The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  “Do you think this will increase violence against gay people?”

  Arthur Bell, whom I had never met, stood in the audience. He moved from his seat to the aisle and came toward me, brandishing a cane: “You’ve made a monstrous, evil film,” he shouted. Sonny Grosso and Randy Jurgensen moved to restrain him as he continued to shout curses at me. The audience was like the crowd at a bullfight or a boxing match.

  “Arthur, I became aware of these places and events from reading your columns,” I said.

  “Why don’t you pay me, then? Why did you rip me off?” he shouted.

  I took questions for another hour before I left the theater in chaos.

  When the film opened, the reviews were excoriating. Bell called it “the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen.” The National Gay Task Force likened it to The Birth of a Nation, which, though a great film, is still regarded as a screed against African Americans. The review of Cruising in Variety ended with, “If this is an ‘R’ the only ‘X’ left is actual hard-core.”

  A firestorm of criticism followed. I quickly gained a reputation as a gay basher. I’d been in the eye of the storm for months, and I began to question my own motives.

  Had I done Cruising simply to stir up controversy? I thought not. I knew it would be controversial, but not to this extent, nor did I believe it would trigger violence against gays. And it didn’t.

  I made it because it was a fresh take on the detective film against a background that had never been seen by a mainstream audience. And it encompassed the themes that continue to fascinate me: good and evil in everyone; our conflicting desires.

  But my timing was off. It was the beginning of the Reagan era, a feel-good period, morning in America. The ambiguous films I revered and the ones I made were passing out of vogue. It happened quickly. Rocky and Star Wars, followed by Raiders of the Lost Ark and Close Encounters, formed the new Hollywood template. Audiences wanted reassurance and superheroes, not ambiguity.

  Cruising was another defeat, on a par with Sorcerer. Flaubert was asked how he could write a novel from the perspective of a woman. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” was his famous answer: “Madame Bovary is me.” I began to realize that my films came from deep within my psyche. My films are who I am, or at least, they are what fascinates and obsesses me.

  Los Angeles, 1980

  A problem makes you forget a problem.

  —

  ARAB PROVERB

  Early morning. Fall. I’m living alone in a ranch-style house I designed and built on top of a cul-de-sac in Bel Air, just west of Stone Canyon off Sunset Boulevard. Bacon, eggs, toast, juice, coffee. Into my car, late-model Mercedes-Benz coupe. Push out to my office at Warner Bros. on the San Diego Freeway. Feel great. Classical music on the stereo. Bruckner, Eighth, von Karajan.

  Sudden sharp pain. Starting in my left arm, spreading quickly to the right. Like a knife, slicing. Can’t breathe. Still driving, foot to the pedal. Blur of colors. Cars everywhere. Pull over. Open door, try to walk, can’t put—one—foot—in—front—of—the—other. Slide back behind wheel. Can’t raise my arms. God, what is this? Pain deeper. Keep arms low on wheel. Drive slowly, ten miles an hour.

  Struggle to breathe. Pull into the Warner Bros. lot. Stagger to my office. Sweating. Toni stands quickly as I fall straight down.

  Paramedics bending over me. Pumping my chest. Stethoscope. Can’t see anymore. Can’t open eyes. Words, as though through a tunnel: “I’m not getting anything . . .”

  Dying. My God, I’m dying. I’ve wasted my life. I haven’t accomplished anything. Lose consciousness. Try to open eyes. Can’t. Dead!

  Then, moving, gliding, as though on escalator. Darkness. A dim white light in the distance. And a voice in my head: “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. It’s all right . . .” Whose voice? Moving toward the light.

  Lights blasting in my face. I’m in hell! Can’t breathe. Oxygen mask. Pull it off. Relentless pain. Faces all around. Surgical masks. Emergency room, St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital in Burbank. “Keep the mask on, please.” I pull it off again, and again. Breath won’t come. Mask back on. Fade out.

  Darkness.

  Three days of observation. Can’t sleep. Prayers on a loudspeaker. Transferred to Cedars Sinai, where I had donated the Nurse’s Training Center in my mother’s name.

  Short gray man, wearing glasses, gray suit, slight paunch, enters quietly. Takes my pulse. Sits. Dr. Jeremy Swan, chief of cardiology, co-inventor of the catheter. “Mr. Friedkin.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired.”

