First Look at the Exorcist: The Beginning Trailer
Source: MTV
MTV has premiered the new trailer for Warner Bros.' Exorcist: The Beginning, opening August 20. The prequel traces the story of Father Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) back to his first encounter with the Devil in post-WWII Africa.
Director Renny Harlin tells MTV what he "tried to do is set up a lot of those unanswered questions that we see in the original. There are a lot of open plotlines that are never explained, so I tried to make it so that if you watch this film and then watch the original 'Exorcist,' the original will seem like the sequel."
You can check out the Windows Media trailer by clicking here. (http://www.mtv.com/global/apps/mediaplayer/asxmaker.jhtml?clipids=1633161&site_type=music&asx_intro_slate=/sitewide/apps/mediaplayer/swf/trailer_slate_10.swf&asx_outro_slate=/sitewide/apps/mediaplayer/swf/trailer_slate_10.swf&s1=news&s2=articles&adPth=/adsetup/movies/&x=x.asx)
What a crappy trailer. What a crappy director. And his explanation of what he was trying to do is the most retarded explanation of a prequel ever--to make the original seem like the sequel. DUH.
End Mini-Vent.
Quote from: MacGuffin
"I tried to make it so that if you watch this film and then watch the original 'Exorcist,' the original will seem like the sequel."
I think you misquoted him. It should say.
"I tried to make it so that if you watch this film and then watch the original "Exorcist," the original will seem that much better."
two pics from the movie:
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fw1.422.telia.com%2F%7Eu42243560%2Fexorcist1.jpg&hash=cc23d993afc8b18641382355fd0ba8dcb81c1294)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fw1.422.telia.com%2F%7Eu42243560%2Fexorcist2.jpg&hash=54210560b77851db794aaf49fdaf62bd59549916)
Well, that explains the killer from Scream. It's been killing me (ha ha!) for forever.
that isn't making sense to me...
if you're serious... the killer from Scream's mask is from the Edvard Munch painting The Scream.
If you're kidding... I'm sorry I missed the joke.
Quote from: RegularKarate
if you're serious... the killer from Scream's mask is from the Edvard Munch painting The Scream.
isn't the mask based on a very old movie character called father death?
Well, I don't know this for a fact... maybe it cam from father death... it just only makes sense that the mask looks like the head of the figure in the painting and the painting is called "The Scream"... I believe you can even buy a scream mask that is decorated with the colors from the painting.
Quote from: RegularKaratethat isn't making sense to me...
if you're serious... the killer from Scream's mask is from the Edvard Munch painting The Scream.
If you're kidding... I'm sorry I missed the joke.
Well, it was a joke. I figured it was apparent in the second sentence.
FULL TRAILER
http://www.latinoreview.com/ExorcistTrailer/index.html
spoiler?
cgi linda blair (http://w1.422.telia.com/~u42243560/exorcist_the_beginning.JPG)
I don't know you guys, it looks kind of scary :drinking:
I don't how this movie's gonna be. The only Exorcist movie that worked for me was the original. So it's hard to imagine this being just as good or an improvement. But the trailer's pretty cool.
Trailer was okey, but no matter how good it had been, there would have been that voice in the back of my head whispering "Renny Harlin made this...". The one thing that really got me in the trailer was the use of Tubular Bells in the end, and if all this has going for it is nostalgia for the first one, well...I'm still praying for the Paul Schrader version on DVD.
It sure doesn't seem in line with the original...it might be just the trailer, but there seems to be a lot of manufactured scary beats, if that makes any sense. The original was very real and organic, I saw a lot of 'Turn around slowly, look at the terror behind me!' shots in The Beginning trailer. I want to see Schrader's version too, maybe Warners was right and it did suck, but I doubt it. I feel sorry for Stellan for having to do this shit twice.
This is the best thing I've read all week. Brilliant stuff. Schrader's version sound amazing, really great...I'll buy that eventual DVD two-pack just to see it. I'm seeing the Harlin version early next week, but not looking forward to it.
