William Friedkin, the Academy Award-winning director of films such as The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer, The Brink’s Job, and To Live and Die in L.A., died on Sunday (August 6). He was 87.
Per Variety, no cause of death has been revealed, and Friedkin is survived by his fourth wife, Shelley Lansing, and two sons.
And he had one hell of a career.
On the New Hollywood spectrum of success (ranked from Scorsese to Cimino), Friedkin lands somewhere in the middle, like Coppola without the full descent into ’80s megalomania (and we say that with affection). He found tremendous success early on in his career — within three years of directing a Sonny and Cher movie, he was winning the Academy Award for Best Director for The French Connection (which also won Best Picture), and continued that hit-maker streak with The Exorcist, which remains the first proper Horror picture nominated for the Academy’s highest honor. It was Sorcerer, his brilliant pseudo-remake of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear — set up against Star Wars with a name that summons thoughts of fantasy warlocks instead of white-knuckle jungle crossings — that started off his trouble.
We’ll say this as plainly as we can. Friedkin was a master at the filmmaking craft. One only needs to look at how genuinely competent and compelling even his most poorly received films were in comparison to other releases at the time, and it’s fascinating how revisionist praise eventually trickled down to most of them. You can easily purchase a 4K remaster of Cruising, Friedkin’s gay BDSM erotic thriller that was so detested during production that the entire film had to be dubbed thanks to the perpetual protests that ruined any chance of shooting sync-sound, so stacked with features from the good folks at Arrow, so that you can grapple with its complex provocations with the benefit of hindsight.
Even after all that discouragement —To Live and Die in L.A., his last major attempt to reclaim the mantle he’d had in the ’70s of “populist-art-filmmaker-who-brings-in-big-receipts” and a movie that is a genuine flat-out classic (including a crazy-good Wang Chung soundtrack and one of the best car chases ever committed to celluloid), underperformed when it hit in 1986 — Friedkin kept working. He spent years working in TV, which was where he got his start, working in the mailroom at WGN-TV before becoming a documentarian. But every so often, he’d crop up with a genuinely interesting mainstream release — the Tommy Lee Jones thriller The Hunted, the Michael Shannon/Ashley Judd two-hander Bug, or the McConaissance-igniting Killer Joe — to remind us that he was still out there, kicking ass, taking names, and occasionally tweeting, just waiting for folks to remember that we still had a living legend still in our midst.
He will be dearly missed, but one can imagine that there will be an Irish funeral at this year’s Venice Film Festival: His last film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, will have its posthumous premiere there early next month. So, we’ll have one more chance to celebrate the man in his preferred medium: The silver screen.