A tall gray-haired man with deep-set eyes, Father Nicola was the acknowledged expert on all reported cases of possession in the United States. He remained a skeptic and never performed an exorcism himself. Without question, he believed in the authenticity of the 1949 case, and he’s quoted as having said Blatty’s novel was 80 to 85 percent accurate. But after the release of the film, he gave interviews in which he claimed he could justify everything from a moral standpoint, including the language, but with the exception of the crucifix/masturbation scene. Because of the controversy the film generated, Nicola backed away from all the advice, support, and expertise he had given me. Blatty was asked to comment about Nicola’s new public stance toward the film, based on that one scene: “The people who complain [about this scene] are the people who think that stained glass is a religion. The crucifix in the movie is a piece of metal, and that’s all. . . . I wasn’t going to make the Devil manageable by compromising. The characteristics of the Devil come through in the girl’s masturbation with the crucifix. That was the most horrible thing that came to my mind, and that’s why it’s in the film. We’re not condoning the action. There is no sacrilege.”
The novel was 340 pages. A 100-page screenplay, more or less, would result in a two-hour film. We worked for several months as David Salven assembled the crew and we started talks with Nessa Hyams, head of casting for Warner Bros. Ted Ashley told me he wanted Audrey Hepburn, Anne Bancroft, or Jane Fonda to play Chris MacNeil. Excellent choices. And with Blatty’s and my blessing, the studio offered the role first to Audrey Hepburn, who responded favorably, but said she would only do the film in Rome, as she was living there, married to an Italian doctor. I thought it was a request on her part, not a condition. No way did I want to film in Rome; it was impractical from every standpoint. All other actors would have to be imported from the United States, and I didn’t want a language barrier with the crew. In fact, I wanted my crew from The French Connection, starting with Owen Roizman and Ricky Bravo. We asked Ms. Hepburn to reconsider, but she declined.
Anne Bancroft said she’d love to play Chris, but she was pregnant; would we wait a year for her? We wished her mazel tov. Jane Fonda sent us a telegram after receiving the script: “Why would anyone want to make this piece of capitalist rip-off bullshit?” I never learned how she really felt.
At one point during these maneuverings, I had a phone call from Ellen Burstyn: “Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“Yes, of course,” I lied. She was considered a very good actress. She was in The Last Picture Show. But I frankly didn’t remember which role she’d played, and I tended to confuse her with Cloris Leachman.
“I’d like to talk to you about Chris MacNeil,” she said.
A pause, while I considered a response. “Ms. Burstyn, I have to tell you the studio is out to Audrey Hepburn, Anne Bancroft, and Jane Fonda.”
“I’m just asking if you’ll meet with me,” she said. “Do you believe in destiny?”
“Do I believe in destiny? I don’t know. . . . Yeah, I guess so.”
“I’m destined to play that part,” she said. “I know in my heart that role is mine.” We arranged to meet at her house on Beechwood Drive. It was on my way home.
Ellen’s house was in the hills above the Hollywood Freeway, where you could hear music from the Hollywood Bowl when there was a concert. The house was old, large, and had few items of furniture. Her son, Jeff, met me at the door. He was a pleasant kid, about fifteen years old. He told me he liked rock and roll and wanted to be a musician. Ellen was a single mother, long separated from her husband. After a few minutes she appeared, barefoot in a long brown shift. She was passionate, intense, focused, and highly intelligent. She told me about her Catholic girlhood and how she had left the church and was now studying to become a Sufi. We discussed the novel for a couple of hours, and I thought she had an acute understanding of it. Yet I didn’t think the studio would approve her.
Blatty also suggested his friend Shirley MacLaine, who had recently made a film called The Possession of Joel Delaney. As much as I admire and respect Shirley, I thought that two films with her, about demonic possession, were one too many. She recognized herself as the model for Chris MacNeil, and her company offered Blatty $75,000 for the rights, plus 5 percent of the net profits but no creative participation in the making of the film. Bill turned it down but still thought Shirley would be right for the role. The studio would have been happy with her, but they began deferring to me on a number of creative decisions.
