William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist &
The Ninth Configuration
Like John Milton, the
author of Paradise Lost, William Peter Blatty is a writer with deep
religious convictions who has been wrongly accused of having sympathy
for the Devil. To this day, he laments down the telephone from his LA
home, there are people who believe that evil triumphs at the end of
The Exorcist.
"So now, because
of a bogus reputation, they will not read The Exorcist," he
says. "They will not look at the film. They're terrified."
It is a sad irony that
a man with Blatty's background should find himself being painted as
the Devil's champion. He was raised as a Catholic by a mother who, he
says with admiration "was extremely devoted to the Blessed
Mother"; and his great-uncle was an archbishop in the Middle
East. Religion is in the genes of William (or Bill, as he prefers to be called), so there came a time when he himself
considered entering the priesthood.
"It was a strong
possibility," he says with a sigh. "But I was too fond of
the ladies; a vow of chastity was not going to work for me."
Instead, Blatty became
a writer with a gift for comedy. Using laughter to exorcise the
painful circumstances of his poverty-stricken childhood, he
transformed some of his own "horribly painful experiences"
into his first comic novel, Which Way to Mecca, Jack? In 1963 he
broke into screenwriting, with the Danny Kaye vehicle The Man From
the Diners Club. A script for Inspector Clouseau's second outing, A
Shot in the Dark, followed. After several more films, Hollywood
turned its back on comedy and Bill found himself out in the cold.
"I was put up for
straight dramatic writing jobs time and again, but I couldn't get a
job. So I had nothing better to do than go down and collect my
unemployment cheque once a week and start working on this novel [The
Exorcist]. I had been thinking about the idea for 15 years, but I had
never dared to attempt something serious..."
Of course, the novel
and its big-screen spin-off became a phenomenon, the latter earning
Blatty an Oscar for his screenplay. He says with sadness, though,
that the only impact of the award was that: "I stopped worrying
about how I was going to pay my bills. I never felt a rapture or even
a glow of success. The process took too long. From the time I thought
of the idea in college, then 20-25 years later taking months, if not
years, to get someone interested in it, and then the writing of it...
By the time it all came to pass, my primary emotion was just one of
immense relief."
The Exorcist reflects
Blatty's own doubts about religion. "When I was writing those
scripts years I was having my own crisis of belief," he says
slowly. "As the characters worked through their problems of
faith, I was working through mine."
But the film went
further than he'd anticipated. Although Blatty had done his best in
his script to ensure that people understood the outcome, the excision
of two cherished scenes by William Friedkin made it possible to
misconstrue the priests' victory as defeat. The scenes gave the film
a moral centre, says Blatty; and they gave you "an opportunity
to not dislike yourself for liking the movie". But Friedkin
decided that the film was running too long, and "the theology
was the first candidate to go out the window".
Seventeen years later,
Blatty got an opportunity to clear up the misunderstanding when he
directed his first feature, The Ninth Configuration. Based on an
early comic novel, Twinkle, Twinkle "Killer" Kane, the film
ends with an uplifting coda that is an affirmation of Kane/ Blatty's
religious faith. If Blatty's intended message - "God is in his
Heaven: all's right with the world" - got lost in Friedkin's
film, there's no mistaking it here.
"Doing The Ninth
Configuration, I welcomed the chance to clarify where I stood,"
he says. "And to show all those people who had misunderstood The
Exorcist that I was not the Antichrist disguised as an author."
The Ninth Configuration
also gave Blatty an opportunity to reconcile, for the first and last
time in film, the different strands of his career. Prior to that
novel, comedy had been his forte and his first love; after it:
"Nobody wanted comedy from me any more. It's as if I had landed
on the planet with the manuscript of The Exorcist under my arm...
That's true even today. If I do mention that I wrote A Shot in the
Dark, their eyes glaze over and 10 minutes later they've completely
forgotten it."
Nevertheless, Blatty
still hopes that he will be asked to direct a comedy, and will not
just be offered films like "Pumpkinhead 4. Or was it Pumpkinhead
3? That's the kind of offer I get."
Behind this wry,
self-deprecating humour, the warm and engaging Blatty is a little
disappointed with the way he is perceived today. During our
conversation, he seemed grateful to be given the
opportunity to talk about a career that has far more shading than
most of us realise. Once it was religious reassurance that he needed.
Today, it is the reassurance that he will actually be remembered as
more than just the author of The Exorcist which Blatty appears to
require most.
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