  “Pain?”

  I nod.

  “You’re in your forties.”

  I nod.

  “You had a heart attack.”

  Until he told me, I didn’t know it. No one I knew had survived one. I didn’t need surgery, but I was in the hospital for six weeks. I couldn’t move or walk. A nurse came to my room every day to help me raise my arms, one at a time, then each leg. In the final week, I was able to walk the hospital corridor for two minutes, then three, eventually ten. When I got home, I had to learn to walk again, five minutes a day on the UCLA track. After three months I could walk for an hour.

  I was determined not to let a heart attack alter my lifestyle. I’d soon be playing tennis and basketball again. I’d make better films, learning from the mistakes of the past. The coils of depression that imprisoned me slowly unwound, like the caterpillar that encloses the butterfly.

  The Twilight Zone

  I had no offers and nothing I particularly wanted to do when unexpectedly Phil DeGuere, producer of the new Twlight Zone for the CBS network, sent me a script with a handwritten note that read: “You probably would never consider going back to TV, but I think this is a special script you might like and if you do, it’s yours.” DeGuere had attracted some of the best writers and directors in the horror-fantasy genre, but the script he sent me he adapted himself from a short story by Robert McCammon, a respected writer in the genre. It was called Nightcrawlers, and it was indeed “special.”

  It moved effortlessly from the real to the surreal. Set in a remote diner in Utah, it was about a Vietnam vet who deserted his unit during combat and came home, haunted by his cowardice. Under the influence of mind-altering drugs prescribed by army doctors, he hallucinates that members of his unit, the Nightcrawlers, have come back from the dead to capture and kill him. In the course of this twenty-minute segment, his delusions become real and the “vets” follow him to the diner and shoot the place up, having committed other murders on the way. The premise was a metaphor for the way Vietnam continues to haunt the American conscience.

  We built an accurate replica of a diner on the soundstage and filmed the night exteriors at a remote location on the outskirts of L.A., with rain machines and lightning effects. We cast a young actor named Scott Paulin to play the haunted soldier. Exene Cervenka, a friend from the 1980s rock band X, played the waitress, and I hired several friends from Stunts Unlimited to play the Nightcrawlers. The five-day shoot was exhilarating. Cast and crew believed in the material and inspired me to explore the landscape wherein reality and illusion coexist.

  This short segment became one of the most widely praised and watched films of my career. For a brief period it restored my sense of confidence. My juices were flowing again, and I felt I could make another film that might draw on everything I had done before and take it further.

  PART IV

  AN UPHILL CLIMB TO THE BOTTOM

  12

  TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.

  Gerry Petievich was a Secret Service agent for nineteen years, assigned to jobs as varied as protecting the president of the United States whenever he was in Los Angeles, and pursuing counterfeiters in the ’hood for passing bad twenties or phony credit cards. He fictionalized his experiences in a novel called To Live and Die in L.A., filled with well-drawn characters—Secret Service agent Richard Chance, a bungee-jumping
“hot dog” obsessed with entrapping Rick Masters, the counterfeiter who killed his partner. John Vukovich, a younger agent, joins him in a scheme to arrest Masters. Obsession, paranoia, and betrayal, the thin line between the policeman and the criminal—it had the elements of classic film noir. It would have been impossible for me to make this film for a major studio, but along came my old friend Irv Levin, former owner of the Celtics and the Clippers and former CEO of National General Pictures. He felt he had missed out by not financing The French Connection, and he wanted to do something with me if I was available.

  Irv started a new production company with Sam Schulman, co-owner of the Seattle Supersonics, and Nick Mileti, who owned the Cleveland Cavaliers, both in the NBA. Their first investment was in the hugely successful Poltergeist for MGM, with whom they had a distribution deal. I optioned Petievich’s book and, inspired by its finely crafted storytelling, terse dialogue, and the zany antics of the rogue Secret Service agents, wrote a script in three weeks.

  I didn’t want the film to be a clone of The French Connection. I would abandon the gritty macho look of that film for something more in the unisex style of Los Angeles in the 1980s. I went to Lily Kilvert, not only because she was a talented production designer but for a feminine sensibility. I hired other women as key members of the crew, including costume designer Linda Bass and a brilliant set decorator, Cricket Rowland.

