The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  When he started to write The Exorcist, Blatty was divorced from his second wife, Beth. But he and Beth remained on good terms, and she let him use her one-room guesthouse in Encino Hills to work. He wrote from eleven in the evening until dawn, what he calls “dream time,” which enabled him to access his unconscious mind. His goal was to produce three polished pages a day. “I thought of myself as a writer of comedies,” he told me. “This one venture outside of comedy was going to be it for me—this story that had been festering inside me for twenty years—okay, I’m gonna do it. I’ve got nothing else to do but collect unemployment. No excuses. My hope was that it would be reviewed with respect, that I wouldn’t be mocked, that’s all I was hoping for.”

  His original plot was about a young boy who has been accused of committing a murder; his defense in court is demonic possession. In that way, he felt he could introduce the history of possession, going back to the New Testament. After Father Bowdern asked him not to write anything that would reflect on the boy in the actual case, he changed the character to a twelve-year-old girl. The plot changed entirely when he started to write. He knew there was going to be a possession, a priest/psychiatrist undergoing his own crisis of faith, and a mother, an atheist, who comes to believe in the idea of possession.

  The novel was to be a supernatural detective story. Blatty’s instinct was to give readers a tingle by hinting at the existence of spiritual forces, but he never thought of the story as being terrifying. The details started to come to him, sparked by a statue he had once seen in Mosul, Iraq, of the demon Pazuzu. In cases of possession, the invading entity, whether real or fanciful, is identified as a demon, not Satan himself.

  Blatty lived in all the places where the novel is set, and he based the major characters on people he knew. Father Lankester Merrin, the archaeologist/priest, is based on Gerald Lankester Harding, whom Blatty met when he was stationed in Lebanon for USIA. Harding was formerly curator of antiquities in Jerusalem, and was instrumental in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Another spiritual model for Merrin was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Catholic priest who was also a scientist, and whose philosophical writings are an attempt to reconcile religion and science.

  The mother, Chris MacNeil, was based on the actress Shirley MacLaine, Blatty’s friend. Chris is on location with a film on the campus of Georgetown when her twelve-year-old daughter, Regan, experiences the symptoms that lead to possession. The director of the film within the film, Burke Dennings, who dies at the hands of the possessed Regan, is a pitch-perfect portrayal of J. Lee Thompson, who produced and directed John Goldfarb, Please Come Home. Blatty based Father Karras, the psychiatrist/priest, on himself, channeling his own grief over his mother’s death, which led to his first and only crisis of faith.

  When Blatty turned the finished book in to Bantam, the publishers were enthusiastic. They held an auction for the hardcover rights, which went to Harper & Row, who assigned an editor who wanted two changes: to give Chris MacNeil fewer foul-mouthed outbursts, to which Blatty acceded; and to eliminate the prologue set in Northern Iraq. To Blatty, and later to me, the Iraq sequence was essential in creating an atmosphere of dread and ancient prophecy.

  The novel appeared in the spring of 1971 to rave reviews, with few exceptions. Harper & Row spent a lot of money on advertising. Bill went on a twenty-six-city tour, but sales were poor. He describes the initial release as “a disaster.” But just as Blatty was about to leave New York and return to Los Angeles, a Harper & Row publicity rep told him that The Dick Cavett Show had a guest cancellation and would put him on if he could get over there right away. When he took the stage, Cavett greeted him with, “I’m sorry Mr. Blatty, I haven’t read your book,” to which Blatty responded, “Then may I tell you about it?” He then spoke for more than forty minutes, interrupted by only one question from the host and a commercial break. Cavett’s question was asked with irony: “Mr. Blatty, do you really believe in the existence of Satan?” Blatty’s answer was that in every society, in every age, there is mention of an “evil magician” that spoils the work of the Creator.

  The Cavett show was seen nationally, and within two weeks The Exorcist went from obscurity to number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Warner bought the rights before the novel was published, offering Blatty $75,000 and hoping he would then disappear. They brought in Paul Monash, a successful writer/producer who had written the screenplay for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and was executive producer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. An accomplished pro, he saw a movie in Blatty’s novel.

