Page 484 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

464 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.
Wally Wallace: The film representative came into the Mineshaft
maybe six months before filming. He wanted to do still pho-
tographs, but he said the ceilings were not high enough for a
movie. I refused because we had a rule at the beginning about
no photographs. We only let friends like Mapplethorpe take
some. . .And then a couple of my staff got involved with the
movie. Others on the staff didn’t want anything to do with it
because it portrayed gays as murderers. . . .
Jack Fritscher: So, to end the rumor: it was not filmed at the
Mineshaft.
Wally Wallace: Cruising was not filmed at the Mine-
shaft — although to this day people think it was. The bar
scenes were done at a place now known as the Cell Block, but
at that time it was — before it was Hellfire — another after-
hours place in the basement of the Triangle Building at 14
th
Street and Ninth Avenue. It is a unique space that is under the
street and not under the building.
Jack Fritscher: It was always a more hetero mix there. My friend
Frank Vickers, the Colt model who was also a model for Map-
plethorpe, liked to play there. [Having photographed Frank
Vickers on video in 1981, I asked him to appear on the cover
of the first edition of my erotic fiction anthology, Stand by
Your Man (1987).]
Wally Wallace: They continued to want to shoot stills in the
Mineshaft, but I refused. [In a much longer and compli-
cated dialog, Wally Wallace alleged to me, the film company
purposely “set up” the first police bust of the Mineshaft by
bribing the cops who had helped Friedkin direct The French
Connection in Manhattan a few years earlier. During the raid,
while Wally Wallace and his staff were arrested and]. . .taken
downtown in a paddy wagon. . . .a crew from the movie com-
pany came into the Mineshaft and photographed everything
[ostensibly to build a similar set on a sound stage]. . .Friedkin
had this obsession to re-create the Mineshaft interior and
exterior.
Jack Fritscher: It certainly looks real on film.
Wally Wallace: In order to create the exterior, he hired the meat
company which is right next door to the Mineshaft, where he
filmed all his entrances and exits to the bar in the bar scenes.
In the movie, people go downstairs after entering, whereas
in the Mineshaft, you had to go upstairs. Otherwise, it looks
the same.

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