The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  Francis told me that Bluhdorn wanted to meet him, Peter, and me with the idea of starting our own production company, to be underwritten by Paramount. We met on the top floor of the Essex House, where Bluhdorn had the hotel’s largest suite. I was first to arrive. I pushed the buzzer outside the suite, and an energetic man about fifty years old, a thick Austrian accent, and a satanic grin greeted me: Charlie Bluhdorn. I was soon to learn that he was not only one of the richest but one of the world’s most eccentric men.

  Bluhdorn started his business with a small auto parts company in Michigan and became a millionaire at thirty and one of the first conglomerate builders of the go-go sixties. He was the founder and chairman of the Gulf and Western Corporation.

  He began to smell my neck! Yes. Smell my neck. “What’s ’at shit you’re wearin’?” he asked in a disgusted tone. “I’m sorry?” I asked tentatively, completely off guard, although Francis warned me about him. “That shitty aftershave?” he persisted. “Oh,” I said, “Guerlain.” “Gehlann, Gehlann,” he mocked. “Com’ere, I wanna show you something.” He led me through the luxurious suite to a large bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and took out a giant-size cut-crystal bottle of Guerlain cologne, which he began to pour on his black dress shoes! “Gehlann?” He laughed. “This is what I do with Gehlann—”

  He then led me back into the living room, which had a magnificent view of Central Park. “I own this hotel,” he said. “I used to be a doorman here, now I own the whole fuckin’ thing. My first job, I made fifteen dollars a week! I was sixteen years old. Fweedkin. What kinda name is that?” “My parents were Russian,” I told him. “Russians!” he snapped. “All crooks.”

  It went on this way until Francis and Peter arrived. We sat, while Bluhdorn paced the room: “Art don’t mean shit. This business is about money! Who gives a damn about a picture that don’t make money? You wanna make real money?” As he paced, he would occasionally lean forward and shout in each of our faces. I had never seen a performance like this.

  “You know I own clothing companies, zinc, cigars. I own all the sugar in the Dominican Republic, the fields, the refineries, I own ’em all. I’m gonna make you fellas rich. We’ll start a new company. You’ll make all your pictures for Paramount. You can make any film you want for under three million dollars. If you got a picture over three, you come to me. Only me. You’ll be completely independent of Paramount. You don’t have to talk to Fwank [Frank Yablans, president of Paramount] or Bob [Evans, head of production].” Francis hated Evans at that time because of a clash over bragging rights to the success of The Godfather. “You’ll have no offices, no employees, no overhead! You just make pictures, and the money will go into a pool that’ll pay for your other pictures. You’ll each get ten percent of the profits of all the pictures. But I want commercial pictures, like The Godfather,The French Connection, The Last Picture Show. I don’t wanna dump art films into this company.” He was fascinating. Riveting. And more than a little crazy. Like the three of us.

  Fantozzi and Gross and representatives of Francis and Peter met with Charlie’s lawyers, and we hammered out a deal in a couple of weeks. We were in our thirties, and we were all gonna be big shots. But for one little thing: Charlie didn’t bother to inform Frank Yablans until the deal was done. One fateful morning, we all met in Charlie’s office on the Paramount lot, and Charlie announced the terms of the deal to Yablans, who listened quietly. “Whadda ya think a that, Fwank?”

  “I think it’s one of the worst ideas I ever heard, Charlie,” Frank said softly. He was forty years old, short, feisty, balding, a bare-knuckles street guy from Brooklyn who came up through film distribution. He wore dark, tailored suits and always had a manicure. He knew how to sell pictures. Good pictures. Bad ones. He could sell anything.

  “Just a minute, Frank,” I interrupted. Fantozzi and Gross each put a hand on my leg to cut me off, but Charlie jumped in first: “What’s wrong with it, Fwank?”

