The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  A long uncomfortable pause, then . . .

  BLATTY (calmly): I think it’s a great idea, Bill, but I don’t think it should be oil and vinegar.

  ME: No?

  BLATTY: Personally, I prefer Green Goddess.

  ME (with mock solemnity): Green Goddess! Bill, you can’t serve Green Goddess to the crew. These are meat-and-potato guys. They want oil and vinegar or vinaigrette.

  BLATTY (annoyed): Billy, I don’t care about the crew!

  ME (incredulous): You don’t care about the crew? I have to work with them every day.

  BLATTY (now angry): Well . . . I’m the producer, and you’ve got to work with me every day! And I happen to prefer Green Goddess!

  I stood up.

  ME: Fuck you and your Green Goddess!

  There was tension in the room. Production hadn’t begun, and Blatty and I were already screaming at each other. Bill stood and shouted, “Call me when you’ve come to your senses!” And with that, he turned and left the room. Dead silence. Salven was doing his best to suppress laughter. Then Greenlaw quietly asked, “Does this happen often?”

  “Every day,” I said, and suggested we move on. This little caper kept the Warner’s executives away from us. They thought we were both crazy enough to blow up the production.

  With reluctance, Morey offered that there were too many night locations in the script. Night shooting is very expensive and time-consuming, requiring big lights and lots of electricians. He suggested we shoot all these scenes “day for night,” which is only possible on an outdoor studio set, draped with large black covers to block out all daylight while the scene is lit for night.

  I said, “But Ed, we don’t have any studio street scenes.”

  “We can shoot all the Georgetown exteriors right here on the backlot,” he responded. I had recently won an Academy Award for direction, but I gave the impression of being dumber than a first-year film student: “Ed, what exactly is day for night?” He explained it to me, simplistically and at great length.

  “Yeah,” I said, not seeming to grasp it. “But we’re going to shoot all the Georgetown scenes in Georgetown.”

  “Jesus, that would cost a fortune,” he said. “We could paint all the buildings black,” I said.

  “What?” Greenlaw asked.

  “For the night scenes, we obviously can’t tent in the Georgetown streets, so why don’t we just paint all the buildings black?” I suggested.

  “You’re not serious.” Morey tried to laugh it off.

  “Oh, and by the way, we’ll be doing all the New York exteriors and interiors in New York,” I informed them.

  “Why?” Morey and Greenlaw asked in unison.

  “The script calls for a New York tenement street and a subway station, also Bellevue Hospital and various doctors’ offices which we can do on practical locations. But more important, you know the laws governing child labor in Los Angeles are tougher than they are in New York. In L.A., we’d have Linda for only four hours a day. After that, she’d have to have two hours of rest followed by two hours of tutoring. In New York, we can shoot ten to twelve hours with her, as long as her strength and energy hold up, and she only needs to be tutored between set-ups.”

  I had always planned to shoot in New York, to get away from the studio and the bosses and the L.A. culture. I didn’t want to drive to the Valley every morning, past shopping malls, to re-create Georgetown. “The house interiors will be built on a stage in Manhattan,” I continued. “We can do it all with a New York crew, and it would be cheaper to take them to Georgetown than an L.A. crew.”

  “How much is this going to cost?” Greenlaw asked Salven.

  “I have no idea,” Salven said.

  “Haven’t you been working on a budget?” Morey asked.

  “Yes, but I don’t know how we’re going to do the special effects or how much they’ll cost,” Dave explained. “This stuff has never been done, it’s all experimental.”

  I was told that the studio hoped to make the film for $5.4 million, but I never saw a budget. All I kept hearing was that we were over budget every day.

  We set up in New York, and I didn’t see any of the bosses for the entire shoot. Greenlaw visited the set twice, stood in a corner, then went up to the production office to meet with Salven and crunch numbers. Word came back through Fantozzi that Wells was freaking out and wanted to fire me. He invited Tony to his home in Beverly Hills and, over drinks, complained about the various accidents or problems that kept raising costs. Years later, Tony told me, “I don’t think they knew what to do if they fired you. It was such an off-the-wall project, who would want to step in? I used to say to Frank, ‘You’ve got this guy till death do you part.’”

