The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  “No, señor.”

  Ricky’s instinct led to interesting framing. Sometimes if he missed focus on a shot or blew the composition he was seeking, he’d yell “Cut!”, turn off the camera, then explain what went wrong. After several such occasions I took him aside. “Ricky, don’t ever say cut! I don’t care if a light falls into the shot, or you see a microphone, or you lose focus. I want the actors to go through the whole scene, and what you think is imperfection may be exactly what I’m looking for.”

  We then shot a long sequence with three actors, and it took us an hour to work out so they could improvise rather than “say lines.” We did a take, and it seemed believable. I turned to Ricky: “How was it?”

  He flipped up the eye patch he wore over his left eye so he would have no distraction looking through the viewfinder. “Completely block,” he shouted triumphantly. “Block! I see nobody. Everybody block lens!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I shouted.

  “You tell me never say cut!” The crew and I burst into laughter. After that, if something really looked bad to Ricky, he would whisper to me, and if I felt we were going to lose something important, I’d restage the scene.

  In the early ’70s we didn’t have what is called a “video assist,” a TV camera linked to the film camera that can play back a shot on a monitor. Then, you had to rely on what the operator saw through the lens, and if it looked good to him, and you liked the performances, it was a take.

  We started filming in late November 1970, during the coldest winter on record in New York. The first scene we shot was the interrogation of the young pusher played by Alan Weeks. I had seen Eddie and Sonny do this scene for real on dozens of occasions. It reminded me of the surreal interrogation in The Birthday Party. Non sequiturs a suspect was unable to process, coupled with specific incriminating questions to which he knew the answers:

  EGAN: Did you ever sit down on the edge of the bed, take off your shoes and socks, and put your fingers between your toes?

  SUSPECT: Wha—what?

  GROSSO: Who’s your connection, Willy?

  EGAN: You ever been to Poughkeepsie? I want to hear it. Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie?

  SUSPECT: No . . . yes . . . yes . . .

  GROSSO: Is it Joe the barber, is he your connection?

  SUSPECT: I don’t know, man . . .

  EGAN: Ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?

  SUSPECT: Yes . . .

  This would go on until the suspect finally gave them the answers they knew he had. I taped those interrogations many times and wrote them down. They always took place in an unmarked police car, the suspect in the front seat, squeezed between Egan and Grosso.

  On the first day of shooting we had to do thirty-five takes of this scene, which called for Hackman to slap the suspect in the face. He couldn’t do it, nor could he get the words or the attitude right. Alan Weeks and Roy Scheider were convincing on every take; Gene was not. I urged him to be more aggressive and to say the words exactly as I had written them. As in a Pinter scene, I saw the words as a kind of blank verse that couldn’t be altered without destroying the rhythm of the scene.

  Next day we looked at the rushes, all thirty-five takes, a full day’s work, each one more embarrassing than the last. The actors were in the screening room along with Phil, Kenny, and Bob Weiner. This was the scene that defined who these cops were and how they worked a suspect. We all knew the scene didn’t play, and everybody left with long faces, saying nothing. That afternoon, Gene called his agent and told her he wanted to quit the picture. When I got home, I tried to think through what had gone wrong. Was it that Hackman couldn’t cut it, or was it my fault? Did my staging inhibit him? Were there other ways I might have staged the scene? I was using Eddie and Sonny’s actual dialogue, but I was asking the actors to deliver it word for word instead of letting them be spontaneous. This was not a scene from a Pinter play. Spontaneity was what I wanted. By having the actors squeezed into a car and holding them to the exact words, I had stifled their performances. Hackman was the focus of the scene and the movie. I couldn’t let him quit; the picture would have been shelved and written off. Fox was in worse financial trouble every day. I met with Gene the next morning. I told him truthfully I thought the failure was mine. I would reshoot it and let the actors do it in their own words, get them out of the car and let them move around.

  Gene was hard to talk to. When he let his feelings out, he often exploded, then withdrew. He told me he was going to quit.

  “I don’t think you have faith in me,” he said.

  Is that the impression I was giving him? It was indeed what I felt. “Gene, I do have faith in you,” I lied. “It’s probably my own self-doubt.” That part was also true.

  “I don’t think I can do Egan the way you see him,” he said.

  “You’ve been with him for a couple of weeks now, you see how he works.”

  “Yeah, and I don’t like it. I think he’s a racist, I think he uses his power over people to intimidate them.”

  “What would you do? You see the kind of people he deals with—”

  “He goes too far,” Gene continued. We got into a heated conversation that cut into the start of the shooting day. Gene talked about himself, how as a boy growing up in Danville, Illinois, he’d hated his father. This led to a reaction against all authority figures and made it tough for him to get along with directors. “I’m not even sure I like being an actor,” he confessed. “I never thought of it as a real job.” He told me that after he left the Marine Corps and while he was studying with a respected acting teacher, Sandy Meisner, he worked as a doorman at the Essex House Hotel in New York. One day, his former commanding officer got out of a limo with a beautiful woman and headed to the front door, which Hackman was supposed to open. Instead, embarrassed, he turned away as though he was on the house phone. As the officer passed him, he said quietly, “Hackman, you were always a fuckup, and you’re still a fuckup.” Gene believed it. He went to acting school because he had nothing better to do. He roomed with Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman, who both established themselves earlier.

