Cruising

That...

Cruising, pretty humorless movie.

Hardcore has some funny little moments

in it.

I don't think that Cruising needs to have a sense of humor at all, but that is something that I think makes it even more almost frankly... yeah or just inaccessible that it's just so like robotic in a way and it's like things just kind of happen i mean i described it as and we're just gonna we shouldn't take too much we're gonna not have anything to say when we get there yeah uh but uh it felt like a movie that just sleepwalked and uh yes and that's both in good and bad ways because i kind of like that about it in its own way but also it's like yeah it just kind of just lumbered around and nothing It really happened.

So,

Levi and I are teaching again.

What he discovers will change his life forever.

He was in 48 Hours.

He was in Cruising.

He was in a bunch of movies.

But I think, you know, it was his connection with Walter Hill.

But yeah, he was a straight up serial killer.

And then he also inspired the movie called The Cruising, which is a 1980 movie that was written by Friedkin as well.

And then he was portrayed in...

The hell is it? Mindhunter.

And the following year, his character was brought back as an undercover detective on an episode that served as a pilot for a spin-off show that didn't get picked up.

Before this, Davis had been in Roger Vadim's erotic thriller Night Games, and he played a leather-clad cross-dresser who gets harassed by police officer Joe Spinell in William Friedkin's Cruising.

Bronson's actress wife Jill Ireland was at the Ten to Midnight casting sessions.

She was impressed with Davis' audition and was influential in convincing director J. Lee Thompson to cast him as Warren.

And it sounds like a very fascinating movie, but the problem with it is that Paul Schrader has no idea, no understanding about gay culture.

I think that he saw William Friedkin's 1981 movie Cruising and said, OK, I get it.

And then he's still in that movie now.

And so that's very much what the representation of gay life is.

It remains unclear to this day who these body parts belonged to, but clothing found in the bags was a match for clothing that had been sold at a local shop popular with gay men.

The Bag Murders and the murder of Addison Verrill directly inspired director William Friedkin to make the 1980 crime thriller Cruising.

In the film, Al Pacino plays a New York cop who goes undercover in the city's leather and S&M clubs in order to catch a serial killer who is targeting gay men.

But when it was released in theaters, Cruising was not lovingly received by the gay community.

In fact, it was thoroughly denounced as trashy and exploitative.

There was real concern that the film painted a picture of gay men and gay clubs as ultra-violent and immoral, thus adding to the destructive stigma.

And while Paul Bateson was only one man, while there weren't serial killers stalking gay clubs, it was nonetheless impossible at the time to see the real killer that would soon infiltrate places like Freddie Mercury's beloved Mineshaft.

[upbeat music] The month that Cruising was released, February 1980, Freddie Mercury was not in New York.