The Exorcist: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two exorcists of extraneous esoterica. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Run talk very good, very nice. And Jordan, as you might have gleaned from that, we are talking about one of the most famous horror movies, famous movies period of all time, one that established an entire sub genre, literally revolutionized the motion picture industry, etc. And scared me and scared of young Jordan. We are talking about The Exorcist. Happy Holidays, as everyone Merry Christmas. This is supposed to be closer to Halloween, but it's.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: Almost on the fiftieth anniversary of the Exorcist release, so it kind of worked.

00:00:56
Speaker 1: It is yes, yes, yes, yes, I can't believe they really the day after Christmas. That's so funny to me. It's perfect, I mean else, yeah, yeah, exactly. This is one of the many classic movies I saw when I was way too young, and then at least until preparing for this episode, I never saw it again. Such bummers include Midnight Cowboy, Bonnie and Clyde, and Deliverance.

00:01:20
Speaker 2: I saw them all in middle school, I would say, and oh yeah, major bummer. But I first became aware of the Exorcist when the two thousand reissue or re release was included in the trailer of my beloved American Graffiti VHS, which means that my obsession with happy days nostalgia led me to the Antichrist. And this was also around the same time that I was getting into Austin Powers and Mike Myers had that great joke as Doctor Evil when his hydraulic chair seems possessed. You know, you had a very young priest and a very old priest. That was definitely the first time I ever heard the power of Christ compels you.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: So yeah, same.

00:01:58
Speaker 2: I think those two pieces of pop culture converged for me and made me curious about checking out The Exorcist. And I don't know about you, Heigel, but there was also an element of forbidden fruit for me because my mom spoke in what I can only describe as awestruck terms about how the Exorcists scared the hell out of her, and I'm pretty sure this movie is why we weren't allowed to have a Wiji board in the house. I'm pretty sure mister Howdy did a number on her. I reacted, Howdy, how dare you? He was in the military?

00:02:30
Speaker 1: Excuse me, Major Howdie.

00:02:33
Speaker 2: I watched this movie last night for the first time in probably twenty years. I started watching it on a full size TV, and then I switched to a laptop because it became too much, and then I minimized the screen on the laptop too, so it was just about three inches square because that was all I could take of The Exorcist. I'm just blown away by how contemporary this film feels, which is again nuts considering.

00:02:59
Speaker 1: That's years old. It is really amazing. I have. I mean, basically that dovetails with mine. I just and I was reading about it before then because I was such a like I just read about horror movies before I saw them. That's why we're friends. That's one of the many reasons why we're friends. I was doing the Glory Days of Barnes and Noble. Yeah. My parents would just let me get pretty much any book because if I was reading, that was cool. So I would get these huge dumb coffee table books that were like the one hundred greatest horror movies of all time, and then I had one on cult movies and that's where I read about like Yodorovski and David Lynch and all that stuff, and so I knew like everything about these movies before I ever even saw them. And it wasn't like a letdown when I saw it. But I do remember a little bit being like this, this was this like destroyed the Western world for a period of months. Really yeah, I was not like I mean, I remember seeing it, I think around fourteen or fifteen and being like, yeah, this is upsetting and like disorienting and unpleasant, But I don't remember being particularly scared by it because I was kind of just like and you know, apologies to Reagan, but I was like, why not just lock the door because you could use her mind to unlock it. It all kind of happens in the room. All of my fears are about things following me, you know that trying or trying to get into my house. It's like all all of my recurring nightmares are about either like Michael Myers Jason Vorhees esque figures or the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. Trying to get into my house. None of them involve like a possessed girl away in a locked room. I mean, I grew up with a sister who was a teenager at one point, so I'm familiar with that experience. You just kind of leave him in the room and you go about your day. So but since I've become more you know, of a of a syneezte if you will, it really does blow me away. Just like you said, how contemporary it feels. And the fact that something like this even a came together, yeah, because like the there was no precedent for this other than Rosemary's Baby, and the fact that even came together is nuts. But you know, and then became such an insane like the amount of money this thing made hand over fist, I had no idea And yeah, and you know, Freakin is so fascinating. And I was writing this whole thing with my Twitter mutual Jesse Hassinger, who was on an episode of the New Flesh podcast, which is one of my favorite horror movie podcasts, and he was talking about when William Freakin died and everyone was like, you know, this huge outpouring of grief and sympathy for William Freakin, and he was like, well, you know, I love the French connection and I love the Exorcist, but there's something that always like I just never really got the hero worship around him, or like the obsession with him. And then he breaks into this sarcastic impression where he's like, ah, you know my friend Billy Freakin. You know he would he would shoot guns all the time on the set, and he would say such awful things to everyone all the time. He was mean, ah, Billy, my pal Billy. And it's all I can think of, because he truly was a garbage human. But he has two masterpieces to his name, and if you listen to a bunch of nerds, a couple other really good films. Phil Spector of Cinema, Yeah, the fact that he did this is I think, like, I don't think this would have succeeded in anybody else's hands, to be honest, because you know, the whole the log line on him, or at least the reader's digest version of his directorial style. And also Owen Roysman, who is his cinematographer, is like naturalism, like pseudo documentarian, very dry on the street level filming and that grounds all the ridiculousness of this movie. And that's why I think it feels contemporary. It doesn't have the like Scorsese like nutjob editing or like Dolly zooms, and it just feels so dry and like and I'm speaking purely on like a visual sense, it just feels so ground and real that it's everything that happens is that much more shocking because it's it's like, it's how I kind of feel about the original Halloween, where everything is just kind of like flatly shot. I mean not flat. John carpents these beautiful widescreen compositions, but it's not like snap zoom psychedelic editing. It doesn't even like you you you know, you get that period in the nineties with a lot of horror movies like Scream where the MTV editing comes in and instead of like wipes or cuts, they do like like really obnoxious sound and fast cuts for transition. So get yeah, yeah, yeah, And I don't you know, you just don't get that here, and it's and that's what goes such a long way towards making it effective. I don't know, you're my Lich may vary. That's really interesting.

00:07:48
Speaker 2: I was actually watching it, and I hadn't prepared to mention this to you, but while watching it, I was trying to think, what are the directors would do something interesting with the source material, because obviously it's based on.

00:07:58
Speaker 1: A best selling book.

00:08:00
Speaker 2: I came up with three names, and I'm curious what you think about this, m John Frankenheimer, Roman Polanski, which is kind of too easy, and your beloved w C. Your beloved JC. I just confused John Carpenter with water Closet. I'm sorry he would think that was hilarious.

00:08:21
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know a ton about Frankenheimer other than manchurin candidate seconds with Rock Hudson. Okay, that's a freaky movie. I would I would. I mean Polanski is, like you said, obvious, but you know, have you ever seen Repulsion? Yeah? Yeah, because I love Downer film. But you know, he would have been great at it. It is funny because Carpenter's early stuff is like like Dark Star, his first film is like so just fantastical, and even stuff like Assault in Precinct thirteen as kind of a fantastical quality into it, and like the gang members are like explicitly supposed to be zombies, like they're not supposed not actual zombies, but like the way that he conceived of it was like what if you made Knight of the Living Dead, but the zombies were gang members, so they're sort of shot in that horror jacent way. And yeah, I don't know, It's it's hard to say. I mean, we have a list of candidates that will read off that shortly. Any who well, from the allegedly possessed kid who inspired the source material and then went on to work for NASA, to the film's supposedly cursed production to the black exploitation rip off that was seized and destroyed by Warner Brothers. Here's everything you didn't know about The Exorcist. I want to do. Oh god, I want to do so many demon impressions. I don't know if I can though, or yeah, what an excellent day for an exorcism, Like there's so much phlem in that. Uh my favorite one is when he like the door slam shut and he's like, did you do that? And she just goes no, so the drawer pops open. Oh right, all right. The exercise is based on the nineteen seventy one novel of the same name by William Peter Bladdie, whose childhood is I would say essential to understanding the work. Born in New York, Bladdy's parents separated when he was a toddler, and he was raised by a deeply religious mother whose sole income came from selling homemade jelly on the streets of Manhattan. Sounds like doctor Evil's origin story. Yeah, exactly. He was beaten with Reed's per Wikipedia. William Peter Bladdie's mother once offered a jar her jam to Franklin D. Roosevelt when the President was in New York cutting the ribbon for the Queen's Midtown Tunnel, telling Roosevelt it's for when you have company. I mean.

00:10:56
Speaker 2: Now, I wonder how much of the mother in the Exorcist is based on his own.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's more she's giving me like Carrie Vibes, actually, like the moment, like Piper Lauri Vibes. True. Yeah, Blady is uh, Bladdy's kind of a head case. Yeah, I feel anyway. So he lived at twenty eight different addresses growing up because they were constantly being evicted because homemade jelly doesn't bills. Yeah, it doesn't pay the bills. He attended a Jesuit prep school on a scholarship and graduated as valedictorian, thus beginning his lifelong loolf affair with the Jesuits, and then subsequently attended Georgetown University in DC and then George Washington University, where he earned his Masters in English lit. He then enrolled in the Air Force and worked for the CIA in Lebanon in the nineteen fifties, and then returning to DC, became Policy Branch Chief of the Psychological Warfare Division of the Air Force. Now, as you might imagine, I was not able to find the details of what Bladdie did as a psychological warfare expert for the Air Force, but I was able to piece together a somewhat tenuous connection. In one of Bladdie's books, he quotes this guy named doctor Tom Dooley, and Dooley was one of the Americans who were involved in the campaign in Vietnam to get the Catholics to move from the north to the south. And they did this in the crudest way possible, which was by simply broadcasting the message through churches and local radio stations that said, the Virgin Mary has departed from the North and Christ has gone to the South and it was successful. So that's a guy Bladdie at least looked up to, and it went into Bladdy's career as a writer. And that's not even the weirdest thing that we'll get to. Yes, But Jordan tell us about another popular psychological campaign.

00:13:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a campaign during the Vietnam War conflict called Operation Wandering Soul, which was a.

00:13:10
Speaker 1: Morale decimation technique where the American Trumpy Booster would broadcast over the jungles at night to the viet Cong these horrific sounds and music and these ethereal disembodied voices claiming to be of the war dead, essentially warning everybody to surrender. Basically, these ghostly voices I think from the sky. Weren't they broadcast from speakers over helicopters or it could be from anything. Really, are you asking me is if I have a validation of this obscure American war atrocity. I wonder if Bladdie had anything to do with that.

00:13:48
Speaker 2: It sounds like something you would have gotten mixed up in, all the way down to the weird sound effects, right.

00:13:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Bladdie's first book is CO which Way to Mecca. Jack I was published in nineteen six. It is a humorous biographical work which tells of his irl long con masquerade as a Saudi Arabian prince in Los Angeles, really and in fact, while still in character, I guess you want to say as this prince. Blady appeared as a contestant on Groucho Marx's game show You Bet Your Life, and he won ten grand, which was enough to allow him to quit his job and write full time.

00:14:31
Speaker 2: Isn't there a story about Sylvester Stallone being so broke when he wrote Rocky he had to sell his dog and the first thing he did when he sold the script was.

00:14:39
Speaker 1: Clow's dog back. I did not know that, but that is Dickensian.

00:14:45
Speaker 2: I was trying to find incidents of weird financial windfalls that writers got that allowed them to, like, you know, write their big breakthrough, and that was kind of the closest thing I got. Yeah, just because I feel like we're never going to talk about the game show You Bet Your Life again, I just want to tell the story about Groucho Marx's probably most infamous ad lib, which kind of sort of didn't really happen, just to g add a little levity to.

00:15:12
Speaker 1: This fairly dark episode. Go ahead.

00:15:14
Speaker 2: There's a famous urban legend that a woman named Charlotte's Story came on that You Bet Your Life show and revealed to Groucho Marx that she had twenty children, and when Groucho asked why she had chosen to raise such a large family, missus story, they said to have replied, I love my husband, that's why, to which Marx responded supposedly, I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while, which in the fifties, yeah, oh yeah. According to legend, this remark was judged too risky to be aired, and according to the anecdote, it was edited out before the episode of You Bet Your Life was broadcast.

00:15:51
Speaker 1: There are elements of truth to this.

00:15:53
Speaker 2: Marion and Charlotte's Story were parents of twenty children, and they had appeared as contestants on the radio version of You Bet Your Life nineteen fifty. Audio recordings of this episode, exist, but there is no evidence of the infamous line. Graucho himself denied that the incident never took place. He told Roger Ebert in nineteen seventy two, I get credit all the time for things. I never said, you know that line and you bet your life? The guy says he has seventeen kids, and I say, I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally.

00:16:21
Speaker 1: I never said that.

00:16:22
Speaker 2: I mean, Groucho is one of the great you know, if you've got a great line, He's up there with Yogi Barra for you know quotables. Yeah, Snopes has dismissed this urban legend as well, which is sad to me. But speaking of Graucho, there's a story that Friedkin tried to add some levity to the set of The Exorcist by having a scene when Father Marin enters the house, remove his hat and reveal himself to be Graucho Marx, because I guess he stayed in touch with William Peter Blattie after his victorious turn on You Bet Your Life.

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Speaker 1: But that's accord, I know right. Well, wait, it didn't actually happen because, according to this myth, which I have not been able to completely verify, but I choose to believe it, Freakin was sick the day that Groucho was going to come onto the set, and so the idea was scrapped. Well, if Bladdy was a prolific writer. He wrote a lot of not just comedic novels, but also screenplays, which is so weird.

