The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

PAUSE

  HAROLD: I don’t remember cutting any lines.

  ME: Oh.

  LONG PAUSE.

  HAROLD: I have my original typescript of the play upstairs in my study. If you hang on a minute, I’ll go up and have a look.

  I held the phone to my ear for a long time while Harold walked up five flights. Finally he picked up the extension in his office.

  HAROLD: I have my typed copy from 1957. I’ve opened it to the interrogation scene, and I don’t see those lines.

  PAUSE.

  ME: Damn . . .

  PAUSE.

  HAROLD: You like those lines?

  ME: I love them.

  HAROLD: Well, go ahead and put them in.

  ME: Are you serious?

  He was. Pinter, known to be insistent about the precise use of his language, was telling me to put in two lines he claimed he hadn’t written.

  Where did they come from? I have no idea.

  Robert Shaw was a brilliant actor, known for heroic roles. His own nature was as far from Stanley’s as possible, but he had a deep understanding of Pinter’s work, and they were close friends. Offscreen he was something of a jock, and one of the most competitive men I’ve ever known. He claimed he was a good enough soccer player to have played for England. On our soundstage at Shepperton Studios I had a hoop set up, and I used to shoot baskets between camera setups. One day Shaw came over to watch me and said, “Why are you playing a girl’s game?” I tossed him the ball and said, “Try it.” He took shots from various distances and couldn’t hit the backboard or the rim. He angrily kicked the ball across the soundstage. Every morning I would come to the set an hour earlier than the crew to prepare the day’s work with Denys Coop. One day I heard the sound of a bouncing basketball. Bob Shaw. He’d come in early to practice so he could play me one-on-one. After a couple of weeks we started to play, and I would inevitably beat him, fueling his frustration. He asked if I played Ping-Pong. I was a Boys’ Club champ at the age of twelve. The next day a Ping-Pong table arrived on the set. Bob fancied himself an exceptional Ping-Pong player, and we’d play a dozen or more games a day. He won occasionally, but not enough to satisfy his appetite for victory.

  Like the rest of the cast, he was always prepared and enthusiastic. We shot the film in sequence from beginning to end, and I planned each setup in advance so the film was made quickly and efficiently. Pinter was often on the set and looked at the dailies. His comments were always encouraging, and he enjoyed the humor and subtleties of his own text.

  My staging was designed to keep the actors moving as much as possible and let the camera follow them. If a scene called for them to remain static, I would slowly and imperceptibly move the camera closer or pull away. I tried to keep the camera invisible, but there were times when I couldn’t resist and opted for radical angles. During the blind man’s buff game in the party scene when the lights go out, I cut to afterimages that occur when a room is suddenly plunged from light to darkness. When the lights were out, I went from color to black-and-white. As the blindfolded characters moved about the room, I had a camera attached to a gyroscopic mount on their backs pointing over their shoulders on a wide-angle lens as they shuffled around in darkness.

  The cast and crew became family to me. I was confident the film would cut smoothly; the performances were excellent, and I was thrilled to have directed actors of this caliber in material this good. Harold wanted to show it to Joe Losey, the director with whom he had made two brilliant films, Accident and The Servant. The day after Losey saw the film, Harold and I met at Hanover Terrace.

  “Joe thought the film was . . . okay,” he began. “He had a few quibbles but only one . . . well, rather urgent request.” I asked him what that was.

  “There’s a shot into a mirror when Meg crosses from the kitchen to an easy chair to resume knitting a sweater for Stanley . . .”

  I remembered the shot and thought it was efficient camera logic.

  “It’s the only mirror shot in the film, and Joe feels it sort of . . . ‘borrows his style.’”

  Losey was known for mirror shots, and used several in each of his films.

  “Joe asked me,” Harold went on, “if you’d consider cutting it.” I thought this was out of line, but I was more disturbed that Harold would ask this of me. I told him I had no cover angles that brought Meg across the room. I also said it was wrong for Losey to suggest I recut my picture for some misperceived “homage” to him. Up until this moment I had treated Harold with deference and respect, but I couldn’t satisfy this request. I wasn’t about to destroy the film’s continuity to mollify Losey’s ego. It was the only tense exchange I had with Pinter in a year of working with him.

