overnight

[Rudie Obias]

OVERNIGHT    2003
RATED: NOT RATED  / RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes
USA  / Documentary
Director: Mark Brian Smith
Starring: Willem Dafoe , Billy Connolly , Jeffrey Baxter , Troy Duffy

OVERNIGHT centers around Troy Duffy, a vulgar and egocentric barman who, a few years ago, managed to sell Miramax head Harvey Weinstein the right to his script as well as a contract for his band and co-ownership of his pub. Duffy was surrounded by a posse of friends that included OVERNIGHT co-directors Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana, one the manager of the band while the other one was supposed to document their "historic" simultaneous film and music rise to fame. Burdened by Duffy's extraordinary ego and lack of temper, the odyssey quickly turned to a debacle and the tandem Smith/Montana, repudiated in the process, stuck around, enduring Duffy's humiliation just for the sake of their film, which they knew at the time, would turn out as a great anti-fable on how to make it in Hollywood. Overnight is unique in its genre as it's at the same time a documentary that morphs into a real-life comedy, drama, a how-not-to-guide for debutant filmmakers and ultimately Smith and Montana's sweet revenge against the odious Troy Duffy.

trailer: http://www.themoviebox.net/movies/2004/NOPQR/Overnight/trailer.php

[MacGuffin]

Success vanishes before night falls
Source: Los Angeles Times

Filmmakers Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana met in Los Angeles in 1996, introduced by a mutual friend and drinking buddy: Troy Duffy. Soon the two were making a documentary of Duffy's seemingly unstoppable rise as he simultaneously landed a lucrative spec script sale and a major label record deal.

Before long, though, Montana and Smith got the feeling they might be in for a bumpy ride as they followed Duffy's bold declarations that he was on his way to becoming a legend and reaping a wheelbarrow full of awards for his feature debut.

From more than 350 hours of footage captured over the next four years, they created "Overnight," the harrowingly hilarious and cautionary tale of how to start at the top — and make a quick dash for the bottom. The movie suggests that Duffy's hard-driving egotism quickly alienated everyone around him: His film fell short of the initial high hopes, and the band career stalled as well.

Seeming at times like a cross between the self-immolating and self-loathing of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and the blissfully unaware naivete of "This Is Spinal Tap," the thing to keep in mind while watching Duffy crash on the rocks of his own hubris, mismanagement and bad judgment is that "Overnight" actually happened. The documentary opened Friday in Los Angeles.

"You can't script a better character than Troy Duffy, in our opinion, for an antihero," Smith says.

"You can't write Troy Duffy. We would watch this material and say to each other, 'Look at the stuff we have, this is the making of both a great drama and a great comedy.' "

Perhaps simply proof that friends and business don't mix, the once-close relationship between the filmmakers and Duffy fell apart due to disputes over money. Though the truth of the matter is likely more complicated, Montana and Smith maintain that their motive in seeing "Overnight" to completion was not to get back at Duffy.

"Some people have suggested this is a revenge piece," Montana says, "but if it was it would have been a lot worse, far more scathing."

Defending himself against a charge of succeeding off the failure of another, Montana rationalizes bluntly: "Let's say his film had been a success, would people be interested in the rise to glory? Or do they prefer the fall? I don't know."

[Gamblour.]

That is awesome, I hope this gets a wider release, to at least one of the art theaters around here.

[meatball]

I'm looking forward to this one. Wish it was released to more theatres, though.

[mutinyco]

Kurt Loder rules...

'Overnight': The Joy Of Watching A Jerk Crash And Burn, By Kurt Loder

The world-class flame-out 'Overnight' depicts actually happened, to an actual jerk.

Considering how many weaselly, self-important jerks one meets on an annual basis, it's surprising how rarely you get to see one of them crash and burn. The great gratification of the new movie "Overnight" is that it preserves such a spectacle in the form of a documentary — which is to say that the world-class flame-out it depicts actually happened, to an actual jerk. His name is Troy Duffy, a would-be genius who moved from Boston to Los Angeles to pursue his twin dreams of selling a script he'd written for a movie he wanted to direct, called "The Boondock Saints," and, at the same time, scoring a record deal for his band, the Brood, with which he played guitar. The movie begins in the spring of 1997. The 28-year-old Duffy is working as a bartender at a West Hollywood tavern called J. Sloan's, but his script has been making the rounds, and Harvey Weinstein, the powerful co-founder of Miramax Pictures, has offered him a dream deal for a first-timer: $300,000 for the script; a $15-million budget to make the movie (on which he'll also have final cut); and a soundtrack side-deal for the Brood with Maverick Records.

In an amazing instance of spontaneous inflation, Duffy's head immediately swells up to the size of a small planet, and he turns overnight into a raging egomaniac. "Everybody knows this is the best f---in' project in Hollywood," he rants to his cronies, in between chain-smoking cigarettes, knocking back drinks and bad-mouthing anyone who comes to mind (Keanu Reeves: "a talentless fool"). And it doesn't help that Weinstein — the man who discovered Quentin Tarantino! — has publicly called Duffy "a unique, exciting new voice in American movies," or that he's been written up in USA Today and The Hollywood Reporter, and featured on the cover of MovieMaker magazine. With his own personal film crew in tow to document his rise into the heavens of cinematic legend, Duffy (who has unwisely signed away any control he might have had over the resulting footage) is launched on an ego trip from which he may never return. All of this before he's shot a single foot of film.

