SORCERER — William Friedkin’s heart of darkness

In the mid-’70s, legendary director William Friedkin — fresh off THE EXORCIST — helicoptered into South America with tens of millions of dollars… and emerged with malaria and a bleak, thrilling masterpiece called SORCERER. The only problem was the competition: A little movie called STAR WARS.

Host Rico Gagliano tells the story of how SORCERER crashed and burned at the box office — with help from the film’s screenwriter Walon Green (THE WILD BUNCH), Oscar-winning producer Mark Johnson (THE HOLDOVERS), and more.

The latest season of The MUBI Podcast – BOX OFFICE POISON — dives into six visionary films... that were also notorious flops. Inspired by the new book of the same name by Tim Robey, film critic for The Telegraph, every episode is a wild ride through a great movie's rise, and fall, and rise. 

BIRD is now showing in theaters across the US, UK, Canada and Ireland. Visit mubi.com/bird for showtimes and tickets.

COW is streaming on MUBI in many countries. You can also check out our special episode with Andrea Arnold about the film - listen here.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

Check out the latest MUBI Podcast Expanded piece - an exclusive preface to Tim Robey's book, Box Office Poison, which inspired this season. Read the article here.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes violence, adult language, a smidgen of megalomania... and spoilers. All right, so as we start this new season, there's a guy I want to introduce you to right off the bat who you're going to be hearing from a lot. My name is Tim Robey and I do film reviews in London for The Daily Telegraph. I've been doing that for 25 years. Okay, and of all the professional film obsessives I know and people, I know a lot of professional film obsessives, Tim has got the most unusual origin story. I had a bit of a family connection with films growing up, because my dad worked in insurance for the film industry. Now, on one hand, that meant Tim got front row seats to watch blockbusters come to life. He used to work adjacent to Pinewood Studios near London, and he would take us, me and my brothers to the film set sometimes. So that's where they shot <i>Batman</i> in 1989. I think I remember seeing the set of <i>Aliens</i> after they'd shot that. So there was always this intrigue in the filmmaking process. But remember, his dad was an insurer. The guy you call when there's a disaster. So Tim also got a first hand look at what happens when everything falls apart. My dad was involved on insuring, for example, <i>Waterworld</i>. Infamously expensive film- where the set sank in 1995.- Oh yeah. And also <i>The Adventures of Baron Munchausen</i>. The Terry Gilliam film. It lost a ton of money. That's the one. And he also told me about the producer of that film, a crazy character who got up to all sorts of weird business like target practice after hours in the empty sets. He would just be firing off guns when everyone was asleep. Crazy stuff. So it's no surprise that years later, during Covid lockdown, when there weren't new movies to write about in The Telegraph, Tim got the idea to revisit an old one that was plagued by more crazy stuff. I decided to write about <i>Land of the Pharaohs</i> Howard Hawks' 1955 flop. The kind of wild battles between Howard Hawks and Warner Bros on the set of that film, the fact that Egyptian extras in their thousands were on set on a daily basis, almost passing out from heat exhaustion and to get through it, chanting the words"Fuck Warner Brothers" in unison. Just all of the stories like that. I thought, this is just a very satisfying assignment. Because compared to all that, he realized, box office successes were boring. Titanic is one of the few great successes in film history that are very interesting, because everyone predicted that Titanic would be a flop, and then it stayed at number one for 15 weeks, which is unheard of. But that's a very rare business. Most films that are hits are kind of calculated to make exactly the amount of money that they make, and they work. Not very instructive, not that interesting to write about or to read about. But the ones that are calculated to do a certain number and then pitifully fail to come anywhere near it. Those films really interest me because I just want to dig into why, and also how. How even if it went well creatively, artistically, how and why did it go so wrong? I suddenly thought to myself, what if I were to choose a whole load of films like this and try and kind of relay the whole span of film history, but only using the flops. And listener? He did. And for the next six episodes, so are we. I am Rico Gagliano. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. I am so very glad to be back after a sojourn away. Thank you to the great Anna Bogutskaya for guest hosting season six last month. Today we launched season seven and it is named after the new book that inspired it, Tim Robey's 'Box Office Poison'. Like the book, in every episode we're going to dive into the tortured history of a movie that cost a mint and lost a mint. That's sort of the way I decided on the choices as I went through. Firstly, was it enough of a flop? They had to have lost a fortune. But for this show, since we're in a moment when big movies are bombing left and right, Tim and I went through the book and picked only the great films. Totally visionary stuff audiences rejected back in the day, and that hopefully provide a little perspective now.