For Nairn-Smith, the relationship was a head trip, as they liked to say in the ’60s. For all his passion for basketball, physically, she found Friedkin lacking. “He loved junk food, loved hamburgers and hot dogs,” she recalls. “He had a terrible body, this horrible fat stomach and wide hips and spindly legs. He’d go to the gym and get a rubdown. That was the extent of the workout.” His hair was long, like everybody else’s, and he wore lightly tinted aviator glasses, because, says Jennifer, “he had these small, beady little eyes.”
Billy had to go to Iraq to shoot the top of The Exorcist. He pressured her to quit Pippin and visit her parents in Tasmania while he was in Iraq. Two of Friedkin’s circle of familiars, Jerry Murphy and Fat Thomas, who had scared off her stalker, collected her in a bullet-riddled Cadillac and drove her to the airport.
With Jennifer now in his possession, the chase was over, and abruptly, the romance ended. The other men were no longer aphrodisiacs, but annoyances. “There were people still buzzing around,” she continues. “He was upset at that, banned it all. He started intimidating me. He was a monster. Once he raised his hand, and I said, ‘If you ever do that, I’ll be gone in three seconds flat.’ But he came down on me very heavily. He pushed a button in the insecure part of myself. You know these women who get beaten? They can’t stand up, lose all self-respect, self-control, self-everything. It’s pretty terrible. I was like putty, totally retreated and withdrew.”
Meanwhile, the production was falling further and further behind. Christmas 1972 found Friedkin still shooting at Fox in New York. An enormous table was put out on the stage laden with holiday food. Friedkin got drunk and tried to do the tablecloth trick, but only succeeded in sending the dishes flying.
The rushes were scary, but the overruns were scarier. “Billy was really bad, he wasn’t controllable, and fighting,” says Warners’ Joe Hyams. Adds executive Dick Lederer, “The movie was running way over. He was driving them crazy, because he was absolutely intent on getting it exactly the way he wanted, and there were terrible technical problems, to freeze the set so that icicles would form, cost a fortune in air conditioning. Until he got it he wouldn’t quit. The cost was going up and up. It was scary.”
Wells wanted to move it to L.A. where they could exercise more control over Friedkin. But once Friedkin got some film in the can, the studio was helpless. Every time a suit would indicate concern over the budget, Billy would say, “So fire me.” Of course, he knew they couldn’t. Recalls Friedkin, “I’m sure they were sticking pins in a Bill Friedkin doll. But I made as though I was working on the Sistine Chapel, and they never really bothered me.” Adds Blatty, “They had the tiger by the tail. The head of physical production, Charlie Greenlaw, would fly in once a week. He would come through the door of the soundstage about two feet but no further, and after twenty minutes he’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got to catch my flight back.’ and he’d be in a cab back to Kennedy.”
Ultimately, it was the rushes that made the difference. According to Calley, “There was a lot of newspaper stuff about, it’s a runaway, the company is going to lose its ass on this picture, and Friedkin is running amok. Everybody was afraid of Cleopatra, that almost brought down Fox. A $7 million budget blew up to a $30 million budget. It was like when Stanley Kubrick took 2001 to Wasserman, Lew said, ‘Kid, you don’t spend over a million dollars on science fiction movies. You just don’t do that.’ And this was about, you don’t spend over a million bucks on a horror movie. But Billy was an angel. He was extraordinary and he would come up every day and say, ‘You’ve seen the dailies, are they okay?’ I’d say, ‘Billy, I can see the wires. When she does the head thing. It’s a bad joke.’ He said, ‘Look, I don’t want to bury you. Maybe I can cut it.’ I said, ‘No, we gotta do it again. The whole point of this is, it has to be perfect.’” But perfect or not, Friedkin was setting a precedent that would come back to haunt him. He was acting as his own producer.
WARNERS WAS DETERMINED to open The Exorcist at Christmas 1973, and tried to rush the picture through post-production, but there were new delays. With most films, the editor is at work assembling a rough cut while the director is still shooting. But Friedkin was so determined to control every aspect of the production that he hired an editor with no feature experience and refused to cut film during the eight- or nine-month production. It wasn’t until Friedkin wrapped that he hired a veteran editor, Evan Lottman, who had to begin from scratch. Says Lottman, “It was all about power. He wanted to be in control of the film.”
