Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) review

Franco and co-director Mathews take a bit of IMDb trivia - that William Friedkin's film Cruising (with Al Pacino) had forty minutes cut by the MPAA - as an excuse to 'recreate'/'reimagine' what the excised footage may have looked like (using Val Lauren as a stand-in for Pacino). Really just a partially-formed concept, with Franco making the 'argument' that there should be more things in mainstream films that make people uncomfortable and push them out of their comfort zones ... and to reinforce that point, he and Mathews hire (mostly) gay men to have sex with each other, lick boots and paddle one another (coincidentally, this was released the same year as Blue Is the Warmest Color, which contained explicit lesbian sex). The suggestion that actor Lauren, after the shooting concluded, would start 'cruising' is not supported strongly by the preceding scenes. At one point Franco jokes, "Fuck scripts!," and then gives his patented Franco Grin: he is a trickster and a performance artist, after all.