The Al Pacino movie that caused a protest on the streets of New York: “I didn’t understand their fear then, and I still don’t”
William Friedkin was a filmmaker who rarely pulled his punches. As much success as it brought him through classics, including The French Connection and The Exorcist, collaborating with Al Pacino on a neo-noir thriller ended up generating so much controversy that there were protests in the streets.
Inspired by Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel of the same name but taking plenty of artistic and creative licence with the source material, Cruising sends Pacino’s detective, Steve Burns, undercover to try and root out the identity of a killer. The criminal in question trawls New York City’s gay bars and clubs, looking for their next victim to murder in horrific circumstances.
As he navigates the culture, Burns finds himself becoming increasingly immersed in the world, all while trying to accomplish the task issued to him by his superiors in the face of the police department’s rampant homophobia. The subject matter was always going to be contentious, but an underwhelming box office run and Golden Raspberry Award nominations for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’ were the least of its concerns.
Almost from the second production began in 1979, New York City’s LGBTQ+ community voiced their constant and vocal opposition to Cruising. At one point, more than a thousand protesters marched through the streets of the East Village to try to convince the local authorities to withdraw their backing of the film. Due to the level of discontent, the production crew also ended up being barred from several establishments, including bars and businesses.
There were even repeated attempts to sabotage shooting, with protestors taking it upon themselves to ruin the lighting by shining mirrors from various vantage points, while whistles, air horns, and very loud music became commonplace within proximity to Cruising‘s on-location sequences. The disruption became such a recurring feature of the shoot that a lot of the audio and dialogue ended up being redubbed in post-production because so much noise had been made by external parties.
Friedkin knew that he was wading headlong into controversial waters, and not just because a Hollywood thriller about multiple LGBTQ+ individuals being murdered was going to be viewed as being staunchly anti-gay. There was also the latent homophobia of society at large that ensured there was going to be an outpouring of indignation from either side of the divide, with the filmmaker addressing the latter party’s concerns in an interview.
“I didn’t understand their fear then, and I still don’t. To me, it’s just a murder mystery, with the gay leather scene as a backdrop,” he maintained. “On another level, it’s about identity: do any of us really know who it is sitting next to us or looking back at us in the mirror? But the vitriol that the film was greeted with still confounds me. Yes, they can look at it as a film and not put it in a political context, which I never intended it to be. It never occurred to me that the film would be interpreted in a political context.”
The director was aware that “not everyone in so-called straight society accepted the gay lifestyle,” but he was also cognisant of the fact that “there was a split in the gay lifestyle” too, which placed him in an unwinnable position of sorts. Pacino also denied there was even an ounce of anti-gay sentiment in Cruising by explaining the content reflected “just a fragment of the gay community, the same way the Mafia is a fragment of Italian-American life” to relate it to his work in The Godfather, but the protests made it clear not everyone was buying into his opinion.
