WHAT WENT WRONG - The Exorcist

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

1973's The Exorcist left audiences shocked, nauseous, and scandalized - unfortunately, director William Friedkin had a similar effect on the movie’s cast and crew. This week, Chris & Lizzie tackle the misfires, gunfire, and actual fires that plagued this classic film’s production.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All right, here we go. Hello and welcome to What Went Wrong, the podcast that explores What Went Wrong in famous movie productions from massive blockbusters to major movie flops. I am Lizzie Bassett, as of course you all know. And I am Chris Winterbauer, as fewer of you know. Welcome, Chris. What movie are we talking about today? Today we are talking about the wonderfully twisted childhood ruining movie The Exorcist, which I saw when I was way too young. I did too. And my experience watching this as a little kid was that I thought it was really dumb and not scary at all.

And then I watched it again as an adult and I just like tears were shooting out of my eyeballs. I was so scared. I think it's more upsetting to grownups than it is to children. For sure, for sure. Obviously this is one of the best horror movies ever. made. I don't think anybody can argue against that. I do want to get one thing out of the way at the top here. Yes, there was a convicted murderer in this movie. It is the radiographer with the sort of chinstrap beard and bad Caesar haircut a la George Clooney and ER when Reagan goes to get the

arteriogram at the hospital. He's also potentially a serial killer who may or may not have been active during the time of the movie. No, we're not really going to talk about him because the behind the scenes in this movie is actually so bat-shick crazy that an active serial killer is not the worst of their problems. Who killed gay men? Yeah. And that is the basis of the movie cruising. Well, it's based on a book, but he did base parts of cruising on Paul Bateson, who is the

name of that serial killer. But if you want to learn more about that, I feel certain there are some true crime podcasts that will cover it. Point being... I also think they talk to him in Mind Hunter. They do. They do. We just saw that.

Small world. Indeed. So now we have that out of the way. Let's dig into what went wrong in the production of The Exorcist, because technically that radiologist murdering people was not a problem for them in this production. No, he was a real pro on set. He nailed it. Okay.

So The Exorcist was released on December 26, 1973. What a lovely release date. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's weird. Warner Brothers really leaned in on this one. It was directed by William Friedkin, written by William Peter Bladdy. About Friedkin, cinematographer Owen Roisman said, it was a very difficult film.

Billy was reaching for the limit. He was committed to it, and he was obsessed by it himself. And that obsession was contagious. So that's kind of a little hint at where we're going here. Just a brief setup on this. It stars Jason Miller as Father Carras. Ellen Burstyn as Chris McNeil. Max Von Sito is Father Marin and of course Linda Blair as Reagan McNeil. And Chris, do you want to set up the plot a little bit? Yeah. So the movie follows Reagan McNeil, a 12-year-old girl as she is possessed by a demon and her mother's attempts to cure her daughter, eventually enlisting the help of the local father Carus. Italian-American, Greek-American priest.

Yeah. Yeah. And then eventually Max von Siddow's more experienced character, Father Marin, who may or may not have a history with this demon traced back to his time in Africa and Iraq. Very good. So did you watch it recently in preparation? I watched it last night. Oh, okay.

What's your sort of feeling having just watched it? It's an exceptionally well-made movie. It's a very strange movie. It's a very slow horror movie. I watched it with my wife and the whole, like, Iraq prologue that arguably, like, has no bearing on the plot in a lot of ways. It takes, like, 15 minutes of the movie. It's great. It sets the tone.

It's, like, a really cool sequence. I'm sure it was very expensive. That would be 30 seconds in, like, a modern horror movie. You know what I mean? And then nothing really happens for the first 40 minutes or so. until like Reagan comes downstairs and pees herself. And my favorite part of the movie actually were the cutaways to father,

like just developing Father Karas' character across the whole first half loses his mother, questioning his faith, he's a psychiatrist. Anyway, it was a much more layered and slower movie than I remembered it being. Yeah, it's also interesting because as many of you probably know, when audiences went to go see The Exorcist, there were, you know, all these stories about people fainting

and vomiting in the theater, and, you know, they're lining up around the block to see this. It was an incredible, massive, massive box office success, actually the most successful horror movie of all time until it was surpassed by it in 2017. But it's interesting. The parts that people were throwing up and vomiting at actually were not the possession parts. It was the medical procedures, which honestly, like, I couldn't even look at that when we were watching it. It was, it is really upsetting.