  I had seen Paris, Texas by the German director Wim Wenders, photographed by an Austrian cinematographer, Robbie Muller. His films were beautifully lit and composed, with long uninterrupted takes. This was the style I wanted for To Live and Die in L.A., in which the city would be portrayed as a violent, cynical wasteland under a burning sun.

  Petievich became my technical adviser. He arranged the parole of a counterfeiter he busted, who showed me the step-by-step process by which money was printed, from the selection of the correct paper (or “rag”) to the method of aging by stuffing the fake bills into a laundry machine along with poker chips.

  In England the year before, I’d heard a band called Wang Chung, whose name came from the sound a guitar makes when strummed. Two songs in particular grabbed my attention: “Dance Hall Days” and “Wait,” from an album called Points on the Curve. Band members Jack Hues and Nick Feldman were at the forefront of what was then called post-punk New Wave. Their sound was created on electronic instruments, a drum kit and keyboard. The lyrics were offbeat, suggestive, and slightly subversive.

  In many ways To Live and Die in L.A. was influenced by the music of Wang Chung, so before I shot a foot of film, I gave them the final draft of the script and asked them to record their impressions of what they read—the same way I worked with Tangerine Dream. The only request I made was that they not write a song called “To Live and Die in L.A.”

  I wanted to portray the city with no landmarks, no iconic skylines or neighborhoods. So I chose fringe areas: Nickerson Gardens in Watts; Temple and Eighteenth Streets, home of the Crips and Bloods gangs; Slauson Avenue in South Central; the Vincent Thomas Bridge; the Terminal Island Freeway; a Fijian community in the shadow of vast power plants in Wilmington; and San Luis Obispo Prison.

  The warden at Obispo allowed us to stage an attempted “hit” in the prison yard, using inmates, in a scene with one of our actors, John Turturro. The warden also let us use an interrogation room and gave us the services of his prison guards.

  My casting director was again Bob Weiner. He saw hundreds of actors at auditions, in plays, and in new films. When Bob brought Willem Dafoe to me for the role of Rick Masters, the counterfeiter, I hired him on sight, as I had done with Roy Scheider some twenty years before.

  Petievich introduced me to his younger brother John, who was serving warrants for the LAPD, and through John I met other police officers I hired for smaller roles.

  Dean Stockwell was the only veteran in the cast. He had been a child star, making his first film in 1945. He was a skilled character actor, and I was impressed with his performance the year before in Paris, Texas. We hired him to play Masters’s double-dealing attorney, Bob Grimes.

  When most of the roles had been cast except for two of the leads, Weiner called me with excitement in his voice, something that was rare for him. He was in Toronto at the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival, and he wanted me to come up immediately to see an actor who had the lead in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  I said, “Bob, I don’t want to see Streetcar. Brando owns that part, and actors either rip him off or they’re totally inferior. If you like this guy, I’ll meet him when he’s done with the play.”

  Bob was insistent. He said the actor he wanted me to meet was one of the finest young actors in America.

  Stratford, Ontario. A charming town along the river Avon, two hours’ drive west of Toronto. As I approached the crowded theater, I noticed something I hadn’t expected: dozens of teenage girls waiting to get in, not for an American theatrical classic but to see its young star. Billy Petersen was thirty-one years old, grew up in Boise, Idaho, went to Idaho State on a football scholarship, discovered theater, and moved to Chicago, which was soon to become the most innovative theater town in America. He started his own acting company, The Remains, and toured with a hugely successful one-man show, In the Belly of the Beast, based on the prison letters of convicted murderer John Henry Abbott. In Streetcar, Petersen made Stanley Kowalski his own. Unlike Brando, he played Stanley not as a brute but as a flawed man, unable to relate to Blanche because of a cultural gap that could never be bridged. Petersen knew what Brando had done—he had seen the Kazan film—yet he reinvented Stanley as a character more complex but just as dangerous and sexy.

