Mineshaft Doc Revisits 1977 Murder Behind Friedkin's Cruising
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- Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders, directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, premieres at Tribeca as a Spotlight Documentary (1 hr 24 mins; sales by Dan Braun) and frames the 1977 murder of Variety critic Addison Verrill — bashed with a cast-iron frying pan by Paul Bateson after a one-night stand — as a portal into pre-AIDS New York.
- Bateson turned out to be the real-life X-ray machine operator who played a small role in early hospital scenes of The Exorcist (1973); Friedkin recognized him after the arrest, an overlap Schwarz says awakened the documentarist in the director and shaped his approach to Cruising (1980).
- Schwarz presents quotes appearing to confirm that Friedkin partied at The Mineshaft in a jockstrap to prep the film, encouraged drinking and drug use on set, and filmed hardcore sequences — while Friedkin, who died in 2023, remained publicly hot-and-cold about the project.
- When the Cruising script leaked to the Village Voice, Christopher Street activists mounted the largest mobilization since Stonewall in 1969 — chanting "Hey-hey, ho-ho, that Cruising film has got to go" — and The Mineshaft revoked filming permission, forcing Friedkin to shoot at The Hellfire Club instead.
- The film's strongest stretch captures a pre-AIDS era when gay men really could simply disappear, with the looming epidemic eventually rendering the Cruising protests a footnote — a tragedy Schwarz returns to before circling back to Bateson, who was released from prison nearly a quarter-century after his conviction.
- Schwarz stops short of resolving whether Bateson killed anyone else or fully delivering on the fetish-as-fear thesis the film opens with, though a De Palma-style score by Makeup and Vanity Set signals he understands Friedkin's pulp intentions even if the original film itself "has never felt finished."
Why it matters: For queer cultural and film history, the documentary links a real 1977 murder to Friedkin's most reviled film and the largest pre-AIDS LGBTQ protest (rivaling Stonewall in scale), using newly surfaced Friedkin quotes to argue Cruising deserves reappraisal as a cultural relic. The Bateson-Exorcist crossover alone reframes Friedkin's auteur mythology around a real crime rather than the censorship battles that have long defined the film's legacy.
