The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  My homesickness faded. He closed the door. “Here’s the thing,” he said quietly. “We’re getting eighty thousand dollars for each show. What’s the most you ever had to produce a documentary?”

  “About seven thousand dollars,” I said.

  “We’ve got to come in on budget,” he continued. “You understand that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “If you come in under, we’ll split the difference with you.”

  I was slow on the uptake.

  “Say you make the show for sixty-five thousand dollars, we’ll split the extra fifteen grand with you.”

  I was still a little slow: “I would want to put whatever I have into the show,” I said naively.

  “Of course,” he said, “but think about it.”

  Later I told Julian Ludwig, who was to be my producer at Wolper, that I was concerned about this man’s proposal.

  “He’s probably getting at least a hundred grand a show,” he said, “but he wants to pick up every nickel. If he tells you you’ve got eighty, you can bet it’s a helluva lot more.”

  The lessons were coming fast. I was shown to a spacious corner office and introduced to a secretary, my first one. Then I met the man himself.

  David Wolper had gone to USC to study film and journalism but never graduated; he became a buyer and seller of odd-lot B movies, travel films, old serials, and cartoons to the growing number of television stations that were springing up around the country, mostly stations with no network affiliation. With partners he bought the television rights to Superman and made twenty-six episodes, which they sold to syndication. When he sold his company three years later, it had become one of the most successful in television syndication. He started his documentary unit with the purchase of government films about the Russian and U.S. space programs and put them together as The Race for Space, which he sold to over a hundred stations in 1960. Two years later he was producing shows for all three networks, and a Time magazine profile labeled him “Mr. Documentary.” When I met Mr. Documentary, he was wearing slippers, wrinkled khakis, and a frayed white shirt and smoking a big hand-made Cuban cigar. At that time he smoked about six a day. His nickname among some of his employees, but never to his face, was “The Olive,” because of his greenish yellow complexion. He was chubby, with close-cropped light brown hair and heavy-lidded blue eyes. He shuffled around his office not caring about his appearance, but there was no doubt he was the boss. He had an almost permanent smile, and he was quick to laugh, but I was soon to discover that his easygoing manner concealed deeper emotions.

  He told me about the three titles he had sold to the 3M Company and the ABC network: The Bold Men; The Thin Blue Line; and Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon. I was to direct all three, and they were to be delivered and on the air within twelve months. They would each be narrated by Van Heflin, a movie star from the 1940s and ’50s, the golden era of MGM.

  What were the shows about? Wolper had only the vaguest notion. He had sold titles without detailed concepts. The Bold Men would be about men who risk their lives for money, adventure, or science. I’d have to find and identify such people and shoot about forty minutes of film per show, but I had to use stock footage to fill out the required forty-seven minutes of programming. This was a disappointment. I didn’t come to Los Angeles to work on stock footage, but it was clear that costs came first at Wolper, and it was cheaper to edit film that had been shot than to go out and shoot it.

  The Thin Blue Line was to focus on the police force of a big city. It was up to me to figure out the city and the content.

  Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon was to be about professional football. There had recently been a television documentary about Sam Huff, a famous lineman for the New York Giants, and the producers had concealed a microphone on Huff during a game, which captured the brutal sounds of football up close. Wolper wanted to do something similar, possibly with the Cleveland Browns and their great running back Jim Brown. Dave knew the owner of the Browns, Art Modell, and the NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle.

  What surprised me was Wolper’s certainty that I could fill three hours of network prime time, when all he had seen was my Paul Crump documentary. For some reason—inexperience or cluelessness—I was completely confident.

  At the end of our first meeting, he said, “Good luck, cookie, you’re gonna do great.”

  Soon after The Bold Man was announced in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, I started to get calls. One was from a stuntman named Rod Pack. Rod looked the part: tall, blond, a surfer’s body, a calm demeanor. He told me about a stunt he had rehearsed with a colleague, Bob Allen. Rod was a skilled parachutist, and he said he could jump out of a single-engine aircraft without a parachute at fifteen thousand feet and rendezvous with Allen, already in midair, who would pass him a chute. Allen would be wearing the required two parachutes. Pack would then have about a minute to secure the chute and pull its cord after falling four thousand feet at 120 miles an hour with no safety devices of any kind. Pack had calculated that in order to fall at the required speed, he needed to add two belts, each containing fifteen-pound weights, around his waist to compensate for the weight of the missing chutes. This was a guess—it had never been attempted. “I’m either going to come down safe, or I’m going to come down dead,” Pack told me. The pilot was a lanky middle-aged man named Harry Haynes, one of the best commercial pilots around, who flew everything from helicopters to jets.

