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One of New Hollywood's most successful wunderkinder in the early '70s, William Friedkin suffered a precipitous fall from the box-office firmament in the late '70s, punctuated by the controversial cop film Cruising (1980). Nevertheless, Friedkin managed to keep his career alive, while the lasting impact of seminal horror film The Exorcist (1973) was confirmed by its enormously successful reissue in 2000.Raised in a Chicago slum, the young Friedkin fell in with a bad crowd, but his mother set him straight and Friedkin finished high school. Unable to afford college, Friedkin got a job in the mailroom at Chicago's WGN TV station. A budding cinephile who especially loved Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1952), Friedkin's ambition to become a director was stoked by his first viewing of Citizen Kane (1941) while working at WGN. By his early twenties, Friedkin was directing live television and making documentaries. After spending the '50s helming, in his own estimation, over 2,000 TV programs, Friedkin made a splash on the film festival circuit in the early '60s with his documentary The People vs. Paul Crump (1962), garnering several festival prizes and the eventual commutation of the title subject's death sentence. Producer David L. Wolper offered Friedkin a job in Hollywood and Friedkin headed west in 1965.After making several documentaries for Wolper and directing episodes of TV's The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Friedkin broke into fiction features with the Sonny Bono and Cher vehicle Good Times (1967). Though Good Times was not a success, the brash tyro was tapped to direct the Norman Lear-scripted vaudeville period piece The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968). Despite moments of charm, The Night They Raided Minsky's did not popularly justify its then-generous budget. Nevertheless, Friedkin forged ahead with two play adaptations, Harold Pinter's mystery The Birthday Party (1968) and Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970). While neither lived up to Friedkin's movie prodigy reputation, The Boys in the Band distinguished itself as the first Hollywood movie exclusively about gay men — even if the limp-wristed, catty stereotypes onscreen raised the hackles of the nascent gay liberation movement. On the verge of never living up to his press, Friedkin took to heart his then-potential father-in-law Howard Hawks' comments about making crowd-pleasing action pictures rather than arty, psychological studies. Cutting any scenes that slowed the pace, and returning to his documentary roots, Friedkin adapted the true crime best-seller The French Connection (1971) with streetwise |
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