  Over the years, he became one of the best film actors ever, and I’ve long since come to appreciate what he brought to The French Connection, but he had to go deep within himself to reveal “the mouse inside the elephant,” and he didn’t want to go there. It was hard for him to play a man who so easily used the N-word and held court in the street. Eddie would show him how to frisk a suspect, then Gene would go before the camera and do it perfectly, and Eddie would shout to everyone within earshot, “Look at that! He’s more me than me!” This would infuriate Gene. One day we were filming a scene on First Avenue and Fiftieth Street near the United Nations on a frigid winter’s day. In the scene the two detectives stand across the street from a fancy restaurant, Le Copain, where the drug dealers, Charnier and Nicoli, are enjoying a gourmet lunch while the detectives eat pizza and drink cold coffee. The crew had to go inside a store on First Avenue to keep warm, and defrost the camera between takes. I still remember the discomfort of the freezing weather. We did a few takes with Gene and Roy out in the street, then I wanted a close-up of Gene’s gloved hands as he rubbed them together to keep warm. One take after another wasn’t convincing; I finally yelled to Gene: “Jesus, it is freezing, can’t you show it to me with your hands?” Gene yelled back, “Why don’t you come up here and show me exactly what you want? I mean exactly!” I stepped in front of the camera and demonstrated. “That’s exactly what I want,” I shouted. “Okay,” he said angrily, then did exactly what I had shown him. “That’s fine,” I said, and he walked off the set for the rest of the day.

  I didn’t know whether he’d come back the next day or not, but I had an insight: Gene had to play an angry, obsessive man, and I could provoke that anger in him and let him focus it on me. Many of his outbursts, all in character, were aimed directly at me after I issued curt, aggressive directions. There were times Gene got into it and became Popeye, but his anger was d
irected toward me more than the drug smugglers.

  The scene where Popeye and Cloudy burst into Roy’s Bar, pull the jukebox plug out of the wall, and start shaking down the customers was a scene I’d seen Sonny and Eddie do many times in real life. You had to see it to believe it, and a lot of people still don’t believe it was possible for two white cops to burst into a bar filled with black pushers and dealers. Gene was terrific in this scene, funny and terrifying; he did it as well as Egan ever did. Maybe I judged him too harshly; remember I’m the guy who wanted Jackie Gleason, Peter Boyle, or Jimmy Breslin. Scheider, and the others, down to the smallest roles, were spot on, every take. Fernando Rey brought elegance and likeability to Charnier. It wasn’t what I was originally looking for, but Charnier, as a gentleman, who loved his wife and treated her with affection, contrasted effectively with Gene’s depiction of Popeye as a womanizer and a brutal cop. I take no credit for casting them. They were a gift from the movie god. Tony Lo Bianco was trying to make his character Sal Boca a class act, a big shot, and the more he played him that way, the sleazier he appeared. Hackman came to realize, though he had no fondness for Egan, that he had to find Egan within himself. Scheider understood Sonny Grosso, liked him, saw him as a stand-up guy, and enjoyed playing him. Bozzuffi (“Bozu”) was a subtle actor who could find his way into any role. He played Nicoli with little effort and invented details and pieces of business that brought him to life, such as eating a piece of baguette belonging to the undercover detective he’s just killed.

  We followed the outline of the actual case, but the studio lawyers made us fictionalize all the names, including Eddie Egan, who became Jimmy Doyle, and Sonny Grosso, who became Buddy Russo. Harold Gary, who played the New York “bank,” Weinstock, who financed the heroin purchase, was based on Angie Tuminaro. We made him Jewish instead of Italian to satisfy the lawyers. They were afraid we’d get sued. By whom? Dope smugglers? After the film was released, Frank Waters, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent—called Mulderig in the film and played by Bill Hickman, who was also our stunt coordinator—actually did sue us. I remember Egan saying to me that if he had the opportunity, he’d have “killed that son of a bitch Waters.” Egan’s offhand remark gave me the ending for the film, wherein Popeye “accidentally” shoots and kills Mulderig, thinking he’s Charnier.

  Frank Waters was very much alive—I knew him. He was a bartender at the restaurant Elaine’s in New York when The French Connection opened, and he stood up in a crowded theater and yelled, “Bullshit!” He then sued Twentieth Century-Fox and Phil D’Antoni for $6 million. The studio settled for $10,000, and we were friends again. Frank actually liked the film, though he felt we glorified Egan’s role in the case and turned his character, Mulderig, into an “incompetent hard-on.” Had we interviewed the many other detectives and agents involved in the case, we might have made a different film, but from the time I first met Eddie and Sonny, I wanted to make the film about them. The French Connection case was just background to me, and the film uses poetic license. The “facts” we found cinematic we kept, like the scene where Charnier eludes Popeye in the subway and gives him a wave and a smile. But the big audience scene, the chase, we invented.