  Blatty later learned, through files he obtained from a friend in Warner’s legal department, that Monash had lowballed him: Warner’s was prepared to pay $600,000 for the film rights. Monash had also agreed to make significant changes to the script without consulting Blatty, to “make it more commercial.” He was planning to set the story in Salem, Massachusetts, scene of the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials, instead of Georgetown.

  Blatty met with Frank Wells, then president of Warner Bros. and the architect of the Monash deal. He showed him the Monash memo and the document revealing the sweetheart deal. After denials of wrongdoing, the upshot was that Monash was kicked out and Blatty became the sole writer and producer, and recipient of the $600,000 fee plus thirty-seven percent of the net profits.

  Frank Wells was a man regarded by many in Hollywood as a gentleman, with a reputation for integrity, but I always thought it extended only to where you were in the food chain. He and I had a cordial, sometimes abrasive relationship, and I found him a prime practitioner of the situational ethics that prevail in the film business.

  When Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, and Arthur Penn passed, Wells offered the film to Mark Rydell, a former actor and jazz pianist who had become a very good film director. He had just finished a film for Warner called The Cowboys, starring John Wayne, and the studio expected it to be one of their most successful titles. It was then that Blatty first suggested me as director. “Who?” Wells asked, incredulous. “Who’s Friedkin? Do you mean the guy who did Boys in the Band and those little art house films? No way!”

  “I understand he has a terrific film coming out called The French Connection,” Blatty said quietly. Wells laughed. “Bill, forget it. We’re not giving The Exorcist to Bill Friedkin!”

  He insisted Blatty screen The Cowboys, then in rough cut. Blatty reluctantly agreed and went into a screening room on the Warner Bros. lot. He came out after ten minutes and reappeared in Wells’s office. Wells was behind his desk, and jumped as though he’d seen a ghost. “Bill, what are you doing here?”

  “I’ve seen enough, Frank,” Blatty said. “I want Friedkin.”

  By then, I had become obsessed with the novel and wanted desperately to direct the film. I put Blatty in touch with Tony Fantozzi, who knew Wells professionally and socially. Wells told Tony, “There’s no chance of this happening.” But Blatty pushed back. He called his lawyer, Charlie Silverberg: “Charlie, do I have director approval or not?” Charlie examined the contract. “Bill, you have consultation, not approval. If they want to hire Rydell or anyone else, you can raise hell, but they have the right to do it. It’s not like they’re forcing you to take chopped liver.”

  At that time, The Exorcist was still the number-one best-selling book, and Blatty was in demand on every talk show. He called Wells: “I’m going on the Johnny Carson show again in two nights, and I’m going to tell Carson and his audience that I didn’t like The Cowboys, and you’re forcing me to take the director.”

  “Bill, I beg you not to do that,” Wells pleaded.

  “You leave me no choice, Frank.”

  By then Wells thought Blatty was crazy enough and motivated enough to do anything. There are times in the movie business when it pays to be thought of as a dangerously psychotic person. Blatty tried to cultivate that reputation, and on occasion, so did I, finding it useful in my dealings with the heads of production and advertising at Fox on The French Connection. Blatty would ma
ke outlandish threats, and people thought he would carry them out.

  The French Connection opened the day Blatty was scheduled to appear on the Carson show. He called Wells, who invited him to come to Warner. When he arrived, Ted Ashley, Warner’s chairman, and John Calley, head of production, were in Wells’s office. They greeted Blatty cordially. Then Wells said, “Bill, is this about Friedkin?”

  “Yes,” Blatty answered firmly.

  “We’ve seen The French Connection,” Ashley responded. “We want him now more than you do.”

  I had no knowledge of the tenets of the Catholic Church. An agnostic believes the power of God and the soul are unknowable. That defines me. Like many, I feel the disconnect between the barefoot carpenter who preached on hillsides and the papal aristocracy; between the man who ate, slept, and taught in the desert and the man who takes his meals from fine china and silver in the majesty of the Vatican and controls billions of dollars’ worth of real estate and banks.

