Provocateur or Documentarian? Revisiting William Friedkin’s Troublesome 1980s in Cruising and Rampage

The writers of American film history tend to consider the 1980s in terms of blockbusters and right-wing ideology. Yet in this decade, as Stephen Prince has observed, ‘Hollywood itself was attacked for films that were unacceptably lewd, bigoted or sacrilegious’. One of the most infamous examples is 1980’s Cruising, William Friedkin’s film about an undercover policeman hunting a serial killer in New York’s gay leather scene. Protests during location filming were accompanied by highly partial coverage in local and national newspapers, while, after its release, Cruising managed to generate yet more controversy when a spat between the filmmakers and the censors was played out in the national press. Seven years later, Friedkin’s ability to attract ‘trouble’ reared its head again when protests, this time before a screenplay had even been written, were made against Rampage’s purported portrayal of a schizophrenic murderer (based on a real case). A concerted letter campaign was the result of one brief article about the writer-director’s research which appeared to imply that the film would make a disturbing correlation between schizophrenia and homicidal tendencies. Given Friedkin’s seemingly unerring ability to generate inflammatory headlines (also evident, for example, when he was making The Exorcist), and making extensive use of Friedkin’s papers, this article considers the extent of his intentionality in his approach to sensitive and controversial subject matter. Was he being deliberately provocative or was he simply approaching serious subjects with a documentary-style precision? These two instances of a filmmaker managing to attract ‘trouble’ opens up a discussion of the effect on filmmaking, and on reception, of such difficult production contexts. Although it has since been subject to some critical rehabilitation, the reputation of Cruising was set in stone by the surrounding brouhaha while Rampage, a largely unknown work, still managed to generate protests although the concerns of the complainants were quickly forgotten when the film rapidly disappeared from sight. In this article, the employment of archival material allows for a more nuanced perspective on how media accounts can sometimes distort our understanding, in retrospect, of contemporaneous attitudes.