Fellowship & Fairydust

In an era when every Marvel superhero movie is marketed as an event, and movies that gross $300,000,000 lose money, it may be difficult to believe that there was a time when certain movies really were events. Films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and George Lucas’s Star Wars-A New Hope (1977) were events. And if one was to take into account inflation, 1939’s Gone with the Wind, was perhaps the biggest movie event ever. 

Audiences waited for hours in lines that frequently stretched around the block to see these movies, which brought in box office numbers never before seen. Not because of the high price of tickets, but because everyone was seeing them. William Friedkin’s 1973 film adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist was one such movie. 

Everyone involved in the making of The Exorcist had great hope for its success. William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel had been a phenomenal success, going on to sell 13 million copies. As Blatty’s novel was topping The New York Times bestseller list for 17 weeks, William Friedkin became one of the youngest filmmakers in history to win the Academy Award for Best Director for his ground-breaking work on the influential crime drama The French Connection. No one expected The Exorcist to be quite as successful as it became though. 

I think it is safe to say that a majority of people know the story of The Exorcist. 12-year-old Regan McNeil and her mother, Chris, are visiting Georgetown University, where Chris is shooting her latest film. Regan begins to display abnormal behavior which psychologists are unable to explain. As her daughter’s condition worsens, Chris begins to suspect that supernatural forces may be at work and approaches Father Damian Karris, a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist assigned to Georgetown, to perform an exorcism.  

Getting the story, one inspired by an actual event, on page and screen took over 20 years and involved two people… author/screenwriter William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin.

 

William Peter Blatty

William Peter Blatty was born January 7, 1928, in New York City. In the autobiographical I’ll Tell Them I Remember You, Blatty wrote that as the youngest of five children, he developed a close bond with his mother, after the divorce of his parents at age 3. Mary Blatty was the niece of a Bishop and a devout Catholic, who took her son to church every Sunday. 

Blatty attended Brooklyn Preparatory, a Jesuit school, and then Georgetown University on scholarship, and graduated from George Washington University with a master’s in English literature. After a stint in the United States Air Force, Blatty joined the United States Information Agency. He later began summiting humorous stories for publication. 

In the late 1950’s while working in public relations at Loyola University of Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, he sold his first novel, Which Way to Mecca, Jack (1960), a comical look at his time spent stationed in Beirut when working for the United States Information Agency. Not long after, he was writing full time. 

As the author of the scariest novel ever written, oddly, Blatty spent the early years of his literary career as a writer of comedy, publishing the novels John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1962) and Twinkle, Twinkle “Killer” Kane (1966), among others. These novels were met with critical acclaim but poor sales. 

In the mid-1960’s, Blatty began a productive collaboration with director Blake Edwards, writing or co-writing the screenplays for Shot in the Dark (1964), What Did You Do in the War, Daddy (1966) and a Rock Hudson/Julie Andrews (Blake Edward’s wife) musical, Darling Lili. Blatty wrote several other films on his own, including 1965’s Promises Her Anything with Warren Beatty and Robert Cummings and the adaptation of his novel, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home. Unfortunately, with the exception of Shot in the Dark, these films performed poorly at the box office. 

When Mary Blatty died in 1967, Blatty wrote in I’ll Tell Them I Remember You, that the life-long Catholic suffered a crisis of faith. Added to that, in The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows-The Full Story of the Film by Bob McCabe, Blatty said that a Jesuit mentor, Reverend Thomas Birmington, S.J., told him that he was wasting his talent on comical novels and screenplays for Blake Edwards’s movies. As Blatty later said in his spiritual memoir, Finding Peter: A Story of the Hand of Providence and Evidence of Life After Death, there were also economic concerns. In the wake of youth films like Bonnie & Clyde, the comical farces that he had specialized in, were no longer what audiences, and therefore Hollywood, were looking for.  

It was then that William Peter Blatty set out to write the story he had wanted to since 1949 when he was a student at Georgetown. 

William Friedkin 

William Friedkin was born August 29, 1935 in Chicago, Illinois, the only son of Louis and Rachael Friedkin, Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. The Friedkins were lower middle class, and young Billy was raised on the South Side of Chicago (not too far from where future First Lady Michelle Obama would be born and raised). 

