William Friedkin

I called TLADILA the ultimate "frog boiling in water" movie, Peterson becomes the actual villain of the film in such a narratively clever and seamless fashion, it's a real crafty and smart trick. Everyone's used to the "cop/agent/etc who breaks all the rules to get his man" movie but this pushes it into absolute corruption and casts all of this guy's relationships in the film in an appropriately ugly light. You see how he infects everyone around him.

What’s amazing about To Live and Die in L.A. is that it completely flips the conclusion of its source novel but still arrives at essentially the same place. Novelist/co-screenwriter Gerald Petievich hates the opening of the film, as he thought that there was no need to show the job most commonly associated with secret service agents. I do have some reservations about that sequence, though, but they pertain to how Hollywood demonizes Muslims

I'm amazed that so many of you have familiarity with To Live and Die in L.A. when it hasn't been released on streaming in the US. It's recently available through Kino Lorber on DVD for $27, but that is a price I'm not willing to pay.

it's on youtube, at least in the uk. has been up for 2 years so seemingly nobody cares.

It's easy to find in public libraries here; that's how I saw it years ago.

What’s amazing about To Live and Die in L.A. is that it completely flips the conclusion of its source novel but still arrives erat essentially the same place. Novelist/co-screenwriter Gerald Petievich hates the opening of the film, as he thought that there was no need to show the job most commonly associated with secret service agents. I do have some reservations about that sequence, though, but they pertain to how Hollywood demonizes Muslims

― beamish13

I noticed on Wiki and my memories of Friedkin's commentary track that he claims main scriptwriting credit. I tend to forget he had a hand in writing or re-writing most of his material.

"Listen.. I ripped everything outta there except the rocker panels."
"C'mon Irv, what the hell's that?!"

all time! up there with "Picking your feet in Poughkeepsie".

TLADILA was available on a cheap "Special Edition" DVD from MGM for ages, and it was a cable staple for decades.

To Live and Die in L.A. is available in beautiful 35mm prints from Park Circus. Ask your independent cinematheque to screen it

On a shout factory Blu-ray which was released a few years ago.

As far as the opening, it's a little bit awkward and has aged poorly if only for the specific Ronald Reagan aspect, but it's absolutely fantastic as being a bit of audience misdirection regarding the William Petersen character.

The Boys in the Band (1970) was both cringey and exhilarating, and it still seems kind of amazing today.

like Cruising.

This was the post I made about it 4 years ago:

I really enjoyed seeing The Boys in the Band again. I can see why it was dismissed in the late 70s and in the 80s as representing an earlier era of self-hatred, but I think it's easier for someone gay to watch it more dispassionately now. I loved the plot of the clueless straight man dropped into the middle of a gay party. Lots of reviews have compared it to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but the over-the-top self dramatizing jokey quality of it makes it way less self-serious. The set, an apartment on East 65th St, was beautiful. And the acting, from the entire original 1968 stage cast, was for the most part really good I thought

I read somewhere that Friedkin has said it's a favorite, one of the films of his that he still likes watching

― Dan S, Friday, January 18, 2019

I'm still very reluctant to see the 2020 remake of it

TLADILA is bonkers

When I first saw it, I was probably 16 or 17. I had absolutely zero idea what direction it was headed in, so needless to say that final act was totally shocking.

“You’re working for me now.”

This was kind of funny (though not surprising, it's a classic Friedkin move, barely pushing the envelope for him):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmskzjXarYE

The Best of William Friedkin's Cruising Commentary pic.twitter.com/nZLeJew40J

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) June 20, 2023

it's on youtube, at least in the uk. has been up for 2 years so seemingly nobody cares.

― stirmonster, Monday, 7 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Lol, so it is!

"For ages [Al Pacino] wouldn't talk about it."

"That's a good thing because he's not very eloquent."

lolz

William Friedkin talks about he works with actors; Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro in "The Hunted" and Nick Nolte in "Blue Chips". Hilarious stuff as usual. pic.twitter.com/XDBmVzJ9V0

— M.A. Bergman (@John_LeTour) August 7, 2023

Oh, The Hunted! I saw that in the theater, somehow didn’t realize it was a Friedkin joint.

