Left in the cold, but glad about it

Breathtaking arrogance, delusional optimism and a cult leader’s charisma could be considered admirable traits in an aspiring filmmaker. They seemed to work for Troy Duffy, the hard-living L.A. bartender who famously charmed Harvey Weinstein into buying his script for $300,000, granting him a $15-million budget, a director’s credit and first cut as well as the soundtrack rights to Duffy’s rock band, and promising to buy him the bar where he worked.

He was christened the next Quentin Tarantino, and suddenly his smirking mug was on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter and USA Today. Jim Carrey’s manager was stopping by the bar, hoping to represent him. Record labels swarmed to sign his band, the Brood. A-list actors were lining up to meet with him. For a few months in 1997 every dreamer in America wanted to be Troy Duffy.

So when his friends Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana proposed a documentary on the experience, Duffy gave them carte blanche access. Within six months, however, Duffy’s unprecedented success story turned into an unsettling portrait of a megalomaniac whose belligerence soon alienated everyone, turning his meteoric success into a staggering fall from grace.

“There’s that cliche that fame changes you,” says Smith. “We learned in this process that it brings out your true character.”

As dreams disintegrate

“Overnight,” which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, tracks the making of Duffy’s “The Boondock Saints,” the violent story of two Irish Catholic brothers who set out to rid the world of evil, and the soundtrack that was to accompany it. The documentary introduces an exuberant and irrepressible Duffy following the March 1997 announcement of his deal with Miramax and follows him for the next three years as his dreams disintegrate.

Within months, Duffy is dropped by the studio and his record label. None of the major studios picks up the project. So he makes the film for half the original budget. Then it’s ignored at the Cannes Film Festival. Ultimately, Duffy pays to have the film shown in five theaters for one week in January 2000.

His band, meanwhile, lands a deal with Lava/Atlantic and records an album. But it sells just 690 copies in six months and the band breaks up soon after.

Duffy is last seen smoking a cigarette on a street corner, gesturing wildly and talking to himself.

Still, it’s impossible to feel anything but schadenfreude. During an interview early in the film, Duffy sums up his philosophy on the entertainment business this way: “What people I don’t think realize is success has nothing to do with how you live your life and how you treat your friends, really. If you got the goods, you got the goods.”

“Overnight” proves Duffy horribly wrong. He tests almost every relationship -- most notably the one with Weinstein -- thereby dooming his projects. In fact, Montana and Smith soon realized that the only upside to having to endure Duffy’s insufferable arrogance was that they got it on film.

“We were in our own bubble,” says Smith, the director, in an interview with the filmmakers in Los Angeles. “Only he and I could look at each other and say, ‘Do you believe what we’re going through? Do you believe what he just said to us? Do you believe we’re still attached to him in this way?’ ”

“And we’re prisoners because we have to finish the movie,” says Montana, the producer. “We can’t get away from him, because this is all we have.... We knew that what we had was the documentary, and we had to finish it.”

Now it looks as if the seven years they gambled on the doc are paying off. A work-in-progress screening at the Seattle International Film Festival last summer led to representation by high-powered sales agent John Sloss of Cinetic Media.

At Sundance, Friday’s midnight screening played so well that Montana says industry folk have stopped him on the street to thank him for validating their own trials in Hollywood.

By Monday, “Overnight” warranted a write-up by Harry Knowles, a film geek whose website Aintitcoolnews.com often generates buzz. “This is what ‘Project Greenlight’ should have been,” he wrote.

Now Montana is smiling a lot and talking about writing a book and lecturing to young filmmakers. Success, it seems, is now within his reach. “Now I can breathe a little bit,” he says.

Even a budding controversy -- Sloss has received threatening letters from a few people in the film who claim they didn’t consent to being filmed -- can’t dim Montana’s optimism. Everyone in the documentary provided written or on-camera releases, he says.

“Nothing can stop the sale of the film,” says Montana, sounding a little bit like Duffy at his peak.

Friends, at first

Smith and Montana met Duffy separately at J. Sloan’s, a dive bar on Melrose, just months before Duffy’s script landed him an agent at William Morris. Smith was a recent NYU film school grad working at a postproduction house. Montana was an actor working as a personal trainer to record label executives.

They both came to Los Angeles to get into the entertainment business and saw opportunity in Duffy’s talent as a screenwriter and a musician. Eventually, they agreed to manage his band. A friendship formed.

At the time, Smith and Montana were spending a lot of time at J. Sloan’s. They filmed themselves downing shots and dark beers with Duffy and his band. Like him, they were from New England. They felt at home with Duffy’s bravado and flattered to be part of his inner circle.

When his script started making the rounds of talent agencies and studios, Duffy started a film and music company called the Syndicate and hired Montana and Smith to develop projects and manage the band. They were thrilled.

“He had incredible charisma,” says Smith. “He could make you laugh like you never laughed before. You just wanted to be around this guy, and he was always the focal point of all the conversation.”

Along with Duffy’s talent and charm, however, came nonstop drinking, condescension and verbal abuse. In his endless rants in the film, he characterizes himself as a brilliant underdog besieged by a world conspiring against him. Yet Duffy appears to be his own worst enemy.

During the casting of “The Boondock Saints,” he refused to meet with Weinstein’s suggestions for the lead roles: Sylvester Stallone and Brad Pitt. He wanted Ewan McGregor, but when the two men met over drinks, they ended up in an argument.

While the cameras roll, Duffy calls Ethan Hawke “a talentless fool” and Jerry Bruckheimer “an idiot,” says “I hate Keanu Reeves” and reserves a special obscenity for Miramax’s Meryl Poster.

After Maverick Records executives decide not to sign the band and then refuse Duffy entry into the building when he arrives to discuss it, he tells his bandmates not to worry. “We are scaring them,” he says. “They’re on the ... run right now because they know we’re going to be successful ... and that’s what they’re more afraid of than anything in this entire world.”

Although Smith and Montana had worked for months as managers of the Brood, when the band landed a record deal with Lava/Atlantic, he refused to pay them a dime. “I don’t believe you deserve a thing for working with this band,” he tells them on camera. Then a moment later, explaining: “You do deserve it, but you’re not going to get it.”

When only Franchise Films offers to finance the filming of “Saints,” Duffy blames Weinstein. “This is all very personal,” he says. “It’s between he and I. He wants to be me.”

Perhaps the most bizarre scene in the documentary comes in early 2000, as Duffy is screening his film at the Palm Springs Film Festival. While he and “Saints” producer Chris Brinker stand outside the theater, a car suddenly jumps the curb, narrowly missing them, then takes off before the driver can be identified. Duffy responds by moving out of his apartment and arming himself.

Some things don’t change

Smith and Montana say they haven’t spoken to Duffy since the Syndicate disbanded in 2000. Repeated requests for an interview with him for this story went unanswered.

However, a search of the Web turns up theboondock saints.com, where Duffy sells film merchandise and maintains a blog for the movie’s fans, whom he addresses as “Flock.”

And in a Sept. 23, 2003, interview with the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, Duffy suggests the Columbine High School shootings sealed the fate of his ultra-violent film, preventing its release in the United States. He also talks about a sequel in the works titled “Boondock II: All Saints Day.”

Of the sequel, he says, “This is actually going to be a history-making movie.”