The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  If you want to study film or actually make films, you don’t need to go to film school; you just need to watch Hitchcock’s movies. The entire vocabulary of cinema is embodied in his work. To refer to him simply as the “Master of Suspense”—which he is—is to understate his total contribution. He was a master showman. When his actors played a double-entendre romantic scene, as in North by Northwest with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint on a train, you could feel the heat between them. All of his works have moments of comedy, brilliantly directed. Even in a film like Psycho, which is dark and disturbing, Hitchcock knew audiences needed to relieve the tension, and he provided that relief, in the midst of brutal murder.

  The playwright Herb Gardner, author of A Thousand Clowns, told me that Hitchcock asked him to come to Hollywood to discuss a screenplay. Gardner was ushered into a conference room, where he was shown an array of storyboards for the film Hitchcock wanted him to write. Hitchcock already had the film conceived, in terms of images; he just wanted Gardner to provide the words. When they met, Gardner thanked him but told him that, while he was honored, he couldn’t accept the assignment; he didn’t think of himself as a caption writer. But he did have a question about two panels in the storyboards. One showed a man falling from a bridge, and the very next one showed the same man sitting at an outdoor café.

  “That’s correct,” Hitchcock answered.

  “How do you have this guy fall off a bridge, and in the next shot he’s sitting in a café?” Gardner asked.

  “The crew goes there,” Hitchcock answered with a straight face.

  Gardner laughed. “I understand that, but how do you get the audience there?”

  Without pause, Hitchcock said, “Mr. Gardner, the audience will go wherever I take them. And they’ll be very glad to be there, I assure you.”

  Hitchcock was forthcoming about his techniques. On the matter of suspense, he understood that forecasting what is going to happen creates a more powerful experience for the audience than letting the events play out without a sense of anticipation. Imagine a scene where two people are sitting at a table having a long conversation; then a bomb goes off, killing them both. The audience is surprised, even shocked, but there’s no suspense. If the same conversation takes place, but the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table, and the characters don’t, that creates suspense. A good example of Hitchcock’s application of this concept is the shower scene in Psycho, where the shadow of the killer appears in the room and on the shower curtain before Janet Leigh is aware of it. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane inspired me to become a filmmaker, but Hitchcock’s body of work was my tutorial.

  Norman Lloyd told Wizan, “There’s more suspense in the first five minutes of the Paul Crump documentary than there was in anything The Hitchcock Hour produced last season.” He asked to meet me. I had never done anything on a soundstage. Now I was sitting across the desk from Norman Lloyd in his sunny office at Hitchcock’s company on the Universal back lot. I had to conceal my nervousness and awe. He asked how I happened to make the documentary and told me how impressed he was with it. He also liked the three documentaries I’d done for Wolper. While I was thrilled to be appreciated by an accomplished filmmaker, I was still learning on the job. I had made six documentaries, but looking back, they were mediocre. There are a few decent moments in each, but I don’t think I had a natural feel for cinema, and nothing I directed reflected the films that inspired me.

  Norman told me this was to be the final season of The Hitchcock Hour, and asked if I’d be interested in directing the last show. Interested? Without a doubt. He handed me a script called Off Season from a story by Robert Bloch, who had written Psycho, and adapted for television by a talented young writer named James Bridges, who later became a fine screenwriter and director, with Urban Cowboy and The China Syndrome among his credits. Off Season was about a big-city cop who accidentally kills an innocent suspect, and is fired from the police force. He moves with his young wife to a small town to start over as a local deputy sheriff with very few challenges. In the story’s finale, he accidentally kills another innocent man, leaving the audience to wonder if the two killings were in fact accidental. John Gavin, then a romantic movie star best known for his work in Psycho, was to play the lead, with supporting roles to be played by Tom Drake, once a star of MGM musicals, and Richard Jaeckel, a terrific character actor who specialized in playing heavies.