Yeah, the cerebral arterogram is apparently, like, what doctors have said. like that's the most realistic medical procedure put on film, like at the time. Yeah. And at the hands of a serial killer, what more could you ask for? Exactly. Steady hand. Okay, so what went wrong? The movie is obviously incredible, but the way in which it was made, I would argue, is not. Today we're going to talk a lot about the treatment of the actors on the set because it was bad. It was just bad. It's worth noting that the 70s, was really a sort of auteur era for directors.

You've obviously got Coppola, Kubrick, Mike Nichols, and all of these guys are part of what's known as the New Hollywood era. And just a brief setup here. Basically up until the mid-60s, you were still dealing with the studio system in Hollywood, where the studios held really every level of power. And the director, while in charge, didn't have anywhere near the kind of autonomy

that we think of them having today. And Chris, do you know what happened that sort of started to dissolve the studio system. Was this the Congress passing the anti-verdical integration law that separated agencies from studios? Basically what happened is it was decided that studios were violating the Sherman antitrust law because they were just employing entirely vertical integration. They owned every part of the process from the theaters themselves all the way up to the contracts on the directors, the crew, the actors, everything.

So as that starts to crumble, the new Hollywood era ushers in all of these directors who are given pretty much completely free reign on their sets. And you have this pretty dramatic shift in power from the studio to one person, and that's the director. We're actually going to be talking quite a bit about the new Hollywood era over the next two episodes, with two films that encompass it even more than this one. And we will give you a little teaser at what those are a little later in the episode. So The Exorcist is based on a 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty of the same name, and he also wrote the screenplay for this. It is loosely based on a true story. Not particularly important for our episode.

Interesting to look into if you want to. Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Mike Nichols were all on the studios list of directors for this, but they passed. Eventually, Mark Rydell, who I had not heard of him, but he did direct on Golden Pond. he also had just come off of the Cowboys and some other things. He's hired to direct this. However, William Peter Blatty happens to go see a screening of a movie called The French Connection. And he decides the studio has the wrong man. Of course, the French Connection is directed by William Friedkin.

And you've seen that movie, right, Chris? Yeah, it's a great movie. How would you describe it? Thrilling. Real. Raw. So real and raw is exactly what captures Bladdy about this movie. That's what he sees and he says, that is what I want.

for The Exorcist, I want it to feel as real as possible. He frequently keeps talking about how he wants it to have a sort of documentary realism. So he convinces the studio to actually buy out Rydell's contract. They bring Friedkin on right away. Wow. Bladdy comes to him with a script. Friedkin gives the script one look and just throws it out. He actually decided it was not close enough to the book.

And he literally sits Blatty down. goes through the book section by section, like dog-earing the pages that he wants in the movie, and dictates to Bladdy, the author of the book and the screenwriter, exactly what he wants the movie to look like. So you're kind of already seeing the kind of control that he has over this project. And I also want to say, like, he's not wrong. The movie is incredible.

You picked the right moments. Yes, he did. So casting begins, and again, the studio wants big names. Now, in the past, they would have gotten exactly what they wanted, but Freed can push his back and says, no, that's not the right move. actors in studio wanted. They wanted Marlon Brando in the Maxvon Seed-out role. They wanted Jack Nicholson.

I know. They actually wanted Jack Nicholson as Karras, which would have been interesting. They, however, end up with Jason Miller, who is a playwright, who had actually just won the Pulitzer for his play that championship season. He'd never been in a film before. He had, however, studied for three years to be a Jesuit priest before dropping out after a crisis of faith. pretty much exactly like Father Carus.

