The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  Wozzeck consists of fifteen scenes, five each in three acts. I decided to frame the stage picture in various shapes to best convey the image. Masking pieces would come from above and from the sides to form either a rectangle or a square or to make the scene wider or more intimate. For example, for a low-ceilinged, smoke-filled tavern scene, only the lower half of the stage was visible, while the upper half was masked out.

  I used the entire stage for the scene where Marie is seduced by the drum major outside her little house. I underlit the tavern space so that various sexual activities, gay and straight, could be suggested around the corners and edges of the room, until the patrons notice that Wozzeck’s hands and clothes are bloodstained after he’s killed Marie in the forest. As the patrons see the bloodstains, the walls begin to close in on him and Wozzeck has to hold them back with both arms, until finally he pushes them away to reveal—the woods, full stage, as he returns to find Marie’s body and search for his razor to destroy the evidence. He wanders into a pool of water near a large rock and drowns.

  In the finale of Act 3 the only scenic piece is a railroad track (possibly to Auschwitz) disappearing into the distance on a bare stage. A group of children are playing around the tracks with Marie’s little boy, now an orphan. The children mock him and run off as he hops around, using a broomstick for a hobby horse. A little girl and the boy are the only ones left. Then the girl runs off, releasing a white balloon into the air, which represents the soul of Marie. Now the boy is alone. He hip-hops on his broomstick, going upstage; then I had him stop, turn to the audience, and put the broomstick on his shoulder, like a soldier’s rifle. Slowly the ambient lights fade, leaving only a spotlight on him that irises down, like the end of a silent film, followed by the curtain. This is the most satisfying moment I’ve directed, in film or on the stage.

  When the curtain fell, there was a long silence, then the loudest roar I’ve heard in a theater. The audience was on its feet, and I was led from my box seat to the stage, where I joined Zubin and the cast. They were drenched with sweat but smiling with joy as they welcomed me to their company and we took bows. The shouts and screams continued as I was called on to take a solo bow. Zubin whispered to me, “If this was Vienna, we’d be up here for an hour.” It meant so much that this man who I so deeply respected felt that our mutual effort would have been even more successful in its country of origin. The critical reaction was as enthusiastic as the audience’s, not a common occurrence in opera, especially for a German opera in Italy.

  Directing an opera in Florence, a center of world culture, gave me a feeling of renewal. We rehearsed six days a week for four weeks, but I was never exhausted. On my days off, Sherry and I would walk to every quarter of the city, discovering Florentine culture. We rented an apartment in the Oltramo section, south of the river. I walked to rehearsal each morning along the Longarno, stopped at an outdoor café for coffee and a croissant, then I’d go into a centuries-old church and drop a coin in a slot to turn on a dim light that barely illuminated a Ghirlandaio or a Bellini. The magnificent monuments to Christianity and the architectural visions of the Medici were everywhere, and we experienced them not as tourists but as adopted Florentines.

  The rehearsals were also a voyage of discovery. Singers who work regularly at the world’s preeminent opera houses must have not only a God-given talent, but study and practice constantly, speak several languages, and become fluent in a wide repertoire, in addition to being able to act while singing. To succeed in opera is more difficult than in the movies, where stardom is often based solely on a personality that resonates with the public.

  As a result of the success of Wozzeck, I’ve directed many other operas—in Los Angeles; in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center; in Turin, Munich, Tel Aviv, Vienna, and Florence again. I’ve directed works by Bartók, Puccini, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Offenbach, and Richard Strauss.

  Each of these experiences has given me the opportunity to immerse myself in different cultures while working within them.

  15

  AFTERLIFE

  For more than twenty-five years Bill Blatty and I argued over the scenes I cut from The Exorcist. These conversations became acrimonious to the point that we didn’t talk to each other for years at a time, but finally our differences became less emotional, and we could laugh at them. But I resisted any notion of reexamining or recutting the film.

