The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  At the same time I had another offer from my idol, John Frankenheimer. John was preparing his magnum opus on Formula One racing, Grand Prix, and he invited me to be the second-unit director, in charge of shooting the actual races in France. When the offer to direct the Sonny and Cher film came along, I was less than enthused. There was no script, this wasn’t my kind of music, and I wanted to work for Frankenheimer.

  The Morris agents—Fantozzi, Mr. Lastfogel, and Joe Wizan—summoned me to a meeting. Their advice: “Do the Sonny and Cher picture.” Why? “Because if you do second unit on the Frankenheimer movie and it works, you’ll be a second-unit director forever. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have a hard time getting a film to direct. Do Sonny and Cher, and whether it’s good or bad, you are a film director. They’re the hottest act in the business. Steve Broidy is a great producer, knows when to spend a buck and when not to. Most important—he knows how to make money.”

  Sonny and Cher lived in the San Fernando Valley on a hill in a new tract house among a dozen similar homes, none occupied except theirs. I pulled up in my 1963 black Ford Fairlane, driven out from Chicago, known affectionately as the Batmobile. A slim young man with long hair and an angry look answered the door. This was Gino, a martial arts expert and bodyguard to Sonny and Cher. In the living room were Harvey Kresky, their agent from the Morris office, and Joe DiCarlo, formerly an employee of the gangster Mickey Cohen, then in charge of Sonny and Cher’s “security.”

  When the introductions were finished, Sonny and Cher burst into the room like a force of nature. Sonny had a bright smile and was immediately warm and cordial. Cher was beautiful but distant, saying, “Hi, Friedkin,” and soon disappearing upstairs to paint her toenails. At only eighteen, she had a Garboesque air of detachment. Sonny handled the business and was clearly the boss. The others deferred to him, and Cher didn’t want to be bothered; but we all liked each other, and by the end of that meeting I agreed to do the picture, whatever the hell it might be.

  I started going to their house every day, just hanging out, mostly with Sonny. He was a paternal figure to Cher, who had never really had a father, just a series of her mother’s boyfriends. Cher was madly in love with Sonny and would do whatever he asked without question. Behind her remote facade, I sensed a deep wound and a mistrust of men, but with Sonny she was always affectionate and deferential.

  Sonny and I started reading scripts, but nothing seemed right. One day he showed me an unsolicited letter he had pulled from a stack of fan mail. They were getting thousands of letters and postcards each week. This one was from a would-be screenwriter named Nicholas Hyams who lived in New York, a rambling but intelligent letter suggesting that their movie should be about them making a movie. Hyams seemed to “get” Sonny and Cher, as well as understanding their audience appeal. He made shrewd observations as to what a film audience would want from them: “Just be yourselves, don’t try to be actors. The audience loves Sonny and Cher and wants to see you as you are.” Sonny suggested we call Mr. Hyams, whose phone number was listed at the bottom of his letter.

  Broidy was wary of adding another nonprofessional to our club. Thinking we needed an old pro, Steve brought on board one of his cronies, a veteran producer of B pictures, Lindsley Parsons. Okay, but Sonny and I didn’t want an old pro writer. It was the first of many battles Steve was to lose. He wanted to make a cheap picture, pick up a quick buck, and get out; we wanted to make our reputations, me as a filmmaker, Sonny as a movie star. We treated Broidy and Parsons like the medieval war horses we thought they were, but Sonny was always respectful, leaving it to me to voice our objections when disagreements came up.

  Nick Hyams was in his twenties, slim, smart, and angry. He tried to conceal his anger, but you could sense it in a crowd. He wore either a perpetual smirk or a scowl on his face, and his manner was unlike the tone of his letter. He was condescending to Sonny and disdainful of me. What he really wanted was to direct the film himself, and he wondered how I had come up with this plum assignment. The three of us met every day for two weeks, with Cher making an occasional disinterested appearance. She’d listen to a few minutes of our conversation, then ask Sonny when he was going to be done. He would say, “Soon,” with a smile or a hug, and we’d go on talking for another four or five hours.

  Nick’s idea to call the film The Sonny and Cher Movie and do it as a kind of documentary with music was good, as far as it went, but he hadn’t worked out the details. The truth was, you couldn’t really bring cameras into their house and show their actual relationship.

