William Friedkin

William Friedkin: The Director Who Shot First

During production of *The Exorcist*, the actor William O'Malley — a Jesuit priest playing a Jesuit priest — could not find the emotion the scene required. Friedkin slapped him across the face as hard as he could and shoved him to his knees, then rolled camera. The take is in the film. Friedkin recounted it for decades without much apology, and it is the cleanest available summary of a career built on the conviction that the result justified nearly anything, right up until the point when it did not.

Chicago, and the Mail Room

William Friedkin was born on August 29, 1935, in Chicago, the son of Rachael and Louis Friedkin, Jewish emigrants from Ukraine whose relatives had fled the pogroms of 1903. His father worked variously as a semi-professional softball player, a merchant seaman and a clothing salesman; his mother was a nurse. The family was lower middle class. He played basketball at Senn High School and graduated at sixteen with mediocre grades that he later attributed to social promotion rather than aptitude.

He went straight into the mail room at WBKB-TV and was directing live television by eighteen. His 1962 documentary *The People vs. Paul Crump*, about a death-row inmate, won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and contributed to Crump's sentence being commuted — an early and literal demonstration that a film could change an outcome. It brought him to the attention of the producer David L. Wolper. Directing an episode of *The Alfred Hitchcock Hour* in 1965, he was admonished by Hitchcock himself for not wearing a tie.

Apprentice Work

The early features were uneven and he knew it. *Good Times* (1967), with Sonny and Cher, he later called "unwatchable." *The Birthday Party* (1968) adapted Harold Pinter; *The Night They Raided Minsky's* followed; and *The Boys in the Band* (1970), from Mart Crowley's play, stands as a milestone of queer cinema regardless of what its director thought of it.

Two Films, Two Years

*The French Connection* (1971) changed him and the decade. He built it on the documentary grammar he had learned in Chicago, sharpened by Costa-Gavras: "After I saw *Z*, I realized how I could shoot *The French Connection*," he said. "He shot *Z* like a documentary. It was a fiction film but it was made like it was actually happening." He fought constantly with Gene Hackman. A casting error — hiring Fernando Rey instead of the actor he had wanted — accidentally supplied the film's essential class contrast. The chase sequence nearly killed bystanders; Friedkin later said that no film was worth that, and expressed shame at his own methods. It won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and Friedkin took Best Director in 1972 at thirty-six.

*The Exorcist* (1973), from William Peter Blatty's novel, arrived after other directors had turned it down. It opens with a desert sequence of desaturated images and dissonant sound before a single supernatural event occurs, which is the whole method: Friedkin used sound to manufacture dread with an exactitude few directors have matched. It was nominated for ten Oscars, won two, and reorganized the horror genre permanently. A 2000 re-release with restored footage grossed $40 million domestically on its own.

He, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich were now the reigning names of New Hollywood, and in 1973 announced the Directors Company at Paramount. Friedkin walked out before completing a film for it.

The Fall

*Sorcerer* (1977), a $22 million remake of *The Wages of Fear* starring Roy Scheider, opened one week after *Star Wars* and was annihilated. Friedkin considered it his finest work and was personally devastated. *The Brink's Job* (1978) failed. *Cruising* (1980), with Al Pacino, was protested during production and savaged on release. *To Live and Die in L.A.* (1985) was a genuine critical recovery, its chase sequence measured against *The French Connection*'s. *Jade* (1995) was not, though he named it among his favorites of his own films.

He suffered a heart attack on March 6, 1981, caused by a genetic defect in a coronary artery, nearly died, and spent months in rehabilitation.

The Late Return

Three plays rescued him. *Bug* (2006), which he took on after seeing the stage version in 2004, won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes. *Killer Joe* (2011), Tracy Letts adapted again, with Matthew McConaughey, was well reviewed and commercially strangled by an NC-17 rating. *The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial*, with Kiefer Sutherland, premiered at Venice and reached audiences in September 2023, two months after his death. From 1998 he also directed opera continuously — *Tannhäuser*, *Salome*, *Aida*, *Duke Bluebeard's Castle*, *Il Trittico* — which is where a man who no longer commanded studio budgets kept working at scale.

He married four times: Jeanne Moreau in 1977, Lesley-Anne Down in 1982, Kelly Lange in 1987, and the producer and former Paramount chief Sherry Lansing in 1991, who survived him. He died at 87 on August 7, 2023, in Los Angeles, of heart failure and pneumonia.

Why William Is Called a Genius

The case is technical and narrow, which does not make it weak. Friedkin's gift was for constructing physiological response in an audience — not suspense as plot, but dread as sensation — and he did it primarily through sound. The opening of *The Exorcist* achieves terror with a dig site, a desaturated palette and a soundtrack of dogs and hammering; obituarists reaching for what made him distinctive land on his use of sound to build "layers of dread, mystery and dissonance." He also imported documentary syntax into commercial fiction filmmaking at the exact moment American cinema was ready for it.

The counter-case is that he knew where the peak was, and so did everyone else. He never approached those two films again in a career that ran another fifty years. His obituaries describe him as self-aware about squandering his gifts and burning his bridges, and the method was reckless in ways he later disowned: he assaulted a priest to get a take, fought his lead actor throughout *The French Connection*, and endangered members of the public during its chase sequence. Some of what reads as inspiration was luck he had the sense to keep — Fernando Rey was a casting mistake. And *Sorcerer*, the film he considered his best, needed forty years of rehabilitation and cannot bear a genius claim on its own. Friedkin was a superb technician with two extraordinary films and a long, honest decline. That is a real distinction, and not the same as a great mind.

Legacy

Every horror film that establishes menace through sound design before showing anything is working inside his grammar, and every gritty urban thriller shot handheld is quoting *The French Connection*. Venice gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2013. He kept shooting until the year he died.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Director — 1972
• Golden Globe Award for Best Director — 1973
• Educated at Senn High School
• Worked as film director, film producer and screenwriter