2023-08-07 22:43:32
William Friedkin on the set of the film Hunted, released in 2003. PHIL BRAY / ALPHAVILLE / LAKESHORE / PARAMOUNT / KOBAL / SHUTTERSTOCK
In 1973, the day after Christmas, the devil took possession of American cinema screens. After having fevered the United States, the satanic trance of The Exorcist spread around the world, filling the coffers of Warner, the studio that had financed it without believing in it, transforming the codes of horror film. Two years earlier, the architect of this demonic triumph, William Friedkin had already upset the rules of detective films. Popeye Doyle, the hero of French Connection, was racist, brutal and not even handsome (it was Gene Hackman). Nevertheless, this Franco-American story of heroin trafficking had moved the crowds.
In the early 1970s, William Friedkin was the first among the young (he was barely 35) princes who had just taken power in Hollywood. But where Coppola, Scorsese or Lucas succeeded in transforming their first successes into long-term careers, Friedkin passed suddenly from the Capitol to the Tarpeian rock. It took him four years to make the successor to The Exorcist. When it was released in the spring of 1977, a week after Star Wars, The Convoy of Fear, remake you wages of fear by Henri-Georges Clouzot was a critical and public failure from which William Friedkin never quite recovered.
Which does not mean that his path as a filmmaker stopped there. Counting video clips and episodes of series, his filmography has around forty titles, some of which, like the very black To Live and Die in L.A. (released in France under the title Los Angeles Federal Police), have become classics over the years. We will discover his last production, a remake ofHurricane on the Caine by Edward Dmytryk, in Venice, without William Friedkin. The author of The Exorcist died on Monday August 7 in Los Angeles, at the age of 87.
William Friedkin was born on August 29, 1935 in Chicago to parents who had fled pogroms in Ukraine at the turn of the 20th century. After high school, the young man was hired in the mail service of a local television station, WGN-TV. He was barely 18 years old when he was promoted to the rank of director, directing live and documentaries.
Best Director Oscar
In 1962, he made The People vs Paul Crump, evocation of the case of an African-American death row inmate who claims that his confession was obtained under torture. Presented at the San Francisco festival, the documentary won an award there, but the channel that commissioned it refused to broadcast it. Paul Crump will have his sentence commuted. The case had enough impact for one of the great American television producers of the 1960s and 1970s, David Wolper, to take William Friedkin under his wing. The beginner directs one of the last episodes of the series Alfred Hitchcock presents (the old master would have criticized him for not wearing a tie on the set) and soon goes to the big screen.
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