Get in line for some hardcore schadenfreude. Playing much like a Cinderella story where someone gets glassed with the broken slipper in the final act, Overnight is a compelling car-crash docu-soap charting the rise and ignominious fall of one Troy Duffy.
In 1996, Mr Duffy was, for a fleeting 15 minutes, the toast of Hollywood. His screenplay for vigilante shoot-‘em-up The Boondock Saints had just been snapped up by Miramax overlord Harvey Weinstein. In a grandiose and orchestrated press scrum, Weinstein, cinema’s most formidable ball-breaker, purchased Duffy’s commendably dingy local bar by way of a welcoming gift and anointed him as Tarantino elect.
Like Matt n’ Ben, Kevin Smith, Billy Bob Thornton or Robert Rodriguez before, Duffy was the new Miramax golden boy and suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the action.
Madonna signed his band The Brood to Maverick Records before hearing a single, derivative grungy note and everybody from Jeff Goldblum to Patrick Swayze came to party down with Troy.
Would this 26-year-old Boston bartender let all this attention go to his head? You better believe it.
As Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith – Duffy’s one-time friends and band managers – let the cameras roll, anticipating the ultimate rags to riches show-business documentary, their subject quickly succumbed to an aggravated case of Hollywooditis, making for a monstrous (and monstrously entertaining) spectacle.
“There are people in Kansas and Cleveland with my face on their refrigerators,” he rants at friends and family, before marvelling at what he refers to as his “deep cesspool of creativity”.
As Duffy’s ego explodes on-screen in a manner recalling Raging Bull fast-forwarded, the carousing and celebrity schmoozing gives way to tyrannical rage and hyperbolic self-mythology.
“There were warning signs,” recalls director Montana. “Long before Troy had the movie deal I remember he sat me down. You have to remember that at this point I had a TV show under my belt and I had worked in the music business for years, and Troy was a bartender with a screenplay. He turned around and asked ‘Tony, what would you be doing without me?’ But I couldn’t have anticipated just how bad he’d get.”
“He just started to buy into his own hype,” continues co-director Brian Smith. “I mean, he wasn’t even from Boston and definitely not from the wrong side of the tracks, as he liked to tell everyone.
Duffy’s gobsmacking treatment of his nearest and dearest, coupled with increasingly abusive tirades against such perceived rogues as Kenneth Branagh, Keanu Reeves and Ethan Hawke form a grimly humorous lesson on How To Lose Friends And Humiliate People.
Watching Duffy lash out at Brian Smith, Montana and indeed, his brother Taylor, one might easily mistake Overnight for a domination movie scripted by Larry David. Just how could they tolerate such behaviour?
“It was sort of like being in a cult,” laughs Brian Smith. “You couldn’t question anything. I think one of the most poignant moments in our movie is when he launches an attack on his own brother.
“People tried to tell him that he was making enemies, but there was no point. Besides, we were there trying to make our film, so we had to just had to stay quiet and see it through to the bitter end”.
Rather unsurprisingly, the wannabe auteur’s obnoxious behaviour would ultimately cost him dearly.
Sinking his teeth ever deeper into the hand that fed, he railed against the Weinstein brothers and unwisely dismissed Miramax co-president Meryl Poster as a “fucking cunt”.
Suffice to say, the multi-million production deal was off and the rest was pissed away with arrogant aplomb.
Unbowed, Duffy ploughed ahead with The Boondock Saints, albeit on a much smaller scale. Having once dissed John Cusack as a casting option, Duffy found himself directing Billy Connolly and Willem Defoe on a cut-price Canadian shoot.
With Harvey and Madonna no longer taking Mr. Duffy’s calls, The Boondock Saints took a well-deserved one-way trip straight-to-video.
Though the film currently enjoys teeny-tiny cult status among a certain kind of girlfriend-free comic-book geek, and is, apparently, very big in Poland, Duffy’s eventual production deal means he earns nothing from the movie’s lucrative DVD afterlife.
Six years on, he remains in the Hollywood wilderness attempting to finance a Boondock sequel and The Brood are completely kaput after shifting an impressively insignificant 690 CDs.
“When the movie was fucked and the record deal was fucked, that’s when he called Tony and I to threaten us,” explains Brian Smith. “Everything else was over, so he wanted to take control of the documentary. It was lousy, because he used 9/11 as an excuse to call, which was pretty low. But we had him signing release forms on camera, so he didn’t have a case.”
Still, even after the legal wrangles worked out entirely in the documentary makers’ favour, Duffy is not one to accept that he may have royally fucked-up.
“You hear him say in the movie that he’s never wrong,” sighs Brian Smith. “And in his mind that’s true. Everything that has happened is rationalised away. When he lost the Miramax deal he decided that was a good thing because Boondock should be a smaller, independent movie.
“Now in one respect that’s positive thinking, but with Troy it was pathological. Everything gets re-written to suit his purposes. So these days he surrounds himself with the Boondock flock as he calls them, the hardcore fans of the movie.”
“Yeah,” continues Montana. “He actually organises his own Boondock appreciation events and invites them all along through his website. You don’t see Tarantino doing that. Or anyone. But Troy’s got an ego to feed.”
Now there’s an understatement.