The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  Two hours by car south of Quito is Cotopaxi, on top of the Andes mountain range at 20,000 feet. We climbed Mount Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. Grassy plains gave way to snow-capped peaks that had once been worshipped by the Incas. Because of its position on the equator, this place had officially been designated “the top of the world,” indicated by an engraved marker. Wally Green and I had a footrace there, which he narrowly won.

  I told Wasserman I wanted to film in Cotopaxi and Pachamama. He was known for never having a piece of paper or anything else on his desk, which made it easier for him to pound. After he listened to my presentation, he started to slap the wooden desk with the flat of his hand: “No way you’re going to Ecuador! You’ll get killed! You’ll get your cast and crew killed! We could never get insurance to film in a place like that!” When Lew pounded his desk, further discussion was futile. I thought I’d circle back another way—I would put together an irresistible international cast, set a start date, then announce to Lew that the only place the film could be made was Ecuador.

  Before I had a script, I went to Steve McQueen, who encouraged me to write it for him. He was fun to be around, and his genius as a film actor was that he was able to convey emotions with few words. With a commitment from Steve, I sent the script to Italy’s biggest star, whose films were popular everywhere. Marcello Mastroianni accepted the role of Nilo, the hit man. Next I went to Lino Ventura, one of France’s leading actors, to play Victor, the stockbroker/embezzler. Lino was concerned about his English, but like McQueen, he needed few words to be effective onscreen. The fourth role was written for a young Moroccan actor, Amidou, who lived and worked in Paris. I had seen him in a brilliant Claude Lelouch film called Love, Life, Death, in which he played an Algerian sentenced to death for murder—an amazing performance—and I made it a point to meet with him when I went to see Clouzot in France. We wrote the role of Kassem, the terrorist, for him, and he committed without a script. Now I had a dream cast of international movie stars, and a script I loved.

  When the script was in good shape, I gave it to McQueen, who had recently left his wife Neile for Ali MacGraw. He called me back within a week. “This is the best script I’ve ever read,” he began. I told him about Ecuador and the incredible locations we’d found. “Can’t you do it around here?” he asked. I told him the locations in Ecuador would give the film an exotic background impossible to duplicate anywhere else. “Here’s my situation,” he went on. “You know about me and Ali. I can’t leave her for a long shoot. You’ll be shooting this thing for months, and I can’t just bring her to Ecuador to hang out. She has her own career.” I insisted it had to be Ecuador, even though Wasserman had told me it was out of the question. “Okay,” he said. “Write in a part for her!”

  “You just told me it was the best script you ever read; how do I put a woman in it?”

  “Well, make her an associate producer,” he suggested, “so she has a reason to be with me.”

  Foolishly, I refused. How arrogant I was. I didn’t know then what I’ve come to realize: a close-up of Steve McQueen was worth more than the most beautiful landscape in the world. He reluctantly withdrew. I could have found deserted mountain roads somewhere near the Mexican border or in one of the western states. Or written a role for Ali, or made her an associate producer.

  With McQueen out, Lino Ventura was on the fence. I then met with Mastroianni in Rome. He was still enthusiastic, but he had a personal problem involving his young daughter, Chiara, whose mother was the French actress Catherine Deneuve. They shared custody, and Deneuve would not allow Chiara to accompany him to Ecuador or anywhere outside of Europe for so long and difficult a shoot. He too had to make a choice, and I lost him.

  Robert Mitchum was another of my favorite actors. We met at his office at eleven in the morning over a bottle of vodka. I wasn’t a drinker, but I needed to show Mitchum I could hold my own. Mitchum was world-weary at that point in his life. Whatever ambition he had as an actor was gone. He worked as little as possible, and only for the money. His performances were always tightly controlled and understated, but he wasn’t going to win awards for his work, and he knew it and didn’t seem to care. He liked the script, but he said, “Why would I want to go to Ecuador for two or three months to fall out of a truck? I can do that outside my house.” It was vintage Mitchum, and I had no answer.

