Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
60 C I N E M O N T A G E B O O K R E V I E W as a writer of comedies. No less uncertain was the film's casting, special eects, edit- ing, and music, any one of which could have derailed the whole enterprise. Then there were the ominous on-set occurrences, including a stage that was consumed by f ire, a severe back injury experienced by Burstyn following an ill-ad- vised stunt, and the death of supporting actor Jack MacGowran within weeks of the completion of his scenes. "Such negative energy in that film!" said Shirley MacLaine, a longtime crony of Blatty's on whom the writer based Chris MacNeil (but who was ruled out for a role in the film). For her part, Burstyn put it this way: "We were calling on some very heavy energy. People might say dark forces, but that might be too dramatic. I don't think you fool around with those kind of energy fields without having some sort of manifestation, and we had a lot." Even so, the film was a gigantic commercial success whose intellectual property is still being harvested — see, for example, this fall's release of David Gordon Green's "The Exorcist: Believer"— and whose behind- the -scenes stories remain fascinating enough to produce a book such as this one. To be sure, the drama surrounding the making of "The Exorcist" has been amply recounted in innumerable documentaries and making-of featurettes, but Segaloff is an author uniquely well positioned to retell well-trod stories fully and well. The author of an earlier biography of Friedkin, Segalo had firsthand access to both the famously mercurial and volatile filmmaker as well as to writer-producer Blatty, and his own involvement with the release of the original film renders him an eyewitness to its iconic status: In 1973, the year that the picture was released, Segalo was working as a publi- cist for the Sacks Theatres chain in Boston. " T i c ke t h o l d e rs wa i t i n g i n l i n e fo r the next performance would see the dis- tressed faces of those leaving and pump themselves into a frenzy even before the lights went down," Segaloff writes of the initial, admittedly over-the-top audience response to the film. His own reaction was more measured but no less appreciative. "I tried to understand why people of faith seemed disturbed in ways that other people were not," he writes. "I also saw that the artistry and thought that went into the film were genuine." In a series of swift, well-delineated chapters, Segalo maps out the backstory, production, and still-ongoing legacy of "The Exorcist." Arguably the Rosetta stone of the project is a 1949 newspaper article about an alleged exorcism that caught the attention of a young Blatty, then a student at Georgetown University. Raised in the Catholic Church, Blatty strayed from his fa i t h o n l y i n t h e s t r i c t l y p ro fe ss i o n a l sense: instead of becoming a priest, as was expected of this last-born of five children, he became a comic novelist ("I, Billy Shake- speare") and screenwriter who traded in farces, including Blake Edwards's "A Shot in the Dark" and "Promise Her Anything," di- rected by Arthur Hiller and starring Warren