  I wonder what it is that draws me so obsessively to dark material. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, written at the end of the fourth century, describes his fascination with “theatrical shows” as a young man: “Why is it that a person should wish to experience suffering by watching grievous and tragic events which he himself would not wish to endure? Nevertheless he wants to suffer the pain given by being a spectator of these sufferings and the pain itself is his pleasure. A member of the audience is not excited to offer help, but invited only to grieve. The greater his pain, the greater his approval of the actor in these representations. If the human calamities . . . are so presented that the theatergoer is not caused pain, he walks out of the theater disgusted and highly critical, but if he feels pain, he stays riveted in his seat, enjoying himself.”

  Almost everything I’ve chosen to direct has portrayed “grievous and tragic events,” pain and suffering, people with their backs to the wall and few alternatives. But while The Exorcist was a unique and original story, I didn’t see it as a horror film; quite the opposite. I read it as transcendent, as Blatty had intended.

  Fantozzi made my deal with Warner Bros.: $500,000, plus 10 percent of Blatty’s 37 percent of the net profits, a princely sum for a director in the 1970s. When my deal was signed, Blatty said, “I’ve got a surprise for you,” and handed me a 172-page script he’d already written! I took it home eagerly, read it, and hated it. He had eliminated the Iraq prologue, and the screenplay was rife with flashbacks and red herrings. Was this going to be Peter Gunn again? He said he’d hired me for my candor, so I gave it to him: “Why would you do this, Bill?” I asked him. “Your worst enemy wouldn’t hand you a script like this.”

  “I never thought the book could be filmed as written,” he admitted, “and I had no real idea how to do it.”

  “We need to start from scratch,” I said. “A page-one rewrite. And I want to go back to the novel. I want to start with the prologue in Iraq and let the audience slowly experience the story as it unfolds.”

  When he had the impulse to hire me, he had not seen any of the four films I had directed. Much later, he saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s, which he kind of liked, and Good Times, which he hated. Nor had he seen The French Connection until after he had proposed me to Warner Bros. and been turned down.

  We started work on the script in January 1972. We set up offices at Warner Bros., and I immediately hired David Salven as production manager, to start putting together a budget and a crew, though we had no screenplay.

  Blatty, Salven, and I went on a location scout to Georgetown, which I saw for the first time. Bill had captured the atmosphere of this beautiful, historic town. From Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac and the Key Bridge looking west, Georgetown University resembles an abandoned castle or sanitorium. Even in bright sunlight, it appears dark and depressing. North of the university is a tall cliff, atop which you can see the backs of Federalist houses that face onto Prospect Avenue. At the northern tip of Prospect is the multitiered stairwell called the Hitchcock Steps, named after the designer who built them. Early mornings, the view from Rosslyn includes members of the Georgetown rowing team in sculls gliding swiftly across the Potomac. Just south of the steps is an elegant Federalist house, the one rented by Chris MacNeil in Blatty’s novel. A wealthy widow, Florence Mahoney, who in 1972 was said to be the largest contributor to the Democratic Party, owned it. Through the auspices of my dear friend Jack Valenti, then chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, former aide to Lyndon Johnson, Mrs. Mahoney was persuaded to let us use the exterior of her house for the film. The three-story house is on the corner of Thirty-Sixth and Prospect. It was perfect in all ways but one; it was too far from the Steps. Father Karras’s climactic leap from Regan MacNeil’s bedroom window down the column of stairs would have been impossible. Our solution was to build a false front that extended the length of the house and contained Regan’s bedroom window. The false front continued around the corner and appeared to bring the bedroom window closer to the stairs, making Karras’s leap possible.