The score was written by Lalo Schifrin, an Oscar-nominated composer. The time came for Friedkin to hear the score, played by a hundred musicians on a studio stage. Billy leaned over and said, “Sounds like fuckin’ Mexican marimba music. I hate fuckin’ Mexican music.” And he threw it all out. Six weeks later on a dubbing stage at Todd-AO, he needed a piece of music. He said, “I remember something that Lalo did that maybe we can use here.” The techie put the reel on, Friedkin listened to it and hated it so much he went back in the machine room, grabbed the reel, ran out the front door and threw it as far as he could into the parking lot across the street, saying, “That’s where that fuckin’ marimba music belongs.”
Friedkin talked Nairn-Smith into going to L.A. with him. They rented a place on Sunset Plaza Drive, behaved as if they were married. Their friends referred to them as “the Friedkins.” They wore wedding bands from Cartier. He wore his on his pinkie, would get upset if she weren’t wearing hers. He forbade her to dance. She told him, “If I can’t dance, I’ve got to do something. I can’t be just having facials and doing my nails.” He was obdurate. She said, “Okay, if I can’t dance, I want a baby.”
“Okay, you can have a baby,” she says he said. Some weeks later she ventured, “You know what? We’re pregnant.”
“No, you can’t have it.”
“Oh, but you said...” Friedkin wasn’t happy. “He screamed and foamed at the mouth and intimidated me into an abortion,” she says. “Then I got pregnant again and they were twins and then there was another abortion. From then on, my life stopped.”
The sound mixing took four months, went down to the wire. Like Coppola, Friedkin would solicit opinions from anyone who was around, the more déclassé, the better. He used to ask the janitor to look at a reel, and if he understood it, that was good enough for him, and he’d put it to bed. Jennifer was helping with the looping. “She was a wonderful girl, and Billy treated her like a dog,” says Jim Nelson, who was hired at the last minute to supervise the mix. “He screamed and yelled at people, he was the worst. I went from a seven-year contract as his associate producer to the guy he hated most in the world—in two minutes. We were right up against the release date, and Calley called on Friday, said, ‘Are you guys gonna be done?’ I said, ‘Basically we’re finished.’ Billy heard me on the phone, and he said, ‘We’re not finished until I tell you we’re finished. You have betrayed me, blah blah blah,’ and that ended it. He made Rafelson look like Donna Reed. Bob wanted his own way, but he wasn’t vicious. Billy was vicious.”
Usually, when studio executives screen a picture, they exit without comment. After Ashley, Calley, and Wells saw The Exorcist for the first time, they just sat there, dumbfounded. Calley asked, rhetorically, “What in the fuck did we just see?” They loved it, but did not know what they had, and decided to release it in no more than thirty theaters, where it was to play exclusively for six months, a terrible release pattern for a potential blockbuster, as The Godfather had shown. Nor did Warners preview the picture. They were afraid to. Says Friedkin, “If The Exorcist had previewed it would never have come out. ‘Cause people would have written on cards, ‘This is terrible, you have a little girl masturbating with a crucifix, you dirty Jew bastard.’ Those were the kind of notes we got anyway, afterward. But if we’d gotten them before, they would have died.” The Exorcist was trade-screened on December 21, and opened on December 26. Burstyn was in her kitchen, watching the TV. “There was a shot of people in Montreal standing in line from
four o’clock in the morning waiting for the movie theater to open up, and it was like forty degrees below zero or something. I thought, How can a movie have that kind of impact before it even opens? I just couldn’t believe it.”
The Exorcist was strong medicine. People collapsed, fainted, reportedly broke into hysterics. The exhibitors were ready with kitty litter for those who couldn’t keep their dinners down. Moviegoers who were convinced that they or loved ones were possessed by the devil besieged the Catholic Church with requests for exorcisms. An official of the Church of Scotland wrote that he’d “rather take a bath in pig manure than see the film.” Reviewers were divided. Kael hated the movie, made fun of Blatty talking about communicating with his dead mother, scoffed at his serious claims for the movie, quoted Friedkin at his most Goebbels-like: “If it’s a film by somebody instead of for somebody, I smell art.”
