William Friedkin

No worries, and apologies for the multiple posts, various distractions keep popping up and that ended up breaking up my response into these very brief posts I'd have to spit out really fast.

I was actually talking about a different scene - when Exley shoots Smith in the back. Looking this up, in their first scene together, Smith asks him: "Would you be willing to plant corroborative evidence on a suspect you knew to be guilty, in order to ensure an indictment?" "Would you be willing to beat a confession out of a suspect you knew to be guilty?" "Would you be willing to shoot a hardened criminal in the back, in order to offset the chance that some... lawyer..." etc. Of course Exley's responses to all of these is "no" and then schematically, Exley betrays all of these principles one by one. Shooting Smith in the back was like the final betrayal of these principles, and the tragic implications seemed to be clear. Even if one justified it because it was how they took down Smith's cartel, one would have to ignore how they successfully framed the African-American characters for a previous massacre by using the same tactics of planting evidence, physical interrogation, and killing a suspect. (Exley is guilty of that, much to his horror, earning the nickname "Shotgun Eddie.") It suggests a thoroughly corrupt system that's unavoidable and inescapable, and it feels apiece to the future that's off-screen: it can only lead to the LAPD detailed in OJ: Made in America. I've got mixed feelings about how much merit the film has for putting that across, and Alfred raises an excellent point too - IIRC being gay in the film (and I imagine the novel too) isn't defined as anything but aberrant and shameful.

dangling the evil gay DA out the window was a cousin to Longshanks throwing his son's gay lover out the window in Braveheart. i don't remember the novel well enough to know this for sure, but i'm pretty sure the DA wasn't gay in the novel, nor did Dudley Smith die. the novel is less streamlined noir and more an overheated ambitious Ellroy narrative; he was moving towards his Underworld USA trilogy style fast.

related: TLADILA is almost comically homoerotic in parts, and with zero gay panic. the two main dudes are vv comfortable w/teasing each other.

James Ellroy is full of shit and will say anything to get ink in the press. He knew he couldn’t have written a script as good as Helgeland & Hanson’s. Also, he hasn’t written anything of note in at least 20 years

i'll give him 14 years, Blood's a Rover was vv good. i don't know about his books since, but their cultural impact has been zero.

Watched To Live and Die on YT yesterday. Really great, and just has a slight edge on French Connection.

"you're working for me now" - cut to credits with Wait playing over the magic hour freeway driving footage - is my favourite ending to any film ever, I have to watch the credits all the way through every time

Blood’s a Rover? The novel-length version of A Boy and his Dog? #onethread

I felt sure that there was a Robin Wood review of To Live and Die where he talked about it being a progressive critique of capitalism - money as a fake object etc - but I couldn't find it on a google hunt just now. Wood does offer a tentatively positive review (from a gay liberation perspective) of Cruising in his 'The incoherent text' essay, where he concludes:

Cruising, shot in 1979, already seemed an anachronism when it was released in 1980: in the midst of the parade of demoralising 'moral' reactionary movies heralded in the late 70s by Rocky and Star Wars, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

I took a film class at Brown called “Forgery and Simulation” and To Live And Die was on the curriculum, along with Body Heat, F is for Fake, and Badlands

Sounds good. Am also reminded of Noel Burch's essay 'Notes on Fritz Lang's First Mabuse', where among other things he notes that "Mabuse uses real bank-notes for writing paper, and counterfeit notes for money."

Friedkin used to tell the story — it might be on the TLADILA commentary track — about Treasury agents coming to him and asking that some shots be taken out of the counterfeiting montage, and others be re-sequenced, because he'd basically shown people how to counterfeit money. Probably bullshit, but who knows?

"I felt sure that there was a Robin Wood review of To Live and Die where he talked about it being a progressive critique of capitalism - money as a fake object etc - but I couldn't find it on a google hunt just now."

As one of the characters points out he has no idea why he is selling his skills, when those skills are to make cash.

xpost

"William Friedkin, in his memoir "The Friedkin Connection," says that the fake money they made was so good that, after some of it left the set, he eventually heard from the Secret Service and a US Attorney. After he avoided a confrontation with them, Friedkin states, "When the film came out, there were news stories about people trying to make counterfeit money after seeing the step-by-step process in our film. I took some of the twenties, those printed on both sides of course, put them in my wallet, and spent them, in restaurants, shoe-shine parlors, and elsewhere. The money was that good."

The news prompted me to finally watch Sorcerer last night, what a blast.

Yeah. It's too bad there's no oral history of it. This is a serviceable piece on how they did the bridge scene though. https://filmschoolrejects.com/how-they-shot-the-bridge-scene-in-sorcerer/

Seeing "Sorcerer" in a theater (2014, after its digital restoration) is one of my favorite movie-going experiences - that bridge scene is SO tense, lots of people were audibly freaking out (but aware of the nervous humor in such an over-the-top tense situation)...I love that I got to share that feeling with a theater full of strangers.

