Speaker 1: Arrow dot net. It's a network of podcasts, twenty different
podcasts to listen to a r r oe dot net.
One of those podcasts is c t CUS, a very
popular show about a group of people who happen to
work at a grocery store. This is how it really
goes down ct CS. The customer is never right. Ero
dot net a r r oe dot net. Enjoy your exploration,
mister Nat. How are you doing today, Sarah?
Speaker 2: Just fine? Thank you. You could probably see that Louie
the Wonderdog is crashing out on the couch behind me,
so he'll audit the interview and if anything happens we
don't like, he'll he'll bite you.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's exactly the way Jazzy is in
this room. She'll sit there and go well and a'll
tronggo what was wrong with that question? I swear to
god you were with me when I came up with it.
Speaker 2: Dude in producing Tom Kleggett, my good friend of many months,
because we didn't know we were working on the same
bok at the same time in different books, and they
came in anyway, He'll explain it to you, Tom Arrow,
Really nice to meet you.
Speaker 1: Oh dude, it's a pleasure to meet you, and it's
always fun to keep these these connections together in the
way that you know, It's like as we grow forward
with Hollywood movies and TV shows these days, it's like
we were forgetting a past. But when we've got people
like yourself, you and Nat, it's like, Okay, now we
have an anchor to grow from.
Speaker 3: Okay, sounds good. Thank you.
Speaker 1: How did you guys even know that you were working
on the same project, because what are the chances of
something like that? Or does it prove that we're not
the original one?
Speaker 4: We weren't aware of each other initially. It was decades
later that we even met. But Billy freaking just coincidentally
allowed both of us to work on our books. But
they were different in that Nats was about Billy himself
and mine was about Billy's films.
Speaker 1: Oh God, that's a good marriage right there, because you
know it is.
Speaker 2: And and Billy was so subtle that he had each
of his working on a book and the other didn't
know it, and he was so discreet he didn't bother
telling us. Fortunately, we had two publishers who didn't know either.
We'd be handing out copies on mimiograph.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, the two of you could be putting
a book together about just this one project. I mean,
this looks like something that would be like Faces Off,
which is up there. You know, we see that on
local stages all the time. You know what it's really
like to be a part of that side of the business.
Speaker 2: I don't think people are really curious about what writers do.
Everybody's had to write term papers, and I don't think
they want to relive that good point.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you say that, and I look down
at my writing hand because I use a nib and
it's just bathed in black ink. I'm going you're right.
I don't think there's anybody else that would honor the
black ink on their finger tips.
Speaker 2: I don't even think anybody writes cursive anymore.
Speaker 1: But do you find yourself the two of you just
sitting there. It doesn't matter what a phase of fame
you're in. You sit there and watch them write to
find out if they're gonna use cursive or they're gonna
go the simple way out.
Speaker 2: I don't know, do do social media to do? Do
smartphones have cursive on them? Because that's what people do
with their thumbs right. You know, how do you write?
What do you write on?
Speaker 1: If I'm going to share a thought, it starts inside
a notebook first, and then I'll then I'll try to
perfect it in the notebook, and then I'll take it up,
and then somebody takes me on and I'm going to
take it down. Take it down. That's enough. I don't
need to be you know, you know, I don't need
any haters on me or anything like that. But yeah,
I'm somebody who's got to see it. And I think
it's a radio thing mat because I mean they always
told us day one of radio, put it on the
page and practice it, and practice it before you even
put it over a thirteen second song intro. So I
just got used to doing that.
Speaker 2: Wow. Wow, I can't imagine writing every talk up.
Speaker 1: But go for it everything everything. Yeah, yeah, well what
it does? I think it creates a sense of confidence.
But at the same time, you've got someone like Dan Valley,
who's a radio consultant, that will sit there and say, well,
that's the reason why you stop in the middle of
your conversations, because you trained yourself to stop by writing.
I'm going oh yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Wondered Tom do you think Billy ever sat down at
a typewriter and wrote out every script? I know he
wrote a couple of scripts, like he adapted the Last
or he adapted the King Newtony Court Martial. But Billy
didn't really consider himself a writer, did he?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 4: I believe I heard that he used that he wrote
it out initially in Longhand, and which would be, you know,
remarkable in and of itself, given you know things today.
