The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  “You guys finished yet?” Stan yelled.

  “We’ve got one more scene, Stan,” Phil answered.

  “What’s that?”

  “The makeup didn’t work when the French cop gets shot in the face.”

  “You know, you guys only had three days, Phil!” Stan said calmly.

  “Yeah, I know, but we have to shoot the cop—”

  I’ll never forget Stan’s next words. “I don’t give a goddamn if you shoot him, poison him, strangle him, or push him off a building. You wrap tomorrow morning! Half a day—that’s all, then get the hell back here!”

  “I hear you, Stan,” Phil answered.

  “You hear me?! You’re going to wind up a quarter of a million dollars over budget, and you’re still not finished!” Phil didn’t respond. Stan didn’t know I was listening, but even if he had, he would have said it anyway: “You tell that son of a bitch Friedkin, if he’s not done tomorrow morning he’s fired! You hear me? I’ll pull the plug—”

  Phil quietly set the phone back in its cradle, cutting Stan off. In truth, we needed two days of shooting to complete the sequence. We still needed to film the meeting between Charnier, Nicoli, and Devereaux. It was in this scene that the plan to bring the Lincoln to New York City, embedded with thirty-two pounds of heroin, was hatched. We filmed the scene at the former offshore prison, now a deserted landmark, the Chateau d’If, where Alexandre Dumas set The Count of Monte Cristo.

  I had a sleepless night in the cheap hotel where we stayed. I had no idea how to make the shot work. Missing, in addition to the failed makeup gag, was the surprise and fear on the detective’s face.

  When we got to the set the next morning, I saw that our special effects man had brought a large rubber syringe filled with makeup blood. I idly picked up the syringe and squirted it against the wall, where it left an enormous stain. An idea came to me: I moved the camera closer to the actor playing the detective. Two feet away from him, I sat on a box just below camera, holding the syringe. I told the actor to go through the motions of opening his mailbox, then turn toward the camera on my cue and look right into the lens. When he did, I squirted him square in the face with the blood syringe. His surprise and the large red stain that covered his face made him throw his head back, and we had the shot. It’s in the film with no additional effect. Stan Hough kept calling, but Phil didn’t take his calls. On the last night of shooting we treated the cast and crew to dinner at the Fon-Ton. We had bouillabaisse and a house wine—delicious. Hough wired us to get the hell out of there immediately, finished or not. By the time the wire got to the hotel, we were heading home.

  We set up our cutting rooms on the Fox lot in a bungalow near the far western edge. The studio was not as sprawling as it is today, with television and movie production, layers of executive office buildings, and few available parking spaces. The only other feature film in production was The Salzburg Connection, which was filming in Europe. Zanuck was gone, but some of the lower-level executives survived. The feeling on the lot was like a small European village waiting for the Nazis to invade.

  The other major studios—Warner, Paramount, and Universal—were also experiencing hard times. The movie business was going through a transition that the Hollywood establishment feared. Easy Rider had come out two years before, and its impact caught them completely off guard: “You mean a bunch of hippies can go out with no script, a few hundred grand, no stars, and shoot a movie that critics and audiences love?” Made under the radar and with no studio supervision, the film caught the mood of the country—disaffected youth wandering aimlessly, no faith in authority or the future. This alienation was happening not only in the streets and in the corridors of power but in literature and art, which caught the same vibe: Jack Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness writing in On the Road; the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg. Also influential were the films of John Cassavetes, small in scope and ambition but revolutionary in style. They looked inward at their characters, not outward at the landscape. The French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism came across the pond like a tsunami, catching young American filmmakers in its wake. Style and attitude gradually replaced content. It was becoming clear that the future was not in movies based on Broadway musicals or patriotic war films or chaste comedies, but change didn’t come overnight. In the early seventies, the studios were still making Fiddler on the Roof, Summer of ’42, Nicholas and Alexandra, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Robert Young, in Father Knows Best, had earlier promised television audiences that the American family was still intact, and Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, and The Partridge Family also offered comforting scenarios. Columbo and Mannix solved a crime every week; the bloody consequences of brutal murder were only suggested. So while there were aftershocks from Easy Rider, Cassavetes, and the new European films, the ’70s revolution in American cinema was like a fireworks burst that faded to black. And while countercultural shifts of the 1960s and ’70s—the antiwar movement, The Joy of Sex, Tim Leary’s “tune in, turn on, drop out” psychedelia, the human potential movement, and the new consciousness pioneered by the Esalen Institute in northern California—were happening all around me, I was oblivious to them. I worked for the factory. In 1970 it happened to be Twentieth Century-Fox. The guys who ran it, Elmo Williams and Stan Hough, were old-school. “You guys are irresponsible!” Stan screamed. “You don’t give a damn about budget! You know how tight money is today? I’ll tell ya, you’d better get in that damned cutting room and not fuck around. This picture is coming out in October, whether it’s finished or not.”