  Norman told me he’d let me direct this episode if John Gavin agreed. John had director approval. He watched my documentaries, then we met. A charming, intelligent man with matinee-idol good looks, he spent about half an hour sizing me up before deciding he would approve me as director. We’ve remained good friends to this day, and I never forget that it was due to him that I had this incredible opportunity.

  Norman emphasized that it was as important to the studio to come in on schedule as it was to do a brilliant show. He gave me this piece of advice: “Make a shot list the day before. Share it with the crew so they can be prepared when you arrive in the morning, and be sure your first setup is simple, so you can get it in one take. That way, the crew will have confidence that you know what you’re doing.”

  For some perverse reason, I set up the first shot as a complicated camera move that took two actors through three rooms, and was impossible to accomplish in one take. At that time television shows didn’t normally do complex setups because of the time factor. The director of photography was Jack Warren, who was nominated for an Academy Award as director of photography on The Country Girl, a film that won the Academy Award for Grace Kelly. An experienced and respected DP of many years’ standing, Jack had worked his way up from being a film loader. I was a novice, who had never worked on a soundstage. Jack and his crew must have thought I was related to someone at Universal.

  When I showed Jack the shot I had in mind, he shook his head. “Jeez, kid, this will take me a couple of hours to light.”

  “I don’t care, Jack, that’s what I want.”

  “Let me show you something else.” He took me back to the set and laid out several angles to replace the one I’d chosen.

  There’s no point in arguing in front of the crew or the cast—just say what you want and move on. But in this case I said, “That’s boring, Jack—I don’t want to do it that way.”

  He shrugged and proceeded to set his lights, and we blocked the camera move I asked for. A young DP on a television series today would light a shot like this in less than fifteen minutes. Jack took an hour and a half. When we were lit and blocked, it took seven or eight takes for the actors, John Gavin and Indus Arthur, to make the scene work. Around take six, a phalanx of Black Suits, including a worried-looking Norman Lloyd, appeared in the shadows. Word spread around Black Rock, which is what Universal is called, that a young director had been unable to print a setup by 10:30 a.m., after an 8:00 a.m. call.

  I thought I was about to be fired, but I also knew I had to bring something original to my work. “Bill,” said Norman, “we’ve got to make the schedule. There’s no give here. Our shows always come in on time and on budget.”

  I had to make a decision: shoot the whole thing like Orson Welles, or do it in the workmanlike style of a TV director. TV directors worked all the time, and Orson Welles couldn’t get a job. In TV, whether a film is brilliant doesn’t matter as much as bringing it in on schedule. The guys who work all the time are the guys who can do both.

  Next morning, the studio again filled with more Black Suits. I was blocking another scene, and Jack Warren was watching, just behind me. I could hear Norman Lloyd’s strident tones as he approached Jack, then said to him in a soft voice, “Jack, I’ve just seen the rushes. I know that first shot took forever, but it’s brilliant.”

  Warren turned to him in amazement. “You liked it?”

  “Liked it? I love it.”

  I heard Jack whisper, “It was my idea.”

  “Well, it’s great stuff,” Norman answered. Then he came over to me and put an arm around me. “Good s
tuff, Bill. I wish I had more shows for you.”

  He was pleased, the Suits evaporated, but in that moment an insight popped into my head like a comic-book lightbulb: even someone as distinguished as an Academy Award–nominated cameraman claimed credit for a shot he had opposed. Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan.

  On Thursday, the next-to-last day of production, Alfred Hitchcock came to the stage to film his introduction. Norman and a group of Suits brought him to where I was rehearsing. He was wearing a black suit and blue tie, the “uniform” on the Universal lot. He was taller than I expected, but with a mammoth girth. I reached out to shake his hand, and he extended his like a dead fish. It was as though he expected me to kiss it. I found him cold and remote, and made a silent vow never to treat young hopefuls that way.

  “Mr. Friedkin,” he said in that iconic British drawl, “usually our directors wear ties.”

