William Friedkin, Oscar-Winning Director of ‘The French Connection’ and ‘The Exorcist,’ Dead at 87
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William Friedkin, one of the great directors of the New Hollywood era who helmed classics like The Exorcist and Oscar-winner The French Connection, died Monday, The New York Times reports. He was 87.
Sherry Lansing, a former head of Paramount Pictures, and Friedkin’s wife, confirmed his death. She said the cause was heart failure and pneumonia.
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Rising to prominence in the Seventies, Friedkin came to specialize in gritty, white-knuckle thrillers, often shot through with a healthy dose of practically documentary-style realism. The French Connection, his breakthrough film, won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Actor for star Gene Hackman. Two years later, he had a box office smash with The Exorcist and would go on to direct favorites like Sorcerer, To Live and Die in L.A., and Rules of Engagement.
Prior to his death, it was announced that Friedkin would release his first movie in over 10 years, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, later this year. The film, which stars Kiefer Sutherland, is currently scheduled to premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Friedkin was born and raised in Chicago, and began his career in the mailroom of the local TV station, WGN. He eventually got the chance to start working on productions and directed hundreds of local television programs, from kid’s shows to live broadcasts. Friedkin was also particularly interested in documentary, and one of his earliest successes was the 1962 film, The People vs. Paul Crump, about an inmate on death row.
Though the film helped kickstart Friedkin’s career, he came to express some misgivings about it. Paul Crump had been sentenced to death for killing a security guard during an armed robbery, while the four other suspects received life in prison. Crump eventually had his sentence commuted to 119 years in prison, and was paroled in 1993; he was later sent back to prison for harassing a family member.
“I was looking for a subject to film; he was looking for a get-out-of-jail card,” Friedkin later wrote. “I don’t dwell on the question because it would mean we both gamed the system. Paul got his freedom, I got my career.”
A couple years later, Friedkin moved to Hollywood. He directed an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965, and two years later helmed his first feature film, the Sonny and Cher musical comedy Good Times. He directed another musical comedy, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, the following year, though other early efforts like The Birthday Party and The Boys In the Band — based on a hit off-Broadway play about a group of gay friends — hinted at the grittier topics and themes Friedkin seemed intent on exploring.
He finally got the chance to do so with The French Connection, a film loosely based on the exploits of a pair of New York City cops who uncovered an international heroin-trafficking scheme. The movie was a sublime thriller, anchored by one of the most memorable car chase scenes ever put to film (which Friedkin later admitted required a $40,000 bribe to film). But Friedkin balanced all that with a staggering, brutally honest realism, especially when it came to depicting the racist, constitutionally dubious practices of Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (played by Hackman).
“Nobody in the film is sympathetic, but there’s something about the film itself that gets through to people,” Friedkin told Forbes in 2021. “In many ways, Popeye Doyle represents what Captain Ahab represents in Moby-Dick, and that is an unflexible, diligent pursuit of, in Ahab’s case, the whale and, in Popeye’s case, the Frenchman, Alain Charnier. I think people relate to that. I never intended that. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not what I thought would happen. I was making a film about unsympathetic characters, but I tried to present them as honestly as I saw them.”
Friedkin followed the critical and commercial success of The French Connection with an ever bigger movie: The Exorcist. Again, Friedkin’s visceral, realistic style was apparent, this time amplifying the harrowing, ghastly, demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl (as well as a deeper exploration of the mysteries of faith). The film earned millions at the box office and was nominated for 10 Oscars, though it only won two, Best Screenplay and Best Sound.
Reflecting on the movie in 2018 with Rolling Stone, Friedkin claimed The Exorcist was snubbed at the Oscars because of a “campaign” led by old school Hollywood directors Robert Aldrich and George Cukor. “The guy who produced the awards show that year told me they were going around saying, ‘If The Exorcist wins Best Picture, it’s the end of Hollywood as we know it,'” he said. “Fuck them. I think there was a lot of resentment and jealousy. Robert Aldrich wanted to direct The Exorcist. And I think what bothered Cukor was that the film was disturbing and blasphemous, as well as the fact I had recently won it for a little fucking documentary about two cops.”
Despite the snub, The Exorcist did have a lasting effect on Hollywood, spawning numerous sequels and prequels, while also helping to re-define and -configure the horror genre at the dawn of the blockbuster era.
After the one-two punch of The French Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin returned in 1977 with Sorcerer, a thriller about four men tasked with transporting nitroglycerin-leaking dynamite across dangerous South American terrain. The movie would later be viewed as a Friedkin classic, and the filmmaker himself described it as “the film that came closest to my vision of what I wanted to make” in a 2013 Los Angeles Times interview. But at the time, the reception was more muted, critically and especially commercially.
The Eighties got off to a tumultuous start with Cruising, Friedkin’s controversial film in which Al Pacino plays an undercover cop trying to a track a serial killer targeting the gay community (activists protested the shoot over its depiction of queer people, though Friedkin defended his work at the time). While Friedkin earned acclaim for his 1985 neo-noir thriller To Live and Die in L.A., much of his work during this decade, and into the Nineties, was less-well received (see, or don’t, the1983 Chevy Chase/Sigourney Weaver/Gregory Hines comedy Deal of the Century, or 1995’s Nick Nolte/Shaquille O’Neal sports drama team-up, Blue Chips).
In 1997, however, Friedkin earned positive reviews with his return to television, where he helmed a remake of Twelve Angry Men. Three years later, he released another widely lauded courtroom drama, Rules of Engagement, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. In the final stages of his career, Friedkin worked closely with the playwright Tracy Letts, adapting two of his plays into movies, 2006’s Bug and 2011’s Killer Joe (Letts wrote the screenplays for both, as well). Friedkin’s interest in theatrical adaptations extended to what will now likely be his film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a legal drama based on Herman Wouk’s 1953 play of the same name.
While Friedkin’s filmmaking pace had slowed in recent years, he did publish his memoir, The Friedkin Connection in 2013. He also received the honorary Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival that same year.
Upon receiving that honor, and while also discussing a then-new restoration of Sorcerer, Friedkin captured what made his best movies so singular in that LA Times interview. “I’m not interested in superhero films, it never really was for me. In Sorcerer, the four guys who are the leads aren’t superheroes, they’re all flawed men desperately clinging to life… I believe there is good and evil in everyone, and that’s true for all the characters in all my films, including The French Connection and The Exorcist. I believe that is the human condition.”
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