"Interior Leather Bar" - a James Franco Movie

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I've been invited to a screening of this movie in NYC on Sept 7 at 7PM and I will be going. To avoid an X rating, 40 minutes of footage was cut from William Friedkin’s controversial 1980 S&M thriller Cruising. In a provocative re-imagining of this censored material, directors Travis Mathews (I Want Your Love) and James Franco create an explicit and steamy nonfiction film-within-a-film about gay sex and masculinity. As the straight lead, Val, prepares to assume the Al Pacino position, he is forced to confront his own sexual boundaries and discomforts, which flare as he pushes deeper into this iconic gay interior. The film had its world premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

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I went to this screening at the Walter Reade Theatre in NYC tonight as part of OUTFEST. So "Interior. Leather Bar." was conceived when James Franco learned about the original "Crusing" movie starring Al Pacino, where Al's character had to go under cover in the NY fetish leather bar scene to uncover a murder. When the original movie was released the MPAA forced the director to remove 40 minutes of that movie otherwise it would have to have an "X" rating. So James and his director counterpart thought how and what those 40 minutes were and if they could be re-imagined. In the process he discovered that he was fighting the norms of what society has taught him to think about what sex should be and what should be in mainstream movies and that he strives every day to remove the society norms from his head and so the process of this movie was facing those inward stereotypes and try to throw them out. So he hired a lot of straight actors including his friend Val who he's known for 15 years and he knew that he would have difficulty doing scenes like that or even being in a movie with scenes like that. So you see the process that Val goes thru to accept even being in this film and worrying about how it may affect his career. So James demonstrated his own struggle with "society norms" by showing Val's struggle being a straight man playing a gay man undercover watching and participating in all of these S&M bar scenes that had real sex in them. It was really a very simple introspection that only a star like James Franco could get away with. But I know a lot of people were disappointed that James wasn't naked etc. but that wasn't the point of this journey.

I've attached a couple of pics I took of the Q&A session afterwards with James Franco and the director and one of the kink actors. (not great photos, but you get the point)