It was a lighthearted musical romp headlined by the pop duo Sonny and Cher in what would be their only movie appearance together. Producer David Wolper was so impressed with it that he brought Friedkin to Hollywood to direct network TV shows.Īfter working on such shows as The Bold Ones, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the documentary The Thin Blue Line, Friedkin landed his first film, 1967′s Good Times. It was the story of a prison inmate who rehabilitates himself on Death Row after being sentenced for the murder of a guard during a botched robbery at a Chicago food plant. He moved from live shows to documentaries, making The People Versus Paul Crump, in 1962. I think of the sounds first and then the images.” “I remember listening to it in the dark, Everything was left to the imagination. “My main influence was dramatic radio when I was a kid,” he said in a 2001 interview. 29, 1939, he began working in local TV productions as a teenager. Friedkin also directed episodes for such TV shows as The Twilight Zone, Rebel Highway and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.īorn in Chicago on Aug. Other film credits included To Live and Die in L.A., Cruising, Rules of Engagement and a TV remake of the classic play and Sidney Lumet movie 12 Angry Men. But he would never again come close to matching the success of those early works. With that second success, Friedkin would go on to direct movies and TV shows well into the 21st century. It received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Friedkin as director, and won two, for Blatty’s script and for sound. It was so scary for its era that many viewers fled the theater before it was over and some reported being unable to sleep for days afterward. The harrowing scenes of the girl’s possession and a splendid cast, including Linda Blair as the girl, Ellen Burstyn as her mother and Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller as the priests who try to exorcise the devil from her, helped make the film a box-office sensation. He followed with an even bigger blockbuster, The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel about a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil. The movie also won Academy Awards for best picture, screenplay and film editing and led critics to hail Friedkin, then just 32, as a leading member of a new generation of filmmakers. He races underneath, dodging cars, trucks and pedestrians, including a woman pushing a baby buggy, before abandoning the pursuit. It contains one of the most thrilling chase scenes ever filmed.ĭoyle, played by Gene Hackman in an Oscar-winning performance, barely misses making the arrest on a subway train, then hurries to his police car to follow the train as it emerges on an elevated railway. The French Connection, based on a true story, deals with the efforts of maverick New York City police Detective James Popeye Doyle to track down Frenchman Fernando Rey, mastermind of a large drug pipeline funneling heroin into the United States. He was 87.įriedkin, who won the best director Oscar for The French Connection, died Monday in Los Angeles, Marcia Franklin, his executive assistant for 24 years, told The Associated Press on behalf of his family and wife, former studio head Sherry Lansing. William Friedkin, the Oscar winning director who became a top filmmaker in his 30s with the gripping The French Connection and the horrifying The Exorcist and struggled in the following decades to match his early success, has died.
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