William Friedkin Did So Much More Than Invent the Horror Blockbuster
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It’s not a movie chase scene so much as the movie chase scene: a breakneck race against time between a criminal on an elevated subway and a cop in a commandeered car, careening through the streets of Brooklyn at ridiculous speeds.
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The bad guy works for a European drug cartel, has just shot a police officer during the afternoon commute and has his gun at the back of the train driver’s head. The “good guy” — those scare quotes are earned when you’re talking about the NYPD’s Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle — is whipping his way through traffic, barely dodging pedestrians and only occasionally avoiding vehicles unlucky enough to cross his path. We keep cutting between the hostage situation on the tracks above and the impromptu demolition derby on the Bensonhurst avenues below. The camera strapped to the front bumper of this runaway Pontiac Le Mans gives viewers an angle that’s visceral and dizzying enough to cause motion sickness. After nearly seven minutes of hot pursuit, the subway crashes, the thug exits and Doyle, following on foot, corners him on the stairs. The crook turns. Our hero fires a bullet into his back.
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You’ve probably seen this sequence from The French Connection, William Friedkin’s groundbreaking crime thriller, a million times. Here comes your millionth-and-one viewing. Because how could you not watch this again right now?
Had Friedkin, who died Monday at the age of 87, only made this adrenaline rush of a scene — much less the movie that would take home the Best Picture Oscar of 1971 (and earn him a Best Director award) — he’d still have a space in the Hollywood wild-man director Hall of Fame.
But Friedkin was so much more than just the guy who helped pioneer action set pieces like that Connection chase, or more or less invent the modern horror blockbuster with the head-turning, pea-soup–spewing movie he made right after that. He was a manic dramatist of the first order, a filmmaker who cut his teeth in the adolescent days of live TV and via early documentary work, then used the techniques he learned to enliven and elevate two pulpy genres into something like rough-edged pop art. Friedkin was a generation or so older than most of the “film brats” and other up-and-coming American auteurs that would turn the 1970s into a second Golden Age. But you don’t get the New Hollywood revolution, or the era of steroidal “event” cinema that followed it, without him.
His pre-French Connection resume reads like a late 1960s showbiz Mad Lib: Alfred Hitchcock (he worked on an episode of the Psycho director’s TV show), Sonny and Cher (the couple’s 1967 star vehicle Good Times), British theater royalty (Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party), Off-Broadway adaptations (The Boys in the Band). He credited his decision to take on the project about two real New York City cops taking on French heroin smugglers to working out at the same gym as the producer, Phil D’Antoni.
The sense of documentary-like realism and a certain go-for-broke attitude helped turn what could have been a modest crime flick into something electric and dangerous; the way that Gene Hackman played Doyle, emphasizing rather than downplaying the character’s less likable or socially acceptable sides, set the template for thousands of law-enforcement anti-heroes to come. (Dirty Harry was still a little over two months away from hitting theaters.)
The movie made Friedkin an Oscar winner and star director, which helped him secure his next picture: a take on William Peter Blatty’s supernatural story about a little girl possessed by the devil called The Exorcist. It’s incredible to think that these movies were made back to back, and that this one-two punch would define the woozy heights and Hollywood box-office treasure hunts of the 1970s only three years into the decade.
Focusing on a 12-year-old girl in Washington D.C. named Regan MacNeil (played by Linda Blair), who begins exhibiting some odd behavior, and a priest experiencing a crisis in faith who aids an elderly man of the cloth in ridding her of an evil spirit that’s taken over her body, the movie hit theaters the day after Christmas in 1973. It quickly become one of the highest-grossing pictures in movie history. Friedkin’s ability to turn standard supernatural-horror scenes into the equivalent of thrill rides and shock treatments caused fainting spells and vomiting among some moviegoers, which only compelled people (along with the power of Christ) to see it that much more. It introduced the antiquated Roman Catholic notion of exorcisms into the lexicon, aided by the now iconic shot of Max Von Sydow, standing in silhouette before the MacNeil house, that graced the film’s poster.
The Exorcist would prove to be the cornerstone of Friedkin’s legacy, and it was a film he returned to many times over the proceeding decades — speaking about it at anniversaries, restoring 11 minutes of footage for a “director’s cut” in 2000, sitting for a feature-length documentary about the making of it, and directing his own doc about a real-life exorcist. It’s still considered one of the scariest horror movies, if not the scariest horror movie of all time.
Like Blatty, who Friedkin had met years before when he refused to shoot a TV episode based on one of his scripts, he never considered it a horror movie so much as a film about “the mystery of faith.” Yet the massive impact it had on what we now know as blockbusters and the public perception of this particular religious practice remains rooted in the genre. “I showed [the exorcism footage] to a couple of psychiatrists who said, ‘It looks authentic, but it doesn’t have the classical symptoms,'” Friedkin recalled in an interview several years back. “And I said, ‘What are the classical symptoms?’ And they each said, ‘Well, the head spinning, and levitation.’ And I remember saying, ‘Doctor, we invented that. Mr. Blatty wrote that and I had to find a way to film it.'”
After the success of The Exorcist, Friedkin could write his own ticket in Hollywood. He would spend the rest of the decade cashing that ticket in and nearly turning himself into an industry pariah. An attempt to start up a director-driven production company with Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Ford Coppola went nowhere. His next film, Sorcerer (1977), was a remake of the French thriller The Wages of Fear and was a massive bomb. A few years later, his adaptation of Gerald Walker’s novel Cruising, about a cop chasing a serial killer in New York’s leather-culture underground, became the subject of controversy and endured protests from the gay community.
Both films have now become cult classics — Friedkin himself always named Sorcerer as his favorite movie — but his career and his reputation took a hit. For every later film that channeled the vintage early 1970s Friedkin like To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), there was something like Jade (1995), which did the director nor the “erotic thriller” genre zero favors.
Still, Friedkin continued to work, and even his least-loved films would be appreciated as works that came from somebody willing to go out on a limb. He experienced a major professional second wind when he took on two plays by Tracey Letts, Bug (2007) and Killer Joe (2011), and gave them the sort of live-wire, extremely nervy screen adaptations they deserved; the latter is arguably the key work in the Matthew McConaughey phenomenon known as the McConaissance. He continued to do tons of press well into his Eighties, and was scheduled to premiere a new film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, at the Venice Film Festival in a few weeks.
Friedkin will continue to go down in history as the man who crafted the king of all car chases and the director who made the devil do it. Yet he was a craftsman who, regardless of whether his films hit or missed, whether by an inch or a mile, lived to shoot. “I’d been away from the A-list for a while, and a lot of directors never survive a disaster like that,” he said, reflecting back on his career in 2013. “But you don’t stop, unless you lose interest in it. And I had not lost interest.”
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