Last night I watched Alexandre O. Philippe‘s Leap of Faith, a 105-minute doc about William Friedkin and the making of The Exorcist. Assembled from a marathon six-day Friedkin interview, the 84 year-old director passes along fascinating story after story about the development, casting, filming and editing of his 1973 classic.

The film premiered at last September’s Venice Film Festival, and it just played at Sundance ’20. I was interested because I was a huge admirer or Philippe’s Memory, a saga of the making of Ridley Scott‘s Alien, which I saw during Sundance ’19.

Leap of Faith (which will probably get some kind of minimal theatrical play before going to streaming) is very good stuff. It held me tight and firm — I relaxed and felt great start to finish. As a longtime Exorcist fan (I’ve seen it 10 or 12 times, the last two or three on Bluray), I eat this shit right up.

Friedkin (known in his heyday as “Hurricane Billy”) is a first-rate raconteur — always has been. He tells it and sells it. And man, what a story. He was between 37 and 38 during the shooting of The Exorcist in ’72 and early ’73, and it was the greatest time in the history of Hollywood to be a hotshot whirlwind helmer. All the signs were favoring.

I loved all the stories in which Friedkin told this and that Exorcist collaborator that their ideas or acting weren’t good enough. Saying “no” over and over again to this or that possibility is partly what strong directing is about. There are always hundreds of mediocre or underwhelming ideas thrown at a director, and he/she has a duty to say “no” to roughly 98% of them.

I especially loved Friedkin’s riff on a certain “grace note” portion in the film (the non-essential but haunting passage in which Ellen Burstyn walks through Georgetown on a crisp fall day as “Tubular Bells” plays on the soundtrack). And I was intrigued by Friedkin’s concluding thought, which keys off footage of Kyoto’s gardens, about the essential solitude and loneliness that we all have within.

But since Philippe is encouraging this kind of thing, I was amazed that Friedkin never even mentions, much less explores, the central social metaphor of The Exorcist.

The story is about the young daughter of a famous and wealthy movie actress succumbing to demonic possession — some adjunct of the devil literally occupying and ravaging her body and soul. But in a broader social upheaval sense this kind of thing was happening a lot in the mid to late ’60s. Middle-aged parents of that era were contemplating the anti-traditional, in some cases shocking behavior of their teenage or college-age kids (longer hair, frank sexuality, pot and hallucinogens, anti-government protests) and wondering what had happened to them. Who is this person? What dark social forces have turned my son/daughter into someone I barely recognize, much less feel any rapport with?

William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel came out of this social earthquake, and anyone who says that late ’60s cultural convulsions weren’t a seminal influence in the creation of this horrific tale is either brain-cell deficient or lying. How could Friedkin not even mention this?

And as long as he’s telling fascinating tales, why not mention the Ted Ashley-Ellen Burstyn story that he passed along in his 2013 book “The Friedkin Connection“?

F.X. Feeney was the kindest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. Well, not specifically — the preceding description actually applies to Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate — but F.X. really was one of the best human beings I’ve ever dealt with in this racket…this kinship of the cloth made up of bicoastal film chasers and acolytes, contrarians, worshippers, cultists, would-be priests, snarkers, chess players, obsessives, rage junkies, hand-jobbers and torch-carriers.

And now he’s gone and my heart goes out. A series of strokes. 66 years old. If anyone hears of a gathering or farewell party of any kind, please advise.

Sharp, perceptive and enterprising though he was, F.X.’s stock-in-trade was the fact that he had a big beating heart that never quit. He didn’t seem to have a caustic or dismissive bone in his body. He might allude to this or that shortcoming in a film or a person, but he never put anyone or anything down. He was mainly about scholarly hugs and caresses.

F.X. Feeney

Plus he was a staunchly emotional Irishman, and I can recall two or three times off the top of my head when his voice cracked while speaking of something near and dear. Buy or stream Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (which no one, I realize, is allowed to mention these days because founder Jerry Harvey killed his wife and himself in some kind of horrific murder-suicide finale), and watch F.X. reflect tearfully on the Z Channel mystique and Harvey’s contradictory currents.

F.X. prayed at the altar of film on a daily, devotional basis. He cared, he believed. You could wake him up at 4:30 am on a Sunday and talk to him about Michael Powell or Budd Boetticher or Michael Cimino or Roman Polanski. The only other film persons I can think of who’ve routinely augmented their film passions with such kindness and tenderness are Guillermo del Toro and Martin Scorsese.

If he hadn’t become a film guy F.X. couldn’t been a great priest. I can see him right now in a freshly pressed black cassock. To me he was always the Film Yoda with the kindly face and the Andy Devine-sized pot belly, that pinkish complexion and that dapper fedora covering his swept-back salt-and-pepper hair.