<i>The Godfather</i> is one of those rare movies that is seen as both a commercial and a critical masterpiece. But most of the movies that we talk about, that we love, that we really admire, were not financially successful. That, by the way, is Mark Johnson, Oscar winning producer of his share of hits. Most recently <i>The Holdovers</i>. But he started his career on the crew of a movie we're going to kick things off with today, director William Friedkin's 1977 thriller <i>Sorcerer</i>, a gritty, big budget masterpiece that was hell to make. The actors are not pretending to be hot and dirty and without sleep. They actually are hot and dirty and without sleep. And which, according to the film's screenwriter Walon Green, debuted at exactly the wrong moment in movie history. We went to a preview of <i>Star Wars</i>, and I looked at Billy and I said "Uh oh." And he said, "Yeah, we may be fucked." I talked to both those guys and many others about the making of a movie that, in a lot of ways, marked the end of a great Hollywood era. So strap yourself in for a rocky ride. The rise and fall and rise again of <i>Sorcerer</i>. We're going to start the story in Hollywood mid 1960s, when a young Walon Green was working as a researcher in the offices of David Wolper Productions. Yeah, David Wolper Productions was an interesting place. It was probably, I would think it was one of the best film schools in film school history. Because people were hired that had no experience like myself. And they were all put to work churning out documentaries. David Wolper was the first person to break into getting documentaries on television that were not made by the networks. Because the network news departments all made documentaries, and Wolper took on the idea of competing with them. To do that, he wasn't looking for dry and newsy docs, he was looking for scrappy storytelling. And one day he hired a hell of a scrapper, a newbie director named William Friedkin. William Friedkin was born in a kind of lower middle class neighborhood. His dad was a merchant seaman, and I think he grew up in quite a tough environment in that way, and had to be tough. And that kind of comes out in his taste in movies as well, and in his style of filmmaking. He had a pugilistic quality, I think. He kind of went into every film raring for a fight. He made tough docs about tough people and tough circumstances. Like 1962's <i>The People Vs Paul Crump</i>, about a death row inmate. It plays out like a film noir.<i>I'm John Justin Smith of the Daily News.</i><i>Somebody told me Paul Crump would make a good story.</i><i>Nine years ago, he was brought into Cook County Jail,</i><i>convicted along with four others of the murder of Ted Zukovsky.</i> And right from the jump, this director's vision was epic. Friedkin's first film for Wolper, the rough cut I remember that he showed to Wolper was 2 hours and 20 minutes long and it was supposed to be a one hour, you know, CBS special. Wolper threw his shoe at the screen when he saw it. I mean, I was just happy to have a job, and I'm sure Billy was happy to have a job, too. But he was more willing to risk his job than most people. The two of them bonded over a love of movies and rose through the ranks. Walon became an Oscar winning documentary director and a screenwriter. But the guys only kind of kept in touch once Friedkin started helming big budget features. At a rare moment when studios were willing to give big budgets to a guy like him, it was the era of New Hollywood. There was a revolution that sort of started in the late 60s and was followed through by the likes of Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, all of whom had these very ambitious and kind of risky, uncommercial looking visions that they manage to pull off. I mean, no one would have guessed that<i>The Exorcist</i> would be this extraordinary cultural phenomenon in Friedkin's hands.<i>Well, then, let's introduce ourselves. I'm Damien Karras.</i><i>And I'm the Devil!</i><i>Now, kindly undo these straps.</i> By 1973, Friedkin had directed the raw, Oscar winning cop thriller<i>The French Connection.</i> But <i>The Exorcist</i>, about a little girl possessed by Satan, turned his career up to 11.<i>The Exorcist</i> was the biggest box office success of that year in 1973. Like an extraordinary degree of critical and commercial success, which put him right at the top.<i>If you're the Devil, why not make the straps disappear?</i><i>That's much too vulgar display of power, Karras.