The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  “Every day,” Wally deadpanned.

  I leave it to you to evaluate this incident. Some of you may find it appalling, others stupid, still others insulting and self-destructive. It was certainly all of that, but at the time, that was my nature. I was still the class clown, and it was also a dumb-ass way of coping with criticism. I wouldn’t want to be treated that way myself.

  One good suggestion they offered was that we show how far the trucks traveled, how many miles across the various landscapes. They thought it would help if we used inserts—close-ups—of the mileage on a speedometer. Initially I snapped at them: “I don’t shoot inserts. If you want those shots, we’ll have to go back to Mexico, the Dominican Republic, or New Mexico.” “Why would you have to do that?” Diller asked. “I told you, Barry, I don’t shoot inserts.”

  Then I turned to Bud Smith: “Bud, put together a crew and have Toni (my secretary) book us a flight to—”

  “No, no, forget it,” Diller cut in.

  But he was right. And within the week I arranged to get the interior of the Lazaro (Scheider’s truck) on the Universal lot, and with a cameraman and an assistant made a close-up of Scheider’s handwriting in chalk on the dashboard next to the speedometer: “218,” the distance in miles to the oil-well fire. Then we photographed the mileage meter, showing various distances, exactly as Diller suggested. And when the Lazaro’s motor dies in the badlands location, there’s a close-up of the mileage meter, at 216.7, and the camera pans to Roy’s initial “218” entry—1.3 miles short. It clarified the difficulty and length of the journey.

  When I finished my cut and approved the color timing and the sound mix, I carried the first print in two metal canisters each containing three twenty-minute reels to Sid Sheinberg’s office. He came out of a meeting, and I set the cans at his feet and thanked him. We shook hands. I had given him a lot of shit, and the film wound up way over budget, costing $20 million, but he and Wasserman and Diller tolerated my extravagances and actually liked the end result. They had big release plans, with Universal distributing foreign, Paramount domestic.

  “How much do you think it’ll do?” Sid asked, smiling.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The Exorcist is over a hundred million and still going, and I think this is a better film. So let’s say at least ninety million.” Was this bluster and bravado? Hardly. I believed it.

  Sorcerer opened in several hundred theaters. The reviews came out on the morning of the first day. The L.A. Times and the New York Times were waiting for me at 7:00 a.m. at the bottom of my long driveway. I walked down in bathrobe and slippers to see what fate awaited me. Charles Champlin had always praised my films, writing glowing articles and interviewing me often for the L.A. Times and for his television show.

  I opened the paper to his review of Sorcerer. It began: “What went wrong?” and went downhill from there. The review was a death knell, as was the New York Times review and almost everything else that followed, except Jack Kroll in Newsweek, who called the film “the toughest, most relentless American film in a long time.” But he was a voice in the wilderness. Most of the reviewers were immune to whatever the film’s merits may have been and simply labeled it a remake. I read Champlin’s review as I walked slowly up the driveway. The hill seemed steeper. I looked around at the gardens I planted, the house I’d built, where I could read, listen to music, shoot baskets, swim, enjoy a Jacuzzi. I thought it was all coming to an end. In many ways it was. The box office opened soft, which meant lousy. Sorcerer had replaced Star Wars at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, but Star Wars opened to such enormous business, they brought it back to the Chinese and kicked Sorcerer out after only a week. Over the next few days more reviews came in, mostly bad. Bad reviews are like watching your kid being heckled during a soccer match.

  I went to Universal the following Monday and told Bud Smith and his assistants and Wally Green that the film was a disaster; it wouldn’t recover its cost, and the studios wouldn’t support it. I’d gone all in on this film, and alienated the top management of two studios in the process.

  That week, Ned Tanen, who’d called me before the film opened to tell me again how proud he was of it, gave an interview to Joyce Haber, the gossip columnist for the L.A. Times, in which he said, “Friedkin never showed us the picture. We gave him carte blanche, and he would never show it to us.” It was payback time, and I was the piñata. I felt I made a great film, but everything fell the other way. I didn’t hear from Sheinberg or Wasserman—they saved their comments for the rumor mill—but I did get a call from Jules Stein. He sounded grave: “Bill, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought the film was wonderful. We all did.” I thanked him, but he had more to say: “They want to end your deal at Universal. Effective immediately. There’s nothing I can do.” I thanked him again for his support. He said, “I don’t know . . . maybe after a little time . . . but they lost a lot of money . . .” A long pause. “I still believe in you. Doris and I want to remain your friends.”