Some spoilers concerning the Schrader version are included....
The Prequel That Wouldn't Die
Hell Hath No Fury
Exorcist: The Beginning, a story of Hollywood possession
by Scott Foundas
Paul Schrader seems relaxed for a man who’s just been doing battle with dark, demonic forces — and I’m not talking about Pazuzu, the sinister spirit that an elderly priest once pursued from the deserts of Iraq to a young girl’s bedroom on a foggy street in Georgetown. It’s October of last year, and Schrader and I have met for drinks in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont to talk about his latest film, Exorcist: The Beginning — which, as you may already know, will not be coming soon to a theater near you. A couple of months earlier, rumors had begun to circulate that Schrader had been fired from the project — a prequel to the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist — after screening his edit for the executives at Morgan Creek, the independent production company that currently owns all rights to the Exorcist franchise. The former New Hollywood enfant terrible, it was said, had failed to deliver a movie that was as scary or gory as its producers had hoped, and a new director would be brought in to do re-shoots. Then, in a press release dated September 15, 2003, it was made official: “Morgan Creek Productions and director Paul Schrader have jointly announced that Schrader will no longer continue as director of Exorcist: The Beginning due to” — drumroll, please — “creative differences.”
As has since been reported, Schrader’s firing was merely the latest in a series of wayward turns that had plagued The Beginning since the beginning — a web of movie making, unmaking and remaking so infernally tangled as to give new meaning to the phrase “development hell.” Indeed, plans for a new Exorcist film dated back to the summer of 1997, when Variety reported that Morgan Creek was commissioning a script from Terminator 2 co-writer William Wisher that would recount Father Merrin’s first confrontation with the devil, in British colonial Africa — events briefly alluded to in both the William Friedkin film and the best-selling William Peter Blatty novel on which it had been based. That script was subsequently overhauled by novelist Caleb Carr (The Alienist) and attached to television director Tom McLoughlin. But the project only really began to pick up steam in the fall of 2000, when The Exorcist, in a tricked-out reissue promoted as “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” bucked all the conventional wisdom concerning special editions to take in $40 million at the domestic box office. Suddenly, The Beginning was back on track, with John Frankenheimer replacing McLoughlin and Liam Neeson set to star as Father Merrin (the role originally played by Max von Sydow).
There the bedevilment might have ended, had the 72-year-old Frankenheimer — in the summer of 2002, during pre-production — not undergone back surgery and bowed out of directing the film. (He died shortly thereafter.) A replacement was sought, and Schrader, rather unexpectedly, landed the gig — no matter that he hadn’t sat at the helm of a major-studio feature since his much-maligned Cat People remake 20 years earlier. Shooting commenced in late 2002, on locations in Morocco and sound stages in Rome, with a budget of $40 million, the largest of Schrader’s career.
“It came out of the blue,” Schrader tells me. “It was very prestigious. A chance to play with the big toys — two cameras, cranes, the lighting, the manpower. So I jumped at it.” When I ask him why he doesn’t seem more riled up about getting fired: “There’s no profit in it. People are going to fuck you. Things are going to not work out. You’re going to get lucky some days. Most days, you’re not going to be lucky. Why dwell on this? Scorsese could tell you virtually every critic who ever gave him a bad review. I couldn’t.”
