Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Friedkin claims he directed his first live television when he was twenty-two, for which he earned $33 a week. A year later he was directing regularly. He got fired from every station in town, but over the next several years, he somehow managed to direct, he says, over two thousand shows, including a dozen documentaries. With local TV in its embryonic stage, it was a great time to be young and ambitious. Friedkin and Butler were too green to know what they couldn’t do. “We were having a ball, walking down the street, blowing ideas out of our heads, and then we went out and did them,” says Butler.

  Friedkin was fearless. “Chicago had a black South Side that white people didn’t go into if they had any sense,” continues Butler. “We were there in the middle of the night, just walking into these nightclubs and shooting film, no permission. How do you keep from getting killed doing that? I don’t know what you’d call it—madness. He was just driven. To get a film done, nothing would stand in the way.”

  Even then he had a reputation for being difficult and abrasive. Says Butler, “Billy had this fantastic ability to see through people. Between the time you came through the door and the time you got to his desk, he had you made. If Billy wanted to tell you what you were really like, he was going to destroy you. It was like a psychiatrist going right inside your head and unhooking the wires.”

  In the early ’60s, Friedkin made a documentary called The People Versus Paul Crump. Crump was a black man who may or may not have killed a guard in the course of a holdup at a baby food factory. He professed his innocence; the film would be a plea to spare his life. The People Versus Paul Crump won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1962. David Wolper saw it—it beat a couple of his own entries—and offered Friedkin a job. But he wasn’t ready to leave Chicago, and turned it down.

  Chicago in those days was bubbling with talent. Haskell Wexler was making documentaries. Every Friday night, Friedkin played poker with Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren. “I remember the day I decided to leave Chicago,” he says. “It was one of the few nights that I lost at poker. The game lasted till Saturday morning. Studs lost too, and we got outside, there was a massive snowstorm that we weren’t aware of, three, four feet of snow, below-zero weather, the wind screaming off the fucking lake, and my car wouldn’t start. We started to walk home, which in my case was about seventy-five blocks. It was like through the steppes. Studs would say, ‘Ah, there’s the hotel that my old man used to run.’ I didn’t give a shit, I was freezing, and on that walk, I said to myself, ‘I gotta get the fuck outta here.’” Like Bogdanovich, Billy headed west in 1965, in an old Ford.

  Friedkin joined Wolper but soon left him to take a job directing episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents for television. On Friedkin’s first day of shooting, Hitchcock came to the set to film his introduction to the series. His only words to the young director were, “Mr. Friedkin, you’re not wearing a tie.” Friedkin thought he was joking; he wasn’t. Always the take-no-prisoners iconoclast, Friedkin said later, “I don’t give a flying fuck about him, and I’m not a worshiper of his, nor have I ever set out to emulate him.” He added, “But I’m glad that people deify directors because I make more money that way.” Five or six years later, he ran into Hitchcock at a DGA awards ceremony for The French Connection. He walked up to the great man’s table, snapped his bow tie in front of his nose, and said, “How’d’ya like the tie, Hitch?” Of course, Hitchcock didn’t remember the incident, but Friedkin never forgot, or forgave, a slight.

  Once Friedkin broke into features, he made four in quick succession. The first was Good Times, with Sonny and Cher, released in 1967, another attempt, like the Monkees, to rip off A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Good Times flopped, and Friedkin realized he didn’t like any of the scripts he was looking at. He announced to Variety in April 1967, when Good Times came out, that “the plotted film is on the way out and is no longer of interest to a serious director.... A new theater audience, I’m told, is under thirty and largely interested in abstract experience.... I defy anyone to tell me what Blow-Up, Juliet of the Spirits, La Guerre Est Finie, and the Beatles films are about.” He attacked the industry for its big-budget productions, and swore he would keep the budgets of his own films down to a million or under.

