Crummy Captain

In the heady, sexy early days of the NC-17 (1990 onward), filmmakers seized upon their chance to make their films a little more explicit, with the hopes that their uncompromisedly dirty visions could make it to a handful of theaters. Directors - many European - seized on literature both for suitably blue source material and arthouse cred.

Louis Malle adapted Josephine Hart's steamy novel Damage. Jean-Jacques Annaud adapted Marguerite Duras' steamy novel The Lover. Lorenzo Onorati loosely adapted D.H. Lawrence's steamy Lady Chatterley. Todd Haynes adapted Jean Genet's work into Poison. John Duigan adapted Jean Rhys' mildly steamy novel Wide Sargasso Sea.

Compare Abel Ferrara. After 1990's King of New York, Ferrara got to work on Bad Lieutenant, a heavy performance by Harvey Keitel in a grim study of a nameless cop's moral deterioration. Anti-literary and unabashedly unpleasant, the flick was a fine example of how the NC-17 could be more than a haven for period-novel medium-core bodice-ripper erotica. As with Ken Russell's Whore, it envisioned the NC-17 as a place to make films for adults, which might mean 'wallowing in sleaze' in some (Ferrara, Russell) cases, but wallowing in sleaze with an intendedly non-pornographic purpose.

Bad Lieutenant wasn't the kind of film to have a sequel or remake, but it's got both. After Bad Lieutenant came out in 1992, Ferrara's followup was the 1993 Dangerous Game, which received a visibility boost thanks to costar Madonna's public trash-talking stint about the movie's quality. Dangerous Game starred Harvey Keitel as a movie director, struggling with a troubled production as well as his own behavioral excesses and moral deterioration. My friends and I couldn't have been the only ones to refer to it as Bad Director.

Bad Lieutenant was produced by Ed Pressman, who's hard at work in the planning stages for another take. Bad Lieutenant '08 (if anything, Bad Lieutenant '09) is in the script stages. It's the debut feature from William Finkelstein, who seems well-versed in the procedural cop/lawyer one-hour drama, with writing stints on NYPD Blue, Law & Order, L.A. Law, Brooklyn South, Murder One, Civil Wars, and, of course, Cop Rock.