One of the actors who wanted to be considered was Roy Scheider, Roy was in demand after his Oscar nomination for The French Connection. I thought he’d be good as Father Karras, but Blatty felt he was not sympathetic. Nessa Hyams suggested Stacy Keach, who had appeared in some of the seminal films of the late 1960s: The New Centurions, Fat City, and DOC. Just thirty years old, he was one of the most distinguished stage actors in the country, with leading roles in the plays of Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill. Blatty and I met with him and liked him, and Warner agreed. They signed him.
I was in New York scouting locations when I read a review of a new play called That Championship Season that had recently opened at the Public Theater. It was set during the twentieth reunion of a basketball coach and his starting five, who won a state high school championship in a small town in Pennsylvania. In the course of a drunken evening, it becomes clear that at the urging of the coach, the team had cheated to win the game. Their victory was a fraud. Their lives were a fraud. There was a photo in the New York Times of the young playwright, Jason Miller. This was his first produced play. He had an interesting look, and his biography was even more compelling. He had worked as an actor in off-Broadway plays and road companies, but was barely able to make a living. He had a regular job as a milk deliveryman in Flushing, New York, where he lived with his wife, Linda, and two young sons.
I had to see his play, possibly because it was about basketball, but more likely because of Fate. It was riveting—funny, disturbing, beautifully written and acted. The play was about America’s obsession with winning at any cost. It held me as it did the audience, the critics, the Tony Award voters, and later the Pulitzer Prize committee. I asked our New York casting director, Juliet Taylor, to set up a meeting for me with Miller. I don’t know why. His picture and bio in the New York Times intrigued me, as did his play, which portrayed the spiritual conflicts of a group of Irish Catholic men. I felt some need to meet with him.
Whatever I was looking for, I didn’t find it in our first meeting. I was staying at the Sherry-Netherland and fighting a cold. I had prescription pills everywhere. Jason later told me he thought I was a pill freak. He had no idea why I wanted to meet him; perhaps he thought it was to buy his play for the movies. When he came to my suite at the Sherry, he was distant and reserved. He was also short, about five-seven, and I thought he was stoned. He told me he had studied for the priesthood at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., but dropped out in his third year, having the same crisis of faith as Father Karras, while continuing a love/hate relationship with the church. I told him how much I loved his play, and he thanked me. When I told him I was planning a film of The Exorcist, he seemed only mildly interested. He was overwhelmed with all the attention being afforded That Championship Season, and had not read the novel.
I continued meeting with Ellen Burstyn. Having started with the certainty that she would never get this role, I soon became convinced that she was our best choice.
“No way!” Ted Ashley shouted from behind his desk. “I’m not giving the lead in this picture to a woman who’s never played a lead in anything!” He was furious. “Ellen Burstyn will play this part over my dead body.” At which point he walked to the side of his desk and lay down, faceup, on the floor. “Go ahead,” he said to me, “try to walk over me.”
“Ted . . .,” I started to protest.
“Go ahead,” he shouted, “I dare you.” I shrugged, then walked to where he was lying, to step over him. He quickly grabbe
d my leg and held it tightly so I had to lean on his desk for balance. “You see!” he shouted triumphantly. “That’s what’ll happen if you try to cast Burstyn. I’ll come back from the dead to stop you!” But alas, the studio had no other choices, and eventually Burstyn was approved.
I got a call from Jason Miller in New York: “Hey, how ya doin’?” he asked cheerfully, as though we were old buddies.
“Congratulations on your play,” I said. It was going to Broadway in the fall.
“Listen,” he said, “I read that book you told me about. That Exorcist. That guy is me.”
“What guy?”
“Father Karras.” I would have ended the conversation if I didn’t respect him as a playwright. “I appreciate your interest, but we’ve signed an actor.” He went on as though he hadn’t heard me: “I’m telling you, I am that guy. Will you at least shoot a screen test with me?”