A couple more things. Bladdy actually wanted Shirley MacLean, who he had written the part four in the book, but her team backed out when they found out that he was insisting on writing the screenplay and producing the movie. Jane Fonda was also offered the role, but she called it capitalist bullshit

and turned it down. I feel like Jane Fonda was just calling everything capital's bullshit in the 70s. It actually makes no sense. And now she makes a Netflix show. So like, let's just be honest. Okay, Jane. Anyway, we end up with Ellen Burstyn in the role of Chris McNeil, who is the mother.

She's amazing in it. She really heavily pursued this. She was friends with Friedkin, and she called him and was like, this is my part. So he winds up with an incredible cast, but not, definitely not the cast the studio was looking for. By the way, also, Max von Sido, he's 43 years old when they filmed this, which means he's at least 30. years too young to play the part of Lancaster Marin. Wait, he was 43 when they shot this?

43, yeah, that's old age makeup on him. He looks 100 years old in this movie. He's 43. No. Yes. What? Not going to right. He's a very handsome 43.

No, sure. But even with old age makeup, he looks so old in this movie. No, it's like, honestly, I was watching makeup test. The makeup artist is Dick Smith, who's like absolutely incredible and watching him put the makeup on Max von Sido. It really is the makeup. I think it's because they don't actually do that much. They just do a lot to the texture of his skin. Oh yeah. I just pulled up a photo of like with and without makeup. That is so shocking. Yeah. I would have guessed he was 73 in this movie. He's 43. He's 43.

I actually would have guessed 100, as I said, 100 years old. Wow. That's crazy. Well, so it's Interesting because like Friedkin has has cast somebody who's literally at least 30 years too young in in the role of The Exorcist. But that's who he wanted. And you know what? It's great. Yeah. So last but not least, we get to casting Reagan. And I want to read a quote from Friedkin about what he says happened when Linda Blair walked in the door of the New York office where he was working on this. I was in despair. My office in New York where we filmed the interiors and where we edited the film. It was at 666 Fifth Avenue. My second. secretary buzzed me and said, there's a woman out here named Eleanor Blair, and she doesn't have an

appointment, but she's brought her daughter with her who's 12 years old. She walked in the door, and I knew instantly that she was the one. She was very cute, smart, adorable, not beautiful, but really very giving and open and just a lovely young girl. I said, Linda, do you know what the exorcist is about? She said, yeah, I read the book. It's about a little girl who gets possessed by the devil and does a whole bunch of bad things. And I said, like, what sort of things? She said, well, she hits her mother across the face and she pushes a man out of her bedroom window and she masturbates with a crucifix.

Oh. And I looked at her mother who was smiling. I said, do you know what that means to masturbate? She said, it's like jerking off, isn't it? I said, have you ever done that? She said, sure, haven't you? And so I hired her because I knew she could handle this material with a sense of humor.

How old was this child? 12. Oh, my God. Well, hold on. Because as I was doing research, is the first indication to me that Friedkin's perception of his actors is maybe not entirely in line with reality. I want to listen to a little clip of Linda herself talking about the masturbation scene as an adult. I didn't understand what masturbation was at that age. So I didn't understand,

you know, I had, there was a box and a sponge and caro syrup with red food coloring. And, that was between my legs. So I just had to put the cross into the box. That's all I was doing. I had no idea what it was until many years later. So very different than Friedkin's recollection. Very different. Jesus.

Yeah. Dark. It is. I think it's very indicative of sort of how he wanted to see the actor's involvement in this and how he wanted to feel about, I guess, the way that they felt about the project. Mm-hmm. So production begins in 1972. Now, the first thing that goes wrong is that a bird flies into a circuit box on the set, ends up setting a fire that burns down almost the entire house set with one exception.

Chris, can you guess which part of the set didn't burn? Her bedroom. Yep. Completely untouched. That's creepy. It sets them back almost six weeks. So we're going to go back to Owen Roisman again, who's the cinematographer. He says Billy and I had a relationship.

so I wasn't afraid of him, but a lot of people were. He did fire plenty of them, and a lot of other people quit. The makeup artist Dick Smith quit three times. Each time Billy had to talk him into staying. He can be the most charming guy in the world when he wants to, but he's also the biggest schizophrenic I know, completely warm one minute and just venomous the next. That's fun.