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Speaker 2: One of his screenplays was A Shot in the Dark, which is one of the Pink Panther movies starring my beloved Peter Sellers as INSPECTACLEUSA. He also wrote what I can only describe as the Anti Exorcist. He wrote a nineteen seventy Henry Mancini musical starring Rock Hudson and Julie Andrews called Darling Lily.

00:17:38
Speaker 1: Huh Well, uh, where were we Yes? Blady eventually turned back to fiction and delivered The Exorcist. The book was inspired by a nineteen forty nine case of alleged demonic possession and exorcism that Bloody heard about while he was a student at Georgetown, which is why the university figured so heavily into the plot of the movie. Eugene Gallagher, who is one of his professors and a priest. Excuse me, Father Eugene Gallagher was a priest at the Jesuit College, told Bladdie about a boy who was believed to be in the throes of demonic possession but had been saved through a series of exorcisms in Maryland and Missouri in nineteen forty nine. It took six weeks to exercise him. I mean, you know, it's a process, a lot of chanting. After decades of only being known as Roland Doe or Robbie Mannheim, the boy in question was identified in twenty twenty one to be Ronald Edwin Hunkler, who went on to a career with NASA, where he patented technology to make space shuttles and their panels resistant to extreme heat, helping the Apollo missions of the nineteen sixties From the Depths of Hell to the Moon the Ronald Hunkler Story Hell to the Heavens. Oh yeah, I know. Hunkler was born in nineteen thirty five, and it was fourteen when he supposedly heard knocking and scratching sounds coming from his bed room walls like that. No, I don't well, now I know what's going into my psychological campaign against you. From there, things basically unfolded in the exact manner of the book and movie. And this may have been because I have read that both Bladdie and Friedkin at points got a copy of the notes that the exercising priests made during this whole six week process, allegedly from Robert J. Henley, who is the president of Georgetown at the time. Sounds grossly unethical, but you know whatever. The family's minister wrote to Duke University's Parapsychology lab about what was going on with Hunkler, detailing how chairs moved with him and one threw him out of it, his bed shook whenever he was in it, and tables overturned, furniture slid across the floor, and a picture of Christ on the wall shook in the boy's presence. Hunkler's mother apparently lamed this on an aunt of his who is a spiritualist, and she had taught the boy how to use a Ouiji board. Dun Dun, Dun. I am now on the Parapsychology Department at Duke University website. On the landing page there is a picture of one of their professors in the fifties testing a dog. They're just at a table and the logo for this, I'm gonna send it to you so that you can verify this because it sounds like I'm making it up. Is the devil reading a book? Yeah, you know, North Carolina in the research triangle has like a whole thing with yes, yep, that is true. Jb Ryan testing a dog and scroll all the way down. Yep. That is a logo of the devil with a pitchfork in one hand and a textbook in the other other A little bit on the nose, guys. So Hungleer underwent a series of medical and psychological tests, and then his family sought out religious teaatures, beginning with a Protestant pastor, and we all know the Protestants, like what are they going to do? You know? Things proceeded to the point where he was moved to Saint Louis for an exorcism, and that's where a lot of other aspects from the book in film, like the messages that we were supposedly scratched into his body, took place. By mid April, the boy was back to normal. So this story was then written up in the Washington Post in August of nineteen forty nine, where Bladdie's professor presumably read it, and we were off to the races. Though the case was well known in Jesuit circles for years after the exorcism, several authors began sniffing into the story, including a guy named Mark o'pasnik, who was among the first to research the story in a twenty sixteen book called The Real Story Behind the Exorcist, in which he concluded, there is simply too much evidence that indicates as a boy, Roland Doe had serious emotional problems stemming from his home life. There is not one shred of hard evidence to support the notion of demonic possession. In another book, Diabolical Possession and the Case Behind the Exorcist, a writer named Sergio Rueda reported a friend of the family explained that hunker was spoiled by his father and his mother was stricter but very superstitious, leading the aforementioned family priest, the Protestant, to initially believe that Hunkler may have manipulated her, to which I say no. Uh. This is great, great scoop by The New York Post in twenty twenty one, they tracked down a female companion of twenty nine years of Hunkler who described him as not religious, and she told the paper he said he wasn't possessed. It was all concocted. He said, I was just a bad boy. The Post confirmed that Hunkler died in twenty twenty at the age of eighty five and was cremated, though not before receiving the Catholic last rites from a priest who showed up at their home without being called to do so. No no, no, no no no. Did you then walk through the door without opening it as he departed? D? D dun d D all right, sorry, keep going anyway.

00:23:03
Speaker 2: This story of exorcism stayed lodged in William Peter Bladdie's mind for years. I wasn't just impressed, I was excited, he later wrote of reading the Washington Post story in his nineteen seventy four book William Peter Bladdie On the Exorcist From Novel to Film.

00:23:18
Speaker 1: He explained too about it, for here, at last, in this city, in my time, was tangible evidence of transcendence. If there were demons, they were angels and probably a god and a life everlasting, but no so. Being Catholic. He died in twenty seventeen, four years before. This guy admitted that he made the whole possession thing up, which, in a way I'm glad, Yeah, you know, that would have really puked him out. That would have probably destroyed him.

00:23:52
Speaker 2: After seeing a film adaptation of Ira Evans Rosemary's Baby in nineteen sixty eight by the aforementioned Ruman Polanski. Bladdie was inspired to tack called the Exorcist Project, believing he could improve on what he thought was Rosemary's Baby's cheesy ending.

00:24:06
Speaker 1: He pitched the one of the most dowter and horrifying endings of all time? What have you done to its eyes? Like? Oh, the cheesy, the cheesier his words, not mine, I should say yes, bladd He pitched his story to an editor at Bantam Books at a cocktail party. That is some heavy stuff for cocktail chit chat. Hey, I want to write a novel about demonic possession. Yeah, it's based on a real story of this kid. He received a twenty five thousand dollars advance, which is well over two hundred thousand dollars in today's money. Ah publishing in the mid twentieth century.

00:24:41
Speaker 2: How a cocktail chit chat can turn into a quarter million dollars. He started writing the book at home and in Sino California, bolstered by speed pills, which.

00:24:51
Speaker 1: Helped him write sixteen hours a day the mid sixties. Yes, what a great life. Quarter million dollar advanced check your bowl of pills? What board does a man need?

00:25:06
Speaker 2: Characters in his Exorcist novel were inspired by real life figures. Bladdy had met a British archaeologist named Gerald Lancaster Harding and be Root.

00:25:14
Speaker 1: Presumably during his time in Can I just say that he was a CIA spook? He must have been, yeah, yeah, yeah. This man excavated the caves where the Dead Sea scrolls had been found, which I can only imagine what Elsie found that he didn't tell us about. So this archaeologist, plus a Jesuit theologian named Pierre Telhard de Chardon, who's also a trained archaeologist, went into the character of Father Lancaster Marin, who was played by Max Valoncido. Other historical exorcisms appear in the novel, The Ledune Possessions, a notorious witchcraft trial that took place in France in sixteen thirty four, and the Luvial Possession, which took place in Normandy a little over a decade later. They get mentioned as part of the research that Father Charis does. Character of the book also tells a story about a fraudulent medium who had studied to be a Jesuit priest. That was a real account published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume one, fourteen, nineteen thirty. Psychical. Ah, psychical. Yeah. Bladdy didn't look particularly far for his inspiration for Reagan's mother Chris McNeil, though at one point he lived next door to actress Shirley McClain, whose name is almost an anagram for McNeil, and when Bladdy knew McLain, she, like the actress Chris McNeil in the book, had him married European couples, her household staff, and Bladdie even incorporated real life quotes from Shirley McLain into the novel's dialogue. So there's your if you take away one bit of pub trivia from this. Chris McNeil on the Exercis is based on Shirley McLain, which kind of makes.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: A lot of sense, because Shirley McLain is a real freak, and I mean that in the best way.

00:26:58
Speaker 1: Did you know this?

00:27:00
Speaker 3: No?

00:27:00
Speaker 1: I didn't.

00:27:01
Speaker 2: Oh, she's famously into all sorts of supernatural phenomena. Wrote a book that actually my girlfriend was reading recently, a nineteen eighty three book called Out on a limb in which she discusses all manner of New Age topics, from reincarnation, meditation, trance, channeling, and even UFOs. For example, she's claimed that in a previous life, she lived in Atlantis and was a brother of a thirty five thousand year old spirit named Ramtha. Okay, yeah, and Jimmy Carter. She's apparently such a well known expert on the topic. Jimmy Carter asked her to speak about UFOs with him, which she has claimed to have seen many times from her ranch in the southwestern United States. So she's pretty cool to be a fly on that wall, Jimmy Carter and trym McLain's talking about UFOs.

00:27:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. The Inexorcist initially received mixed reviews and not much coverage. Laddy was on a twenty six city book tour, and he kept arriving in cities to find the bookstore who were uncomfortable with the work had returned to their copies to the publisher. But the book's fortunes were turned around by a stroke of completely random luck. Bladdie had pre auditioned to be on Your Beloved Cavitt Show weeks before and had been told not to expect an invitation. A producer told him, Kavit's a total non believer and he'll just wrinkle up his nose at this. But then a guest had to drop out at the last minute, and the show reached up to Bladdie and they he and Kvit had an on air conversation about whether or not the Devil actually existed, and it was so made for such good TV that the book was number one on the New York Times bestseller list two weeks later, stayed there for four months, parking in the top ten for over a year. Ultimately, it sold more than thirteen million copies in the United States alone, perhaps fittingly given that he was inspired by Rosemary's Baby, another book into prestige film adaptation, Bladdy had an eye on a film version of The Exorcist from the beginning. One early stumbling point was that he insisted that he write the screenplay and be attached as a producer, something that caused Shirley McLean's people to drop out of working on the film with him. He also, at one point, I think, offered to forfeit all of his royalties from it to Freakin if Freakin would let him play father karis So, Gladdy's insistence on inserting himself into this film at any and all costs to his personal and professional reputation is truly a thing to behold, a lesson to us all. Among the early directors floated for the project were Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovitch, and Mike Nichols. But Bladdy also supposedly had William Friedkin in mind from a start, but Freakin was considered unknown quantity, and it wasn't until everyone else had passed, and then the French connection came out and was a huge hit that Warner Brothers acquiesced. Bladdy was surprised when Freedkin asked him to redo the screenplay to make it as accurate to the book's dialogue as possible. In the aforementioned book, one of his books on the subject, he wrote, even where changes I'd made in the dialogue were only slight, Billy would cringe and asked that I keep the dialogue exactly as it had been in the book. Some subplots were trimmed, and there were other changes made to keep things from going too far off the rails. The crucifix scene in the book was more prolonged and explicit, and the film also declined to mention that in the book, Reagan, while possessed, suffered from constant diarrhea. That's my edit of the Exorcist. I do re edit of the entire film is just put constant farting and noises in there. I'm a child freaking recalled to the Hollywood Reporter that he'd once taken a meeting about directing a film adaptation of Peter Gunn, and he said, I didn't care for the script at all, and said so in rather graphic terms. As I was leaving the office to go to the parking lot at Paramount, along comes this fellow who introduced himself as Bill Blattie. I didn't know he'd written the script, but he said, thanks for saying that. We all think the script needs a lot of work. I appreciate that you were honest, even if it cost you a job. Bladdie was apparently so struck by this moment that, despite not seeing anything Friedkin had directed in the intervening years, sent him a copy of the Exorcist. While he was on a press tour for the French Connection, Freakin canceled his appointments that night and read the book overnight and loved it. He got back in touch with Bladdie, and Freakin recalled Blattie telling him, You're the only director I've met who hasn't bullshited me. I really appreciate that, and I think that's the kind of relationship I need to get this story made the way I'd like to see it made. And then Bladdy added freaking kept threatening Warners that he'd go on Johnny Carson and tell Carson's audience that Warners was going to hire a director he didn't want. What a dick. I love him so much.

00:32:01
Speaker 2: In addition, too is appreciating Friedkin's ability to give it to him straight. He also, as you mentioned earlier, like the realism of the French connection, which is something that he wanted for this film as well. Mike Nichols would have been a really interesting choice to direct The Exorcist because I mean I mostly think of him as you know, being one half of Nichols and May the comedy duo and directing The Graduate.

00:32:25
Speaker 1: But he also directed The Day of the Dolphin. Have you ever heard of this movie, The Day of the Dolphin?

00:32:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's this weird Roman Polanski was working on it when Sharon Tate was killed and he ended up stepping back for obvious reasons to recover, and it went to Mike Nichols. It's this weird, like I guess you'd call it a psychological thriller movie about government operatives trying to teach dolphins how to communicate with humans. It's really this bizarre sci fi thriller movie. So in a weird way, the Roman Polansky to Mike Nichols to sense it makes some weird sort of sense. Yeah, well, freaking said of the other directors who turned down the project. Stanley Kubrick said, I only like to develop my own stuff, and he changed his attitude about that when he did the Shining, but that was his excuse. Arthur Penn had just done Bonning Clyde and said he didn't want to do anything else about violence, especially with a child. Nichols thought it was going to be impossible to pin this story on the acting of a twelve year old girl. None of this stuff bothered me.

