James Franco Is Remaking Deleted Scenes From William Friedkin’s CRUISING

William Friedkin's Cruising is a film that fascinates me to no end. I've covered it on the site before, but I can't stress how much you need to see it. It's one seriously bizarre moment in time where two of Hollywood's top players (Friedkin and star Al Pacino) collaborated to take audiences to a very dark place, and blow up their own careers in the process. Admittedly, the attitudes are dated. But more importantly, as a film the narrative is rather fragmented. Part of the reason for that is some 40 minutes of footage was excised by the studio. What remains is a seriously compelling, flawed film that might have been great.

Now, either James Franco is even more fascinated by Friedkin's movie than I am or maybe he lost a bar bet or something, because apparently he's gone out and remade the missing 40 minutes of Cruising. We can all gather what was IN those missing 40 minutes, so this is a long way of saying that Franco might have just made a gay porn short. Dubbed James Franco's Cruising (not sure if that's a name above the title thing a la John Carpenter, or just a sentence), the film allegedly took two months from conception to edit. That, my friends, is creative drive.

But will we ever see it? James Franco does a lot of weird shit (soap opera appearances, experimental films) and also abandons things to which he's attached (REM's last album was slated to have music videos for each song directed by a number of names; guess who never turned his in?), so the odds that we'll ever get to see this are only slightly higher than the odds that most of you will actually want to see it.

Indiewire has more, including a still that looks astonishingly similar to a scene in Friedkin's film: