Beyond the Law
Takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.
Norman Mailer
Casts & Crew
Rip Torn
Norman Mailer
George Plimpton
Mickey Knox
Buzz Farber
Beverly Bentley
Marsha Mason
Also Directed by Norman Mailer
Writer, ex-con and 40-something bottle-baby Tim Madden, who is prone to black-outs, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a pool of blood in his car.
Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.
Norman Mailer’s first feature filmmaking effort stars the director and his two longtime collaborators Buzz Farbar and Mickey Knox as a trio of gangsters holed up in a ramshackle New York apartment, drinking, braying, and fighting.