  I never saw them again.

  Fantozzi met with Sheinberg, who delivered the news officially. My deal with Universal, which began with such promise, was over. “Where’s my twenty million dollars?” Sheinberg yelled at Tony. “How am I gonna get my twenty million dollars back?”

  What was it about this film that so alienated critics and turned off audiences?

  A combination of things, surely. Star Wars, which was pure fantasy with clearly defined heroes and villains, had changed audiences’ tastes. Sorcerer was presented as hard-edged reality; the four leads were fugitives from justice. The title was probably misleading, and the copy line, “from the director of The Exorcist,” didn’t help. The ending was not only ambiguous but a downer. The reviews were not just negative but personal attacks, probably deserved, based on my callous, self-involved behavior. My sudden success in Hollywood after years of failure had convinced me that I was the center of the universe. Many were waiting for me to crash, and I obliged them in spades. I had flown too close to the sun and my wings melted.

  My films became more obsessive, less audience-friendly, and would turn even darker in the future. They would continue to portray the American character as psychotic, fearful, and dangerous.

  Headaches and fever came over me. My doctor was a well-known and respected physician to the stars. She had a great reputation and a lot of patients. She diagnosed my illness as a flu and prescribed antibiotics. But it went on for weeks. I became nauseous and weak, and prey to a lingering depression. I went to another doctor, who ran blood tests and informed me I had malaria. “Have you been to a foreign country recently?”

  “Yes, but I had a series of shots and quinine pills before I left,” I told him. He smiled. “The bugs don’t know you had the shots,” he said. “You’ve got malaria. The good news is, there’s a new pill that’ll cure you, but you need to rest. I mean, don’t do anything for a while. You might think about going into a hospital.” The pill, Artemesinin, was a miracle cure. But I had to get out of Los Angeles. I tried to put Sorcerer behind me, but failure was now my constant companion.

  I flew to Paris. To the Plaza Athénée. I’d recuperate there in a beautiful suite with easy chairs, overstuffed couches, and twenty-four-hour room service. I felt at home in Paris, but like a hospital patient more than a tourist. I immersed myself in French culture and took long walks along unfamiliar but beautiful cobblestone streets. For a long time I had no contact with America and its film industry.

  Even so, my reputation wasn’t completely destroyed. Producers still wanted to make films with me, though my choices were diminished. A call came from Marty Bregman, a producer–personal manager based in New York. Marty’s most important client was Al Pacino, for whom he produced Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. At one time he represented not only Pacino but Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, and Faye Dunaway. He and Pacino were developing a screenplay based on the memoir of the disabled Vietnam War vet Ron Kovic, called Born on the Fourth of July. Marty told me that he and Al loved
Sorcerer, thought it was a great film and wanted me to work with their screenwriter on a first draft of the Kovic book. Films about Vietnam were box office poison at that time, and studios were reluctant to make them, but Al was a big star, and Marty said that with the two of us, every studio in Hollywood would want to make this picture. I told him I had no plans to come to the States, so he said he would meet me in Paris and bring the writer. They were determined that I direct this film.

  The writer was a shade over thirty years old, eager, intelligent; he knew my films better than I did, and he said I was the perfect director for his screenplay. His manner was cordial, respectful; there was little sign of the dark, controversial artist he was later to become. Oliver Stone had directed a few forgotten films himself, but he wanted to be a writer. He would make whatever changes I thought necessary to the script, but he knew his subject well. He was wounded in combat in Vietnam and came home with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

  Oliver and Bregman came to Paris for three days of meetings. They got Al on the phone and he told me how enthusiastic he was to play this role with me directing.