I later made a friend because of "Sorcerer" - I was checking out at a record store, and the cashier was commenting on a Tangerine Dream album I was getting, mentioning how they also did the "Sorcerer" soundtrack. And I was like, "I love that Friedkin movie" - then we chatted about "The Wages of Fear" - ah, two music/film nerds, nerding it out...

...and thanks for that article about the bridge scene! Holy crap!

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/13/my-friend-billy-mark-kermode-remembers-exorcist-director-william-friedkin

Can't say I like Kermode much but this is a pretty nice tribute.

Reading the Devil’s Advocates monograph on Cruising and it’s quite good, as (obv) is the film itself

Just looked it up--would definitely read that, although Amazon copies are a little pricey.

I managed to snag it when the price dropped significantly a few weeks back. But yeah, the books in that series are way spendy (but often great)

I always forget Touch of Evil's Valentin de Vargas plays the judge in TL&DILA.

I saw Sorcerer last week, and yeah, the bridge scene is incredible. Going to a Cruising screening tonight.

Just saw TL&DILA for the first time this weekend. What a wicked, lurid, amoral movie. After 1994, these kind of movies seemed to have ceased to exist as they all became Tarantino-ed.

Good point, you might be right.

Yeah you know that is a good point, everything after a certain era got really jokey and a bit more gleefully, winkingly amoral rather than simply matter of fact. These guys aren't reveling in their respective schemes, Peterson is this pathologically overconfident psycho and Dafoe is all business (tho he's extremely sexualized obv), and there's nothing spelled out and no audience handholding. I'm trying to think of a movie from the last 20 years that tries to mine similar territory, and I can't really think of it. A cop thriller where it's not even that the leads are antiheroes, and you side with them because they get the job done, they're presented fully as the good guys (maybe Dirty Harry types to the extent that they're on the edge) and you wind up realizing they are the true villains and destructive forces.

Keeping in mind that I really like Tarantino a lot, but he's one of those who is virtually impossible to successfully emulate and so he's the only one who's truly good at that specific thing he does. And his influence resulted in almost exclusively trash.

Abel Ferrara has a similar vibe to TL&DILA, but he obviously predates Tarantino. Trying to think of something else post 1994.

End of Watch had it both ways: All Cops Are Good and They Are Also The Biggest Street Gang In LA

Listening to Siskel & Ebert episodes from the early '90s, I was shocked to think that this was my world for a long time: choosing from forgettable thrillers and shit SNL comedies. Stuff like Malice and Guarding Tess hit #1 at the box office.

Also one year before Tarantino: Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs.

Disclosure, With Honors, On Deadly Ground, The Specialist

There's a Friedkin program going on here at the Waterloo rep: The Exorcist/French Connection/Sorcerer. Hour-long drive, not sure if I'll rouse myself for anything.

All those Joe Eszterhas things.

Maybe I'm misremembering how the storyline goes, but I recall Q&A maybe having some very very superficial similarities with TLADILA. Just in terms of the nolte character, and how his storyline plays out. I forget if he was quite obviously a villain at the very start.

I took a date to see a preview screening of Jade. That one didn't go as well as I hoped.

xp - my favorite tidbit about With Honors was where they had to dress up the University of Illinois campus to look like Harvard:

The exterior of Winthrop House appears, but the interiors pictured are not that of actual Harvard houses, and the last scene of the movie was shot at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The buildings and surroundings were dressed up to look as if it were Harvard and many of the people in the final scene are Illinois students. The graduation scene was shot while the local climate in Illinois had not allowed for the trees to bloom leaves and so artificial branches and leaves were stapled on.

I think Q&A--which didn't hold up all that well last time I saw it; some of it is really heavy-handed--is closer to Internal Affairs, with the Gere/Nolte characters very similar.

Yeah obv TLADILA is more of an action film, which maybe makes the story arc even more startling to an extent.

I think the Johnnie To film Drug War shares its cynicism and bleakness and brutality, and the ostensible hero being a destructive force is there too. But it's not the same type of movie at all, it's more an indictment of the system and the drug war.

Watched The Exorcist for the first time this weekend. It was quite an achievement from a technical standpoint but I didn't find it scary at all; I guess I'm 100% not a Catholic anymore. (The scene where the doctors tell Ellen Burstyn that Catholics still believe in exorcism, like they're trying to keep from laughing in her face, was pretty amazing.)

think sicario attempts some level of the amoral ambiguity of TLADILA?

There's a Friedkin program going on here at the Waterloo rep: The Exorcist/French Connection/Sorcerer. Hour-long drive, not sure if I'll rouse myself for anything.

― clemenza, Monday, 18 September 2023 17:16 (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

id drive an hour and back for any one of them on the big screen tbh

My local theatre's doing Sorcerer, Cruising, TL&D, Killer Joe, The Guardian, and The Exorcist - I'm hoping to go to them all.

They also showed The Wages of Fear the same week as Sorcerer, which... cool idea, but I couldn't fathom wanting to watch that story again so soon.