RIP: Why didn’t William Friedkin get much credit when he was alive?
Following his death, Friedkin’s peers have come forward to praise him. In a typically erudite post on social media, Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola wrote, “I grieve for the loss of a much-loved companion. His accomplishments in Cinema are extraordinary and unique” — gotta love that capitalized C there. Mission: Impossible filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie, whose action scenes owe a substantial debt to Friedkin, wrote, “Raconteur, hellraiser, gentleman, giant. He smashed the mold while making it, ensuring he would always be imitated and never, ever equaled.”
Fine words after a man’s death are easy. Why didn’t he get this credit when he was alive?
Certainly, Friedkin’s two most famous films cast a long shadow. The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman in what might still be this great actor’s finest performance, is the ultimate gritty New York police procedural, shot as if it was a documentary and all but rubbing the audience’s faces in the dirt. And The Exorcist, which established Friedkin as an A-list director and turned satanic possession into box-office gold, was all the scarier because of the filmmaker’s lack of overt sensationalism, meaning that when the big frights came, they really landed hard. Both were big commercial hits, and had matters then gone slightly differently, there is no reason why Friedkin should not have had a career along the lines of a Scorsese or a Spielberg.
Unfortunately, Friedkin’s next picture, Sorcerer, a remake of the French thriller The Wages of Fear, was a substantial commercial flop, opening a month after Star Wars and being completely ignored in its wake. That the film was substantially underrated and is only now being given its due reappraisal, was little comfort. The director also acquired a reputation for being difficult on set, and without the comfort blanket of profit, Friedkin’s lucrative deal with Universal Studios was canceled immediately. His next movies, the undistinguished crime comedy The Brink’s Job and the dark psychosexual thriller Cruising, certainly displayed his versatility. The latter was decades ahead of its time in its unflinching depiction of BDSM practices in New York gay bars, leading it to become a cult film, but Friedkin’s imperial phase was over.
As Peter Biskind recounted in his 1998 look at the Hollywood Young Turks of the late 1960s and ’70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:
The Sorcerer trailer Bud Smith cut played in front of Star Wars at [Grauman’s] Chinese Theater. 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 f*cking being blown off the screen. You gotta go see this.’”
Friedkin went with his new wife, French actress Jeanne Moreau. Afterward, he fell into conversation with the manager of the theater. 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 C3PO et al.
Sorcerer was a major disaster, grossing only a piddling $9 million worldwide. Friedkin was dumbstruck. He could not believe the public didn’t like it. He could not believe the critics didn’t like it. Says Smith, “He probably put more into Sorcerer than any other film he’d ever done—time, energy, labor, and thought.” The picture is punctuated by some striking images, but it is self-consciously arty and pretentious, ironic in view of the way Friedkin had once put down film art in favor of commercialism, derided Coppola and Bogdanovich for their artistic aspirations. Friedkin says now, “I probably shouldn’t have done Sorcerer, ‘cause it was written to be a star-driven vehicle, and there were no stars in it. I made a big mistake with McQueen. I didn’t realize that the close-up is more important than the wide shot. A shot of Steve’s face was worth more than any landscape I could have shot. That was great hubris on my part. But the mere fact that the studio didn’t want me to make it kept me persevering and overlooking all of these things.”
The Mandalorian’s second season episode “The Believer” was a fun homage to Sorcerer, but in retrospect, by simply shooting it, it’s a bit of a cruel joke on him as well. RIP