  After meeting with Pack, Allen, and Haynes, and listening to their wild scenario, I rushed into Wolper’s office.

  He listened impassively, the ever-present cigar in his mouth. “Sounds great, cookie.”

  “How much should we offer him?” I asked.

  Without hesitation he said, “A thousand dollars.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding—he could die doing this!”

  Dave leaned forward, “You think he’s for real?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “And he came to you, right?” I nodded. “Offer him a thousand and give him the still photo rights. Tell him they should be worth a lot more than that.”

  “I don’t have the chutzpah to go back to him with a grand.”

  “He’s going to do it anyway! Whether we pay him or not, cookie.”

  I went back to Rod with the offer of a thousand dollars. He laughed and said he already had ten thousand dollars from a freelance still photographer, Larry Schiller, just for the still photo rights. Schiller was one of the best freelance photographers in the country. He worked for Life, Look, and other photo journals around the world. He saw the value in Pack’s death-defying stunt and immediately wrote a check; he was now calling the shots. He let us film the stunt for The Bold Men, but he would control the ancillary rights, which included not only the still photos but all subsequent television news coverage. The stills eventually were worth over half a million dollars, and pictures of the stunt appeared on the covers of every major photo magazine in the world—before the airing of The Bold Men. But even though we were scooped, it was the highlight of our show.

  I covered it with several cameramen, including Bill Butler, who I brought out from Chicago. We had a camera inside the single-engine Piper Cub and a couple of cameras on the ground to film the preparations, and on long lenses, the exchange of chutes in the air and the aftermath. Larry Schiller set up several remote cameras and a micro-camera built into Rod’s helmet. We filmed the stunt over the town of Arvin, California, near the Mojave Desert, on a bright weekday morning. We proceeded as though it was just another day at the office, but the threat of death was in the air.

  Two days before, Haynes, the pilot, who had nerves of steel, seemed edgy. He confided to me that Pack and Allen were not necessarily the best of friends. There had recently been a rift in their relationship over Allen’s fiancée. Pack had supposedly had an affair with her. If they failed to make contact in midair, it would be seen as merely a fatal error. I was aware of this as we filmed them, carefully packing the chutes in preparation for t
he stunt.

  Everything we were going to do was against some law. I never gave that a second thought; nor did Wolper. Pack and Allen had theoretically “rehearsed” the stunt, but this was to be the first time they had actually performed it. They didn’t appear nervous, nor was there apparent tension between them. I set up the shots and tried to keep the mood light, but I knew it could all go sour. If someone was injured or died on this stunt, it could involve manslaughter charges against Wolper, the ABC network, the 3M Company, and me. But I didn’t hesitate. I told everyone to mount up and started the cameras rolling.

  Bob Allen was the first to jump, holding the spare chute at arm’s length. Pack then jumped, and the rest of us held our breaths as he attempted to maneuver toward Allen. It seemed like forever, but it was only a matter of seconds before they rendezvoused in midair and Pack strapped on the chute and pulled the cord.

  The result is still thrilling to watch. Afterward there was an FAA investigation. Haynes, the pilot, lost his license. No charges were brought against the rest of us, but I had crossed a line I would encounter again many times.

  Julian Ludwig put me in contact with Jaime Contreras, a well-known production manager in Mexico. I flew to Mexico City to meet with him at the Churubusco Studios. He found two wonderful, unexpected characters for The Bold Men. One was Carlos Román, a young man who, for a handful of tourists in Acapulco, performed the most dangerous high-dive in the world from the top of La Quebrada (the Broken Rock), a height of 136 feet. The rock angled out another fifteen feet at its base, and the water was only ten feet deep, so if he cleared the face of the rock, Román had to execute an immediate flip when hitting the water, or crash into the jagged rocks just beneath the surface. I filmed him frolicking on a beach with his wife before setting out with the only tool of his trade, a bathing suit. He had to climb the face of the rock barefoot to reach the top, where he first offered a prayer to a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe before executing his dangerous dive.

