Tag: William Friedkin
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The Brink’s Job (1978)
How does a filmmaker respond to a major disappointment, despite believing their most recent work is undeserving of such treatment? For William Friedkin, the fact that Sorcerer did not live up to its expectations at the box office revealed more about the times than the quality of his work. In his memoir, he mentions the…
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Sorcerer (1977)
Sorcerer, the movie for which William Friedkin wished to be remembered, is as taut and intense a thriller as any that has been made before or since. One of the reasons for this is how Friedkin strips the story down to its bare essentials: four men attempt to transport extremely unstable explosives two hundred miles…
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The Exorcist (1973)
When the movie adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist opened the day after Christmas 1973, few who saw the picture could have imagined the film’s staying power. Over budget with no star names, the studio did not have high expectations for its returns and were shocked by its wild success. Even in the 1970s,…
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The French Connection (1971)
For some filmmakers, the chance of a lifetime comes along, often by happenstance, when the right material is presented to them at the right time, and they decide to make a movie that will become one of the defining achievements of their career. For William Friedkin, after four productions which challenged him to adapt to…
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The Boys in the Band (1970)
At a pivotal moment of twentieth century American culture, playwright Mart Crowley adapted his life story to the stage in order to understand the place he and others like him occupied in society. Despite the fact that the story revolves around a collection of gay characters, Crowley insisted he didn’t write The Boys in the…
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The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968)
William Friedkin’s third feature has an improvisational, put-together-at-the-last-minute feeling that is appropriate for its subject matter, which deals with the evolution of staged comedy shows in 1920s New York City. Based on historical fact, the movie revolves around the biggest burlesque theater, run by Billy Minsky, as it struggles to stay open despite crusading moralizers…
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The Birthday Party (1968)
Theater and cinema have always had a kind of sibling rivalry despite theater being much older and, some might say, more sophisticated in nature. Yet, when the movies burst onto the scene in the early twentieth century, denizens of the theater quickly realized how soon their fates could be written on the wall if they…
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Good Times (1967)
American cinema lost one of its iconic filmmakers of the ‘New Hollywood’ era when William Friedkin passed away August 7. His most celebrated works stem from the 1970s, that great decade of commercial moviemaking when it seemed to audiences then (and especially now) that a new sense of filmmaking and the purpose of cinema was…