  In 1999 Blatty told me he talked to Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros., who agreed to rerelease The Exorcist in first-run theaters, with an advertising campaign and TV spots, if I would restore the footage cut from the 1973 release. This got my attention, but I didn’t know if any of the previously unused negative could be located. Bill called Ned Price, head of postproduction and technical operations for Warner Home Video, and apparently they had all the negative intact and in good condition.

  “Will you just look at it with me, Bill?” Blatty pleaded. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  Something in his voice moved me, so I reluctantly agreed. The film was one of the most successful of all time, regarded as a classic despite hundreds of rip-offs. Why change it now? I told Bill I was reminded of a story about the Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, who went into the Musée d’Orsay, where one of his paintings was on display. He proceeded to open a small bag that contained a palette, paints, and brushes and began to paint over the canvas. He was seized by guards and taken to a security room.

  “But I’m Bonnard,” he said; “the painting is mine, and I’m fixing it.”

  “The painting is finished, M. Bonnard, it’s in the Musée d’Orsay!”

  That’s how I felt about The Exorcist.

  Ned Price, a staff editor, Blatty, and I gathered in an old editing bay on the Warner Bros. lot that hadn’t been remodeled since the studio’s founding in 1928. Blatty and I hadn’t seen each other for many years, though we’d occasionally speak on the phone after he moved to the East Coast. He was heavier, grayer, slightly stooped, and moved a little slower. We hugged, and I was reminded that but for him I would not have made the film for which I’ll probably be remembered.

  The editor turned off the lights, and we reviewed the scenes I had cut. There was an early visit by Chris to Dr. Klein’s office just after his first examination of Regan. Regan still appears normal, but there’s an uncomfortable undercurrent to the scene.

  There was a light moment between Father Merrin and Chris just before the exorcism, where she offers and he accepts a drink.

  There was a scene on the stairs of the MacNeil house between Merrin and Karras during an interlude in the exorcism, in which Merrin offers the meaning of Regan’s possession to Karras: “I think the point is to make us despair, to see ourselves as animal and ugly, to reject the possibility that God could ever love us.” Blatty always felt that this was the moral center of the film that would allow the audience not to despise itself for enjoying the horrific scenes that preceded it. He thought that despite efforts we made to show that the demon did not take Karras out the window but that Karras did it himself as an act of love to save the girl, many in the audience thought it was the devil’s work and that the film ended on a downbeat note.

  We originally filmed an epilogue between Father Dyer and the detective, Lt. Kinderman. The scene is light and hopeful. Kinderman offers to take Dyer to lunch. The idea was that in their light banter, Karras’s spirit lives on and his sacrifice will be remembered.

  In 1973 I felt that all these ideas were implicit and that the story needed no underlining. If people wanted to believe that the demon took Karras instead of Regan, they should be free to do so.

  We also recovered a shot that had become iconic for not having been included, the Spider Walk, wherein Regan walks backward down a flight of stairs on her hands and feet, ending in a close-up with blood streaming down her face, upside down. A contortionist named Linda Hager performed this stunt, and the only reason I didn’t use it in the original version was that we were unable to conceal the thin wires that
supported her.

  After we reviewed about twelve minutes of material, I sat silently for a moment. The lights came on, and I remember thinking, Well, this stuff isn’t bad, I don’t think it can hurt the film or its reputation. I turned to Bill and said, “I think you’re right.” His face lit up. As we walked out of the cutting room, I put my arm around him and said, “You know, I finally get what you were trying to say.”

  Along with Bud Smith, one of the film’s original editors, we began to integrate the new footage. I added a few other images, including, at the very beginning, a shot of the MacNeil house showing Regan’s window as the light goes off, followed by a dissolve to the alabaster statue of the Virgin that was later desecrated. I added more subliminals of the demon face, and with the use of CGI (computer generated imagery), which didn’t exist when we made the film, we “removed” the wires on the Spider Walk. We remixed the sound track, adding more subliminal sounds to the state-of-the-art, 5.1 Dolby stereo. We then sonically cleaned the entire negative, removing all scratches and dirt. When we’d finished, it looked and sounded like a new film.

