Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [47]
One of the biggest sellers in the publishing industry of the decade was Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, a tract that compared end-time prophesies with current events. It became one of the first of such books to break out of the Christian market into the mainstream. Bantam released it three years after it was published in 1970, and it went on to sell nine million copies. Satan was hot. “If I had been writing fifteen years earlier,” Lindsey said in an interview, “I wouldn’t have an audience.”
Suddenly a book about the possession of a young girl was of the moment. In Blatty’s novel, the Devil’s main target is not the girl. She’s merely the vehicle for his assault on the priest, Father Karras, who is struggling with his faith. At the end, Karras completes the exorcism and throws himself, along with the demon, out the window in an act of sacrifice. In Blatty’s original draft, the little girl Regan, played in the movie by Linda Blair, explains to her mother Chris MacNeil that Father Karras killed himself to prevent “the animal” from harming them. The publisher suggested that this passage was unnecessary and Blatty took it out. But it began a debate about how explicit the religious message of the story should be that would continue for years, and that heated up when Warner Brothers optioned the book for a movie adaptation.
Blatty, who also wrote the screenplay, saw the drama and terror in the evil of the Devil. Blatty was better positioned than anyone in the history of the horror movies to convince people that a macabre story about the Devil was not just silly fantasy. Roman Polanski clearly didn’t believe in the Devil, but to Blatty, his story was no horror show. It was how it really was. But director William Friedkin, who, like Polanski, was an agnostic Jew, didn’t believe in possession. The old morality tale wouldn’t spook out anyone. Friedkin thought of The Exorcist as a movie about evil, but he knew it needed to shock and terrify before it made you think about heaven and hell. The movie was the product of a clash of these two visions.
The central battle on the set of most Hollywood movies rarely involves the writer, because, really, what’s the point? The job of writers, especially the young ones, is to deliver a script, keep quiet, and then complain to his friends about how his carefully chosen words were changed. Due to his combination of savvy, pugnacity, and belief in the message of the movie, however, William Peter Blatty proved to be an exception.
He started with several advantages, including that the director owed him his job. Friedkin was not the first choice, however, since the studio pursued Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, and others who turned it down. Blatty himself pressed the book into the hands of Peter Bogdanovich as he walked into a screening. He opened the cover and saw a note from Blatty that read, “This is a movie you must direct. It won’t get made without you.” Bogdanovich turned it down, too. It was just another horror film.
The studio wanted Mark Rydell, but Blatty pushed for Friedkin. The success of Friedkin’s first real hit, The French Connection, helped convince Warner Brothers, but Blatty was also a ruthless negotiator. When Paul Monash, who had produced Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, approached him with an offer of $400,000 and a percentage of the profits, Blatty suspected a deal had already been cut and saw an opportunity. After hearing from Monash’s secretary that there had been communication between Warner Brothers and Monash about the script, he went to his office on a day that Blatty knew Monash wouldn’t be there. Blatty asked the secretary if he could use the phone in his office. She agreed and, like a spy, Blatty searched for evidence. “I lunged at the file drawers. Locked. I went back to the desk and slipped open the top drawer and there was the key. A key,” he says. “Then I tried the key, it worked and I found the original of the letter in which Monash made the deal with Warner Brothers. He made a deal!”
The agreement he found completely reshaped his script, got rid