</i> And I think he really felt that he was the man. You know, he was at the very top, and everyone was waiting with bated breath for what his next film was going to be. Walon Green was surprised to be one of the very first to know. I mean, we didn't really hang out together. And then I ran into Bud Smith, who was a film editor we both knew and had worked with, also from Wolper. And Bud said, "Billy's looking for you. He's got a project he wants you to work on." He had just done <i>Exorcist</i>, so he was like, you know, huge."I said, really? What is it?" And he said, "<i>Wages of Fear.</i>" Actually a remake of <i>Wages of Fear</i>, director George Clouzot's classic 1955 French thriller with a brutally simple premise. Somewhere in Latin America, an oil rig catches fire. To put it out, the oil company needs to truck in a bunch of super combustible nitroglycerin. In exchange for 2000 bucks cash, four destitute guys in a nearby nowhere town sign on for the suicide mission of driving the nitro over 300 miles of rough road. One hard bump, and they and their trucks will go... And I won't spoil the exact ending... But as one guy says near the end. When you asked for trouble, it always comes. It's a tough, existential movie. And you can imagine why Friedkin would want to remake it in tough, existential 1974, the year of the Watergate hearings, the last full year of the Vietnam War. You can also imagine why he'd have Walon Green write it. By then, Walon had already written one of the toughest, most existential Westerns ever made, also set in Latin America, Sam Peckinpah's bloody <i>The Wild Bunch</i>.<i>If they move, kill 'em.</i> But Green says that didn't even cross Friedkin's mind. Y'know, it's funny because I don't think Billy and I ever discussed <i>The Wild Bunch</i>. I think what made him think of me more than anything else was the fact that I'd actually been there. I'd worked in Latin America before I was in the film business. I was working in Mexico and Central America for a construction company. I knew back country Latin America pretty well, and then when I worked for Geographic, I did a show on the Amazon. So I was down there. You know, he if he's going to do a cop movie, he's not going to talk to other people that wrote cop movies. He's going to talk to cops. And I think the same thing applied to this. You know, I kind of knew the terrain. In other words, ever the documentarian, Friedkin wanted his take on <i>Wages of Fear</i> working title <i>Sorcerer</i> to feel real, and Walon Green was about to learn the lengths he'd go to do it.- I think <i>Sorcerer</i> was 162 pages.- That's a lot. Yeah, because, you know, if you wrote a script for Billy, every detail that you had discussed and he liked or you had seen with him or whatever, had to be in the script. Like if you were in a room and there were paintings on the wall, what paintings were they and where were they placed? How big were they? And some scenes, you know, I might have rewritten them 25 times, and we wrote on yellow paper, so you could distinguish draft from final. And I had a stack of yellow pages that came all the way up to the desk by the time I finished the film. Man, there's enough for like four movies in there. You could have made an entirely different film. Yeah. And that was just the writing. Billy had Bud Smith and myself travel all over the place looking for the villages and roads and all that kind of stuff. I mean, Bud was all over South America. John Box, who was the art director, was in South America, and we all went to Ecuador for about three weeks. After a while, all this continent trotting pre-production started costing a ton of money, which it was becoming clear, Friedkin didn't really care about. And the studio people who did care, he wanted the hell out of his way. Universal had sent a guy named Kaplan who was going to be the money manager of the thing, and we went to a town called Esmeralda, and the mayor of the town came out and met us and everything. And he said, "You know, it'd be really great if we had a school, a new school building." He was showing us around the town. And Billy said, "Kaplan, give this man $2,000 so they can build the goddamn school." And he said, "Well, you know, Billy, we don't have a deal, or anything." He said, "I don't care about a deal. Give him $2,000 right now." And so the guy didn't have a choice. He opened his briefcase and he took out $2000. And Billy saw there was more money in the briefcase, and he said,"Make it four. Give him four." And they did. They gave him the money. What could they do? I mean, he was driving him crazy. I think he thought if I harass them enough, they'll leave.- The moneymen?- Yeah. This is a nightmare. We're getting out of here. All right, so maybe this is a good time to talk about this movie's budget. As befitted one of the world's biggest directors, it was large. 