for the gay community in general and for Addison\u2019s family and friends,\u201d Walker said. \u201cHe lost sight that a bright journalist with a loving family and a host of friends was murdered in a very tragic way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gay community had good reason to be suspicious of \u201cCruising.\u201d Outside of European cinema and the queer underground, by the time the film came out, Hollywood had mostly treated gay men as foppish monsters (\u201cThe Maltese Falcon\u201d)or killers (\u201cRope\u201d) or as prone to suicide (\u201cAdvise and Consent\u201d).<\/p>\n

Rage over \u201cCruising\u201d started to boil in 1979 after the screenplay was leaked to the gay Village Voice reporter Arthur Bell, who complained that<\/a> Friedkin was making what \u201cpromises to be the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen.\u201d Thousands of people protested<\/a>, disrupting Friedkin\u2019s location shoots in downtown Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Jim Hubbard, a filmmaker and gay rights activist, remembered protesters blocking traffic for dozens of Manhattan blocks. <\/p>\n

\u201cHollywood learned that it needed to present homosexuality and what we would now call queer culture in a more complex light,\u201d said Hubbard, whose Super 8 footage<\/a> of the protests is included in \u201cMineshaft.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the outrage, United Artists released the film, pleasing Friedkin but infuriating Pacino, who, according to Schwarz\u2019s film, was so angered by the finale\u2019s suggestion that his character might be a killer \u2014 an ending Pacino did not know was coming \u2014 that he refused to do any publicity. In his 2024 memoir<\/a>, Pacino called<\/a> \u201cCruising\u201d \u201cexploitative,\u201d and said he donated his pay from it to charities.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2026: \u201cCruising\u201d has \u201cto some degree been completely rehabilitated,\u201d said Eugenio Ercolani, a film historian and a co-author of a book<\/a> about the film. Among its fans are those who appreciate the film\u2019s unflinching look at New York\u2019s gay sexual underground, a microcosm that AIDS eventually decimated. In 1985, the Mineshaft was among the first gay venues that New York City shut down<\/a> as part of its AIDS prevention measures.<\/p>\n

Schwarz said he was hopeful that his documentary would further the already decades-long reappraisal that \u201cCruising\u201d has had, and deserves.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s still a terrifying movie,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re still talking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the film \u201cCruising\u201d opened on Feb. 15, 1980, almost nobody celebrated on Christopher Street, the gay enclave…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1591,98270,39960,98271,98266,64419,96033,81917,9,24,55,54,56,98267,98272,98273,98268,98269],"class_list":["post-251705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-actors-and-actresses","tag-addison","tag-al","tag-bateson","tag-cruising-movie","tag-documentary-films-and-programs","tag-homosexuality-and-bisexuality","tag-jeffrey","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-pacino","tag-paul-1940","tag-schwarz","tag-tribeca-film-festival-nyc","tag-verrill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}