MINESHAFT: THE CRUISING MURDERS (Tribeca 2026) – Review by Leslie Combemale

No matter what you think you know about director William Friedkin’s movie Cruising, or, for that matter, about New York City in the late 1970s, you’ll learn more by watching Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders. Acting as director, producer, and editor, Jeffrey Schwartz offers up a fascinating, (albiet “kitchen sink”) documentary that explores the 1979 thriller starring Al Pacino, the gay history happening around the making of the film, and the real-life murder that “inspired” his film.

Only 10 years before the making of Cruising, the historic demonstrations that were the catalyst of the LGBTQ civil rights movement happened after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Friedkin, who was particularly attracted to telling stories about isolated or closed communities, heard about the murder of Addison Verrill by a man he had taken home from the Mineshaft, a private BDSM and leather club in the same area of Greenwich Village. He used that event as a springboard for a film in which an undercover cop (played by Al Pacino) infiltrates the underground leather community to track down a serial killer.

I remember watching Cruising not long after it was released. I had friends in the leather community. Each progressive scene made me angrier, and I was by no means alone in my opinion. I felt the movie sensationalized the subculture as predatory and sociopathic. It was one of the only films released by a major studio centered on gay culture, and THIS is what they allowed the filmmaker to say? In it, gay men were either killers or victims. During production, Cruising was the catalyst for such loud and well-attended protests that activists impeded the making of the film. A copy of the script had been leaked and shown to have incredibly problematic portrayals of members of the gay population, and more specifically, the leather subculture. It galvanized the community, with thousands of protesters showing up every day of production.

What Schwartz not only shows those protests and why they took place, but he puts it into context against the story of the real murder. Using interviews with activists and journalists of the time, as well as those influenced by that part of New York and LGBTQ history, and family, friends, and investigators of the murder of Addison Verrill, he pulls together a picture of what happened, and its repercussions. Ultimately, a gay man named Paul Bateson was tried and convicted of Verrill’s murder. The filmmaker talks to Verrill’s sister, his former partner, a detective on the case, a longtime friend of Bateson’s, and others to get as complete a story as possible around the events of the night, and Bateson’s possible motive.

As far as Friedkin’s perspective, he chose to build a film loosely based on Verrill’s murder, but, as is the way of Hollywood, he made it bigger and more violent. Schwartz includes excerpts from the director’s memories of the filming, including the fact that he and an advisor on the movie spent every night for months at leather bars, dressed appropriately, which often meant sporting nothing but a jockstrap. During production, he hired porn stars as extras and in small parts, and filmed sex and drug use, which was edited into the movie. He designed another well known bar called The Hellfire Club to look as much like the Mineshaft as possible.

Pacino really believed he was doing the gay community of the time a solid by doing research and committing to his performance. He later discovered Friedkin, unbeknownst to him, wrote an ambitious ending that suggested Pacino’s character might have been the killer. As a result, he refused to do any PR or speak of the film ever again.

Coincidentally, real life Mineshaft killer Bateson had a small role in Friedkin’s film The Exorcist. You can see him in that scene in this documentary.

In addition to revealing all the above information, Schwartz goes on to cover the Ramrod murders, called the West Street massacre, which happened on November 19th, 1980, barely a year after Cruising was released in 1979, arguing yet again that responsible filmmaking matters. The director also shows how the AIDS epidemic impacted gay life in New York, leading to the closure of the Mineshaft and nearly every other leather bar and gathering place of the time.

Cruising has not aged well. Even at the time, it died a quiet death at the box office because the script was awful and the story was ridiculous. Gay folks, then and now, have a field day pointing out all its inaccuracies. The way it offered very limited representations of gay culture as hunter and prey rates very high on the ICK factor to this day. Still, it ALSO captured a moment in time as it relates to 70s leather culture, and as such, has become something of a cult classic to members of today’s leather community.

Those who are interested in New York and/or gay history will learn a lot watching this documentary, but it ends up feeling like there’s too MUCH information, and could have benefitted with a bit more of a targeted focus. This could have been three films instead of one.

3 out of 5 stars.