But I think he may have decided that writing scripts
himself was the way to go because.
Speaker 3: It became for him, for some.
Speaker 4: Topics something where it just had to come directly from
his mind onto the page. And I do believe the
first script he wrote himself was Cruising. He had contributed
to previous scripts, of course, but did not take a
writing credit. The French Connection, for example. You know, so
much of that was ad libbed based on conversations that
Freakin and the actors Hackman and Scheider had with the
cops who were there as both technical advisors as well
as the cops who actually worked on the original French
Connection case.
Speaker 1: So the two of you, how do you even research
that if they're using improv and ad lib. I mean,
how do you go in to get that experience, you know,
to with us that are catching it on your pages.
Speaker 2: But in my case, I was fortunate to have been
able to meet both Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. Eddie
passed some years ago, but I worked with Sonny on
a television special for HBO, and so I got to
know him fairly well. And he was not Roy Scheider,
and Roy Scheider was not Sonny Grosso. But I can
see how Sonny was the guy who would wrangle Eddie,
who was not a nice person, and keep him in
tow for the for the movie. But that's the kind
of energy between the two of them that Billy was
able to tap and recreate with Gene Hackman, who was
one of the sweethearts and one of the least violent
people of all time, and yet he was able to
act as violently as he had to. This is what
Billy was able to do. He was able to wrangle people,
He was able to make them do what he wanted
them to do. Because a great director, write this down, everybody.
A great director sets the scene so that the actors
can behave like the characters they're playing. And that's what
Billy managed to do both with The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer,
to Live In, Die In La Everything. Actors were not themselves,
they were their characters when William Freakin directed them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Matt, you know what though, when we're giving
that kind of legal freedom to be able to explore
a character like that, there's always that sense of fear
inside each and every one of us because we're afraid
that we're either going too far or it's not far enough.
Oh my god, we may have to do this over
and over again. So that that always brings fear to
me when when someone says, this is what I need
you to do. Oh really, I need a little bit
more direction. Nope, in your hands, buddy, put your experience
ahead of everything. And and so it kind of freaks
out a bit.
Speaker 2: Well, if you trust your director, you know you're not
going to get made an ass of.
Speaker 3: A freak. Can also put real fear into some people.
Speaker 4: Yes, on the French Connection, one of his one of
his technical advisors was Randy Jurgensen, who was also a
police officer who worked on the French Connection case. And
it's the scene where Gene Hackman shoots Frog two, who
has just jumped off the subway train that he had
hijacked and is running away up the steps of the
station to get away from Hackman, and Hackman shoots him.
Speaker 3: He shoots him in the back.
Speaker 4: And Randy Jurgensen told me that he went to Freakin
and he said, please.
Speaker 3: You can't do that. I'm a New York I'm a
New York cop. I can't. My friends are going to
see this movie.
Speaker 4: You have this police officer shooting a suspect in the back.
Speaker 3: Please give him a gun.
Speaker 4: Let there be a second gun that he has, Let
him take a hostage, do something. And Freakin told him
for several days, don't worry about it, don't worry about it.
Speaker 3: Randy said, I begged him to redo the scene, do.
Speaker 4: Something else, and Freaking kept telling him, don't worry about it.
Then the picture comes out and the one sheet poster
is the shot of Hackman shooting Frog two in the
back with.
Speaker 3: His hands up, and.
Speaker 4: Randy said, he and Freakin went to the first show
that night in New York City at seven o'clock and
when that scene came up, the audience erupted in applause,
and Freaking turned to him and said, what do you
think now?
Speaker 3: And Randy Randy said, that's when I.
Speaker 4: Realized I was just a technical advisor.
Speaker 3: Billy Freakin was a filmmaker.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. We'll be back with Naton Thomas
right after this. We're talking one of the things that
you You've talking me into the research department because what
I'm starting to get from William. And I call him
William because I didn't know him enough to call him Billy.
So therefore, but when I researched William, what happened was
I felt like that he took from his imagination and
made things happen on that camera immediately. So I did
research on that. Is it possible to do exactly that,
to be able to photocopy or do some sort of
copy of what you're thinking and put it on the camera,
And it said you can't do that, But yet William
proved that you can do that.