Sometime prior to our meeting, I had seen Schrader’s version of Exorcist: The Beginning. The television screen was small, and the film was far from finished — all the music and visual effects were temporary, the image itself a high-resolution output from a computer editing system. But even under such circumstances, there was no escaping the lyrical sense of terror evoked in the opening scenes of Schrader’s film. In a predominantly Catholic Dutch village in the waning days of World War II, the murder of a German SS officer leads his lieutenant to round up the villagers for interrogation. As snow flurries fill the sky, the lieutenant demands that the local priest identify the guilty party — surely, inasmuch as he is their confessor, he must know which of these people has blood on his hands. The priest, of course, is Father Merrin (played by Stellan Skarsgård, who replaced Neeson during pre-production), and when he insists that none of his parishioners is culpable, the lieutenant sets about a diabolical course of action. He will kill 10 villagers as a warning to the real killer, wherever he may be. What’s more, Merrin must select the 10 who will die. Should he refuse, the lieutenant vows to kill everyone. “God is not here today, priest,” he bellows as Merrin collapses into prayer.
From there, the film plunges into postwar colonial Africa. Merrin, now working as an archaeologist, is overseeing the excavation of what appears to be a Byzantine church situated high in the hills surrounding the town. It seems to have been buried, intentionally, just after it was constructed, as if to contain some spiritual force rather than exalt it. And as Merrin digs, a mysterious presence seems to set itself upon the entire region. A tribal elder’s wife gives birth to a maggot-infested fetus; two British soldiers are found murdered at the dig site, their corpses contorted to resemble those of John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul; and an escalating standoff between the British and the natives bears discomforting similarities to one Merrin himself witnessed not so long ago . . .
Rather than worshipfully recalling the claustrophobic, kitchen-sink realism of the 1973 film, Schrader and Carr seemed actively engaged in subverting, as best they could, its iconography. Shot by no less a visual poet than Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, One From the Heart and virtually everything by Bertolucci), the film is visually wide-open, with a dramatic sense of landscape and a marvelous attention to the subtlest tricks of light. Moreover, this Beginning views demonic possession less as a singular occurrence — the terrors visited upon an innocent young victim — than as a contagion born in the hearts of men, able to cross oceans of time and space, infecting entire communities in its wake. It is, by Schrader and Carr’s own admission, an internalized piece of psychological (as opposed to visceral) horror. It’s also, not incidentally, an epistemological study of faith, set against a world that gives even the righteous many reasons to question their beliefs. In short, just the sort of brooding, introspective piece you might expect from Schrader (who was raised as a strict Calvinist and who has explored similar themes in films from Hardcore to Affliction) and Carr (who, though best known for his novels, has also written extensively about military history, global terrorism and other Zeitgeist matters), but which Morgan Creek would later claim was exactly what it hadn’t asked for.
Back at the Marmont, to hear Schrader tell the story — or as much of the story as he is able to tell, given the “non-disparagement” agreement he and Morgan Creek chairman and CEO James G. Robinson have mutually agreed to — he had little inkling that anything was amiss until midway through the Morocco part of his shoot. “When Jim came to Morocco, he started saying to me, ‘It isn’t scary enough,’ which became a mantra,” says Schrader. “We had to get out of Morocco by Christmas, and we only had two weeks left in Morocco before Christmas. So I told him there was nothing we could really do with the Morocco stuff anyway, but let’s add some more stuff when we get to Rome. About eight to 10 elements were subsequently added to make it scarier — all within the context of the script we had, and without going into any real hardcore horror stuff, because it had always been established that we didn’t want spinning heads and pea soup. And if you don’t want that, then it’s natural to assume that you don’t want that kind of in-your-face horror.”
But then, Schrader adds, “By the time I was shooting in Rome, my relationship with Jim had deteriorated quite a bit.” There were fights over editors and composers, and over whether Schrader would do postproduction work on the film in New York (where he lives) or L.A. Then, Schrader says, in March 2003, he screened his cut for Robinson and other Morgan Creek executives (including company president Guy McElwaine), following which there was talk of re-editing, of cutting down the film’s 130-minute running time. After another round of edits supervised by Schrader, a separate cut of the film was prepared by Robinson himself. By which point, the writing on the wall was plainly visible.
