R.I.P. William Peter Blatty

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Big Magilla
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Re: R.I.P. William Peter Blatty

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True enough, but the novel was an absolute page-turner that I think I read in one sitting through the night when I should have been sleeping. The film was, and is, one of my favorite horror films thanks mainly to Friedkin's direction and the performances of Burstyn, Miller, von Sydow and Blair/McCambridge.

It was based on a real D.C. exorcism that took place in the late 1940s. Blatty based the Burstyn/Blair characters on Shirley MacLaine and her daughter and the director on J. Lee Thompson. MacLaine and Thompson were the star and director, respectively, of the godawful John Goldfarb, Please Come Home.

None of the sequels to Friedkin's film were worth a damn, including 1990's Exorcist III, the one Blatty wrote and directed himself. It was his second film as director after The Ninth Configuration ten years earlier. That's the one that won him a Golden Globe for his screenplay under its original title, Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane when he was still coasting on the success of The Exorcist. He was still coasting when he died. There was a TV series of The Exorcist with Geena Davis that debuted on the Playstation Network (whatever that is) on my birthday in September. It was nominated for an ASC award the other day.
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Re: R.I.P. William Peter Blatty

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William Peter Blatty, at the end of the 60s, was nothing much beyond hack writer. His most publicized film was John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, which made headlines when Notre Dame objected to the way its athletes had been portrayed in the film. Perhaps his biggest claim to fame was having impersonated a sheik as a contestant on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life.

And then he wrote The Exorcist -- a mediocrely written but gripping horror novel that it seemed everyone in America read -- it was the Da Vinci Code/Girl with the Dragon Tattoo of its era. I was among this vast group: what I can say of the novel is, it was as half-assed a book as I ever read in 48 hours.

Two years later, there was the movie -- also shoddily done (it had been rushed into release, and parts of it cried out for re-shoots and re-editing), but once again it didn't matter, as it became a box-office phenomenon, with, as one person put it, people lining up "to see what everyone's throwing up about." Its legacy is essentially felt to this day: demonic possession films, if they existed prior to 1973, were strictly B-movie/drive-in entries. Ever since, they've been a Hollywood staple.

Beatty, not satisfied with having made a metric ton of money, seemed to think he deserved literary praise. He won an Oscar for his screenplay (in a category where literally every other nominee was better written), and went around inflating his achievement with such claims as "quite frankly, it's an apostolic work." His ego seemed unbounded.

He never really had a hit again -- not that he needed to. But he'll always be in the film histories for The Exorcist.
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R.I.P. William Peter Blatty

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