Of all the people in the New York and Los Angeles film realm there are maybe four or five I would consider confessing my sins to. Until today F.X. was one of them. I could go into the confessional closet, get on my knees and say, “Bless me, father, for I have sinned against whatever or whomever.” And F.X. would say, “You’re absolved, Jeff. Go and sin no more. And while you’re at it you might want to find a bigger place in your heart for Michael Cimino.”

F.X. and I worked as in-house freelancers for People in ’97 and ’98. It was in the People offices that F.X. passed along a story he’d gotten from Lars von Trier at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, about an alleged incident between Harvey Keitel and Nicole Kidman during filming of Eyes Wide Shut. (I once referred to it as “The Saga of Mr. White.” **)

A lot of brief tributes have appeared on F.X.s Facebook page.

So Typewriter Joe is fading and wheezing? If Biden doesn’t finish second or at least a strong third in New Hampshire, you can stick a fork in him. And that’s obviously not in the cards. Elizabeth Warren isn’t doing any better. Face it, fellas — it’s Bernie vs. Pete, and if Bernie takes the nomination (which seems likely), Trump gets another term. Question: How long will it take Joe’s Johnny-on-the-spot African American supporters to take a hard look at this situation? How long can they continue to say “yeah but I feel comfortable with the man because he was Obama’s vp”? Sooner or later they’re going to have to wake up and smell the coffee.

Last year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences earned a certain negative notoriety for failing to include legendary director Stanley Donen, who passed on Thursday, 2.21.19, in the Oscar telecast’s “death reel” tribute, which aired three days later on Sunday, 2.24.19. Talk about your drag-ass approach to keeping up with breaking events.

Today Variety ‘s Brent Lang reported that this Sunday’s death reel will include Kirk Douglas, whose passing was announced yesterday. Lang reports that the reel had been locked but Douglas will be squeezed in regardless. That’s very accommodating of them. I know very little about editing but I’ve been told that slipping in a last-minute departure is no technical biggie.

Notice to Hollywood luminaries: Try to croak at least four days before the Oscar show. If you wait until Thursday you’ll probably be Donen-ized. Douglas would have presumably suffered the same fate if he’d expired this morning (2.6).

Or is this really a matter of status? Are you telling me that if, God forbid, Julia Roberts or Warren Beatty or Denzel Washington were to be struck dead by a lightning bolt on a golf course today or even tomorrow that the Academy would say “nope, sorry…too late for the death reel because we need more than three days.” I somehow doubt that.

Soon after waking this morning at 8:10 am (having overslept), I was asked/ordered to visit Hollyway Cleaners to pick up some dry cleaning. I like to wake up a bit and maybe sip some coffee before driving. Not this time. “Go now, please.”

Two or three minutes later I was out the door. It was the height of rush hour with Melrose Ave. and Santa Monica Blvd. traffic at a near-standstill…jammed. Did I take the rumblehog, which would have meant that the three-quarters of a mile journey would’ve taken three or four minutes, tops? Of course not. I took the VW Beetle, which resulted in 10 minutes of traffic agony, maybe a bit more.

I love swearing while driving. I get to bark and yell all I want and nobody says anything back.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Wallace to Romney: “You realize that this is war. Donald Trump will never forgive you for this.” What will Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson say about Romney this evening? Romney: “The most difficult decision I’ve ever made in my life.”

I’ve been feeling such strong Parasite fervor over the last few weeks, but it won’t be winning the Best Picture Oscar. Can’t happen, forget it. So the idea is that a great number of Academy members know or have sensed this, and so they’ve voted to give Bong Joon-ho the Best Director Oscar as a pat-on-the-back compensation prize for not winning the Big One. Along with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay as well as Best International Feature. How’s that one sound?

Herewith a discussion of Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman, an interesting possibility as far as this Sunday’s Oscar Awards are concerned (i.e., Bong Joon-ho might take the Best Director Oscar away from 1917‘s Sam Mendes as a kind compensation prize for Parasite not winning Best Picture) and a dark discussion about how (a) the primary season has almost certainly boiled down to Bernie Sanders-vs.-Pete Buttigieg. The bitter conclusion was that (a) the odds of Bernie not winning the Democratic nomination are dwindling as we speak thanks to the anti-Pete crowd (African Americans, under-30s, progressives), and (b) if and when this happens Trump will almost certainly be re-elected. As Roger Friedman said earlier today, Bernie will win the northeast, California and Austin, Texas. Thank you, ideological purists….thank you, the all-or-nothing crowd….thank you for four more years of Donald Trump! Again, the mp3.

