The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Read online

  DEDICATION

  THIS BOOK IS FOR MY SONS JACK AND CEDRIC,

  AND FOR SHERRY, WHOSE LOVE HAS GIVEN ME THE

  INSPIRATION TO WRITE IT.

  EPIGRAPH

  O Fortune,

  Like the moon

  You are changeable

  Ever waxing and waning . . .

  . . . Fate—monstrous

  And empty,

  You whirling wheel,

  You are malevolent,

  Well-being is in vain

  And always fades to nothing.

  —CARL ORFF, Carmina Burana

  Arrogance, however disguised, is the essence of every artist. What could be more arrogant than saying, “Pay attention to what I’ve done, it’s of great worth and importance.” The energy to paint, compose, sculpt, be an architect, comes from a belief that is without qualification at least during the hour of creation. When someone calls you arrogant, don’t deny it. Smile and gently say, “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  —ELIA KAZAN, Kazan on Directing

  Camera Logic. The instinctive choice a director makes on where to place the camera to best tell the story. The camera’s not jiggling or wandering around or being seduced by something else in the frame. It’s exactly where it should be. Hitchcock, John Ford, Sidney Lumet, and others achieved this. Would that Camera Logic applied to Life. Everything would be framed just right. Not only what’s in the frame but who.

  —WILLIAM FRIEDKIN

  No matter.

  Try again.

  Fail again.

  Fail better.

  —SAMUEL BECKETT

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Fireflies

  Part I: First Impressions

  1. Chicago

  2. Mr. Documentary

  3. Good Times

  4. Silences

  Part II: The ’70s

  5. Popeye and Cloudy

  6. The Mystery of Faith

  7. Empire of Light

  8. The Devil in the Details

  Part III: The Tunnel at the End of the Light

  9. Hubris

  10. Sorcerer

  11. Armed Robbery and Murder

  Part IV: An Uphill Climb to the Bottom

  12. To Live and Die in L.A.

  13. A Safe Darkness

  14. A New Path

  15. Afterlife

  16. The Marine Corps and the Tracker

  17. Fade Out

  Part V: Fade In

  18. Puccini

  19. Catharsis

  20. Reel Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  Filmography

  Photo Credits

  Index

  Photo Section

  Author’s Note: *Spoiler*

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE: FIREFLIES

  An oversize manila envelope lay on my desk when I arrived at the production office of Cruising, the film I was directing in New York. I opened the envelope and pulled out acrylic and spray-painted works on paper, collages of faces and bodies with scrawled words and splashes of color in the style of graffiti. I found them amusing but not to my taste. A handwritten note accompanied them telling me how much the young artist Jean-Michel Basquiat admired my films and how pleased he would be if I would accept these early works as a gift. I threw them in the wastebasket and never acknowledged his note. A few years ago a Basquiat painting from that period sold at auction for fourteen million dollars.

  At about the same time a demo recording was sent to me that contained rhythmic soul-disco tracks behind a high falsetto voice. The music was original but not something I appreciated. There was a handwritten note from the young recording artist, Prince, wondering if I’d consider doing a “music video” of one of his songs for the fledgling network called MTV. I didn’t respond.

  I passed up an ownership stake in Mike Tyson when he was first discovered by Cus D’Amato. I declined one third ownership of the Boston Celtics and the opportunity to be one of the producers of Star Wars.

  There were films I directed that I shouldn’t have and others I passed on that were successful. I’ve burned bridges and relationships to the point that I consider myself lucky to still be around. I never played by the rules, often to my own detriment. I’ve been rude, exercised bad judgment, squandered most of the gifts God gave me, and treated the love and friendship of others as I did Basquiat’s art and Prince’s music. When you are immune to the feelings of others, can you be a good father, a good husband, a good friend? Do I have regrets? You bet.

  Not long ago I was interviewed by two foreign journalists at a restaurant near Beverly Hills about my new film Killer Joe, which had just been shown at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. We were talking about filmmakers who changed the course of cinema forever: D. W. Griffith with Birth of a Nation, Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, and Jean-Luc Godard with Breathless. Their work had a lasting impact on all filmmaking that followed, including my own. The interviewers asked me how I felt about the films being made today.

  At that point, two young women came to our table. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and they were the only other customers in the restaurant. They apologized for interrupting, but they’d overheard our conversation and just wanted to tell us why they go to the movies. They don’t want to wallow in depravity or violence; they want to come away feeling joyful and happy. Fair enough. I asked them what films they had recently seen that qualified.

  Bridesmaids, they agreed. Also The Help. I had seen neither, but I knew they were popular.

  “Have you ever heard of Jean-Luc Godard?” I asked. They seemed puzzled.

  “What about Federico Fellini?”

  Yes, they’d heard of him.

  “Can you name a film he made?”

  They couldn’t.

  “What about Orson Welles?”

  Of course they’d heard of Orson Welles.

  “Can you name a film of his that you’ve seen?”

  “Oh, um . . . Rosebud,” the blonde said proudly.

  “What do you remember about it?” I asked.

  “A sled.”