  The portents were clear, but I dug in deeper. The studio wasn’t enthusiastic about the film, and I couldn’t put together the cast I wanted. This was a good time to back away, look for something less ambitious. But I thought I was bulletproof. Nothing was going to stop me.

  Sid Sheinberg halfheartedly suggested Roy Scheider for the lead. After The French Connection, Roy had been one of the leads in Jaws, Universal’s biggest hit. Roy and I lost contact after I turned him down for the role of Father Karras in The Exorcist. He was still bitter, and I had misgivings about him, but Universal would do the picture with him. Lino Ventura would not take second billing to Scheider. My dream cast evaporated, but I thought an audience would see the film simply because I made it. I cast a good French actor, Bruno Cremer, instead of Ventura. The actor I’d originally wanted for the role of Charnier in The French Connection was available, so I cast him—Francisco (Paco) Rabal—in place of Mastroianni. They were fine actors, but unknown in the United States. “My advice,” said Wasserman, “is to forget this thing. We’re not going to do it unless we get a financial partner, someone to share the risk.”

  Help came from an unexpected source: Charlie Bluhdorn. Charlie heard I had a script that was set in a small South American town and in a jungle. He had everything I needed in the Dominican Republic, which was then virtually a “wholly-owned subsidiary of Gulf and Western,” and he told Wasserman that Paramount would co-finance the film if I agreed to shoot in the Dominican Republic. He said his recently appointed chairman of Paramount, Barry Diller (who replaced Yablans), would call me.

  The next day I met with Diller. He had been a hot young executive at the ABC Network, not yet the entrepreneur he’s become. He was a vice president of ABC during one of its most successful periods, but the Paramount job was his first in the movie business. Diller read my script and was enthusiastic. He offered to have Paramount take over the production. Wasserman and Sheinberg agreed to pay half the costs and let me shoot in the Dominican Republic.

  I hired the renowned British production designer John Box, who had designed two of the best films ever made, both for David Lean: Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Box was a tall, laconic, mustachioed Englishman. He warned me that he didn’t draw or draft plans. He was a “concept” man; he left the drawings and blueprints to his art director, in this case Roy Walker, an affable Englishman who idolized John, as did many in the British film industry.

  I had recently seen the film Tommy with music by the Who, directed by Ken Russell, and I was impressed with the cinematography. The DP, Dick Bush, did another film with Russell, an impressionistic biography of Gustav Mahler. He also worked with Lindsay Anderson, a director whose work I admired. We brought him in for a meeting; I liked him and hired him.

  John Box, Salven, Dick Bush, Wally Green, and I went to scout the Dominican Republic, where we found a dirt-poor village called Alta Gracia, about two hours’ drive from Santo Domingo. This town would become our “town at the end of the world,” Las Columnas. The bar, the police station, the decrepit houses, while not as exotic as Ecuador, could all serve as locations. The mountain roads were steep, winding, and dangerous. We found a vast area of mounded vegetation that gave way to a clearing where we could build an oil derrick and set it on fire.

  I met with the Dominican president, Joaquin Balaguer, a short bespectacled man, nearly blind and deaf, who pledged the total cooperation of his country. He hoped I would be able to portray the beauty of the Dominican Republic, but I wasn’t looking for that—I was looking for a place that suggested hell on earth, where desperate fugitives would come as a last resort. I didn’t f
all in love with the Dominican Republic as I had with Ecuador, but it was the only place I could get the film made.

  Salven put the budget at $20 million. This would normally have been a deal-breaker, given that the film starred Roy Scheider and a bunch of unknown European actors. I agreed I’d try to make it for under $15 million, still an enormous figure at that time, and we got a reluctant green light.

  The film became an obsession. It was to be my magnum opus, the one on which I’d stake my reputation. I felt that every film I’d ever made was preparation for this one.

  When we scouted Ecuador, I noticed that all the long-haul cargo trucks, the kind that would be used to convey cases of dynamite, had unusual decorations painted on them as well as names—the names of wives or girlfriends, religious or mythological names such as Orpheus or Herculio, and one in particular that intrigued me, Lazaro (Lazarus). Our trucks were old M211 army vehicles. I asked John Box to name one of them Lazaro, but it took me a while to come up with the other name.