Friedkin grew up on the rough streets of Chicago, which would greatly influence his films The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), as he mentioned in his memoir, The Friedkin Connection. He attended Senn High School, where he excelled at playing basketball but was a poor student. 

At age 16, Friedkin got a job in the mailroom at WGN-TV, and by 18 he was promoted to assistant director and then director of live television, sports events and talk shows. 

Friedkin is frequently identified with the “New Hollywood” movement of the 1970’s when a new generation of directors, that included Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola, all educated at film schools and beginning their careers doing low budget film, took over Hollywood. Friedkin, however, did not attend film school or college at all for that matter. Steven Spielberg, arguably the most talented of what became known as “The Movie Brats” and certainly the most commercially successful, also did not attend film school.  Like Spielberg (who spent his first couple of years directing television), Friedkin did not start out in low budget films, but in documentaries. 

It was while still working at WGN, that Friedkin made his first documentary, The People vs. Paul Crump. Paul Crump was a black man who had been convicted of robbery and murder and was on death row. Friedkin believed Crump was innocent and had been framed by the Chicago P.D. Working with $6,000 and cinematographer Bill Butler (who later shot Jaws, Grease, Rocky II, Rocky III, and the high rated 1983 ABC mini-series The Thorn Birds), Friedkin put together a film that recreated the events of the robbery and murder and the police’s arrest and interrogation of Crump, with interviews with Crump himself. Though The People vs. Paul Crump was never shown on television (it is currently available on DVD), it won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and resulted in Crump’s sentence of death reduced to life in prison. 

The People vs. Paul Crump earned Friedkin a job with producer David L. Wolper making documentaries. It was at this time, when Friedkin was in his mid-20’s, that he went from being a casual film fan to true cineaste. He credits seeing a re-release of Orson Wells’s Citizen Cane as the film that sparked his interest in filmmaking. He also cites Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques also as major influences. Leaving Wolper after a year, Friedkin was hired in 1965 to direct one of the final segments of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, an episode called “Obsession”. 

Over the next several years, Friedkin directed a number of mostly forgettable low budget films including Good Times (a musical with Sonny and Cher), the unfunny comedy The Night They Raided Minsky’s and two “art house” films, an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party and a play by Matt Crowley called The Boys in the Band. The latter is the only really interesting of the four films as it’s one of the first Hollywood productions to address the issue of homosexuality, and features strong performances. 

The Boys in the Band was also an example of Friedkin’s interest in films concerning dark subject matter, including obsession, aberration and the forces of good vs evil. All three of which can be applied to the film that truly made his career: The French Connection. 

The landmark film is the story of New York City P.D. narcotics officer Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman), whose obsession in breaking a case between a rich New York businessman and a French drug smuggler results in two deaths, many innocent lives at risk and the blurring of the fine line between who is good and who is bad. Besides for winning Friedkin the Best Director Oscar, The French Connection won Best Picture and Best Actor for Gene Hackman, among other awards, and helped to redefine the action genre. 

 

The Case

The story that William Peter Blatty had been wanting to tell for the better part of two decades took place in 1949 when he was a senior at Georgetown University. The case involved the demonic possession of a 13-year old boy in Cottage City, Maryland. The actual exorcism was performed in St. Louis by Father William S. Bowdern, a Catholic Priest and a member of the Society of Jesus. When Blatty was unable to get the rights to write a non-fiction book on the case, he decided to write a fictional account inspired by the case. 

In 1993, an actual account of the exorcism was published as Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism by Thomas B. Allen. It tells the story of Robbie Mannheim (not his real name) and begins in January 1949. Robbie was a somewhat shy boy who tended to keep to himself. Robbie’s Aunt Harriet (also a pseudonym), his father’s sister, knew of the young boy’s interest in board games and brought him a Ouija board. 

Harriet Mannheim believed in Spiritualism and that not only did life continue after death but that the living could communicate with the dead. She frequently attempted to communicate with those who had died. Though Robbie’s father, Karl, was not a believer in the supernatural, both his son and wife Phyllis, believed the stories that Harriet told them. 

On the evening of January 15, 1949, Karl and Phyllis had gone out for dinner. Robbie was left with his Grandmother Wagner. Sometime that night, Grandma Wagner heard a dripping sound. The dripping was coming from the ceiling of the grandmother’s bedroom. When Karl and Phyllis returned home the dripping had stopped, but had been followed by a scratching sound, which Karl believed was mice under the floorboards. When the scratching continued for several days, Karl called an exterminator, who found not a single trace of mice. The scratching continued. 

