CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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The American ratings board, the Motion Picture Association Of America (MPAA), screened a rough, unmixed cutoff/re Exorcist on 3 October 1973 and passed it with an *R' rating meaning 'Restricted', i.e. no one under seventeen was to be admitted without a parent or adult present.
"There was no problem with gettingan 'R* rating at alt," Fried kin explains. "The ratings board was then being run by a very sensitive, intelligent guy named Aaron Stern. He had a very strong control over his board. Stern wentto see The Exorasrwith his board and he called me a half hour after they finished screening it and he said 'Congratulations. í think it's a great film. We're going to give you an 'R' rating with no cuts. We're not asking for one frame to be cut.' Warners and i thought the whole film would be cut to ribbons to get an 'R', which we had to do. We could not release it as an 'X' picture-they wouldn't do it. So I anticipated a lot of editing as a result of the ratings screening. But he said 'We're gonna give you an 'R', no cuts. I think we're gonna get a lot of heat for this and I think you will as well. Butthis film should be seen as you made it. It's deserving and good luck to you.' No subsequent ratings board would have given it an 'R' without cuts."
Still the spectre of the new obscenity legislation hungoverthe movie and Blatty found himself constantly defending the movie
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WILLIAM PETER BLATTY'S
Directed by WILLEM FRIEDKIN
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before its release, while he was promoting his new book /'// Tell Them I Remember You, a reminiscence of his late mother. "Let me tell you how The Exorcist novel was received," he told one interviewer. "The former Chancellor of the Catholic Church for the City of New York, who is now pastorát Sacred Heart, made The Exorcist required reading for his parish. In fact, the novel was taught by nuns in some Catholic high school. Nuns! Any community that decides that it wants to ban 77?e£xo/r/srdeserves the punishment of never seeing the film, unless they leave their grubby little towns. You'll find the novelty of the act vanishes, and then the little minds will no longer be interested. Furthermore, this picture could never be construed as appealingto prurient interests."
Something else started happening in the run-up to the release of The Exorcist More and more stories began to appear in the press, not just more inflated, fanciful pieces about the so-called 'curse' behind the movie, but stories about the making of the film, its budget overruns, the alleged infighting. Lalo Schifrin talked to The Hollywood Reporter about his dismissal from the film: "My score, 1 stand by it, is one of the best I've ever done, i had not the opportunity to record it. He [Friedkin] only listened to three or four cues, and he walked off. Everybody there loved it. I was applauded by the musicians, which happens very seldom in Hollywood."
The rift between Blatty and Fried kin, and the former's supposed barring from the editing process, also became the stuff of tabloid fare, with talk of Blatty taking legal recourse. Executive producer Noel Marshall told The Hollywood ReporterXhaX Blatty was indeed taking legal action over "the firingofSchifrin and other differences, presumably including his alleged barring by Friedkin from post-production editingand dubbing." Even the possessory credit on the film - Blatty wanted it billed as 'William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist' although normally the directortakes such a credit-was makingthe news. Before anyone had seen it, The Exorcistwas becoming an event. The movie itself was now the story, not the story of the movie. It didn't matter what was true, just as it didn't matter later who did or didn't faint, throw up, etc. whilst watching the film. The Exorcistwas
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moving movies beyond simple entertainment. Now they were news and cinema would never be the same again.