  “Here’s what’s wrong,” Frank began angrily. “When these guys start making flops—and they will—you’re gonna blame me, even though I’ll have no say over what they do. And if they make a few hits, you’ll say, ‘What do I need Paramount Pictures for?’ It’s lose-lose for me.”

  “Fwank, you’re wrong,” Charlie shouted. The Directors Company, as we called it, was his idea, and he wanted it to happen. I stood up angrily and walked out.

  But the Directors Company was formed, “Fwank’s” objection notwithstanding. Francis was preparing a small film about a wiretapper, The Conversation, with Gene Hackman. It was budgeted at under $3 million, and was immediately folded into our new company. Peter had a film ready to go called Paper Moon, to star Ryan O’Neal and his daughter Tatum, about a con man traveling through the Midwest during the Depression. I had no idea what I wanted to do next.

  The first film from the Directors Company was Paper Moon, and it was a financial and critical success. It got us off to a great start, and I was proud to be a part of the company that produced it, though I had nothing to do with its making. Then Francis released The Conversation in 1974, the same year he released Godfather II. I went up to see a rough cut in his screening room in San Francisco with about twenty of his friends and colleagues. I found it ragged and incoherent. It seemed like a ripoff of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, using sound instead of photography.

  After the screening, Francis went around the room asking each of us how much money we thought the film would make. His lawyer said at least $25 million. Other estimates went from $10 to $50 million, which would have meant an enormous profit. He came to me last. I said, “Francis, I don’t think it’ll take in five hundred grand. I think we’ll lose money on it.” The others ridiculed my comment, which was probably not the subtlest way to put it to a friend, but I felt they were just blowing smoke and telling Francis what he wanted to hear. He reminded me that it was unfinished, a rough cut, but I honestly thought there was no way it could be fixed. And because I loved Francis, I wasn’t going to bullshit him. The next time I saw it, it was better, but it never gelled for me, though it went on to win major critics’ prizes and Academy Award nominations.

  One of the many young people Francis was mentoring at the time was a shy, bespectacled young man with a shock of thick, wavy brown hair that made him look like a 1950s teenager: George Lucas. Francis had produced George’s first full-length film, American Graffiti. Part of our deal at the Directors Company was the option to produce other films, if they cost less than $3 million and if we all agreed. Francis gave Peter and me a script George had just finished writing. “We can make this if you guys like it,” Francis enthused. “It’s gonna cost more than three million, a lot more, but it’s really great, and I think we should do it.” The script was set in a galaxy far, far away, and it had wookies, robots, a princess, and other assorted comic book characters. “How much will it cost?” I asked. “George has a budget of around nine million,” Francis said.

  “Nine million dollars!” Peter was laughing, but Francis believed in George from the day he saw his student films, and it’s because of Francis that a major studio, Universal, made American Graffiti. I read George’s script and told Francis I didn’t get it. Peter had the same reaction. “Who’s gonna direct this?” I asked. “George,” Francis said. Because of his relationship with George, we had first crack at Star Wars, but Peter and I passed. “You guys are wrong,” Francis told us.

  Hubris had overcome me, and Yablans used it to divide us. He encouraged Peter to make his next film for our company, an adaptation of the Henry James novel Daisy Miller, about a young American girl in nineteenth-century Europe who meets and falls in love with a fellow American. The film was to star Peter’s protégée Cybill Shepherd, a pretty young model who made her film debut in The Last Picture Show. Francis remained neutral, but I told Peter he shouldn’t make it for our company. We had promised Bluhdorn “commercial” films. Peter and I exchanged ugly words, but Yablans not only convinced Peter he should make it, he financed a record album of
Cybill singing the songs of Cole Porter and put up a huge billboard with her picture on the Sunset Strip advertising the album, Cybill Does It—To Cole Porter, Produced by Peter Bogdanovich. The album sank without a trace, but Peter started filming Daisy Miller. I took a strong adversarial position and played right into Yablans’s hands, forcing a breakup of the Directors Company. The company lasted less than a year.

