Overnight (2003)
Written and directed by Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith
At some point in the early 2000s, a DVD of The Boondock Saints showed up in my dorm and was watched incessantly by several of the other guys on my floor. I will admit I have seen it more than once, mainly because it seemed to be ambient white noise in many dude’s dorm rooms at the time. I couldn’t articulate my criticisms of the picture then, but it felt like a loud and pointless exercise in cliche machismo. Just a few years later, another DVD showed up in my dorm, and that was the documentary Overnight, which told the behind-the-scenes stories of the man who made The Boondock Saints and helped me finally understand why I hated that picture.
As the title suggests, seemingly overnight, Troy Duffy went from being another schlub to being in the middle of a bidding war over his screenplay for The Boondock Saints. It was Miramax, headed by convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, that won. They offered Duffy $450k to rewrite and direct the film, even dangling the final cut as an added cherry. The film would be given a $15 million budget, while Duffy’s band, The Brood, would write & record the soundtrack. Hey, and while they were at it, Miramax offered to buy J. Sloan’s, the bar where Duffy worked, and would act as co-owners with him. Two of Duffy’s friends, as well as the managers of The Brood, decided to document this rise to fame in Hollywood. Instead of a story of triumph, they chronicled a perfect example of mediocrity and self-destruction.
In 2024, masculinity in America has completely lost the plot. Faced with a society growing more accepting of transgender and nonbinary people, a subset of American reactionaries have decided to attempt a shitty cosplay of characters from 300. Combined with the supplement grift, an extension of the centuries-long tradition of snake oil, it has created one of the most obnoxious, idiotic bursts of meaningless noise I have ever experienced. You can see the roots of this mindset in the way Troy Duffy accepts this rash of good luck with a sense of entitlement. Of course, Troy should have all these things; he’s super awesome, right?
You can understand the hunger to get out from the grinding gears of capitalist wage slavery, but Duffy, like so many before him, is drunk on the consumption culture of America. Promises of making him co-owner of his workplace send the future director into nightly drinking binges with his buddies, chucking glasses across the bar to hear them shatter against a wall. He regularly puffs on cigars and buys office space to prop his shoes up on a desk. He does what so many of us working poor people do when we have this opportunity, which is to behave like a child’s version of a rich person. Why would a stand-up fella like Harvey Weinstein ever lie to Mr. Duffy? He’s a man of his word, right?
Duffy failed to calculate how to hold onto the riches he attained. Because he started from such a place of resentment, he demands what his movie should be and who should be in it. Like so many people at the top of the American food chain – well, let’s not go that far – like many of the people who believe the delusion that they are at the top of the food chain, Duffy thought he could throw his weight around, and people in Hollywood would do as he commanded. He forgot that he lived in a nightmarishly transactional and vindictive society. Hollywood even more so than other parts of the country. Soon enough, no one returns his calls, and Duffy is left in the dark about whether The Boondock Saints will ever be made.
The thing about Troy Duffy, for all his posturing to present himself as a Boston townie, what we don’t see in this documentary is that he was actually born & raised in Connecticut, attending private schools, and had a Harvard-educated father who was an English teacher that had his children regularly write book reports for him. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with these things (though I personally think private schools should be banned), but it reveals that Duffy’s pose as some sort of “guy from the streets” is a farce.
The true face of privilege emerges as the man torpedoes his own film career and then proceeds to fuck things up for his band, which includes his own brother. At one point, a producer overseeing the recording of The Brood’s first album remarks that Duffy’s brother is the creative heart of the band, something Troy surely picks up on, leading to him trashing things like a spoiled toddler. The directors of Overnight recorded their own firing as managers of the band, cut out from every last dime with no acknowledgment of their work to get to this point.
Duffy never sees the failures as his own fault or the result of just how the Hollywood system works. Nope, there’s a tinge of conspiracy theory in his words. They have it out for him because his movie is so good, and they know it. As someone who has had the displeasure of seeing The Boondock Saints multiple times, it is not good, save Willem Dafoe’s performance, which is not helped in any way by Duffy’s horrible writing. Eventually, he would get the damn thing made after obtaining more financing from Franchise Picture. A dismal debut at Cannes in 1999 resulted in no one clamoring to buy the thing. The Columbine shootings would be cited as a reason why, but the imagery of The Matrix didn’t seem to slow that movie’s success down.
I won’t say that Duffy is talentless. Based on his background, I expect him to have a solid understanding of literature and writing. However, arrogance can be a hell of an obstacle to overcome. The Boondock Saints is such a dismally lousy movie because it is someone trying to write characters whose experience he only knows from other movies. He’s not a poor kid from Boston and didn’t try to educate himself on what that would be like. Instead, he lazily cribs from more talented filmmakers like Tarantino and Rodriguez, thinking he can lift the best bits and have a good movie.
While Overnight is not a spectacularly shot documentary, the camera work here is often horrible; it is a rare up-close glimpse of someone self-sabotaging with such vivid detail. There never seems to be a moment that the film’s subject is aware enough to understand how someone outside this situation will view him. He is wholly subsumed in his narcissism, happy to ruin the opportunities of people around him to soothe his own fragile ego.
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