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Book Review CONTINUED FROM PAGE 62 76 C I N E M O N T A G E In Segalo's telling, the editing of the film was its own series of trials. The super- vising film editor of record was a newcomer named Jordan Leondopoulos (whose scant subsequent screen credits go no further than 1981), but the bulk of the editing fell to Norman Gay, Evan A. Lottman, ACE, and Bud Smith, ACE. Ruthless with his own work — and, by extension, Blatty's — Friedkin lopped off a number of scenes during post-production, including Regan's "spider walk" down a flight of stairs and a theologically weighty discussion between Karras and Merrin. Blatty never reconciled himself to these cuts, and by the turn of the millennium, he had managed to cajole Friedkin into reinstating them. Prepared by Friedkin's then-regular editor Augie Hess, this cut was dubbed "The Version You've Never Seen" when it was released in theaters in 2000. "The first thing to say is that it is not the director's cut," said film critic Mark Kermode. "If anything, it is the writer's cut." Burstyn was opposed to the after-the-fact tinkering. "I like the original the way it was," she said. As would become typical for a Friedkin production, the soundtrack was given enormous scrutiny. Volunteering to drink, smoke, and consume raw eggs to suffi- ciently distort her voice, legendary actress Mercedes McCambridge was called in to dub the lines spoken by the demon-pos- sessed Regan; McCambridge's voice, in t u r n , wa s f u r t h e r a u g m e n te d b y " t h e squeals of pigs being led to the slaughter, voices played backwards, dierent micro- phones, and various levels of distortion on the combined tracks." Famously, a score by Lalo Schifrin did not pass muster with Friedkin — "He took the roll of [sound] film, took it out in front of Todd-AO, right in the street, and just threw it into the parking lot," recalled editor Smith — but providence was on his side when he happened upon an eerie recording by Mike Oldfield titled "Tubular Bells," the sounds of which are still synonymous with the film. Perhaps the various on-set accidents and strange goings-on suggest that "The Exorcist" was a cursed film — or, as Burstyn put it, one that was interfering with nefari- ous energies — but it's clear from its many strokes of creative good fortune that it was also a blessed one. Certainly the executives at Warner Bros. had reason to be thankful: on its original release, the film grossed $193 million. Yet if the public responded to the picture, a cadre of Hollywood old-timers felt it was an example of how far their industry had fallen. Although the film was nominated for 10 Oscars — including Best Picture, Director, Actress for Burstyn, Sup- porting Actress for Blair, Supporting Actor for Miller, and Editing — veteran director George Cukor is said to have proclaimed: "If this thing wins an Academy Award it's the end of Hollywood." (The film walked away with two Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay for Blatty and Best Sound for Robert Knud- son and Christopher Newman.) Yet despite its excesses, shock effects, and occasional gross-out moments, the film is notable for having by and large honored the serious- ness with which Blatty first undertook the project. "I didn't set out to scare the hell out of people as you do with a horror film," Friedkin said. "I set out to make a film that would make them think about the concept of good and evil." "Cursed," however, might very well be the right word to describe the subsequent entries in the "Exorcist" canon, most of w h i c h we re b e s e t b y p o s t - p ro d u c t i o n drama. In 1977, John Boorman made as his follow-up to his masterpiece, "Deliverance" (1972), the first sequel to "The Exorcist," "Exorcist II: The Heretic." This highly imag- inative, ostentatiously stylized film has long had admirers in high places — New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote that "the picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang's loony 'Metropo- lis')" — but Boorman's initial 117-minute cut prompted fierce audience blowback. "I saw this film at a night-before preview, and the audience started laughing at the movie well before I was inclined to," said film scholar Tim Lucas. The perception that the film was a stinker was so pervasive that Warner Bros. compelled Boorman to make post-re- lease cuts that resulted in a 110-minute running time. "Whatever [the audience] laughed at, he cut," Segalo writes. "Some of the excised footage made it into the final version eventually released on home video, some did not." Reflecting on the experience, Boorman said: "The sin I committed was not giving them what they wanted in terms of horror. There's this wild beast out there which is the audience. I created this arena and I just couldn't throw enough Christians in it." Thirteen years later, Blatty, who had not been involved in "Exorcist II," agreed to transform his novel "Legion" into "The Ex- orcist III," but the project was betwixt and between: although "Legion" had featured characters from "The Exorcist," it was in no way an obvious continuation of the earlier story. Executives from Morgan Creek were dismayed. "The problem, the company real- ized, was that a film with the word 'exorcist' in the title needed an exorcism," Segaloff writes, pointing to $9 million worth of rewrites and reshoots that included the fantastical notion of Jason Miller (Father Karras in the original film) being cast in a role already occupied by Brad Dourif; in the final film, the actors alternate. A similar fate befell Paul Schrader's "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist," which Morgan Creek was suciently dissatisfied with to shelve and supplant with an entirely different pre- quel, the film that became "Exorcist: The Beginning," directed not by Schrader but by Renny Harlin. For those interested in the vagaries of modern Hollywood, as well as the power of editing to make or break a movie, the multiple versions of "Exorcist II," "The Exorcist III," and the "Exorcist" prequels all exist on DVD and Blu-ray. The "mystery of faith" may confound humanity for the rest of time, but this book proves that the mystery of good (and bad) moviemaking is almost as intractable. ■ "The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear" By Nat Segalo 311 pages, Citadel, $28, 2023