  On a balmy Los Angeles evening in September of 2000, Blatty and I sat at a window table in a Starbucks next to the historic Fox Bruin Theatre in the heart of Westwood, California. People were lined up around the block, waiting to get into the theater. There was a buzz in the crowd of largely young people, many of them the sons and daughters of those who’d lined up at the now-demolished National Theatre a few blocks away in December 1973. We clinked our coffee cups, laughed, and toasted one another. The enthusiasm and acclaim continued in theaters around the world.

  Less than a year later, in May 2001, torn between addictions, Jason Miller died of a heart attack in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I wonder if he’d have worked harder as a playwright and had a happier life if I hadn’t picked him from a photograph in a newspaper and led him to the temptations of Hollywood. He’d achieved success with one play, but nothing afterward. A sense of guilt came over me at the announcement of his death. Though my discovery of him brought him an Academy Award nomination and instant recognition as an actor, it led to an unfulfilled life.

  16

  THE MARINE CORPS AND THE TRACKER

  Scott Rudin is a smart, prolific producer of films and plays. He’s also stubborn and abrasive, qualities I share. Often his failures are as interesting as his successes. He was under contract to Paramount when he brought in an original script he had developed for years with Jim Webb, then a novelist and military lawyer who was a Marine Corps first lieutenant and rifle platoon commander in Vietnam. Wounded in combat, Webb came out with a Navy Cross, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. By coincidence, he was a student at Georgetown Law School when I was directing The Exorcist on campus.

  In 1987 President Reagan appointed Webb Secretary of the Navy, but he resigned less than a year later over a disagreement with the President about the Navy’s overall size. Jim is complex, principled, and courageous. At times he can be argumentative and mean-spirited, but in fairness, he describes me as the only man in the country with a temper worse than his. An American soldier has no better friend than Jim Webb. He was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War memorial designed by Maya Lin, calling it “The Black Ditch of Shame,” and campaigned successfully for another statue nearby, a depiction of three battled-scarred veterans.

  Webb’s screenplay, Rules of Engagement, was about loyalty and the moral ambiguity of warfare. A fictional account of Jim’s own experiences, it tells of the clash between American relations in the Persian Gulf and military justice for one man. The rules of engagement are flexible guidelines devised by the U.S. military to minimize excessive violence in combat. But combat is excessive violence, soldiers are sent into battle to kill people and blow things up. Webb’s script asks the question, “What constitutes murder in a military action?”

  The film begins in Vietnam. A Vietcong unit ambushes a marine platoon led by Lieutenant Hays Hodges. To rescue his friend, Lieutenant Terry Childers and his platoon capture another Vietcong unit and force its commanding officer to stop the attack on Hodges’s platoon, saving their lives. Thirty years later, Childers, now a colonel, is commanding a marine expeditionary unit to rescue the American Ambassador in Yemen and his family from a dangerous protest outside the embassy. Marines are killed and wounded, and Childers orders his men to open fire on a crowd of civilians gathered around the embassy. The question of the film is whether Childers ordered his marines to fire on an innocent Yemeni crowd, or did the crowd have weapons and fire first? He’s charged with murder and asks his friend Hodges, now a military lawyer, to defend him. The deck is stacked against Childers, and the national security adviser would rather have him take full blame than that the incident be viewed as a failed policy of the United States.

  It was left to Webb and me to polish the script, which meant clarifying story points, but we couldn’t agree on how to accomplish this. We were two equally strong-willed people, unwilling to compromise. In the end, Rudin handed the project off to my friend and benefactor Dick Zanuck, who had become a successful producer after leaving the executive suite; he coproduced Jaws, The Sting, and Driving Miss Daisy, winning Academy Awards and big box office returns. We turned the script over to a young writer, Steve Gaghan, and worked with him for three months to make it more penetrating and unpredictable. Tommy Lee Jones signed to play Hodges and Samuel L. Jackson to play Childers. Ben Kingsley was cast as the American Ambassador; Anne Archer as his wife; Guy Pearce as the prosecutor; Bruce Greenwood as the national security adviser; and the Moroccan actor I so admired and worked with on Sorcerer, Amidou, was cast as a Yemeni doctor.