  Gerry Greenberg, assistant to the veteran New York editor Carl Lerner, was the young film editor I brought with me from New York. We had worked together on The Boys in the Band, but The French Connection was his first film as an editor. It’s common for an editor to do what’s called an “assembly.” He or she determines the preferred takes and puts them together in the order of the script. When shooting is finished, the director and the editor look at the assembly, then make changes—lengthen this shot, shorten that one, move a scene to a different position, even delete sequences. From my days at Wolper I’d been uncomfortable working this way. I saw it as a colossal waste of time. I prefer to look at all the printed footage with the editor and determine how it should be put together shot by shot, often in ways that differ radically from the script. In this way I can rediscover and “listen” to the film, give notes, view the changes, and move on. The late John Ford would print only one take of each setup, so that the editing process on a Ford film consisted of little more than removing the slates. Gerry Greenberg is a good editor, but his first assembly of The French Connection made me want to quit directing. Running about two and a half hours, it was painfully slow and labored and made little sense. It included a take of everything I shot. My next impulse was to destroy the film as Howard Roark in the novel The Fountainhead blew up a building he designed because it was compromised by a committee. This wasn’t Gerry’s fault. I’d shot the film so freeform it could have been assembled any number of ways.

  In editing I don’t start from the first scene and work through to the end. I might work on a scene in the middle of the film, or even the final sequence. I like to work first on the easiest scenes, the ones with fewer setups. Often the length of a shot is determined only by how long I think it can hold the screen. Sometimes there will be a technical problem, like a microphone entering the frame, or an actor blowing a line in a take that’s otherwise good. I try to cut first for performance, then pace.

  A film is made three times: first when you prepare the script. When you shoot it, with contributions from the cast and crew, it becomes something else. Then in the cutting room, during editing and sound mixing, it acquires a new life. The film changes and evolves, and only coalesces when these stages are complete.

  The chase was obviously the most challenging to put together. There was a framework that dictated the sequence of events, but the length of shots, the inserts of de
tails, and where and when to use Hackman’s reactions were arbitrary. Looked at without sound effects, the sequence would be half as effective. While we worked on a rough cut of the picture, a crew of sound editors was recording audio backgrounds and effects. Chris Newman, the production sound recordist, had recorded distant traffic, crowds, and other backgrounds in their original locations; but all the individual effects—the El train, the Lincoln, the Pontiac, the gunshots, and other specific sounds—had to be rerecorded. Guns, of course, don’t fire real bullets in a movie . . . they’re blanks, and they sound thin, like firecrackers. It was common to use studio library effects for all films. When I told Stan Hough I had to go to New York to record the El train, the Pontiac, and the Lincoln, because there weren’t individual tracks of them available in the Fox sound library, he hit the roof.

  “God damn it! Who’s gonna know the difference?” he shouted.