00:33:26
Speaker 1: Who do you think was a bigger bastard Bladier Freakin Probably I think, yeah, I don't think Blady was as cruel as freaking I think he was just on a level he did work as a CIA psychological warfare. Well, that's true. Bladdy is so fascinating to me, just he's so Catholic and just like such a unique, uh psychological makeup. I don't I don't know, uh, but yeah, I think it was freaking Jack Nicholson was floated as an early choice to play Kris.

00:34:12
Speaker 2: I guess freaking thought he was quote too unholy to get away with playing a priest.

00:34:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is hilarious considering he would actually go on to play the devil in The Witches of Eastwick. Oh yeah. Roy Schneider and Paul Newman were also floated soon I know, but this was just part of the chorus at the tail end of the sixties. They were just throwing those guys anything, and so was Gene Hackman.

00:34:38
Speaker 2: I can see that really working because he would have been fresh off his role as a priest who was losing his faith in the Poseidon Adventure. And he also has his background with William Friedkin in the French Connection. I almost wonder if it was two on the nose and that's why he didn't either accept it or get it.

00:34:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense.

00:34:56
Speaker 2: I also saw that mash star Alan Alda was either off for the roller or encouraged to audition, but he.

00:35:03
Speaker 1: Declined because he didn't like the book. Hey, the Power of Christ compels you. That's really good. And I get another martini in here. Wow, that's really good. Wait two more? No, that's all you can get? Wow. I've never heard your allan all though? Can you radar? No? I don't. He's a helium for that. Yeah, yeah, I've also heard al Paccino was considered, which he kind of looks like Jason Miller with the sad eyes and the Yeah, he's Italian, so it's automatically half the Catholic points there. I like to imagine late era scent of a woman Pacino throws the Holy water on her, she arrives and say, oh ah, too easy, too easy? How could you do? Late era Pagino doing the Power of Christ compels you just yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Butino has he done anything like explicitly Catholic? Do you think he's super? I mean, yeah, I don't think so. Cerpico, eh, has Piccino ever played a priest? Now? He was also the Devil again, another actor who went on to play the devil in The Devil's Advocate. Oh right, wow, the Exorcist to playing Satan Pipeline. The role anyway ended up going to record scratch character actor Stacy Keach. It yeah, I don't even I had no idea, but apparently Keach was like quite a young Turk on the theater scene at the time. He was thirty and had all this huge ground swell of theatrical enthusiasm for him based on work that he'd done on Broadway. Off Broadway, but fate conspired to bring Free Weaken and actor writer Jason Miller together. Freakin was watching Miller performing in the play that he had written, The Championship Season, which later won a Pulitzer on Broadway, and asked to speak with him. He wanted to pick his brain about the themes of lapsed Catholicism in both Miller's play and The Exorcist. Miller at the time before Championship Season, Broke was kind of a nobody. He was working as a milk delivery man in Flushing Sounds Grim. Freakin off handedly gave Miller his copy of The Exorcist, and he was surprised when Miller called him back after reading the novel and told him that guy is me, And in fairness to Stacy Keach, whose contract had already been signed, Miller had gone to Catholic school and had at one point even studied to be a Jesuit priest for three years at Catholic University of America in DC until experiencing a crisis of faith. So he actually, yes, he was that guy. Freaking thanked him, but told ke He told him Stacy Keach has already the ink dries on the deal. Undeterred, Miller asked for a screen test, took a train to la literally across the country to do a scene with Ellen Burston, and then after that, Freakin had burst in interview Miller about his life and this was apparently something he did also with Linda Blair, where he just had Ellen Burston facing away from the camera just talking to Jason Miller and Linda Blair and just kind of asking them documentary style, journalist style questions about their life. And then he had Jason Miller give a Catholic mass as if he was doing it for the first time. Hell of an audition. This is all from Freakin's autobiography, which I would be remissing my duties. If I didn't mention was called the Freakin connection, it would only be better if he called it the freedkinsists. Yes, he really should have called it that considering his directing style. Miller had obviously done stage at but he had never appeared in a film, and Freedkin was swayed by, in his own words, Miller's dark good looks, haunted eyes, quiet intensity, and low compassionate voice. He does have quite the haunted men to him. So the studio bought out Stacy Keach's contract at Freakin's insistence. There's a great documentary called Leap of Faith where Freakin just basically sits in a chair and talks about the Exorcist at the screen for like two hours. What a guy, Billy Freakin.

00:39:33
Speaker 2: It's a quick word about father Karas's mother, who is played by val Silk Mabiarus.

00:39:41
Speaker 1: How's that? Yeah? Sure, pretty good. She was reportedly discovered by Freakin in a Greek restaurant, and like Jason Miller, she'd had no film experience prior to this, she'd only done Greek stage dramas, and she was reportedly cast because she reminded both Freedkin and William Peter Bladdie of their mothers Jesus. Uh well, this is the point where we all have to do Why you do this to me? Why you do this to me? Uh So? After losing Sherloan McLain, Jane Fonda was another choice to play Chris McNeil. She was deemed too beautiful no William freaking said that. She responded in a telegram, why would any studio want to make this capitalist rip off?

00:40:26
Speaker 2: Bullsh what's capitalist about demonic possession?

00:40:33
Speaker 1: You know she was in our hanoid Jane face, so it's probably just called everything capitalist rip off? And then she married Ted Turner the definition of capitalism, so and bullshit. Later she supposedly apologized, clarifying the reason I didn't want to do it is because I don't believe in magic. Oh surely didn't make her Mandy friends in the Catholic Church, referring to religion as magic. Oh, I love Jane Fonda. Then Ted Ashley, who was at the time the head of Warners, floated Audrey Hepburn and Anne Bancroft as well. Hepburn said she would do it, but she would only film in Rome, where she was living at the time, Freakin wrote, I thought it was a request on her part, not a condition. No way did I want to film in Rome. It was impractical from every standpoint. All other actors would have to be imported from the United States, and I didn't want a language barrier with the crew. We asked miss Hepburn to reconsider, but she declined. Anne Bancroft accepted the role, but she was pregnant and asked production to hold on for a year, so she was also out. And this is the craziest thing. Freakin also wanted Carol Burnett Chris McNeil. He supposedly saw through her comedic personality to the depth of acting within. I think that's something about what he said. I'm not just making fun of Carol Burnet, who was obviously incredible, but he was like, no, I think she could carry a dramatic role like this, the entire role, with like pantomime painted cheeks and like Danielle at one point.

00:42:08
Speaker 2: That's really bizarre. I mean, all well, I just want to say something. I don't understand why the character of Chris McNeil had to be an actress in this movie.

00:42:19
Speaker 1: I don't know if that was a vestige of the novel, which I've admittedly never read. I don't think it adds anything to the plot. I don't understand why she just wasn't. I don't know a single mother. I don't really understand what it adds to the story. Yeah, needed, Why actually have you read the novel? I have not. I have not. No, maybe I will. Yeah, now I kind of want to. I wonder if that's like explored more well.

00:42:45
Speaker 2: The person who did get the role of Chris McNeil, Ellen Burston, campaigned for the part with a similar intensity to Jason Miller. She apparently called William Freakin and asked do you believe in Destiny?

00:42:57
Speaker 1: Which is a hell of an opening line. It's not like when Stan Kubrick used to call Stephen King late at night and ask him like, do you believe in God?

00:43:07
Speaker 2: Freakin, from his book, was quoted as saying she was considered a very good actress. She was in the Last Picture Show, but I frankly didn't remember which role she played, and I tended to confuse her with Chlorus Leachman. In other words, Freedkin was not impressed with his future leading lady. What a horrible thing to say. After the fact, Ellen Burston told him that she'd had a strong Catholic upbringing as a girl, but she also left the church after a bad experience. Any any further information on the bad experience?

00:43:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was a yeah, And you think it was a you think it was a priest. Yeah.

00:43:47
Speaker 2: But Freakin liked her and started floating her to warners, but the studios had Ted Ashley was adamantly opposed, at one point acting out the phrase over my dead body to Freakin in his office.

00:44:00
Speaker 1: This is my favorite anecdote from this episode. You take it. So Warner's studio head, Ted Ashley h literally he was yelling at Freaking about casting Allen Bursta, and he said, over my dead body. That's hows what happened. And he laid down in his office in front of the door and was like, go ahead, try to leave, walk over my dead body. And Billy freaking dutifully tries to and Ted actually reaches up and grabs his leg and he says, this is one will happen if you cast Burston. I'll come back from the dead and stop you. Anyway, she got the park.

00:44:41
Speaker 2: That's up there with what was that the Scott rudin the guy that was working with Scott Ruden, who eventually just started building pillow for us to hide end when Scott's yah, yah, yeah, oh god, Hollywood is run by.

00:44:53
Speaker 1: Children, such powerful, rich children, boiled children. Yes, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment.

00:45:11
Speaker 4: Wow.

00:45:16
Speaker 1: The other roles of the film came fairly easy.

00:45:19
Speaker 2: William Peter Bladi showed Freakin a picture of the priest who inspired the character of Father Maren, and Freaquin immediately was inspired to write to Max von Seido, who accepted the role, although apparently studio wanted Marlon Brando, which just would have been all kinds. I think the reason I heard that Freakin said no was it would turn this movie into a Brando movie, and that's not what this is.

00:45:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, lapel of Christ compels you. Yeah, he's not in a fat Brando phase at that point, but it would have been funny if he had been. This compels you. The point of the devil's doing this I not believe completely assing. It's like eating out of a bag of flour eaters, Caros. When was the last time you think Brando gave a damn oh Superman. No, yes, before Superman, I don't know because it was gone by apocalypse. Now they said he was. He was was out horrified when he showed up, like so fat, because Kurt's is supposed to be this huge badass or like made it through the marine training at like the age of forty, and he's like, and now I have this bag of skin who showed up getting the dark. Yeah, exactly, like freaking and bladdie.

00:46:48
Speaker 2: We're seeing a play scouting an actor for a role, and instead they saw actor Lee J.

00:46:53
Speaker 1: Cobb, who was best.

00:46:55
Speaker 2: Known for originating the role of Willie Lowman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, as well as role and Twelve Angry Men and on the Waterfront. And he wasn't on stage. She was just in the audience. It was a nice sacredicity there.

00:47:09
Speaker 1: What if that actor ever found out that he was uh, he was being scouted for The Exorcist. Instead they saw the audience was more impressive. Yeah, a more famous actor in the audience were like, oh, fuck this guy. Anything about who it was? I didn't know.

00:47:27
Speaker 2: Maxi Moosito was a champ and his performance is obviously amazing, but he was so unnerved by hearing some of the horrifying things coming out of twelve year old Linda Blair's mouth that he forgot his own lines at one point, which is understanable.

00:47:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, and she did every That's the craziest thing about this to me is that she read all that stuff obviously like and gave her own performance that was dubbed over. So it was actually in all of the thing where you're like, oh yeah, Mercedes Mcambridge blah blah blah, but then you're like, oh yeah, twelve thirteen year old Lenna Blair actually set all that awful stuff and it's pretty you know.

00:48:05
Speaker 2: I thought like, oh yeah, nineteen seventy three, I'm sure a lot of that's pretty tame by you know, today's standards.

00:48:11
Speaker 1: Oh no, sure, isn't my.

00:48:15
Speaker 3: What an excellent day for an exorcism.

00:48:18
Speaker 1: Well then let's introduce ourselves.

00:48:21
Speaker 3: And I'm the devil. Now kindly do these struts. If you're the devil one, I make the straps disappear. It's much too vulgar, or display a cow or charis the mother's in here with us? Kars, would you like to leave a message? I'll see that she gets it. How long are you planning to stay in Reagan until she rots a nice stinking in the Europe?

00:48:45
Speaker 1: Casting Reagan speaking of her was much harder and took four months. Over a thousand girls aged eleven to thirteen sent in tapes, and production was despairing that they'd ever find a girl of Reagan's age who could anchor the film, and they were about to start looking at teen actresses. You simply looked younger.

00:49:03
Speaker 2: I'd read that they were actually considering people with Dwarfism who are adults as well.

00:49:08
Speaker 1: My favorite bit of this that I had no idea about was that Jamie Lee Curtis was going to audition for this, and she said this in twenty eighteen, and her mother, Janet Lee of Psycho Fame said no.

00:49:27
Speaker 2: Other folks who are up consideration were Eve Plum, who played Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch. She apparently auditioned for the role of Reagan McNeil. Dana Plato of Silver Spoons Fame claims that she auditioned, although Bladdie said he had no memory of this and thinks she made it up. My favorite almost cast was Debbie Reynolds and her real life daughter Carrie Fisher, who would have been perfect. She looks just like when you look at Carrie Fisher in Shampoo, and she was like fifteen because it was filmed a couple years later.