  Two weeks before we had to start production, D’Antoni and I decided to meet at my apartment on Eighty-Sixth and Park early one morning. After breakfast we started walking south on Park Avenue. We vowed to keep walking if it took us to the Battery and back, until we could “spitball” a chase sequence. It’s hard to say who came up with what—we just let the city envelop us from one neighborhood to the next, and we kept tossing out ideas. This is how our conversation went:

  “We can’t have a car chasing another car.”

  “Why not?”

  “You did that in Bullitt.”

  “We’ve already got two foot chases—We’ve got to use a car—”

  “Okay, but it doesn’t have to chase another car.”

  The smoke rose from the sewers as we walked past hordes of shoppers, people hurrying to and from work or lunch . . . ten blocks . . . fifteen blocks . . . we felt the roar and rattle of the subway beneath our feet as we walked.

  “What if—”

  “A subway train!”

  “We’re using the subway in the scene where Charnier gives Popeye the wave.”

  “Right,” sadly.

  Long pause—twenty blocks.

  “The elevated—”

  “What?”

  “An elevated train, before it goes into the subway, or after it comes out—”

  “Are there any elevated lines left?”

  “I don’t know—there used to be the Third Avenue Line.”

  “That’s gone—”

  “There might be one or two in the other boroughs. There’s nothing in Manhattan.”

  “Okay—how do we get our guy on the El?”

  “He’s running from something, and Popeye’s chasing him—”

  “Who?”

  “Not Charnier, we need him for the end of the picture.”

  “Nicoli!”

  “Okay, Nicoli gets on an elevated train—”

  “What if we get Popeye on the same train and they go from car to car and the passengers are—”

  “No—that’s another foot chase.”

  Another pause. Twenty-five blocks.

  “Nicoli hijacks the train.”

  Then, together, “Popeye hijacks a car—”

  “Below the tracks!”

  “So it’s a car going at top speed—”

  “Through city traffic—”

  “With pedestrians everywhere—”

  The subway continued to roar and rumble beneath us.

  “And the car is chasing the train as we cut back and forth—”

  “Why is Popeye chasing him?”

  “Say he killed somebody—”

  “Who?”

  We stopped on a pedestrian island in the middle of the street for a few seconds, surrounded by the yellow blur of taxis, serenaded by a symphony of car horns.

  “Nicoli tries to kill Popeye—misses him—”

  “Maybe he kills someone else—”

  “Popeye chases him, but Nicoli has a head start and runs up to an elevated platform—”

  “Popeye follows him but misses the train—”

  “So he has to go back down, hijack a car, and—”

  “What if the motorman has a heart attack?”

  “—he loses control, and the train plows into another train parked at a station—”

  “Nicoli and the other passengers are thrown, and that allows Popeye to get to Nicoli—”

  We stopped on a corner, shook hands, and hugged. After walking fifty-five blocks in one direction, we had our chase.

  We never scripted it, I never storyboarded it. I simply talked the cast, crew, and stunt people through it, shot by shot; it was all in my mind’s eye. There were numerous variations and D’Antoni and I met often to refine the details. Aside from the question of whether there were any elevated lines still in New York, there were two other major questions. First, how fast could an El train go at top speed? If it could do a hundred miles an hour, we didn’t have a chase, unless we had Hackman commandeer a racecar, which would have been ludicrous. But the most important question was, Could we get permission to film on an elevated train? I had already decided I would steal the street shots—that is, shoot without permits, with hidden cameras, and put our actors into situations with real pedestrians. There was a film commission in New York, but it didn’t have a lot of support from the city under Mayor John Lindsay; a lot of the shots we made, for example a traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge, would not have been approved, even by a strong film commission. But to shoot on an elevated train, we needed permission.

  Fat Thomas had good news: there were two lines left that we could use, both in Brooklyn. One was the Myrtle Avenue Line; the other, the Coney Island Line. I drove below both with Fat, and it was clear that the line running from Coney Island was above the most inte
resting neighborhood, along Stillwell Avenue. At the second stop, Bay Fiftieth Street, a three-story staircase led up to a long platform just two blocks from the Marlborough housing project, which I chose as the location for Popeye’s apartment. It was directly across from the Stillwell tracks. It gave me the idea that Popeye could be coming home from a bad day, and the assassin, Nicoli, could be waiting for him on the roof of Popeye’s building to kill him with a long-range rifle. Nicoli would miss, and Popeye would then chase him on foot to the Bay Fiftieth stairwell, up to the platform, lose him, then go back to the street, flag down a car, commandeer it, and resume the chase under the tracks. It all sounded terrific, but could we get permission from the Transit Authority?

  Their main offices were in lower Manhattan. We met with the head honcho, a middle-aged African American. With me were D’Antoni and Kenny Utt, our production manager. We had no script of the chase, but I described the concept as D’Antoni and I worked it out on our walk. The TA guy listened with interest, occasionally nodding, sometimes frowning. When we finished, I asked him how fast an El train could go at top speed.