I still stand by defending Cruising but, like with Showgirls, I do hope the strident opposition never evaporates

To Dan's point above, I thought The Boys in the Band held up pretty well when I checked in on it a few years back.

The Ryan Murphy remake is predictably grotesque.

One other thing I like about TLADILA is how Chance and Jim are dispatched by Masters' shitkicker nobody henchman in the exact same extremely undignified manner, just the disgusting end to a pointless quest for justice. The Departed might owe something to that film as far as the ending goes but that one's not as shocking, and it winds up with a sense of justice Friedkin doesn't entertain as a possibility. The world is cold and bleak, and all people are corruptible.

With the original music ("The Disco Strangler"!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2-zyD48qCg

Here’s my favorite Friedkin story. (I wasn’t ready to do stories yesterday.) Actually, it's 90% set-up and 10% story. Bear with me.

I worked as an assistant editor on all of his films at Paramount in the 90s and early 00s. These were generously budgeted movies, [..
.]

— Darrin Navarro, ACE (@dnavarro_ace) August 8, 2023

People without twitter accts can't read threads anymore.

This worked for me : https://nitter.net/dnavarro_ace/status/1688979670698717184

(Stolen from the Criterion Forum)

Also copied from that forum:

When I was in film school, Friedkin visited. The Guardian was about to be released and he screened it for us. It is a terrible film(*) and after it had finished there was polite the-filmmaker-is-here applause and then awkward silence. This was from the same person who’d made The Exorcist and The French Connection? Friedkin immediately launched into a story about the first time he’d met one of his film gods, how he’d acted a blithering idiot in the face of greatness, how all he could do was blurt compliments a la Chris Farley . His hero told him, “You should see my new one!” and invited him to his house for a screening; feeling chosen, he braced himself for a new masterpiece. Two hours later when the lights came up, he couldn’t think anything but, “How did such a talented guy make such an irredeemable piece of shit?”

It was a masterful clearing of the air, and for the rest of the night he regaled us with possibly apocryphal making-of stories about his greatest hits that have either since been recorded for posterity or have been shelved for shinier or more legally acceptable tales. How the former head of the MTA now owned a bar on a Caribbean island that he’d bought with the bribe they’d paid him to sign off on the train chase in French Connection. How he’d brought in El Topo’s Gonzalo Gavira to foley on Exorcist and watched as he went about jumping on sleeping people and literally wringing their wallets. You’ve probably heard those. Friedkin talked far longer and far better than the feature he’d brought.

One memorable bit particular to that screening: During the Q&A one boy asked if, after he graduated, he should hold out for his dream project (film students, ha ha) or just take any available work. Friedkin boomed. “Take anything! Take whatever, if you’re lucky enough! If someone comes to you, if you meet someone, and they say, ‘We’re making a movie called Two Donkeys Fucking,’ you say, ‘I’M YOUR MAN!’”

My friends and I made “I’M YOUR MAN!” the response to any shit detail that came our way, and Two Donkeys Fucking became the go-to working title for just about everything.

And what he said about the end credits to Killer Joe:

I’ve been listening to Clarence Carter for years, and I was always hoping to be able to use “Strokin’” in a movie. “Strokin’” is one of the great American songs. To me, he was the Mozart of Southern music. You can almost never hear “Strokin’” on the radio, not in this politically correct world. So I thought I should give this to the audience — it has nothing to do with the picture.

There’s a disc jockey in all of us, and I just wanted to share “Strokin’” with all of you. Why not? Where are you gonna go and hear “Strokin’” in this day and age? Where? Nowhere! Here, that’s it!

I mean, if I were doing a movie about the life of Beethoven, I would use “Strokin’” on the end credits. Or Shakespeare! You know, if I was doing Hamlet, imagine ending it after Hamlet’s death, and the funeral oration by Horatio or Fortinbras, then you hear “Strokin’.” And that sends you right out of your chair – YES! It’s not about a guy who got killed in a duel, and killed his uncle because his father’s ghost told him that his uncle was sleeping with his mother and he had to kill his uncle… what a stupid plotline that is.

