On Billy Friedkin

Great picture of him here – kind of noir-ish. And that photo has set my mind a-rambling.

I have been watching Billy Friedkin movies before I even knew who the guy was.

The Exorcist basically ruined my childhood.

It wasn’t until I read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that I learned about this guy’s journey – which is fascinating – it kind of incorporates the entire 70s-autuer-director journey – all in one man’s life.

I recently saw again The French Connection (it was my first Netflix movie – I will always look on it fondly for that reason, no just kidding) – and you know, you hear so much about these movies, they’re referenced so often – that sometimes you forget. You forget how good they are, or how influential … we’ve now seen so many spectacular car chases that perhaps the one in French Connection seems (in memory) not so cool, or memorable … You take it for granted. “Oh yeah, whatever. Gene Hackman. Famous car chase with elevated train. Yeah.” That is – you take it for granted until you see it again. (here is the famous car chase scene on YouTube – it starts with Popeye Doyle basically commandeering some dude’s car and taking off with it … although, if you haven’t seen the movie – I beg you not to just watch the chase on You Tube. Rent the damn movie – it’s so good!!) There is a reason why this chase is remembered, revered, imitated. You can’t beat it – for its reality, rawness, and sheer gripping excitement. This isn’t a car chase where you have to adjust your expectations, and by that I mean: if you see a movie from the 50s, 40s, 30s, whatever – and you see a fist fight, or you see a love scene … if you are passively expecting a bloody realistic gory Raging Bull type fight, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re expecting to see naked writhing bodies, you’ll be disappointed. So in order to not only accept these old movies, but LOVE them – you have to get into the world of that time. Accept their conventions. Don’t be all baffled because movie styles or acting styles are different. Adjust, for God’s sake.

But that car chase in French Connection still – to mind – stands as one of the greatest car chases of all time. Nothing looks orchestrated. There are certainly no special effects involved. The lighting is grim, that kind of blinding wintry sun that New York gets sometimes – the kind of sunlight that points out the urban decay, the grime. Popeye Doyle is driving like a bat out of hell – and it seems completely real. There is nothign “cartoonish” about this chase. You fear for his life, you fear for the passersby who stop and stare. Sometimes you are looking at the street from Hackman’s perspective behind the wheel – and that is truly nervewracking – and sometime (like in that great and now classic shot) you get far enough back to see the train racing along the elevated tracks, with the car barreling along beneath. UnbeLIEVable. Audacious, really. That’s one of the words that always comes up for me when I think of Billy Friedkin. Audacious. To say: I want to do a car chase – where a car chases an elevated train – trying to stay beneath the train above him on the tracks – with passersby – and oncoming traffic – and busy daylight New York streets … that is some audacious shit. I love it.

Audacious can be good. Audacious can also be self-destructive. This ended up being the case for Friedkin – but there’s something really attractive to me about his audaciousness … I root for him. The dude was nominated for, what, 10 Oscars? Even Sorcerer – which was pretty much a financial disaster – and the end of Billy Friedkin’s Golden Boy period – was nominated for an Oscar. I find Friedkin fascinating and always have. If you look at pictures of him in the 70s, he wears a long white scarf, a leather jacket, and big Jim Jones-ish Ray Banz … stalking around like he owns the world. And for a brief period there, he did. He could name his price. I love that he’s still around, though. And his career has been no slouch since his heyday. I mean – To Live and Die in LA was one of the best films of the 80s – I loved that movie. Friedkin survives!

Here is one of my favorite anecdotes about Friedkin.

He had been struggling to make Sorcerer (a movie that was so expensive that it required mergings of conglomerations and corporate backings and complicated financing to just finish it … and then of course – it opened and barely made back any of that money – this was the death knell for Friedkin – it was too big a bomb to let him off the hook) – but Friedkin, to this day, says that Sorcerer is the favorite movie of his career. He can “bear” to watch it. It was one of those massive projects that got away from its director – a typical thing that happened in the 70s – and sometimes it worked out well (Apocalypse Now) and sometimes it was a debacle (Heaven’s Gate is first on that list, naturally – it’s rare that one movie brings down an entire studio around its own disaster … but also Sorecerer). The auteurs gone nuts!!

Anyhoo. Sorcerer finally opens in 1977. Friedkin was nervous about it. Nervous about how it would do. The first time the preview for The Sorcerer played in a movie theatre – Bud Smith (the editor who had cut the preview, put it together) went to go see it. It was playing before the headline movie … another little movie that opened in 1977 … one that nobody thought would do all that much, because it was so “out of sync” with the style of the rest of the movies at that time … you know, it was a little independent movie called Star Wars.

Here’s the response from the Friedkin team (this is an excerpt from the marvelous Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, linked to above):

The Sorcerer trailer Bud Smith cut played in front of Star Wars at the Chinese Theatre. Says Smith, “When our trailer faded to black, the curtains closed and opened again, and they kept opening and opening, and you started feeling this huge thing coming over your shoulder overwhelming you, and heard this noise, and you went right off into space. It made our film look like this little, amateurish piece of shit. I told Billy, ‘We’re fucking being blown off the screen. You’ve got to see this.'”

Friedkin went with his new wife, French actress Jeanne Moreau. Afterward, he fell into conversation with the manager of the theatre. Nodding his head toward the river of humanity cascading through the theater’s doors, the man said, “This film’s doing amazing business.”

“Yeah, and my film’s going in in a week,” replied Billy nervously.

“Well, if it doesn’t work, this one’ll go back in again.”

“Jesus!” Friedkin looked like he had been punched in the stomach. He turned to Moreau, said, “I dunno, little sweet robots and stuff, maybe we’re on the wrong horse.” A week later, Sorcerer did follow Star Wars into the Chinese. Dark and relentless, especially compared to Lucas’s upbeat space opera, it played to an empty house, and was unceremoniously pulled to make room for the return of C3P0 et al.

A new era had begun.

But Friedkin is still here.