I stood up and shook his hand. “Thank you for letting me meet an interesting person,” I said, and left.
On the plane ride home, I played our conversation back in memory. Second thoughts set in. What could I possibly tell him about music for film? But this was my film, and I wanted first to please myself.
During the 1960s in Chicago, I used to go to jazz clubs—the Blue Note, Theresa’s Lounge, and the Sutherland Hotel. One evening I met a young Argentinian pianist and arranger, Lalo Schifrin, who was touring with the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra. He had written and recorded a brilliant modern jazz suite for Dizzy called Gillespiana. We became friends and would correspond regularly as he continued to tour the world. Lalo told me his ambition was to write music for films, and I confessed it was my dream to one day direct them. By the time we next met in Hollywood, Lalo had gone on to write many film and television scores, including the theme for Mission Impossible and his great score for Bullitt.
We felt sure we could collaborate, as friends who had similar musical references. I ran The Exorcist work print for Lalo, and he was enthusiastic. I told him I had been listening to a lot of contemporary classical music, by composers like Hans Werner Henze, George Crumb, Anton Webern, Yannis Xenakis, and Krzystof Penderecki. I felt that the Exorcist score should be atonal and minimalist, like a cold hand on the back of your neck. I wanted abstract chamber music because I felt a big orchestra would overwhelm the film’s intimacy. I brought some LPs to Lalo and played him the tracks I felt could be a template for our score. I also thought we needed a brief, sixteen-bar musical motif, occasionally superimposed over the soundscapes, something innocent like Brahms’s “Lullaby.” I told Lalo I wanted very little music, not a wall-to-wall presence.
About three weeks later, Lalo played the piano score for me. The music was abstract enough, but how would it sound expanded to other instruments? I reminded him that I wanted a small group, not a large orchestra. We were scheduled to record the following Monday at the legendary facility where the great Max Steiner scores were recorded for the Warner Bros. films of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.
I arrived to the disturbing sight of seventy or eighty musicians assembling. There were five percussionists and a full complement of brass and strings. The opening titles, followed by the first scenes of the film, appeared on a large screen behind the musicians. Lalo gave the downbeat, and what followed was wall-to-wall noise, using every component of this big band, including electric brass. This was not Webern—it was more Stan Kenton or the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. I was in shock. It’s not that the music was badly written or played; but it was the opposite of what I wanted.
I took him aside: “Lalo, I think it’s wrong.” He moved away, incredulous. Everyone in the studio knew I didn’t like what I was hearing.
John Calley was summoned to the session. He asked Lalo if he was willing to make changes. Lalo reminded him that we had the full orchestra booked for two more days, followed by a day of cues with a smaller group. He had no time to rewrite or rearrange the music, if he wanted to.
As a filmmaker, you need the stamina and the moxie to trust your instincts and defend your choices. I was concerned about rejecting Lalo’s music after rebuffing the great Bernard Herrmann, especially given the approaching delivery date. I’ve never studied music, but I’d developed a taste for what I liked and disliked—“I know it when I hear it,” to paraphrase former Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart on pornography.
Calley had been supportive of me throughout the process, through all the inexplicable disasters and rising costs. He turned to me: “What do you want to do?”
“John, I can’t put this stuff in the picture.” I told him we should cancel the other sessions and start again with somebody else.
“I’ll cancel them, Billy,” he said, “but we’re committed to pay the musicians for the next three days.” I was mortified, but I felt Lalo’s music would have overwhelmed the film.
I made so many seemingly irrational decisions throughout the process, but this one capped them off. With less than two months before the release of the film, we had no music score or final sound mix.
There are certain sound tracks that define a film. Try to imagine A Man and a Woman without the music; or Chariots of Fire,Psycho,Rocky—just a few bars of these scores on the radio or TV, and you’re reminded of images from the films. I didn’t want songs or melodies for The Exorcist, only mood and atmosphere. I told Lalo I was sorry and tried to shake hands. He returned my gesture with a look of contempt and walked away.