The film was previewed, a few days before its release, at a screening held at the Directors' Guild of America. Present were a mix of public, Warner Brothers' executives and the movie's publicist Joe Hyams. (As the screening began, the final reel wasn't there as Billy was still mixing it down the street. It arrived just in time.) "Shortly after the film started somebody screamed some obscenities from the first row and at that point í remember getting out of my seat and moving to the back of the theatre," Hyams told the BBC. "Now at a certain moment in the film - it's when the girl's having her examination -the first person comes past me headingfor the rest room. And he gets sick in the rest room. I asked him if he was feeling better and he said 'Yes, I am.! should not have had Mexican food.' A couple of minutes later another person comes running out and 1 ask them if they had Mexican food. Now after a while, five or six people physically get sick. Other people could not watch it and were just white and faint. I just thought: how do we keep this story from spreading? The last thing we want is a film that is making people sick. And my management was all in one row and 1 remember their heads were turning, watching what was happening. The film ends and seven or eight of our top executives are seated alone in the theatre. One gentleman, a high-level executive, suggested that it might be best if we shelve the film and never distribute it. He thought it was just totally obscene and should not be shown to people. They talked about it for about five minutes and shot down the idea. Then they said 'What happened here tonight Joe?' I said 'I don't know.' They said 'Why were people running up and down the aisles?' 1 said 'They were getting sick.' They said 'We have to put a lid on this, people getting sick at this film.' Then I said 'Fellas, I don't know what happened tonight. I saw the same film. All I can tell you is the other 900 people who saw this film are all congregated outside this theatre talking about it. Not one person has gotten in their car to leave yet. You can't get into any of the bars across the street because they're packed with people. That's what you got fellas, rWsyour movie.'"
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When the film was released, the day after Christmas 1973, it didn't disappoint. The end justified the hype and propelled it to unheard-of levels. "We literally finished ľ/jefxo/r/sŕ three days before it opened," Friedkin said at the time. "Frankly, if there hadn't been an opening date I'd still be workingon it. Given the chance, I'd have had all the actors in the booth on openingnight with microphones, changing and fine-tuning it. Actually, I'd still be working on The French Connection if somebody hadn't said 'Get it out of here and into the theatres.' I just always want to make it that much better."
Despite mixed reviews, and Friedkin's perfectionism, the movie that opened was greeted with unprecedented audience reaction. People came, they saw, they threw up, they fainted, in one case they miscarried a baby, in others they sought psychiatric aid or spiritual counselling. Then they queued up outside the theatre for up to four hours to do it all again. Playing in just two theatres-one in New York, one in LA-the film took a record $94,003.50 from 28,183 admissions in its first week.
"I was present the first time somebody fainted," recalls Blatty. "It was at the first preview in New York. I was nervously standing at the back and this woman came up the aisle, with her hand over her face and she kept murmuring'Jesus, Jesus.'And I remember thinking'! hope that's not Pauline Kael.' I thought we were in deep trouble. But the point that she walked out on was the scene at which I never look - the artereogram scene. I only watched it once when I had to see it on the movieola in the rough cut. I've never looked at it since. And actually, that's the scene that caused most of the getting weak and fainting. When the head spins and whatever, they're having a wonderful rollercoaster ride."
Cinema managers were forced to lay on smelling salts. Frank Kveton, a cinema manager in Oakbrook claimed "My janitors are going crazy wiping up the vomit." A minister in the same town proudly noted "We turned them away in hundreds from my Exorcist sermon" as church attendance rose dramatically. Heart attacks whilst watching the film were reported. In Berkeley a man was
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injured as he charged the screen attempting to "get" the demon; in Boston several young men paraded naked before the screen insistingthey were the Devil. In New York they lit fires on the street to keep warm whilst waiting several hours to get in. Ticket touts were charging up to $sofor a pair of tickets; one cinema security guard claimed he was offered bribes of up to $110 to let people in. Box office records fell, and continued to fall, as more and more theatres were added to meet the demand. In Washington the 'R' rating was overturned and no one under seventeen was allowed in; in Boston the film was given the dreaded 'X' rating. And in Chicago, six people were reported to have ended up in a psychiatric ward after seeing the film. Still the people came. Donald Rugoff, president of the Cinema 5 chain, said "I don't thinkthere's been anything like it in the history of the business." The Toronto Medical Post reported that, afterviewing the movie, four women were confined to psychiatric care. A Chicago psychiatrist publicly declared "There is no way you can sit through that film without receivingsome lasting negative or disturbing effects." The film crossed all social boundaries, attracting a large black audience in the inner cities, something that Warners hadn't anticipated, (lason Miller latertold Mark Kermode about visitinga black friend of his in Harlem who dragged him along to a cinema showing the movie: "1 said 'Are you kidding me? i don't wanna go and see The Exorcist.' He said 'No, you gotta see this. I don't want you to see the film. I want you to see the audience.' So we go in and there's like maybe 200 blacks in the audience -and they've got lunches. And they've got beer and they're passing joints, and The Exorcist is on. It was like this colony of people, they went and they spent all afternoon watching this film, bringing lunch in, bringing pizza in, talking, yelling, reading lines. And that probably to me was the epitome of the power of the film. That for these people they had to be around it. It was like being around the totem pote, something sacred to them.")
