David Kittredge’s Boorman and The Devil, which I saw this morning at 9 am, is one of the wisest, deepest, most poetic-minded, most eloquent and most satisfyingly assembled “inside baseball meets human vulnerabilty” documentaries that I’ve ever seen.
With the festival nearly over, I wasn’t expecting any kind of triple or home run. But it’s a truly masterful film.
It actually ranks among the four or five best films I’ve seen in Venice thus far…seriously.
Kittredge doesn’t just cover the whole, calamitous, chapter-by-chapter story of the making of John Boorman‘s The Exorcist II: The Heretic. He also assesses Boorman’s entire career while examining his personal passions and tendencies.
The most intriguing aspect is an atmospheric recreation of the fascinating Hollywood milieu of 1976 and ’77, which was when the film was made…the closing chapter of the whole sprawling saga of New Hollywood, which began in ’67 (The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde) and ended with the super-successful, game-changing release of Star Wars in May ’77.
Produced over the last seven years, Boorman and the Devil is a very thorough telling of a grueling creative effort. Kittredge has interviewed pretty much every living person who worked on the film, starting with Boorman, the project’s bruised but resilient godfather.
Costars Linda Blair (who turned 66 last January) and Louise Fletcher (died three years ago) are given a healthy amount of screen time; ditto uncredited screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg and Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown.
A stimulating variety of peripheral participants and observers are also heard from — directors Joe Dante and Jeff Kanew, critics Bilge Ebiri and Stephanie Zacharek plus author and former Variety reporter Joe McBride.
There’s footage of a funny story about a sneak preview screening, passed along by Exorcist helmer William Friedkin….hilarious.
The Boorman interview apparently happened in ’18, as he tells Kittredge’s camera that he’s 85. Born in 1933, Boorman is now 92.
The two best docs about “difficult shoots that produced a good or classic film”, of course, are George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coopola‘s Hearts of Darkness (’91) and Les Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (’82).
Kittredge’s doc belongs in the pantheon of an opposite category — i.e., docs about the making of movies that went horribly wrong.
Throughout the viewing I was saying to myself “how ironic that a movie this rich, insightful, compassionate and enticingly human-scaled is a study of one of the most notorious artistic and commercial failures in Hollywood history.”
Before seeing Kittridge’s doc I would have said that the best “films that went wrong” docs are (a) David Gregory‘s Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’ (’14) and (b) Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe‘s Lost in La Mancha (’02).
Now I’m tempted to say that Kittredge’s doc is better than these two. It’s certainly their equal and then some.
Geoffrey Macnab‘s 9.2 Guardian piece about the doc is worth reading.
The professional-grade sketchings of key episodes during the film’s making are truly exceptional. I’ve reached out to Kittredge for an answer to this and other questions.