18 million bucks. It's a pretty huge budget. The biggest film of the year in 1974 was probably <i>Towering Inferno</i>. And that cost 14 million. Yeah, that's a lot of money to be messing with, which is why Universal were nervous when it started to creep up that high and wanted to split the cost with Paramount to kind of make sure they were covered, but they were not covered. Now, back then, probably the best way to ensure your movie would earn that big a pile of cash back was to cast a mega-star in the lead role, and they didn't. I think the fact that Friedkin was at a point in his career where he'd been very, very successful with some of his other films, both critically and commercially, he felt that he didn't need to cast any really, really big movie stars. That's Christina Newland. She's lead film critic for the UK's i newspaper and writes about <i>Sorcerer</i> basically every chance she gets. She's a mega fan. He wrote in his autobiography that he was going to cast Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen didn't want to travel to some of the more exotic locations that they were filming in, and Friedkin just refused to compromise on that and said, you know, basically we don't need McQueen. Other actors were approached like Robert Mitchum, who apparently looked at the script and said, "Why would I want to go to Ecuador to fall out of a truck? I could do that outside my own house." So he turned it down. Undeterred, Friedkin went with a way less marquee name: Roy Scheider. Who had obviously had a huge hit with <i>Jaws</i> two years before. But Roy Scheider and Friedkin had fallen out, actually over <i>The Exorcist</i> because William Peter Blatty, the writer of <i>The Exorcist</i>, did not think that Scheider was the right man to play Father Damien. Roy Scheider thought that role should have been his. They fell out. They weren't on speaking terms. Oh, man, there's already some animosity baked into this relationship. There is, and the shoot did not help their, you know, their friendly relations, let's put it that way. In the same way that, you know, like having a kid doesn't help a marriage that's already in trouble. It's like maybe making a super complicated movie in the jungle is not the best cure- for a, you know, dissolute friendship.- Yeah, very much so, yeah. Turned out it really wasn't a cure for much of anything. Friedkin and team build a treacherous, cinematic bridge over very troubled South American waters, only to watch the whole thing plunge over the edge. Coming up in a minute. Stay with us. All right, everybody, MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters, movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers. We've always got something new for you to discover. And boy, is there something I hope you will discover right away. It is a film called <i>Bird</i> from Oscar winning British filmmaker Andrea Arnold. The last fiction film that she made was the awesome <i>American Honey</i>. That was eight years ago, I think. So I've been looking forward to this one.<i>Bird</i> is a coming of age kind of fable, kind of social realist look at marginalized young people. Arnold is so great at getting across the hurdles of life on the fringes of characters like this. The movie stars two of the best indie actors around, Barry Keoghan, who you know from <i>Saltburn</i>, and Franz Rogowski, who killed it in the movie <i>Passages</i>. It has also got the debut of Nykiya Adams playing the latest, and what I think is a long line of this director's tough heroines. The New York Times called <i>Bird</i> a delicately moving coming of age story. I would say that's accurate, and you can see it in cinemas in the US, Canada, UK and Ireland right now, it's called <i>Bird</i>. I'm also going to urge you, while you're at it, to subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com M-U-B-I.com so you can watch Andrea Arnold's 2021 documentary <i>Cow</i>, which is a tough watch, but it is on my list of the greatest movies ever made. There's nothing like that movie. I'd also love it if you went back and listened to my interview with her about that movie on this very podcast. Okay, so you can find links and details about tickets and showtimes and all this stuff in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode. So remember Mark Johnson from the top of this episode, produced <i>The Holdovers</i> and also hits like <i>Rain Man</i>. Well, in 1975 he was what's called a DGA trainee, a fledgling director assigned by the Director's Guild to go watch and learn the ropes on a Hollywood movie shoot. And I was assigned to a film directed by Billy Friedkin called <i>Sorcerer</i>. After two years of pre-production, cameras were finally rolling on Friedkin's epic. Mark had no idea what he was in for. I was fairly young. I knew who William Friedkin was. He had just directed the third top grossing movie of all time in <i>The Exorcist</i>, so there couldn't be a bigger director I was meeting. And like everyone I spoke to for this episode, by the way, he really loved the guy. He's bigger than life. A good looking man, and carried himself with a certainly very regal, and then he would undercut it every now and then by saying something really very funny, very off color, or something sort of scandalous and just undercut the sense that, oh my God, here's the great William Friedkin. But Mark started to realize that at this particular point in his career, Friedkin did kind of think he was pretty great. You know, when you have that kind of success, it certainly went to his head. And I think that he felt that he was somewhat untouchable. He was sort of like the