At the time of our meeting, Schrader was still uncertain about the long-term future of his film, though he had gotten wind of who would be warming his recently vacated director’s chair: Renny Harlin, the Finnish action specialist previously responsible for the smart-shark thriller Deep Blue Sea and two of Hollywood’s better sequels, Die Hard 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, but whose résumé also includes Cutthroat Island and Mindhunters, an abysmal updating of the old Agatha Christie And Then There Were None idea that has so far been bumped by Miramax from at least five different release dates.
“I had actually wanted to stay on and do the re-shoots myself,” Schrader told me. “They were contractually obligated to use me, and so they drew up a bill of particulars, of things I had done wrong, a lot of it just normal stuff — fights, angry disputes. It was going to go to arbitration, where the DGA would have represented me. But the people from the DGA said, ‘Look, you could lose this. If you lose this, you will lose your salary, and you will open yourself up for a civil suit for damages. It’ll be a nuisance suit, but it will keep you in lawyers for the better part of a year. It will cost you a lot of money, and what you will win is the right to do re-shoots that will be dictated to you, and during which there’ll probably be a second director on the set. So what are you fighting for?’”
Two months later, Harlin was in Rome, on Schrader’s old sound stages, shooting a film called Exorcist: The Beginning, made from a new script and featuring almost entirely new creative teams in front of and behind the camera. (Skarsgård and Storaro were the lone holdovers.) Virtually none of Schrader’s scenes were expected to be retained.
“There’s nothing like making a practice movie,” chuckles James Robinson. It’s now May 2004, midway through the Cannes Film Festival, and I’ve literally run down the Croisette from an early-morning press screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 to meet with Robinson in his temporary office at the posh Hotel Martinez. Posters for his first three movies to be distributed by Universal — where Morgan Creek has just moved its deal after more than a decade at Warner Bros. — line the room, while Robinson’s very presence at Cannes is itself something of a statement: Despite reports to the contrary, Morgan Creek is alive and still kicking. Famous for making his fortune before he ever set foot in Hollywood, as a Baltimore entrepreneur whose holdings included a highly profitable Subaru distributorship, Robinson co-founded Morgan Creek in 1988 with then-partner Joe Roth. They went on to enjoy early hits like Young Guns and Major League, mixed in with such prestige titles as David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Paul Mazursky’s Oscar-nominated Enemies: A Love Story. In 1991, the company hit its first bona fide home run with the release of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But the past few years have been leaner for Robinson, who hasn’t had a smash since 1995’s Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and whose recent efforts include the likes of Chill Factor, Juwanna Mann and I’ll Be There, pictures that either went straight to video or might just as well have. Any way you slice it, Robinson, who prides himself on his hands-on involvement in all of Morgan Creek’s productions — he claims to personally cast the lead roles in all his pictures, in addition to choosing the key creative teams — has a lot riding on Exorcist: The Beginning.
“I was not happy with the Paul Schrader version,” says Robinson, who looks a bit like Merv Griffin and whose words flow forth in the just-plain-folks patois of a small-town politician running for office. “Now why do I say ‘Paul Schrader version’ when I’m such a hands-on guy?” he continues. “Bottom line here is that we give the director a lot of latitude during the actual making of the movie, and then I step back in during postproduction. I’m there during production, but if a director has got himself a certain agenda, he can put that thing into effect. So, I saw the director’s cut. Then I went in the editing room with Paul, but no matter what we did, it had been shot in such a way that you really couldn’t change it. I use the word cerebral — the movie was more cerebral than it was fun or scary or all the other things. But let’s not kid ourselves. This is the entertainment business. Realizing we could not get the movie we thought we were going to get, the one Frankenheimer would have given us in a heartbeat, I said, ‘We can just throw the thing at video and walk away, or we can make another movie.’”