  “An audience will,” I said. I told him I would go to New York alone and record everything myself, with no location fees and no paid personnel. He reluctantly agreed. Dick DiBona at General Camera let me use a Nagra. We got the picture cars again, and with the help of Sonny Grosso and Fat Thomas, I recorded all the acceleration sounds, brakes, sudden turns, everything. We went back to the Stillwell Avenue Line in Coney Island, where we recorded an El train starting, stopping, and running at top speed, from inside the train, outside, and under the tracks. The impact of the crash was made by a large hammer hitting an anvil—to which we added reverberation and boosted the volume.

  A sound we couldn’t find was a powerful gunshot. Magnetic tape produces a clean, crisp sound; optical track has a loud hiss, loud as the desired effect itself. For some reason, Fox kept its sound library on optical tracks, not magnetic tape. I read that George Stevens, the great American director of Shane, Giant, and other classics, used to replace the sound of a six-gun with that of a shotgun to enhance the effect. I asked the sound editors and the rerecording mixers at Fox if anyone owned a rifle or a shotgun. One of them did.

  We were editing, mixing sound, predubbing dialogue and movement, while separately assembling sound effects tracks. The release date was looming. We worked seven days a week, sometimes fourteen-hour days, and the overtime for the crew was piling up, causing Hough to vent at me every day. Occasionally he’d come into the rerecording studio and yell at Ted Soderberg, the chief mixer, and his crew to work faster. One early Sunday morning the mixer who owned the shotgun brought it to the Fox lot, which was empty except for our sound crew. Ted Soderberg recorded the shots. These were the last remaining specific sounds we needed. We were about to finish mixing a reel, just before the lunch break, when Hough stormed into the mixing studio. He wasn’t in his usual mufti but dressed for a Sunday game of golf.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” he bellowed. I’d never seen him this angry. The crew was terrified. His gaze shifted and lasered onto me.

  “What’s wrong, Stan?” I asked innocently.

  “What’s wrong? We had a bunch of neighbors complain they heard gunshots. They called the switchboard and they bounced it to me!” I explained to him what we had done and why. This made him angrier. “Where the hell do you get off, bringing a loaded gun to this lot?”

  “Stan, we tried to use the library gun shots, but they’re covered with hiss and they have no level—we can’t make them louder without raising the background noise.”

  “You’re full o’ shit!” he shouted, moving closer. I honestly thought he was going to take a swing at me. He pointed a finger that came an inch from my face. “You’re telling me the library gunshots are no good?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” I said quietly.

  “God damn you,” Stan shot back. “I recorded those gunshots myself for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They’re good enough for Butch Cassidy but not Bill Friedkin!”

  Ted Soderberg chimed in, “They’re on optical, Stan. The hiss is so loud I can’t use them.”

  “Let me hear them,” Stan said menacingly. Ted played the optical gunshots at an acceptable level—the hiss was apparent, even to Stan. He sat down. “Can’t you clean ’em up?” he asked Ted.

  Ted shook his head—negative.

  “Here’s what we recorded,” Ted offered. He played our shotgun shots at full level. There was no hiss.

  Stan shot me a dirty look and stormed out.

  By the time I finished my rough cut and had a temporary sound mix, Twentieth Century-Fox was controlled by a Wall Street brokerage firm, but the caretaker studio management was led by Darryl Zanuck’s longtime film editor, Elmo Williams, and his head of editorial, Sam Beetley. Elmo and Sam were “below-the-line” blue-collar guys, not “suits.” Phil and I were anxious to meet Elmo; he had a reputation as a great film editor, having won Academy Awards for, among other films, High Noon. He told us that Fred Zinnemann, the director, lost his way on High Noon; that he, Elmo, had gone out with a second unit and filmed the empty railroad tracks, the clock as it approached noon, the train speeding to its destination with killers on board; and that he had commissioned Ned Washington to write the title song. These were the most memorable elements of the film. In short, he claimed he not only cut the film but also shot the scenes that framed and held it together. Elmo was so convincing and his reputation as an editor so huge, we believed him. After lunch we screened our rough cut for Elmo and Beetley, and I was looking forward to their critique of the film, convinced that whatever their comments, they would improve it.

