Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [136]
The Exorcist had been a difficult film to get off the ground, despite the book’s success. According to Friedkin, three top directors—Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, and Mike Nichols—turned it down, largely because they didn’t think it would be possible to cast as the possessed Regan a young girl who could do everything that the script demanded of her. “The whole movie was balanced on that,” Friedkin remembered. “There was an open call for a thousand girls. Linda Blair never came to the open call. Her mother brought her in. [Until then] I thought I was going to have to do it with a sixteen-year-old. No one else came close.” The Warners publicity stated that Friedkin had actually looked at some five hundred girls, and Pauline seized on this fact for one of the most lacerating observations she ever put down on paper. “I wonder about those four-hundred and ninety-nine mothers of the rejected little girls.... They must have read the novel; they must have known what they were having their beautiful little daughters tested for. When they see The Exorcist and watch Linda Blair urinating on the fancy carpet and screaming and jabbing at herself with the crucifix, are they envious? Do they feel, ‘That might have been my little Susie—famous forever’?”
Blatty was incensed by her review and lit into her on television and in print interviews, though he apologized by letter a few months later. Friedkin was also upset about her attack, though he admitted that she had perhaps scored a point when she called The Exorcist “the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s.” “I found it wrong-headed,” said Friedkin. “On the other hand, I know many people who went into the priesthood because of that. I remember meeting James Cagney toward the end of his life, and he had seen it, and he said, ‘Young man, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. I had a barber for twenty years, and he saw the movie and he left being the barber to enter the priesthood.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Kael was probably right—but it wasn’t intended that way.”
The Exorcist would eventually gross in the neighborhood of $165 million. Its success was also an early harbinger of sweeping change in the industry that not even Pauline could have predicted.
Fortunately, there was Robert Altman, who was proving to be not only in artistic command but highly prolific. Thieves Like Us, his newest picture, was released in February 1974. Filmed in and around Jackson, Mississippi, on a budget of $1.25 million, Thieves Like Us was an unusual film for Altman in that it followed its source material, a novel by Edward Anderson about a trio of bank robbers during the Depression, rather closely.
By now Pauline anticipated Altman’s new films with such fervor that she decided to make a visit to the set of Thieves Like Us. She knew that the material was very close to that of Bonnie and Clyde, but she read Anderson’s novel and liked it, and she was curious to see how Altman would transform it. Pauline’s presence was a major event for the cast and crew, who felt her support for their work as keenly as Altman