  After filming his preparation and giving the viewer a sense of the danger, I filmed the dive in slow motion, and added Román’s point of view as he plunged toward the water’s surface. He performed this death-defying act every day for a few clapping hands and a handful of coins.

  In a small village just south of the city of Cuernavaca, Jaime introduced me to Mickey Luquin, a Mexican police captain who for eight years had trained his nineteen-year-old son Mickey Jr. to become a skilled sharpshooter. Captain Luquin demonstrated his son’s prowess. Using a six-shooter, Mickey Jr. shot an apple off his father’s head at fifty paces. He then did it again, over his shoulder, using the facet of a diamond ring as a mirror! When I asked Captain Luquin for permission to film them, he brought out cervezas for us, a bottle of orange soda for Mickey Jr.

  “Do you trust my son?” he asked.

  I said I did. Then he said something to Jaime in Spanish, which he translated for me: “He wants you to put one end of a cigarette between your lips; the captain will put the other end between his. At fifty paces, his son will split the cigarette in half, firing his six-shooter.”

  I thought he was joking—he wasn’t. He wanted me to show my faith in his son’s ability before giving me permission to film. “Don’t do it,” Jaime urged. “No matter how good a shot he may be, if he misses, you will be dead.”

  A voice in my head said, Do it! I had become fearless for the sake of my work. I honestly had no idea what would happen as I stood at one end of the Luquins’ yard, a three-inch cigarette poised between my lips and the father’s. Mickey Jr. lined up his shot. Suddenly I heard the six-shooter’s loud report, and felt the whoosh of the bullet as it whipped past my face. I saw half the cigarette in the father’s mouth, and I slowly took the other half out of mine. The sequence showing Mickey Luquin Jr.’s skills, using his father as a target, runs only three minutes in the finished film, and ends with Heflin’s narration: “The question here is, Who is the bold man—the son, or the father?”

  From Mexico City I flew to Madrid to film and interview El Cordobés in his hotel suite before a bullfight, donning the suit of lights. El Cordobés (Manuel Benítez Pérez) was a sullen twenty-eight-year-old with no education, caught up in his own celebrity. He was the idol of the bullring throughout the Spanish-speaking world. As a teenager, he made his reputation as an espontanéo, a kid who jumped out of the grandstand with a crude cape and tempted the bulls until security guards threw him out. He resembled, and was often compared to, James Dean. He spoke no English, and I knew little Spanish, but he agreed to let me film him for American television. Nervous before an upcoming corrida but skilled at concealing it, he arranged for me to film the bullfight with several cameras, all on long lenses, showing how dangerously close he positioned his body to the bull’s horns. His passes were beautifully executed, and he dedicated the life of the bull to the people of his hometown, Cordova. In the short time I spent with him, I saw that the bullfight was a contest as much about man against himself as man against bull.

  I asked him a question I put to others in the film: “What frightens you?”

  “I’m not afraid of death,” he answered; “only life scares me.”

  Chet Jessyk, a lion tamer with a traveling circus in San Diego, let us film him as he worked with a whip, a chair, and twelve African lions, all in a cage at the same time. He invited us to come inside the cage with him while he put the lions through their paces. My usually intrepid cameraman, Vilis Lapenieks, was married and wanted no part of it, so I took the 16 mm. Eclair camera and went into the cage. I was scared, but I had learned to put fear aside. Fear is a motivator; my own overriding fear was failure.

  I stepped inside the cage.

  “Just stay behind me,” Jessyk said as the lions circled, snarling and snapping at us. I concentrated on filming his actions and the lions’ reactions. After ten minutes in which he brought the lions within inches of us, he dismissed them and brought in six lionesses, more excitable, less predictable, and more dangerous than the males. They moved faster and seemed to sense my fear.

