Friedkin Uncut (Quoiat Films, Ambi Distribution, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 26) my husband Charles and I watched a quirky 2018 documentary on director William Friedkin, Friedkin Uncut, on Turner Classic Movies, which followed it up with one of Friedkin’s two most famous movies, The Exorcist (1973), and then a previous filmed interview with Friedkin done right after The Exorcist’s release. Friedkin Uncut was written and directed by Francesco Zippel and was based on extended interviews Zippel did with Friedkin in 2017 in his palatial home in the Hollywood Hills which he shared with his wife, former 20th Century-Fox studio head Sherry Lansing (the first woman to run a major movie studio, unless you count Mary Pickford at United Artists in 1919). William Friedkin was one of the many major directors who got his start doing live television in the 1950’s – he said he got his first job by accident by going to the wrong building and missing the job he meant to seek; he got hired to work in the mailroom and within a year he was a TV director. During that apprenticeship he made a documentary show called The People vs. Paul Crump, about an African-American man named Paul Crump who was unjustly convicted of murder and served nine years on Death Row until Otto Kerner, then governor of Illinois, saw Friedkin’s film and pardoned Crump. The idea that a movie could undo a miscarriage of justice and literally save someone’s life impressed Friedkin big-time and made him more determined than ever to get out of the relative media backwater of Chicago and crack Hollywood. Friedkin got his start in feature films from the rather unlikely quarter of Sonny and Cher – his first theatrical feature was their exploitation musical Good Times – and even that early he got a reputation for taking on unusual and edgy projects, including the film of Mart Crowley’s pioneering Gay play The Boys in the Band. He also made a film of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and directed Bert Lahr in his last film, The Night They Raided Minsky’s.

Then Friedkin got his big break when he directed the blockbuster Academy Award-winning hit The French Connection, which he shot in a guerrilla style. Instead of shooting the New York street scenes early in the morning when the streets were empty of traffic, he shot during the day and caught New York’s actual teeming millions as they went about their ordinary business. For the film’s famous car chase, Friedkin hired the stunt driver who’d previously driven the car Steve McQueen’s character chased in Bullitt (1969) and, rather than risk turning the cinematographer’s wife into a widow, he got in the camera car and literally shot the scene himself. Friedkin got the job of directing The Exorcist when William Peter Blatty, who’d written the novel on which The Exorcist was based and had cut a deal with Warner Bros. to write the screenplay as well (Blatty’s biggest previous film credit was for the original The Pink Panther, hardly a movie that suggests he’d be good at creating a horror story!), saw The French Connection and decided he wanted The Exorcist to have that same sort of raw energy. Blatty based The Exorcist on a real-life case of alleged demonic possession in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown suburb in 1949, and Friedkin traced participants in the real-life exorcism, interviewed them, got details that hadn’t made it into Blatty’s book and incorporated them into the film. The real case had involved a 14-year-old boy, but Blatty changed the possession victim into a girl (he described her as 12 in the novel, but Linda Blair, who played her in the movie, was actually 14 and looked it). The Exorcist was a huge hit – people literally lined up for blocks to get in to see it – and Friedkin would have seemed to be on his way to a huge career both artistically and commercially.

Alas, he didn’t make another movie for four years (unless you count his 1975 filmed interview with director Fritz Lang), and when he did it was a financial bomb: Sorcerer, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) starring The French Connection co-star Roy Scheider as one of four truck drivers assigned to deliver a load of dynamite to the site of an oil-well fire. Friedkin insisted that Sorcerer wasn’t a remake of The Wages of Fear since he and his writer, Walon Green, took only the basic situation of the original – four men driving two trucks down barely functional roads in a remote South American country – and invented new characters and plot points. He also called Sorcerer his best film and the one for which he’d most like to be remembered, though of course when Friedkin died in August 2023 at the age of 87 the films that got mentioned in his obituaries were his back-to-back early-1970’s blockbusters, The French Connection and The Exorcist. After another crime thriller, The Brink’s Job (1978), Friedkin’s next movie was Cruising (1980), which starred Al Pacino as a homicide detective going undercover in the New York Gay S/M scene to catch a serial killer preying on Gay men in S/M clubs. Friedkin found himself the target of an intense pressure campaign by Gay organizations who insisted that Cruising should not be made at all because it would inspire copycat real-life murders of Gay men. Picketers formed strike forces to invade Friedkin’s locations and disrupt the filming, and Friedkin Uncut includes an interview with one of the Gay activists who tried to work his way around the seeming contradiction between upholding freedom of speech and calling for the suppression of a specific film. I remember the controversy around Cruising quite well and there was a certain degree of “Ét tu, Bill?” around it because the same director who’d depicted Gay men sympathetically in The Boys in the Band was now joining the Gay-bashers and making a movie that supposedly exalted them. In any case, the AIDS pandemic started in 1981 and almost immediately turned Cruising into a museum piece – the free-and-easy sexuality of the Gay clubs Friedkin’s film was about ended almost immediately.

Friedkin’s career after Cruising had its ups and downs; among the ups included a quite good crime thriller called To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), for which Friedkin got the British synth-rock duo Wang Chung to write a quite effective score and killed off one of his protagonists, Richard Chance (William Petersen), three-fourths of the way through the movie. Friedkin claimed that this was a major innovation, but this was a typical case of “first-itis”: a quarter-century earlier Alfred Hitchcock had shocked his audiences by killing off Janet Leigh midway through Psycho (and well before Hitchcock did it, James Whale had pulled the same gimmick with the young Gloria Stuart in his 1933 film The Kiss Before the Mirror). Friedkin mentioned in his interview that he deliberately wanted to cast To Live and Die in L.A. with unknowns because he wanted audiences to come to the characters without any previously conceived expectations of having seen them in earlier roles, though one of his newbies, Willem Dafoe, became a star later. (Dafoe was the second actor Friedkin worked with who’d also played Jesus Christ: Max von Sydow, who played the title character in The Exorcist, had played Jesus in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965, eight years earlier, and Dafoe would play Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1987, two years after To Live and Die in L.A.) Later Friedkin would hook up with playwright Tracy Letts for an adaptation of Letts’ play Bug (2006) and another crime film, Killer Joe (2011), and he’d also do a documentary on a real exorcist, The Devil and Father Amorth (2017), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Friedkin said he didn’t like the whole concept of film festivals, and particularly the competition between films for awards at them (he refused to allow any of his movies to be entered in festival competitions, though he’d let them be shown out of competition), but he’d always wanted to visit Venice and he found the entire concept of building a city on water so enthralling that he joked that if he has another life after this one, he’d want to be a gondolier. My memories of William Friedkin as a filmmaker is he was talented but also frustrating, though there was one fascinating anecdote about him. One of the many other filmmakers Zippel interviewed for his film compared him with Sidney Lumet as a director who would almost never shoot more than a single take of a scene – and it occurred to me that was because both Friedkin and Lumet got their starts as directors on live TV, where you had to get it right the first time and retakes weren’t an option at all.