Troy Duffy: Shitty Rock Star of Film
The documentary Overnight, which I wrote about for today’s Fractured Mirror 2.0 entry and am unhealthily obsessed with, famously tells the story of Troy Duffy, a grubby small-time loser who became a big-time winner when Harvey Weinstein (who at that point was only considered one of the worst monsters in Hollywood history) famously offered to buy Sloan’s, the bar where Duffy wrote The Boondock Saints, so they could run it together and offered to finance Duffy’s debut to the tune of fifteen million dollars.
Historic success eventually devolved into equally spectacular failure when Weinstein got annoyed with Duffy, dropped the project and then blacklisted the obnoxious instant auteur. The Boondock Saints once again failed egregiously and dramatically when it was barely released theatrically.
Yet, in what was becoming an unfortunate pattern, incredible failure once again gave way to extraordinary success when The Boondock Saints found a HUGE audience on home video. The Boondock Saints and its 2009 sequel The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day have collectively grossed over one hundred million dollars in video and streaming income.
Ah, but Duffy wasn’t just an unusually unbearable Quentin Tarantino wannabe. He was also a musician convinced that his incredible, incontrovertible talent and drive would transform the music industry as a whole.
As Overnight indelibly and hilariously chronicles, at one point EVERYONE seemingly wanted to get into bed with the sociopathic overalls enthusiast. Duffy had incredible heat in the music industry as well as the film business.
People might have called Quentin Tarantino a rock star of indie film because his movies were cool and hip and he had a massive cult of personality built upon his persona as well as his films. Duffy wanted to take it one step further and be a rock star of cinema but also an actual rock star, the kind that plays arenas and shags groupies and sells million of albums.
But where The Boondock Saints was a massive flop that became a huge cult movie and cash cow, The Boondock Saints’ debut album, Release the Hounds, sold 609 copies despite being distributed by a major label.
Release the Hounds seemed to be the beginning and end of Troy Duffy as a musician. As far as I know the album has no following whatsoever. It’s not like the movie, where it lost lots of money initially but then found a huge, appreciative and very loyal audience.
But if Duffy’s musical career is the unmistakable failure that his movie career should be that has not kept him from becoming a rock star of sorts in his own right.
The intensity of Duffy’s fandom feels more analogous to the following of a cult musician than an independent filmmaker. Fans of The Boondock Saints define themselves in no small part through their enthusiasm for two god-awful movies and their even worse creator.
Fans of The Boondock Saints get tattoos of their favorite movie and flock to the internet to angrily confront people who do not appreciate Duffy’s Scorsese-like genius. Duffy’s cult, such as it is, is rooted in tough guy attitude, hedonism and macho posturing. In that respect he’s more nu-metal than New Wave.
Also, Duffy can’t think of anything cooler than white guys in sunglasses and leather jackets smoking cigarettes, drinking excessively and having casual sex , a juvenile conception of rock and roll hipness.
It’s telling that the only other movie that Duffy references in Overnight is Dead Man Walking, and that’s only to complain that it was an anti-death penalty movie when it should have been about how that miserable bastard got what was coming to him.
Needless to say, that’s not the opinion of a cinephile but rather a rock and roll meathead who feels the need to discourse on things he knows nothing about.
Duffy achieved his dream of becoming a rock star, albeit in a different medium and also shitty. He’s the Nickelback of indie film directors, only thankfully not as prolific or as popular.
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