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth, however, than he plunged into a $5 million film, The Night They Raided Minsky’s for UA, from a script co-written by Norman Lear. Ralph Rosenblum, who later cut for Woody Allen and edited Minsky’s, was annoyed and puzzled by the director’s “aggressiveness and rank-pulling.” But Rosenblum felt the studios had brought it on themselves. “Hollywood was in its down-on-your-knee-to-youth phase at the time,” he wrote in his book (with Robert Karen), When the Shooting Stops. “The studio executives had billed Billy as a prodigy—who could be surprised if he behaved as if he were on an altar?”

  Friedkin moved his mother out to L.A. that same year, installed her in a big house he was renting in the flats of Beverly Hills, between Sunset and Santa Monica, that used to belong to Mickey Rooney. Referring to his obsession with his mother, Friedkin’s enemies—and there were many already—used to refer to the house as the Bates Motel.

  After The Birthday Party, an adaptation of a Harold Pinter play which did no business at all, Friedkin made The Boys in the Band, which was released in 1970. The script was written by Mart Crowley, who also produced, and was based on Crowley’s play of the same title. Crowley introduced Friedkin to Kitty Hawks, daughter of Howard Hawks and Slim Keith. Keith had been married briefly to Leland Hayward, which made Kitty Brooke Hayward’s half-sister for a Hollywood moment. Kitty was a stylish, beautiful, and very well connected rather neurotic woman who had a famously bad relationship with her legendary father. She was working at an ad agency and did some modeling. She and Friedkin started seeing a lot of each other during the production of Boys, and he moved into her apartment in New York at 1049 Park Avenue.

  One day, she got a letter from her father, then in his seventies, whom she had not seen in almost two decades, asking to meet her. He had seen her picture on the cover of Vogue. Billy and Kitty flew out to L.A., met him at Chianti Ristorante on Melrose. When they arrived, he was already there, bald as an egg, eyebrows like little puffs of cotton, looking like a newborn baby. He pushed a brown paper grocery bag at her, saying, “I’ve got something for you.” Overcome, tears welling up in her eyes, she opened the bag—and inside were two men’s shirts, unwrapped, from the May Company he had bought and tossed into the bag. Boys had just come out. Hawks said, “That’s about those queer fellows.”

  “Yeah,” replied Friedkin.

  “I don’t know why you’d want to make a picture like that. People don’t want stories about somebody’s problems or any of that psychological shit. What they want is action stories. Every time I made a film like that, with a lotta good guys against bad guys, it had a lotta success, if that matters to you.”

  When they returned to their hotel, she burst into tears. Friedkin got the shirts.

  Hawks’s words did matter to Friedkin. “They really stayed with me,” he recalls. “I would have embarked on a course of having made obscure Miramax type films before Miramax. But I had this epiphany that what we were doing wasn’t making fucking films to hang in the Louvre. We were making films to entertain people and if they didn’t do that first they didn’t fulfill their primary purpose. It’s like somebody gives you a key and you didn’t even know there was a lock; it led to The French Connection.” Later, Friedkin would say he was making pictures for his uncle in Chicago who worked in a deli—“Therefore I have my finger on the pulse of America.”

  On the basis of his last two pictures, Friedkin had gotten the reputation for being an art film director, the kiss of death. He was depressed, afraid he would never work again. He almost took a job as an editor at Random House. Afraid that he was becoming unemployable, he did an abrupt about face, planted some quotes in Variety that placed him firmly in the Hollywood mainstream. “American films of the ’30s and ’40
s had clear story lines and strong characters,” he said. “The New Wave of European filmmakers took over and we all went out and copied Godard and Fellini, forgetting where our roots were.”

  The French Connection was a fact-based thriller about a drug ring busted up by the New York police department adapted from a novel by Robin Moore. It had been a best-seller, but the project had nevertheless been turned down all over town. Phil D’Antoni, who produced Bullitt at Warner-Seven Arts, was attached as producer. On the basis of The People Versus Paul Crump, he approached Friedkin. Just before Dick Zanuck left Fox, he said, “I got an extra two million dollars in a drawer here, if you guys can do the picture for that, I’ll make the thing.” He also warned them: “If you muck it up, it’ll just be another episode on Naked City.” “Zanuck was right,” said Friedkin. He thought to himself, I gotta put a cop up there like they’ve never seen before, a cop who’s good and evil, as much victim as victimizer. You don’t see that on Naked City.