“We’ve cast the role!” I shouted.
“I don’t care—”
“You don’t care?”
There was something in his voice—his insistence, his passion—which was irresistible. “As long as you understand we have a pay-or-play deal with another actor for this part, you can come here on your own nickel, and I’ll shoot a test with you.”
“Great,” he said.
“How soon can you get here?” I asked.
“About a week,” was his answer.
“A week! Why don’t you fly out tomorrow?”
“I don’t fly, man. I’ll take a train. Be there in four days.”
Blatty and every executive at the studio were now convinced I’d lost it, but I set up a test for Jason on an empty stage at Warner Bros. and recruited Ellen to work with him. I asked my friend the cinematographer Bill Fraker, who’d shot Bullitt and Rosemary’s Baby, to light the scene where Chris tells Father Karras she believes her daughter is possessed. After a few takes, I had Ellen interview him about his life and kept the camera over her shoulder on his face.
Then I shot a close-up of Jason as he said Mass, and I asked him to say it as though for the first time, to discover the meaning of the words, not rattle them off as I heard so many priests do. He seemed relaxed in front of the camera, but I wasn’t knocked out. Ellen took me aside: “You’re not going to cast him, are you?”
I was surprised by her question: “Why not?”
“Oh Billy, come on,” she said. “He’s too short, and he’s not really an actor. When I break down in that scene, I need to fall into Karras’s arms. I need a big, strong man . . .”
It happened that Ellen was dating “a big, strong man” at the time, a fellow actor she asked me to audition. I did and was unimpressed. The next morning, I screened Jason’s test. The camera loved his dark good looks, haunted eyes, quiet intensity, and low, compassionate voice. He had a quality reminiscent of the late John Garfield. The fact that he had a Jesuit education and had studied for the priesthood sealed the deal for me. I ran the test for Blatty and the Warner executives. “This is the guy,” I told them.
“What’s wrong with Stacy Keach?” Blatty asked.
“Nothing, but this guy’s the real deal.”
Frank Wells spoke up: “We have a contract with Keach.”
“Pay him off,” I insisted.
Wells was livid: “You just cast him.”
“I was wrong,” I said. “Jason Miller is going to explode in this part.”
The other major roles were quickly cast. Blatty showed me a photograph of Gerald Lankester Harding, his inspiration for Father Merrin. Harding was lean and gaunt, with close-cropped white hair. The image of Max von Sydow came immediately to mind. Max had been Ingmar Bergman’s leading actor in classic films like The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal. We sent him a script in Sweden, where he lived, and got an immediate response. He would be pleased to play Father Merrin.
The casting of Lieutenant Kinderman was another unexpected gift. Blatty and I went to see a play in the San Fernando Valley. An actor in the play was suggested to us for a key role. We didn’t respond to the actor, but there was someone in the audience that night, a few rows ahead of us: Lee J. Cobb, immortalized for his performances as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Juror Number Three in Twelve Angry Men, and Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront.
With Cobb and von Sydow cast, we had a solid foundation, but the biggest problem would be to cast Regan. For four months in 1972, half a dozen casting directors around the country put hundreds of young girls, ages eleven through thirteen, on videotape. Over a thousand girls eventually auditioned. I watched the tapes, if only for a minute or two, and personally interviewed at least fifty girls. It seemed hopeless. The question was not only whether a child could portray the character’s innocence as well as her possession without self-consciousness, but how she would react to the experience itself. How would it affect her life? None of the girls I met seemed likely to overcome those obstacles. I thought about Mike Nichols’s reason for declining the job—“You’ll never find a twelve-year-old girl to carry the picture.” We started to audition fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who looked younger, with similar results. One afternoon at my office in New York, my secretary buzzed me: “There’s a woman out here named Elinore Blair. She doesn’t have an appointment, but she brought her daughter and wonders if you’d see her . . .”