A ten-year friendship was over. Whenever our paths cross, we avert our eyes. We haven’t spoken to each other for forty years. I understand his anguish, but I don’t know a polite way to reject someone’s work. I still listen to some of his scores and to Gillespiana, which sounds as fresh and original as when he wrote it over forty years ago. My disappointment in him has long since passed, but if confronted with the same situation today, I would do the same thing. Hopefully I’d find a more diplomatic way, but I’m not sure that would make it easier.
Inevitably, a number of disputes arose between Blatty and me. From my point of view, I was doing what a director does, but in so doing, I was making decisions that usurped Blatty’s role as writer and producer, and most important, as creator of The Exorcist. Though film is the most collaborative of media, it is a director’s medium. You can’t make bottom-line decisions by committee or in concert with anyone—not the producer, the writer, nor the cameraman, the actors, or even the studio. At a certain point, you have to believe in the film you’re making and what will be its final form. At any stage of production, one or more of the aforementioned will happily take over and do their own thing. Open that door a crack, and you’ve lost the film.
In fact, as the creator of The Exorcist, Blatty was more qualified than I to make all the final decisions. What pushed against that was the process of filmmaking itself. At no time did I feel I was making a film that went against Blatty’s intentions. He was my ideal and most important audience, and I was sure I’d delivered the film he fought for me to direct, even though we often differed on key details. Our worldviews were similar, not identical. Though we began on the same course and Bill was theoretically captain of the ship, I knew that in the final stages I would have to guide the boat alone.
I lived with the possibility it could all turn to disaster. It had in the past. But with total confidence, even arrogance, I went, as they say in poker, “All in.”
After canceling the Schifrin sessions, I met with Larry Marks, Warner’s music director. I told him I’d made a temp score from excerpts of the same contemporary classical music I played for Lalo: five pieces by the Polish composer Krzystof Penderecki; one by the renowned German composer Hans Werner Henze; and fragments composed by George Crumb and Anton Webern. I filled in with short works that were sent to me by two young American composers: David Borden and Harry Beer. I segued from one to another, creating my own score.
“The Musicians Union won’t allow us to use preexisting recordings,” Larry said, so he had to get permission from the publishers, then go to London and hire an arranger, a conductor, and a small orchestra to rerecord them.
Calley was sure of one thing: this film existed in my head and nowhere else. We didn’t have time to commission a new composer and risk throwing out another score. He gave Larry the go-ahead, while the other executives at Warner’s were convinced I had flipped. The film had already experienced costly overruns, which would inevitably affect the profit margin. If it failed at the box office, the executives would appear incompetent.
Before Larry left for London, I asked if he had any ideas for a motif—something like Brahms’ “Lullaby,” that could serve as a kind of child’s theme. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he admitted, but he pointed to a large room and a table covered with audition discs. “There’s a turntable in there; see if you hear anything you like.”
Auditioning music this way was called “needle dropping.” I began
to play through the stacks, listening for no more than several seconds before changing discs. I did this several hours a day, and on the fourth day I was ready to give up. Wearily, I selected a disc labeled Tubular Bells, written and performed by Mike Oldfield. It began with a simple motif played softly on a bell, followed by a lengthy narration by the composer. The disc was a teaching tool more than a piece of popular music. But that opening motif, short but just long enough, was haunting. I played it for Larry Marks.
“This is what you’re looking for?” he asked in astonishment. Tubular Bells was recorded by a new company in London called Virgin Records. It had come in unsolicited. As Virgin founder Richard Branson would say in his autobiography, its use in The Exorcist was his company’s first million-selling record, and actually launched Virgin Music. Like much else, it was a gift from the movie god.