00:49:58
Speaker 1: She looks just like Linda Blair. Oh yeah she does. Yeah, she has that same kind of little chubby cheek's cute, cute little face and probably was also already doing cocaine. Also, Denise Nickerson, who played Violet Beauregard and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was encouraged to audition, but was discouraged from doing so by her family, who found the story too dark, which is impressive considering the movie she started was about a chocolate tycoon killing children, yeah, luring children into saw traps. But one day at Freakin's office, which was hilariously at six sixty six Fifth Avenue, a woman named Eleanor Blair simply showed up asking if he would consider her daughter Linda for the role. Blair's mom, Eleanor has a cameo in the film as a nurse. Linda Blair, in Freakin's words, was smart but not precocious, cute but not beautiful, a normal, happy twelve year old girl. She had done some modeling, but hadn't been in a film prior, and her main interest at the time was horses, which is so adorable. Freaking writes that when he asked her what she knew about her character in the book, she responded, well, she pushes a man out of her bedroom window, and she hits her mother across the face, and she masturbates with a crucifix and then Freaking I don't know why his mind went here, but he said, well, he said, do you know what masturbates is? And she says yes, And then he says, have you done it? And she goes, sure, haven't you? And he was like, that was when the light went off in my head that I knew she would be able to handle all this stuff. And then the fact that she hit it off with Burston was also a plus. But that's what a demon. That's a weird thing, I think to ask a twelve year old girl, I have bad news.

00:51:50
Speaker 2: In August of twenty twenty one, sixty six six fifth Avenue was renamed six sixty fifth Avenue.

00:51:56
Speaker 1: First because I remember seeing that sign coming out of this at Yeah, I forget what subway stop it was. That's rude of them that it's a landmark. I like the fact that Linda Blair's own agency didn't think to recommend her for the apart in The Exorcist, her agents sent along thirty.

00:52:16
Speaker 2: Young actresses, but not Linda. If her mom hadn't stepped in, she wouldn't have snacked the part. So hopefully she got a new representation after that.

00:52:25
Speaker 1: All right, wow. Two other women helped bring Reagan to life. Warner's forced freed getting to use a woman named Eileen Deat's, who was fifteen years Blair's senior, as Blair's stunt double. She stands in for the crucifix scene, the fistfight with Father Karras, and others that were deemed just too extreme for Blair, and she also appears as the face of Pazuzu. No too much for you. I hate that those little one shot yeah interstitial bits, but the oh, it's it's like a mime from hell. I hate that soul that is what they make up was originally going to be. That was the first design that they rejected for Reagan. Yeah, as possessed and Deets was angry that her contribution to the film had been minimized, and she would later claim in the Press that she'd performed all the possession scenes, and then Warners counted her by tallying up her screen time at just over twenty eight seconds, which feels unnecessarily cruel. We'll talk about Eileen Deetz later, but then now I want to talk about Mercedes McCambridge. She provided the speaking voice of the Possessed Reagan, one of the It's on the Mount Rushmore voice performances. Man, I mean, she is so scary and what is that voice? It literally like if you were like, what what sounds like it comes from the depths of hell, I would say that voice a gender. I have no idea what age it is. It's yeah, yeah, I can't even do like, I can't get as low as she does. Sound like Tom Waite. Dude, It's so fucking crazy. She and was even more nuts. She had already had a full career by the time she got to this. She worked extensively with Orson Wells during his radio era. He once called her the world's greatest living radio actress, which is a pretty great compliment from Orson Wells. Yeah.

00:54:19
Speaker 2: Sadly she was not in his infamous War of the World's radio play, but she was in some great ones, and.

00:54:23
Speaker 1: By nineteen forty nine she won an Oscar for All King's Men. And then she also acted opposite Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar against Elizabeth Taylor in Giant, and she has a memorable cameo menacing Janet Lee in orson Well's Touch of Evil, also infamously known as the film that Duke Ellington did an amazing score for and the film that has Charlton Heston in brown face as a Mexican guy. Anyway, Freakan's first choice for the role was another voice actor named Ken Nordeen, who I know through my beloved Tom Waits. Tom Waits described him as an early influence on his kind of beat jazz. What I think is the era of Tom Waits's like sort of Billy Joel with a worst drinking problem era where he was doing like lounge jazz piano and then like beat poetry inspired stuff over the top. Nordin would just improvise or recite poetry over like a jazz combo, and he called it word jazz, which is what I call my writing. But he couldn't summon a sufficiently demonic voice, and so Freakin turned to McCambridge, and she was performing at a Dallas stage production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf. She watched a rough cut of the film with Blair reading the lines, and then she told Freakin that she was a recovering alcoholic and deeply Catholic, and she cited the religion as helping her get through the addiction. She was a really early public advocate for alcoholism treatment. She actually had to leave AA because she was no longer anonymous because she went before a Senate subcommittee testifying about alcoholism and addiction in nineteen sixty nine. McCambridge added that she went in to have two priests on set when she or on the sound stage where she was doing the recording, to help her get through some of this blasphemous dialogue. And she was a smoker for thirty years, but she told Freakin that in order to pull off what she was envisioning is the voice for this, she would have to start drinking again, and that's what she did. One of the most famous things about this movie that's recited is that she chain smoked, slugged down Jack Daniels and to get the suitably disgusting sound for the famous projectile vomiting scene. She swallowed eighteen raw eggs and a pulpy apple. Ah. For some reason, the pulpy apples the thing that kicks it. Yeah right. Talking to The New York Times about the experience, she called the role the most difficult performance of my life and a terrible experience. She delved into her inspiration for the voice, and this is where it gets truly horrifying. The wheezing, for instance, My chronic bronchitis helped with that. I did it on one microphone, then on another, elevating it a bit, then a third and fourth, two tones higher each time, and they combined it as a chorus. The wailing just before the demon is driven out. That's a sound I once heard at a wake in Ireland. I used moaning cries I'd use when playing Lady Macbeth for Orson. For the groaning sounds, I pulled a scarf around my neck, tight and almost strangled. And this is the thing that really haunts me. She pulled inspiration from Certain's screams that the demon made from her experiences drying out in a detox facility, remembering the cries of patients going through alcohol withdrawal and a truly haunting quote, she said, I cried out from my remembered hell. That sounds like something from like like a Paradise Lost or Dante or something like.

00:58:14
Speaker 2: I mean, the thing that's even more upsetting for me is that she must have known that she was about to go through that again now that she started drinking again for this performance. That's true of all the disturbing elements of this film and production, this woman breaking her heart earned sobriety is maybe the most upsetting to me. My girlfriend's in the midst of getting her master's to be a therapist, and she's in the middle of taking in classes on an addiction, and she's been talking to me at length about that. And yeah, I mean, I don't think I realized the sanctity with which.

00:58:47
Speaker 1: Those in recovery hold their sobriety. So that is a truly insane sacrifice. And that's got to be one of the darkest elements of this story. I'd say, yeah, yea already talking about it. Just goes into this like they always do, the oh she chained smoke drink Jack Daniels and you know, slug down eggs. That's like the logline. You see all the BuzzFeed listicles and you know whatever. But she really went deep and it took a lot out of her. How long was she celebrated? I don't, I don't, but yeah, I mean, it's also crazy that she was like she wanted to be such an advocate for getting alcoholism in the public eye in nineteen sixty nine, that she was like, well, I guess I'm not an AA anymore. That's nuts, man. Wow.

00:59:36
Speaker 2: William Freakin, in a twenty twelve screening Q and A, admitted that he was equally horrified by the lengths that she went for this performance. One detail that often gets cited is at MERCEDESM. Cambridge recorded her lines strapped to a chair to give the impression that the demon was struggling against bonds. Freaking said, I tied her hands behind her back and she would do the dubbing a line at a time, and often she would ask for more booze and more cigarettes. She'd come off a take and then go to a couch in the back where these two priests were.

01:00:09
Speaker 1: And she would collapse in their arms and burst into tears. Jesus right, it just gets worse and worse.

01:00:17
Speaker 3: It wasn't hard for me to imagine the rage. See if it's this close.

01:00:24
Speaker 1: In me right here, I'm only a go be. It's that close, and everybody, everybody came from the second forward a hi.

01:00:38
Speaker 3: That isn't hard.

01:00:41
Speaker 1: Now some are, predictably. There are two versions of what happened next. Freaking has claimed that McCambridge voluntarily gave up her credit on the film, telling him she didn't want people to think about who did the voice. McCambridge said that he in fact promised her a credit, and it was only when she showed up at the screening that she realized she'd been omitted from the film's credits. She told The New York Times, it's heartbreaking when someone you thought was a friend does that. Freaking told her that there wasn't time to get her added to the credits, and there's been a persistent conspiracy theory that it was at one point floated by Mercedes McCambridge herself, that the detail that she voiced the demon was kept out of the press until Linda Blair had secured an Oscar nomination. They let everyone think that Linda Blair did that voice to help her land an Oscar and then, like the day after it came out that she won the nomination, the studios leaked the story to Variety in the trades and said that it was a woman with a career in an Oscar. It wasn't this child in her debut film performance. So really a raw deal for Mercedes. Yeah, it's a pretty sleazy move because once a nomination's given, it can't be revoked. So I mean, that's a good play.

01:02:02
Speaker 2: But on the flip side, there are some people who think that the news that this you know, professional voice actress with an Oscar to her name actually provided that unforgettable voice might have actually torpedo Linda Blair's chance for an Oscar win, which.

01:02:17
Speaker 1: I mean, let's be real, kind of deserved it you think? Do you think she deserved it? I mean, I mean, I admittedly I have never seen paper Moon, but yeah, because the Oscar did go to Tatum O'Neill, who still holds the record as the youngest Oscar winner ever for paper Moon. But I say this would love to Linda Blair. I think her career after this testifies that she maybe wasn't the greatest actress of all time and that.

01:02:50
Speaker 2: She just was She not a great actress or was she just like typecast slash developed drug problems.

01:02:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, other problems, that's true. Yeah, and her life was admittedly made much more insane by this film. But you know she didn't. Yeah, I don't know. She's great. I mean she is. She is perfect for this because it's, like freaking said, She's like smart, but not obnoxiously so. She doesn't give off like Jonathan Lipniki vibes. She doesn't have like theater kid vibes, like like Jacob Tremblay. So uh yeah, but I yeah, I mean, I don't know, man, I listen to me on a twelve year old grew performance in one of the most famous films of all time. Merry Christmas everyone. You can't say I'm not consistent. I mean I will say. I'm gonna know a ten year old, I mean the old thing with her dad in Paper Moon, right O'Neil. So I'm gonna say you know what, No, she would have gone to Linda Blair. Damn it. Anyway, the whole thing with Mercedes Mcambridge went to the screen actors guilt, and she got her name reinserted in the credits. On a related note.

01:04:05
Speaker 2: This is one of the first movies that didn't use credits after the opening title card.

01:04:09
Speaker 1: Did you know that? Yeah? I think Freakin had some kind of quote about that where he said, like, Citizen Kane is the only good film that had the credits before the action, or something like that. Something predictably obnoxious. Let me see if I can find it, but go ahead.

01:04:24
Speaker 2: And speaking of titles, William Peter Bladdie claimed that Warner Brothers wanted to change the title of The Exorcist because none of the studio executives knew what an exorcistem was.

01:04:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, which scans it does, doesn't it. Saga also had to intercede on the behalf of a third woman who played Reagan, stunt woman and Miles. Reagan was a trained gymnast and she performed the spider walk sequence that was cut from the original film. Apparently, Bladdie didn't feel that the contraption that they use to keep her safe was sufficiently removed from the original cut, so he cut it out and put it back in two thousand when they could use CGI to pain over it. It is horrifying. She walks backwards and on all fours down a set of stairs and then vomits up blood. It's one of the worst things I've ever.

01:05:17
Speaker 2: Seen somehow, but walking backwards down the stairs was more upsetting than the vomiting bloe.

01:05:23
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's so canny. It gives you that like deep sense of like freidian unease where you're like, that's not how that body works should be. And so she spent two weeks rehearsing that scene and did it on the first take whoa, and then it was cut. So it was reinstated for the two thousand re release, and she wasn't again, was not credited, although she'd been telling people. She did an interview where she said, you'd been telling people that she had done that stunt for years, and the fact that she wasn't credited ended up damaging her credibility to it and costing her work, and so SAG once again intervened and got her name at it.

01:06:01
Speaker 2: That scene is so infamous to me because I for me, it ranks up there with the head rotation pea soup thing.

01:06:08
Speaker 1: I thought it was in the original. Maybe I just remember seeing it from like trailers and stuff for the reissue or the re release, but yeah, I mean that's like, that's for me. The thing that really stays with you. Yeah. Oh oh, I don't even like I don't like thinking about No, we're done, moving on. Production on The Exorcist was split between Washington, d C. For exteriors and sound stages in New York for the interiors at the McNeil home. The various hospital settings are in New York as well. Bellevue One was shot at Fordham in Bronx, but despite this, the film has become known as something of a love letter to Georgetown. Multiple scenes are shot at the university. Jason Miller spent a week on campus studying the Jesuits there to prepare for his role, and they actually got some on set visits from Father Thomas King, who is a professor of theology at Georgetown, to bless the set after some of the accidents. Around three hundred Georgetown students, staff, and faculty, including Jesuits, appear as extras in the movie, earning salaries from thirty five to one hundred and twenty eight dollars per day, while Warners paid the university's standard one thousand dollars a day to film there. Blady was so deeply Catholic and so concerned about his Alma Mater's spiritual soul that he started a petition to the Vatican that made it all the way to the Vatican's highest court, seeking the enforcement of Canon law to reform Georgetown University, which he felt had strayed away from its founding principles. It was still ongoing at the time of his death in twenty seventeen.

01:07:43
Speaker 2: I don't know what this says about fate or God or what, but it was during production that Bladdie met his future wife, Linda Trero, who was a tennis pro who'd been hired as an extra on the set at Georgetown.

