It's interesting that
Overnight is on this list. It's a film I've just decided I need to see, though I haven't seen
Boondock Saints in its entirety (I saw some of the scenes of Dafoe's, and that was enough, really). But your write-up of it in the 1990s List thread made me curious about whether the rest of the film really was as bad as the several minutes I saw. I hadn't read or heard anything about Duffy's personality but decided to look up an interview with him to see how he presents himself, and what I found was almost unbelievable. Just look at
this clip of Duffy talking to one of Ray Carney's classes. It surpassed anything I could have hoped to see, except for maybe him getting into it with Carney mano a mano.
But the thing that interests me about
Overnight is that it was made at Duffy's request, and two of his friends at the time shot it to document his sudden rise to filmmaking success, but ended up capturing his failure and the disintegration of their friendship with him.
Carney has this gem
on his website in reply to a question about how it came to be that Duffy was a guest in his class:
As far as I can tell based on that visit, Troy is an idiot. And his film is worse. He and his film were inflicted on me due to my lack of advance knowledge about either fact. We all make mistakes. However, I gather someone was there to record mine. (May yours go unmemorialized.) No one asked my permission to film or told me about the work that resulted. Typical. I assume it is awful.
He goes on to change the subject to himself, at length, explaining that he never watches any of the documentaries he's interviewed for, but they're all worthless, trivial and simplistic. He just knows they are.
Eventually he attempts to invoke Noam Chomsky to validate his points, attributing to him a quote about "institutional control of discourse," a phrase that Chomsky has never used as far as I'm aware. And when Chomsky writes about propaganda in democratic societies, it's hard to imagine what he had in mind had anything to do with movie-related documentaries being made that say things that Ray Carney disagrees with (thus in Carney's words the "dopey view" prevails, and one of the chosen few like Carney aren't allowed to present "the truth" about hacks like Hitchcock).
But anyway, Carney's site was once again well worth reading, especially because I love the knowledge that what's going on behind his smile in that clip is something like, "Fuck, how did this idiot end up in my classroom?" I need to see all of
Overnight and am hoping for lots of inarticulate displays of belligerence punctuated by awkward silences and staring vacantly into space.
(edited for typo)