Overnight Review

OVERNIGHT
DIRECTED BY Tony Montana & Mark Brian Smith
STARRING: Troy Duffy, Taylor Duffy, Tony Montana, Mark Brian Smith, Billy Connolly, Willem Dafoe


In 1997, a Boston doorman named Troy Duffy was swept away in a wave of publicity when a script he’d penned entitled The Boondock Saints was bought by Harvey Weinstein (of Miramax Films). Not only did Weinstein purchase the film for $1 Million, he also agreed to purchase the bar for which Duffy worked, co-owning the establishment with him. Harvey also agreed to hire Troy’s band The Brood to record the soundtrack for The Boondock Saints. In short, Troy was offered a golden ticket
He was Harvey’s boy. Once the promise of fame and fortune hit, Troy had his friends Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith document his ‘rise to glory’, the footage of which forms the basis of Overnight, which plays less like a documentary and more like watching someone set fire to a Van Gogh.

With his directorial debut in the offing, Troy forms The Syndicate, a production company consisting primarily of members of The Brood and his fledgling documentary crew, Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith. The Syndicate is intended as the production company by which Troy will ‘dominate’ global cinema and music. Meeting everyday to discuss his rise to ‘world domination’, Troy holds court.
Dressed in his trademark overalls, he chain-smokes cigarettes, guzzles beer and
lambastes his colleagues reminding them of what pathetic hanger’s on they are and how they ‘wouldn’t be anything without him’. Aside from hurling general abuse, Duffy spends a majority of his time getting trashed every night at his bar and languishing in his production offices making abusive phone calls to a variety of production executives and agents, wondering why his project isn’t the highest priority at Miramax and waiting for his impending takeover of Tinsel town.
There are several sequences in which Duffy meets with a variety of celebrities who have latched on to the buzz surrounding ‘Harvey’s boy’ however this honeymoon period soon ends when Duffy discovers that Miramax has put The Boondock Saints into ‘turnaround’ and shelved the film. At this point, Troy doesn’t just burn his bridges with Weinstein; he takes a flamethrower to them. This all culminates in an explosive conference call to Miramax in which Troy blusters and demands that his deep ‘cesspool of creativity’ be duly recognised. His crowning achievement is to end the conference call by calling Meryl Poster, the co-President of Production at Miramax, a c**t. Believing that aggression and castigation somehow equals business acumen, Duffy stumbles embarrassingly through a series of misadventures (including a recording contract for The Brood) and screws up one phenomenal opportunity after another. After destroying his relationship with Weinstein, he destroys his friendships with the documentary makers, claiming they have done nothing to warrant being paid and that they are worthless friends. Duffy is soon given a harsh lesson in the true power of ‘Harvey’, when he figures that he’ll shop his hotly touted script to other studios. Duffy is shocked to discover that no other studio will touch The Boondock Saints after Harvey has passed on it. Eventually a small independent company, Franchise Films, finances the picture but for less than half of what Miramax were prepared to put up for it. Duffy shoots his opus regardless with Billy Connelly and Willem Dafoe starring, an indication that the foul mouthed doorman does have at least a modicum of talent. It’s eventually released onto DVD where it’s found a cult audience.

Watching Troy piss a dream career up against a wall is surely one of finest examples of schardenfreud (pleasure in another’s misery) imaginable however as a three dimensional documentary, Overnight is hardly unbiased. If anything, it’s a total stitch-up orchestrated by disgruntled friends. However in the filmmakers defence, the stitching is ably done by Duffy himself, whose incessant rambling, abusiveness, posturing, pontificating and offensive verbosity - makes for one of the most compelling car-crashes of a documentary you’re ever likely to see.

JARROD WALKER