“Kinks are eroticized fears,” says author Dan Savage in this fascinating documentary, which takes a brutal murder as its starting point and goes on to paint a portrait of pre-Aids New York, with the filming of William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) as its backdrop. Not all Friedkin’s films hit the zeitgeist in the way that his signature film The Exorcist did just a few years previously, but, certainly, none were as reviled as Cruising. Though he doesn’t really follow through with it, director Jeffrey Schwartz makes a case for that film maudit’s reappraisal, perhaps more as a cultural relic than for its artistic content.

The inciting incident that starts the film is the 1977 slaughter of Variety film critic Addison Verrill, found murdered in his apartment by Paul Bateson after a one-night stand. Like many gay men at the time, Verrill was sailing close to the wind with his sexual encounters, much to the dismay of his partner at the time. One of his many stops was the gay S&M fetish club The Mineshaft, which lay behind a darkly nondescript door in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, another was the nearby truck stop where early-morning orgies took place in near-darkness. The danger was almost part of the thrill.

Almost, because, until a number of dismembered body parts were discovered floating in the nearby Hudson, The Mineshaft was deemed seedy but somehow safe. When Verrill was found, his head bashed in with a cast-iron frying pan, Manhattanites wondered if there was a pattern forming here, and that a serial killer was taking advantage of the anonymity afforded by gay street culture, with its emphasis on casual sex and uniform clothing (leather and Levis).

Verrill was not (it seems) the victim of a serial killer but a tormented alcoholic, a subject that Schwartz returns to in the film’s unexpected final stretch. But Bateson’s arrest and conviction influenced Friedkin in a wholly unexpected way: The director recognized him as the real-life X-ray machine operator who ended up playing a small part in The Exorcist’s early hospital scenes. The documentarist in Friedkin was awoken — the man who once climbed into a lion’s cage with a camera, six months before it tore its owner’s shoulder off.

Friedkin is no longer with us and was known to blow hot and cold on the rumors about Cruising, but Schwartz has the goods here, with quotes that appear to confirm reports that the director partied at the Mineshaft in a jockstrap to prep the film, encouraged drinking and drug-taking, and filmed hardcore scenes during the shoot. Friedkin’s intentions, however, do remain vague, which perhaps explains why the film has never felt finished, why star Al Pacino effectively walked away, and why the “twist” ending still packs a punch.

None of these matters were uppermost in the minds of Manhattanites at the time, however; once the script was leaked to the Village Voice, the Christopher Street natives mobilized in a way not seen since Stonewall in 1969. Believing the film to be exploitative and dehumanizing, protestors took to the streets with drums, whistles and chants — “Hey-hey, ho-ho, that Cruising film has got to go” — and, after pressure from its clientele, The Mineshaft withdrew permission to film there (Friedkin used The Hellfire Club instead).

This middle section of the film is its strongest section; like Rachel Mason’s recent doc My Brother’s Killer, it portrays an important time, not just within gay culture but in big-city life, when marginalized people really could just disappear. The great tragedy of Schwartz’s film is, of course, the looming specter of the Aids epidemic, which made the perceived outrage of Cruising fade into nothing, although it at least prepared New York for the disaster that was about to hit it. Schwartz, however, doesn’t end there, returning to the curious story of Paul Bateson, who was released from prison nearly a quarter of a century later.

Like Cruising, Bateson’s story leaves a lot of questions unanswered (were there other murders?), as does this documentary, which seems to show a perverse nostalgia for the pre-Giuliani years of New York nightlife. It also doesn’t quite address the connection set out at the beginning between fetish and fear, although the pulsating, Brian De Palma-like score by Makeup and Vanity Set suggests that Schwartz know very well what Friedkin was trying to do.  

That’s a subject explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s new feature film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but it’s probably to his credit that the director ditches the theory to return to the murders that started it all; there’s a big f*cking difference between experiencing the frisson of covering the waterfront for some late-night “taboo” sex and turning up headless in the Hudson River.

Title: Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders
Festival: Tribeca (Spotlight Documentary)
Director: Jeffrey Schwartz
US Sales: Dan Braun
Running time: 1 hr 24 mins