Overnight
Writemovies.com
October 2004
There's nothing more inspiring than a good rags-to-riches
story. Filmmakers Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana knew that they had a
potential fairy tale in their hands when they began documenting the career of
their friend, 23-year-old writer/musician Troy Duffy. Seven year later, their
documentary film Overnight has a story to tell, but a Hollywood
ending it's not.
Almost immediately after they began filming, Duffy hit the
big time. His screenplay The Boondock Saints, about Irish-Catholic
vigilantes in Boston, was sold to
Miramax for a cool million dollars. An unprecedented deal had Duffy directing
the film with a $15 million budget, while his band "The Brood" was
tapped for the soundtrack. The industry was abuzz about this hot new talent;
even Miramax head Harvey Weinstein paraded his protégé around town, creating a
media spectacle when he offered to buy the seedy West Hollywood
bar where Duffy worked.
A hard-boozing chain smoker with a crass mouth, Duffy seemed
an unlikely candidate to join the Hollywood elite, which
made his success story even juicier to the media. As "Hollywood's
new hard on," he wasn't just scrappy new filmmaker- he was confident to
the point of sheer arrogance, and almost eloquent enough to carry it off. "He just had a lot of charisma,"
says Montana without hesitation.
Smith agrees, adding "I think also what attracted Troy
to us was his bed of knowledge on many different subjects...this was a kid who
read a book a week growing up."
Smith and Montana
admit that Duffy always had an unpredictable temper, but the camera documents
the extremes to which it went. "As soon as he got the success—got the
office, got the deal with Miramax, got the record deal with Maverick—then you
started to see the change happen," says Smith. The film shows Duffy boasting about his
success to anyone who will listen. He's going to be legend. He parties with Matthew McConaughey and
Patrick Swayze. Ethan Hawk is a
"talentless fool." In
what emerges to be an almost schizophrenic manner, Duffy's attitude toward the
people around him shifts repeatedly between boisterous camaraderie to vicious
verbal assaults.
By the fall of 1997, after months of casting disagreements
and ignored phone calls, Miramax dropped the film, Maverick dropped the band,
and Duffy was blacklisted by Hollywood.
Through it all, the cameras never stopped rolling, because Smith and Montana
knew they had something unique on their hands. "We went home for Christmas
time that year not knowing what we were coming back to," says Montana.
"But, we knew we had such powerful material shot until that point that
anything that could happen to this kid would still be entertaining. You have to
embrace the film and change your way of thinking a little bit…this is not going
to be the next Quentin Tarantino, but there’s something special about this
story."
And entertaining it is. Overnight is essentially a
"what not to do in Hollywood
guide, how an over-inflated ego, poor negotiating skills, and generally a bad
temper can make even the greatest success story come crashing down. Eventually The
Boondock Saints was picked up by Franchise Films and made at a fraction of
the original budget, with Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, Willem Dafoe and
Billy Connelly. The band got picked up by a division of Atlantic Records. But
the film only opened in five theaters for a week, and the soundtrack sold 690
copies. Meanwhile, Duffy alienated himself from his entire crew, which is
richly captured when his soft-spoken brother Taylor tries to confront him. In
true style, Duffy is still able turn the situation around, defending himself
and attacking the others until bitter and lonely end.
Even as supposedly impartial observers, Smith and Montana
were not exempt from Duffy's wrath. "When our story was ending...he then
turned on us," says Montana.
The filmmakers tell stories of sabotage and feared violence, "because we
knew that he would do anything in his power to control this film and stop
us." Since the film has garnered
attention on the festival circuit, Duffy has remained out of the media
spotlight, only once referring to Overnight as "an 82-minute smear
campaign.”
Today, with the theatrical release of their film,
Smith and Montana accept their severed relationship with Duffy.
"You have to play a certain game, pay your dues. At the end of the day,
you have to have talent to persevere, but this is a prime example of somebody
who was trying to change an establishment that had been around for a
century," says Smith. The filmmakers maintain that this is not a vengeance
piece with an agenda, nor does it come across as one. Duffy is portrayed as an
unsympathetic character, but his character is not completely loathsome—instead
he represents the egoism and self-righteousness that we all want to express
sometimes. He just had enough conceit to actually pull it off for a while, and
though we cheer when Duffy gets his comeuppance, perhaps there is some sense of
relief that it’s not us on that screen.
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