Overnight
See also:
Boondock Saints, The (Uncle Cliff)
Entertaining film. Fascinating story. Totally manipulative documentary.
Sure, all documentaries are stories skewered in some way, if by political bias, dodgy editing, lack of footage, a push to sensationalise things, or in this case, pure simple revenge. By turning their documentary into propaganda against their former friend and fellow filmmaker the documentary makers have incidentally added another interesting layer to this captivating Hollywood cautionary tale, but they have also annoyingly left out great chunks of the story in the pursuit to paint Boondock Saints director Troy Duffy as an idiot arsehole who fucked up a golden opportunity to make it in Hollywood because of his big mouth and out-of-control ego.
Not that they had to manipulate things too much to get that point across. Duffy is an arrogant delusional self-worshipping arsehole – which I'm sure is commonplace in Hollywoodland - but usually people wait until they actually do something before throwing their weight around. Duffy promotes himself as the second coming after getting an amazing (some would say stupid) deal from Harvey Weinstein that would take this blue-collar barman and give him a directing deal on his first film script as well as signing his band to do the soundtrack, AND buy his bar for him just for good measure. This deal goes straight to his head as he and his tight group of mates start drinking away their success and rubbing shoulders with Hollywood stars who come buzzing around the new hype on the block, but soon the tight group starts to disintegrate over money, power and work squabbles as Duffy disappears more and more up his own arse.
It's after a scene where we see the documentary makers – who were also Duffy's band's managers as far as I could tell – be screwed out of some cash that the film starts throwing some cheap shots at Duffy, one of the most blatant editing manipulations being where they inter-cut an interview with Duffy describing how he wanted to find a nice, intelligent girl with clips of him being a crude, drunk sexist yelling at girls to flash him their tits. It's just a little too easy to take shots like that when you're filming a guy who seems to be drunk most of the time – and kind of callous since the documentary makers are there also getting drunk off Duffy's dime – but the other side of the coin is that they didn't put those racist and sexist comments in Duffy's mouth, and most documentary makers would rub their hands with glee if their subject started sprouting such colourfully offensive comments as Duffy does.
It's a shame that after a while it does feels like we're skipping to outrageous footage of Duffy being a grade-one arsehole screwing his friends and talking about himself more than rappers drop their own names in their songs. Case in point is when the Duffy finally gets his film project off the ground, a pretty remarkable achievement considering his clash with Weinstein left him pretty much ostracised – how? No idea. The film doesn't go into it. Duffy obviously directed the Boondock Saints without incident, on time, and without his cast rebelling against his arrogance because they breezed through the potentially most interesting part of Duffy's story in a minute without any acknowledgement of how hard it would be for a first time director to execute such a film. I was expecting an absolute car-crash to take place once he stepped foot on set but we got nothing of the sort. Hell, I don't even know exactly how Duffy blew it in the first place. Sure he's a megalomaniac arsehole and it's hinted that he fucked up all his show-business relationships almost immediately but having read a lot about Harvey Weinstein and his brash brand of wheelin'n'dealin I could just as easily leave with the impression that Duffy simply got screwed over by a bigger megalomaniac than himself.
Even though they were part of Duffy's inner-circle and thus in an advantageous position to make a documentary on their friend, the directors should have cut themselves out of the film if they wanted at all to appear balanced in the least, but it seems they were more inclined to get their faces on camera whenever possible, faking their friendship with Duffy long after things soured so they could keep on shooting their film and exploit the shit out of him once things predictably went to shit. It still makes for a fascinating fucking film, just not the film I thought I was going to get.