  I had tasted fame and money, and they tasted good. Little did I realize how shaky was my foundation. While telling myself I didn’t suffer fools gladly, I treated people badly. David Brown, the legendary Hollywood producer, used to say, “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make successful in show business.”

  Jules Stein, founder of MCA and owner of Universal Studios, had become a friend. We met while I was preparing The Boys in the Band, and saw each other socially in New York and Los Angeles. Jules and his wife, Doris, and I used to go to the Hollywood Park racetrack. One day he called and asked me to meet him in his office at Universal City. He was excited about the success of The French Connection and The Exorcist, and he said, “I’ll give you a million dollars if you come over to Universal.” I put Fantozzi in touch with the head of Universal business affairs, and somehow the “million-dollar signing bonus” became a million dollars to direct a picture.

  Universal had just finished construction on a four-story office building on the lot for its producers and directors, and I was given my choice of suites. Dave Salven joined me and we were given our own production company. But I still had no idea what I wanted to do next.

  I came across a novel by Gerald Walker, a reporter for the New York Times. Good title: Cruising. The story was fascinating: a series of murders in the gay bars of New York, and a detective who was assigned to go undercover to find the killer. After The Boys in the Band, though, I wasn’t anxious to pursue another film about gay life. Phil D’Antoni was interested in the book and optioned it, with a new young director attached: Steven Spielberg. They tried to set it up but found no takers. I’ve often thought about the path Spielberg’s career might have taken had he directed Cruising.

  While on the Universal lot, I was invited to a private screening of Spielberg’s second feature, Jaws, weeks before it opened. Sitting alone in a screening room, I wasn’t impressed by the film. In the space of a year, flush with success and an overblown opinion of my talents, I failed to appreciate the genius of both Lucas and Spielberg. Soon the American film industry would belong to them.

  At that point, I was spending more time with lawyers and accountants than actors or writers. I had fallen into the trap of losing focus on the work and concentrating instead on peripherals. It was to cost me dearly. My behavior during this period was erratic. I was at the edge of a cliff, and my demons were standing by, waiting to push me off.

  The question of what to do next continued to elude me. It had been more than two years since I’d directed a film, and I was going back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, buying paintings and antique furniture and enjoying the spoils of success. I was no longer the kid from Chicago who walked or took the subway everywhere and played in pickup basketball games. I was playing tennis instead, and driving a new Mercedes. There was a disconnect between who I was and what I had become.

  You would hear me regularly pontificating on the Barry Gray radio show or see me on Dick Cavett, Charlie Rose, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, any number of television talk shows. On one of these, I was asked about films that influenced me, and two that came to mind were H.-G. Clouzot’s Wages of Fear and Diabolique, both French films I hadn’t seen for twenty years. I started to think about a new version of The Wages of Fear, not a remake but based on the same premise: four men, strangers in a foreign country, fugitives, broke and desperate, who sign on to drive two trucks carrying crates of nitroglycerin to extinguish an oil-well fire two hundred miles away, across unforgiving landscapes. The premise seemed to me a metaphor for the countries of the world: find a way to work together or explode. My film would have wholly original characters. I would make it grittier than Clouzot’s film, with the “documentary feel” for which I had become known.

  I believed I could make an audience care about the unlikeliest of heroes—a swindler, a terrorist, a hit man, and a driver for the Irish mob, with no redeeming characteristics.

  10

  SORCERER

  Fantozzi and I went to Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg to tell them this was the first picture I wanted to make for Universal. They agreed to let me develop the screenplay.

  But first we had to acquire the rights, and this proved to be complicated. The Clouzot film is of iconic stature, but Clouzot didn’t own the rights. The novelist Georges Arnaud, who wrote the original source material, Le Salaire de la peur, controlled them, and he had a long-standing feud with Clouzot. He was happy to sell the rights to us, but I felt I had to meet with Clouzot in Paris and get his blessing first.