  Dale Dye was our technical adviser for the combat scenes. Dale, who served in the military for twenty years, owned a company called Warriors Incorporated, made up of former combat vets who trained actors to play soldiers. He did the same for Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. He started by taking Tommy Lee and Sam along with his vets to bivouac in the woods, day and night, for two weeks. When they came out, they had an understanding of the anxieties and fears, the heat and exhaustion, felt by combat soldiers.

  Gaghan’s script was an improvement on Webb’s, but Jim hated it and tried to frustrate our ability to get cooperation from the Department of Defense. As a former Secretary of the Navy, he had clout and connections. Permits we received were canceled at the last minute, and only through the efforts of Jack Valenti did we get as much cooperation as we did. Jack intervened with Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s film liaison, who granted us limited permission to film aboard the USS Tarawa, an amphibious assault ship on maneuvers near the naval base in San Diego. The Tarawa would later be stationed in Yemen, providing logistical support after the USS Cole was attacked by al-Qaeda in Sana’a.

  In the film the ship is called the USS Wake Island and is stationed in the Indian Ocean, when a report of the attack on the embassy in Yemen comes in. We were able to bring Sam Jackson on board, leading a troop of marines to be dispatched on CH-46 twin engine Huey helicopters to rescue the Ambassador and his family. We had one day to film aboard the ship, but the captain and his crew were cooperative and we got everything we wanted. Strub denied us everything else, and filming became a costly logistical battle. Again because of Webb’s determination to sabotage the film, we were denied permission to film at Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps base in North Carolina. We had to rent an abandoned Signal Corps facility near Manassas, Virginia, and hire off-duty Marines as extras.

  We of course got no assistance from the government of Yemen to film there, but with the help of Amidou, a Moroccan citizen, we were allowed to film in Ouarzazate in southern Morocco, on a plateau of the Atlas Mountains surrounded by the Sahara Desert. With the approval of King Mohammed VI, we were given full cooperation. Bob Laing, our production designer, who worked as an assistant on Sorcerer, hired a Moroccan crew to paint sections of the old Kasbah to more closely resemble Sana’a in Yemen, and the people of Ouarzazate already wore the clothing of the Yemeni. The Moroc
can Air Force lent us three Chinook CH-47 helicopters, a slightly different model than the ones we used on the USS Tarawa, but Laing had them painted to resemble the steel gray CH-46s.

  The raid on the U.S. Embassy set in the Kasbah was the most difficult sequence I’ve ever filmed, and the most realistic. It looks like news footage while capturing the emotions of the Marines and the demonstrators. The weather was hot and dry, and many of the crew got food poisoning and were wiped out for long periods. It took three weeks to shoot this fifteen-minute sequence and one other in Morocco, where Hodges goes back to Yemen to determine the truth about the charges against Childers. It was Dick Zanuck’s daily encouragement and advice that made me appreciate again the value of a good producer.

  We returned to Los Angeles to film the court-martial sequence on the Paramount lot. Tommy Lee and Sam were intuitive actors, and we never had to discuss character motivation. Directing was a matter of showing them where I wanted them to be in the frame. Occasionally I’d ask for a little more or a little less emotion or to play it faster or slower, louder or softer.

  The film was a box office hit, but many critics saw it as jingoism, especially in Europe, where my films were generally well received. In the film’s first few weeks of release, protests were lodged. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) described Rules of Engagement as “probably the most racist film against Arabs ever.” It was also denounced by one William Rugh, former American Ambassador to Yemen. The most widespread complaints came from Yemen’s ambassador to Washington, D.C., Abdulwahab Abdulla al-Hajri. He called the film a complete distortion and a slander against his people: “All of a sudden Yemenis, even women and children, have become terrorists and want to kill Americans,” he said. “It’s a total ruin for us. It ruins our image.”