  I was listening to an album by Miles Davis called Sorcerer, with driving rhythms and jagged horn solos that characterized Miles’s band in the late 1960s. We painted the word Sorcier (French for “Sorcerer”) on the other truck, and I later decided to call the film Sorcerer, an intentional but ill-advised reference to The Exorcist. The original title I’d proposed was Ballbreaker, to which Wasserman responded, “Are you out of your mind?” Maybe I was. It turned out to be the most difficult, frustrating, and dangerous film I’ve ever made, and it took a toll on my health as well as my reputation.

  We started shooting in Paris with Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer), who tries to cover up a bank fraud he has committed at his father-in-law’s respected brokerage house. Victor’s brother-in-law commits suicide over this incident, and Victor is forced to leave his wife and country. In a scene between Victor and his wife (Anne Marie Descott), an editor at a publishing house, she reads him a passage from the memoirs of a retired French army colonel who has to make the decision whether or not to kill an innocent woman during the French-Algerian War. He eventually squeezes the trigger, which causes Victor to comment that he was “just another soldier.”

  “No one is just anything,” his wife responds. This line is the theme of the film.

  We moved to Jerusalem for the sequence that introduces Kassem (Amidou), a terrorist who blows up an Israeli bank. We had the cooperation of the Israeli Security Forces, who appear as themselves in pursuit of the terrorist. The bank was located directly across from the office of Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem, and the mock explosion we set off was so powerful it broke a window in his office. While we were filming, an actual terrorist bombing occurred two blocks away, and we rushed there to film its aftermath. We were able to “steal” shots of our cast in the old city and at the Damascus gate without extras, so the sequence has a documentary reality.

  The third prologue, set in Elizabeth, New Jersey, has an unusual origin.

  “Gerry M.” is a guy I knew in New York through Breslin and Fat Thomas. Gerry was “a friend” of Hughie Mulligan, head of the Irish mob in Queens. He had a record that included armed robbery, but I enjoyed his company and his stories. After we got to know each other, Gerry gave me the details of a number of capers he had pulled as “the leadoff man,” the first man through the door in a robbery attempt.

  Gerry told me about one of his “jobs,” the robbery of a Catholic church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the collections from other churches in the area were brought to the basement, counted by the priests, and divided among the other parishes equally. I asked Gerry to give us details of the robbery, and we used it as one of the prologues. In fact, we filmed in another church in Elizabeth, where “Jackie Scanlon,” the character played by Scheider, is introduced as the wheelman for the gang that robs the church during a wedding. I put Gerry into this scene as the leadoff man, along with two friends of his who were nonactors but part of Gerry’s world. One of them had been an IRA member in Dublin during the Troubles. At the end of the scene, Gerry’s character shoots one of the priests, and during the gang’s escape, the getaway car crashes, killing all but Scanlon. The wounded priest’s brother is a local mob boss who puts out a contract on Scanlon.

  The accident that causes the getaway car to overturn seemed impossible to shoot. Several New York stuntmen had a go at it, and we went through seven cars without achieving the effect. This went on for a week, during which my frustration reached the boiling point. Salven suggested we bring in a specialist he had worked with in Los Angeles, Joie Chitwood Jr., a famous thrill-show driver. Joie flew to our location in New Jersey and I explained the shot to him. He was short, stocky, part Indian, self-assured, and fearless. He studied the logistics at the site and had our special effects crew build a slanted ramp, about forty feet long, over which he could drive the car at top speed on two wheels, flip it in midair, and crash into a fire hydrant. After three days of construction and calculation, Joie did the stunt in one take. It’s a spectacular shot in the film, but the delay put us behind schedule, the first of many such glitches. The action sequences still to come were as dangerous and life-threatening as this one, and months of shooting remained.

  I checked into the Hispaniola, a third-rate hotel but the best Santo Domingo had to offer. We were assigned a local contact who was wired into various branches of the Dominican government, the army, and the police. He was able to arrange permits for us to shoot anywhere and get cooperation from the locals to be in the film and lend their vehicles and horses. He introduced me to a Dominican army colonel who was a power broker in the country. The colonel had recently shot and killed a man in a restaurant and never went to trial; he was not even charged with a crime. His explanation satisfied the authorities: the man he shot was a Communist and deserved to die.