  “Stay calm,” Chet warned me. “They don’t know how weak we really are. That’s our only advantage.” In the film the sequence ends when Jessyk removes a splinter from a lioness’s tooth using a pair of pliers. The lioness appears docile and grateful.

  About a year after The Bold Men aired, Chet Jessyk’s daughter called to tell me that a lion had attacked her father, biting off one of his arms. He was hospitalized, and no longer able to perform.

  Every year a handful of men seek to break the land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats outside the sleepy little town of Wendover, Utah, on the Utah-Nevada border. Throughout the 1960s the record alternated between two men—Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons. In 1965 I filmed Arfons’s attempt to challenge Breedlove’s record of 526 miles per hour. Like the other subjects of The Bold Men, Art was low-key and soft-spoken. He looked like an American Indian; dark skin, thick black hair, and a broken nose. He was six feet tall and in good shape but for a slight paunch. He was a garage mechanic from Akron, Ohio, and he towed his vehicle, encased in a specially built bus, from Akron to Bonneville. The vehicle in which he hoped to set the record was no more than the engine of an F-105 fighter jet he had bought at a surplus sale. He added three tires, a cockpit, and a steering wheel capable of going in only one direction—straight ahead. He called the result the Green Monster, and pronounced it a racing car. The following morning, he and his three-man crew arrived at the Flats, fourteen square miles of rock-hard salt in a dead straight line, so straight and barren you can see the curvature of the earth.

  At the track, officials of the Racing Association prepared the timing devices, electronic beams that measure a vehicle’s speed as it passes. The land speed record is achieved by averaging three runs through a measured mile, within an hour. The average of the two fastest runs determines the record. Though the fourteen-mile course involves only one measured mile, the cars can only be braked by inflating two parachutes in the rear. The driver has twelv
e miles in which to brake or plunge into a tributary of the Great Salt Lake. Many have had to be rescued, or died.

  A wire mesh fence screens off the wreckage of vehicles that blew apart, killing their drivers. I filmed Arfons as he stared at the wreckage of the Infinity, a car driven by his friend Glen Leasher in 1962. The Infinity’s right rear tire blew at 350 miles per hour, the car skidded into the lake, and Leasher was killed. I intercut stock footage of this tragic event as Arfons stared at the wreckage.

  On the morning of the race the officials took their places in a trailer alongside the track to monitor the timing devices. An ambulance pulled up, and we hear Art’s voice on the sound track: “All I need’s five hundred and thirty miles an hour, and I got the record. If a man leaves a record in the books, his life isn’t wasted.” Just after 9:00 a.m., the Green Monster’s single engine roared to life in a fiery rage. Its sound was deafening and its velocity a blur; within seconds, the chutes flew open and the speed was recorded: 463 miles an hour, well short of the record. Wind force had shattered the glass of the canopy, and Art and his crew had to replace it. Before the second run, he asked me if I’d like to ride along.

  Vilis Lapenieks, the cameraman, said, “You’re crazy,” but without hesitation I put on a safety helmet, took the camera, and wedged myself into the canopy next to Art. I filmed his face, his hands on the speed stick, and the black chalk line against the solid white salt as it flew by. The timing devices measured 515 miles per hour on this run, eleven miles short of the record, with only twenty minutes remaining. On a third and final run he would have to exceed 550 miles an hour to claim the record. But the tires had only been tested safe to a maximum speed of 550.

  Art was calm, determined. When I emerged from the airless cockpit, I was nauseous, my stomach in knots. The tires were replaced, and Art and his crew pushed the Green Monster a third and final time to the starting line. He gave a thumbs-up and blasted off. In seconds, as we filmed, we saw the car lose control; the right rear tire exploded, and the chutes failed to open. Chaos. The ambulance rolled out, its siren blaring. Vilis, Nigel Noble the sound man and I, the officials and a handful of spectators raced along the track. About twenty feet from the body of water, where it would have sunk, the Green Monster had come to rest, lopsided, its right rear tire blown to shreds. When Art emerged from the cockpit, the official told him that his speed through the final measured mile was 559 miles an hour. His last two runs had achieved an average 536 miles an hour, a new land speed record. The small crowd lifted him to their shoulders. The Bold Men ends on this shot.