“The path was silver, grained with streaks of rose-gray, and the walls of the canyon were turquoise, mauve, chocolate and lavender. The air itself was vibrant pink.”
Those might be production notes in the script margins of William Friedkin’s To Live in Die in L.A. (1985), one of the most garishly exhaust-plume-orange and postmodern-hot-pink cop films ever made, if they weren’t the topographical filigree of Nathanael West: a snippet from a beautiful passage in his otherwise coruscating fresco of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust. The proto–West Hollywood patina of West’s momentarily gay wilderness notwithstanding, the reality is that nothing bleeds brighter or smells sweeter under the Southern California sun than fresh bullshit wafting down through the Hollywood Hills. The stuff flourishes in the desert heat, and connoisseurs simply pluck it from the smog whenever the urge needs indulging. Friedkin—the late, great regent of serious-minded Hollywood horseshit…I mean, the director of some of the greatest commercial American cinema ever made—positively adored the stuff, and loved to let it waft around.
His finest films—Cruising (1980), The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), To Live and Die in L.A.—are lotuses in the mung, gloriously efflorescent spores on the fertilizer of innumerable Z-grade genre formulas: the good bad cop, the haunted teenager, the thin line between law and fate. There are, too, the many fecal farragoes and other misbegotten misfires he essayed: Jade (1995), The Guardian (1990), Rampage (1987)—films as maudit as they are, by a few, perversely admired. (Only the loneliest auteurist would consider rescuing the C.A.T. Squad films.) And then there was Friedkin’s love of saying, or exaggerating, practically anything, half-remembered nonsense or wholesale wishful thinking, to entertain his interlocutors. When I interviewed him in 1994 during the making of Jade, I toted along my copy of the Cruising soundtrack, which Friedkin gleefully autographed (after Mink DeVille), “It’s so easy!” Upon mentioning my love of Joe Spinell, in general and in Cruising, “Hurricane Billy” took the bait. “We shot a scene where Joe Spinell was getting sodomized with his nightstick up against his patrol car, and he’s singing ‘I’m going to Kansas City, Kansas City, here I come!’” he told me, breaking into a grin. “But we couldn’t use it.”
Of course you did, Billy. Because who cares whether that’s true or not? Whatever it is, it’s beautiful, and beautiful precisely because it’s both impossible to believe exactly what you want to hear. Ditto stories about (and other desecrations based upon) the legendary “lost” half hour of leather-bar footage from . Legends, like loose shoes, are luxurious things. But look, I only met the man once, heard him speak live once (on stage at the DGA in conversation with Fukasaku Kinji, after a screening of [1973]), and have listened endlessly to his raconteur-style (that’s French for “bullshit artist”) commentary tracks and interviews (many of them reified in Friedkin’s highly entertaining memoir, ), so don’t take my word for it. Here’s legendary sound recordist and mixer Chris Newman, who won an Oscar for , on Friedkin: “He’s honest. He’s dishonest. He tells you what you want to hear. He’s very clever psychologically; very instinctive about who you are, and who he might be at that moment.” That Friedkin told critic Mark Kermode a slightly cleaner version of that story about Joe Spinell a few years later (as he doubtless had to others on numerous occasions) only presses the point.
