Thursday, September 17 at 7:00 PM
Theatre One — Palm Springs Cultural Center
2300 E. Baristo Road, Palm Springs
The 85-minute documentary is followed by a Q&A and the Cinema Diverse Opening Night Reception.
Jeffrey Schwarz revisits a notorious murder, an infamous Al Pacino film and the LGBTQ+ resistance that surrounded it
By The Hollywood Times Staff
ATLANTA, GA (The Hollywood Times) 9/11/26 – One of the most provocative chapters in LGBTQ+ film history is coming to Atlanta as acclaimed filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz brings Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders to the 39th annual Out On Film LGBTQ+ Film Festival.
The 85-minute documentary combines true crime, Hollywood history, queer sexuality and activism as Schwarz revisits the complicated story surrounding William Friedkin’s controversial 1980 thriller Cruising.
For anyone who knows Cruising primarily as the Al Pacino movie set inside New York City’s gay leather and S&M scene, Schwarz reveals that the story behind the film is arguably even more compelling than what ended up on screen.
At its center is Addison Verrill, a journalist and film critic murdered in New York in 1977.
Paul Bateson, a radiology technician who had appeared briefly in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, was convicted of Verrill’s murder. The case became one of the real-life inspirations that drew Friedkin into the underground world he would eventually dramatize in Cruising.
But Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders is far more than a murder mystery.
Schwarz connects Verrill’s story with the making of Cruising and a volatile period in LGBTQ+ history, when gay men were gaining unprecedented visibility while continuing to face discrimination, police harassment and political attacks.
The documentary transports audiences to late-1970s New York, where leather bars such as the legendary Mineshaft offered gay men something difficult to find almost anywhere else: community, freedom, sexual expression and a place to exist outside the expectations of mainstream society.
It was a world that fascinated Friedkin.
His resulting film, Cruising, starred Pacino as police officer Steve Burns, who goes undercover in New York’s leather scene while investigating the murders of gay men.
Even before cameras stopped rolling, however, many LGBTQ+ activists feared that Hollywood was once again portraying gay men as disturbed, violent or dangerous.
The opposition was fierce.
Activists demonstrated around filming locations in Greenwich Village and deliberately attempted to disrupt production, believing a major Hollywood movie connecting homosexuality, leather culture and murder could fuel existing prejudice.
Seen decades later, those protests have become an essential part of the film’s history.
The controversy did not happen in a vacuum.
The late 1970s were an extraordinarily turbulent period for LGBTQ+ Americans. Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign had gained national attention. California voters had confronted the Briggs Initiative, which sought to remove gay and lesbian educators from public schools. The assassinations of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone remained painfully recent.
Into that atmosphere came a major studio thriller connecting gay male sexuality with murder.
It was never going to arrive quietly.
Mineshaft does something more interesting than simply asking whether Cruising was good or bad for the gay community. Schwarz examines the people, fears, politics and culture surrounding it while allowing viewers to reconsider the film through the distance of nearly half a century.
There is also a deeply human story beneath the controversy.
Verrill could easily have been reduced to “the murder victim who inspired Cruising.” Instead, Schwarz brings the focus back to the man whose life was lost, making the documentary both an exploration of a vanished queer world and a remembrance of someone who might otherwise have become a footnote in Hollywood history.
That distinction matters.
Queer history can too easily become a collection of famous films, notorious crimes and provocative headlines. Mineshaft looks beyond those headlines at the people who actually lived that history.
Schwarz is particularly well suited to the material.
His documentaries Vito, I Am Divine and Tab Hunter Confidential have explored LGBTQ+ figures and portions of entertainment history that Hollywood either ignored, misunderstood or sanitized.
With Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders, he once again examines the complicated intersection of sexuality, entertainment, identity and cultural memory.
And Cruising itself has undergone an intriguing evolution.
A movie once greeted with anger and demonstrations by members of the gay community has subsequently been debated, reclaimed and rediscovered by younger generations of LGBTQ+ viewers.
That transformation makes Mineshaft especially fascinating in 2026.
The documentary is not simply asking audiences to reconsider an old Al Pacino movie.
It asks viewers to remember what gay life looked like before AIDS devastated communities across America, what visibility could cost LGBTQ+ people at that time and how dramatically the meaning of a piece of art can change depending on who is watching it and when.
For younger LGBTQ+ audiences, the documentary serves as a cinematic time capsule.
For viewers who lived through the period, images of leather bars, public protests and gay men defiantly claiming space may carry entirely different emotional weight.
And for everyone, the film raises questions that remain strikingly current.
Who gets to tell the stories of marginalized communities?
When does representation become exploitation?
Can a controversial work eventually be separated from the political and cultural environment in which it was created?
And who decides which pieces of queer history deserve to be remembered?
There are no simple answers, which is precisely what makes Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders worth seeing and discussing.
After making its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival, Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders now joins the lineup at Atlanta’s Out On Film, where true crime, cinema history and LGBTQ+ resistance will meet another queer festival audience.
Out On Film celebrates its 39th year September 24 through October 4, 2026, with screenings, filmmaker conversations and events at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta, followed by a virtual encore through October 11.
Mineshaft is ultimately about much more than Cruising.
It is about who gets to define queer history, who survives in our collective memory and how LGBTQ+ communities continue to reconsider the stories once told about them.
Nearly fifty years later, that conversation is far from over.
