Director William Friedkin's controversial 1980 film Cruising, about a cop
(played by Al Pacino) who goes undercover in New York's gay underground, is currently seeing a one-week limited theatrical run. This will lead to its debut DVD release September 18, and Friedkin--bravely, considering the heat he took from the gay community first time around--re-introduced the film for a screening at the Castro Theater in San Francisco's Castro District. (Also known as Eureka Park, the enclave was estimated to be 95 percent gay by a census-based UCLA study).

Shot in New York locations that included legendary clubs the Mine Shaft, the Anvil and Ramrod, the picture was attacked even as it was being made for its lurid representation of the leather subculture, as woven into a murder mystery. One San Francisco activist called it a genocidal portrayal, and the Village Voice's Arthur Bell would brag, "I put out a contract on Friedkin's movie".

As covered by the San Francisco Chronicle's Edward Guthman, the appearance (at which Friedkin's wife Sherry Lansing was present) was a mixed success:

Friedkin, 72, was at the Castro Theatre last week for an invitational sneak preview of "Cruising." In the lobby, half a dozen security guards stood sentry, a safeguard against the possibility of newly revived hostilities...I "I didn't set out to upset people," Friedkin said, before his provocative, often ridiculous and occasionally erotic movie unspooled. "I set out to make a film set in a milieu I had never seen depicted."

Guthman detailed the events around the February, 1980, debut:

In the weeks leading up to the premiere, gay demonstrators assembled in San Francisco at the Transamerica Pyramid to pressure the Transamerica Corp., the parent organization of United Artists, to halt release of the film.

At the Ghirardelli Cinema, where the movie was set to open, vandals spray-painted "Stop KKKruising" and "Stop Killer Movie," prompting General Cinema Corp., the theater chain that owned the Ghirardelli, to cancel the scheduled run of the film. The movie was rebooked at the St. Francis Theater, a seedy grind house on the fringes of the Tenderloin, close to a male-prostitute pickup site...two weeks later, [then Mayor, now Senator Dianne] Feinstein sent United Artists a bill for $130,450 for extra police protection necessitated by the arrival of "Cruising."

"Cruising" arrived in a blaze, then petered out. New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it "hopelessly garbled ... an anti-climax." Stuart Byron, a Village Voice columnist who reported on Hollywood's financial side, called it a "ten-day wonder" [at $19 million] at the box office.

Friedkin didn't do himself any favors in defending "Cruising" last week at the Castro. When he shot the film in the summer of 1979, he said, he was conscious of the specter of "mysterious deaths which later proved to be AIDS." Were that true, "Cruising" might be defended retrospectively as a cautionary tale about indiscriminate sex.

But Friedkin's math is way off.

It was another two years before The Chronicle reported on "a pneumonia that strikes gay males" (June 6, 1981) and the Washington Post described a "medical mystery that appears to be on the scale of the toxic shock syndrome or Legionnaire's disease" (Aug. 30, 1981). Those were the first alarms in an epidemic that "Cruising" couldn't have anticipated.

Meanwhile, a universe away in L.A.'s Bel Air, former Paramount chief Lansing and transgressive filmaking specialist Friedkin have sued ADT Home Security for a slow response (an alleged hour and 45 minutes) to a burglary last winter in their home.
Part of a recent wave of heists in L.A.'s pricier neighborhoods, they joined victims Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and Duran Duran's John Taylor and wife Gela Nash-Taylor of Juicy Couture as burglary victims. They'd been promised 24-hour patrols with a response time in minutes when they paid $25,000 for a "top of the line" system.