Speaker 2: He was a manipulator. He knew what people wanted, and
he was able to convey to the crew, which is
really the biggest job of a director to take what's
in your mind and make the crew and the other
people realize that on film. He was able to get
it done miraculously most of the time. Some of the
time it didn't quite work, but his reach exceeded his
grasp in some occasions, but most of the time it
really worked. It just its remarkable how he managed to
do it. He could play the audience like the proverbial harp.
Speaker 1: The two of you. How are you able to capture
the emotion and get it to me? Because you're creating
movies in my imagination? Is it possible that you're able
to always call this the dear future reader moment? In
other words, you experienced it, you went through the writing
as well, and now you're passing it on to us.
That's a dear future reader moment.
Speaker 3: Just God given inate ability, but he does.
Speaker 2: Samuel Goldwyn, the producer, was trying to belittle writers, and
he said to Lillian Hellman, what is writing anyway? It's
just putting one word after the other. And Lillian Hellman,
who was an estimable writer, said, no, it's putting the
right word after the right word, and not too many
of them.
Speaker 3: Good point. Billy also had.
Speaker 4: This ability to literally see the movie he wanted to
make in his head, how he wanted, how he wanted
things set up, how he wanted shots done where he
wanted the actors.
Speaker 3: Place, et cetera, and.
Speaker 4: At least probably at least halfway or better into his career.
Speaker 3: That is how he made his movies.
Speaker 4: He did not shoot a single frame until he actually
had it in his head exactly what it was going
to look like. Of course, he was also ready for
any changes on set, because changes, you know, the unexpected,
what happen on any film and likely does on every
film at least somewhere along the line.
Speaker 1: Now, Matt, the one thing that you kind of prove
inside this book is that William was very much into
what I call verbal taekwondo. He could use his words
to move people, and he learned that art quite well.
Speaker 2: He was an autodidact, which means that he learned everything
on his own. He barely got through high school and
then just used the College of life. And he enjoyed
being with people. He enjoyed especially being with people whom
you wouldn't want to be with. A lot of guys
who you know, had reputations, shall we say not everybody
in his family had been honest either, But he was
a straight kid and he managed to use that knowledge
of how to deal with people to if he wanted
to tear your heart out just with a couple of words. Now,
he never did with me, and I'm sure he never
did with Tom. But there were some people that he
could eviscerate, and it was always for a purpose, you know,
it was always to get the movie. He was never
needlessly cruel, although one assistant director told me that Billy's
idea of a joke it was to reduce someone else
to tears. I never saw that, but I know it
did happen. He was somebody who got what he wanted
for the good of the film.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, but there was no guilt trip afterwards, because
I mean, as a creative person, I'll say stuff, I'll
do things. Big man, you don't want to hang out
with me when it's all over, because now I'm going
through a guilt trip.
Speaker 2: Only a couple of times did I ever experience Billy
having I wouldn't call it guilt, but i'd call it
second thoughts. After Sorcerer came out, he wrote me a
long letter from France, where he was living with his
then wife, Jean Moreau. I let the audience take that in,
and he was very depressed that the film had not
done well at the box office, and he said, look,
the grosses are lower than whale shit. He was always colorful,
and he was very depressed that the film didn't do well,
and of course it took forty years before it was accepted.
Speaker 1: And he wrote none of this down in a journal
or anything like that, because it seems like this man
was just packed with quotes and he was filled with experience,
and it's the kind of stuff that really is to me,
would guide someone along to understand where it is that
we're growing with a movie.
Speaker 2: His twenty thirteen memoir The Friedkin Connection says most of it,
but he says at the very beginning of it that
anybody who's reading the book looking for a scandal is
going to be disappointed. It is still one of the
great memoirs of a director because it actually conveys the
joy of making movies rather than the drudgery. And that
was Billy. He was incessantly optimistic even when things weren't good.