  Slim Keith was putting a lot of pressure on Kitty and Billy to get married. But Billy wasn’t the marrying kind, at least not then. Women found Friedkin fascinating. Susanna Moore met him before she became Beatty’s assistant. She says, “Billy had a kind of stream-of-consciousness way of thinking and speaking where the unconscious is very close to the surface that was irresistible, and there was a kind of playfulness and surrealism and brilliance.” He had a series of one-night or one-week stands with “a lot of girls with big tits who gave great head,” as he puts it.

  “The first sex I had was with a black hooker, five bucks a pop, and for years I would just see hookers,” he recalls. “I don’t know that I had the most healthy sexual upbringing. I was really a scoundrel. All I was interested in doing was getting laid. We were shooting The French Connection on Madison Avenue and 69th Street, in front of the Westbury Hotel, Gene Hackman running down the street after some French guy, and a girl with blond hair walked right through the shot. I said to my AD, ‘Get somebody out there, bring her back,’ and I wound up fucking her for six months. That’s all Francis ever cared about, and Bogdanovich—his muse was his cock.” Meanwhile, according to Howard Rosenman, a bright kid from Far Rockaway who was producing commercials, Kitty began an affair with him. (Hawks refused to comment.)

  The French Connection was shot in New York for five weeks through the winter of 1970 and 1971. Producer Philip D’Antoni felt that the reason Bullitt had done so well was because of the hair-raising car chase through the streets of San Francisco, and he insisted there be one in this film as well. Friedkin obliged, shooting a stomach-churning chase, featuring a car and an elevated subway for which The French Connection became duly famous. It was a hard shoot, and Friedkin was often moody and depressed.

  Friedkin took a traditional approach to The French Connection. “I came back to clarity of presentation,” he said, meaning he abandoned the New Hollywood mannerisms of his early work. Later, he would say that what he cut in the editing were the scenes that made the characters more complex, but retarded the action. In two short years, as if heeding Hawks’s chance remark, Friedkin had reversed course.

  Still, increasingly conservative though Friedkin sounded, The French Connection was far from a conventional picture. He was comfortable with the documentary idiom and used it, giving the film a loose, handheld feel that anticipated Hill Street Blues by a decade. Often, he wouldn’t bother to block a scene, just told the cameraman to follow the actors. Moreover, the moral landscape of the film was dark, complicated, and European. “In those days, Coppola and I and other guys, we’d sit around and talk about which way film was heading,” he recalls. “You know, Godard or Fellini, documentary and street reality, or formalism and works of the imagination. They were not, it seemed to me, diametrically opposed. I had seen Z by Costa-Gavras. It made me realize you could take an actual story and make it as exciting as good fiction. I thought, I know how to do that. Fuck, that’s like introducing documentary technique. It was a big influence on The French Connection.”

  Pace Hawks, there were no clear-cut heroes and villains. The French Connection was cynical and hard-edged. Friedkin resisted Hackman’s inclination to sentimentalize his character, the “hero,” Popeye Doyle. In one scene, Doyle shoots an unarmed man in the back who is running away from him. The villain, the French connection (aka “Frog One”), escapes, and at the end, Doyle shoots and kills an FBI agent. Like Altman, Friedkin dismissed the script (for which Ernest Tidyman won an Oscar). From his point of view, the dialogue was ad-libbed and improvised.

  By June, the engagement to Kitty was off. “My career has ruined every personal relationship I’ve ever had,” Friedkin complained, “and there’s nothing I can do about it. In order to make a relationship work, both parties have to be concerned about what’s right for us. But if us is ever at odds with what is right for me and my picture, there’s no contest. Maybe it’s a cavalier coldness on my part—I just don’t know myself that well.”