Sounds a little bit like the demon that's possessing Reagan. Also, I was just thinking about how like with Linda Blair, it's entirely possible that she even said, you know, when he says, you know, do you know what masturbation is? And she says, oh, yeah, like, you mean jerking off? It's entirely possible that she said that without having any idea what that was, just that somebody said that. And then he's just like, oh, great, this precocious 12-year-old.

Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. I think she's telling the truth that she had no idea. Yeah, exactly. Especially when you're watching footage of her behind the scenes in this. Like, I think it's very clear that she doesn't fully understand what's going on. She is amazing in this movie, by the way.

Yeah. So let's get into Friedkin's directing style for a minute because it is interesting. The first thing we're going to talk about is his affinity for slapping actors. The classic slap method. I know it well. So let's take a listen to what he says about the time that he slapped a priest. Great. Here we go. Do you physically attack people you work with?

There have been occasions. They slap people before. Yeah, well, a priest in The Exorcist. He was not an actor. He was a priest. And it was four o'clock in the morning, and we were freezing. And he had to give the last rites to his friend who had just plunged from the top of a flight of steps. And the crew was there and freezing, and we did about 25, 30 takes, and he wasn't getting it. And he couldn't reach the emotional point. And I had read that other great directors had done that. John Ford, George Stevens had done that. Just whack. Yeah. And I first asked, I took him by the shoulders, and I asked him if he loved me and if he trusted me. And he said, you know I do, Bill.

I said, okay. And I told the cameras to get ready. And I hit him as hard as I could across the face. And I said, roll it. And he went right into the scene, the shock of it. The shock brought forth the tears. And afterwards, he embraced me. Thank me.

You can't pull out your car too often, though, can you? No, I haven't done it more than 570 times. I will say, of all the people he could have slapped on this movie, I'm most okay with that guy. You're about to be a lot more okay about that guy because it was reported, he was recently accused of having molested a student at the school he taught at in the 80s. So I will say that slap may have been deserved. but not for the reasons Friedkin thought it was. Fair.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, God. Oh, boy. Also, that priest talking about it later, remember that moment where William Friedkin says, I asked him, do you trust me? The priest's response when talking about it was, you always trust someone until they ask you if you trust them.

Yeah, exactly. Which is like, yeah. So this is all coming from a place of him wanting to look as real as possible. It's coming back to that sort of documentary style filmmaking. That is exactly what appealed to Blatty in this process. So some other things that Friedkin did to try and achieve that reality. He was obsessed with making the makeup look real. The prosthetics that were used on Linda Blair actually burned her skin

and sometimes took up to five hours to apply. Also, that infamous scene where she does the sort of backwards crab walk down the stairs, it's actually not in the initial theatrical release, which I did not know. It's not because that's the version I watched last night and it's not in it. Yeah. That's the same thing we did. So the reason for that is that he didn't like that the stunt woman and contortionist had to use wires to go down the stairs. And they were somewhat visible.

So they took it out. Later on, when they were able to digitally remove the wires, he allowed it to go back into the edit. I think around the year like 2000 almost. I mean, it's actually pretty late. that that shows up. So all of the effects had to be practical. The room itself was sitting on eight pneumatic wheels. Anytime the film set appears to be shaking,

it's because grips are literally physically shaking the room. Also, you may have noticed that, especially towards the end of the film, you can see their breath because it's so cold in her room. Obviously, if this were now, they would just do that digitally, but it was 1972. So they actually refrigerated the set. and I want to play a little clip that describes exactly how cold it was.

Just shooting the exorcism in general was difficult. It was very time-consuming because on a technical level, we had to run the air conditioners while we were setting up and preparing. The only reason we wanted the room to be cold was we had to see the breath. And the catch-22 there is we had to refrigerate the room with air-conditioners in order to see the breath. Well, you see the breath usually with moist cold. And air condition is take the moisture out of the cold also.

