Interior. Leather Bar.

10 p.m. Fri. & Sat.; 8:45 p.m. Thurs. Feb. 13;
10 p.m. Sat., Feb. 15 at Grand Illusion. 
Not rated. 70 minutes.

Co-directors James Franco and Travis Mathews, learning that 40 minutes had been censored from William Friedkin’s incendiary 1980 film Cruising, decided to remake/reimagine them. We see some of those completed scenes, but basically this is a making-of doc—in other words, we are watching Franco’s footage of Mathews filming actor Val Lauren playing Al Pacino playing undercover cop Steve Burns playing gay. To recreate the discomfort Pacino’s character (and presumably Pacino himself) felt while shooting the original steamy S&M-bar scenes, they naturally had to cast a straight actor in the role. (After we see Lauren and his fellow thespians receive a lesson on how to cruise, it becomes amusingly clear they needn’t have bothered—the attitude and body language of a gay man on the prowl in a club is identical to an actor’s habitual, perpetual how-do-I-look self-consciousness.)

For a working actor, Lauren’s surprisingly unworldly, and consequently Interior. Leather Bar. is primarily an exploration of his personal conflict over all this scary gay stuff. On the phone with Lauren, we hear his agent’s harangues, warning him of the damage to his reputation that’ll be done by “Franco’s faggot project.” (Because of course after Cruising, Pacino’s career tanked.) Since Franco’s stated motivation for this exercise was a demand for the freedom to explore sexuality on film, and since the unseen agent’s homophobia thus lies at the crux of the issue, it’s odd that these conversations are the scenes that ring falsest; and when we later see Lauren sitting against the wall of a parking lot, his script in his lap, reading aloud the stage direction “Val sits against the wall of the parking lot. The script is in his lap. He reads to himself,” you suspect the entire thing—in yet another layer of meta—is a fully scripted put-on. (What’s not simulated is the close-up fellatio; take this either as warning or encouragement.)

gborchert@seattleweekly.com