Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [45]
Hitchcock had almost no role in the episode, outside of lending his name and taping the wry introduction that made him one of the most famous personas in the world, with a more recognizable silhouette than Elizabeth Taylor. Running the show was Norman Lloyd, the veteran actor whose career languished after he was blacklisted in the fifties before reinventing himself as a television producer. For this episode, he took a chance on a new director, William Friedkin, who would go on to make The Exorcist, which revolutionized the horror genre less than a decade later. Friedkin had never been on a soundstage or worked with a script. His entire career was in nonfiction films and commercials. What he did know about making a thriller was largely from watching the movies of Alfred Hitchcock. While he hoped to meet the master, Hitchcock stayed off the set, but did make one appearance to shoot his narration. Arriving with a phalanx of men in suits, he was brought over to meet the young director. Hitchcock was dressed in formal wear, his customary suit hugging his rotund physique. He approached daintily holding out his arm. Friedkin shook his hand. It felt clammy.
“Mr. Friedkin,” Hitchcock said, dragging out the vowels. “Usually, our directors wear ties.” At first, the younger man thought it was a joke, but when he heard no laughter, Friedkin mumbled something about forgetting his at home. Hitchcock promptly turned and walked away. That slight stuck with Friedkin, but the chip on his shoulder did not begin with this exchange. Growing up in a one-room apartment on the west side of Chicago, Friedkin was brash, ambitious, occasionally difficult, and a natural fighter. That aggressive quality rubbed some people the wrong way, but it also helped land him the most important job of his career.
Shortly after working on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, he interviewed for a job on a movie adaptation of the Peter Gunn television detective series. It was at the Paramount commissary and Blake Edwards, who cowrote the movie with William Peter Blatty, asked the questions. Blatty, who wrote the novel and the adaptation of The Exorcist, recalls being surprised at how confident this young director was in criticizing the movie he was trying to be a part of. At one point, Friedkin attacked the script in harsh terms, arguing that a dream sequence that Blatty had written clashed with the style of the rest of the movie. Edwards disagreed, fighting back, but Friedkin did not back down, arguing the point long after it was clear he wouldn’t change anyone’s mind. “He wouldn’t stop, so he didn’t get the job,” Blatty says. What turned off Edwards, however, piqued Blatty’s interest. “When it came time to select a director for The Exorcist, I wanted the guy who wouldn’t lie to me, so I wanted Bill.”
WILLIAM PETER BLATTY discovered the mysteries of a higher power for the first time at the age of three. It had been a difficult year: his father, a Lebanese immigrant, left home, leaving his mother to raise two children by herself in New York. She peddled jelly on the street for extra money and taught her children that God was looking after them. She took her son William to twelve different churches on Holy Thursday. Unlike Wes Craven, Blatty embraced the religion of his youth.
Blatty first heard about exorcism in a theology class at Georgetown University, when a priest discussed a 1949 case about a boy who had been possessed in Mount Rainier, Maryland, not that far from campus. To a young, searching Catholic, this was more than a spooky anecdote. If a demon was real, he thought, why not an angel? Blatty tracked down the priest who performed the exorcism and tried to convince him to write about it, to no avail. When Blatty finished school, he started writing frothy screenplays for Blake Edwards such as A Shot in the Dark and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? But the exorcism story weighed on him. In a meeting with his