01:07:55
Speaker 1: All give but we will get to a better marriage That came from his film. Later. Yes, exteriors for the McNeil's home, including the iconic shot of Maren under the street light probably top five iconic film stills of all time. Possibly those were shot at thirty six hundred Prospect Street. Freakin would say that he considered shooting inside of Senator and later Treasury Secretary Lloyd Benson's house in DC. Benson asked for one million dollars, which is I guess what something the Treasury secretary would do.

01:08:33
Speaker 2: That's like almost ten million now, so that is that basically a no, Yeah, you can't probably what that is. The woman who owned the house that they did eventually shoot at, Missus Florence Mahoney, didn't want her plants to die during production, so the crew had to construct special sets when filming the exteriors so they didn't block the light.

01:08:57
Speaker 1: I love a plant, mom. Yeah. The famous Exorcist steps, by the way, which they were originally built in eighteen ninety five, which have you ever been there, explains why they're so damn treacherous looking. They are steep. They were built during the construction of a storage structure for cable cars as sort of a priority path for workers. They had been referred to as the Hitchcock Steps. Freaking said, a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's nineteen thirty five the thirty nine Steps. Although I think there are seventy something Exorcist steps, they required a bit of a cheat to appear as they do in the film. They added an extension to thirty six hundred Prospect Street to allow keros to fall propertily. Otherwise the property was set too far back from the steps to make it believable. And then obviously they were also padded with like a half inch of rubber for the poor guy who had to fall all the way down the damn things. And in an incredible bit of capitalism, Georgetown reportedly yards students five dollars admission to watch the stunt of this guy falling down the stairs from nearby rooftops. And even more hilariously, to me, Bladie said that that fall he wrote the fall into his novel because he was there was an incident that he remembered from being a student where one of his physics classmates was hospitalized after falling down a flight of stairs fleeing after attempting to steal a final exam. The steps were recognized as a DC landmark in twenty fifteen, and a plaque at their base commemorates them.

01:10:34
Speaker 2: I have a question, go on, when you said that they were known as the Hitchcock steps, was that because they looked like the steps from the thirty nine Steps or did he Hitchcock film that there.

01:10:44
Speaker 1: I have no idea. I don't know. I know thirty nine steps is one of my blank spots for Hitchcock. Maybe it was just they were like a steps, right, yeah, staircase And of course production also shot in muscle Iraq for three months for the film's opening. In his interview to two thousand and six Oscar Screening, Freakin said that because America did not have diplomatic relations with Iraq at the time, he dealt directly with the ruling Bath Party, who agreed to production on the condition that he a higher a large number of Iraqi crew members b teach them how to create makeup, blood and see donate a print of the French connection. Freaking told the Hollywood Reporter, I remember the head of Warners, Ted Ashley, saying, if you go over there and you get killed, it's your own fault. They didn't, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Temperatures reached one hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit, limiting their shooting window to down or dusk, and this was particularly hard on Max von Sadau, who was wearing Dick Smith's extensive and impressive old age makeup. He would remove it after shooting and sweat trapped between his skin and the latex appliances would pour off his skin like a river. Oh yeah, there's a disgusting mental image for you. So in pulling off a bunch of latex old age appliances and sweat dripping out of it.

01:12:11
Speaker 2: Yet another problem with the Iraq shoot was that the massive statue of Pazuzu was accidentally sent to Hong Kong at first, and not Iraq.

01:12:20
Speaker 1: So fun fact about the name of the demon Pazzuzu, it is not actually mentioned in the first movie. It's only actually mentioned in the second movie, which is famously one of the most dog movies ever made. It is truly awful, despite having both Blair return, James Earl Jones, Richard Burton, and Nurse Ratchet herself. Oh Louise Fletcher. Yeah, yes, yes, and it is stunningly, stunningly dog. I really directed that, John Borman, Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow. But yes, that is the film in which the demon says, I am Pazuzu. So, I mean that's kind of the name. It's a little Yeah, it's not the most phonetically threatening name you could come up with. No, uh, what's a good like something or like anything in or is threatening? Yeah, yeah, or Thomas Gary. I am Gary the Demon. I am Gary. I had a whole bit in college.

01:13:39
Speaker 2: I just because you know, there are plenty of people named Gary, but I've never seen a baby named Gary, Like, can you imagine a baby named Gary An a whole sketch.

01:13:51
Speaker 1: That was just baby Gary. He's just born with a with a five o'clock shadow and a bad back and worried about, you know, refinancing his house. Yeah, yeah, I know the tracks. He's got to get his boat siding replaced.

01:14:06
Speaker 2: Well, one problem that Freakan didn't have was with the Catholic Church, which is surprising to me. Freaking said at the aforementioned Q and A that quote, most of the people at the highest levels of the church accepted the film totally because the Roman ritual of exorcism is still in the New Testament, adding that church officials later told him they credited the film for inspiring a flood of applications to convents and seminaries.

01:14:32
Speaker 1: I mean, it is actually a deeply conservative film in a sense because it's you know, the Catholic Catholicism wins and solves what science could not, Like you see how the church would have been like, oh yeah, we count as one as a w Did it win? Well it won for Reagan, Yeah, okay, it won the battle, lost the war. Well, yeah, on the plus side, for the Catholic church.

01:15:00
Speaker 2: Two real life priests appear in the film. One of them was a priest from Buffalo, New York, named Father William O'Malley, who once gave William Peter Bladdie grief about the characterization of Father Karras and his novel. He was cast as Karas his mentor, Father Joseph Dyer, who I believe is the guy who comes up to his body after it's thrown down the stairs at the end and gives him last absolution.

01:15:26
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, and we'll talk about that, yeah, yeah, oh yeah.

01:15:33
Speaker 2: Also, the Jesuit Reverend Thomas Birmingham appears as the president of Georgetown. William Freakin later said the cardinal in New York preached about the Exorcist from the pulpit and said great things about it. The guy who was the head of the Jesuit order at the time, Father Pedro Arupe, who is headquartered in Milan, he had his own print of it and would show it to his fellow priests and bishops and cardinals. I mean, I get it, but I just have a hard time, especially with the crucifix shot. Well, yeah, imagining these priests would watch that.

01:16:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know, they were, they were having a tough time in the seventies. Yeah, there was a Beatles Rosemary's Baby, you know, pot they led Zeppelin. They needed a win.

01:16:25
Speaker 2: Still, there were dissenters about The Exorcist. Freaking would add. The cardinal in Boston loathed it and wanted it banned, as cardinals in Boston often do. Billy Graham, who was not Catholic, it deserves to be said, denounced it from the pulpit and said, the devil is in every frame of this film.

01:16:44
Speaker 1: Hum, you know you do it well. If Billy Graham name drops here, yeah, it comes for you. So now we have to get to the other most famous thing about the Exorcist, which is the alleged cur suh. He was a curse said to feel three froze again. What am I doing? Curse froze again? Yeah. And in fairness, there was an admittedly tremendous run of bad luck the profel production, and we'll list them in order of severity. As we mentioned, the statue of Pazuzu was lost in transit to Iraq, which delayed production there for three or four weeks. Half the eighteen person crew in Iraq were replaced at one point or another due to either dysentery or sunstroke. Which would you prefer? Ooh, I think dysentery. Yes, is a clowns. You know, you're just looking afford to lose some weight. I'll go at dysentery. Yeah, you just scooped out for a couple of days. You're not like it's like a colonic. It's like a free colonic. Most famously, a fire at Fox Studios in New York on West fifty fourth destroyed most of the interior sets when only an NYC baby Greatest City in the World bing bong a pigeon flew into his circuit box cause sky rat, causing a six week delay. However, and six weeks six weeks man this film film for over a year. God, however, and this is the spookiest part. I think it's turning into Dracula now. Uh. The set for Reagan's room was untouched. Wow. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun du dund dun dun dund dun dud dun du walking on broken class No, I just have poor pitch. According to Possessed, The True Story of an Exorcism by Thomas B. Allen Freakin, asked one of the film's consultants, the aforementioned father Birmingham, to perform an exorcism on the set. But because in Catholicism there were actually very strict things you have to go through for exorcism, Birmingham said he this didn't qualify and b would probably just freak everyone out more. Uh So he blessed it instead and also a spooky part. Burmingham told Alan nothing else happened on the set after the ritual, but around that time there was a fire in the Jesuit residence in Georgetown or the set for it. Spooky. Ellen Burston actually suffered a permanent injury to her back, but not because of anything supernatural, because Billy Freakin was a dickhead. She was performing the scene where she gets yanked back and slammed against the wall. I possessed Reagan and you know they did that in the old fashioned way where they just put some wires on you and pulled real hard. And she told she asked, freaking like, you know, he's hurting me, Can you tell him to stop? And freaking said no, and do it harder. Yeah. Well, to hear Elan Burston tell it, she either saw or felt a freaking gesture behind her back to the stunt guy to not tone it down or to pull harder, and so the guy did. He slammed her against the wall and she fell on the floor, and that is her real scream of pain. That is the final take that appears in the film, and she permanently injured her back. Linda Blair was also permanently injured by a similar effect. She's in a wire harness being thrown up and down for that shot, and she was screaming in pain while she was shooting, but everyone thought she was just in character. The incident fractured part of her lower spine and resulted in lifelong scoliosis. Wow. Other people were minorly maimed. A crew member lost his toe, a carpenter chopped off his thumb. That was a fanzine called Cassel Frankenstein that director Joe Dante actually wrote. For one point. Jason Miller's son Jason, who himself was an actor and maybe best known for his role in The Lost Boys, was critically injured during filming when he was struck by a motorcyclist on a beach. Was Jason's son in this movie, No, but Jason Patrick is the kid's name. He's gone on to be in quite a bit of stuff.

01:21:08
Speaker 2: Wait, he's the one who broke Julia Roberts heart. They were engaged and then they broke up right.

01:21:14
Speaker 1: Before you know, I was Keifer Sutherland.

01:21:16
Speaker 2: Oh right, revenge on Keifer Sutherland by having an affair afterwards with Jason Patrick.

01:21:23
Speaker 1: You're right. So many lost boys, so little time, and now the deaths. In a documentary about the film, Ellen Burston recalled that an astounding nine people died during the making of the film. She quoted an assistant cameraman whose wife had a baby during the shoot. The baby either died or was still born, she said. The man who refrigerated the set died. The night watchman died. The aforementioned Vassiliki Mariaros, who played the father of Father Caro, who played the mother of Father Carris. Excuse me, she passed away during production in February nineteen seventy three at the age of eighty nine. Admittedly, while Jack mcgoweran who is an Irish actor who specialized in Beckett, he was one of the foremost stars of Beckett's plays. He played the drunk director Burke Dennings he finished filming, went back to London and died as a result of the flu epidemic that had broken out there. On his first day that he arrived in the States to film, Max von Sidau received word that his brother had unexpectedly died in Sweden and he had to return home, which further delayed shooting. Linda Blair's grandfather also died during the shoot. This curse persisted after alleged curse persisted after filming wrapped. This is pretty crazy. I do have to admit. The studio chose a theater across the street from a sixteenth century church in Rome for the premiere of the film in Italy, and as it happened, a thunderstorm was occurring that night, the church was struck by such a powerful blow of lightning that the cross on top of the spire broke off and fell into the plaza below, which really must have freaked everybody out, I have to say. And then also in twenty fifteen, Hatra, which was a designated World Heritage Site where the prologue was shot, was damaged by militants from isis now it gets worse, it gets Yeah, So one of the most famous scenes in the film, And honestly, the one that I have the most trouble watchings is this is what supposedly caused people to run out of the theater and puke or faint. This is the scene in which Reagan undergoes a procedure called a cerebral angiography, and that was It's a now archaic y ok, buddy, Yeah yeah, I'm just white knuckle up, clear this description. Yeah. So, it is a now archaic medical procedure in which a patient's carotid artery from the front of the neck was punctured in order to insert a catheter, during which a contrast agent was injected to make the patient's blood vessels more visible under X rays. They did it to the curated because it was the fastest and most powerful way that this coloring agent would circulate through the body. But it is gross. It is a not an artery you want punctured. Generally speaking, I'm not a doctor, but I do know that freaking just happened upon it. While he was visiting NYU. He was researching these different medical procedures that would be portrayed in the film, and the doctor who arranged the visit recommended that he witnessed this procedure performed by a tech named Paul Bateson. Freakin was so impressed with Bateson's deft hand with the procedure and especially with young children, that he cast Bateson in the film, and that scene of the exercise is now one of the only places where you can see this footage of this procedure being performed, because it's no longer done, and it's become famous in medical circles for this accuracy. Now, that's not where Bateson's story ends. Bateson was a lifelong alcoholic. He dipped in and out of sobriety and was a patron of the He was also a gay man and was a patron and frequenter of the West Village's gay bars, in particular leather clubs like the mind Shaft. But it was at a Christopher Street bar called the bad Lands that he met Addison Verel, who was a reporter for a variety at the time. The two ended up drinking all night doing drugs. They went back to Veryl's apartment and had sex, and then Veryl ended up being murdered. A friend of Verrel's was a gay activist and journalist named Arthur Bell, and he wrote an article about Verel's murder in The Village Voice, contextualizing within the larger epidemic of violence and murders that were happening to gay men in the West Village and the nypds seeming refusal or inability to do anything about it. The article ended with Bell's phone number. It's kind of an insane thing to do for a journalist. You would not get away with that today. Self boxing, yeah, and Bateson called him. He didn't identify himself by name, but he had a number of details about the murder that were not released to the public. While waiting for Bateson to call back, Bell and the NYPD who were there received another call, this time from a guy who said he knew Batesen from a detox program. This guy said that Bateson also called him to confess, so they arrested him, and long story short, he ended up serving a little over twenty four years for the murder. He is believed to have died in twenty twenty one. It gets weirder because Freakin visited him with in jail Bateson and spoke with him about a series of serial killings of gay men that the NYPD believed Bateson may have been connected to. These were called the bag murders because the victims were dismembered and placed in the Hudson River in bags, and they had markings on them indicating that they had come from the NYU Medical Center's neuropsychiatric unit. Bateson told Freakin that the NYPD was pressuring him to confess to these murders in exchange for reduced and he was never conclusively linked to them anyway. This whole thing then spurred Freaking to adapt New York Times reporter Gerald Walker's nineteen seventy novel Cruising, about a police officer going undercover in the gay community to catch a serial killer. That film stars a hilariously too old for the role Al Pacino and features scenes that were set at the gay club hell Fire that was redecorated to resemble The Mine Shaft, and it came out in nineteen eighty to widespread protests from the gay community, although it has since been reclassified as something of a cult classic. WHOA, what is the Mine Shaft? It's a leather club. Oh yeah. There's a scene in Cruising in which a large black man strides into the interrogation room dressed in nothing but a jockstrap and a cowboy hat and slaps someone across the face and then walks out. It is never explained or addressed further sounds like my first day at people. Hey, you're still under an NDA. You can't talk about that. Uh. We make jokes to trial lighten this ye, to get into the rockets darker. Yeah.