Speaker 1: Well, absolutely, now with you putting the focus on the
movies right away, I mean, first of all, I depend
on NAT's writing to keep me up to date with
the older movies, because if I've not seen them. They're
brand new to me. But I've got to ask you
a question, Thomas, in the way of is that we
know the name of the movie, but for some reason
we're forgetting the makers of the movie, and we need
books like this that knock us upside the head saying,
pay attention, someone made this movie. It didn't just happen.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm glad that both Nate and I were here
to fill in those blanks. It's because for me, it's
because I love movies. I know it's a cliche, but
I've loved movies ever since I can remember, and freaking
Freakin's films had such an impact on me, particularly French Connection,
The Exorcist and Sorcerer. They were the reason that I
wanted to write my book from the get go. Ironically,
with the financial and critical failure of Sorcerer, initially it
became very curious. I became very curious about what will
he do next? And though he never achieved the kind
of success that he had early on, he continued to
make films and they were always interesting. Even the failures
were interesting to see because of who he was, and
he made movies because he said, I'm interested in this topic.
Speaker 3: There is a saying in Hollywood.
Speaker 4: Not all films work, and there are also the films
that do work. And Billy was one of those filmmakers
who had both the pinnacle of success and the valley
of defeat. And yet he continued to make movies. And
thankfully that was the case. He didn't retire, he didn't
go away. He was making movies right up until the
very end really of his life. And a lot of
those movies are going to continue to be touchstones.
Speaker 3: For movie audiences, whether they're watching them at home or
in theaters.
Speaker 1: See, this is the type of book you two, that
I like to put in front of future broadcasting students.
When I'm in there in that class and it's filled
with a bunch of dreamers who think they're stars already,
I'll drop this book in front of them and say,
I need you to go through a couple of these chapters,
and I need you to find something that you think
you are and let's talk about it. And all of
a sudden, you create conversation in the way of if
we don't get this modern day generation of these TikTok
video people doing something seriously, then they're going to miss
the boat because it's all there. The lessons are put there,
and you guys are making those tools.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for bumby half both of us. You know,
Tom's book deals primarily with the films and my book
deals primarily with the filmmaker. I think if you shuffle
the pages together, you have a pretty good portrait not
only of Billy Freakin, but of what Hollywood and movie
making was like for the last fifty years and has
changed greatly, and Billy was one of the reasons that
it went one direction or another. I think there's a
certain amount of nostalgia but also a certain amount of
accomplishment because it look what he did that nobody could
ever do again.
Speaker 1: So now the two of you, in the research that
you've done on William Freakin in the way, was he
ever aware of the time limit on movies? Because it
seems like today we're getting shorter and shorter and shorter,
and it's like going, I don't want this to feel
like a binge watch man, I need two hours plus.
Did he think about the time limit?
Speaker 4: I know he is to say, And other people that
I interviewed, like William Peter Bladdie, for example, who wrote
and produced the Exorcist. Billy's touchstone was two hours. We
got to keep it less than two hours, otherwise people
are going to start shifting around in their seats and
get uncomfortable. I don't think he made a film that
was much over two hours. Some of them were, you know,
could be closer to ninety five or one hundred minutes.
But he just felt that that was an ideal, a
pretty ideal storytelling time for a movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they're the limits. The limits are the
human bladder. Frankly, it's true of because nowadays people watch
movies on something the size of a business card so
they can take it in with them to the hooper.
But they can, you know, but movies can be any length,
and having watched the films in Terrence Malick, I can
assure you that they are. But Billy like to keep
it short and sweet. Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because those movie breaks like that are something I
actually get paid money to do. To go into a
theater and watch people watch a movie, and I am
to take notes on when people get up to go
to the bathroom, and usually it's the same kind of scene.
If it looks like it's gonna lighten up a bit,
I gotta go. I'm not gonna be gone long, but
I gotta go. And I'm wondering if these movie directors
understand if you don't give them a break right now
at one twenty one, they're gonna go and they're gonna
miss out on a valuable part of this story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, then you watch The Godfather, which is two minutes
short of three hours, and you don't want to move
from your seat, right It really depends on totally on
the filmmaker, totally on whether the film is any good.
People don't leave good films.
Speaker 1: Oh God, I love your attitude. I love your attitude.
All right, Where can people go to find out more
about the two of you? Because twenty minutes is never enough?
Now you know that about me, it's never enough.
Speaker 2: We're both online and you can buy our books at
the regular places. Tom Claggett is William Friedkin films of Aberration,
Obsession and Reality Minus Hurricane Billy that both reprinted now
in spanking new editions, and you can find them all
over on Everything and everybody.
Speaker 1: Well, please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you too.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thanks Eryl, Keep up the good work yourself,