"I would say the first five, six, seven, eight weeks of the showing of the film the same reaction occurred as happened that night we showed the film at the Directors' Guild," says Joe Hyams. "Some
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people leavingthe theatre, becomingsickand so on. Then after seven or eight weeks, it kind of settled down. People were braver and whatever created that phenomenon kinda went away at that time. Did I play it up? Sure, I played it up in the sense that people wanted to know how many people got sick last night. I would inflate the figures. That was my job. There was nothing I could do to kill that picture, so I'd lie a tittle. But that was the extent of it. There was really nothing we had to do that wasn't happening by itself. Which is what happens on an event movie. It just transcends everything and anything publicists and marketing people can do."
Six months after its release, Warners expanded its run to no theatres in the New York area, bringing in a first week sum of over $3 million, and forever changing the nature of film distribution in America, by taking quality movies and opening them on more and more screens, something that was to prove a hugely important factor in the release of such subsequent event movies as jaws and Star Wars, and the blockbuster era that The Exorcist gave birth to. Still the hysteria continued. Evangelist Billy Graham went as far as to say that there was evil present in the actual celluloid ofthe movie.
Blatty, for one, was stunned by the whole reaction: "Completely. And to this day I do not understand it. I look at Billy Graham's comments that there was a power of evil in the film and 1 thought that he was mad. But you know, he was on to something. 1 think what he was trying to express is that there is an explosive power in the film and the fact is that it is greater than the sum of its parts. It's thatX factor. I don't know what that is. People say things like 'Ah, there are subliminal images, they're brainwashing us. There are things that our consciousness does not see but our unconsciousness is comprehending and that's the secret ofthe power of the film. It's none of that; there are no subliminal images. If you can see it, it's not subliminal."
In trade bible Variety, Rabbi Julius G. Neumann was quoted as saying: "This movie is addingto the frustration and confusion of our youth by claiming that whateverthey do, contrary to accepted religious or society's norm, is not really of their own makingbutthat
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ofthe Devil inside of them." Blatty responded to the hysteria by saying "There are a lot of neurotic people. I may well be one of them. If they read the book, or see the film, neither experience makes them neurotic. To my mind, they were neurotic to begin with. Now they have a name for their neurosis. They say 'I'm possessed.' Anyone who is mentally unstable should not see the film, whether it's a child oran adult."
Warners proudly predicted that the film would outgross the $34 million haul of My Fair Lady, up until then the company's biggest ever money spinner; industry pundits predicted it would outgross the $85 million made the previous year by Francis Ford Coppola's The God/btáer, making it the biggest movie of all time.
The New York Times got on line for an extensive report from the queue outside one New York theatre where 'people stood like sheep in the rain, in cold and sleet for up to four hours to see the chilling film about a twelve-year-old girl goingto the Devil.' The Times found a wide cross-section waiting in line -from a sixty-eight-year-old woman ("I have never stood in line for any movie or any restaurant before in my life"), to a forty-six-year-old housewife ("I haven't stood in line since the time I saw FrankSinatra"), to a large contingent of teens and twentysomethings, includingjack Fletcher, a nineteen-year-old student, who said "You feel contaminated when you leave the theatre. There's something that is impossible to erase. I've had nightmares ever since I've seen it." Another person interviewed on 'the line' was the actor William Hurt, then a twenty-three-year-old Juliard drama student 'who talked more like a sociologist' when quizzed about his reasons for standing on line: "It makes the movie better, right? The more you pay for something, the more it's worth. And it also has to do with telling your friends that you've seen it."