Because it was dehumidifying at the same time, we had to get it to like 20 below zero before you'd even see the breath. Oh, my God. 20 below zero. I heard an urban legend once that it snowed inside the set. It's true. No, it's true. Oh, really? It's true.

They said they came in one morning and there was a thin layer of snow on the set. Yeah, I heard that it, like, it created its own. atmosphere inside because it was so cold. Oh my god. And they had kept it so cold for so long. And by the way, there's all these pictures of them on set and like all the men are in these freaking ski suits, you know, like head to toe covered. Linda Blair is in a damn nightgown and she's 12 years old. God, this movie sounds so miserable to make. Horrible. So the biggest thing for him was he didn't just want his actors to look frightened or startled. He wanted them to actually be frightened and startled, which, by the way, is not acting.

You know, whatever. And one of his favorite ways to achieve this was to actually fire off guns right next to their heads without any warning. What? Yes, yes. Like a prop gun or something? No, no, no, like a real gun. And they did not always have blanks in them. Oh, my God.

He actually, so he really pissed off Jason Miller, who played Father Karras. There's a scene when Damian Karris is listening to the tape that he's just recorded of Reagan speaking. And if you remember in that scene, he's kind of crouched in front of the tape recorder, he's listening. And then all of a sudden the phone rings and his head snaps like a gun has gone off. Now that is because William Friedkin fired off a shotgun right next to his head. Oh my God, that's awful. However, I will say having directed a scene where somebody has to react to a phone, we had to use one of those portable air horns because people anticipate the phone and you can tell, but I would never use a shotgun. Let me tell you what you don't anticipate. A shotgun. Yeah, exactly. I bet you the prop guy brought him an air horn and he was like, I'll take the shotgun.

Here's how bad the gun situation actually got on set. But like there's a gun situation. It's like we have to take his guns at the top of the day. Oh, my God. So Max von Sito would actually walk on set every morning and he would ask the cinematographer where the guns were that day. And Owen would tell him. It's like Michael Scott doing improv in the office.

Oh, no. Give me your guns, Michael. And it's William Friedkin on the set of a movie. Literally. Oh, what a psycho. Yeah. So Von Sido said that Friedkin behaved like a man with total freedom and total power. which is exactly what he was doing.

However, probably the most irresponsible instances on set have to do with the stunts and the safety of the actors, particularly Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn. So the first scene that we're going to talk about, and this is pretty infamous, but it's the scene where she is on the bed. She's not fully kind of transformed yet.

She's in that sort of white nightgown, like on top of the sheets. And she's being tossed up and down on the bed and she's flailing. And then the part that we're about to hear her talk about is when she starts to be pitched forward into a seated position and back position over and over and over again. At first, I thought that was a dummy or a model when I first, because I was like, it's moving too fast.

That can't be a person. It's her. And then if you pause it, you can absolutely tell that that is a 12 year old girl who was just being whipped at like roller coaster speeds on this bed. Yeah, so let's hear Linda talk about that moment because she'll actually explain what happened. I said to Billy, if I was a devil, I'd get up and grab it, and I would thrash her.

I would let her know. He said, go ahead and do it. It's a rigging that Marcel Volketeer came up with that was a mold of my back, and it was like a hard metal, and then they had like a brace around my stomach. And then it was laced up on the sides. I had her completely strapped in, and I had her.

It was actually manually pumped by some big men on the other side of the wall. I could throw her up and back, and I had her. And the lacing came loose while I was being thrown. And so as I went forward, the piece was coming back. So it was a constant. And the dialogue was, please, make it stop, make it stop, it hurts, it burns, whatever. She started screaming. I didn't know what to do.

And so I'm just yelling. It hurts really, really. And somebody thought I yelled Billy. And I actually never broke character. She wanted out. She wanted really out. She was really getting thrashed. That's the footage I used in the movie where I'm crying my eyes out

because they are brutally damaging my back. I mean, it's hard to listen to when you actually have the context of like... Even when you're watching it, you can tell... Yeah. You know what I mean? there's something not right about it in the movie itself. Yeah. It doesn't feel like movie magic.