  I was in my own “uniform,” T-shirt and khaki pants. I thought he was putting me on, and I tried to make light of it; “Oh, I guess I left it at home,” was the best I could muster before he turned and walked away, clearly not amused. The Suits drifted along in his wake. We crossed paths only once again, five years later.

  Shortly before Off Season was aired, Norman Lloyd called to tell me that Hitchcock had made no editorial changes to my cut. Usually he would suggest numerous revisions. I was pleased to hear that, until I saw it; then I wished the Master had put his stamp on it. I recently saw it, forty years on, and it’s terrible, lacking style and reeking of compromise.

  An actress named Dodie Heath had a small part in Off Season. A kind, lovely woman, she lived on Sunset Plaza Drive with her husband, Jack Cushingham, tennis pro to the stars. Among his friends was director John Frankenheimer. While I believed Orson Welles to be the best living film director, Frankenheimer was without a doubt the most innovative and influential director of “live” television drama in a medium that produced Sidney Lumet, Franklin Schaffner, Robert Mulligan, Fielder Cook, Arthur Penn, and Delbert Mann. As a young television director in Chicago I had seen all of Frankenheimer’s memorable shows on Playhouse 90 and other drama anthologies. No one will ever top his shows because live television drama is over. Not only were the performances he drew from actors exceptional, his use of live cameras was unparalleled.

  One night at the Cushinghams, I met John and his wife, the actress Evans Evans. I was as awestruck as when I met Hitchcock. John had become a successful film director, with The Birdman of Alcatraz, All Fall Down, The Manchurian Candidate, and other classics. We became friends. He was tall, handsome, a ladies’ man, though happily married. His hobby was gourmet cooking, and he and Evans had a second house on the fashionable Ile St. Louis in Paris, where he studied cooking at the Cordon Bleu. He was as good a chef as he was a director, and a bon vivant. I looked forward to being in his company and picking his brain. He had Wolper send him my documentaries to screen, and his appreciation meant more to me than any other reactions.

  After The Hitchcock Hour, the Morris Agency was getting inquiries about me. It was time to move on. Fantozzi and Lastfogel met with Wolper, and he agreed to let me out of my contract with the promise that I would one day, at his call, direct a film for him for seven thousand dollars! We remained friends, but he never exercised that option. I’m sure he believed I wasn’t ready for the big time, and he was right.

  3

  GOOD TIMES

  I’ve worked with many talented people, but only a few geniuses. One of them was Sonny Bono. Though he and Cher had a number of hit recordings in the mid-1960s and early ’70s, and later their own television series for four years, it was their strange costumes and comedic personae that drove their popularity. When I met them in 1965, they had the number-one hit in the country, a rock ballad called “I Got You Babe.” The sentiment in Sonny’s lyrics was real; he wrote what he felt. In that year alone the duo had five songs in the top twenty, but soon the zeitgeist changed and the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and The Doors would eclipse them.

  Sonny was thirty, though he didn’t talk about it. Cher was eighteen. They’d first met two years before at Ben Frank’s Coffee Shop on Sunset Boulevard just east of the Strip. Sonny was a gopher for the legendary rock producer and creator of the “wall of sound,” Phil Spector. Cher LaPiere, a striking young beauty, was basically homeless. Her mother, Georgia, an attractive blonde, had several boyfriends and was estranged from Cher and her father, John Sarkisian, a dark, troubled Armenian drug addict who would eventually overdose. Neither Georgia nor John paid much attention to Cher, and she would crash wherever she could. After a year of seeing Cher at Ben Frank’s, Sonny and his then girlfriend invited her to sleep on the floor of their one-room apartment. Sonny used to take her to Spector’s recording sessions at Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in East Los Angeles, and Spector would often ask the two, or anyone else who was in the studio, to sing background. He was then recording the Ronettes, Ike and Tina Turner, and the Righteous Brothers. His “wall of sound” was a product of the inherent limitations of the studio’s space: its small size, low ceilings, and echo-chamber acoustics. Sound recording at the time took place mostly in high-ceilinged, soundproofed studios with separate microphones for each section—strings, percussion, and so on—but Gold Star’s acoustics allowed for no separation. If a producer wanted to hear more drums or bass, he would record them separately and overdub. In the 1950s and ’60s, Gold Star was the recording studio of choice, originally because it was cheaper than the others, but before long its string of hits—among them “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” and Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep Mountain High”—put it on the map.

