The mélange of gay and straight male actors appearing in Mathews' and Franco's docu-fiction casually shoot the shit, check one another out ("Are you gay or straight?"), and speculate on whether they'll see Franco doing the dirty on the jobsite. Leather Bar., remembers that "during auditions it became clear that capturing real actor interactions with sex, gay sex, and cruising and the subsequent conversations they had about their varying levels of comfort was some of the most interesting material." Austinite Keith Wilson, who worked as cinematographer for Interior. takes as its starting point the lost 40 minutes of footage from Cruising, apocryphally thrown on the cutting room floor because of its pornographic content. Directed by Travis Mathews and James Franco (both of whom also appear in the film), Interior. Leather Bar., set to screen during this year's Polari film festival. Similar currents of desire – for stardom, for sex – flow forth during a lengthy conversation between a group of extras in the hourlong genre-bending 2013 featurette Interior. They participated in Cruising ostensibly because they dug kinky sex – and let's face it, the prospect of seeing Al Pacino in leathers, in "their" environment, might have been too delicious to pass up. And here's the rub: Many of these men were the patrons of these bars. Receiving special dispensation from the Screen Actors Guild, Friedkin secured the services of hundreds of (mostly) gay men who were paid $50 a day to appear as patrons in the very real leather bars Friedkin filmed in, bars such as the Ramrod and the Anvil.
Yet there was another group of gay men present for the filming of Cruising, a group no one really mentions – the extras.
#MOVIE SCENE GAY MEN CRUISING STRAIGHT GUY IN CAFE SERIES#
How could a narrative of an undercover cop, played by straight actor Al Pacino, solving a series of "bag murders" set within the gay S&M club scene say anything positive about contemporary gay life and culture? Fists were up: Protests on the film shoot were so vigorous that, according to Friedkin, Pacino "really freaked out during the making of the film.
It was the year that William Friedkin's Cruising was released to widespread critical derision, a film with the capacity to, in the words of its director, "scare middle-of-the-road gay activists." Gay activists in New York*, where Cruising was filmed, had a lot to be concerned about.