  “Have you ever seen The Exorcist?”

  Of course, they blurted out.

  “Did you enjoy it? Did it leave you with a feeling of joy and happiness?”

  “Yes,” the brunette said emphatically.

  “Why?”

  “Because it made me think,” the brunette said.

  “So a film that makes you think is important too?” I suggested.

  “Well, yes,” said the blonde.

  I was curious: “What did The Exorcist make you think about?”

  “The devil,” said the brunette. “It made me think there’s a devil,” she continued.

  Not precisely what I had in mind when I made the film.

  The journalists were eating it up. They had it all on tape; it would provide great color for their pieces. More than likely, these women wouldn’t see Killer Joe, an edgy black comedy with full frontal nudity and violence. Not the kind of movie that has you leaving the theater filled with joy or happiness.

  It takes talent, imagination, and a feeling for the zeitgeist to find a subject that touches a nerve. What I still want from a film—or a play, a painting, a novel, a piece of music—is exhilaration. I want to be moved and surprised at some revelation about the human condition.

  I think about the love affair I’ve had with Cinema. Images or fragments pop into my consciousness like fireflies. When I’m able to capture their brief flash, they illuminate a dark corner of memory.

  In forty-five years I’ve
directed only nineteen films, though I’ve developed or tried to make far more; I’ve also directed hundreds of television shows live and on film. I’ve directed a handful of plays and a dozen operas so far. Some of my films are well known; others are forgotten, lost on the roller coaster that is Hollywood, where dizzying heights are followed by gut-wrenching depths.

  After I finish a film, deliver the prints to the distributor, and do interviews in several countries, the parade’s gone by, and it’s back to real life. The spotlights go off, there are no more autograph seekers, and all that’s left is exhaustion and the thought of what’s next. Or could this be it? The idea of quitting never occurred to me, but there were times when I sensed the man was at the door ready to collect the furniture and the keys to the house.

  From their beginning, the movies developed as an entertainment medium, and its objective has remained profit. A director gets to make a film only because a studio executive or a financier thinks it could make money. It’s almost impossible to choose a project with no eye to the marketplace. Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Godard, and Akira Kurosawa had to sell tickets, and when their films stopped working at the box office, they couldn’t get them made.

  You can have shelves of trophies and citations, appear on countless critics’ lists, be honored at film festivals all over the world, but you still have to take a meeting with a young studio executive who’s never produced, written, or directed, and sell yourself all over again. I have fewer meetings these days, and often the executive just wants to tell me how much my films have influenced him. I smile, thank him, and leave to get back on the roller coaster.

  Let me share the ride with you, and illuminate, with the help of the fireflies, how my films were conceptualized, shot, edited, and marketed, and how I came to direct operas without ever having seen one.

  Life is lived forward, but can only be understood backward.

  PART I

  FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  1

  CHICAGO

  My DNA suggested no hint of success at anything. My parents and grandparents came from Kiev in the Ukraine during a pogrom in the first years of the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, Russians were starving, and afraid of a world war or a revolution. They were ruled by the incompetent despot Czar Nicholas II. A violent pogrom in 1903 was fueled by racist literature claiming the Jews drank the blood of Christians at the Passover feast. That’s the year my parents, grandparents, and all their relatives escaped to America in steerage, in the bowels of freighters. My mother had twelve brothers and sisters, my father eleven. They spoke no English and were tradespeople and shop workers. The men in my family were dark-skinned, with handlebar mustaches. The women were short and heavyset. Their apartments smelled of gefilte fish, cabbage, smoked herring, and stale clothes.

  I loved my mother, Rachel. She was kind and gentle and seemed to care only about my well-being. She had been an operating-room nurse for many years and lost an eye when a tray of surgical instruments exploded as she was sanitizing them. She had an artificial eye that was so perfectly implanted you’d never know it wasn’t real. She continued nursing until I was born, then stopped work to raise me. All our relatives and neighbors loved “Rae,” as she was called. I never heard her say a bad word about anyone, and she had no interest in gossip or pettiness.

  My parents were good people, and we were close. They wanted me to have a happy life, but they didn’t know what I needed to do to prepare for it. They never encouraged me to study music, play sports, or marry a nice Jewish girl. Grammar school and high school never engaged me. I went only because it was mandatory.

  My father, Louis, worked all the time. He would leave early in the morning and come back late in the evening. I would look forward to his return, but he had little time for me, except occasionally on weekends. He seemed to have no sense of purpose except day-to-day survival. He had been a semiprofessional softball player in his youth, then a cigar maker, and he worked in a men’s clothing store, owned by his brother-in-law, on South State Street in Chicago. My father owned nothing and made fifty dollars a week. Until he was laid off. Then we lived on welfare, in a one-room apartment with a kitchenette, one toilet, a small closet, and a bed that came out of the wall for them, next to a cot for me, on North Sheridan Road in uptown Chicago; no surprise I was an only child. Our neighbors were Jewish, German, Irish, and Polish, descendants of the Europeans who settled in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. We used to sleep in Gunnison Park just off Sheridan with thousands of other families on a summer’s night. Few people in our building or neighborhood had air conditioners—not even the kind that fit into a window. It wasn’t as though I was deprived of anything. We were poor, but I never knew it. All my friends lived the same way.

