The great William Friedkin has passed at age 87.

I was going to begin my brief obit (other obligations are pressing as we speak) with a headline that shouted “drat!…zounds!…now Friedkin will never come clean on the French Connection censorship thing!”

Because it is entirely fair and logical to presume that no one in his inner circle will now come forth to sully the late director’s name by confirming the likely truth of the matter, which is that “Hurricane Billy” did, in fact, either ask for or approve the censoring of the Act One N-word scene in his 1971 Oscar-winning crime flick.

So yes, I’m a little bit angry and muttering “curses, foiled again!…he snuck out like a cat burglar!” But let’s put that story aside and show proper respect to a great, outspoken, occasionally turbulent director who ruled the ’70s with enormous drive and primal hunger and churning ambition.

Friedkin was one of those seriously ballsy grade-A hot shots who flourished when big-boy auterism was in flower…from the early to late ’70s he was one of the leaders of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” motorcycle club, standing side by side with Steven Spielberg, Brian DePalma, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Fosse, et. al.

And yet, truth be told, Friedkin’s serious golden god period lasted only eight years, or from ’70 through ’77…a chapter that encompassed the making and release of four grade-A films — The Boys in the Band (’70 — a delicious zeitgeist-capturing bitter comedy that I own on Bluray and watch every couple of years), The French Connection (’71 — his finest and most vigorous and super-adrenalized achievement — a truly great film…winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture), The Exorcist (’73 — an excellent, wholly believable horror classic….his commercial peak achievement) and Sorcerer (’77)…a first-rate, hugely ambitious action action thriller that not only disappointed commercially but killed Friedkin’s career momentum.

He recovered, of course, but Friedkin never reclaimed that special current of dynamic power and auteurist urgency…from the late ’71 opening of The French Connection through the collapse of Sorcerer six years later he was damn near king of the fucking world.

Hurricane Billy kept that major-auteur-fascination thing going for another seven years (’78 through ’85)…galloping along on his mighty egoistic steed with the making of four more films…The Brink’s Job (’78), Cruising (’80), Deal of the Century (’83) and To Live and Die in L.A. (’85), his second best urban crime flick and arguably his third best of all time.

A 35-year downshift period followed, during which time Friedkin directed The Guardian, Blue Chips, Jade, Rules of Engagement, The Hunted, Bug, Killer Joe and the forthcoming Venice Film Festival non-competitive selection, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

If the keepers of Friedkin’s legacy want to do the right thing, they’ll push for the restoration of that censored French Connection scene and erase all copies of the edited bullshit 2021 version. If the Disney guys have any decency they’ll just forget about the whole matter…they’ll say “look, Friedkin was in his late 80s and censoring that scene was completely out of character for a guy known for his ballsiness and obstinacy, so let’s just forget it happened and restore the footage and be done with it.”

The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination is three and a half months away. The usual conspiracy titillations will be reconsidered, but no one will ever know anything conclusive about an alleged conspiracy because two witnesses to the murder who had cameras (Abraham Zapruder and Mary Moorman) were too cheap to buy better cameras, and a third witness (Orville Nix, who died in 1972) has two strikes against him — he shot his Dealey Plaza footage with a mildly shitty 8mm camera, and was either too dumb or too lazy to shoot the Kennedy motorcade from a reasonable distance.

If Zapruder had shot the murder with color film inside a decent 16mm camera instead of an 8mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD…if Moorman had used a movie camera instead of a black-and-white Polaroid Highlander 80A…if Nix had used a 16mm color movie camera with a decent zoom lens….all three had their unique motives and economic limitations and that’s understandable, but from a forensic perspective they sorta kinda blew it.

Imagine being Orville Nix at 12:28 pm on 11.22.63, standing on the grass in Dealey Plaza between 80 and 100 feet away from Elm Street, all pumped and primed with his 8mm color camera…

Interior Nix dialogue: “Okay, I can hear the motorcycles and the cheering…the Kennedy motorcade is coming down Main Street and will be cruising down Elm in a minute or two…maybe I should run over to Elm to get a decent shot of the President and his wife and Governor Connally??…naahh, it’s better to stand 80 to 100 feet away…that way my family and friends can see the grassy knoll hillside and the plaster walls and the bright blue sky…who needs to capture film of the actual faces of President Kennedy and Jackie?…the green grass and the panoramic vistas are better.”

In the meantime, what about that mysterious muzzle flash and the legend of Badge Man?

HE to JFK conspiracy pallies (including Joseph McBride and Oliver Stone): “A rifle muzzle flash is said to be barely detectable above a grassy knoll wall. Or at least, so says assassination researcher Robert Groden.

Groden’s film A Case for Conspiracy shows a flash above the small concrete wall at frame # 24 in the Nix film, which is the same instant as frame # 313 in the Zapruder film.