  Gold Star defined West Coast rock of that era, becoming as legendary as Nashville’s Sun Studios. Iron Butterfly recorded at Gold Star, as did Buffalo Springfield, Duane Eddy, Bob Dylan, the Bee Gees, Bobby Darin, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

  Sonny wanted to be a producer like Spector, and he learned by studying Spector’s methods. Before coming to Los Angeles, Sonny worked for a butcher in his hometown, Detroit. His parents were Italian immigrants, and like them, he never finished high school. He was married to a childhood sweetheart with whom he had a daughter in 1958, but they divorced in 1962. He was one of the funniest and warmest people I’ve ever known. It wasn’t long before he and Cher discovered they had a lot in common. “You really want to be a singer, don’t you?” he would tease her.

  She would protest, “No,” and then tease him in turn: “You want to be like Phil.” Sonny didn’t deny it. “Why don’t you make your own record?” she suggested.

  “I can’t do that; not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know enough about it, and I don’t have money to pay for a session.”

  “Stan would let you use the studio.” Stan was Stan Ross, cofounder and recording engineer at Gold Star.

  “Who’s going to pay the musicians?”

  “I know you want to write songs, and you can write as good as Phil,” Cher said. Sonny had in fact written a song that Sam Cooke recorded in the early 1960s. Sonny and Cher’s mutual teasing became mutual encouragement, and soon Sonny’s former girlfriend was gone, and Cher was living with him. They managed to get a recording contract under the name Caesar and Cleo. With what little cash he had and after pawning his electric typewriter, Sonny wrote “I Got You Babe,” which became a number-one hit. In personal appearances, Sonny, pudgy and about five-seven in lifts, wore a pageboy haircut, a fur vest, and fur boots. Cher had long black hair and colorful pantsuits that revealed her slender arms and long, lean body. By 1965 they were major stars.

  The Morris agents used to have regular lunches at the Hillcrest Country Club, a private club started by rich Jews who couldn’t get into the Gentile clubs. At one such lunch, Fantozzi said to Abe Lastfogel, “Sonny Bono wants to do a movie—we introduced him to Friedkin, and they hit it off.”

  Abe said, “Wh
at do you need from me?”

  Tony said, “Somebody’s gotta pay for the film.”

  Abe said, “I’ll get Steve Broidy to do it.”

  That was that. I was amazed at the speed at which things happened, and I started to believe it was because of my talent. Think about it. I’m suddenly in a situation where everyone wants me to direct something. Last year I was in Chicago, struggling to keep a job. A year or two before that, I was in an unemployment line, with no prospects.

  Broidy made a small fortune as owner of Allied Artists, a B-picture factory, in the 1940s and ’50s. He sold the company and made another fortune in real estate and banking, becoming one of the founders of Union Bank of California. He had been out of the movie business for years and had little interest in pop culture, but the appeal of Sonny and Cher at that time was not lost on him. Over lunch at the Hillcrest he made a deal with his friend Abe Lastfogel for the rights to a Sonny and Cher film. The idea was to make it as quickly and cheaply as possible, before interest in them died down.

  Mr. Broidy had shiny white hair, a red complexion, and wore dark suits. His manner was gruff. He had a thick Bronx accent, and rarely looked you in the eye. He had a short attention span, and I’m guessing he was about seventy years old at that time. I was just another wannabe director to him, a necessary inconvenience. My résumé was hardly terrific, which meant I could be had cheap.