  The script was camera-ready. I committed to direct it, and Marty and Oliver went back to the States to set it up. “This is a slam dunk,” Bregman assured me. Weeks went by. Every studio passed. Was it because of me? Was it Vietnam? It certainly wasn’t Pacino. Every studio wanted to do a film with Al, and Kovic’s book had strong reviews and good sales. Bregman kept telling me to hang in. He was certain of raising the money privately, but the studios were saying, “Why don’t you guys make something else? Make a cop movie.”

  Dino De Laurentiis called to see if I was interested in taking over a film John Frankenheimer had developed but lost interest in. It was based on a book called Big Stick-Up at Brinks, about the famous robbery of the Brinks security company in a Boston garage in 1958. Dino sent the script to Paris; I read it and told him I thought it was weak, and I would have to start over from page one. He agreed, and when I told him I wanted Wally Green to rewrite it, that was okay too. I insisted we shoot in Boston, hopefully at the actual Brink’s garage, and I wanted to retitle the film The Brink’s Job. The picture was going to be distributed by Universal, the studio that recently broke my deal, but Dino was going to finance it himself. I returned to L.A. to work on the script with Wally.

  At the same time, Marty Bregman said he’d raised the money for Born on the Fourth of July and was ready to start shooting. But I’d committed to The Brink’s Job, having heard nothing positive from Marty since our meeting in Paris. I wished him good luck. They hired Daniel Petrie to direct the picture, and started shooting the Long Island sequence in which Ron Kovic comes back from Vietnam a cripple in a wheelchair to his hometown, where he’s given a hero’s welcome. After a week, Bregman’s money dried up and production had to stop. The script reverted to Oliver Stone, who finally got to direct it himself twelve years later, after writing and directing Platoon in 1986. Such was the fickle finger of fate. Oliver was meant to direct those films, and as much as he wanted me for Born on the Fourth of July, he did it better than I ever could.

  11

  ARMED ROBBERY AND MURDER

  The Brink’s Job had a good cast—Peter Falk, Paul Sorvino, Warren Oates, Peter Boyle, and Gena Rowlands. The owners of the Brinks Corporation had acquired a sense of humor about the twenty-seven-year-old robbery and gave us their cooperation, the use of their name, armored trucks of the period, and access to the actual garage where the robbery took place. Wally and I framed it as a comedy and modeled the story after the classic Italian caper film Big Deal on Madonna Street, about a group of inept thieves who try to pull off a heist while their incompetence keeps getting in the way. In The Brink’s Job a gang of lowlife criminals from the North End of Boston managed to rob the biggest and best-known security company in the world, whose security measures were in fact a myth. The robbers became working-class heroes for what seemed such a bold and outrageous caper, netting them a million dollars in cash in 1950. J. Edgar Hoover called it “the crime of the century,” and while the thieves were eventually caught and did time, the money was never recovered. In Boston we met the surviving members of the gang: Jazz Maffie, a North End bookie; Sandy Richardson, a longshoreman; and Vinnie Costa, a small-time thief and cousin to the ringleader of the robbers, Tony Pino, the character played in the film by Peter Falk. Barry Bedig, my prop man, and I used to play poker every Friday night in my suite at the Copley Plaza with Sandy and Jazz and a guy named Dante, a flashy dresser who ran the bookmaking operation for the North End syndicate. Clever as they may have been as thieves, Sandy, Jazz, and Dante were not good poker players, and over the ten weeks of the shoot I won $90,000 and Barry netted $45,000. Poker was a skill I’d brought with me from Chicago.

  Sonny Grosso, who came to Boston to do security for us, warned me to cancel the final game. He had a tip from a friend in the North End that Dante believed Barry and I were “running the game,” thinking it impossible that we could keep winning. Sonny emphasized that his information was serious, and the game was going to get “hit.” I took his advice and called it off.

  Peter Falk was a fine actor, but it was tough to take Columbo out of the character he played. I probably pushed him too hard, but his performance as the “mastermind” of the Brink’s job is labored, and it’s as much my fault as his.

  Peter Boyle as Joe McGinniss, the bar owner and fence who forces his way in on the heist, Alan Garfield as Vinnie Costa, and Sorvino as Jazz Maffie are all pitch-perfect, but the standout performance, worth the price of admission, is by Warren Oates as Specs O’Keefe, the slightly deranged member of the gang who eventually cracks under police pressure and rats them all out.