  In the end I made the film I wanted to make. Palomar released it without fanfare in a handful of theaters, and it didn’t find an audience. I had hoped the film would bring redemption for Good Times and Minsky’s. That wasn’t to be. But The Birthday Party is a film of which I’m proud. The cast played it to perfection. With the exception of an occasional over-the-top directorial flourish, I think I captured Pinter’s world. The time I spent with him and the many conversations we had were the most valuable and instructive of my career.

  My future prospects in Hollywood were uncertain, but I brought my mother from Chicago to live with me in a rented house that was owned by Mickey Rooney on a quiet street in Beverly Hills. The house was small but charming, old brick and wood paneling, and my mother had never lived this well. She made friends in the neighborhood and continued nursing part-time, as she still had the energy and the will. I would drive her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where she worked, or I’d pick her up. She could not have been prouder of my accomplishments and that I had achieved enough to take care of her in this way. She was a calming influence, and it was because of her love and belief in me that I didn’t lead a wasted life. I met regularly with Tony Fantozzi, but I had no offers. Thirty-two years old and washed up. But Fantozzi and the Morris office continued to believe in me.

  Not many people saw Minsky’s or The Birthday Party, but two who did were Mart Crowley and Dominick Dunne. They were about to coproduce the film version of Crowley’s provocative play The Boys in the Band for a new production company, Cinema Center Films, owned by CBS Television. Mart and Nick originally wanted the play’s director, Robert Moore, to do the film, but Gordon Stulberg, head of Cinema Center, was reluctant to go with someone who’d never been behind a camera. They invited me to come to New York and see the play—but not before Mart called Harold Pinter, who gave me a glowing recommendation. They’d heard about my problems on Minsky’s, so I wasn’t a clear choice. But I had done three films, and wouldn’t ask for a lot of money; possibly they thought the play was director-proof.

  It’s difficult now to imagine the impact the play had in 1967. It was the first to deal openly with a gay lifestyle, and it was both hilarious and moving. Those who saw it, and there were over a thousand performances in its first incarnation, would never forget it. The important playwrights at the time, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, both gay, never dealt openly with gay subject matter. When Mart finished his play, he took it to Albee’s producing partner, Richard Barr. Barr liked it, but Albee didn’t. He told Mart the play was terrible and that it would set back gay liberation and bring more hatred and violence to gay people.

  Mart was devastated to have his work dismissed by his idol, but Richard Barr produced it in a small off-Broadway theater. Albee thought it a mistake but agreed only on the condition that the play never be moved to a Broadway theater, which it easily could have after its first two weeks. It was an immediate sensation and the hottest ticket in New York, but to this day it has not been produced on Broadway.

  Each of the characters portrayed a different aspect of gay life, from the closeted to the campy, from the faithful to the promiscuous, from a male hooker to a schoolteacher, all guests at a birthday party. (Yes, another one.) The one “straight” character is an uninvited and uncomfortable guest at the party. When I read
Mart’s screenplay, I was excited about its potential as a film. It was written out of passion, anger, and experience. Two weeks went by during which other directors were interviewed; then I got a call from Mart to return to New York. After several drinks, we had a long talk. Mart told me about his life, being sexually abused as a child; growing up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in a conservative Catholic family with two alcoholic parents; attending Catholic University in Washington, D.C.; working in Hollywood as Natalie Wood’s assistant. She gave him the time and the encouragement to write The Boys in the Band, his first play.

  He told me about his struggle to come to terms with being gay and how he had written the play in a state of depression, basing the characters on himself and people he knew. He was overwhelmed by the play’s success, having known mostly failure in his creative endeavors up to then. Mart insisted we use the play’s original cast, to which I agreed. They had come to embody their roles and worked well as an ensemble. We also agreed we’d have to achieve a realistic tone, and it would of course be an entirely new staging. He had ideas for opening up the film with a visual prologue in a handful of New York locations, but it needed the claustrophobia of a one-room set to retain its impact. The trick was to keep the film claustrophobic but cinematic.