  I worked with John Robert Lloyd on The Night They Raided Minsky’s and The Boys in the Band, and he also did the sets for Midnight Cowboy. We leased a soundstage at F&B Ceco, a large old facility on West Fifty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue where John was going to re-create the interior of the Mahoney Georgetown house: “A red brick Colonial gripped by ivy” near “a fringe of campus belonging to Georgetown University,” next to “a sheer embankment plummeting steep to busy M Street.” Blatty made it an important character in the story, as he did Georgetown itself.

  I asked John to design the interior of the house to reflect the Colonial style, but to make the rooms larger and all the walls “wild” so we could move the camera freely. Half in jest, I told him I never wanted to see the colors pink or chartreuse anywhere on the set, never thinking he would actually use them. We had to build Regan’s bedroom as a separate, free-standing set, on top of a large ball bearing so it could be pitched and rolled during the exorcism sequence.

  Shortly after the interior of the “MacNeil House” started construction, what I saw shocked me. There were curved archways, not common in a Colonial interior; the ceilings were too low to allow overhead lighting; the rooms were too small to allow for depth or complex staging; and worse, there were paint samples on the walls: pink and chartreuse!

  John Lloyd was nowhere to be found. He had been going around New York for several days, being photographed with Linda Blair as “Regan’s father,” for family pictures to be placed around her bedroom set. I hadn’t asked him to do this, nor did I see him as the ideal person to “portray” the absent father. Literally hundreds of photos were taken with John and Linda, none of which were usable. When I confronted him, he had no response, no excuse. It was a nightmare, but I had to fire him.

  Salven suggested a young designer named Bill Malley. Malley had no feature credits, only a handful of television shows, but Dave had problems finding an experienced feature designer to take over. The top people in the creative areas of filmmaking are reluctant to replace a colleague, especially a respected one. But Malley had nothing to lose. He seemed pleasant enough, and as we were about to start shooting, without having seen any of his work, I hired him.

  Production was to begin August 14, 1972. Three months before that, Salven and I had selected a team of five special effects men and sent them to New York to begin experimenting. The team was led by Marcel Vercoutere, who moved with his wife and young child to the basement of the soundstage on West Fifty-Fourth Street. Marcel and his crew worked twelve- to fifteen-hour days to achieve the levitation, bed movement, head spinning, and all the effects the script required. Everything had to be done mechanically. Marcel would call me in to see their efforts, and it became a process of trial and error, but he and his crew were tireless. They’d show me an effect, I’d criticize it, they’d make corrections. Without this lengthy advance preparation, none of the effects would have been achievable.

  Along with the special effects team, I hired Dick Smith to begin preparing makeup for the various stages of Regan’s possession. Dick created special makeup for Little Big Man and The Godfather. He first made an impression of Linda Blair’s face, which he took to his studio in upstate New York, where he began to sculpt various horrific masks. The most highly respected makeup artist of his time, h
e trained some of the best at work today, including Rick Baker, who was his assistant on The Exorcist. Dick could be temperamental in defending his work, and on a number of occasions he was ready to quit. He showed me various attempts to turn the face of an innocent, angelic child into that of a violent, raging demon. I rejected his early efforts, not because they weren’t good, but because they didn’t seem to be organic. They concealed too much of Linda’s own features, which I felt were essential to convince an audience this was happening to her.

  There’s a brief scene in the novel and screenplay where a metal crucifix is discovered under Regan’s pillow in her bedroom. She later uses the crucifix to slash her vagina. Could we not assume she used it to disfigure her facial features as well? Then, as the film progresses, the demonic makeup could evolve out of these gangrenous self-inflicted wounds. I presented this idea to Dick Smith, and he embraced it. He brought me a medical textbook that showed the effects of gangrenous wounds on burn victims. From these he created the demonic makeup that would worsen throughout the “possession” scenes. After weeks of experimentation, Linda’s makeup required three hours to apply each day and an hour to remove.