I contacted Jack Nitzsche, a music producer who had done albums for Mick Jagger, Boz Scaggs, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, among others. Jack had a great feel for soundscapes as well as music, and he had a simple approach to producing them. The opening sounds over the titles are a series of quiet abstract tonal chords that Jack created simply by rubbing the edge of a wineglass. During a recording session, his girlfriend was sleeping facedown on a couch. He placed a microphone on the floor next to her, then ran across the studio and jumped on her back, landing with both knees. Her shocked reaction is the sound we used when Regan throws up on Father Karras.
We rerecorded the movements of the actors, a process called “Foley” after its creator, wherein “sound actors” walk and move, pick up objects, and open and close doors, in sync with the action on the screen. The Foley track replaces or enhances what the actors are doing onscreen, so that dialogue and sound effects are heard clearly, without extraneous noise. This technique is also used for foreign versions of a film, so that when it’s dubbed into another language, only the English dialogue track needs to be replaced.
Before starting the mix, I had seen two films by a Polish-Mexican director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, which were outrageous masterpieces. One was called El Topo (The Mole), the other The Holy Mountain, and the sound tracks were extraordinary. They were created by Gonzalo Gavira, who lived in Mexico, spoke no English but had a cousin in Los Angeles who was able to contact him for us. One day Señor Gavira, a short, middle-aged man in an old white cotton shirt and shiny dark pants, wearing no shoes, came to the mixing studio with his cousin. We ran the film for him while his cousin whispered a running translation of the dialogue. When the lights came up, he said in Spanish: “I’m ready.”
It usually required months for a sound effects crew to assemble a sound track. I asked Señor Gavira what equipment he needed. His only request was an old, cracked leather wallet that contained credit cards. Placing the wallet close to a microphone, he bent and twisted it, and that became the sound of the bones cracking in the demon’s neck as it turned completely around. Gavira was in the studio for about four hours, created several key effects using only his body, then went home to his little town on the outskirts of Mexico City.
In all, the mix went on for three months, six days a week. The demon voice recorded by Mercedes McCambridge was mixed with animal noises and with an audiocassette I received from Father Bermingham that contained an actual exorcism recorded in Latin in the Vatican. McCambridge’s screams and moans were enhanced with the terrifying shrieks of the child on the Vatican tape.
I arranged for Blatty to see my cut at the Warner screening room in New York. Though he had seen dailies and made suggestions for retakes, all of which I did, this was the first time he would see the film put together, with the demon voice and my choices for the music. You are never more vulnerable as a director than when showing a first cut to someone you respect.
The next morning, we met at the St. Regis Hotel for breakfast. As I walked down the short flight of steps to the King Cole Room, I saw him sitting alone. He gave me an enthusiastic thumbs-up and a big smile, then a hug. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “I have no notes. Don’t change a thing.” I was elated. As he confirmed in many interviews since, he “sprinkled holy water” on my first cut. He called Leo Greenfield, head of distribution at Warner Bros., and told him the film should play in as many theaters as possible, “This will be bigger than The Godfather,” Blatty assured him.
Then John Calley saw the cut. While enthusiastic, he did have notes: “Take out the second doctor consultation scene; take out the scene between Karras and Merrin, where Merrin ‘explains’ the ‘meaning’ of Regan’s possession; reverse the order of two scenes, and cut the final scene between Dyer and Kinderman that ends the film on a hopeful note.” Calley’s notes were unsettling. My initial response was, “Who the hell is he to tell me how to make a film?”
But his notes gnawed at me until gradually my anger dissipated and his ideas resonated. I went to the cutting room and reluctantly began to implement his suggestions one by one. And maybe it was because I hadn’t seen the complete film for several weeks, but his ideas seemed fresh. The pace seemed to improve, and I didn’t miss the apostolic underlining. Blatty thought Calley’s changes would hurt the film, but over his objections, I took out a total of twelve minutes, bringing the running time to just over two hours.