She was smart but not precocious. Cute but not beautiful. A normal, happy twelve-year-old girl. Her name was Linda Blair. Her mother was quiet, pleasant, not a “stage mother.” Linda was represented by an agency that suggested ten other girls to us. Not her. She had done some modeling, no acting. Her main interest was training and showing horses, for which she won a lot of blue ribbons. She was a straight-A student in Westport, Connecticut. I found her adorable. Irresistible. I asked her if she knew what The Exorcist was about. “Well . . .,” she said thoughtfully, “it’s about a little girl who gets possessed by the devil and does a whole bunch of bad things. . . .”
I nodded. “What sort of bad things?”
“Well . . . she pushes a man out of her bedroom window and she hits her mother across the face and she masturbates with a crucifix.” I looked at her mother. She seemed to realize her daughter was special. Linda was unperturbed.
“Do you know what that means?” I asked her.
“What?”
“To masturbate.”
“It’s like jerking off, isn’t it?” she answered without hesitation, giggling a little. I looked again at her mother. Unflappable. “Have you ever done that?” I asked Linda. “Sure, haven’t you?” she shot back. I’d found Regan.
I asked her to come back to Los Angeles and shoot a test. Clearly, she was not troubled by the language or the substance of the film, but I had to be sure she could sustain the character, and I needed the approval of Blatty and Warner Bros. I asked Linda to prepare a few of the early scenes, and Ellen and I worked with her, but you could see her “acting.” I kept the camera rolling and had Ellen interview her, as she had Jason. Talking about herself and relating to Ellen, Linda was spontaneous, and I realized I had to create an atmosphere on the set where she could be spontaneous, not worry about doing scenes word-for-word.
Blatty introduced me to Father Bill O’Malley, who taught English and theology at McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester, New York. He was in his early thirties when he first met Blatty and criticized the portrayal of Father Dyer in the novel. He thought Dyer, as written, was a cliché. Blatty was amused by his criticism, but we were both impressed with his sense of humor and good nature. I was spending a lot of time with Jesuits and I thought O’Malley embodied their keen intellect and scholarship. I asked him to play Father Dyer.
I began to immerse myself in the New Testament and the Jesuit order. On one occasion I received Holy Communion and later told Blatty what a moving ceremony it was. He thought I had unwittingly committed a sacrilege and phoned the officiating priest to apologize. The priest told Blatty not to be concerned: “It can’t hurt him.”
One Sunday mor
ning about a month before filming began, I invited Blatty and Father O’Malley to spend a weekend with me at a beach house I was renting on Long Island. O’Malley said Mass, using a bagel and cranberry juice, as I had no bread or wine in the house. The words of the Mass have continued to move me ever since, and on that occasion, they moved me to tears.
So much has been written about the “freedom” young filmmakers enjoyed in the ’70s. In fact, Coppola on The Godfather, Spielberg on Jaws, myself, and others were often at odds with studio management, usually over budget and schedule. We were constantly on the verge of being fired. Blatty and I created a scenario that would keep the studio at arm’s length. At the first production meeting, to decide where and how we would make the film, we met in the offices of Charlie Greenlaw, head of physical production, with his assistant, Ed Morey. David Salven and Blatty joined me. Greenlaw and Morey were tough old-school guys who would usually dictate terms to producers and directors. Blatty and I pretended to be on our best behavior, listening carefully to the cost-cutting measures they wanted to impose. At one point, I said, “You know, I’ve given this a lot of thought, guys, and I think I have an idea how we can save some money.” All eyes turned to me. I looked at Blatty, who knew what was coming; we had rehearsed it. I produced a sheet of paper filled with meaningless numbers and pretended to refer to it. “We have to serve lunch and sometimes dinner to the cast and crew, so I’ve worked out a plan that I think could save us, at least fifteen grand.”
“What’s that?” Blatty asked, feigning genuine interest.
ME: I think we should serve just one salad dressing, not give everybody a choice of several.
Greenlaw and Morey turned to each other, then back to me. Could I be serious?
ME: By my calculation, the least expensive dressing would be oil and vinegar or vinaigrette.
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 23