Harvard sociologist Howard Reisman, author of The Lonely Crowd, argued.that standing in line in such a manner was a good way for strangers to meet in a city: "Standing in a movie line doesn't commit you to having a motive. It's a relationship that doesn't ask too much. In a singles bar there is a motive, and people who go there are subject to interpretations and misinterpretations. For example, a
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single woman at a singles bar might feel that people wilithinkshe's there as date-bait. The 'standing on one foot' conversation that she might have with a stranger in a movie tine might be more comfortable for her."
Events on 'the line' weren't always so convivial. One cinema was forced to close its doors when the crowd, fearing that after hours of waiting they would not make it into the last screeningof the day, started to riot. This astonishing reaction to The Exorcist was repeated worldwide, although news reports took a distinctly darker tone when the film arrived in Europe. John Power, a sixteen-year-old London boy, suffered a fatal epileptic fit the day after seeing the film with his girlfriend, promptingnumerous 'Boy Dies After Seeing The Exordsť style tabloid headlines. Seventeen-year-old Nicolas Bell claimed he had become 'possessed' after seeing the film and killed nine-year-old Sandra Simpson. Bell said in his defence: "It was not really me that did it. There was something inside me. 1 want to see a priest. It is ever since I saw that film, The Exorcist I felt something take possession of me. It has been in me ever since." In West Germany, nineteen-year-old Rainer HertrampPs suicide was blamed on the movie, leading to calls for it to be banned. Back in England, screenings of the film were picketed by an unspecified evangelical organisation who handed out leaflets proclaiming "We can't stop you seeing this film, but you should know the film bears the power of evil". The front of their four-page booklet featured a quote attributed to the Western Psychiatric institute of Pittsburgh, USA ("after admitting twelve new patients"), "Some people who never before needed mental treatment were falling apart after seeing this film." Over the page an unnamed twenty-three-year-old Cambridge graduate insisted that "anyone who sees this film runs the risk of serious mental and spiritual danger and disturbance."
Billy Friedkin had set out to make a provocative film, but even for him, things got out of hand:"! remember readingthat a classmate of Prince Charles saw the film and immolated himself on the alter of a church in England. Then there were also stories tike James Cagney the actor. I met him at an American Film institute lunch and he told
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me that he hadn't seen The Exorcist but his barber had. This man was his barberfortwenty-five years. He saw the film, quit beinga barber and went off to enter the priesthood. There were a tot of stories like that. The reactions were much more extreme than 1 thought. I thought the reactions both pro and con did get a bit extreme."
Blatty found himself on the receiving end of the hysterical reaction to the film on several occasions: "I used to appear quite frequently on the Tonight Show" he explains "And there were stories of pictures faltingoff walls when I would appear, or marble tables cracking in two, and on and on and on. And I would yawn... but there were two appearances on the Tonight Show back to back in which the first time they lost the picture, and johnny Carson leaned over and told me that this had never happened before. Of course we were talking about The Exorcistat the time, and the next time, they lost the sound. And then somewhere in that period, I was invited to dinner by Richard Pryor, and there were a lovely group of people there and after dinner my wife and I were sitting on the sofa facing the fireplace. And above the mantle was an enormous oil painting that hungfrom a very thickingot that must have been about fourto five inches long and affixed by a strong leather band. Now Richard Pryor is offering me coffee, standing there with a tray with cream and sugar on it, and suddenly there's this massive crash behind him. He looked and the painting had come off. There is now dead silence in the room, nobody speaks and everybody's trying not to look at me, until Richard says 'Sugar?' We then examine this thing-the ingot is in place; the leather band that held the painting in place was unbroken. It was very bizarre."
Needtess to say, now that it was out there, the film bred more controversy. The United States Catholic Conference publicly criticised the MPAA for allowing the fitm its'R' rating. In Boston, Mrs Rita Warren took the film to court in an attempt to get it banned, -citing it as obscene and blasphemous: "We are the community. The community has been offended by this film and it must be stopped." The action was eventually dismissed.
In Washington, where the movie had filmed, a seventeen years
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and older restriction was accompanied by police action, with threats to arrest anyone who attempted to take a minor into the cinema, or sell a ticket to a minor.