  The French Connection, which cost $1.8 million, was released in New York on October 7, 1971. Friedkin was on the phone to the studio the night it opened, asking for the numbers, how many people attended the first show, the second show. He hung up, a big grin wreathing his face. “I’m a millionaire,” he announced happily. Indeed, The French Connection was a huge hit, reaping $26.3 million in domestic rentals before it played out, plus $12 million foreign and a $2 million TV sale. It turned Friedkin into a bankable director. His first check totaled $643,000. He started taking tennis lessons with pro Alex Olmedo at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  After Friedkin won his Oscar, he was battered by feelings of inadequacy. “The next day was the only time I ever went to see a psychiatrist,” he recalls. “I was profoundly unhappy. I told him I won an Oscar and didn’t think I deserved it. It was not so much unworthiness I felt, as much as I had a perspective: the Shostakovich 7th Symphony, the Beethoven 5th Symphony, I’ve never done anything like that. He never said a word, just kept writing, voluminous notes on a yellow lined pad. The hour was up, and I left.”

  Still, Friedkin’s foray into commercial filmmaking had paid off. For the moment, anyway, he relinquished whatever thoughts he had of turning his considerable talents to anything other than making money. “I have no image of myself as an artist,” he boasted in the press. “I’m making commercial films, I’m making a product designed to have people buy it.”

  IN EARLY SUMMER Coppola called Bogdanovich, told him that Bluhdorn had suggested starting a company. “We’d get a bunch of directors in, make pictures with complete autonomy, and eventually take the company public,” recalls Bogdanovich. “That’s how we were going to make a lot of money.” The idea was based on First Artists, an actors’ company that included Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier—only with directors. In many ways, it marked the zenith of directors’ power in the ’70s, and its fate prefigured their fall from grace. Coppola and Bogdanovich, along with Friedkin, flew to New York to meet with Bluhdorn. During the flight, they played poker. Bogdanovich won $100 from Francis, and on the return trip, $100 from Friedkin, playing blackjack.

  Friedkin, who had never met Bluhdorn, was the first one to arrive at his suite in the Essex House. Bluhdorn opened the door, leaned over and sniffed Friedkin’s neck, asking, “Friedkin, vat’s dat shit you’re verink?”

  “Guerlain.”

  “Guerlain? Come here!” He led Friedkin to his bathroom, where he had every aftershave in the world, including a cut glass Baccarat bottle of Guerlain. He opened it up, saying, “Dis is vat I do to Guerlain,” and poured it on his shoes. “That was my introduction to Charlie Bluhdorn, and he never got any saner as long as I knew him,” Friedkin recalls. “Then he launched into a long speech about how years earlier he had been a doorman at the Essex House, saying, ‘Now I own dis fuckink tink. Dat’s vhy I invited you so you learn how to be smart and make money like me.’”

  When Coppola and Bogdanovich arrived, Bluhdorn laid out his idea. They could make any picture they wanted under $3 million w
ithout submitting anything to Paramount. The studio agreed to capitalize the company to the tune of $31.5 million. Quipped Billy Wilder at the time, “This deal should win an Oscar.” To Bluhdorn, it seemed like an inspired scheme, a way to corral the three hottest directors on the planet. But that was only the beginning. Bluhdorn envisioned raiding all the other studios, especially Warners, where he hoped to grab Kubrick and Nichols. This in particular appealed to Coppola, who was still livid at Wells for trying to extract his pound of flesh. “Part of my desire to get involved with [Friedkin and Bogdanovich] is revenge,” he said at the time, “for lots of vindictive, Mafia-like reasons—because I’m so mad at Warner Brothers.”

  Bluhdorn, still very much the loose cannon, had cooked up the idea without telling Yablans. Five minutes before a second meeting at the Gulf + Western Building on Columbus Circle, Bluhdorn called the Paramount head. “You von’t belief vat I’ve done, an impossible dream, an impossible dream,” he barked into the phone.

  “Tell me, Charlie, what have you done? What’s the impossible dream?”

  “I put togedder a company, a director’s company, vid Francis and Friedkin, and Bogdanovich.”

  “Oh, that’s great, that’s great, Charlie, have a good time with it.”