  He was not in good health, and soon to have open-heart surgery. He was being cared for by his second wife, Inès, and we could only speak through an interpreter. For the past ten years, he was doing documentaries for television of performances by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but he hadn’t made a feature film for seven years, though he had several in planning stages. It was awkward for me to propose a new version of one of his landmark titles. He neither blessed nor opposed it, but told me what I already knew: he didn’t control the rights and couldn’t stop me. He wondered why I would want to do it, having received so much acclaim for my own recent work.

  What I didn’t say was that frankly, of all the possibilities that crossed my mind, this was the only one that stuck. I told him I wanted to give him a share of the profits, if there were any, and he thanked me.

  Walon (Wally) Green was a young writer and documentary filmmaker I knew at Wolper, where he wrote and produced several National Geographic specials. He made a semidocumentary called The Hellstrom Chronicle that won an Academy Award the same year as The French Connection. A couple of years before that, he was co-writer of one of the best westerns ever made, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Wally spoke fluent French, Spanish, Italian, and German, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music and literature. We talked about a new version of The Wages of Fear, and he was enthusiastic. He suggested I read Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the definitive work of “magic realism.” It was another life-changing work and became a template for our version of The Wages of Fear. Wally and I worked on an outline together, creating the four desperate characters who wind up as fugitives in a poor village somewhere in South America.

  We devised four prologues to show how each man came to this place: a wheelman for a gang of thieves who rob a church in Elizabeth, New Jersey; an Arab terrorist who blows up a bank in Jerusalem; a hit man who kills a stranger in a hotel in Vera Cruz, Mexico; and a French stockbroker who is caught up in a bank fraud involving his in-laws’ company. We purposely set out to make these characters hard to “root for.” I thought I could take an audience wherever I wanted them to go, and they’d be glad to be there.

  The script took four months to complete, but when we finished, I thought it rocked. Sheinberg, Wasserman, and Ned Tanen, president of production at Universal, read it and were concerned about its cost. The backstories took place in four locales—Vera Cruz, Jerusalem, Paris, and Elizabeth, New Jersey—and the main story somewhere in South America. Bud Smith would be my editor and coproducer. With Wally, we went to scout Ecuador, which had the most wild and exotic landscapes in all of Latin America.

  Cabo de San Francisco is a poor fishing village in Esmeraldas, on Ecuador’s southwest coast. We chartered a helicopter from Quito, the capital, and landed in a field just outside the tiny village. Makeshift shacks were built on stilts over the sea. Hundreds of schoolchildren, accompanied by their teachers, ran out to greet us, waving Ecuadorean flags and cheering. They had never seen an American, let alone a helicopter. They stood, beaming, at attention and
proudly sang their national anthem to us. Two laborers whispered to one another in Spanish as we passed them to tour the school. Wally tried to conceal his laughter. “What’s funny?” I asked him. “One guy just said, ‘Who is that?’ pointing to you,” he answered through his laughter. “The other guy said, ‘He must be the president of our country.’ ‘But he’s a gringo,’ the first guy said. And the other guy answered, ‘Of course he’s a gringo, you idiot.’”

  The classrooms were small: blackboard, broken chalk, and a few erasers. No books. I asked the headmaster if they needed books. “Yes,” he answered sadly. I’ll never forget those eager, innocent faces. We must have seemed like Martians to them. For three years afterward I sent them boxes of books. But Esmeraldas wasn’t the right location for our film.

  We went on to Pachamama, in the Amazon rain forest. The natives, known as the Achuar, had scarred, painted faces and colorful headgear. They lived in straw huts, surrounded by giant koaba trees and two-thousand-foot waterfalls that bounced halfway back up. Every kind of exotic bird flew across the area, which was rich with oil deposits. It’s one of the most beautiful places on earth, and though it would be difficult to film there, it had everything we could ask for, scenically.