No question: Robinson is persuasive. Like any true salesman, he’s eternally diplomatic and knows how to work the room. “Jim’s a nice guy,” Caleb Carr tells me by phone several weeks later, “but if you want to go to your grave being one of the most untrustworthy, unreliable people on Earth, he’s got a good shot at it.” Though, like nearly everyone involved with Schrader’s film, he has since moved on to other projects, it’s clear that Carr, who previously suffered an infamously protracted courtship with Scott Rudin over a movie version of The Alienist, still feels bruised by his Exorcist experience. “You know, I had a very interesting upbringing on the Lower East Side of New York City, and I often marvel at the fact that anything can still shock me,” he says. “I have seen most of the horrible shit that people can do to each other at very close range. Yet I am still stunned by Hollywood people’s capacity to be dishonest. It’s just amazing.”
Pounding the Hollywood pavement between book gigs, Carr had originally come to Morgan Creek to work on a couple of other assignments when, in the fall of 1998, he stumbled onto his own archaeological find: Wisher’s script, lying around in a dusty storeroom. “It did have enormous problems, but it also had one of the greatest opening scenes of a horror movie that I’ve ever read,” Carr says in reference to the Dutch-village sequence he would embellish in his rewrite. “The idea of doing a prequel to The Exorcist was not something I had ever considered, but in the course of reading this thing, I started to think, ‘This is a really cool idea. How does an average priest become an exorcist?’” Though Carr claims it was only through his own persistent nagging that he was even allowed to take a crack at the project, upon finishing his script he found a trio of allies in Morgan
Creek’s president at the time, Jonathan Zimbert, and development executives Joe Martino and Hilary Galanoy. Unfortunately, all three were soon to leave the company, in what Carr describes as the first signs that “This was destined to be one of those projects where misfortune just rained down all over the place.”
And for Carr, who had gotten along famously with Frankenheimer, Schrader’s hiring was something of a thunderbolt. (Admittedly not the first person who would spring to mind for the project, Schrader had, according to Carr, landed the gig mainly because of the expectation that his name would generate healthy foreign sales for the film. For his part, Robinson says he “didn’t know Paul Schrader from Adam” when he was proposed by McElwaine, a friend of Schrader’s agent.) “The only time Schrader and I had any contact was a phone call that we had after he was officially hired,” Carr says — a story consistent with Schrader’s own account. “We talked on the phone for probably two hours, out of which I probably talked 15 minutes. And never once — it’s a meaningless detail that nevertheless has some meaning — did Schrader manage to get the words out of his mouth that he liked the script. When I hung up the phone, I realized, ‘That’s it. This is now officially over.’ I called Jim Robinson and said, ‘You need to know that if you hire this guy, this will be his movie. If the day comes when Paul calls me and says, I don’t understand something or I’m lost on this, I will answer the phone. But I do not anticipate that happening.’ And Jim’s constant refrain is that he runs the company, he’s in charge of the show, and, basically, it’s his movie. Which is utter nonsense. He says that on every shoot, and every time he’s got some peculiar excuse for why he actually couldn’t control the director at all.”
If Carr sounds tough on Robinson, you should hear him talk about Schrader. Though he has softened his line considerably since the widely circulated e-mail message in which he accused Schrader of being drunk on the set and suggested, among other things, that the movie might be saved by re-shoots only “if that little cocksucker stays in his fucking hole,” Carr makes little secret of his disdain for Schrader’s version. “What it reminds me of,” he says, “is if you did a blocking rehearsal of the script and somebody filmed it. Nobody’s really focusing. All the actors have that unmistakable look where they’re standing around silently screaming, ‘Someone direct me, please!’ I’ve done a lot of directing in the theater, and I know that look on actors’ faces. But I don’t really blame them. It wasn’t an easy script to do.” He is, however, more than happy to blame Schrader. As he told the Web site Horrorexpress.com in September of last year, “All this crap about Morgan Creek wanting a conventional horror movie is just that, crap made up by Schrader to cover his ass, or rather to cover his lackluster cut.” It was a moment, Carr freely admits, at which he himself was being actively courted by Morgan Creek to return to the project, though that never happened. “I’m sure that Jim Robinson, right up to the moment he got on the plane with Renny Harlin to go to Rome and re-shoot the whole movie, was on his cell phone saying to me, ‘Now, I want to make sure you’re still involved,’” Carr says. “It was one of the most amazing bullshit jobs ever.”