01:28:20
Speaker 2: Lastly, and perhaps most horribly, the voice of the demon. Mercedes McCambridge suffered an unimaginable loss in nineteen eighty nine by her son John Markle, who'd committed assorted crimes at his investment firm, killed his wife, Christine, and their two daughters, Amy and Suzanne, and then himself in their little rock home. He supposedly wore a Halloween style mask to commit the murders. Do you mean like a Michael Myers No, I think just.

01:28:47
Speaker 1: Like a dime store Halloween mask.

01:28:49
Speaker 2: Jesus Christy wore a Halloween style mask to commit these murders and left a fairly cruel note to McCambridge that, although it absolved her of any wrong doing in his financial crimes, basically accused her of being an absentee mother.

01:29:05
Speaker 1: I think you can read the text on her Wikipedia page. It is not nice. Yeah, don't investigate that further. Yeah, no, you really don't want to.

01:29:15
Speaker 2: Of course, at least some of the misery on the set of The Exorcist could be chalked up to the film's production schedule. Principal photography went from the scheduled eighty five days to more than two hundred, meaning that the movie went two point five million dollars or twelve point five million dollars to day over budget. They'd lost somewhere in the neighborhood of about four months of shooting time owing to various delays, so they were behind schedule and rushing. This coupled with the fact that interiors were shot primarily with available light as opposed to being professionally lit. I think I saw something about how Freakin wanted the kitchen to be all like stainless steel appliances and shiny surfaces and the sunnitographers.

01:29:57
Speaker 1: Can't light this. He was like, Yeah, what a matter? Pain in the ass that was? It's like lighting this consisted of flicking the switch on the ceiling light and just going for it.

01:30:09
Speaker 2: So these sets were dim and consequently accident prone, which is not exactly a combination for an injury free set. As you say, then, of course there is good old Billy Friedkin, who could be a tremendous bastard aside from the aforementioned situation with Burston in which she broke.

01:30:31
Speaker 1: Her coxsis, I believe it was the outcome of that of the back injury. Yeah, freaking combined an exacting and exhaustive approach to filming with down light awful behavior. He also, I love this, denied the extent of Ellen Burston's injuries in a twenty eighteen interview, saying I'm sure she was hurt by the fall. You follow on your backside, it's gonna hurt, But she wasn't injured, as my father's high school football coach would say, is it pain or is it injury? Jesus Pennsylvania high school football? My friends. So here's some tales of Freakin's particular brand of horse on the set of Exorcists, as were counted in the legendary tome on seventies Hollywood Easy Riders Raging Bulls, absolutely a must read for anybody interested in this era of cinema. Some aer all of what you're about to hear, would earn William Friedkin the nickname Wacky Willie from his crew. So deeply downplaying the depths of this, he fired John Robert Lloyd, a production designer who'd worked with him on several films, the day before principal photography was set to begin. Delayed things six weeks. He had his director's chair stenciled with an oscar for the French connection next to his name. He delayed shooting while he sent his propmaster in search of preservative free bacon because he didn't like the way the bacon in a particular shot was curling. He worked so methodically that one crew member reported coming back from three days of sick leave to find Freakin's still shooting the same shot. He would fire people in the morning and rehire them by afternoon. One crew member recounted that Freakin had a smiling conversation and a handshake with a guy and then walked past him and said, get this guy out of here. Slapped William O'Malley, the aforementioned real life priest playing Father Dyer, across the face before a take to get a suitably emotional line reading from him. Though he did at least have the courtesy to ask him do you trust him? Before he struck him in the face, And.

01:32:37
Speaker 2: That was right before he was giving final absolution to Father Carris after it got thrown out the window, and.

01:32:42
Speaker 1: It was after like fifteen takes because Freaking was berating him and was like, you're not giving me enough, and man William O'Malley was like, I've just given my best friend the last writes fifteen times, like what do you want for me? And Freakin says, do you trust me? And then slapped him across the face him to roll again. Freaking once got drunk and attempted to do the tablecloth out from under the dish's trick on an enormous spread that Craft Service had set out for Christmas and failed, sending everything to the floor. He would play tapes of anything from South American tree frogs to the soundtrack of Psycho at high volume on the set to unnerve his actors. Perhaps most famously, he not only carried his own pistol on the set and fired it off frequently, but he'd also have his prop director randomly fire blanks from a shotgun to keep the actors in a state of fear and high alert. In an interview, Jason Miller recalled one of the arguments he got in with Freakin. Happened after the director fired a gun near his ear to get an authentic reaction from him. Just before a take. He threw a reel with music from Leialo Schiffrin, one of the film's original composers, across the street into a parking lot while in post production, saying that's where that in marimba music belongs. As per an interview with Eileen Dietz, who is Blair's stunt double for Reagan, Freakin wanted the smell of the demon to be rancid, so he did this thing during the possession sequences where he would hide old hamburger meat and rotten eggs on the set so it would make the actors feel uncomfortable. The problem was that the cast and crew all got sick, so we had to stop shooting. There was a whole discussion between Deets and Freaking about the masturbation scene where they argued over the correct way to mime masturbation with a crucifix. Yes, I just love William. Freaking was like, no, trust me, I know how to do this better. Than you, and she was like, I beg to differ as you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, and then of course has the whole refrigerated set situation, which be kind of touched on in Our Thing episode. Cinematographer Owen Reutzman explained in an interview with the American Society of Cinematographers that the set for Reagan's bedroom was duplicated and built inside a larger insulated structure and then refrigerated down to telemheigel twenty degrees below zero dah, because they wanted both the effect of seeing the actor's breath and of course they wanted to make the actors genuinely uncomfortable, as if the slapping, the gunshots, the psychological warfare style music being played at loud volumes, and the raw food wasn't enough, and presumably verbal abuse at every corner as well. I'm guessing yeah, yeah.

01:35:45
Speaker 2: We tried it at first, just below freezing about twenty five degrees, and you could see some breath, but it really wasn't enough, and as soon as the lights were turned on, the heat took care of the cold so quickly that it didn't even make a take. We found out during the test period that this wouldn't work. He went back to the drawing board. A system was developed that could refrigerate the room quickly to any temperature from zero to twenty below. The breath showed up fine at zero. Bo Freakin won the actors to really feel cold because he felt that would help their acting. An actor on their knees for fifteen minutes at twenty below zero is really going to feel cold.

01:36:20
Speaker 1: It worked out very well.

01:36:23
Speaker 2: It worked out very well for the performances. But the refrigeration system, which they adopted from a restaurant air conditioning unit and would leave on overnight that chilled the room before the actors arrived, cost fifty thousand dollars or almost half a million dollars today, and broke down constantly. And also the lighting they used would warm the room, so they could only complete about five shots a day, which slowed things down. All told, the exorcism scene, which was filmed entirely in sequence, took nearly a month to shoot.

01:36:54
Speaker 1: A month in a month under twenty degree in Hell. Yeah yeah, a month in hell raw rotting food. Oh boy?

01:37:03
Speaker 2: Oh, my favorite anecdote about the horror frigeration scene. Apparently there was a layer of moisture in the set one day which resulted in a thin layer of snow. It started to snow in the bedroom set. I just I love contrasting this with the one hundred and thirty degree temperatures on location in Iraq, and.

01:37:21
Speaker 1: Maxwan Sidau was there for both. Like poor sweet Max Vaughn Sidau just a gentle mourning his brother gentlemanly swede in mourning, literally going from one temperature extreme to the other, while small child's screaming for vanities and obscenities at him. So there's all that under a more fun production note though, iconic makeup artist Dick Smith, who ultimately quit the films three times overworking the Speacon. He designed the old age makeup for Maxwan Sidau, and that was Dick Smith's specialty. He's basically held up as one of the pioneers of this particular sub genre of makeup effects. Yeah, that maximum set out in this movie was only I think forty four. Ye're not alone in that. Everyone was like when they saw him without the makeup, they were like, he's not that old. It took four hours to apply and Pauline Cale, the Dean of American Film Critics, singled it out in her otherwise not particularly positive review in The New Yorker. Smith's old age makeup method was something of a revolution in the film industry. He used multiple latex appliances in overlapping pieces instead of just a one piece mask, which had kind of been they would just slap something on and be like, ah year old now, and this was an innovation that allowed actors to actually act, that allowed them to access the full range of their facial expressions. Prior to the Exorcist, this was most famously seen in Little Big Man for Dustin Hoffman's character in nineteen seventy, which aged Hoffman to one hundred and twenty one years old. Dick Smith was also similarly remembered for aging Marlon Brando and The Godfather and f Murray Abraham in Amiday, for which he received an Oscar Because, as dutiful listeners will recall, the Oscars only instituted an award for makeup in nineteen eighty one for your beloved Rick Baker. Yes, for his work on an American Werewolven London, though there was a special Achievement award for makeup in nineteen sixty eight for Planet of the Apes. What do you think prompted this the best makeup category that added full time in eighty one? I mean it had to be. Might have been an American werewolf in London. I guess yeah, because the Thing wasn't until eighty two, so they hadn't truly seen what that could do. Yeah, it might have been that. Honestly, they were just like, this is so insane, new category.

01:39:39
Speaker 2: Also, your beloved Rick Baker, who worked on a lot of John Carpent movies, including The Thing, served as Dick Smith's makeup assistant for The Exorcist.

01:39:47
Speaker 1: I think this was the first time they worked together. He wrote him a letter because he read Dick Smith had a makeup book that came out, and Rick Baker wrote him a letter. It was like, you're my hero and Dick and Dick Smith, in his infinite generosity, was like, come for me. Smith was also responsible for the Demonic makeup, not just on Linda Blair, but on Blair's stunt double, the aforementioned woman whose ghoulish white makeup appears as single frame inserts in the film. That was the original look you hate it so much. I love it. I hate it's kind of goofy and quaint. I don't like the team. That was the original look that Smith concocted for Blair, but then freaking recalled it a Q and A Why don't we try and do what looks like she scarred herself and these sores will just progressively get worse and worse. Smith did a lot of research on gangrenous wounds and burned victims, and he brought me a lot of actual photos of people to whom that had happened. I think the most unsettling thing to me is when her lips start getting like really disgustingly chapped, like in the early medical testing scenes. It's just that really gets under my skin. Speaking of getting under your skin, some of the wounds sustained by Reagan during the possession were simple to achieve, like the branding on her arm, which is just a top layer of latex that they pulled off with wires. The other ones, like when the words Helped Me appear on her stomach, also deeply unsettling. That was a false stomach that they built out of latex, and they scratched the letters in first and then used it hair dryer to make them sort of recede, and then the shot you see in the film is that whole process run in reverse. I think it's so brilliant, so interesting. Smith also helped special effects supervisor Marcel Vercutier with the latex dummy built for the head rotating scene. Disgustingly, the thing had a condom in its throat to make it look like it was breathing, and a tube that blew warm air through it so that it would generate steam. Verkutel, in the nineteen ninety eight BBC documentary about the film, The Fear of God, said that they tested this thing by placing it in the front seat of a taxi in New York, and then when enough people were looking at it, they made the head spin and when that got the desired reaction, they said, oh, it'll work. It was one of the only things that made Linda Blair, who is otherwise a champ with the rest of the horrifying material in the film, uncomfortable. Speaking of uncomfortable, the projectile vomiting scene has become one of the defining images of the film. Freakin explained in a two thousand and eight interview with DGA quarterly over the years. Everyone refers to the vomit here as pea soup, but it was really porridge with pea soup coloring. It had a much better texture than pure pea soup. The brand they used for the pea soup was Anderson's. They tried Campbells at first but found it wanting. We used a very thin plastic tube that ran from the side of Linda's mouth, underneath her nightgumb down to the floor where a special effects technician was stationed with a Jerry rigged pump and a hand crank on cue. She would tilt her head the right way and he would pump the stuff up through the tube, seemingly out of her mouth. The consistency of the porridge is what determined the speed at which you would move through the pump. The actual take is in the film is something of It was either a mistake or another of Freakin's act of wanton cruelty. In every rehearsal, the mix landed squarely on Jason Miller's chest, and he was reassured that it would do that when they were actually filming, But when the cameras were rolling, it hit him in the face and his horrified reaction is completely genuine. And also I just want to say, we mentioned earlier that shot of father Maren arriving at the McNeil home with his suitcase being silhouetted in the street light and the mist is all du dun da dun da dun du dun dun duh. It's so iconic, it's awesome. I love it so much. That was coming from Bladdie's description as Maren as a melancholy traveler frozen in time, and Freakin wanted to recreate a painting by Belgian surrealist Rene Agreete, otherwise most famously known for Cinepa zun Peep for the Apple Records logo and the Apple Records logo. Yes, it was a painting called Empire of Light, and so he gave Owen Roysman, the cinematographer, the whole day to light the scene. They had to remove the window frame from the facade that they built on the house, replace it behind the window, and then put a spotlight in between the two layers to illustrate that specific spot where Maren would be standing. And then they also had to flood the whole street with fog, and Roysman said that as they set up for this shot, the wind started blowing, so they had to flood the street with even more fog. They also somehow upped the voltage on the street lights to get light coverage, which is like, I don't know how they if you had to apply to the city to do that, and they got it in the first take proper preparation. They also talked about the levitation scene, which they did with wires. Roysman said he wouldn't have had an issue hiding wires with lighting and background colors, but because of the way Freakin wanted it, Linda Blair was levity actually being lifted through multiple extremes of background light and shadow made him very difficult to hide the wires that he said they had to go in and practically paint frame by frame. He said it was like doing a retouching job all the way through. God, what a pain in the ass and worth it. Yes.

