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The Boondock Saints and Overnight: Troy Duffy’s Career as Cautionary Tale
1,638 words
In light of the recent Dublin riots, I thought I would write something Irish-themed and settled on Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints, a cult Tarantino knockoff movie from 1999 with Irish-Catholic themes. In the process of researching this I discovered the documentary Overnight about the making of the film — which is actually a far more interesting movie in itself. You can watch it here.
The history of Hollywood is that of a power struggle between producers and directors. Most of the time, producers are in ascendant, but the problem with producers is that they are risk-averse and like making movies that are similar to other movies that were successful. Then one day, some auteur director will come along and make a highly original movie on a shoestring budget that becomes a massive success. The producers will see this and decide that perhaps directors should be given more freedom, and will try just giving some more adventurous ones some money and let them do whatever they want. An example of this is the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, which kicked off the New Hollywood movement.
Once there has been a string of successful films by auteur directors, the producers will see what they could do on a shoestring budget, and wonder about what they could do with bigger budgets. This is how films such as The Godfather and Taxi Driver came about. But what will inevitably happen is that some auteur directors will become megalomaniacs, go massively overbudget, and turn in some unwatchable piece of garbage that nearly bankrupts the studio — which necessitates the producers stepping in and taking control back. An example of this would be Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s 1980 follow-up to The Deer Hunter — which killed the New Hollywood movement and destroyed United Artists, a studio that had been around since the silent era. This cycle has played out a few times in Hollywood’s history.
After the runaway success of Quentin Tarantino’s first two films, Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), the 1990s were a director’s decade. It is a cliché to describe someone as “often imitated but never duplicated,” but this is undeniably true in the case of Tarantino. In the years following Pulp Fiction, Hollywood churned out a slew of Tarantino-esque “guns & gangsters” movies that had all the Tarantino trademarks: offbeat characters; edgy humor; aesthetic violence; witty, street-smart dialogue; and multiple, interconnecting storylines, often told in non-chronological order. Suicide Kings, Go, Thing’s to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, and Phoenix were but a few. Guy Ritchie of Sherlock Holmes and Man from U.N.C.L.E fame originally rose to prominence as “the British Tarantino” after the release of his classic 1998 cockney gangster film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels — in my opinion, the only Tarantino knockoff to give Pulp Fiction a run for its money. Most of these films are now completely forgotten, but some went on to become cult classics in their own their own right.
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In 1997, 24-year-old Troy Duffy was being heavily hyped in the entertainment press as “the next Tarantino” after his script for what would become The Boondock Saints became involved in a bidding war between studios. Duffy came from a similar background as Tarantino: Tarantino had started out with minimal connections in the movie industry, had not attended film school, and was famously working at a video rental store when Reservoir Dogs was picked up; Duffy likewise had minimal connections, had not attended attend film school, and was working as a bar bouncer when he wrote The Boondock Saints.
The bidding war for the script was ultimately won by Harvey Weinstein, whose Miramax had just swept the Oscars. Weinstein made Duffy a dream offer: He was to get $300,000 for the script, $150,000 to direct it, and a $15 million budget for the film itself. To top it off, Duffy’s unsigned band, The Brood, was hired to provide the soundtrack, and Weinstein agreed to purchase the bar where Duffy worked and allow him to run the place. The hype around Duffy was so intense at the time that Madonna’s Maverick Records, which was then riding high after cutting the biggest-selling album of the 1990s, Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, offered Duffy’s band a record contract, sight unseen. The band did not even have a demo tape.
With the entire world being laid at Duffy’s feet, his band’s manager, Tony Montana (no relation), started following Duffy around with a camera in order make a documentary about Duffy’s meteoric rise to stardom. This film would eventually become 2003’s Overnight, and instead of documenting Duffy’s unfolding Cinderella story, it is a fascinating character study of a delusionally egotistical and narcissistic sociopath who psychotically burns bridges and squanders opportunity after opportunity at an alarming rate.
