<P> Philip D'Antoni, who had produced Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection, approached Friedkin with the idea of directing a film based on New York Times reporter Gerald Walker's 1970 novel Cruising, about a serial killer targeting New York City's gay community . Friedkin was not particularly interested in the project . D'Antoni tried to attach Steven Spielberg, but they were not able to interest a studio . A few years later Jerry Weintraub brought the idea back to Friedkin, who was still not interested . Friedkin changed his mind following a series of unsolved killings in gay leather bars in the early 1970s and the articles written about the murders by Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell . Friedkin also knew a police officer named Randy Jurgensen who had gone into the same sort of deep cover that Pacino's Steve Burns did to investigate an earlier series of gay murders, and Paul Bateson, a doctor's assistant who had appeared in Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist, who had confessed to some of those murders . All of these factors gave Friedkin the angle he wanted to pursue in making the film . Jurgenson and Bateson served as film consultants, as did Sonny Grosso, who had earlier consulted with Friedkin on The French Connection . Jurgenson and Grosso appear in bit parts in the film . </P> <P> In his research, Friedkin worked with members of the Mafia, who at the time owned many of the city's gay bars . Al Pacino was not Friedkin's first choice for the lead; Richard Gere had expressed a strong interest in the part, and Friedkin had opened negotiations with Gere's agent . Gere was Friedkin's choice because he believed that Gere would bring an androgynous quality to the role that Pacino could not . </P> <P> The Motion Picture Association of America originally gave Cruising an X rating . Friedkin claims he took the film before the MPAA board "50 times" at a cost of $50,000 and deleted 40 minutes of footage from the original cut before he secured an R rating . The deleted footage, according to Friedkin, consisted entirely of footage from the clubs in which portions of the film were shot and consisted of "(a) bsolutely graphic sexuality...that material showed the most graphic homosexuality with Pacino watching, and with the intimation that he may have been participating ." In some discussions, Friedkin claims that the missing 40 minutes had no effect on the story or the characterizations, but in others he states that the footage created "mysterious twists and turns (which (the film) no longer takes)", that the suspicion that Pacino's character may have himself become a killer was made more clear and that the missing footage simultaneously made the film both more and less ambiguous . When Friedkin sought to restore the missing footage for the film's DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer had it . He believes that UA destroyed the footage . Some obscured sexual activity remains visible in the film as released, and Friedkin intercut a few frames of gay pornography into the first scene in which a murder is depicted . </P> <P> This movie represents the only film soundtrack work by the seminal Los Angeles punk rock band the Germs . They recorded six songs for the film, of which only one, "Lion's Share", appeared . The cut "Shakedown, Breakdown" was written and recorded especially for the film by Toronto cult band Rough Trade . </P>

Who was the killer in the movie cruising