  Cher was obviously a gorgeous flower that had not yet bloomed. She was completely and voluntarily under Sonny’s domination, but this wasn’t an image you’d want to portray. Nick’s idea was “new wave” and hip, but there was no meat on its bones. After two weeks of batting it around, I had a private meeting with him. He clearly didn’t want to have this one-on-one, and his attitude was sullen and morose. I told him our meetings were going nowhere, and Broidy wanted to start the picture as soon as possible. Nick’s response was that I didn’t understand his vision.

  The next day Sonny got a long letter from Nick, warning him about me: “Friedkin’s never directed a movie. Have you seen any of his documentaries? They’re not great.”

  “Well,” I said, “that tears it.”

  Sonny could see I was stung by Nick’s comments. “Billy, I trust you a hundred percent, you and I are joined at the hip, we’re going to do this movie together,” he said. I thanked Sonny for his support but told him that Broidy and Parsons were getting restless. “I know,” he agreed: “Here’s what I think we ought to do. Before we cut Nick loose, let me ask him for a treatment—his best shot.”

  In due course a three-page treatment arrived at the house. It was all sizzle; nothing specific, just a restatement of Nick’s philosophy about movies in general, Sonny and Cher in particular.

  Sonny shrugged. “He’s gotta go.” A confrontation with Hyams would be a waste of time, so Sonny called and thanked him.

  Without a screenplay, we couldn’t prepare a budget, but Steve said he wanted to make the film for no more than $500,000, including Sonny and Cher’s $100,000 fee.

  We told Steve we’d write the script ourselves, at no extra cost to him. Despite the fact that neither of us had written a screenplay, Steve said go ahead. He had no idea what to make of us, but he was committed to making the movie.

  We worked around the clock and on weekends. Takeout dinner always came from the Villa Capri, a popular Italian restaurant in East Hollywood. We ate clam zuppa by the dozens and whoever ate the least had to pay for the whole dinner. Occasionally Cher would appear and listen to what we’d written. Her comments were restricted to one word—“Okay” or “Really?” or “Why?” or “Ugh”—usually accompanied by a frown; then she’d take off. She’d have no part of our clam zuppa marathons, warning Sonny not to eat too much garlic bread.

  We tried to flesh out Nick Hyams’s idea of the movie being about Sonny and Cher making a movie. The film would be a Faustian tale about compromise. How much would Sonny and Cher sell out to make a stupid movie? Sonny came up with the structure, the gags, and all the good stuff, and we wrote everything on yellow pads. The film would show our heroes being courted by a Mephistophelian film producer called Mordicus who only wanted to cash in on their celebrity. Cher in the script, like Cher in real life, was against the whole process, but Sonny was gung ho, and their arguments eventually caused a breakup, followed by reconciliation and a happy ending, of course. The script portrayed their fantasies of the kind of films they’d like to make, and these fantasies were satires of the private eye genre, a Tarzan movie, and a Western. Each “film within the film” would be a short comedic sequence and include a new song. As in real life, Sonny and Cher were up against a deadline to start shooting. Steve wanted to call the movie I Got You Babe, but Sonny came up with a title from a new song he was working on, “Good Times.”

  We finished the script on a Friday night. The following Monday we
were supposed to start preproduction, which involved set design, casting, hiring a crew, and location scouting. On Saturday morning Sonny and I read the pages to his entourage, who were suitably impressed. Even Cher smiled a few times. Sonny asked if anyone could type, and since there were no volunteers, he found a script-typing service in the Yellow Pages. About three hours later a pleasant young woman arrived with a portable typewriter, awestruck to be meeting Sonny. He set her up at a kitchen table, and we went into the den to watch a football game and hang out. We had another clam-zuppa contest.

  Late afternoon became early evening . . . we had forgotten about the typist. At about seven forty-five, Sonny looked at his watch. “How many pages did we give her?” he asked.

  “I think about eighty,” I said. “No less than eighty.”

  “How long should it take to type eighty pages?” Sonny looked around the room.

  Harvey spoke up. “What? Three hours?”

  Sonny again, “What time did she get here?”

  “Around noon,” I answered. Blank stares all around.