You know what I mean? It's just like, oh, let's just abuse someone on camera. And that'll give us the effect that we need. She's 12. And even if she weren't 12, even if she was, you know, 50. We're going to get to a grown woman who they did the same thing to. Yeah, exactly. But it did permanent damage to her spine.

And she wasn't the only one to sustain a spinal injury. let's hear from Ellen Burstyn, who sustains something in the scene where it looks like Ellen Burstyn gets like sort of thrown off of the bed by Linda Blair. I had a rig around my midriff with a wire coming out the back, and the stuntman was pulling me. So we took her back the first time, and it was a good shot. And Billy said, we're going to do it again. I said, Billy, he's pulling me too hard. I can get hurt.

And Billy said, well, it has to look real. I said, I understand, but I'm telling you, I could get hurt. And the stuntman was standing there listening to this, and Billy said to him, okay, don't pull her so hard. But as I turned away, I felt them exchange a look. And he said, give it to her this time. He said, really? And he says, give it to her.

And this is Ellen Burstyn, right? You're a nice lady. And so I said, okay. So when I hauled off, she came completely off her feet. You see me hit and you see me reach from my back. I screamed in horrendous pain. Billy motioned to Owen to tilt the camera down on me. And I saw it and I was so furious.

and said, turn the effing camera off because I couldn't stand that he was willing to just get a quick shot of it before they called the ambulance, you know? A couple things. This stunt guy has got a weird vibe. Really weird. Yeah, it's like, wow, it's just, this is how we do it in the movie business.

It's like you're talking about hurting people and admitting that you're hurting people. It's very strange. Well, it's almost like every time he's just leaning on the fact that he had the express permission of William Friedkin. It's as if he's in the army and it's like, well, it was the orders. Exactly. But it's like that just shows you how much perceived power the director had, but also how other people, I think, used that as an excuse as well on set. Yeah.

And I mean, ultimately, the stunt coordinator's job at least now. It's to not hurt people. It's to protect the actors. Yes. And from a more cynical perspective, it's to ensure that there's not like a worker's comp claim on the production. But really more than that, it's like you need to, he is there as a barrier between the director and dangerous things. Not this guy. It also does remind me, too, of the moment in the abyss when Ed Harris gets up and it's just like, you're not even rolling right now.

You know what I mean? It's kind of the inverse of that moment with Mary, Elizabeth. Mastrantoio. Doing her in Toplitz scene. And James Cameron, there's like an exploitative quality to it. Yeah. In this case. And you can tell when they slow-mo it in this clip and you watch her hit the ground.

You're like, oh, yeah. She's just clear. It looks like she like landed on a tailbone or something. It just like really. It pulls her straight back from the middle of her back. So a couple more examples of this in the movie. Shocking that there are more, but there are. For Father Karras' fall at the end of the film, the one where he dives out that window and down those steps.

Yeah. The shot that William Friedkin wanted, basically the way it was explained to the stuntman, they decided the only way to make it look real was for him to really fall down all 92 steps of that Georgetown staircase. They padded the steps with rubber, but that guy did it. He did a headfirst dive down 92 steps. They did more than one take of this. of him doing it. And apparently there were Georgetown students. This is Jason Miller talking about this.

He said that they actually sold tickets on the rooftops to watch him do a head first dive down those stairs over and over again. It's crazy. And it's so funny, they made him do the whole thing when it's like, I think in the movie it's cut into like three or four shots. Oh my God. It's cut.

And it's also like it's like choppy and weird the way that they do the shooting of it. So that could totally have been a doll. Feels unnecessary in a lot of ways. For sure. Just briefly. there is sort of the lore of the curse of the exorcist. There were no fewer than nine deaths during and immediately after filming. Both the actor who played Burke Dennings, who is the director that she does push out the window.

