A young girl gets possessed by a demon and as things get worse the mother has no other choice but to turn towards religion. An exorcism is performed by Father Karras and Father Merrin.
Blaine: William Friedkin is the type of director who doesn’t like to search for a project to direct. He rather have the project come to him. William Friedkin just finished making “The French Connection” and then he got the script for “The Exorcist” delivered to him from William Peter Blatty. William Peter Blatty had sold the rights to “The Exorcist" to Warner Bros. for 3.5 million dollars and he wanted to know if William Friedkin was interested in directing it. William Friedkin was able to read the whole thing in one night and he called William Peter Blatty the next morning saying he’ll do it. William Peter Blatty wanted William Friedkin because he started his career off making documentaries and he liked his style in filmmaking. William Peter Blatty wanted “The Exorcist” to have a bit of a documentary feel to it. The story for “The Exorcist” was inspired on a real story about a fourteen year old boy from Maryland who underwent exorcism in 1949.
Linda Blair was twelve at the time and she was an actress who had appeared in 75 commercials and was a model for clothing ads. Linda Blair was thinking about giving up acting until she was offered to be in a movie. Of course Linda was more interested in being in Disney movies than monster movies, but she was this sweet and cute girl, which is why William Friedkin wanted her. Because Linda was a minor she couldn’t understand curse words and her role required her to curse a lot. Linda couldn’t even understand the lines she had to say during her audition. It was a challenge for William Friedkin to figure out how Linda was going to curse. Linda also didn’t understand the inappropriate stuff she was doing while they were shooting the movie. She even didn’t know what the devil was because she was raised Protestant and they hardly talk about the devil. She just did what William Friendkin told her to do and she was able to understand what he wanted her to do. Linda found her performance through William Friendkin. Linda was terrific on set and she never complained once. She also had fun on set and pretended that it was a game. Linda Blair did a good job at transforming herself into someone else once the cameras started rolling. She was serious and evil.
The makeup was a challenge for makeup artist Dick Smith because he had to figure out how he could transform someone as sweet as Linda Blair into something hideous when she is possessed. It also had to look real. Dick did several makeup tests until he thought of Linda looking pale and having scars. And her face would get worse the more the demon stays inside her. Another thing Dick Smith had to do was age Max von Sydow by twenty or thirty years because he was in his 40s at the time and his character, Father Merrin, was supposed to be this elder priest.
It wasn’t easy to shoot “The Exorcist” in Iraq because the weather was 130 degrees there. They had to wait till seven in the afternoon because the weather wasn’t so hot and the sun was still around for four more hours. The hospital was easier to shoot at for when Linda Blair is being tested on to see what is wrong with her. The hospital was a New York University Medical Center with an actual radiologist and his assistants. The lighting in that room was very easy for the cinematographer because he didn’t have to figure out how the lighting should be in the shot.
Steadicam didn’t exist back then, so you couldn’t do long takes and they needed a long take from the first floor to the second. They built this chair with wires for the cameraman to sit on and the crew would pull him up the stairs. It could go in any direction, forward, backward, side to side. In one scene, Linda Blair grabs the shrink’s nut sack, attacks him and makes him fall backwards and William Friedkin wanted the camera going down with the shrink as it focusses on him. Both William Friedkin and the cinematographer had to figure out how to shoot that, until they thought of putting both the actor and the camera on some kind of chair rig. The camera would be attached to it, facing the actor as he sits on it. Then the thing would tilt over and both the camera and the actor would go down at the same time. The set had to be cold for the scene where Father Karras and Father Merrin perform the exorcism on Linda Blair. The cameras had see the actors breathing cold air out of their mouths. They had to run the air conditioners in the room so the air could get cold while everyone was prepping up. The crew wore ski suits, while the actors wore long underwear under their costumes.
