Producers: Travis Stevens, Jim Fall, Alan Koenigsberg and David Kittredge Director: David Kittredge Cast: John Boorman, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, Rose Portillo, Rospo Pallenberg, Victor Hau, Ron Vargas, Melissa Skoff, Bonnie Prendergast, Mike Flanagan, Joe Dante, Karyn Kusama, Bilge Ebiri, Stephanie Zacharek, Simon Abrams, Jim Hemohill and Joseph McBride Distributor: Yellow Veil Productions
Grade: B
A behind-the-scenes filmmaking documentary that might better be thought of as an autopsy of a notorious disaster, David Kittredge’s film uses interviews, archival material and even some animation to describe the difficult making of 1977’s “The Heretic” and the calamitous reception John Boorman’s sequel to William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” got when it was released. “Boorman and the Devil” also acts as part of the inevitable effort at rehabilitation that’s an obligatory element of film criticism nowadays; revisionism has seemingly become integral to the afterlife of every big-budget bomb from the seventies and eighties.
The centerpiece is an interview with Boorman conducted in 2018 with then eighty-five-year-old director, in which his recall of detail is amazing (if, as always in such matters, open to some measure of doubt, or at least suspicion of revision) and his attitude—not so much regretful as resigned—is candid. But there are also clips of interviews with stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher and actress Rose Portillo as well as crew members—assistant director Victor Hsu, Boorman’s secretary Melissa Skoff, assistant cinematographer Ron Vargas, script supervisor Bonnie Prendergast and, perhaps most revealing, Boorman’s ad hoc consultant and script reviser, the pompously self-confident Rospo Pallenberg. (Trivia fans: Pallenberg went on to direct Brad Pitt in his early high school slasher movie “Cutting Class.”)
Boorman’s involvement with “The Exorcist,” he explains, began years before “The Heretic” when, fresh from the success of “Deliverance,” he was offered the chance to direct the original film. He declined, believing the story amounted to the torture of a child. After the film, ultimately helmed by William Friedkin, became a huge phenomenon in 1973, Boorman was approached regarding a sequel. He accepted, seeing “The Heretic” as an opportunity to make a “riposte” to “The Exorcist,” a “metaphysical” film about goodness, even though when he asked Stanley Kubrick about the project, Kubrick replied that the only way to do a sequel would be to provide “more blood and gore.”
Nonetheless Boorman went ahead with what he suggests was a noble goal, its high purpose evidenced by the fact that he didn’t want his film to be titled “The Exorcist II” at all, but rather simply “The Heretic.”
But things started to go wrong in pre-production. Though the script secured the return of Blair and Fletcher, suddenly famous after “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Boorman was disappointed when he failed to land Jon Voight for the third lead, that of a priest assigned to investigate the circumstances of the original exorcism. Instead, he was pressured to cast Richard Burton, already famed for unreliability.
The script itself underwent major changes, and Boorman’s hope to film in locales across the globe was jettisoned in favor of a shoot on Hollywood soundstages, which brought enormous logistical problems—the importation of thousands of locusts (which would symbolize the demon Pazuzu, also shown in closeup via some questionable effects shots) and the trucking in of tons of sand for sequences set in Africa. Add to that the pressure of finishing in time for a release date mandated by the system of blind bidding the studio had used to secure guarantees of large payments and long runs from theatres that desperately wanted the film; Warner Bros. virtually covered the production’s expected cost from the system, but failure to meet the date would mean substantial financial loss.
Burton’s drinking and nonchalant attitude (he would leave at precisely five each evening, per his contract) and illnesses among the cast slowed progress, as did technical setbacks that required reshoots. But the most serious obstacle to keeping to the schedule was Boorman’s contracting a fungal infection from the sand carted in for the African sequences, which forced the production to close down for over a month. The scramble to rewrite the film’s third act added to the sense of impending doom, and rumors of a “curse” began to circulate.
A major revelation in the interviews involves how cavalier safety issues were treated at the time, not only in filming atop the Warner building in New York, which endangered both Blair and Boorman, but in an immolation scene featuring Portillo. It was only a half decade later that a tragedy occurred on John Landis’ set for his segment of “Twilight Zone: The Movie,” so this wasn’t an isolated case.
The movie, now titled “The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” did make the scheduled release date, but met with critical brickbats and audience hostility. The damning reviews are cited mostly via graphics, but viewer antipathy is shown not only in dismal box office receipts and reports of derisive laughter at the tedious scenes of “synchronized hypnosis” involving Blair, Burton and Fletcher linked up mentally through wire headdresses and flashing lights, but recollections of the test screening at which angry patrons literally chased studio executives out of the theatre. Boorman’s recutting was unable to salvage things, and the picture went down as one of the worst disasters in Hollywood history.
On the evidence provided here, Boorman remains convinced that some of the film represents his best work, and believes that it was audience expectations for another “Exorcist” rather than his cerebral, theologically complex rejoinder that was the deciding factor. (He also criticizes Burton’s “limited” performance, observing that he acted only from the neck up, relying on his voice.)
Though in passing Kittredge, who also serves as his own editor, includes negative comments, his present-day interviewees, both critics and directors, are ambivalent. Most acknowledge the flaws in “The Heretic,” but also point out its visionary quality and technical audacity. Such a viewpoint is hardly new: Pauline Kael pointed to its grandeur in comparison to “The Exorcist” (which she despised), and Martin Scorsese compared its message to the Book of Job. But only film historian Joseph McBride goes so far as to declare it a masterpiece. Perhaps in his assessment he can take comfort in the last words spoken in Boorman’s film by Fletcher’s character: “I understand now. The world won’t. Not yet.”
For now, “Boorman and the Devil”—decently shot by a clutch of cinematographers (Seamus Deasy, Tom Guiney, Ed Herrera, Alan Jacobsen, Elle Schneider) but hobbled somewhat by cutesy animation and an irritating score by Eduardo Daniel Victoria—is a fascinating account of how a filmmaker’s ambition to do something great came crashing down in the face of practical realities. Whatever Boorman intended, “The Heretic” remains, for all the efforts of its revisionist admirers, a failure of monumental proportions.