12 days later, on January 26, Aunt Harriet died suddenly in her St. Louis home. Robbie was understandably saddened by his aunt’s death and took solace in the Ouija board that she had given him, possibly trying to communicate with Harriet.  

The scratching sound in Grandma Wagner’s bedroom had stopped not long after Aunt Harriet had died but was replaced by the sound of squeaking shoes. This continued for about a week when Phyllis Mannheim began to suspect that Aunt Harriet was attempting to communicate with them. One night while Phyllis, Robbie and Grandma Wagner were lying in Robbie’s bed, it began to shake, as if Harriet were trying to communicate with her family. 

Over the course of the next month, strange occurrences continued, including several instances at Robbie’s school, such as when his desk would suddenly begin to move around, crashing into other desks. One night at home, a Bible rose from a bookshelf and landed at Robbie’s feet. Another time the family was sitting around talking when a vase rose from the table, hovered in the air and then smashed into a wall. A short time later, while the Mannheims were visiting friends, a rocking chair that Robbie was sitting in began to spin around. Robbie also came down with a case of pneumonia. 

Frightened and wanting to help their son, the Mannheims sought out help from a physician, a psychiatrist, and even a psychic. After no solution was found, Robbie’s family turned to a minister. 

Reverend Luther Miles Schulze, a Lutheran minister at a nearby church visited the Mannheim home where he was witness to Robbie’s bed shake, furniture appearing to move on their own and other strange phenomena. At first, Schulze believed that these events were caused by Robbie but decided to help the family. 

On Thursday February 17, Reverend Schultz asked Karl and Phyllis to allow Robbie to spend the night with him and his wife. That night, Schultz witnessed a chair tip over, Robbie’s blankets go flying across the room and Robbie shaking uncontrollably in the bed. It was then that the Lutheran minister suggested to the Mannheims that they take Robbie to a Jesuit priest. 

The exorcism of Robbie Mannheim lasted several months with several different priests taking part in the ritual, including Father Raymond Bishop, S.J., and of, course, Father Bowdern. The exorcism is believed to have been completed on April 18th. 

 

The Novel

After the death of his mother, William Peter Blatty experienced a period of great sorrow that lasted for several years. One night he dreamed that his mother had been trying to communicate with him. He woke up crying. Was his mother trying to communicate with him through dreams? 

In his 1973 book I’ll Tell Them I Remember You, Blatty wrote that after his dream he was troubled for a period of several weeks, worried that his mother was attempting to communicate with him, until reading a book called The Other Side by Bishop James Pike. The book was about Pike’s belief that his dead son Jim had been trying to communicate with him and was able to reach his son through a medium named George Daisley. Blatty had several sessions with Daisley, but nothing meaningful came from them. In early July 1969, he rented a cabin in the woods and began to write The Exorcist. 

When writing a book, many authors first outline their story so they have a road map to follow over the course of the writing. Blatty said that besides research on possession and some character sketches, he had nothing. This made writing a novel especially challenging. In Out of the Shadows, author McCabe said that Blatty was also only able to find three documented cases of Church approved exorcisms, the 1949 case in St. Louis, one in Earling, Iowa in 1928, and another in 1962 that was rumored to have taken place in Cleveland. 

Blatty based certain aspects of the character of elderly priest and exorcist Father Lankester Merrin on British archeologist Gerald Landkester Harding, who the writer had met while stationed in Beirut. Harding had excavated the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered in 1956. The Scrolls had actually been found in 11 different caves over the course of 1946, 1947 and 1956, with Harding taking part in latter excavations. 

Chris McNeil, an actress and the mother of the possessed 12-year old girl Regan, was modeled on Blatty’s good friend, actress and author Shirley MacLaine. Burke Dennings, the alcoholic and bigoted director of the film that Chris is at Georgetown shooting, was based on filmmaker J. Lee Thompson, the director of The Guns of Navarone (1961), the original Cape Fear (1962) and the cult slasher movie Happy Birthday to Me (1981). Thompson directed Shirley MacLaine in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, which was written by William Peter Blatty. Father Damien Karris, a Jesuit priest with doubts about his faith, was based on Blatty himself.