Issur Danielovitch, otherwise known as Kirk Douglas, passed today age 103. Cheers, salutes and celebrations for a truly legendary fellow — an ego-driven, headstrong, no-nonsense hardhead, thinker and studly swaggerer during his day. A real pusher, doer, striver. It’s funny but all of that hard-nosed stuff has fallen away now that he’s left the earth, and all I’m hearing in my head right now is Alex North‘s Spartacus overture.

Douglas was one of the first male superstars to adopt a persona that was about more than just gleaming white teeth and manly heroism, although he played that kind of thing about half the time. But Douglas also dipped into the dark side, portraying guys who were earnest and open but hungry, and who sometimes grappled with setbacks and self-doubt and hard-fought battles of the spirit.

Douglas’s peak years as a reigning superstar and a producer-actor known for quality-level films ended 56 years ago with his last steady-as-she-goes lead in a fully respected film — John Frankenheimer‘s Seven Days In May (’64).

Douglas kept working and writing and flooring the gas as best he could, but out of his 103 years only 15 were spent at the very top.

He broke through at age 33 as a selfish go-getter in Champion (’49) and then fed the engine with 19 or 20 high-calibre films — Young Man with a Horn (’50), The Glass Menagerie (’50), Ace in the Hole (’51), Detective Story (’51), The Big Sky (’52), The Bad and the Beautiful (’52), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (’54), The Indian Fighter (’55), Lust for Life (’56), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (’57), the masterful Paths of Glory (’57), The Vikings (’58), The Devil’s Disciple (’59), Strangers When We Meet (’60), Spartacus (’60), Town Without Pity (’61), Lonely Are the Brave (’62), Two Weeks in Another Town (’62) and finally the Frankenheimer film.

Big stars will sometimes flirt with journalists from time to time. They’ll turn on the charm for a week or two and then “bye.” I was one of Douglas’s flirtations back in ’82, for roughly a month-long period between an Elaine’s luncheon thrown by Bobby Zarem on behalf of the yet-to-shoot Eddie Macon’s Run, and then the filing of my New York Post piece about visiting the set of that Jeff Kanew-directed film in Laredo, Texas.

I hit it off pretty well with Douglas during the luncheon, in part because I talked about how much I admired Lonely Are The Brave and how Eddie Macon seemed to be roughly similar to that 1962 classic (i.e., a tough lawman pursuing a sympathetic, good-guy outlaw). Douglas talked about anything and everything at the luncheon, and I remember his being fairly wide-open with his impressions about Stanley Kubrick (i.e., “Stanley the prick”), with whom he’d famously partnered on Paths of Glory and Spartacus.

Our Laredo interview happened between takes. Neither of us regarded Eddie Macon’s Run as anything more than a servicable B-level programmer so we mostly discussed Douglas’s career hallmarks, and to my satisfaction he realized early on that I knew all about his good films. All those years and years of watching Douglas’s older films, and now all that TV time was paying off like a slot machine.

I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil’s Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and Lust for Life and Lonely Are The Brave. And then I made an attempt at quoting his “eight spindly trees in Rockefeller Center” speech from Ace in the Hole. Douglas was drinking a bourbon (or something fairly stiff), and I remember his leaning forward at this point and saying, “You’ve really done your homework.”

You have to sit up and take notice of any new Sally Potter film, and I mean especially one that will premiere at the 2020 Berlinale. Bleecker Street Media will give Potter’s relationship drama a limited release on 3.13.20.

The Roads Not Taken boilerplate: “A day in the life of Leo (Javier Bardem) and his daughter Molly (Elle Fanning) as she grapples with her father’s chaotic mind. As they weave their way through New York City, Leo’s journey takes on a hallucinatory quality as he floats through alternate lives he could have lived, leading Molly to wrestle with her own path as she considers her future.”

Does anyone on the face of the planet believe that Fanning could possibly be the biological child of Bardem and…who’s playing his wife, Laura Linney? (Take a gander at the actual parents, Stephen and Heather Fanning.) What are the odds of a dark-eyed man of Spanish blood fathering a girl who looks like a tall Swedish milkmaid?

What does this clip tell you about the intelligence and awareness levels of average voters out there?

Iowa primitive (female, 70something): “How come [the fact that Mayor Pete is gay] has never been brought out before?”
Iowa precinct captain: “It’s common knowledge.”
Iowa primitive: “I’ve never heard it!”
HE observer (standing nearby): “It’s the content of a candidate’s character, yokel granny, and not his/her domestic predilection.”

Too many people don’t listen, don’t read, don’t scan the headlines, don’t watch newscasts and don’t want to know from nothin’, and yet they still make decisions. That’s why we are where we are right now. Uninformed voters have harmed this country before, and they will harm it again.