New Doc Looks Behind William Friedkin’s Infamous Queer Slasher Film Cruising

Queer doc filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz looks behind the strange history of how Cruising got made in his new doc, Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders.

By Kilian Melloy

Endless controversy has accompanied William Friedkin’s 1980 queer slasher flick Cruising, a thriller that purported to peer into the secret recesses of the gay leather community by following an undercover cop, played by Al Pacino, as he plumbed dark depths of depravity looking for a serial killer. The film trotted out every fixation in the disapproving homophobe’s playbook: Back rooms! Slings! Fisting! Open air sex in public spaces! And, of course, knife-wielding maniacs declaiming “You made me do this!” as arterial blood spurted and victims writhed in terror against their bonds.

The movie is laughably bad — even Friedkin allowed that it’s not his best work — but the way the film’s critics in the LGTBQ+ community saw it, that was beside the point. The movie, they argued, harmed the queer community because of the way it seemed to suggest that danger and violence permeate queer sexuality. Friedkin and the film’s defenders took the opposite stance, claiming that the movie would generate understanding and sympathy. Perhaps to that end, there is a likeable gay dude named Ted (Don Scardino) in the movie who befriends Pacino’s character and acts as his guide in the queer demimonde. That “nice gay,” of course, ends up being slaughtered; so much for steering away from stereotypes.

The movie was a box office flop and should simply have faded from memory, yet here we are forty-six years later still debating it. Jeffrey Schwarz’s (Tab Hunter Confidential) documentary Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders unpeels the strange history of how the movie got made, revealing where Friedkin got the idea to make the film and how he essentially captured gay porn on film in the course of making the movie.

New York in the mid-1970s saw a rash of slayings called the “bag murders” in which gay male victims were murdered, their remains chopped up, stuffed into garbage bags, and disposed of in the Hudson River. The dismemberings prompted speculation that the perpetrator may have had some medial training, not unlike conjectures around the motives and identity of Jack the Ripper still focus on the way the notorious London killer’s victims were skillfully dispatched. Unease around the killings found a lightning rod in the killing of Village Voice reporter Addison Verrill, who was murdered in his apartment in 1977 after spending the night with a man named Paul Bateson. Verrill had been spotted at gay bar Mineshaft the night before; could that club, and others, be the stalking ground of a coldly calculating killer?

In the case of Verrill’s murder, little seemed calculated. He had been bludgeoned with a skillet and then stabbed. The killer stole money and a credit card. A caller claiming to be the killer contacted Village Voice reporter Arthur Bell and shared credible-sounding details of the crime. It didn’t take the police long to close in on Bateson, who had struggled with substance abuse and who gave at least two accounts of what had happened: In one, he had no recollection; in the other, he was driven by a compulsion not to let the encounter be fleeting in nature. Police considered Bateson a possible perp in the bag murders but never found any evidence to substantiate their suspicions. Bateson was tried and convicted of Verrill’s murder and sentenced to two decades to life in prison, eventually doing more than two dozen years in lockup.

But here’s where things get truly strange: Bateson had had a small role in Friedkin’s movie The Exorcist while employed as a radiological technologist; he appears in the scene in which Linda Blair’s character undergoes a procedure that involves opening an artery. Reading of the crime, Friedkin paid Bateson a jailhouse visit at Rikers Island. That conversation inspired Freidkin to adapt the novel Cruising, by Gerald Walker. Some of the footage Friedkin took for the movie was captured at Mineshaft — though the principle photography was beset by angry protestors, who, alerted to the movie by Bell and fearing an exploitative hatchet job, set out to disrupt the production. In another development, Friedkin, in his research, turned to former police detective Randy Jurgensen, who, like the protagonist of the novel and film, had been a real-life undercover cop who had been assigned to pretend to patronize gay clubs in an attempt to identify the perpetrator of the bag murders.

The documentary makes the entire complicated affair seem like something a screenwriter might have come up with from whole cloth, but in an added twist Freidkin, struck mid-production by what he thought was an interesting inspiration, edited the film in such a way that Pacino’s character is implied to have been the killer he was supposed to be pursuing — a twist that, the doc tells us, Pacino saw as a “betrayal.”

The doc compares Cruising to another Friedkin film — the original The Boys in the Band, which also provoked controversy — and its focus becomes the anger the production sparked in New York’s gay residents (despite the number of gay extras who participated). As a glimpse at the origin and production of a notorious movie, Mineshaft does its job admirably, bringing a number of people with firsthand memories of the movie’s making before Schwarz’s camera (not to mention Hollywood biographer Nat Segaloff, author of Hurricane Billy, a Friedkin bio).

In the end, Mineshaft feels like an investigation in its own right, laying out evidence and meticulously explaining sequences of events. Still, mysteries persist; for some things there simply may be no answers.

“Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders” will have its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival on Saturday, June 6, with public screenings to follow on June 7 and 8. The film is also an official selection of Frameline 50 in San Francisco. It will also be screened at the Provincetown International Fllm Festival on June 12 and 13.