After months of editing, I felt the film should end on a more ambiguous note. I wanted viewers to remain unsettled and without resolution. I cut the Dyer/Kinderman scene and brought the film to an abrupt end as Dyer turns away from the now empty flight of steps. This omission gave many the impression that the film ends on a note of pessimism. Regan tenderly kissing Dyer on the cheek and the Saint Joseph medal were meant to offset this, as a kind of subtle “resurrection” of Karras. This omission became a source of conflict between Blatty and myself for decades. As Blatty said in an interview in 1998, “The film that Billy delivered in 1973 was highly effective, but it lacked a spiritual center. You proceeded from shock to shock without a clear purpose. It was a roller-coaster ride whose success made me comfortably well off, but also troubled me. And ironically, I always believed that removing the moral center of the film actually limited its audience appeal. . . . With these scenes, you understood why you were being subjected to all this horror, why the girl was suffering so.”
I still emphatically disagree. I believed that while the film’s “message” was unstated, the obvious conclusion was that good had triumphed over evil . . . not always, not forever perhaps, but certainly in this case. In hindsight, I think that if the film has relevance, it’s due to the tension between Blatty’s tightly structured script and absolute faith and my improvisational, agnostic approach to it. Blatty’s stated goal in the novel and the film was apostolic. I simply wanted to tell a good story. Its conclusion to me was inherent: the girl was possessed, and the exorcism was successful. Blatty wanted that underscored; I did my best to eliminate underscoring.
Few people know the identities of the MPAA Ratings Board members. We were told they’re mostly educators and representatives from the Parent-Teacher Association, plus retired film executives, but their names are purposely withheld. When Jack Valenti formed the MPAA in 1968, he approached Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist in New York, to devise the ratings system. Stern, as head of the Ratings Board, would not normally participate in a film’s rating. He would only see it if there was a controversy within his board.
A half hour after the board screening was over, I received a call from Dr. Stern. We had never met nor spoken until that phone conversation. “Billy, this is Aaron Stern. Can I call you Billy?”
“Sure.”
“Listen, I’ve just seen The Exorcist. It’s a great film. We’re going to give it an R, and I’m sure we’ll catch heat for that and so will you, but this is a movie that should be seen as you made it, so we’re not asking for any cuts. I’m about to call Ted Ashley and tell him.” This was electrifying. If Stern had been standing in front of me, I’d have kissed him on the lips. All that remained was to conform the negative and start making prints.
You begi
n by screening the work print with a “color timer,” telling him what shots you want to make darker, brighter, with more contrast, more blue, less red, and so on. You review the print shot for shot, and The Exorcist, like most films, had several thousand shots.
Warner Bros. owned the Technicolor lab, so we timed the prints there. As we saw various reels come off the printer, I thought they looked awful. There are reasons why a 35 mm. print can be inconsistent from shot to shot or from one reel to another. The composition of the water in the developer is constantly changing, and the electrical current to the printer fluctuates. This can cause one shot to appear bluish and the next greenish, and consistency is difficult to achieve.
There were a few great “timers” who knew how to achieve consistent results, but the reels coming out of Technicolor were either “milky,” too dark, or too bright. Completing the film was going to be an obstacle course to the very end. I went to Calley and Wells and told them that the lab was not producing a satisfactory print. The lab, of course, was another source of revenue for the studio. The cost of printing was billed to the overall cost of the film, so when Warner printed their films at Technicolor, the money went from one pocket into another. If you directed a film at Warner, you had to use Technicolor.
I was assured by Roger Mayer, chief executive of what was left of MGM, that the MGM lab was still the best in the business. Roger was a longtime studio boss, reliable and decent, who was active on the board of the Motion Picture Academy. I knew him only slightly, but he had a good reputation.
I told the executives at Warner’s I wanted to pull the film out of Technicolor and see what the MGM lab could do. You can imagine how that went over, as the difficulties of finishing continued to pile up. Calley ran interference for me. We took the negative out of Technicolor—scandalous at the time—and moved it to MGM, which had only one picture, ours. The timer was Bob McMillian, a soft-spoken man in his early fifties who spent all his working life in the lab, where he had timed hundreds of films.
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 28