A required experience, a night out at Fenway Park. I thought our seats were amazing, being just a few rows from the actual field. Here we are, me and some of my program. (Aren't we cute?) We grabbed this photo just before the guy in the red jacket told us to get the hell outta there. (Lesson: you're in the way here if you stand anywhere for too long.) |
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I met my French/Argentine classmate Laura, and we saw William Friedkin at the Harvard Film Archive last night where he introduced his newly restored film Sorcerer and stayed after for a lengthy (and funny) Q&A session. The film looked as though it has just been completed, despite being from 1977. Friedkin too seemed far short of his 75-plus years, his frequent ramblings and digressions the only sign of the cantankerous directions that being in the elderly zone might perhaps make one prone. I especially enjoyed his repartee with the oddly coiffed Hayden (the curator of the HFA) and the members of the audience who dared stand and exchange ideas with him.
Friedkin spoke about The Exorcist insofar as to talk about the development of Cruising, which two audience members asked about. He described how the neurological clinic assistant seen in Exorcist played by a man named Paul Batesman (who coincidentally actually had served in that position at NYU Medical Center) was the same man later found guilty of the murders of young men whom he had met in lower east-side Manhattan S&M clubs (in particular, The Mind Shaft), taken home, drugged, killed, and dismembered, tossing their body parts into the East River. His undoing were the very bags he had been using, which had been tinily stitched with the name of his very department at the hospital leading to the police directly to him. Friedkin had gone to Riker's Island to interview Batesman in a similar manner as he had at the beginning of his career (1960) when he had interviewed a man named Crump on death row and eventually made such a persuasive documentary arguing the man's wrongful conviction, that the governor of the state, so moved, had pardoned the prisoner, and this only occurring within six months of Crump's scheduled execution. (Friedkin mentioned that one power of film -- the ability to save a man's life -- was something that drew him to the medium -- and which the impending move to Hollywood nearly beat out of him.) In discussing Sorcerer, a title which he admitted was not expected, Friedkin said that his film was really about how fate always wins. That no matter how much work or good one does, everyone still ends in the same way. And you can see this in the film, no more visually (and aurally) than during the horrendous journey the two rattle-trap trucks must make along treacherous roads to the blast site while carrying highly explosive materials. In leading up to this discussion, Friedkin reminded us that he had spent three months in Mosul, Iraq in 1973 before Saddam, Al-Qaida, and ISIS, living among the Azidi people (which in recent news had been cornered on a mountaintop by ISIS), and he mentioned how he had never felt closer to any people before. He had been invited back in 2003 to receive an honor related to The Exorcist but due to the impending campaign and subsequent invasion by the U.S. he finally could not go. Friedkin had spent years and years after the release of The Exorcist creating foreign versions of the film and personally overseeing the distribution of the prints. (Coincidentally, Batesman upon first sight of Friedkin from the other side of the prison glass ahead of the interview had asked nonchalantly how the film was doing, drawing eruptions of laughter from our HFA audience that night). For Sorcerer Friedkin was drawn to the material of Arnaud's (from whom he had gotten the rights as the author of the novel The Wages of Fear) primarily for reasons of being able to shoot in a non-static location such as had been his experience on The Exorcist. And this despite having the artistic clout to take on pretty much any project at the time, due to the enormous success of The Exorcist (which ran in theaters for a full year) and The French Connection. In his career Friedkin has been very inspired by Citizen Kane and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (as well as MGM musicals), but never saw a Buster Keaton film until after some of his most famous chase scenes had been seen. Friedkin sees the soundscape of a film as an entirely separate part from the production cycle. In particular, Friedkin asked the audience if they were familiar with the radio jokingly and recalled how fantastic and moving radio dramas were and how Orson Welles was a huge part of that. Indeed, watching Sorcerer (or any Friedkin film) one almost need not be reminded of how important sound is to their psychological impact, given the unsettling and powerful effects Friedkin achieves with the soundtracks of The Exorcist and Sorcerer. Getting back to Friedkin's experience with making Cruising, after the prison interview with the killer Friedkin wanted to shoot in the actual locations where the murders occurred and thus wanted to shoot at Mind Shaft. That club and many others were owned by a member of the notorious Gambino family, who Friedkin just happened to know. And thus he managed to get permission to shoot at these clubs. (And no doubt, the family expected something in return.) Friedkin went on to discuss To Live and Die in LA, which came from his fascination with the lives of secret service agents who went from being asked to take a bullet for the POTUS to chasing petty criminals in the streets for simple raps such as stolen credit cards. He found that contradiction amazing. All in all, Friedkin, with his rapt attention on worldly events, his continuing career in his mid-70s -- he has just written a memoir called The Friedkin Connection, as well as recently directing the film Killer Joe -- along with his efforts to restore his past films, as well as his overwhelming interest in all the arts and in discussing his career in such an open and uncomplicated manner, makes me excited to see what this iconoclastic, uncompromising figure might do next. |