Several tests of the vomit coming out of the mouth were done. They used a piece of cardboard as a target practice for where the vomit would hit. It was very tricky to shoot that sequence because it had to show the vomit coming straight out of Linda’s mouth. They had to put this tube right into Linda’s mouth. And when they shot the scene, the vomit came straight out of the tube through Linda’s mouth. The vomit was really pea soup. People were curious to know how they did the effect with the head spinning around because no one had ever seen an effect like that before. It was a animatronic done by Marcel Vercoutere, the man in charge of special effects. All the details like the skin and teeth on that thing were done by makeup artist Dick Smith. The thing would sit next to Linda Blair while she was in the makeup chair and she was scared of it. The dummy was also going to be in the scene when the room is freezing cold because William wanted to do the spinning head twice, but they realized that it was going to have to breath out air. Lucky thing for them, Marcel thought of everything and he was able to quickly think of a way for air to come out of that dummy. He put a mechanical device inside the dummy’s mouth so that way it would look like it was breathing.
Another thing people questioned was how they made Linda Blair levitate. Computer technology was still years away and all the special effects were done mechanically. The cinematographer was friends with an artist who was able to make the wires lifting Linda Blair invisible by painting them. And the cinematographer made sure there was a lot of shadow in the background so that way the wires’ shadows wouldn’t show.
One of the executives at Warner Bros. told William Friedkin to cut out some scenes in the film and he didn’t like that. This was William’s movie, he spent over a year making it. Not to mention he just won an Oscar for directing “The French Connection”. He told the executive “My direction is not good enough?!” William Peter Blatty was upset they had to cut scenes out of the movie as well because he thought it looked perfect. And according to him they shot the whole novel. When “The Exorcist” premiered it was very hard to watch for a lot of people because it was so scary, but it was a box office hit. People would pass out or feel ill in the theater. The scene that was the most hard for everyone to watch was the doctors putting a needle in Linda Blair’s neck, blood coming out and then they stick a tube in there. That’s a scene even I have a hard time watching.
William Peter Blatty was nervous when “The Exorcist” premiered and he noticed someone walking down the aisle with her hand on her head. He was afraid that she might be a critic and he thought everyone who was involved with “The Exorcist” was in big trouble. As scary as it was, “The Exorcist” turned out to be a huge hit and a few months after it’s release, William Peter Blatty won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Linda Blair was stunned when she saw “The Exorcist” for the first time and she realized that she had just been apart of something that would change her life forever. Of course there were a few problems with Linda Blair’s life after “The Exorcist”. People would see Linda on the streets and assume that she was like her character. Linda Blair also got death threats and people would look at her strange. Warner Bros. hired police to look after Linda Blair as her bodyguards until this person who was sending the threats was found. Whoever it was never got caught or identified. Willaim Friedkin and William Peter Blatty hadn’t spoken to each other for years after “The Exorcist”, until early 2000. William Peter Blatty asked William Friedkin if he could consider looking at the footage that was cut out of the film, so they both went to Warner Bros. and looked at the footage in the editing room. William Peter Blatty thought it would be a good idea to make an extended version of “The Exorcist” with the scenes they had to cut out. There were some scenes that they couldn’t add to the extended cut because the actors weren’t saying their lines loud enough to hear. The music in the background was also missing. One of them was a scene where Linda is asking her mother about death when she takes her to a memorial for men who had died in the war. Another scene that got cut out of “The Exorcist” was the spider walk down the stairs and the lighting on it was too bright. But with today’s technology they could digitally adjust the lighting. The wires showed too, so that had to be cut out by computer. “The Exorcist” got scarier when they released the extended version in 2000.
My rating on “The Exorcist” is five out of five stars
Scary Movie 2
The Simpsons
Plot: Maggie gets a new baby toy, although when Homer ordered it he thought he was getting pizza. The thing scares Maggie and possess an evil inside known as Pazuzu. He takes over Maggie’s body. Homer and Marge are having a party downstairs with friends. Maggie shows up saying “No one leaves alive”. Marge wants to get Maggie’s first words on video. Maggie kills two of the guests and brings hell to the party, so neighbor Ned Flanders ties her down to the bed, but she manages to kill him too. Homer and Marge have a Catholic Priest take a look at Maggie. The Priest does a test to see how powerful the demon is. After the Priest sees how terrible it is he performs an exorcism on Maggie and manages to free her soul from Pazuzu.
