, but also for the equally dramatic burnout many saw as his comeuppance. One catastrophic production – which would recoup less than half its roughly $20 million budget – turned him from a commercial titan to a Hollywood pariah. Ironically, that film looks increasingly like the greatest he ever made: 1977's Sorcerer, a white-knuckle thrill ride about risk and predestination. A myth holds that Sorcerer opened a week after Star Wars (which Friedkin had turned down the chance to produce), and therefore never stood a chance. In fact, the gap was a whole month, which, given Star Wars's gradual rollout, made things even worse. Cinemas that had pooh-poohed George Lucas's film on its first release in May were begging to get in on the action come June, and crossing out every other release with thick black markers. The era of the all-conquering blockbuster had begun. These were bad times for any other film to come down the pike, especially one that was such a hell-on-earth experience, when everyone was dreaming of a galaxy far, far away. Sorcerer's trailer had actually debuted before Lucas's film in a few sites, promising something grim, gritty, and portentously downbeat, with Jaws star Roy Scheider in the lead, three foreign actors alongside him, and not a lot of merch potential, to say the least. Cinephiles would have known that it was based on a 1950 French novel, Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), which had been filmed already, in breathtakingly tense fashion, by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1953. The script Friedkin commissioned from Walon Green begins with four vignettes to establish his quartet of unheroic main characters. Nilo (Francisco 'Paco' Rabal) is a hired killer who shoots a mark in Mexico, and coolly walks off. Kassem (Moroccan-French actor Amidou, riveting throughout) is){kind=link}
The Exorcist director was the toast of Hollywood until one disastrous production – the finest he ever made – turned him into a pariah
The career of the great William Friedkin, who died this week at the age of 87, is acclaimed not only for the director’s blazing successes of the 1970s (The French Connection, The Exorcist), but also for the equally dramatic burnout many saw as his comeuppance.
One catastrophic production – which would recoup less than half its roughly $20 million budget – turned him from a commercial titan to a Hollywood pariah. Ironically, that film looks increasingly like the greatest he ever made: 1977’s Sorcerer, a white-knuckle thrill ride about risk and predestination.
A myth holds that Sorcerer opened a week after Star Wars (which Friedkin had turned down the chance to produce), and therefore never stood a chance. In fact, the gap was a whole month, which, given Star Wars’s gradual rollout, made things even worse. Cinemas that had pooh-poohed George Lucas’s film on its first release in May were begging to get in on the action come June, and crossing out every other release with thick black markers. The era of the all-conquering blockbuster had begun.
These were bad times for any other film to come down the pike, especially one that was such a hell-on-earth experience, when everyone was dreaming of a galaxy far, far away. Sorcerer’s trailer had actually debuted before Lucas’s film in a few sites, promising something grim, gritty, and portentously downbeat, with Jaws star Roy Scheider in the lead, three foreign actors alongside him, and not a lot of merch potential, to say the least. Cinephiles would have known that it was based on a 1950 French novel, Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), which had been filmed already, in breathtakingly tense fashion, by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1953.