While writing The Exorcist, Blatty never entertained the idea that he was writing a horror novel, but rather a novel inspired by actual events. He believed that the 1949 exorcism of Robbie Mannheim was authentic and that as such, it proved the existence of God. Like Father Karris, the Jesuit priest and psychologist in his novel, Blatty had begun to question his faith in the wake of his mother’s death. As author Thomas Clagget addressed in William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession, and Reality, near the end of the story when Karris challenges the demon to leave Regan and take possession of him and then leaps through the window and hits M Street two stories below, the Jesuit has reclaimed his faith and knows not only will his death stop the demon and save Regan, but that he will go to Heaven. Karris’s sacrifice is a very heroic moment. 

As he recalled in, I’ll Tell Them I Remember You, as he was completing his novel, Blatty began to experience supernatural events that led him to believe more than ever that his mother was attempting to communicate with him, including his daughter Mary Jo, seeing a ghost in her bedroom. Decades later in Finding Peter, Blatty would tell of events following the death of his young son, Peter, that proved to his satisfaction that his son was communicating with him and his wife Julie, such as lights suddenly turning on in a darkened room and Peter’s Rosary disappearing from the pockets of his father’s pants and reappearing the following day. Blatty also addressed the concept of people having souls, and there for a means to communicate from beyond the grave, in his 1978 spiritual thriller The Ninth Configuration. 

 

The Film

As he would recall more than 40 years later in his memoir The Friedkin Connection, William Friedkin was first approached by William Peter Blatty about directing a film version of The Exorcist in 1971, when on a promotional tour for The French Connection. Blatty had sent Friedkin a copy of the novel, which the director sat down one late afternoon in a hotel to read. So engrossed was he in the story, that he cancelled off the dinner plans he had for that evening so that he could finish the book. When he contacted Blatty, he told the author that he wanted to make the movie as close to the novel as possible, which pleased Blatty. 

William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty had met in September 1966 when Blake Edwards asked to meet the young filmmaker about directing Gunn, a film based on Peter Gunn, a television series about a private investigator that Edwards was the executive producer of. The screenplay for Gunn was written by Edwards and William Peter Blatty, which Friedkin read and did not like. In a follow-up interview, Friedkin voiced his reservations for the script. Blake Edwards was infuriated that this young hot shot from Chicago with one film to his name was criticizing his screenplay, but Blatty-who was also at the meeting-was impressed that this young director was standing up to one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, especially as Blatty agreed the script for Gunn didn’t work and that everyone knew it but did not have the courage to stand up to Blake Edwards.  

Blatty had signed a deal with Warner Brothers to write the screenplay for and produce a film version of The Exorcist. The studio had approached several prominent directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, and Arthur Penn, all who turned the project down. Despite or perhaps because of the phenomenal success of the novel, filmmakers were reluctant to take on the film as its success would depend too much on a young child actress in convincing an audience that she was possessed by demonic forces. 

Warner Bothers was interested in signing Mark Rydell, a former television director, who had helmed episodes of such television fare as The Wild, Wild West, The Fugitive, and Gunsmoke before turning to film with 1967’s The Fox starring Sandy Dennis and Keir Dullea (who a year later would portray astronaut David Bowman in Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey) and The Cowboys with John Wayne. Blatty, however, wanted William Friedkin. Warner refused to sign Friedkin at first, but soon had a change of heart once The French Connection opened. 

In his 1990 biography Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin-Director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, film historian Net Segaloff said he felt that Blatty and Friedkin were kindred spirits as Friedkin was an only child and Blatty was the youngest child resulting in them both being extremely close to their mothers. Blatty said much the same in I’ll Tell Them I Remember You. 

The person most associated with The Exorcist would unquestionably be Linda Blair. Linda had little acting experience prior to taking on the role of Regan McNeil, a 12 – year old girl who becomes possessed by the devil. Friedkin and Blatty saw hundreds of young actresses for the role of Regan, but Friedkin felt Blair possessed an intelligence that would be important for the part. The role of Regan’s mother, Chris McNeil, went to Ellen Burstyn, with playwriter Jason Miller (The Championship Season) being offered the role of Father Damien Karris. The only cast members with distinguished film resumes were Max Von Sydow and Lee J. Cobb. Sydow, a favorite of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, was cast as the elderly Father Marrin, while Cobb, a veteran actor of such acclaimed films as 12 Angry Men, took on the role of police inspector Kinderman. The Exorcist had a superb cast, each actor delivering a layered performance that brought to life characters that the audience could sympathize with. 