Nowadays, back in upstate New York, where he teaches military history at Bard College and has no immediate plans to return to L.A., Carr has a marginally more generous take on Robinson’s intentions for Exorcist: The Beginning. “You know, the script that I read that they were going to use for the re-shoot — along the lines of a shitty imitation of The Mummy — it wasn’t the worst script I’ve read of that type,” he says. “It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t necessarily awful.”
Reading that script later, I too find it an entertaining, if altogether more conventional, affair. Credited to first-time screenwriter Alexi Hawley (with Carr and Wisher sharing “story by” credit), it has been predictably gussied up with buzzing flies, upside-down crucifixes, sinister tarot cards and, in what may be perceived as a nod to fans of The Passion of the Christ, blood-soaked messages scrawled in Aramaic. The possibly possessed village boy from Carr’s script has been eliminated in favor of an entirely different possibly possessed village boy. A mad professor has been added to the mix. But what’s more remarkable about Hawley’s script are all the ways in which it doesn’t differ from Carr’s. Africa and the archaeological dig are still there, as is the British army, the flashback to the Dutch village (though now positioned much later in the story) and Merrin’s ultimate standoff with the demon — even if, true to a prediction Schrader made at our first meeting, that confrontation is now more physical than theological. “If they were going to spend all that money to do a rock ’em, sock ’em Exorcist, I figured they would have gone toward a Texas Chainsaw–style movie,” Schrader (who has also read the Hawley script) tells me when I drop by his Manhattan office in July on a rain-soaked afternoon. “But they didn’t. They just tried making a more rapid version of what they had and, as such, probably a more commercial version. But whether it’s more commercial in the context of where they were when they made that decision is another matter. If no money had been spent at all, then I suspect that script is more commercial than the one I directed. But having already spent $35 million on my version, is it still more commercial?”
Time will tell. A print of Harlin’s film was not made available for preview in connection with this article, though, speaking by phone from the film’s sound-mixing stage, Harlin assured me that “Like the original, this is a very adult horror film. It very seriously examines the issue of faith and God’s presence in people’s lives as deciding factors in whether or not justice takes place in the world.”
Even on a bright summer’s day, the house at 3600 Prospect Street exudes a cool, quiet menace, as does the adjacent flight of stairs, with its dramatic plummet down to M Street below. And here, on this particular day, stands William Peter Blatty, the man who was once one of the top comedy writers in Hollywood, before a certain novel and film immortalized this house and these stairs and, indeed, Blatty himself. In 1949, less than a mile away, Blatty was an undergraduate at Georgetown University. It was there that he followed, in the pages of the Washington Post, the account of a boy from Silver Spring, Maryland, who had supposedly been freed from the devil’s grip following a series of exorcisms conducted over a period of several months. The story stuck with Blatty, though it would be more than 20 years before he fictionalized it as The Exorcist. That, of course, was the real “beginning” — if one that has been subjected, for more than three decades, to countless revisions.
Published in 1971, Blatty’s novel was a phenomenon from the start, spending 55 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Released two years later on the day after Christmas, William Friedkin’s film version, produced and scripted by Blatty, was itself no slouch. According to The New York Times, at Manhattan’s Cinema 1 theater, “People stood like sheep in the rain, cold and sleet for up to four hours to see the chilling film,” while inside there were reports of nausea, fainting spells and heart attacks — a scene that would be repeated for months to come in cities all around the country. Despite pans from some major critics (including Pauline Kael), the R-rated film went on to gross $193 million (not including the 2000 reissue) and received 10 Oscar nominations, winning for its sound and for Blatty’s script. Though Rosemary’s Baby had created a stir five years earlier, The Exorcist tapped deeper and more potently into the cultural nerve center than any horror story that had come before it or, quite possibly, has since. Not surprisingly, plans for a follow-up began almost immediately, even though both Blatty and Friedkin excused themselves from the negotiations.