  We never spoke about my own sexual preferences. But he knew I’d acquired a reputation for being difficult, and it was important to him that we communicate and work closely together. He was not going to be a passive screenwriter.

  Nick Dunne suggested we meet with Adam Holender, a young director of photography who had recently come from Poland and studied at the famous film school in Łódź. Within three months after Adam shot a couple of documentaries and a few commercials, John Schlesinger hired him as Director of Photography on one of the best films of the late 1960s, Midnight Cowboy. The film was beautifully photographed and became the only X-rated film ever to win an Academy Award. Adam used handheld cameras, long lenses, and natural light to capture the world of a male hustler on Forty-Second Street. Nick set up a call for me with Schlesinger to talk about Holender.

  “He can be difficult,” John said.

  “How so?”

  “I think you should meet him and see how you feel about him.”

  We went on a location scout to the terrace of an Upper East Side apartment that belonged to the actress Tammy Grimes. She agreed to let us use it as the exterior of the apartment where Michael (played by Kenneth Nelson), the host of the party, lived. The interior would be built as a duplex on a soundstage with walls that could be moved for angle changes and lights. Mart, Nick, and I loved the terrace. Adam didn’t. Not enough room for lights, he said. I told him we’d only be using it for two brief scenes in broad daylight and could go with natural light. He looked at me as though I was demented.

  We went to a garage nearby, where Michael’s friend Donald (played by Frederick Coombs) would stop to gas up and check out the handsome garage attendant. The garage was large and brightly lit with fluorescents. Holender thought it was impractical and would be better set on a stage.

  We went to Doubleday’s bookshop on Fifth Avenue, where we had three setups at most. Holender said there was too much daylight streaming through the windows.

  The last location scout was to a hotel room in the Sherry-Netherland, overlooking Central Park. I needed two shots there; a silhouette toward the window of Alan, Michael’s college buddy (Peter White), sitting on the edge of the bed tearfully talking on the phone; and a reverse close-up of Alan, to see his tears. Holender shook his head. Wouldn’t work. Why not?

  “Where am I going to put my lights?”

  That was it. We hired Arthur Ornitz, who’d photographed A Thousand Clowns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and later Serpico and Death Wish. Art was fast, and he shot all the locations with no fuss. He made it possible to shoot a wide array of angles and imperceptibly change moods as “day” evolved into “night.”

  I rehearsed for two weeks and encouraged the cast to rediscover their characters. At first they resisted; they’d done the play for a year. Words they had learned long ago I told them to forget, rethink, and rediscover. They found subtleties in their performances that weren’t possible onstage, and I was able to emphasize relationships with the placement of the camera. The Birthday Party had sharpened my sense of how to capture a scene without allowing the camera to be intrusive.

  Mart wrote a scene that was offstage in the play. Hank, the schoolteacher (Larry Luckinbill), and Larry, his lover (played by Keith Prentice), leave the party when it swerves drunkenly out of control and go up to a guest bedroom, where we see them kiss passionately. It would undoubtedly have been the first time such a scene was portrayed in a mainstream film. Luckinbill and Prentice reluctantly agreed to do it; then, after objections from their agents, refused. Such a scene would ruin their careers, they were told. Mart and I talked to them for weeks as their anxieties grew, along with their resolve not to do the scene. As we were about to reach the end of the schedule, they realized the scene’s importance and its value as a statement about their characters’ commitment. They were putting their trust in me to shoot the scene sensitively, and I tried to approach it as just another shot. Much later in the cutting room, we felt we didn’t need it, that it would only sensationalize the moment. In retrospect, I think we should have kept it.

  During preproduction, Mart and I would socialize together. He took me to the Pines section of Fire Island, a Long Island beach community that was an all-gay enclave, and I was able to meet the prototypes of his characters. There, everyone was without inhibition, and parties went on all weekend, day and night. As a straight man in a gay world, I got a sense of what it was like to be an outsider.