Christ. I don't think anybody could say no to him. If you shoot a priest for $67,000, how much is my life worth? Case in point the first sequence Johnson worked on part of the movie's prolog set in new Jersey that intros Roy Scheider's character, a robber whose gang shoots a priest during a heist. Fleeing the scene... They crash headlong into a semi. Now, this is like 30 seconds of screen time. It was slated to be shot in three days. But... because it didn't work exactly as Billy wanted, we were at it for several weeks. He wanted it hit in a particular way. We shot that over and over again. I can't tell you how many cars or trucks we destroyed in the process, and that just sort of a beginning sequence. Yeah, once Friedkin and crew moved to shoot in South America. That's when things got really extreme. There's way more elaborate set pieces that he has to shoot, essentially in the jungle. Like, for instance, a tense sequence in which the truckers use nitro to blow up a giant fallen tree. This is obviously well before the days of CGI. They have to find a tree, get it down there and lay explosives inside the trunk. And so they set it all up, and off goes the explosion. And it's just this puny little thing, like a few matchsticks fly into the air. You know, it's, nothing happens. So Robey says Friedkin called up an old friend from Queens. Whose nickname was Marvin the Torch. And this guy, this guy was known for essentially blowing up failing businesses to claim the insurance money. That was his... Wait, so he has a friend in, like, basically the mob? Yes, absolutely. This is very much the kind of background that we're talking about with Friedkin. He gets this guy to come in. Marvin the Torch flies in with two suitcases, which are labeled beauty supplies, and he blows the tree to smithereens and then just gets out.- And that's his entire role in the film.- Is he in the credits?- Marvin the Torch?- I don't believe he is. I don't believe Marvin the Torch is credited, no. But the more Friedkin resolved to get shots like this by any means necessary, the more he worried about being reined in by the guys back home paying for it all. He sort of had his run of the place and then got paranoid, perhaps paranoid, that somebody was reporting on him, letting Paramount and Universal know what was going on with the film so he would fire people the moment he thought that they were somehow getting word back to Los Angeles. In fact, he fired a lot of people on <i>Sorcerer</i> for a lot of reasons. Five production managers, at least one location manager. Then his cinematographer quit. A guy called Dick Bush, and he basically realized when he'd been shooting in the jungle for a few weeks that he'd underexposed all the footage. So it was all just way too dark, and he walked off. I mean, he just decided I can't carry on with this. Almost half the crew were hospitalized or sent home from a variety of tropical illnesses. Amoebic dysentery, gangrene, and malaria basically affected everyone.- Oh, my God.- It was just hell in the jungle. And then Friedkin was this authority figure who was so exacting and had quite a temper. And I always joked that, you know, I started as a production assistant and I ended up as the second assistant director, and I felt that if <i>Sorcerer</i> had gone on another month or two, I would have ended up producing it. Not because of my competence, but because everyone else had been let go. I gotta say, Mark, before we started taping, you said you had really positive memories of working on this film, but it sounds...- Oh yeah.- It was brutal. No no. If, as a producer now, I can't think of a worse movie to have produced, and to have a situation where you have a director who had that kind of power and control. But as a second assistant director learning his way into the movie business, it was fascinating. It was just great. Just the idea of the power, of the exactitude of filmmaking. And, you know, the best example, of course, within the movie is the bridge sequence. The bridge sequence. I'm going to spend some time on this because as fans of the film will tell you, and I'm one of them, it's one of the greatest stunt scenes ever. In it, Scheider's crew have to slowly, carefully steer their two giant nitro loaded trucks over a narrow, rotting bridge suspended over a roiling river in a pummeling rainstorm. Costs $1 million to build this thing. It's an extremely sophisticated sort of stunt set. It's got a concealed Hydraulic system and cables will be attached to it so that the trucks can sway on it. 200ft long, and it takes three months to build. And as it's being built over this 12ft deep river, somewhere deep in the jungle, there is zero rainfall and it becomes a dry riverbed. So they've built this incredibly expensive bridge over nothing. So they move the bridge, the whole giant gizmo, nearly 3000 miles away to a similar looking river with like, actual water in it. In Veracruz, Mexico. This movie was never supposed to have shot in Mexico, and it was supposed to have been finished months before we actually got to Veracruz. But alas, this scene was not going to wrap quickly.