“When they first came to me,” Blatty tells me as we duck out of the heat and into the neighborhood bar known as the Tombs, “I said, ‘What are you talking about? There’s no sequel here. That’s the end of the story.’ Then, they came back and said, ‘We have a story of our own, but we don’t have sequel rights.’ So I just named an utterly outlandish figure for those days. And they said, ‘Okay.’” The result would not arrive in theaters until 1977 — by which time several Exorcist knockoffs had already appeared, including the Italian Beyond the Door, an act of cinematic plagiarism so blatant that Warner Bros. sued its producers. But Warner had nobody to blame but itself for John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, a cosmic disaster on which no expense had been spared, save for the brainpower of the people responsible for making it. It too attempts to tell an origin story of sorts, about the young Father Merrin’s African adventures, but ends up being much more memorable for its gobs of New Agey telepathy, its disco-fabulous Ennio Morricone score and its recurrent image of James Earl Jones dressed as a giant locust.
However, the true precedent for Exorcist: The Beginning may be the strange case of Blatty’s own Legion, his 1983 mystery novel that tells a story unrelated to the events of The Exorcist but involving two of the first novel’s peripheral characters: the movie-obsessed detective William Kinderman and the priest Father Joseph Dyer. In 1990, Blatty was approached to adapt and direct a screen version of Legion, though by the time the movie hit theaters, it would be called The Exorcist III and would feature changes — mandated by its producer — that saw the story rewritten to be more of a direct sequel. Those changes included the return of Father Damien Karras (the young priest-psychiatrist who falls to his death at the end of The Exorcist) and the addition of an exorcism scene at the end. The producer in question? None other than James G. Robinson. “Jim Robinson, armed with a copy of my screenplay and his secretary, had requested a meeting with me,” Blatty explains. “He began by turning to his secretary and saying, ‘You tell him.’ She then held up a copy of the screenplay, which I’m supposed to start shooting the next morning, and said, ‘I read this, and I really think it’s wonderful. But what does it have to do with The Exorcist?’ So, I tried to explain to them that The Exorcist was not Rocky — we’re not going to go after a new, one-armed demon every episode. But Robinson wouldn’t give it up. He just let me go my way until the very end, let me do my cut. Then I showed up on the Fox lot one day, and my parking space was gone and the editing-room door was locked.” In fact, Blatty has no shortage of other Robinson stories — unlike Schrader, he ultimately decided to tough 30 things out with Morgan Creek for the duration of postproduction — many of which doubtless informed the more lunatic episodes of Blatty’s 1996 satirical novel Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing. As for The Exorcist III, it rolled into cinemas on August 17, 1990, in a cut Blatty acknowledges was far from what he had intended, just one week after the release of another much-beleaguered sequel, the Chinatown follow-up The Two Jakes. Both films were gone before anyone had much of a chance to notice they were there.
So, there are now four official Exorcist movies and countless imitators, among which only 1976’s The Omen — itself the progenitor of three unmemorable sequels — made any real impact on audiences or the box office. (Nor is there any end in sight: Robinson, who cites his concern for the longevity of the Exorcist brand as his primary motivation for making the Harlin version, promises that a TV series is next in the pipeline.) Yet, not one of these derivations, with the exception of the best parts of Carr’s script and Schrader’s movie, has managed to strike the same dark, primal chord as the original. As Carr sees it, “It’s an easy mystery to figure out. The Exorcist was such a story of the moment. It exposed things we were scared of that we didn’t even know we were scared of at the time. It showed that the traditional path — Catholicism, God and the devil, all of this stuff — could still raise its head and shatter your life. To me, that was really the genius of it, the eruption of the old world into this cool new world of the ’70s that everybody thought was basically untouchable.”
