Success vanishes before night falls

Filmmakers Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana met in Los Angeles in 1996, introduced by a mutual friend and drinking buddy: Troy Duffy. Soon the two were making a documentary of Duffy’s seemingly unstoppable rise as he simultaneously landed a lucrative spec script sale and a major label record deal.

Before long, though, Montana and Smith got the feeling they might be in for a bumpy ride as they followed Duffy’s bold declarations that he was on his way to becoming a legend and reaping a wheelbarrow full of awards for his feature debut.

From more than 350 hours of footage captured over the next four years, they created “Overnight,” the harrowingly hilarious and cautionary tale of how to start at the top -- and make a quick dash for the bottom. The movie suggests that Duffy’s hard-driving egotism quickly alienated everyone around him: His film fell short of the initial high hopes, and the band career stalled as well.

Seeming at times like a cross between the self-immolating and self-loathing of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the blissfully unaware naivete of “This Is Spinal Tap,” the thing to keep in mind while watching Duffy crash on the rocks of his own hubris, mismanagement and bad judgment is that “Overnight” actually happened. The documentary opened Friday in Los Angeles.

“You can’t script a better character than Troy Duffy, in our opinion, for an antihero,” Smith says.

“You can’t write Troy Duffy. We would watch this material and say to each other, ‘Look at the stuff we have, this is the making of both a great drama and a great comedy.’ ”

Perhaps simply proof that friends and business don’t mix, the once-close relationship between the filmmakers and Duffy fell apart due to disputes over money. Though the truth of the matter is likely more complicated, Montana and Smith maintain that their motive in seeing “Overnight” to completion was not to get back at Duffy.

“Some people have suggested this is a revenge piece,” Montana says, “but if it was it would have been a lot worse, far more scathing.”

Defending himself against a charge of succeeding off the failure of another, Montana rationalizes bluntly: “Let’s say his film had been a success, would people be interested in the rise to glory? Or do they prefer the fall? I don’t know.”