William Friedkin (1935–2023)

I heard Friedkin plugging this memoir on The Dennis Miller Show and picked it up at the library. It didn’t disappoint. What makes it a good read is the fact that Friedkin knows that his name could be legally changed to The Guy Who Made The French Connection And The Exorcist but that he never discounts the importance of these films in his career or in the reader’s motives for reading the book: these two films get 100 pages each and what Friedkin reveals about them is interesting and illuminating. (I would list some of the more memorable items here, but anyone who picks up the book will not want these sections spoiled.) He never argues for the merits of his duds (The Night They Raided Minsky’s) but he also speaks earnestly enough about some of his overlooked films. The fact that I just added Sorcerer to my Netflix queue—despite a friend of mine with perfect movie judgment recently telling me that it isn’t any good—is proof of Friedkin’s writing.

At times, Friedkin can be a bit disingenuous, as when he feigns surprise that anyone would have been as shocked as they were by Cruising or that The Exorcist really “isn’t a horror film.” But these moments are rare. He is good on the topic of how Killer Joe received an NC-17 rating because the violence was “personalized” and that if (in the words of one ratings board member), “if it were just some guy dying, like in Saw, we wouldn’t care,” as well as how he became a director of opera. He is also mercifully tight-lipped about his marriages and personal life, again understanding that anyone who picks this up wants to read about movies. (It has about a tenth of the personal items one finds in The Kid Stays in the Picture.)

Part of the book’s draw is that the reader keeps thinking, How did this guy, so obviously intelligent and knowledgeable about filmmaking, not make more great movies? It’s a question Friedkin poses himself more than once in the book. Near the end, he states that he would have made better films overall if he had been born earlier and working at the height of the studio system, an assertion that the technical knowledge he displays throughout the book seems to uphold. One of his epigraphs from Samuel Beckett—“Fail better”—suits the book well and makes it as much about a man trying to do something meaningful with his life as it is about how to film a chase scene in New York.

His apprenticeship in television is interesting and the book as a whole is very well paced. I just wish he included the names of more films and directors he admires. Of course he mentions Hitchcock, Wells, Ford, Bergman—but he also calls Woody Allen “the best living American filmmaker.” Really? He also never mentions two of the biggest dogs on his resume: Deal of the Century and The Caretaker, which is odd, since much of the book is about what went wrong with films he was certain would be blockbusters (Jade, Blue Chips). At any rate, this is a fine memoir that I’m glad to have read. Friedkin’s voice is like the camera in a well-made film: it leads one on but never becomes the star of the show.
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