  “I wonder if she’s hungry,” Sonny said, and went to the kitchen with a container of clam zuppa. About five minutes later he came back to the den with a two-inch stack of paper and a wistful smile on his face. Behind him I noticed the typist going out the front door, her portable in tow. She seemed upset. “You’re not gonna believe this,” Sonny said, smiling, and handed me the pages.

  I started to read, shaking my head in astonishment.

  “What’s wrong?” Harvey asked.

  I skimmed the pages, then set them down slowly. “She typed herself into this script.”

  “What?”

  “She took what we gave her and created her own screenplay, focusing on the story of a typist who comes to work for Sonny and Cher and stays on to become their manager.”

  “No shit!” Joe said. We heard the screech of brakes as the typist’s car pulled out of the driveway.

  “What did you say when you saw this?” I asked Sonny.

  “I thanked her, and told her we wouldn’t need her anymore,” he said, as though this sort of thing happened every day. “And I gave her the clam zuppa.”

  When the budget came in at $800,000, Sonny and I had to listen to Broidy scream for an hour: “This picture should be made for five hundred grand! We made pictures at Allied Artists for two or three hundred. We’d shoot them in a week with great directors and big-name actors . . .” Steve was right, of course, but I wished I had accepted Frankenheimer’s offer. It was Sonny’s optimism, his belief in what he created, and of course Abe Lastfogel’s skills in the art of persuasion that calmed matters down. We went ahead with an $800,000 budget. Broidy presold the rights to Columbia Pictures for $1.2 million before we even made the film. This shrewd old bastard knew what he was doing.

  Lin Parsons brought potential crew members to the Paramount lot, where we rented a soundstage. The meetings were with “old pros” like Bob Wyckoff, who had worked with Parsons before and became our director of photography. Mel Shapiro, who I had worked with at Wolper, was hired as editor; and to his credit, Lin brought in David Salven to be my assistant director. Dave had a great sense of humor and worked on at least fifty films. He knew the game and played it better than anyone I’ve ever met. His father was Cecil B. DeMille’s assistant director, and Dave’s education was on DeMille’s sets. He and I became close friends, and he was like the older brother I never had.

  A legendary character actor, George Sanders, agreed to play the evil producer Mordicus. I was shocked when he accepted but looked forward to working with him—with trepidation. He had given so many fine performances, and won an Academy Award in one of my favorite films, All About Eve. Why would he take this role in a low budget, under-the-radar movie, starring two nonactors and with an inexperienced director? I soon learned that many well-known actors, no matter how distinguished, had personal demons and financial problems.

  Mr. Sanders did what I asked of him, accepted corrections, was suitably malevolent, and left without a word at the end of the day.

  We also shot scenes on locations around Los Angeles. If you drive due north of Paramount Pictures for less than two miles you pass a modest residential area before you come to Bronson Canyon, a large undeveloped tract that looks like the Old West, where hundreds of B westerns were shot. We went there to make one shot of Sonny riding across a hilltop on a beat-up old sway-backed horse for our western parody. I told Bob Wyckoff I wanted a silhouette, and we should shoot at the end of the day, not before 6:00 p.m. This was literally one shot with a single camera. To my surprise the crew was called to the location at noon, making it impossible to do any other studio work that day. When I arrived at the location, I saw a bank of twelve enormous theatrical lights called “brutes” pointed at the hilltop. There was a crew of at least sixty people gathered around the catering truck. I went to Wyckoff, who, with his electricians, was carefully adjusting every light as though he was lighting the Parthenon.

  I said, “Bob, what the hell are all these lights? I told you I wanted a silhouette.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he answered grumpily, staring at his shoes. “I got to use these guys, Bill. I’ll give you a silhouette, I’ll expose for it, but I have to use all this equipment.”

  Salven explained that it was a case of “back scratching.” The cameraman who employed the most crew members got the best crews. Bob was feathering his nest at great expense to management. This shot was one of our most expensive days—massive trucks, gigantic lights, an enormous crew—and lasted less than ten seconds on screen.

  Bob was a competent DP; I would describe how I wanted each shot to look, and he would invariably overlight it. He was a by-the-book guy, with no imagination. I was the youngest guy on the set, and the least experienced. I had gotten to this place too soon, but I learned that before you could accomplish anything creatively, you had to be able to manage a crew, win their respect, get everyone on the same page, and most important, vet the crew thoroughly before hiring them.