 

The Aftermath 

The Exorcist was released on December 26, 1973 to critical and commercial success. It did for horror movies what 2001: A Space Odyssey did for science fiction. It took a genre often associated with B-movies and made it respectable in the eyes of critics. It also attracted moviegoers who did not often go to horror films. The Exorcist made horror mainstream paving the way for Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975), The Omen (1976), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), the Spielberg/Tobe Hooper collaboration Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984) and The Sixth Sense (1999) to each become major box office hits. 

The Exorcist would go on the gross more than $200,000,000 at the domestic box office, and surpassed The Sound of Music as the highest grossing movie of all time, before being surpassed by JAWS two years later. Adjusted for inflation The Exorcist has made nearly a billion dollars and is the ninth highest grossing movie of all time in America. 

Having directed The French Connection and The Exorcist back to back, William Friedkin’s career has been erratic, a series of ups and downs, with unfortunately more downs. The brooding action-thriller Sorcerer (1977) and the glossy crime drama To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), the latter of which features another great Friedkin chase sequence, are both excellent films (even if the former was a box office failure) on par with The Exorcist and The French Connection. The highly controversial Cruising (1980) about a New York police detective (Al Pacino) who goes undercover in New York City’s sexual underground to catch a serial killer targeting gay men, is an interesting if flawed film that despite a poor box office performance is regarded as a cult classic, as is Sorcerer, about a group of criminals hiding out in South America who are hired to drive two trucks containing unstable dynamite over 200 miles through a jungle and across a decaying bridge during a thunderstorm. Friedkin’s two recent films the psychological thriller Bug (2005) and the black comedy Killer Joe (2011) are also quite good. 

At his very best, William Friedkin is as talented and visionary as his fellow New Hollywood peers Spielberg, De Palma, and Scorsese, but at his worst, his films have been major misfires, a few of them among the worst movies ever made. In 1978, Friedkin directed the comedy The Brink’s Job with Peter Falk and Peter Boyle, which features some of the most idiotic characters ever put to film, and manages to be even less funny than The Night They Raided Minsky’s. These films showed little more than that William Friedkin was not good at comedy. This in itself is not unheard of among the Movie Brats as Steven Spielberg showed with his big budget comical disaster 1941 (1979) and Brian De Palma with the ill-conceived adaptation of Tom Wolf’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). The major difference is that after these box office failures, De Palma and Spielberg stayed away from comedy whereas after the poor performance and controversy of Cruising, Friedkin directed the dreadful satire Deal of the Century (1983) starring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines and Sigourney Weaver, which brought in a mere $10,000,000 at the domestic box office ($9,000,000 less than Cruising). The before mentioned Killer Joe, starring Matthew McConaughey and Gina Gershon, is both a comedy and a good movie but it’s a very dark comedy making it more in tune with Friedkin’s sensibilities as a storyteller than The Brink’s Job and Deal of the Century. 

In 1990 Friedkin returned to the horror genre with The Guardian, a terrible film starring Bond girl Carey Lowell (Licence to Kill) in the story of a possessed tree, and the only slightly better basketball themed Blue Chips (1994). A film that showed potential was Jade (1996) a psychological erotic thriller starring David Caruso and Linda Fiorentino and written by Joe Eszterhas (Flashdance, Jagged Edge) that featured elements of The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A. and Cruising (it even had a car chase), but didn’t solidify into anything resembling a good movie. 

Despite having produced some excellent movies as well as some awful ones, as Net Segaloff touched upon in Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin-Director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin had never been one to stick with any one particular genre. With the exception of Deal of the Century, he’s never done a film to play it safe. He plays the odds even if the results are as frequently bad as they are good. 

After the huge success of The Exorcist in both novel and film, William Peter Blatty would write several religious themed thrillers like The Ninth Configuration (1978), Legion (1983) – a direct sequel to The Exorcist – and Dimiter (2010) as well as the spiritual memoirs, I’ll Tell Them I Remember You (1974) and Finding Peter: A True Story of the Hand of Providence and Evidence of Life After Death (2015). Blatty would also write the screenplay and direct the film versions of The Ninth Configuration (1979) and Legion (1990).