Then Harvey Weinstein stops taking his calls, and by the fall of 1997, Miramax has put "The Boondock Saints" into turnaround, meaning the project is up for grabs by any other studio that might want it. None does. And with production continually being pushed back, Maverick Records eventually bails out of the soundtrack deal. (Duffy learns this when he tries to drop by the Maverick offices and is told he's not allowed in the building.) By now, the trade media are starting to look at the bartender-cum-director in a different light (headline: "Back Behind the Bar"). But then an independent production company picks up "The Boondock Saints," and Duffy finds his movie back in play, although on a much-reduced budget. He finally manages to assemble a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Scottish comic Billy Connolly and porn star Ron Jeremy. Shooting begins in Duffy's hometown of Boston.

In addition to this cinematic resuscitation, the Brood have been offered a recording deal by Lava Records. This prompts the other members of the band, who have essentially been starving ever since they moved out to L.A. at Duffy's behest, to ask him to front them modest loans against the Lava advance money — not cash outright, just loans. Duffy swats them away. "I don't believe you deserve a thing," he tells them. (One of the bandmembers is his own brother.) Problems crop up quickly. Lava chief Jason Flom doesn't like what he's hearing from the Brood's initial sessions. But what does he know? In a meeting with the band, Duffy says that although Lava has put up a quarter-million dollars to make the album, "Look how Jewish they're being about it." In addition, it's been discovered that there's another band called the Brood — an all-girl group from Portland, Maine, that's been putting out records since 1992 — and they have no interest in selling the rights to their name. This doesn't sit well with Duffy (according to "Overnight" co-director Tony Montana, he castigated the rival Brood as "a bunch of talentless f---in' dykes"). But in the end, his Brood is compelled to release its album under another moniker — the Boondock Saints, what else? It sells a total of 690 copies. Lava quickly drops the band, and the band quickly breaks up.

One of the sweetest sequences in the annals of payback is the one in which Duffy and his retinue travel to France in the spring of 1999 to screen the finished "Boondock Saints" for distributors at the Cannes Film Festival. Ensconced in semi-swank digs on his talent agency's tab, Duffy swings wildly between his usual unfounded braggadocio ("I know I'm one of the best there is, and I'm gonna be the best") and — when distribution deals fail to materialize — clueless incomprehension. ("Where's the offer? What's going on?") The movie finally does get released — barely — in January of 2000. It plays for one week in five theaters, dies, and goes straight to video.

Wouldn't it be annoying if "The Boondock Saints" turned out to be a good movie, unjustly ignored? I recently picked it up on DVD (10 bucks), and can report that it's a film that almost certainly wouldn't exist if Quentin Tarantino hadn't made "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" a decade ago. "Boondock" is a vigilante tale pitting two young Irish-American men against all manner of urban scum. In hapless thrall to Tarantino, director Duffy cooks up offbeat forms of torment (a fat mobster gets his butt set on fire) and makes sure that somebody says "f---" about every 20 seconds. Willem Dafoe, who appears not to have been given much in the way of direction, plays a gay FBI agent who listens to opera on his Discman while swanning around bloody crime scenes. There's none of Tarantino's jacked-up pop-cultural fizz to any of this, and none of his snappy way with dialogue. The movie opens with a beautiful color sequence shot in a Catholic church, but quickly begins to drift — you can feel the energy leaking out of it as it stumbles along. But if you stay with it ... well, I don't know what would happen if you stayed with it. I couldn't.

[Gamblour.]

Man Loder would love this thread: http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=1271&highlight=boondock

That's the best write-up I've read in a while. I cannot wait to see Overnight. Thanks Mutiny, I'm in love with Loder now.

Edit: Eeee! I love him more, he loved The Village

[meatball]

How do you know he likes the Village?

[SiliasRuby]

How do you know he likes the Village?

He Just Knows, ok? Jeez, why do you need to pry sooo much into other people affairs...hehehehe

[meatball]

How do you know he likes the Village?

He Just Knows, ok? Jeez, why do you need to pry sooo much into other people affairs...hehehehe

it's in my nature  

[Gamblour.]

He told me in bed. Actually, I woke up the next morning with this written on my ass in lipstick: http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1489816/07292004/story.jhtml?headlines=true

(Everything after /articles was on my right ass cheek)

[meatball]

i actually misread and thought that you were saying Duffy liked The Village. thanks though, gamblor's ass.

[joebuck]

I think i read somewhere that Duffy is making a sequel to The Boondock Saints right now.  Can anybody confirm this?

Maybe that means a sequel to Overnight....

[MacGuffin]

I think i read somewhere that Duffy is making a sequel to The Boondock Saints right now.  Can anybody confirm this?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330083/

[SiliasRuby]

I saw this today with Meatball and we thought it was great. Worth the ten bucks...It was soo sad (Spoiler begin Troy is soo gosh darn egotistical about everything and he gets angry sooo easily, it really was sad that he didn't get any of the Home Video sales and rental sales forThe Boondock Saints, but he kind of deserved it by being such a loud mouth jackass the whole timeSpoiler End) it brought a tear to my eye and yet really funny. Go see this flick if you can. [/b]

[NEON MERCURY]

deliverance?