  We sought permission to film at Georgetown University, the pivotal setting of the story. Blatty was one of the university’s favorite sons, and since it was a Jesuit school, the faculty and the Jesuit Order were comfortable with a story about the reality of demonic possession. The university was then under the leadership of Father Robert J. Henle, who had come to Georgetown only a couple of years before. He was a lively, energetic man, a true Jesuit scholar and teacher. There was always a bottle of J&B in the lower left-hand drawer of his old wooden desk. He had been the academic president of another Jesuit school, St. Louis University High, and had written Henle’s Latin Grammar, five highly respected volumes that are still widely referenced. He was an authority on philosophy and jurisprudence, having translated and summarized Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Legal Reasoning. Immediately upon taking office in 1969, Father Henle made it his mission to raise Georgetown to the top rank of universities in the country, a task he was to achieve.

  He and I became friends. He believed in the veracity of the 1949 case and felt that Blatty had written an essentially faithful, though fictional, account of it. He was also a friend of Father Bowdern, the exorcist, and Father Tim Halloran, who had been on the faculty at Georgetown and assisted Father Bowdern in the ’49 case. Father Henle agreed to let me film in his office and the conference room next door and anywhere else on the campus. I used to meet him in his office at the end of his workday, and we’d share a glass of Scotch. One early evening he said, “I’ve got something to show you,” and handed me a large, cracked red cardboard folder, tied with string. In it were twenty-nine pages of typed documents. I glanced through them and felt a chill. These were the collated diaries of the priests as well as doctors and nurses and other patients present during the 1949 exorcism.

  I felt that Blatty’s fiction had the ring of authenticity, and reading the diaries only reinforced my conviction. I discussed their content with Father Henle, who told me that the church took no official position on the case—in fact, it refused to discuss it—but all the accounts are replete with graphic, incredible detail. The diaries were compiled by Father Raymond Bishop, and they begin on March 7, 1949. The exorcism took place in a secure hospital room on the fourth floor of Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis, later at the boy’s family home in Maryland, then back at Alexian Brothers. There were

  rappings and scratching in the walls of the hospital room . . . furniture moving as though by an unseen force . . . the shaking of the mattress . . . sexual references to the priests and nuns . . . religious relics flying off the walls . . . agonizing shouts and screams that seemed to emanate from deep within the boy . . . curses, swearing and diabolic laughter, as well as gyrations and physical strength beyond his natural powers . . . blood, scabs and welts appearing on his skin . . . violent outbursts and attempts to kill the priests . . . the letters H-E-L-L appearing on his chest and these words spoken from the mouth of the boy by “another voice” and remembered by all the
witnesses: “All people that mangle with me will die a terrible death.”

  For the most part, the boy would alternate between stable behavior and inhuman symptoms, between exhaustion and extraordinary stamina. The diaries were verified by more than fifty witnesses. They are still in the Jesuit archives of the Washington, D.C., diocese.

  With deep conviction that the diaries were real and not a hoax, and my inherent belief that, as Hamlet says to his friend Horatio, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” I set off on a course that would alter my belief system and my life.

  As we reworked the script, it became apparent that Blatty tried to compress about 150 pages of the book into the first 30 pages of his first-draft screenplay. We cut all backstory and red herrings, but we weren’t just making cuts; we were finding new possibilities.

  I learned about a procedure to diagnose brain damage, called an arteriogram, which I was able to see at the Department of Radiology at NYU Medical Center. I thought it would be a powerful addition to have Regan undergo this procedure to underline the frustration of medical science in determining the cause of her “illness.” When I described it to Bill, he immediately put it into his screenplay.

  Bill’s friend and mentor, Reverend Thomas Bermingham, who taught classical Greek at Fordham and who became an adviser to me as well as appearing in the film, introduced me to Reverend John Nicola, a priest who had studied at the Vatican and written a doctoral thesis on possession. He was then assistant director of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. I met with Father Nicola, and he agreed to help me understand the ritual and to clarify its most significant passages. I asked Bill to incorporate Nicola’s belief that when a particular phrase seemed to agitate and affect the demon, the exorcist would repeat it. In our film, the phrase is: “The power of Christ compels you!” repeated several times to bring Regan down after the demon has raised her off the bed.