  Blatty and I knew that criticism would come from the Church if the film was perceived to conflict with doctrine, but I also consulted with prominent doctors—Norman Chase, professor of radiology at NYU Medical Center, as well as two prominent physicians, Drs. Herbert Walker and Arthur Snyder, so that the details of internal medicine and psychiatry would be accurate. I asked each of the specialists if the early symptoms experienced by Regan were possible and if they would have been diagnosed and treated as depicted, with psychiatry, hypnotherapy, radiology, even confinement in a mental institution. These doctors had all witnessed similar behavior, and it seemed to resemble hallucinations derived from paranoid schizophrenia. Yes, that was how they would have treated it within their known disciplines, up to the point of the manifestations that led to the possibility of possession. As the clinic director in the film reluctantly suggests after a thorough examination of Regan: “There is one outside chance of a cure. . . . I think of it as shock treatment . . . it’s purely force of suggestion . . . the victim’s belief in possession is what helped cause it, so in that same way, the belief in the power of exorcism can make it disappear.”

  Before we started production, I rehearsed every scene, with the exception of the Iraq sequence, in a storage room on the top floor of Al & Dick’s restaurant on West Fifty-Fourth Street. This was my hangout, where D’Antoni and I first met Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. We were able to approximate our various sets. The rehearsals were a way for the cast to get to know each other and discover their characters. But by the time we started to film, their performances became “frozen.”

  The best films I’ve made are the ones where you can’t see the acting, where the actors embody their characters, and their performances are allowed to breathe. By rehearsing to an obsessive degree, I’d squeezed the life out of the performances. I could see this happening in the first few days of shooting. What was most important to me was spontaneity, not perfection, so I told the actors to forget everything we’d rehearsed, which is like a judge telling a jury to disregard the testimony they’ve just heard. I told them they could change the words, as long as the ideas and plot points were maintained. I would never do this with a classic text, but it’s often done with contemporary dialogue. Acting is reacting, listening to what the other characters are saying, hearing them as though for the first time, and responding without preconceived line readings.

  Principal photography began at the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on New York’s Welfare Island. We decided to film the New York locations first in order to give Malley time to redesign and build the interior sets for the Georgetown house. The scene at the hospital involved Father Karras and his uncle John visiting Karras’s mother in a hospital ward of mentally ill female patients. Most of the women in the scene were actual patients I filmed with hidden cameras, to enhance the atmosphere of poverty, illness, and depression that marked the end of Mrs. Karras’s life.

  Karras’s mother was played by Vasiliki Maliaros, a woman my extras casting director, Lou DiGiaimo, discovered in a Greek restaurant. Karras’s guilt over his failure to provide for his ailing mother brings on his crisis of faith. I felt that Karras, not Regan, was the real target of the demon; the goal, to cause the priest to perceive the human condition at its worst and thus surrender his beliefs. For the hospital scenes, I had Karras’s grief-stricken dying mother confined to her bed in arm restraints. At the appearance of Karras, she cries and thrashes around, like Regan during the possession scenes. I looked for other ways to link the mother to the possessed girl as a way of focusing Karras’s sorrow and guilt. At one point, while in the bedroom with Regan alone, he sees his dead mother staring at him from her bed. This happens just before he hears his mother’s plaintive cry from Regan’s mouth: “Why you do this to me, Dimmy?” And later, during the exorcism, the demon taunts Karras: “You killed your mother! You left her alone to die!” In a small apartment on East Twenty-Third Street, we filmed the scene between Karras and his mother before she’s hospitalized. With a few brief strokes, I could show their loving but troubled relationship.