The process was this: 25:58

we would say, okay, we're ready to go. The assistant director, Newt Arnold, would signal the physical effects crew probably half a mile up the river, and they would start to throw debris into the water. So that there would actually be debris under that bridge. So it would be on camera. Said, okay, we got that happening. And then we needed the rain towers, which were supposed to simulate the pouring rain. We would get those turned on, and then somebody else would signal the helicopters, of which we had three who would fly over the rain towers and then distribute the water. So it looked like it was havoc. And then I would say,"Okay, we're ready, let's go." And we would start to move the bridge so that the bridge would start to sway. And then we would have the actors start to drive the truck across the bridge. And I remember this is all, it would take over an hour. These details. Hundreds of people preparing for this one take, and I remember that one of the times we did it, we had all of this work done shooting the truck, and then somebody said, the damn windshield wipers aren't on. And so we had to abort the take and spend another hour and a half to get the next one. The sequence ended up costing 3 million bucks, 15% of the whole budget. Shooting went on for weeks. At least once the trucks actually plunged off the bridge, miraculously not killing anyone. By the time it was all over, Friedkin had lost 50 pounds. Years later, in Friedkin's autobiography, he said that at this point he'd become like Fitzcarraldo, the main character in the Werner Herzog drama, who is determined, come what may, to drag a giant steamship over a mountain in the Amazon, all so that he could build an opera house.<i>I want the opera house. I want my own house.</i> It also reminds me of what was going on at the same time on the shoot of <i>Apocalypse Now</i> in the Philippines. What Francis Ford Coppola was attempting, a shoot that had gone wildly over budget and over schedule. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. These were the days of these guys who were already kind of legendary talents of the 1970s, the kind of the new wave of American filmmakers. This is the moment when they start getting carried away and trying to sort of almost go up-river, deep into the jungle to fulfill these wild visions that they have, but being more and more disconnected from reality in the process. For everyone involved, sounds like returning to reality after this shoot was a process. It almost, it was so, so commandeered my life that when it was over with, it was a major, major PTSD. I mean, just I couldn't, I couldn't figure out what life was without <i>Sorcerer</i>. And for Friedkin, this bumpy truck ride wasn't over. The film's final budget had ballooned to 21 million bucks.<i>Sorcerer</i> had to be a hit. But Walon Green says as the film came together in the edit room, they were pretty sure it would be, You know, we all loved it. I mean, I don't think Billy and I had angst about the film. The studio did. Yeah Universal's marketing people were at a loss with <i>Sorcerer</i>, especially given the cast. There was the sort of known Scheider and then a bunch of respected but not exactly bankable overseas character actors. The studio said, how do we sell this? It looks like a foreign film. Well, in the milieu that Billy and I were part of, you know, kind of younger Hollywood, right? That was-- Wasn't anything wrong with that. I mean, we're basically looking for that. You were like, perfect. We love foreign films. Yeah. It's like, yeah, so shit, what's wrong with that? In fact, Friedkin seemed to go out of his way to make <i>Sorcerer</i> darker, more arthouse, more international, right down to his choice of composers. He'd heard this record by Tangerine Dream. He brought Tangerine Dream in. That was a funny meeting. These guys, they were Germans. And Billy came in and he said, I want this to be really dark. I want you to get into the mind of Adolf Hitler. And this guy, this Tangerine... the head of the Tangerine Dream guy, looked at him he said, "Oh, the head of Hitler? No problem, Billy, no problem." Here's a track from the score, appropriately titled <i>Abyss</i>, the seething sound of a movie about dead end guys on a suicide mission. And the thing is, as post-production wrapped in late 76, this all made commercial sense. For years, dark, gritty visions had performed at the box office:<i>Midnight Cowboy, Clockwork Orange,</i><i>Taxi Driver</i>, hell,<i>The Exorcist</i> was no comedy, and it didn't have huge stars either.