The New York Times ran an article also criticisingthe MPAA's rating, forcing MPAA President jack Valenti to issue a rebuttal: "Ratings come from what viewers see, not what they imagine they see. In The Exorcist, there is no overt sex; there is no excessive violence. There is some strong language, but it is rationally related to the film's themes and is kept to a minimum. The Exorcist deals in the metaphysical unknown, always terrifying because it cannot be defined or readily comprehended."
It was through another piece in The New York Times that Mercedes McCambridge threw her oar in. Dissatisfied with what she saw as a betrayal by Friedkin over her lack of credit on the movie, McCambridge went public, outing herself as the voice of the Devil and criticising Linda Blair into the bargain. "Hervocal performance was laughable," the actress said. "I gave the most difficult performance of my life and then Warners didn't give me a single credit on the picture or in the advertising. The man who supplied the jewels got a credit. 1 cried. Billy Friedkin promised me a special credit - 'And Mercedes McCambridge.' He broke his promise - it's heartbreaking when someone you thought was a/nend does that. I put my father's crucifix against my forehead just twenty minutes ago. It was ice-cold, and I thought 'God has deserted me. Shall! go off on an ocean cruise?'
"I'm a product of sixteen years of convent education and I am still a devout Catholic, so speaking those vile blaspheming words was an agony for me.... So you see, after all I went through why I'm mad at Billy Friedkin for not getting me on those credits. Any child could have wiggled on the bed. If there was any horror in the exorcism, it was me!"
Billy Friedkin replied angrily to the story: "In our conversation I said 'Now if you really do this thing right, no one will realise that the voice was dubbed,' and she agreed. Her contract called for no credit and she admitted that it wasn't important. When the picture came
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out and was this enormous success, she evidently changed her mind and did that hysterical interview with someone at The New York Times. She seemed to be saying that she thought God was punishing her for doingthe demon's voice, but it could be all put right if she got a credit.
"I agree she was entitled to credit," he continued, "But where she is off the mark and wrong, and where she has committed the most unprofessional action I've ever seen, is where she tries to diminish Linda Blair's contribution. Linda Blair worked on that film for over a year. She did every scene in that film herself, created the role, worked at it. I mean every actor and every technician that was there can verify that.
"All of a sudden it was everything about Mercedes McCambridge," Blairtold the BBC. "She did the voice so they tried to pull my nomination for an Academy Award. It was an awful time after the film was released because everything was 'Did Linda Blair really do the film?' So I'd gone through everything I'd gone through, and it's quite obvious beneath the make-up it's me, and the voice is a jhixture of Mercedes and I. And my hat's off to Mercedes for the work that she did. I know what she went through and doggone it, yes, she should be recognised forthat. But I was very much a part of that."
Blair's contribution to the movie was called into further doubt when her double- Eileen Dietz-decided to speak up next, this time in an open letter to Variety, petitioning the Screen Actor's Guild 'simply for the right to talk about the work I filmed.'Fried kin, eager to stand up for his young star, attacked Ms Dietz's claims on the Barry Gray radio show: "Linda Blair's stand-in - Eileen Dietz-decided to build a career on the false claim that she played some of the demonic scenes in the picture. She was a stand-in and a photo double in a handful of scenes that last a few seconds on the screen. Her contributions -ten shots - totalled twenty-eight seconds in a film that lasts two hours. It's like when you see a film in which the guys are playing poker and there's a close-up of the hands. You use a double for the hands. It's a common practice."
Blair spoke up for herself soon enough, instructing her lawyers to
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petition the Screen Actor's Guild to arbitrate the matter, forcing Dietz to back away. "Nobody could have anticipated the kind of horrendous attention that Linda got after making the film," says Ellen Burstyn, "And how difficult it was for her to handle. I think we were all protective during the making of the film -we all saw that as a difficult thing for her- but that turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was, i think, the fame that came from it."
just to add to the litigious fervour, Warner Brothers also got involved, taking action against Newsweek magazine which broke Friedkin's embargo on printing pictures of Blair in demon make-up, which they had obtained by snapping them directly off the screen in a local theatre.
Inevitably, as the various controversies surrounding the movie grew, so did the stories about it's so-called curse.
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