It's the ultimate Cinderella Story: A young, first-time screenwriter working as a bouncer in Los Angeles gets the opportunity of a lifetime when Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Studios buys his script, gives him a hefty advance, lets his band record the film's soundtrack and promises his new discovery co-ownership of the bar he works at.
Well, as the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. This is the story of Troy Duffy, writer and director of the cult hit "The Boondock Saints" as told by two of his friends in the documentary "Overnight," which recounts Duffy's meteoric rise and spectacularly depressing fall. The documentary is surprisingly objective in that it is effective from two angles. Those who are great fans of "Boondock Saints" will probably see Duffy as an embittered tragic hero who continues to fight for his art while everyone around him loses faith. Those (like me) who just don't "get" Duffy's film see the director as an opinionated asshole whose sudden success turns him into a power-mad paranoid. His attempts to retain complete control over his movie and his band make him lose credibility in the eyes of his family, friends and bandmates, whose lives and livelihoods are pretty much destroyed by Duffy's antics.
What happens is this: Duffy makes the monster deal with Miramax and becomes, in his words "Hollywood's new hard-on." Then, suddenly and without warning, Miramax drops him. The band makes a record deal with Maverick records, then the record company pulls out at the last minute. Franchise pictures ends up buying the "Boondock Saints" script, and giving Duffy less than half of the budget Miramax offered. Duffy accepts and makes his film, but no major studios are interested in distributing the film. Finally, Indican pictures, a small independent studio, releases the film for two weeks in five theaters accross the U.S. The band does eventually get a label and cuts a record, but the record sells less than 1,000 copies in six months and they are dropped, at which point they break up rather unceremoniously.
"Overnight" did definitely make me feel sympathetic to Troy Duffy. Although I don't consider myself a "Boondock Saints" fan, and Duffy and his friends aren't exactly classy, clean-cut guys, I did feel a certain amount of pain seeing this blue-collar guy from Boston who thought he had something big going get continually screwed over by almost every Hollywood establishment. I suppose one might compare Duffy's predicament in "Overnight" to the famous battle between Terry Gilliam and the major studios over the distribution of "Brazil." But the difference is this: Gilliam is a director who started off as a financial success with "Time Bandits" and went on to make some great films, both commercial hits like "12 Monkeys" and movies that were artistically beautiful but tanked at the theater (see "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen"). The only movie Duffy has under his belt, seemingly because of the situation laid out in "Overnight" is "The Boondock Saints," a movie that I was surprised ever got made at all, let alone something that could ever have been optioned by Miramax. "Brazil" was a movie worth fighting for. "Boondock Saints" not so much.