Tuesday, December 19, 2006

My "Fuck Blockbuster!! Hello Netflix" selection of the day: "Overnight"

Despite how much we might not want to admit it but most of the time we turn our heads like the lemmings that we are and look at the end result of a car crash to see if there was any carnage, we might even want to see a bra brawl where some poor schmo is geting his ass kicked against our better judgment, well, "Overnight" is the best possible self-destruction I have ever witnessed in cinematic form. This documentary is about Troy Duffy, the dude who wrote and directed the cult classic "The Boondock Saints", and how he went from being a bartender in Los Angeles to selling his script to Miramax for three-hundred thousand bucks. Beside that, he was set to direct his flick with a 15 million dollar budget and his band, "The Brood", was to produce the soundtrack and get a contract from Maverick records for the trouble.(In the deal Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, was to buy the bar Duffy worked in and hire him to run it as part of the deal)

For a while everything is great, and even though Duffy comes off as an arrogant prick who is madly in love with his own voice, you can understand a person being full of themselves after pulling off such a coup. But before you know it the deal turns sour, Miramax puts the film in "turnaround", Duffy's calls are refused, and slowly what was once perceived as arrogance is now just him being an asshole who seems like he's on a suicide mission where his objective is to burn every bridge when it comes to his business relationships, friends, and family. The film is eventually made anyway, with a smaller company and for half the budget, but it eventually flops but becomes a cult classic on DVD.(Unfortunately for Duffy, he doesn't see any dough from those sales because of the deal that he signed.)

This documentary is just a cautionary tale about not pissing the wrong people off, because this footage was supposed to document the good times and the start of a brilliant career, but Duffy fucked over the two gentlemen who were filming it as well so I guess the best revenge for them was putting out one man's self destruction in DVD form. I must say, the final quote at the end of the documentary by Albert Goldman is quite fitting:

"No man is really changed by success. What happens is that success works on the man's personality like a truth drug, bringing him out of the closet and revealing...what was always inside his head."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

word...love this movie. There's nothing like watching someone circle the drain.....