<i>Sorcerer</i> seemed a safe enough bet. Literally. I think Friedkin made a wager with one of his chief executives, saying that he thought it was going to do very well, maybe like 90% as well as <i>The Exorcist</i>, you know,$100 million, something like that. And in the end, it grossed 9 million worldwide. It was an absolutely crushing failure for him, which completely blindsided him. It was a crazy fall from grace that the movie's boosters have pondered for decades. Was it the low wattage cast, or maybe <i>Sorcerer</i>'s cryptic title? It did kind of make it sound like another Friedkin horror joint, which it wasn't. Super critics Siskel and Ebert blamed it all on marketing. Tim Robey has other ideas. It's really the main two factors are the critical fraternity in America turning against Friedkin at this exact moment. The critics did not get <i>Sorcerer</i>, and they perhaps resented the idea of him remaking this kind of French classic. But he tells a story of walking down to his post box on the morning of its release to look at the LA times and the critic at the time, Charles Champlin, who'd basically been extremely positive about all of his past work, in his review, began it by saying "What went wrong?" But Robey says probably the biggest problem was <i>Sorcerer</i>'s competition, a movie that debuted just three weeks earlier at one of the biggest movie palaces in LA. I'll tell you, when-- Billy and I got the chills, we went to a preview of <i>Star Wars</i> at Grauman's Chinese. And we went to Grauman's Chinese, must have been early in the day, you know, before the day's run. And they ran <i>Star Wars</i> for us. And I looked at Billy and I said, "Uh oh." And he said, "Yeah, we may be fucked."<i>Star Wars.</i><i>It is more than just a successful movie. It is a box office phenomenon.</i> Yeah, today, a good grown-up thriller like <i>Sorcerer</i> could maybe hold its own against a sci fi blockbuster. You'd call it counter-programming. But in summer 1977,<i>Star Wars</i> was something totally new, and it was all anyone wanted to see.<i>The movie is called Star Wars, and since it opened here nine days ago,</i> capacity crowds have filled the 1100 seats in the theater almost daily. You know, it isn't like, oh, it came out and it really did good business. I mean, the film, they couldn't run it enough times during the day to satisfy the audience demand.<i>Sorcerer</i> had to get out of the way. And in fact, it came out at Mann's Chinese for example, in Hollywood and replaced <i>Star Wars</i> on the main screen there, but only for one week, because it did so badly that cinema owners, as in many across the country, immediately reinstalled <i>Star Wars</i> just one week later. The kind of movie audiences, and therefore Hollywood, wanted changed overnight. I newspaper's Christina Newland chalks it up to call it grimness fatigue. I think there's a lot of conversation about there being, you know, it was <i>Jaws</i> in 75 and then <i>Star Wars</i> in 77. That kind of led Hollywood into high concept cinema, spectacle based cinema, again. The idea that ancillary markets became important, all this stuff that we kind of, you know, I think scholars talk about in terms of things changing. But my dad was young in the 70s. He would have been about 20-21 around the time that these films were coming out. And he just said that people were sick of seeing depressing stuff at the cinema. And, you know, I do think there's that time in like, the aftermath of Vietnam where everyone had been watching quite downbeat, fatalistic films and people wanted to see something that was a bit more escapist. Yeah, when Friedkin and Green wrote<i>Sorcerer</i> in 74, bleak was all the rage, but by the time they emerged from the jungle three years later, it was out of style.<i>A cowboy movie set in space, that's Star Wars.</i><i>It's old fashioned entertainment, pure and simple, with no moral, no message.</i><i>And it appears this is what just about everybody</i><i>in the country is in the mood for.</i><i>Douglas Kiker, NBC news, Washington.</i><i>Sorcerer</i> was just the first domino to fall. Around the same time you got Scorsese doing<i>New York, New York</i> is 77 as well, isn't it? Same year, yeah, 1977. Yeah, so you've got <i>New York, New York</i>, which is a big failure.<i>One From the Heart</i> is a little bit later on Coppola's kind of <i>film maudit</i>.<i>Film maudit</i>, a cursed film. The reign of New Hollywood auteurs was over. And on some level, studios were glad to see it go. You know, the traditional, the received wisdom about it is that they were overindulged. They were acting like children. They were spoiled brats. They had too much budget, and they were self-indulgent. I think that's quite an anti-art attitude to have about it. Whilst their behavior wasn't always great, you know. And there were drugs and there was some dictatorial behavior and so forth. I also think it can be a little bit too harsh on these quite uncompromising artists who did often create really great, unwieldy, ambitious works of art. I think they had to be fairly bloody minded and single minded if they were going to get anything