It is easy to see why people, especially women, detested the picture. It presents a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession, and the men in the picture—almost all celibate priests—unite to abuse and torture Regan, as John Boorman recognized, in their efforts to return her to a presexual innocence. Having Regan jam a crucifix into her vagina is intended to be a sensational and fiendishly inventive bit of sacrilege, but it is also a powerful image of self-inflicted abortion, whether the tool is a crucifix or a coathanger. Both Friedkin and Blatty were fixated on their saintly mothers; the scenes between Karras and his dying mother were obviously heartfelt for both men, and in the repressive sexual economy of the film, Regan’s whore is the flip side of the Madonna. The Exorcist is filled with disgust toward female bodily functions; it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to see the famously gross scene in which Blair vomits pea soup as a metaphor, Carrie-like, for menstruation. Indeed, The Exorcist is drenched in a kind of menstrual panic.
But for most people, the picture worked. It was terrifying. Like Bonnie and Clyde and other New Hollywood pictures, The Exorcist turned its back on the liberal therapeutic framework of the postwar period. (The psychiatrist in the movie is just befuddled, clearly inadequate to the task, and Burstyn has no choice but to call upon the Church.) In exchange, the picture substituted a kind of born-again medievalism. Like The Godfather, The Exorcist looked ahead to the coming Manichaean revolution of the right, to Reagan nattering about the godless Evil Empire. Satan is the bad dad who takes up residence in the household of the divorced MacNeil in the stead of the absent father-husband. Families who pray together and stay together don’t have unseemly encounters with the devil.
Friedkin was upset by the conservative release pattern. He says, “They didn’t see this thing coming. They didn’t see Star Wars coming. These were things that happened to them. They didn’t make them happen. Imagine what The Exorcist would have done had it opened like The Godfather, or Jaws a couple of years later.” Despite the fact that Warners had mucked up the distribution, The Exorcist grossed about $160 million ($89 million in rentals), in the days of $3 tickets, before it played out.
Indeed, the numbers were astounding. The Exorcist accounted for 15 percent of key market grosses in February 1974. When the box office numbers started coming in, Dick Lederer walked into Barry Beckerman’s office at Warners, threw them on his desk, and said, “Kid, the fun is over. There are guys in New York looking at these figures, saying, ‘This is the kind of money you can make in the movie business?’ We’ve been having a good time out here and been very successful, but it’s gonna get real serious after this.” Like The Godfather the year before, The Exorcist changed the business.
THE NIGHT THE EXORCIST opened in Paris, Friedkin wanted to meet French filmmakers, and with the help of Joe Hyams and the French Film Office had dinner with Henri-Georges Clouzot, Claude Berri, François Truffaut and a few other French directors upstairs at Fouquets. It was a love fest. They all adored The French Connection, and as the red wine flowed, the French were fulsome in their praise of the American. Likewise, to meet the cream of France’s Nouvelle Vague was any American cineaste’s dream, and Friedkin was excessively deferential. He proceeded to confess that he’d stolen from all of them, and he particularized, going through their films scene by scene, explaining how he adapted them to his own. They were dumbfounded. Clouzot asked, “How could you keep all that shit in your head?” Clouzot’s films had a big impact on Friedkin as a young man, and he repeatedly addressed him as “maestro.” Clouzot asked Friedkin what he was going to do next. “I want to do your picture,” replied Friedkin in all innocence. “Wages of Fear.”
“Why?”
“I want to do it. It’s a masterpiece.”
“Billy, you’re being foolish. You’re a bright young guy, what do you want to do this old tired shit for?”
“Please, maestro, let me do it.”
Flattered, Clouzot gave him the rights, which Billy discovered later he didn’t own. As he was leaving, Billy joked, “I promise you I will not do it as well as you did.”
Eight:
The Gospel According to St. Martin
1973
• How Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, Lucas proved he could kill kittens with American Graffiti, while Nicholas Beach became the movie brat Malibu.