01:45:09
Speaker 2: Now, before we get into the music of The Exorcist, we should take a look at its sound design, which won the film.

01:45:14
Speaker 1: One of its odds goes I think one two freaking circumvented normal union rules by hiring the film sound team. Bob Fine Gonzala Gariva and Doc Siegel and Ken Norden and ron Nagel as separate contractors. He was not going to play by even the most basic levels of union rules for making a film. Okay. Ken Nordeen, who we mentioned earlier, was not credited in the film in a theme you should.

01:45:41
Speaker 2: Probably recognize by now, and sued Warner Brothers receiving a cash settlement in lieu of a credit. I've lost count of a number of people who weren't credited and had to settle for an undisclosed cash payout. Supervising sound editor Cecilia Hall said The Exorcist was one of the first films to understand the importance of affecting the audience psychologically. William Freakin said he wanted it to be too loud because he wanted the audience to be slightly on edge in the middle of the film, in the beginning of the film, and the end of the film, pretty much through the whole film volume aside. Ron Nagel used a number of unconventional methods to get the effects in the film. He recorded a bunch of bees he'd shaken up in a jar and the sound of his girlfriend's stomach after chugging a glass of water. The scratching sounds in the attic, heard several times throughout the film were a layered construction of quote guinea pigs running on a board covered with sandpaper, the scratching of fingernails, and the sound of a bandsaw as it flew through the air.

01:46:42
Speaker 1: Who thinks of this? I wonder how much of its trial and error? Yeah, versus like Wow? I mean that's like folly worked to the extreme. Love it. I love that stuff so much. Sounds such a joy to me, just because it's fun to imagine these guys just like on a set being like, yeah, turn that bands on and throw it through the air. Yeah, that's it. Have we got any guinea pigs? I got an idea we could take them back right their receipts. Gonzola Garriva created the sound that was made when Reagan's head did its three undred and sixty degree turn by taking his old, cracked leather wallet and twisting it back and forth against the microphone. We gotta splice that in Who Lifts and Rings with the Father? I'm the Holy Spirit.

01:47:32
Speaker 2: Davio, And as we alluded to earlier, there were actually two scrapped versions of the film's soundtrack. Freakan's first choice was Bernard Hermann, composer of Psycho and dozens of other iconic film tracks. Their initial meeting did not go well. To hear Freedkin tell it, he basically met someone who was as much of an abrasive egomaniac as he was. He showed Bernard Herman a cut of the film, and afterwards Hermann supposedly told him, I might be able to help you with this piece of but you have to leave it with me and I'll see if I can come up with something. Herman compounded this, Phil Paul if you will, by telling Freakin that the film's opening scene in Iraq needed to be cut, and then he wanted to score the film with a church organ, which Freaking rightly felt was a little on the nose.

01:48:19
Speaker 1: So Bernard Herman was out.

01:48:22
Speaker 2: For what it's worth. Herman later said that Freakin wanted equal billing with him for the score. Oh, I can see a film composer not really wanting to share that with the film's director.

01:48:33
Speaker 1: Next, Leialo Schiffrin, legendary film and TV composer, probably best known for the Mission Impossible theme any other big ones I'm missing, h I think of it his bullet basically any like seventies and End of the Dragon like any seventies like Funk influence score was probably Lalo or you know Isaac Case. Oh yeah.

01:48:56
Speaker 2: Leilo Schiffrin completed a six minute score with an eighty He's ensemble, and we already mentioned how that went. Freaking tossed the tape into what an alleyway behind his editing building, parking lot, parking lot, parking lot.

01:49:11
Speaker 1: In Marimbo Music.

01:49:15
Speaker 2: Ay two thousand and five interview, Lailo Schiffrin said of the episode, in the past, we had an incident caused by other reasons, and I think Freaking wanted vengeance, which I love. Yeah, they had some kind of past predating.

01:49:27
Speaker 1: What maybe it was French connection.

01:49:30
Speaker 2: Oh maybe, so freaking as he told the Castle Frankenstein magazine, which you mentioned earlier, decided quote, rather than get bad imitation Stravinsky, I might as well have the real thing.

01:49:43
Speaker 1: Ouch. Yeah, it's like it sounds like a huge diss on Herman more than more than Schiffrin. So freaking descended on the music library at warners Uh and actually assembled an array of composers that are considered like the twentieth century cannon bedrock of like contemporary classical Christoph Penderewski in particular, has become a huge totem in horror movies. Anton Veburn is one of the Orvayburn was one of the pioneers of twelve tone serialism under Arnold Scherenberg and another composer named Hens Vanna Hens. Since I just wanted to mention because of his name and your beloved Jack Nietzsche, Yeah, who worked with Neil Young and the rest Phil Spector. It's something like just ambient piano passages that underscore transitions. And Freakin wrote in his Ao biography that Nietzsche arrived at one particularly cruel method to get a particular sound. During our recording session, Nietzsche's girlfriend was sleeping face down on a couch. Jack placed a microphone on the floor next to her and ran across the studio and jumped on her back, landing with both knees. Her shock reaction is the sound we used when Reagan throws up on Father Karras what is it? Perhaps tickled by this display of man's on fathimable cruelty, freaking would work with Nietzsche again on cruising. How many spines were ruined in this I know, right, like sins Sins he got Jack Niche's girlfriend. Yeah. And Pendershki in particular has become this big touchstone and whoror there's like one of his works in particular has been reused, not just in this, but Stanley Kubrick also used a segment of the same work in The Shining. David Lynch has used Penderreshki in four separate projects. And despite all of this, there were only seventeen minutes of music in this two hour film, including Yes, Tubular Bells, do your freaking tell it. I felt the need for something that was akin to Brahms's Lullaby, a kind of childhood film. I went to see the head of Warner at the time, and he didn't know what the hell I was talking about, so he said, go to that room over there, the music library. I went through the stack until I came to this thing called Tubular Bells by a guy named Mike Oldfield, and Warner had no interest in it, was not going to release it. It's a narration record because right after I played Tubular Bells, Mike Oldfield starts narrating and talking about tubular bells, what they are and how they sound. But I listened to that refrain and it hooked me. And when they won the rights to it, that's not that's not correct, but we'll address that in a moment. Tubular Bells, though, is a hilarious and ponderous piece of prog rock cheese. The entire album is forty nine minutes long and contains two tracks. Oldfield was just nineteen when he recorded it and plays most of the instruments on it, totally two hundred and seventy four overdubs. Hilariously. Despite the album credits for things like speed guitars, fuzz guitars, and guitars sounding like bagpipes, there is only one guitar on the record, a telecaster that had previously belonged to Mark Bolan of t Rex. Mike Oldfield was like a guy in the kind of London prog rock scene in the early seventies he had played with. I don't know one of those jerk offs. It was just like a studio guy. My favorite thing from the liner notes is there's a credit for something called Glorfindelle guitar Golrfandelle is yes, the name of a lord of the rings elf and was the nickname given to a custom fuzzbox that was given to Mike Oldfield. The aforementioned narration about the record on the record is Vivian Stanshall, formerly of the comedic rock group Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

01:53:52
Speaker 2: Fans of the Beatles who have seen The Magical Mystery Tour will know the bonzol Dog Douda band for the strip club scene in that film. He was also a close friend of Keith Moon too.

01:54:02
Speaker 1: I'm literally never going to listen to a single recorded work of bat Band because I hate that name so much. It pisses me off to no end. Oldfield told The Quietest at a twenty eleven interview. I didn't design tubula Bells as a piece of scary movie music, although I was pretty paranoid at the time. I was only nineteen and I had a lot of psychological problems and phobias. The pieces linkage with the Exorcist, though it doesn't bother him. He added, I'm quite lucky because eventually, as performance royalties come in, the payment after Halloween is always quite comfortable and having that for something I designed forty years ago in a little tiny room and a horrible part of London is quite nice. Tubula Bells is also quite important in the legacy of just British recorded music period because Richard Branson and his business partner Simon Draper heard demos of Oldfield's work and offered to pay for professional recording. After shopping the finished product around unsuccessfully, the pair deci to start their own label, Virgin Records, to release the album, released in the UK in May of nineteen seventy three and in North America in October nineteen seventy three. Sales were initially slow, but that situation changed following the release of The Exorcist in December nineteen seventy three. The album has gone on to sell fifteen million copies worldwide. Basically launching Virgin Records and foisting Richard Branson on us all the pair's relationship did deteriorate, though, I think Branson was so desperate for a follow up at one point. This is from an anecdote from the book The Show That Never Ends, which is a really great piece of music writing about the prog rock era, Branson drove I think a Rolls Royce Phantom or like one of these obscenely rich guy cars, drove it to Mike Oldfield's house and was like, do you have anything to follow up tubular bells. I will leave this car here as an advance on a down payment and take a cab back to London. And things got so bad that by nineteen ninety, Oldfield inserted a message in Morse code in his album Amarok that read off RB but at least of a twenty four At least as of a twenty fourteen interview with I Think the Guardian, he said he still got to fly first class on Virgin Airlines for free. In Easy Riders Raging Bulls, It's recounted that after a screening of the completed film, Warner's exec John Cally said, what did we just see? At the film's first sneak preview, cast and crew were stunned to find viewers screaming and running out of the theater. The production designer Bill Malley said, when it was over, nobody applauded. Everybody just sat there. They still didn't know what they had seen. Shockingly, though, when it was submitted to the ratings board, despite the then and now graphic violence, the film got an R rating instead of an X, largely due to the head of the board of the time, doctor Aaron Stern, who supposedly called freakin and said the film should be quote widely seen. However, his successor at the rating sport, Richard Hefner, differed, saying how could anything be worse than this, and got an R. Warner Brothers was understandably skittish about the film and offered no test screenings, releasing it at only thirty screens across twenty four theaters. The film's word abouth popularity quickly forced them to expand, and without getting into what I consider the tedious details of film distribution, it should be noted that, with its various releases, The Exorcist has grossed and adjusted eight and a half billion dollars worldwide. It remains Warner brothers second highest grossing movie of all time, behind Check's notes Barbie I love that. That's their one two punch. Yeah, they should do double features. Man, I'd see barber Cist. That's better than Barbieheim.

01:57:55
Speaker 3: So be.

01:57:57
Speaker 1: Barber Cist, barbar Cist. This was despite various bands against the film, Your beloved Boston and Hattiesburg Mississippi were kindred spirits in attempting to prevent local showings, with police arresting the projectionists and manager of the theater after the film's first Hattiesburg showing and finding them Wow. The film was also banned in parts of Wales, and when it was resubmitted for a British home release after the landmark British Video Recordings Actor of nineteen eighty four, which led to the so called video Nasties era, the film was banned entirely and it was unavailable legally for ten years. Yeah, it was up there with like a clockwork orange and like also really awful, like street trash, all the faces of death, like all the really up exploitation movies. I guess there were some towns in the UK where it was allowed to be screened, giving rise to Exorcist bus trips organized by local travel companies. I just cannot believe that this film had the legs that it had, Like you would think after seeing it for the shock value, it might not last, but its a testament to its quality that it did because people were showing up repeatedly. And another half of the film's legacies, of course, the madness that happened when theaters started screening it widely, and it must be said that basically this forced the studio to put it into wide distribution. Thirty theaters is nothing, you know. And once they saw how theaters were being shut down by the demand for this film, they pushed it wide. But people were standing at these enormous lines to see it. They would light bonfires on the street to keep warm while they waited in line and try and bribe their way upside. Once inside, they would faint run out of the theater to vomit. One headline from February nineteen seventy fourth set a viewer had fainted, hit the arm rest of his seat and broken three ribs. New York Times headline that year said a security guard had told a reporter that several people suffered heart attacks, one woman had a miscarriage. One viewer actually sued warners after fainting and breaking their jaw. Studio settled out of court. Theaters in Toronto reported that they had plumbers on standby for vomit clogged toilets and sinks, as well as ambulances outside the theater. Meanwhile, perishes across the country reported increased calls from congregants requesting exorcisms, or simply just people flocking back to the church in droves after being scared stiff by the film. Scared straight, I guess if you will, in the parlance of modern times. My personal favorite clipping from this era that I alluded to earlier was a theater manager in Chicago met his wife when she fainted into his arms during a screening of the Exorcist, and they were married two months later. That's just too precious for words. Yes, well, this isn't.