  I approached Mart’s screenplay as a love story, with humor and pathos. I saw his characters as people, not types, and I tried to reflect their pain at having to hide their true natures from the prejudices of family, friends, and colleagues. The Boys in the Band is a compassionate, insightful work, and I tried to understate its deeper social implications.

  The film was widely publicized, but the reviews were mixed and the box office disappointing. A great many people loved it, and to this day I hear from people on whom it had a profoundly liberating effect. Today, it’s generally regarded as a landmark film. I say this in all modesty because I believe its power lies in Mart’s script and the brilliant performances by the entire cast, which went virtually unrecognized at the time.

  Three members of the cast—Larry Luckinbill, Peter White, and Reuben Greene—survive. I can still watch the film with pleasure, but at the time it was another box-office failure. Four in a row.

  PART II

  THE ’70S

  5

  POPEYE AND CLOUDY

  In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a place to shoot a western, The Squaw Man. He was living in New York City, so he boarded a train heading west and got off at Flagstaff, Arizona. Surprisingly, the weather was bad there. He sent a telegram to his partners back east, Jesse Lasky and Sam Goldfish (later Goldwyn): “Flagstaff no good. Want authority to rent barn for $75 a month in place called Hollywood.” The yellow barn was at Selma and Vine Streets and was still being used for horses. The Squaw Man was released a year later, and is one of the first full-length films made in Hollywood. It was certainly the first most successful. In 1926 the barn was moved to the United Studios on Marathon and Van Ness Streets, which soon became the home of Paramount Pictures.

  If the weather in Flagstaff hadn’t been bad, if the barn in Hollywood hadn’t been for rent, if The Squaw Man had not been a hit, there wouldn’t have been a Hollywood. In later years the old weather-beaten barn in which The Squaw Man was photographed was converted into a gymnasium on the Paramount lot, equipped with weights, mats, rings, chin-up bars, and, most important: the best steam room in Los Angeles. From the time of its reincarnation as the Paramount gym, the man who ran it was a short, bald, good-natured fellow named Orlando Perry, or Perry Orlando—not even he was sure which was correct. I got to know Per
ry and his gym when I was directing Good Times on the Paramount lot. I remained a regular for sixteen years, until the old barn was designated a landmark, moved off the lot, and relocated opposite the Hollywood Bowl, where it is now the Hollywood Heritage Museum.

  Perry’s massages were wonderful, and his clients included Clark Gable, Steve McQueen, William Holden, and many other male stars in Hollywood. Until the mid-1970s women weren’t allowed. You could lift weights, take a steam, then fall into a deep sleep on Perry’s old massage table. Before you knew it, you’d wake up refreshed and invigorated. Perry’s friend Johnny Indrisano, a former light-heavyweight boxing contender, used to hang around the gym and tell great boxing stories. Johnny had over sixty professional fights, and when his boxing days were over, he went on to stage the fight scenes for various films. He did the great bar fight in Shane and the fight on the ranch between Alan Ladd and Van Heflin. He also staged the fight in the diner that ends Giant. Johnny taught me how to use the punching bags, and I would spar with him two or three times a week for years.

  I first met Phil D’Antoni in the steam room at Paramount. Phil had recently produced his first feature film, Bullitt, after packaging and producing television specials. He had a quick smile and a Bronx accent; he was even-tempered, but he never let you forget he was Sicilian. The Morris office represented us both, and Fantozzi thought we would hit it off. He sent him my documentaries, and Phil had seen my four features. He thought I had promise, and felt we could work together. We had similar interests and sensibilities. We liked and disliked the same movies. I thought Bullitt was one of the best films of my generation.

  One afternoon Phil told me about a book he optioned by Robin Moore, author of The Green Berets. The book was nonfiction, and told the story of the largest heroin bust in the United States. It was called The French Connection, and it focused on the exploits of two colorful New York City detectives: Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. I couldn’t get through it; it seemed dry and procedural on the page, and it wasn’t until I flew to New York with Phil and met Egan and Grosso that I was able to see a movie in their story.