“In the trades I see, ‘This picture will be helmed by veteran director Martin Scorsese.’ It seems like only yesterday I was a ‘new young filmmaker.’ ”
—MARTIN SCORSESE
In the summer of 1973, Martin Scorsese and producer Jonathan Taplin were making the rounds, looking for a studio to distribute Mean Streets. Scorsese thought he had an in at Paramount. After all, his good friend Francis had directed the movie that saved the studio, that made Italians-with-guns a hot item. Marty had a meeting, came away elated. He didn’t yet know that rarely in Hollywood did anyone ever say no. He thought, Oh my God, they love me! They’re going to take the picture. The next morning, he and Taplin were going to screen the film for Peter Bart, and later that afternoon, for Warners. Scorsese asked Taplin, “Warners is bidding for it?”
“Yeah...”
“Paramount’s going to take it, so do you want to cancel the Warners appointment?”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we should go just in case, just to see. Maybe they can have a little bidding war between them.”
“That would be great.” They were confident that when Bart and his assistant, Ronda Gomez, saw it, they would close the deal at Paramount. But Bart was in a bad mood, made worse by the spectacle of Marty’s friends—his agent, Harry Ufland, his writing partner, Mardik Martin, Taplin, and a few others—lounging around the screening room when he had been assured Scorsese would be there alone. Marty popped a Valium, trying to calm himself down. No more than ten minutes in, Bart leaned over the telephone console, called the projectionist on the intercom, and the lights went on. He stood up and announced, “Don’t waste my time, go sell it to John Calley, I’m not interested,” and walked out. “We were shocked,” says Scorsese. “It was like a slap.” Quips Bart, “I really felt the courteous thing for the studio to do was give a quick answer. They didn’t take it that way. It was a quicker answer than they wanted.”
Taplin took Scorsese to a Turkish bath. “We had the film with us in huge 35 mm cans, walking around like beggars with this movie,” recalls Scorsese. “We sat in the bath laughing, from the unexpectedness of it, and saying, ‘Thank God we didn’t blow off Warners.’”
That afternoon, they drove out to Burbank, screened it for Calley, and Leo Greenfield, head of distribution, both of whom had lived in New York. Scorsese was in a state of high anxiety as the film began, the lovely shots of the corridor of lights arching over the crowded streets of the San Gennaro festival sparkling against the night blackness of the city, dying as each frame went through the projector. Calley and Greenfield had ordered lunch, and just when De Niro began his brilliantly incoherent improv with Keitel in the back room of the club, nervously explaining in insanely intricate detail why he hadn’t been making the payments
on the money he owed, a waiter walked through the door of the screening room, stood right in front of the screen, and asked loudly, “Who’s got the tuna on rye?” Somebody said, “Shhh,” and Scorsese breathed a sigh of relief. He felt it had kicked in.
Calley and Greenfield were getting excited, pointing at the screen exclaiming, “Hey, I remember that place.” “I used to hang around with a guy just like that.” Calley said, “Wait till Ted Ashley sees this. He used to live right around the corner.” They cracked up when Sandy Weintraub and her sister Barbara appeared in one scene, and De Niro said, “Which one do you want, the Weintraub broad?” By the picture’s climax, a hush had fallen over the screening room, as the executives watched and heard the swerving car and the squeal of brakes, the shots, the crash, De Niro covered with blood, holding his neck, staggering past the geyser of water from the broken hydrant, and then it was over. No one said a word. Walking out, Marty joked that Calley had liked the picture because the Weintraub girls were treated like pieces of meat, and he couldn’t stand their father, Fred, his former bête noir at Warners. Whatever the reason, they had sold Mean Streets to Warners.
FOR SCORSESE, Mean Streets meant a return to the old neighborhood, the place in which he had grown up. An insular, devoutly Catholic ethnic subculture, Little Italy on New York’s Lower East Side might just as well have been another planet. Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942, in Flushing, Queens, where his barely upwardly mobile parents, like other children of immigrants, fled the tenements. Five years later, for reasons the young boy never fully understood, his family moved back to a fourth-floor walk-up on Elizabeth Street, his father’s old block. Charlie Scorsese was a pants presser and tailor, his mother a seamstress. They were hardworking union people, only a generation removed from the Old Country. “I lived in a Sicilian village most of my life,” says Scorsese. “There was Us, and there was the world. You could feel palpable tension, always on the verge of violence.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 33