Immediately after signing his deal with Weinstein, Duffy became impatient that the movie was taking too long to go into production, so he started making threats and accusations against high-powered movie executives in the hope of speeding up the process. Within a year, Duffy was dropped by Weinstein and essentially blacklisted from Hollywood. Duffy tried going back to the other studios who had previously bid on his script, but by then Duffy’s outrageous behavior was well known, and they all passed. Maverick Records also withdrew their record deal with Duffy’s band.
One suspects that part of the problem was that Troy Duffy did not sufficiently “pay his dues.” Had he, like most first-time screenwriters, spent years toiling in frustrating obscurity, receiving rejection after rejection, before landing his big payday, he might have had more appreciation for the opportunity that was being handed to him. Instead, he scored the movie industry’s equivalent of a “hole in one” by landing a big deal on his first try with very little effort, not to mention receiving the praise of various A-list celebrities who initially clamored to be in his film. All this left Duffy with a delusional sense that he had been touched by the hand of God. But as things turned out, the sight of a man power-tripping as though he is a five-time Academy Award winner when all he had done was written a script that was well-received is a sight to behold.
Franchise Pictures eventually offered to fund The Boondock Saints with half the budget that Weinstein had offered; his band, The Brood, got another record deal from Atlantic. But even once The Boondock Saints was completed, Weinstein’s blacklisting made finding a distributor impossible, even after the film was screened at Cannes. As for the record deal, once in the studio Duffy engaged in a power struggle with the producers, refusing to follow their directions. The album bombed spectacularly: only 690 copies were sold.
By some miracle, Blockbuster Video saved the day by agreeing to take The Boondock Saints on and promote it as a Blockbuster exclusive.
As for the film itself, it is about two Catholic Irish-from-Ireland brothers, Connor and Murphy MacManus, who are living in Boston. After they kill two Russian mobsters in self-defense, the brothers have a religious epiphany that it is their holy mission to rid the world of evil as vigilantes. The two set about tracking down and murdering gangsters from Boston’s Russian and Italian mafias. They are soon joined by a third member, Rocco, who was a low-level errand boy for the Italian mafia until his bosses attempted to kill him by sending him on a suicide mission. All the while, they are pursued by a gay — yet ironically homophobic — FBI master detective played by Willem Dafoe, whose performance makes The Boondock Saints worth the price of admission alone.
The film could fairly be described as Irishsploitation, as it is full of Irish Catholic imagery: lots of religious choral music and closeup shots of Celtic crosses at pivotal points. One rainy night, the ceiling of their squat starts leaking; the water falling on their heads is meant to be a metaphor for baptism as the brothers awake to the newfound realization that they have been given a mission from God.
It’s not a bad movie, although Tarantino’s influence is obvious and at times — painfully so. The vigilante brothers recite a family Catholic prayer before executing their targets in a manner similar to how Samuel L. Jackson as hit man Jules Winnfield recites a biblical passage before dispatching his luckless victims in Pulp Fiction. There is another scene in Boondock Saints where a cat is accidentally shot out of nowhere, which recalls the scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta as Vincent Vega unexpectedly shoots a backseat passage while they are driving down the highway. The Boondock Saints also lift’s Tarantino’s trademark non-chronological storytelling.
To be fair, The Boondock Saints went on to become a “bro” cult classic, and so Troy Duffy’s delusional self-confidence was not without some merit. As deplorable of a human being as he is, he is not without a degree of talent. As flawed as it is, The Boondock Saints is probably a better movie than anything I could have come up with when I was 24, and one wonders what might have been had Troy Duffy not alienated literally every studio in Hollywood. As it was, Duffy only directed one other film: a sequel called The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, which came and went with little fanfare.
The lesson here is that talent on its own is never enough. As talented as Troy Duffy may have been, he was ultimately brought down by the people he screwed over. If Weinstein’s blacklisting was not enough of a death sentence in itself, Duffy’s former friend and manager, Tony Montana, who had supported Duffy from the beginning, delivered the kill shot with this utterly devastating documentary, Overnight, which annihilated Duffy’s reputation.