  Faces, bodies, trees, cars, flew by as my three-wheeler bike raced along North Sheridan Road past the grocery store, the movie theater, legs pumping furiously against the wind, ending at the shore of Lake Michigan, watching the ice floes breaking with the onset of an early spring, like pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Streaks of pink and orange form in the distant sky over the white lake. I’m five years old, and this will be my last year of freedom before starting kindergarten.

  When I was six, my mother took me to the Pantheon Theater on Sheridan Road. We were going to see my first movie. I later learned it was called None but the Lonely Heart. The Pantheon was an ornate old movie palace, seating thousands. When we got to the theater, I had no idea what to expect. I sat in a large red velvet chair next to my mother. The theater was full, and the lights started to dim. I was excited, but apprehensive. Suddenly the theater was plunged into darkness. I could hear the curtains parting, then an enormous black rectangle came alive with a blinding white light and a loud blast of music. The comforting darkness was shattered by words I couldn’t read. My instinctive reaction was to scream at the top of my lungs. I clutched my mother’s arm; I couldn’t breathe.

  Strange faces turned scornfully toward us in the half-light, and my mother rushed me out of the theater into the blinding sunlight. We walked home for miles, until I could calm down. That was my first experience of seeing a film.

  Miss Dorothy Nordblad’s third-grade public school class at Graeme Stewart School started promptly at 8:00 a.m. We’d line up, about thirty of us, outside the classroom. We had to be early, because Miss Nordblad was never late. She was an attractive brunette, probably in her mid-thirties. She wore tight-fitting pastel suits and sensible heels, and her silken hair fell to her shoulders. Her manner was gentle and direct. She taught Spelling, English, and Math, and she’s the only teacher who made me curious to learn. I don’t remember any of the other teachers or anything specific about any subject. I learned to spell, add, subtract, and multiply, and that was it.

  I was eight years old in 1943, but I wasn’t afraid of the war. Miss Nordblad and our parents assured us that American soldiers were fighting in a just cause and would ultimately win. We did our part by bringing in old newspapers and tin foil from gum wrappers to be recycled for the war effort, but we knew from all we had been taught, or heard on the radio, that the enemy would never come to our shores, and that eventually, we would defeat them.

  My real enemy wasn’t the Germans or the Japanese but Miss Sullivan, the school principal. To an eight-year-old, she was the enemy within. She was tall, matronly, severe, her gray hair pulled back in a bun. She wore dark floor-length dresses, usually gray or black, with lace cuffs and collars, and she looked like Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho. I remember her charging into classrooms and taking a misbehaving student to hang him by the collar of his shirt in the cloakroom behind the blackboard, where he would stay for the remainder of class. Sometimes two or three of us would hang silently in the closet together. You learned to suppress inappropriate behavior, and there was a price to be paid if you screwed up.

  Her name was Nancy Gates, and we were nine years old. Nancy was tall for her age and slim, with blond curls. She had beautiful skin and perfect features, and when I lo
oked at her something warm would come over me, something I didn’t understand. She dressed smartly in white blouses and long skirts, or Victorian-style dresses, and she always came to school in a wide-brimmed hat. It was the hat that first caught my attention, the way it framed her face and provided a soft shadow over her bluish-gray eyes. Her voice had a quiet lilting tone, and she was mysterious and seductive.

  One day, standing in the hall outside our classroom, I was staring at her hat and the back of her neck when suddenly she turned around, looked into my eyes, and said, “You’re very handsome, Billy.” The way she held my gaze, her conspiratorial tone, and the way she lightly brushed my chest and smiled, opened a door within me. It was a quiet moment, but to me explosive. From then on we held hands and even kissed passionately in the auditorium during screenings of Encyclopedia Britannica films that warned of the evils of drunkenness, premature sex, and talking to strangers. The rest of that blissful semester, Nancy and I were in love. Among my buddies it wasn’t cool to admit you had a girlfriend or that you had any feelings for the opposite sex. I never talked about Nancy to my parents or anyone else. Sometimes we would meet at Mary Jean Bell’s apartment and listen to records. Mary Jean’s father was “Ding” Bell, who played with the Spike Jones Orchestra. Mary Jean had all the hot 78 rpms, a lot of Spike Jones of course, but also Stan Kenton’s Orchestra, which was considered taboo at our school. Kenton’s music was a sinful, corrupting influence, our teachers told us, much like Elvis’s for a later generation. I remember listening to Kenton’s band on a portable 78 rpm player under the bed at Mary Jean’s apartment. The music was dissonant, rhythmic, surrealistic, compulsive.

  One morning I arrived at school, and Nancy wasn’t there. She must be sick, I thought. Two or three days went by, and she didn’t show up. I got up the courage to ask Miss Nordblad if something was wrong with Nancy.

  “She left school, William—she transferred.”

  My heart sank through the floor, I felt helpless and empty. “But . . . where?” I stammered.