Anyone remember Cruising? The William Friedkin-directed, Al Pacino-starring murder mystery set in New York City's gay S/M bar scene circa 1979?
Turns out the movie had a lot more gay sex action than we ever saw, largely because the Motion Picture Assn. of America (MPAA) forced Friedkin to cut about 40 minutes of it in order to change the movie's rating from X to R—and now actor/writer/director James Franco has teamed with gay art-porn director Travis Mathews to recreate that lost footage.
Franco wanted to update [Cruising], but he couldn't get the right," reported. Bryce J. Renninger for Vulture.com. "As Mathews' gay art porn/drama I Want Your Love was getting press attention, Franco's people emailed Mathews to ask him to talk about the film. Within 24 hours, they were talking."
"He knew he wanted real gay sex in it," [Mathews] said. "His people went looking for a filmmaker who had filmed real gay sex, and I suspect someone who would complement his vision. We talked about why we would be interested in still looking at this film. We talked about his interest in the film and his interest more broadly in so many gay-themed stories and visionaries. He's worked with so many in front of and behind the cameras over the years."
In the Vulture article, Mathews noted that Friedkin had wanted to release a 30th anniversary edition of the film with the cut footage restored, but Warner Bros. told him that the excised material had been destroyed, and Mathews speculated, "It's possible those 40 minutes implicate Pacino's character in the gay S&M culture. That was the place we started from as a launching point: James Franco's version of those lost 40 minutes. ... If you forget about [Cruising's] whole murder mystery backstory and you just look at the bar scenes, I think it's quite an insightful, important document of an important subculture, right before AIDS hits,
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