Now if you end it with “Strokin’” you have a whole other kettle of fish. The audience goes out bopping. Strokin’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTbglsNi5xA

Lock thread lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6kTGFDhPKI

he sounds like a Trump imitator

He was on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast - last year I think - and his voice was so similar to Trump’s that I couldn’t really enjoy the episodes.

huh I don't think he sounds anything like Trump

He did do a lot of Respect The Office Of The President bullshit in defense of Trump, as described in this thread. But not like his art was ever about being society's moral voice of conscience anyway.

I can't remember the title of the work in question, but he did a '90s interview for a Toronto alt-weekly where he was promoting his newest film (TV movie?), with a very definite pro-capital punishment agenda

Wild, given how he started:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrSnv2z2ZGs

xp Can't say I'm surprised - watch the extras to The French Connection where they discuss the scene where Doyle shoots his would-be assassin in the back. One of the technical advisers (an active veteran police officer) saw them film that and ran over to berate Friedkin, telling him "that's murder" only to be blown off. When they previewed the movie, the audience erupted in applause at that moment, and Friedkin apparently ran over to the same adviser and told him "THEY don't have a problem with it, so YOU should not have a problem with it." Making that moment the poster was like rubbing his face into it.

It's one of the sad things about the movie to me, at least how that moment was digested in pop culture - it genuinely reflects how much American culture values revenge. It reminds me of a similar scene in L.A. Confidential, which I've seen twice - once with a large, younger crowd who cheered at what happened, and once with a small group of arthouse patrons who remained stone quiet. The latter seemed to get the tragic implications of that scene, especially the way it called back to Ed Exley's very first scene with Captain Smith.

And yes, I've heard some argue that Friedkin's best work is actually that documentary.

L.A. Confidential endorses the police vigilantism, I'd say.

L.A. Confidential endorses the police vigilantism, I'd say.

James Ellroy is a fascist.

xxp (Forgot to add that in later years, Friedkin no longer believed in Crump's innocence, so yes, pretty wild how much he changed.)

xp Re: L.A. Confidential, it never felt like an endorsement to me, but one reason I grew to like it less was that it seemed like cynical defeatism to me. (Referring to Hanson's film and his interpretation of Ellroy's work.)

FWIW, Ellroy absolutely hated Hanson's film but wasn't forthcoming until after he died.

Re: L.A. Confidential, it never felt like an endorsement to me, but one reason I grew to like it less was that it seemed like cynical defeatism to me.

I don't wanna derail the thread, but I'm glad you mentioned this scene. I've been meaning to watch L.A. Confidential again, in part to see if my impressions were correct. Unless my memory's wrong, Exley and Bud White don't reckon with any moral qualms about dangling the Evil Gay D.A. out the windows: the camera framing and the editing whip the audience up; we're on their side. Then the film moves along to the next plot point.

It's one of the sad things about the movie to me, at least how that moment was digested in pop culture - it genuinely reflects how much American culture values revenge.

I don't want to push back against this too much because I do agree copaganda has a real effect on ppl's opinions, but at the same time as someone who consumes a lot of Italian and Hong Kong action cinema I'm pretty confident in saying revenge is appreciated by audiences around the world, as is violence in general. Depending on time period and geographical area, I imagine the audiences would have cheered equally loud if the same exact scenario had played out amongst cowboys or post apocalyptic road gangs or, perhaps most tellingly, criminals. Likewise I wonder how much of that advisor's objection was genuine moral disgust and how much was "this makes the cops look bad". Anyway I've heard quite a few defenses of French Connection as a film that shows cops being the violent, racist pieces of shit they are - but I guess it's still up to the viewer whether that then registers as "yeah this seems bad" or "hell yeah it's great they are like that" and Friedkin may have believed the latter.

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