  Petersen was just under six feet tall, trim, with the grace of an athlete, and it was clear why the audience was made up mostly of women. When I met him backstage, he was warm and personable. We shared a love for Chicago, especially the Cubs and the Bulls. I gave him my script and asked him to come to New York when he finished Streetcar.

  I thought he could become an action star, and like Hackman, he also had the acting chops. Through Bill I met his friend John Pankow, also from Chicago and a stage actor with little film experience. John was thirty, gentle, with a sweet smile, quick to laugh. I liked him immediately and saw that he and Bill had a rapport that would work for Pankow’s character John Vukovich, Chance’s younger partner.

  To make a popular action film with complete unknowns was a leap into the void, but I was confident I could pull it off. Petievich’s novel was delightfully twisted. Two Secret Service agents learn through an informant about a courier carrying $50,000 in cash to buy stolen jewelry. Because the L.A. office of the Secret Service doesn’t have enough real money to buy counterfeit money, Chance and Vukovich decide to rip off the courier and make the buy, and entrap the counterfeiter.

  The actors spent a lot of time hanging out with Petievich and other Secret Service agents so that when we were ready to shoot, they were in character. Petersen and Dafoe stayed away from each other off the set, and developed a mutual dislike as befit their characters. Dafoe learned the counterfeit process from Petievich’s parolee and printed thousands of fake twenties, some on one side only, some on both, and we filmed it in graphic detail.

  Before the start of production approaches, I often experience a sense of dread that brings troubled sleep or no sleep at all. A scene that won’t play. An actor miscast. A disconnect with a cameraman. Failure of imagination. Conflict with the producers. This dread turns into irrational fear and self-doubt that hovers above me like a storm cloud. It affects my attitude toward family and friends, and I become surly for no apparent reason. Sometimes a hidden reserve of energy emerges from this anxiety and jump-starts my creative juices. This time was different. I never felt more confident or inventive than I did on To Live and Die in L.A. I loved the cast, the locations, the script; everything fell into place.

  I wanted to do a chase scene as the centerpiece of the film. I thought for many years about what I might do to surpass the chase in The Frenc
h Connection. For To Live and Die in L.A. it would be at high speed going the wrong way on a freeway.

  “The chase” is the purest form of cinema, something that can’t be done in any other medium, not in literature nor on a stage nor on a painter’s canvas. A chase must appear spontaneous and out of control, but it must be meticulously choreographed, if only for safety considerations. The audience should not be able to foresee the outcome. It helps to have innocent bystanders who could be “hurt” or “killed.” When I see vehicles in a film whipping through deserted streets or country roads, I don’t feel a sense of danger. Actual high-speed chases take place in big-city traffic or on crowded freeways. Pace doesn’t imply speed; sometimes the action should slow to a crawl, or even a dead stop. Build and stop, build and stop, leading to an explosive climax. It also helps to keep a left-to-right or right-to-left continuum, so the audience understands the geography. I’m not concerned about this when shooting dialogue or other scenes, but with a chase, it must be clear where Person A is in relation to Person B. If A goes left or right, B should follow the same route.

  Whether he’s on horseback, behind a wheel, or on foot, the chase must be a metaphor for the lead character: reckless, brutal, obsessive or possibly even cautious. If the chase is to be believed, the actors must convincingly portray fear. And the director has to keep reminding them of this; the close-ups “proving” their fear are seldom actually dangerous to perform. The real danger belongs to the stuntmen.

  Sound is added after the picture is cut. I like to layer sound, not only using vehicle noises but mixing in interpretive sounds like a jet engine roar or a shotgun reverb, so some sounds aren’t simply heard but felt.

  There’s a continuing debate among critics and bloggers about the best chase scenes ever filmed. Bullitt is way up there. So is John Frankenheimer’s Ronin, filmed in Paris in 1997. The James Bond films are highly rated. Many critics cite the silent era, especially Buster Keaton’s locomotive chase from The General in 1927. Keaton directed other outstanding chases: an acrobatic escape, from his early short film called Cops (1922); the driverless motorcycle chase from Sherlock Jr. (1924); and others. Keaton did his own stunts and directed all his films, and remains to my mind the most innovative of American filmmakers. I was fortunate to have seen all his films after I made The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A., and Jade, or I’d have been intimidated or, worse, borrowed from his treasury of ideas.