He dies almost as soon as filming ends. What happened? How do you die? Natural causes. I think he died of a heart attack. Jesus. The woman who played Father Carus's mother, who was a Greek woman, also passed away as soon as cameras stopped rolling. and creepy that they've also both died in the movie.

A night watchman on set died. The newborn baby of a camera assistant died. Max von Seedow's brother died. Linda Blair's grandmother died. Jason Miller's son was actually almost killed by a motorcycle on an empty beach, is one description I saw of the accident. Okay. It's very strange.

Really weird. And then there are two more that I couldn't find exactly who passed away. but Ellen Burstyn insists that there were nine deaths affiliated with the project. So William Friedkin said, quote, I don't have any enemies. Presumably there are people who don't like me, but I wouldn't call them enemies and I didn't then. The studio executives were just objects that I had to get by to do what I wanted.

The same was true for all of us back then, Coppola, Bogdanovich, and Spielberg. Talk about getting fired. We were getting fired every day. I got fired about five times from The Exorcist. my producer would get the phone call and then simply hang up. So that's his experience of this. However, contrast that with Linda Blair, whose entire life essentially becomes colored by the exorcist.

At 13 years old, this movie comes out. She's receiving death threats. On the other side of that, she's being expected by reporters to talk about Catholicism and God and the devil. Warner Brothers ends up having to hire bodyguards for her for more than six months after the movie due to the death threats. Despite her obvious talent as an actress, this completely encompassed her career.

She didn't really have another defining role. She keeps working. She's still working, but it's certainly not what it could have been. Friedkin gets to move right on to an incredible career, including films such as sorcerer, cruising, to live and die in L.A., Killer Joe, and many more. Something I found really interesting, when I was researching this, is that for all the talk of Friedkin talking about this movie like a documentary,

he actually never saw a real exorcism prior to making this movie. It wasn't until 2017 when he does see one for the first time. And that's when he makes the documentary The Devil and Father Amorth following a priest performing his ninth exorcism. On finally seeing a real exorcism, here is what Friedkin said. It was terrifying. I went from being afraid of what could happen to feeling a great deal of. of empathy with this woman's pain and suffering. Awfully interesting, given the way that he treated a 12-year-old girl on the set of his movie. So that about wraps it up for The Exorcist. I have a sixth clip.

Did you want me to play it? I skipped it. You know what? It's going to creep you out. So, yeah, why don't you play this? This clip that Chris is referencing, this is Freedin talking about how he interacted with Linda Blair on set and how he got her. her to give the performance that she gives.

Kind of surrogate father to Linda. I would very often kid her into doing something. I would say to her, now, you're going to have to take this crucifix, and you're going to have to pretend that you are thrusting it between your legs. And she would say, oh, no, like a little girl. She was 12 years old. She'd say, oh, no, I'm not going to do that. And I'd say, oh, yes, you are.

Oh, yeah, come on. and I would kid her into it. I'd start tickling her, making her laugh. I think it was her affection for me that allowed her to do things that have probably never been asked of a child, and certainly not in a movie. It was about mutual trust.

Okay. What? I know. I mean, the killer thing is like... Painfully unselfaware, man. I know. The thing is, he... Like, he...

does get unbelievable performances out of these people. The movie is absolutely incredible. It does feel real that is part of the horror of it. But I think that part of the problem, though, and, you know, to bring this all to a close, in art, it's, we've historically deemed it acceptable for an artist to abuse themselves or take their own pain and translate that into something creative for us to consume. And what's challenging with where it gets, I think, ethically complicated at best and at worse just leaves complicated and becomes gross really quickly is in movies when the director is the manager, but there are a number of.

of people and artists present, et cetera, and it's a work environment. And then they are pushing people to do things that maybe they'd be comfortable doing. You know, we've talked about James Cameron, for example. But ultimately, they're setting boundaries for those around them in an environment where to say no will draw the ire of not only everyone around you, but the studio that you're working for and potential opportunities down the line, the pressure of any actor to just say yes to whatever the director, especially a big director, you know, like William Friedkin wants, is going to be incredibly high.

