Repossessed
What's scarier than the new version of The Exorcist? Writing about it.
      by Sarah Kendzior

"Stay away from Captain Howdy, and call me in the morning."

In the beginning, there was Laptop Boy.

"I've heard," he says to William Peter Blatty, who is sitting a foot or so away, "that this story was inspired by something that happened to Shirley MacClaine's daughter."

Silence. "You're teasing me, aren't you?" says Blatty blankly. Clearly, Laptop Boy is not. "No, it wasn't, but Shirley was my first choice for the part, because I had modeled the character of the mother on her."

"Not on Jane Fonda?" Pause. Scanning for sarcasm. Negative. Crap.

From the Exorcist press notes, handed out before the interview session began: "Blatty's novel was inspired by a repeated exorcism of a 14-year-old boy, which took place in 1949 in Maryland."

Don't people read these things? They're the cheat sheets of entertainment journalism, after all. Biographies, quotes, interviews, reasons for being -- they're all neatly wrapped up in a dozen or so pages. You've read whole articles by other journalists and often marveled at the similarity -- the word for word steal, in the cases of certain publications -- and pitied those whose work is so continuously reprinted yet never acknowledged.

This is William Friedkin. He stood us up.

Someone -- someone who has read her notes -- asks Blatty about the inspiration for the story. "I heard some detail of the exorcism from one of my New Testament classes at Georgetown. And, like so many Catholics, I've had little bouts of wavering faith over the course of my life, and I was going through one of those at that time. When I heard about the case, and read the details that seemed so compelling, I thought, my God -- if someone were to investigate this case, and authenticate it, what a tremendous boost it would be. And I thought, someday, I would like to see that happen or maybe I would like to do it. I was thinking non-fiction. At the time, you know, I was not a writer--"

Laptop Boy, who is roughly twice your age and has been a junket crasher for lord knows how long, interrupts: "Who was your teacher at the time?"

Blatty is bewildered. "Oh, um, my teacher was Eugene Gallagher, a Jesuit." Laptop Boy dutifully types away.

The poor man resumes. "I read of an attempted debunking," he continues. "I got as far as the point where the writer said that the bed that the evangelical minister, who had the boy in his home overnight to observe, had reported him to be rolling around, moving. And this writer said, 'Well, it turns out that the bed was on rollers.' I had a vision of this writer fifty years later going into the house and finding the bed, and examining the rollers. Either that," he concludes, "or the diary of someone who is morbidly obsessed with rollers."

Oh-kay. Maybe it's something in the air. Or the food. You move your coffee cup a little further away.

William Peter Blatty on the set of The Exorcist in 1973.

Finally, someone asks something interesting. "So why is the film coming out now, in 2000?"

A little voice whispers money. You look around, confused. Then your realize it's in your head.

The truth is, you really love The Exorcist and honestly think it's one of the greatest horror movies ever made. You figured the last thing that could possibly go wrong is an Exorcist junket. Maybe there's some sort of inverse ratio thing going on.

"Because it's taken me that long to persuade Bill Friedkin to give us the original cut," says Blatty. This leads to a discussion of where the hell Bill is, anyway. Tired. Right.

That topic dispersed with, Laptop Boy chimes in. "You wrote it as a book and then you wrote it as a movie? Or when the book came, the movie rights were--"

From the Exorcist press notes: Blatty had pursued the possibilities of The Exorcist as a motion picture even before the novel was published.

Blatty: "No, no, no! I sold the book to a paperback publisher, Bantam Books, and then they commissioned me to write it... I put it out to every movie studio in town, and they all turned it down--"

Interrupter, not Laptop Boy: "Now I'm old enough to remember first reading the book when it came out in paperback--"

Yet obviously not enough to learn not to cut off your interview subject--

"I read it as a teenager, and the one thing that I thought really carried over in the movie was the general atmosphere. It's not like current horror, which is slash gore torn limbs -- yet there are shocking scenes -- but I thought the hospital scenes are more frightening in their own way than a lot of things in the bedroom. Was that intentional?"

You're not old enough to remember when The Exorcist came out on video and you still can't believe these people.

Blatty: "I tried to make every bit of it as creepy as I could. I had the same response you do to the hospital scenes. There's been a lot of hyper talk about people fainting and vomiting and all that. Anyone who faints, it's during that scene, the arteriogram. I was standing in the back of the theater in New York at the first public press preview. Too nervous to sit down. And along came this woman who started walking down the aisles. She had a hand to her head. I could see her lips moving. She got close enough to me to start murmuring, 'Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.' I thought, if this is Pauline Kael, we're dead."

Finally, a real quote! Maybe you won't have to write that self-indulgent second-person article nit-picking the junket after all.

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