done. Friedkin kept making movies, some great ones, right up till his death last year, but he never came close to the success of his early work. Meanwhile, <i>Sorcerer</i> became a footnote. Anyone who stumbled on the grainy, mis-formatted home video versions that finally came out in the 90s might not have recognized it as a masterpiece. But then came the 21st century and vindication. You know, there has been an increased, I guess, in the past 10-15 years particularly. Interest in going back to these eras and finding or revising the history of what was reviled at the time. You know, critics love to have something that they can rehabilitate, often to the point that people seem to be rehabilitating things where you're like, actually, I don't know that that probably wasn't that great to begin with. Like, the critics were right the first time around. But that is simply not the case with <i>Sorcerer</i>.<i>This is a film that I that was released about 37 years ago, and it was dead.</i><i>It died a bad death.</i> That's William Friedkin in 2014 at the CPH PIX Festival in Copenhagen. That year, after years of struggle, he'd managed to get a new digital restoration made of <i>Sorcerer</i>. It was a smash hit on DVD, and he toured it around the world.<i>And getting it back into the way you're going to see it tonight</i><i>was like raising Lazarus from the dead.</i> Christina Newland saw a screening that year in London. I mean, yeah, you couldn't overstate the sense of occasion around going to see it, for one thing and knowing that Friedkin was going to be there like beyond just the experience of watching the film in the cinema and that incredible soundtrack, just, like thrumming through the cinema. It was great that he was around to see and to pay attention to the fact that its reputation was genuinely being rehabilitated and continues to be rehabilitated. I think people rightly recognize it now as one of the best films of the 70s. Which has come as a surprise even to some of the people who helped make it. Like Mark Johnson. Because I didn't, in terms of my career, I didn't have people refer to it for the longest time, and now people say, "Oh my God, you did <i>Sorceror</i>." And I went to a screening several years ago at the Aero in Santa Monica, and Billy was there, and I was able to watch it with a full audience. And I sort of realized why it is as good as it is. And it's very much these details. Friedkin never let anything go. You know, it was never"Okay. That's fine. Let's move on." He had to get what he wanted. And I think that's what a filmmaker needs. That's what an artist needs to do.<i>If I had the opportunity, I would change all of my films in one way or another.</i><i>If I could recut them.</i><i>Sometimes change my selection of shots,</i><i>sometimes even make changes in the story.</i><i>But not this film, not Sorcerer.</i><i>This is the one film that I've made that I would not change a frame of it.</i> In 1974, William Friedkin got a huge idea. He trucked it slowly, painstakingly around for over three years through two studios, across continents. And then he detonated it on screen exactly as he'd envisioned. It didn't make as much money as <i>Star Wars</i>, but that feat was just a spectacular. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us this season for more stories about great films with bad box office. Next time director George Miller takes a beloved family film and roasts it over a spit. So they did a screening for these executives and their children, and the children were traumatized. They ran, literally ran past me screaming out of the theater. We're trotting out <i>Babe Pig in the City</i> with guests including Farmer Hoggett himself, James Cromwell. Follow us wherever you listen so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, let's roll credits. This episode of the MUBI Podcast was written, hosted, and edited by me Rico Gagliano. This season's inspired by the new book

<i>Box Office Poison: 40:31

Hollywood Story in a Century of Flops</i> by Tim Robey. That's published by Faber and Faber in the UK and Hanover Square in the US. Go get it. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Jackson Musker is our booking producer. Steven Colon mastered the episode. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick, except the track <i>Hot Smoke</i> by the band People with Bodies. Extra thanks this week to Joel Jacks Studio's David Harper for recording Tim and especially Carina Lesser. The show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, let them know we're something special. Also, if you've got questions, comments or your own list of great film flops, email us at podcast@mubi.com And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast just head over to mubi.com to start watching. Thanks for listening. Go watch some movies and remember failure is okay.