So I think that the question we have to ask ourselves is, you know, as people who consume movies and for us, like, work tangentially in this business is what are we going? to allow, you know, as acceptable behavior from these people? And are we going to let the fact that they just made something great justify the abuse? Because like you said, it's like, yeah, he got great performances. He made a great movie. Stephen Spielberg's made great movies. And my understanding is he's never slapped anybody and he's never broken anyone's backs either. And so did Sidney Lumet and, you know, a number of other people. It comes down to something that Jason Miller actually said about

about him firing the gun off next to his head. He, I'm paraphrasing, but he basically said, like, what pissed him off the most about it is he was like, Billy, I'm an actor. Like, it's my job to recreate that response. I don't need the stimulation there to do it for me. It's almost like, it's like he's taking their job away from them to a certain degree

by sort of, like, manually creating all of this stimulation. And by the way, just to end on a bit of a light note, what William Friedkin said to Jason Miller, when Jason Miller said, you know, basically like, what happens if you accidentally shoot me in the fucking head? William Friedkin goes, don't worry, we have Jack Nicholson waiting in the wings. Great. Really fun. All right. So, Chris, what went right? I mean, what went right is they made an incredible, an incredible movie.

And what went wrong is that they had to ruin at, you know, worst someone's life to do it. And at its lightest, at least severely damaged them with Linda Blair. And also what went wrong is it perpetuate, it furthers this idea that the only way to make a movie this good was there's no counterfactual. So it's like he had to do this to get this version of the movie made. We don't know that that's true. Yeah.

We don't. There's no. It, you know, Francis Ford Coppola, we're going to do Apocalypse now coming up. And Francis Ford Coppola nearly got everyone killed, literally making that movie. And it's one of the best war movies ever. But I think we can all look to saving Private Ryan, where Steven Spielberg was shooting that thing ahead of schedule and everyone was feeling great and say, no, you don't have to simulate the hells of Vietnam in order to make a movie. And you don't need to destroy a girl

in the same way that the devil would literally to get that performance from her necessarily. And I think it's more actually, I think what we need to start looking at it as is it's actually more of an indictment of the director's talent for them to need to resort to shlocky tactics that are damaging to the people on set, then it is a compliment to their dedication to the craft or ingenuity. And so I think we need to flip that on its head. I will actually, I'll call out of what went right and give William Freakin some credit. One of the most incredible things that he did on this set was the way that he envisioned a lot of these shots that we kind of take for granted today, a lot of things that you'd be able to get with a steady cam and some other types of

sort of crane shots and rigs that are readily accessible now that were not invented then. If you watch some of the behind the scenes, the way that he and the cameraman actually worked together to create some of these shots is really incredible and really cool. And it did kind of lead to the sort of technology that we have today. One shot, there's a tracking shot where it follows them up the stairs all the way to the top. and they actually had to dangle a cameraman on a wire, basically. They put him in a harness and on a wire, and they sat him on this little like swing seat almost.

And they had him, and they just literally dragged him up the stairs, and they had to light it so there were no shadows whatsoever. And he just followed the assistant all the way up the stairs. And that was their version of a setty cam. Yeah. So I will say, like, He is an amazing, he is an amazing talent. Absolutely.

And it is an amazing movie, but at what cost? Yeah. And I think what went right too is they didn't feel the need to over-explain the movie and the mythology and whatnot in the way that I think a lot of horror films are forced to maybe right now. Like, all the mythology needs to make sense and we need to be able to understand it. And I just liked how ambiguous the movie was at the end of the day. I agree with that. All right. So just to wrap this up, we do have one request from all of you lovely listeners, which is if you have a minute, please leave us a review. It would just, it would mean so much. And we'd very much appreciate it. Five stars, five stars. Five stars, but also some words. As Chris said, we do have Apocalypse now coming up next. And then following that, we will have a special guest coming on for Heaven's Gate. I'm very excited about that one.

And when you're leaving these reviews, guys, try to keep it professional. And not make it personal. No, I disagree. I disagree. Personally attack Chris as much as possible. Okay, bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing in music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthana Uos.