  One of the early scenes in The Exorcist was set in the New York City subway, where Karras is asked for money by a drunken beggar who says, “Can you help an old altah boy, Fadda, I’m a Cat’lic?” Lou DiGiaimo searched the bars of Manhattan looking for a real alcoholic. He found Vinny Russell, who was in his forties but looked twenty years older; his address was the White Rose Bar on Fourteenth Street. Lou kept Vinny supplied with drinks at the White Rose for several weeks until we were ready to shoot, then brought him to the subway station in Grand Central where the scene was to be shot. He wore his own filthy clothes. I told him how I wanted him to say the line, which had to be coordinated with a subway train passing behind him. Vinny was drunk the entire night and kept asking when he could go “home” to the bar. It took five hours of filming to get him to say the line convincingly. It was recorded with a lot of background noise, so about seven or eight months later, after filming was completed and edited, Lou brought Vinny, drunk as ever, to the recording studio to postsync the line he had said months before. He had no memory of having filmed the scene. When he saw his face on the screen, appearing again and again in a loop, he thought he was in an alternate universe. I told him he had to repeat the line in sync with the way he had said it originally. He had no idea what I was talking about. We recorded this one line for two hours until finally I said, “Great, we’re done,” at which point Vinny, who never acted before or since, stood up from behind the microphone and announced, “I ain’t gonna work for that director no more!”

  Bill Malley was able to quickly reconstruct the interior of the Georgetown (Mahoney) house and the separate bedroom for special effects. Together with the set decorator, Jerry Wunderlich, he made the house interior look as good as the original. Wunderlich was able to rent master paintings, fine rugs, and period furniture. Ellen and Linda developed a rapport that allowed their scenes together to become effortless. The scene where Chris is putting Regan to bed and Regan suggests she thinks her mother is having an affair with the director Burke Dennings is one of my favorites in the film. I shot it with two cameras—one a close two-shot, the other over Chris’s shoulder to Regan. Owen used long lenses so we could keep the cameras far enough away to be unobtrusive. It was done in one take. Another favorite scene is between Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) and Chris, where he shares with her his confusion over the death of Burke Dennings, who seems to have fallen or “been pushed” from her daughter’s bedroom window. Kinderman’s low-key, respectful manner unnerves Chris more than if he had come right out and accused her daughter of murder. What he doesn’t say and how she processes it, while trying to conceal her emotions, contributes to two of the subtlest performances I’ve ever captured. I told the actors to keep their feelings hidden as they begin to comprehend what is unspoken. We shot this sce
ne only twice, once from his point of view, then from hers, with the camera imperceptibly slow-zooming toward each.

  Halfway through shooting, we were way over schedule. “I think your problem is Roizman,” Greenlaw said. “He’s too slow.” The real problem was my obsessive desire for perfection.

  “What do you suggest, Charlie?” I asked.

  “Let me find you another cameraman.”

  I don’t know to what extent he tried to find a replacement for Owen, but it didn’t happen. I had approval of his replacement, which I would never have given. It was an excercise.

  Our plan was to complete the interior sets on the New York stage, move to other New York locations, then finish photography in Georgetown. One morning, predawn, my phone rang. I was still in the rented apartment on Park Avenue between Eighty-Sixth and Eighty-Seventh. We weren’t scheduled to start shooting before 9:00 a.m., and I was half asleep. Salven was on the phone. “Don’t bother to come to work today,” he said sadly.

  “Why? Am I fired?”

  “No. The set burned down.”

  I sat up in bed, now totally awake. “Are you pulling my leg?”

  “The whole set’s in flames. Completely destroyed.”

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know,” Dave said. “The firemen are here now.”

  By the time I arrived, the stage was filled with smoke. Firemen everywhere. The set was in ruins, along with all the expensive artwork, furniture, and rugs. The question of how the fire started was never adequately explained. There was a lengthy investigation by the insurance company, which paid off on the theory that because the stage was old and there were pigeons flying around in the rafters, a pigeon may have flown into a lightbox, causing a short circuit. There was one night watchman at a desk just outside the stage door. He saw smoke seeping from the crack below the door: “When I opened the door,” he said, “the flames were everywhere, about thirty feet high.” I was frightened and confused, for the first time since we started production.