02:01:03
Speaker 2: An early version of the film's poster featured Reagan's hands with the bloody crucifix with the tagline God Help this girl. The poster was rejected by William Friedkin, supposedly because it included the word God, which he thought should never be used in ad copy.

02:01:21
Speaker 1: How cute of him, I know, not the bloody crucifix, but the word God was what bothered him. Warner's campaigned heavily for the film at the Academy Awards, and we're rewarded with nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, art, direction, set decoration, cinematography, editing, and sound. It was the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture, though had ultimately only one for Adapted Screenplay and Sound. George Q.

02:01:48
Speaker 2: Koor, who'd won a director for My Fair Lady as well as directed in Philadelphia's Story, the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born, and a bunch of Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy Joints threatened to resigned from the Academy of The Exorcist won Best Picture, which I love.

02:02:04
Speaker 1: Can't Take the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen, Bitch. The film had less positive impacts elsewhere. Bladdy sued Warners and Freaking over credits and supposedly being barred from production. At one point, Bladdy's name was added, and he eventually dropped the suit, though he and Freaking fell out and didn't talk for years afterwards, and I think Freaking retaliated by saying, you were not banned from production, you were banned from post production. Linda Blair. Meanwhile, I was given a security detail for months after the film by the studio after receiving death threats. A cop was stationed at her home when the movie came out. The amount of pressure that came down on me wasn't anything I was prepared for, she told The Independent this year, especially all the pressure the press put on me. They thought I had all the answers about faith and Catholicism. It was probably the most awful thing you could imagine. Unsurprisingly, Blair spiraled. In nineteen seventy seven, she was part of a massive drugsting that took targeted thirty one people for interstate cocaine trafficking. She did appear in the god Awful aforementioned sequel to The Exorcist, The Exorcist Heretic, alongside Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, and James Earl Jones, but she wasn't really able to sustain a career on the order of The Exorcist, though she did. Pat should date an impressive number of musicians, including Rick Springfield, who she meant when she was fifteen and he was twenty five, which.

02:03:30
Speaker 2: Gross didn't meet. I believe they were dating when she was fifteen and he was twenty five, reportedly allegedly legal reasons.

02:03:39
Speaker 1: Yeah. She also dated Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes, Neil Spider Giraldo, the future husband of Pat Benattar and her guitarist Sticks guitarist Tommy Shaw, the lead singer of Minor League's classic rock dorks Black Oak, Arkansas. And lastly, and most impressively, Rick James for two years, who wrote the song cold Blooded about her. Didn't think that was a connection we'd be making this episode. Sadly, Jason Miller struggled with alcoholism for years. He did reprise his role as Father Carris in the deeply underrated third Exorcist movie that I Love has become a big cult classic one. Did that come out ninety one? But he was so late, Yeah, but he was. So it's a great film. It has a deeply drunk and belligerent George C. Scott in it as Father Kinderman. And it's got all these because Bloody directed it and from his novel, So it's got all these really rightly touches, just these astounding stretches of like great dialogue. It's not particularly graphic. It has a very bizarre scene in which Heaven is depicted as an all white, set dressed version of Grand Central, in which Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Ewing, and Fabio all have cameos. But sadly, Jason Miller continued to struggle with alcoholism his whole life, and he was in such bad shape by the time this film came out that he basically shoots to what amount as cameos and friggin' Brad do Reef, the voice of Chucky is in this film doing the load work for that character, and he is tremendous. He is so scary. Great film. Everyone goes see The Exorcist three or screen it. They just took all the shit off screening, by the way, which pisses me off to no end. It was all on Max for a few weeks and you could see all of them, and they just took it off, So now you have to rent it. So yeah. Miller sadly died at sixty two of a heart attack, which related to his lifelong alcoholism, in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he had retired to her quieter life as director of a local theater. X months to Dow and Ellen. Burston obviously continued their distinguished careers. Burston won her Oscar for Alice doesn't live here anymore the year after The Exorcist. She also absolutely walks away with Requiem for a Dream. Oh yeah, that scene in which she delivers the monologue about wanting to be on the TV show is devastating, and not just to me. You can notice in that scene where she delivers that monologue that the camera drifts slightly off center and goes a little bit out of focus before correcting. That is because she caused the cameraman to cry. She also reprised her role as Chris McNeil in the absolutely piss poor Exorcist sequel that came out this year. David Gordon Green now has done damage to two of my favorite horror movies of all time, with The Halloween and this one. It is the official position of this show. I speak for both of us when I say, don't let that man near anything else. Give him puppet master next, or I don't know, something far worse than this, stop giving him prestige or anyway. Ellen Burston famously this year made hilarious interviews in which she talked about the Lanths that they that Gordon Green and David Gordon Green and Blumhouse went to the Warner Brothers. Blumhouse paid four hundred million something like that for the rights to The Exorcist. By the way, and this first film I think did maybe one hundred two hundred. It did not underperformed, and they supposedly have two more coming out because they were like, give Gordon Green another trilogy to really get his creative vision for this out there. Anyway, Ellen Burston was like, no, I won't do it, No, I won't do it. Then they came back and she was like, double what you were offering, which was already in her words, seen lee high amount of money. And then she turned around and donated it as an endowment to a master's degree program at Pace University, which is such a power move. God love her. William Peter Bladdie went on.

02:08:14
Speaker 2: To write, adapt direct, and produce The Ninth Configuration, which became a critical hit but a commercial flop.

02:08:21
Speaker 1: I've never heard of it.

02:08:23
Speaker 2: He also wrote and directed, as you mentioned, the third Exorcist film, Legion, which became a cult classic and a favorite of my beloved Alex Heigel, and continued writing extensively about the original Exorcist as well as other novels as well, and he died in twenty seventeen at the age of eighty nine. William Friedkin's commercial fortunes declined post Exorcist. He made Sorcerer, an adaptation with the French film The Wages of Fear, which flopped but you say has undergone a critical reassessment.

02:08:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, that movie's wild. It's about truckers driving a load of TNT through the jung It's scored by Tangerine Dream and stars Roy Schneider. I don't know, I so I haven't seen it. I probably should have you seen Cruising, which you also mentioned before, which I have not seen Cruising. I would like to see it, Yeah, I kind of. It's morbidly fascinating to me. We should do some kind of like watch party version of that. All right, I'm game for that. I'd like to watch that.

02:09:27
Speaker 2: He did to Live and Die in la in nineteen eighty five, which was a success that was career for the most part, declined after that. He did have some late era success with a pair of Tracy Lett's adaptations Bug in two thousand and six, Any crime film, Killer Joe.

02:09:43
Speaker 1: He died just this year, in August twenty two days shy. It was eighty eighth birthday. So I want to touch on one more thing here. Having basically invented the modern exorcism movie, which is still that you can't find a movie about an exorcism that doesn't mirror this. It's just really not possible. I will say The Autopsy of Jane Doe is pretty good, kind of comes kind of close. It's a horror film about these guys doing a autopsy and a woman who was possessed takes place, all in the morgue. Pretty cool, I think Brian Coxson is it right. Great film, So a little bit of background that's necessary and just one of my favorite bits about this. Anecdotal reports from the time suggest that the crowds flocking to see The Exorcist were at least one third black, with one woman being quoted in the New York Times as saying, a lot of Blacks relate to voodoo and witchcraft and that kind of devil stuff. Many still believe in black magic, especially those from Haiti and the Deep South. And it gets more interesting because the film's skimpy distribution initially meant that in Los Angeles, the only theater in the area that could be found to show the film was in Beverly Hills, and so Warner Brothers did not anticipate that black people would want to see this movie, and he said in this book called Shock Value that created a problem for Warner Brothers because it's playing in lily white theaters in Westwood, and all of a sudden, the merchants are seeing a huge number of African Americans coming to their enclave. We needed to open up theaters in black neighborhoods. A guy named Stephen Farber equipped in film comment that The Exorcist may have done more to integrate Beverly Hills than any civil rights action. Some people have also theorized that The Exorcist caused the inadvertent end of the black exploitation movie because this the era, because the studio is basically realized, hey, we don't have to make movies that are transparently and surely catered to black people, because black people would just see movies if they're good. And this was a revelation to them. Because again, Hollywood is run by rich, stupid children. That all brings us to Abby. Abby is a film directed by a guy named William Girdler, who, in a six year span from seventy two to seventy eight made nine movies, three of which he also wrote himself. Some of his filmography are considered minor exploitation classics, like Grizzly, which was essentially a rewrite of Jaws, starring a bear instead of a shark, that rost thirty eight million worldwide on a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars budget, making it the most profitable independent film of all time until Halloween comes out. Some of Girdler's other films starred icons like Pam Greer, Leslie Nielsen, and Tony Curtis. And Abby also starts William Marshall, who is most famous for Blackula and its sequel, and he's a great actor. If you ever see Blackcula, he's like, gives this incredible, like Broadway esque performance for something that is like he's the only person in there who's like, this is not exploitation film. This is a serious, damn role. Abby is accordingly a straight up rewrite of The Exorcist, with the twist that they just substitute for Catholicism the African Yoruba religion, and it is so on the nose that it was almost released according to some reports. I read as the Black Sorcist, which is admittedly catchier. That's not even a pun at the city. Is that a Simpsons that gag where they're like next up. Our exploitation marathon continues Blackulaw Blakenstein and the Blunch Black of Blowtre Blom. Abby was a surprise box office smashed or it had short windows in theaters. It grossed nearly four million dollars in just its first month and was noticed in the New York Times. Was reviewed in the New York Times, and Girdler, in a comment that would bite him in the ass shortly afterward, told the Louisville Courier Journal, Sure we made Abby to come in on the shirt tail of the Exorcist. That's like the Chappelle's show theory. He's like Rick James being like, yeah, I don't remember grinding my boot heels into's couch. Quick cut, Yeah, I remember grinding my boom boot heels into his white leather couch. Warner Brothers were indeed beset at the time by a flood of Exorcist imitators, mostly from the usual suspects, by which I mean, oh well, I just want to just something.

02:14:33
Speaker 2: William Girdler died soon after the success of this film. He died in nineteen seventy eight at the age of thirty in a helicopter crash in the Philippines, about thirty miles from Manila along with his producer, there were scouting film locations for a film about drug smuggling, and also the aforementioned Grizzly No William Marshall, Oh yeah, he's best known to me as playing the king of cartoon some pee Wee's playhouse.

02:14:57
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, right, I forgot he was also in that. So Warner Brothers were indeed beset by a legion of hey pun intended exorcist imitators, mostly from the usual suspects, by which I mean the filthy Spanish and Italian low budget film industry. Among the exorcist ripoffs flooding from those oily shores where Spain's Exorcism, Italy's The Anti Christ re released stateside as The Tempter, and a remake of Mario Baba's Lisa and the Devil titled The House of Exorcism. All of those films were released in nineteen seventy four. They took a year, not even a year. It came out to the end of seventy three months they took to rip it off. They probably watched it once and were like, yeah, we're rolling. One Italian co production, Beyond the Door opened in the United States in May of seventy five and that grows around fifteen million before Warners sued them over there, but that suit dragged on until nineteen seventy nine, whereas when Warners went after American International Pictures, which is a famous low budget film studio from the time, caved immediately because they had already made so much money on it. The film was out of theaters by nineteen seventy six, and Warners were allegedly allowed to seize and destroy all copies of the film, resulting it being unavailable through only like rips today. Could the movie is effectively lost? Abby, Yeah you could. I mean you can see it, but it's just through like there's never been I don't think they have an original print of it. That's amazing. God yeah yeah, Wikipedia page scarcely be a prince. In the end, the film is just a kind of fascinating curio because it was probably the first time that many white Americans were exposed to a truly original African religion in the Yoruba culture that goes through the film, albeit directed by a white guy from Kentucky.

02:16:53
Speaker 4: So you take a good bit the bad, all right, which is at the end of the day, what you can say about the Exorcist, you take the good with the bad.

02:17:04
Speaker 1: True. Aside from mentioning that this film is in the library of Congress Film Marcus Baby, what else could we possibly say? It is a deeply resonant fable about spirituality and faith and the face of evil, and it helped legitiize the horror genre in ways we are still feeling today. And as one woman told the Associated Press in an interview conducted to the height of the film's mania, I don't know. I guess it was a good movie, and People magazine call it the feel good movie of the year. Folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information, too much exorcism. This has been too much Satan, too much Bazuzu. I'm father Heigel, and I'm father Jordan. We are casting you out. We'll catch you next time. Your mother sucks in help. He thought I was going to make it through the whole podcast without segment, didn't you you grube? Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder. June, the show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.

02:18:30
Speaker 2: For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.