William Friedkin, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker who died on Monday at the age of 87, was a rebellious exemplar of the New Hollywood era, when visionaries such as Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Hal Ashby, and others briefly shook the faltering studio system, replacing musicals and Bible epics with the gritty dramas of personal cinema.
Before megalomania derailed his career, Friedkin scored a controversial hit with The French Connection (1971) and produced a pop culture sensation with the harrowing shocker The Exorcist (1973), which broke box-office records and, even more astonishingly, roared into the national conversation, on radio programs, in op-ed pages, on television talk shows, and in general-interest magazines—the dominant information platforms in an age when America was still a monoculture.
But Friedkin, short-tempered, reckless, and unpredictable, almost missed his chance at celluloid fame.
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