  Rough cuts are without color correction, final music, or sound effects, and sometimes with dialogue missing that will be dubbed or added later. The French Connection rough cut was rough, but you could get an idea what it might become. By the time I finish a first cut, few surprises are left and insecurity sets in. I wasn’t overjoyed with the rough cut; I thought it could be improved, but I didn’t know what else to do with it. It was tight at an hour and forty minutes. The characters were well drawn in a kind of impressionistic way. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue—just enough, I thought, to tell the story.

  Screening rooms are dark, airless places. The Zanuck had big overstuffed red leather chairs, cracked with age; a sound panel was set up a few rows from the back of the theater where you could control the playback level. It was set at what the projectionists agreed was “comfortable”—usually too low for my taste. Before the screening I snuck over to the panel and cranked up the volume. When Elmo and Beetley arrived, Elmo had his assistant crank it back down to “normal.” During the entire screening, Elmo, who sat a few seats to my left, gave a continuous stream of quiet dictation to his assistant—from the opening titles until after the lights came up. Can you imagine how disconcerting it is to a filmmaker showing his film for the first time, to hear whispered chatter from a studio boss, whose head is turned away from the screen and toward his assistant? About fifteen minutes into the screening, I turned around to look at Sam Beetley, sitting just behind us. He was not giving notes to his assistant, which was comforting until I realized he was fast asleep—not snoring, just breathing softly. This was our first audience for The French Connection.

  When the lights came up, we knew we were in trouble. None of the usual condescending remarks about how the film had potential but needed work, or how it could easily be fixed with a nip here and a tuck there, or “let’s preview it and see what an audience thinks.” Elmo dove right into his notes, taking the pad from his secretary. In his high-pitched nasal tone, he read, “In the shot where you see the French killer shoot the guy in the hallway, add four frames to the dead guy’s face. By the way, who is the guy who gets shot?” (That, by the way, was never completely clear. He’s supposed to be an undercover French detective.) “The shot where we see the two cops in Brooklyn beating the pusher, take off six frames. When the cops are sitting in their car watching the couple make up the Sunday papers in the grocery store, add four frames . . .” And on it went, Elmo suggesting frame cuts or additions to almost every shot. Occasionally he would turn to Beetley, who h
ad just awakened and was trying to clear his head and pretend he was alert, “Do you agree, Sam?” in that nasal twang.

  Beetley nodded vigorous approval. “Oh, yeah.” The secretaries were stone-faced—they knew we were in trouble. Finally, Elmo arose and the others followed. He walked over to Phil and shook his hand, saying, “Well, there’s some good things in the picture, but I think it needs a lot of work. I’m off to Salzburg, and I should be back in a week. When I get back, I’d like to see the changes and look at the whole film again. Part of the problem is, I don’t understand the story.” With that, he and his entourage were gone.

  Phil and I were alone in the screening room. Sheepishly he said, “Well, that wasn’t too bad, a few shots here and there—”

  I started to pace angrily. “Phil, this guy is full of shit. He’s never seen the dailies. He doesn’t realize that when a cut is made on a certain frame, it’s because the next frame might have a serious problem; a light falling into the shot, or a camera jiggle, or a microphone in the picture, or an acting flub, or a—”

  Phil tried to calm me down. “Billy, he’s one of the greatest editors who ever lived—”

  “Bullshit! Zanuck must have told him exactly what to do. Also, to just chop the film up like this, we’d ruin the pace.”

  “Can’t we just try it?” Phil asked.

  “You’ve trusted me this far, go the extra mile,” I pleaded. “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s just trying to assert his power. You’re the greatest bullshit artist I’ve ever known. When he comes back in a week, just tell him we made all his changes and they worked like gangbusters.”