  The colonel and his attractive mistress invited Wally, Dave, and me to his home. There were twelve soldiers armed with AK-47s scattered around the steps outside his house. The colonel spoke no English, so Wally translated as he proudly gave us a tour of his paintings and furniture, which were all truly kitsch. After each description, I would say admiringly, “Wow, what a piece of shit,” or “This stuff is dreck,” or “Pure Howard Johnson.” Wally had to fight back laughter and tell the colonel in Spanish how impressed I was with the house. This went on for about half an hour when it became apparent that the colonel’s lady, a sexy brunette, married to someone else, who said very little at dinner, did in fact understand English. If she had given up my little joke, the colonel would no doubt have shot me, with complete immunity. Another Communist who deserved his fate.

  I chose the locations with John Box and the stunt coordinator, Bud Ekins. The road that takes the trucks to their destination, a burning oilfield, leads over washboard terrain, steep mountain passes, and an old wooden suspension bridge, at one point ending in front of a giant koaba tree that has fallen across the jungle path. The tree was about forty feet long and ten feet across, lying on its side. One of the actors would carefully siphon a few drops of “liquid dynamite” from one of the cases being transported on beds of sawdust onto the fallen tree, and a rock would be rigged to slowly descend and smash the dynamite, exploding the tree and allowing the trucks to pass. Marcel Vercoutere, the resourceful special effects man on The Exorcist, worked on Sorcerer as well. All the “gags” he rigged had gone smoothly. He loaded the back of the tree, the side facing away from the camera, with a small amount of real explosives. I had three cameras ready to roll at various film speeds when suddenly the sound of a large helicopter filled the air and a giant Sikorsky began to descend in a field near our location, blowing plants, shrubs, and camera equipment every which way. To my amazement, Charlie Bluhdorn stepped out of the helicopter, accompanied by Marty Davis, a short, jovial man in a black business suit and tie who was the public relations head of Gulf and Western (later to become Bludhorn’s successor after his death). With them was a beautiful, buxom young blonde in a diaphanous off-white dress and high heels. The area was deep within a jun
gle, flooded by recent rains, and thick with mud as they struggled toward our explosion site. Members of the crew laid down two-by-fours to facilitate their passage.

  “Fweedkin!” I heard ringing out over the sound of the chopper blades shutting down. It was unmistakably Charlie. He embraced me, I shook hands with Marty, and they introduced me to the blonde, a German model and would-be actress. “Fweedkin! What’s goin’ on here?” I explained what we planned to do while the effects crew continued to prepare the explosion. Charlie had come to the Dominican Republic to check on his many holdings, meet with government officials, and visit our set with his companion before they returned to New York.

  “This Fweedkin is ah genius! Ah genius!” he told Marty and the blonde. “Looka this! Only ah genius would think up a scene like this!” I showed them where they could safely stand and provided them with earplugs, checked the framing of the three cameras, then gave the cue for the explosion. There was a loud pop, but nothing happened; then a few scattered twigs flew out of the back of the tree, causing no real damage. I threw down my headset and cursed Marcel and his crew: “What the hell happened?” I yelled.

  “I guess we didn’t load enough,” Marcel explained sheepishly. At that moment, the helicopter could be heard revving up. I turned to look for Bluhdorn and his guests, but they were ascending without a good-bye.

  No longer was I “ah genius.”

  Marcel didn’t have nearly enough explosives to blow the tree. In desperation I called a friend in Queens, New York, known as “Marvin the Torch.” Marvin wasn’t his real name but a nom de plume bestowed on him by Jimmy Breslin. But he was “a torch.” He blew up failing businesses for insurance money, “turning grocery stores into parking lots,” as he put it. In a room of a thousand men, he would have been among the last three you would suspect of being an arsonist. He was in the beauty supply business in Queens. We used to call his wife “Mrs. Torch.”