  When it came to the end of our twenty-day shoot at Paramount, we had forty-five minutes of usable film and a lot left to shoot, including three more songs. Steve Broidy was apoplectic. Sonny was philosophic; he and I were like brothers, and could laugh at our problems.

  Out of adversity I came up with a backup plan. I would bring Bill Butler, my cameraman from Chicago, to Los Angeles, pick up a small nonunion crew, and go to various locations without permits to complete the shoot for very little added expense—less than $100,000. When I presented my plan to Steve, he was almost incoherent; what the hell was I thinking? But he thought the film we shot had promise. He decided to take a chance and let me finish the film “under the radar.”

  Butler came to Los Angeles, and we put him up at the Sunset Marquis. I screened the footage we had for him and introduced him to Sonny and Cher. Then Sonny, Dave Salven, Butler, and I worked out a plan to shoot roughly half the film guerrilla-style. We drove around the city from Malibu to downtown L.A., shooting what were essentially music videos, way before their time. It was good to work with Bill again, and we accomplished more in a day than in three with a full union crew.

  One Saturday morning, we all piled into a station wagon. Our small crew and equipment followed in another wagon. I drove the lead car, and we pulled up to the Paramount Pictures main gate. There was one guard on duty. I rolled down my window and said, “Sonny and Cher . . .,” pointing to them, and the guard of course recognized them. He knew we had offices on the lot and had filmed there, but he didn’t realize that we’d shut down the week before. He never questioned why we were driving onto the lot unannounced and with another vehicle behind us. “We’re just gonna make some publicity shots,” I explained. He smiled, nodded, and waved us through. Just beyond the main gate was a permanent Western street used regularly for the hit television series Bonanza.

  Sonny got into his cowboy costume, and we filmed him on the Bonanza street in a parody of Gary Cooper in High Noon. We filmed for a
bout an hour, then shot additional footage around the lot with both Sonny and Cher. Everything was done with a handheld Aeroflex camera operated by Butler. When we finished, we drove to the main gate, thanked the guard, and laughed all the way to the next location.

  We filmed Sonny on his motorcycle on the San Diego Freeway at night, also without a permit. We filmed around the new Music Center still under construction in downtown Los Angeles, in the Malibu hills, and on Sunset Strip. The city was ours, and the plan was to shoot quickly, get in and out before passersby or police officers knew what was happening. In less than two weeks we had an additional forty-five minutes. I felt good about the film. I began to think it might work.

  In the course of his career as a songwriter, singer, and producer, Sonny (with Cher) sold over eighty million records and had many top-ten singles. Though he could neither read nor write a note of music, when he heard a melody in his head he would call his arranger, Harold Battiste Jr., to come over. Sonny would hum the parts to him—melodies, counterpoint, rhythm. Harold would transcribe Sonny’s humming into notes on paper, laying out lead lines for the various sections. Sonny would say, “I need eight strings, two percussion, a piano, two trumpets, bass . . .” Harold would book the musicians, known as the “the Wrecking Crew,” which often included Carole Kaye, David Bromberg, Dr. John (Mac Rebennack), Glen Campbell, and others who later became successful solo artists. Sonny would arrive at Gold Star Studios, and if there were any changes, he would hum them to Battiste, who would revise the music sheets. Then Sonny and Harold would go into the control room with recording engineer Stan Ross. When Stan had preset his sound levels, Sonny would address the musicians over a speaker from the control room. There was no conductor. “Okay, guys, you ready?” There were nods and waves, then Sonny would say, “One, two three—hit it!” Initially it was all cacophony, then he would “sculpt” the sound: “Trumpets, play softer; guitars, take a break before the violins come in; drums, do it like this: ‘kachung kachung kachuka-kachung,’ okay?” Battiste would quickly rewrite the various sections, and they’d start again. Sonny would tell Stan, “I want to hear more violins, less brass, more echo on everything.” Stan would readjust the levels, and Sonny would continue to “sculpt” the background track until he was ready to “lay one down.” It would sometimes take three days before he was satisfied.