  I cast Gerry M. again, in the pivotal role of Sandy Richardson. Gerry had a friend named “Spanish Eddie” Colombani, a safecracker who was finishing a stint in prison. As a favor to Gerry I got Eddie paroled to my custody as technical adviser to Falk, to show him the techniques used by a “peteman” (safecracker). Eddie, accompanied by his parole officer, was on the set every day. He was a dark-skinned, heavyset man, nearsighted, with black wavy hair, and though his fingers were thick as sausages, he was considered the best peteman in the business. I loved hanging out with Gerry and Eddie in various bars in Brooklyn and Queens, and I thought they’d be invaluable resources for the cast, to give them “a feel” of the underworld.

  One day I took Gerry and Eddie with me on a location scout to Charlestown, a Boston suburb, to see an old bubblegum factory. I wanted it for an early robbery scene by Pino and his gang that illustrated their ineptitude, and for which they went to prison. We were ushered into the office of the president of the company, who had an amazing trompe l’oeil painting of an old-fashioned gumball machine on the wall behind his desk. I complimented him on the painting, and he told me it had been on that wall since the factory was first built.

  After the visit I went to a production meeting while Gerry and Eddie went off on their own. That night, when I got back to my hotel room, the painting was on my bed! I thought it might be a gift from the president, but there was no note. Then it hit me. I called Gerry and told him to find Eddie and come to my suite immediately. They sheepishly confessed to having stolen the painting. I went ballistic. “How can you guys be so stupid? This guy’s letting us film in his factory!”

  “But you liked the picture,” Gerry said apologetically, a delinquent child.

  It was late, but I made them go back to the factory, break in again, and put the picture back where it belonged.

  One afternoon during the shoot I got word that the cutting room had been robbed by two masked men. The assistant editor, Ned Humphreys, was pistol-whipped, and the editor, Bud Smith, was told to hand over all the exposed reels to the robbers. Later a call came into the production office, demanding a $1 million ransom for the film, and the Boston police were alerted. Press and television crews were all over the story, and it was national news for three days: the film was stolen for ransom! It turned out that
the thieves had taken about a dozen reels of work print. The negative was safely stored at a lab in California, and could easily be reprinted. What the robbers took, they didn’t realize was worthless.

  I didn’t confide this to the press because the Boston police entered the case and asked us to wait for the next call from the robbers, and try to arrange a meeting. Within days, I got the call, with the cops on the line. A guy with a New York accent demanded $1 million by a certain date or he’d destroy the film. The Feds asked me to negotiate with him while they traced the call. I kept the guy on the line for about fifteen minutes until I got a thumbs-up from one of the cops. I then told the guy on the phone that his price was too high, hoping he’d get back to us to set a meeting, but the thieves never called again. They probably discovered that what they had was worthless. No one was ever caught, and we simply reprinted the footage. But there was a lingering suspicion, never proved, that Spanish Eddie and possibly even Gerry, my friend Gerry, were behind the caper. On the advice of the local cops, I thanked Eddie and cut him loose.

  The Brink’s Job has some nice moments, despite thinly drawn characters, but it left no footprint. There’s little intensity or suspense, and the humor is an acquired taste. The film doesn’t shout, it doesn’t sing—it barely whispers. None of this went unnoticed by the critics. Personally, the experience was not a total loss, though. The months I spent in Boston and the contacts I made fulfilled a lifelong dream.

  I love basketball, and I still see a lot of games, though I’ve given up playing. When I was a teenager, there were no televised games, but I used to see newsreel clips of the Boston Celtics with Bob Cousy and Bill Russell. Cousy is still the most complete player I’ve ever seen, and I modeled my game after his, though I never came within a fraction of his talent. In 1977, while filming The Brink’s Job, I was invited to speak at several Boston area colleges. I also agreed to give a talk, followed by a Q&A, at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. I accepted only because I knew that Cousy had a home there. I asked the university president if he’d ever heard of Bob Cousy. He smiled. “He lives right down the street; would you like to meet him?” Cousy came to my talk, was gracious and friendly, and we stayed in contact for years.