Cruising Redux

So...back in the early 80s, William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist, etc.) directed a film called Cruising where Al Pacino plays a cop who goes undercover in the gay S&M scene to track down a serial killer. As this film was released in a post-Stonewall world enlightened by the lectures of the legendary Vito Russo, gay rights groups were up in arms over the fact that this film was yet another example of Hollywood demonizing homosexuality by associating it with deviance, violence and evil. Though Friedkin began his career with the film adaptation of the legendary gay play The Boys in the Band, some activists went so far as to ruin takes by creating loud noises while the film was shooting on public streets. When the film was completed, forty minutes of graphic S&M action had to be removed in order to secure an R rating. Apparently that footage has been lost to the ages. Or so we thought...

A lot has changed in thirty years and now Cruising has come to be seen as a sort of anthropological document of a time and place that no longer exists. And so, James Franco (yes THAT James Franco) and Travis Mathews have gone to great effort to recreate/reimagine that lost footage. A documentary of their effort  (which also seems to deal with some of the original film's exploration of the line between voyeurism and participation) will be premiering this coming January at Sundance. Check out the vaguely NSFW trailer after the cut...