Cinema Diverse Opens With Jeffrey Schwarz’s Powerful Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders

Documentary revisits the murder, controversy and queer history behind William Friedkin’s Cruising

By Hollywood Time Staffers

Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) — Cinema Diverse: The Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Film Festival will kick off its 2026 edition with a film that takes audiences deep into one of the most controversial chapters in queer cinema history.

Jeffrey Schwarz’s Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders screens Thursday, September 17 at 7:00 p.m. in Theatre One at the Palm Springs Cultural Center, followed by a Q&A and the festival’s Opening Night Reception. The 85-minute documentary combines true crime, Hollywood history, queer culture and activism while examining the complicated story surrounding William Friedkin’s notorious 1980 film Cruising.

For anyone who knows Cruising only as the Al Pacino movie set inside New York City’s gay leather and S&M scene, Schwarz makes clear that there is a much larger story behind it.

At the center is Addison Verrill, a journalist and film critic who was murdered in New York in 1977. Paul Bateson, a radiology technician who had briefly appeared in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, was convicted of Verrill’s murder. The case became one of the real-life elements that drew Friedkin toward the underground world he would later dramatize in Cruising.

But Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders is not simply a murder mystery.

What makes Schwarz’s documentary especially compelling is the way it brings together Verrill’s story, the making of Cruising, and a period of LGBTQ+ history when gay men were becoming increasingly visible while simultaneously facing discrimination, police harassment and growing political attacks.

The film takes viewers back to late-1970s New York, when leather bars including the Mineshaft became places where gay men could find community, sexual freedom and a sense of belonging outside mainstream society.

That world fascinated Friedkin.

His resulting film starred Pacino as police officer Steve Burns, who goes undercover in New York’s leather scene while searching for a killer targeting gay men. Yet even before Cruising reached theaters, members of the LGBTQ+ community feared that the movie could present gay men—and particularly leather culture—as violent, dangerous and pathological.

Those fears erupted into protests during production.

Gay activists demonstrated around filming locations in Greenwich Village and attempted to disrupt the production, convinced that Hollywood was once again taking a marginalized community and turning it into something frightening for mainstream audiences.

Seen today, those protests are an important part of the story.

This was a period when LGBTQ+ Americans were fighting battles on numerous fronts. Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign had become a national movement, California voters had recently faced the Briggs Initiative targeting gay and lesbian teachers, and the assassinations of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were still painfully fresh.

Against that backdrop, a major Hollywood movie associating gay sexuality with murder was never going to arrive quietly.

Mineshaft asks viewers to consider both the film and the community that found itself represented by it.

That is one of the documentary’s strengths. Rather than simply deciding whether Cruising was good or bad for the gay community, Schwarz looks at the people, circumstances and history surrounding it.

There is also something deeply human beneath all of the Hollywood controversy.

Verrill could easily have become nothing more than the murder victim whose death inspired a movie. Instead, Schwarz brings attention back to the person who was lost. Tribeca, where the documentary had its world premiere earlier this year, described the film as both an exploration of a vanished world and a tribute to Verrill, whose 1977 murder helped inspire Friedkin to write Cruising.

That shift is important because history, particularly LGBTQ+ history, can sometimes become reduced to provocative headlines, famous movies and notorious crimes.

Mineshaft restores some of the people behind those headlines.

Schwarz is particularly well suited to the material. His previous documentaries include Vito, I Am Divine and Tab Hunter Confidential, films that have explored queer figures and portions of entertainment history that mainstream Hollywood often ignored or misunderstood.

Here, he once again explores what happens when Hollywood, sexuality, history and identity collide.

There is another fascinating dimension to Cruising nearly half a century later. The movie that once caused enormous anger within the gay community continues to be debated, reassessed and rediscovered by younger LGBTQ+ audiences.

That makes Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders particularly timely.

It isn’t merely asking us to revisit an old Al Pacino movie. It is asking us to remember what gay life looked like before the AIDS epidemic devastated communities across America, what visibility cost LGBTQ+ people at the time, and how dramatically the meaning of a film can change depending on who is watching it—and when.

For younger viewers who never experienced that period, the documentary serves almost as a time capsule.

For those who lived through it, the images of leather bars, street protests and gay men claiming public space may bring back very different memories.

And for everyone, the film raises questions that remain surprisingly relevant: Who gets to tell the stories of marginalized communities? When does representation become exploitation? Can a controversial work eventually be separated from the fears and circumstances surrounding its creation?

There may not be easy answers.

That is precisely why Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders makes such an intriguing choice to open Cinema Diverse.

The festival is not simply beginning with a movie about queer history. It is beginning with a movie about who gets to define that history, who gets remembered, and how the stories LGBTQ+ people tell about themselves continue to evolve.

Screening Information

Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders
Thursday, September 17, 2026
7:00 p.m. – Theatre One
Palm Springs Cultural Center
2300 E. Baristo Road, Palm Springs, CA 92262

Opening Night Q&A and Reception immediately following the film.