William Friedkin comments on it??

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Fantastic find, Doctor_Penix!

Incredibly interesting anecdotes from Friedkin.

Can you imagine if Spielberg actually had ended up making the original Cruising after all?

And I hadn't known that Friedkin had been inspired to do the film by having met and interviewed a real serial killer who had preyed on victims met in New York's gay bars (or a gay bar)!

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Strange. Friedkin gives a somewhat different description of how he came to make Cruising in an interview published by Salon.com back in 2008.

In the more recent remarks he made during a Q&A session that is recorded in that youtube video Doctor_Penix linked to, Friedkin said:

It was 40 minutes of what you would call "pornography" that I shot because I was able to shoot it. The guys in the bars were friends of mine. And I used to hang out -- this particular bar was The Mineshaft, at 835 Little West 12th Street in New York.... [At that time] it was the Meatpacking District and there were the hardcore S&M clubs down there. And I happened to know a lot of the guys, and I actually knew the guys who owned the clubs, who were, they were in particular owned by a guy named Matty "The Horse" Ianello. And he was the head of two families -- the Genovese family and another Italian family. And he owned The Mineshaft. He controlled almost everything on the west side of New York, from top to bottom. And he was a friend of mine, and I liked him a lot. And I asked him if I could shoot in the clubs, and he said, "Why?" And I told him I had a story about some actual murders that had taken place....

And he goes on to say that he had become interested in the story based on a series of Village Voice articles on murders going on in the bars, along with his having actually met (and filmed!) a guy who eventually confessed to having committed some of the murders.

But in the Salon interview, he only mentions the Village Voice articles and the murderer he'd worked with. He says nothing about his relationship with the Godfather who owned the bars -- or the fact that he (Friedkin) was friends with and knew a lot of the guys who hung out in the bars. In fact, he instead says of Cruising:

But remember, it was always meant to be the background for a murder mystery. An exotic background — there weren’t too many people who knew about the existence of those bars. But it had nothing to do with “Boys in the Band” or my attitude about gay people. I had none.

http://www.salon.com/2008/11/24/friedkin/

Seems weird to on the one hand say that he was friends with a lot of the guys who hung out in the gay S&M bars, yet on the other to say that he had no opinion about gay people.

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