That’s also, Carr adds, the hardest thing about the original to duplicate. “What I kept trying to tell people was, ‘If you’re going to do it again, you have to do the same thing — you have to tap into what the horror is today, now that we’ve seen every possible kind of physical horror, not only in horror movies, but on the news.’ We haven’t yet found a way to cope with the fact that, at their base, a lot of people are not good people. And that’s a scary, scary thought — that even that little bit of evil that’s in every person can be drawn out and used . . .” And for a moment, it’s impossible to be sure whether Carr is talking about Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, James G. Robinson or, perchance, the devil himself.
Blatty, who hasn’t seen either version of The Beginning, is skeptical about the ability of any new Exorcist story to recapture the alchemy of the original. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he says. In his office on the Paramount Pictures lot, William Friedkin adds, “I don’t know if it’s possible to come close to what we did. But I can tell you that Blatty and I didn’t set out primarily to terrify people. We set out to make a film about the mystery of faith.” It’s on that count, as Friedkin sees it, that the many pretenders to the Exorcist throne have come up woefully short.
“What I think they’ve done,” he tells me, “is just taken the title and gone out and tried to scare the shit out of people, because that’s their perception of what the original movie was. But its impact was far deeper than the fact that people were scared. They really believed it for the most part, or they at least thought it was possible. And they were frightened by it in the same way as by some kind of authentic miracle or disaster of some kind. They realized overwhelmingly that there was evil in the world — that evil could manifest itself and take lives the way a plague or an earthquake might.” And while Friedkin’s exposure to The Beginning has, like Blatty’s, been limited to the movie’s trailer — which he resents for “drizzling” shots from his film over Harlin’s “like a salad dressing” — he has a few ideas about the purported reasons for Schrader’s dismissal. “It’s representative, in my opinion, of profound stupidity,” he says. “What would they say about Luther or A Man for All Seasons — that they’re too religious and profoundly internal, and don’t have enough action, and don’t have enough scares?”
Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning opens in theaters nationwide next Friday. Meanwhile, Schrader’s cut, which had seemed as though it might go the way of von Stroheim’s Greed and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons to become The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen . . . and Never Will, has been announced by Morgan Creek as a future DVD release. “There ought to be something we can get out of this first movie,” Robinson told me back in May. “So I thought, maybe if we spend the money to finish up the effects and get the sound right on the Schrader version, then on DVD we’ll have a two-pack. Perhaps we can also do an HBO or Showtime sale. But definitely not a theatrical release.” A more pragmatic Schrader is quick to point out that no actual deal has yet been put in writing. In the meantime, he’s focusing his energies on The Walker, a thematic sequel of sorts to American Gigolo that he’s been trying to get made for years. In the immediate future, he’s doing a pilot for the FX network. And he has recently landed his “second job for the rest of my life,” in the form of a book assignment from Faber & Faber that Schrader describes as the film-studies equivalent of The Western Canon. “Basically, it means re-reading and re-viewing the history of the cinema — the history of film aesthetics, the history of all the masters, all of it. It will be a defense of film as high art versus populist entertainment, as a sort of reaction against all this people’s-choice mentality about movies. I’ll be lucky to finish it before I die.” So the war between heaven and hell — or maybe just art and commerce — continues.
NOTE: After completing the interviews for this article, I received a message from William Peter Blatty saying that Schrader had sent him a copy of his version of Exorcist: The Beginning and that, in spite of his initial reservations, he found it to be “wonderfully acted and directed,” “elegant” and “a class act.” In fact, he liked it so much he watched it twice.
Quote from: James G. RobinsonBut let's not kid ourselves. This is the entertainment business.
Christ, is he
acting producer or what? And he imagines himself the real mind behind every film he makes? :evil: Some fucking people.
So wait, did the actors act TWICE in two different Exorcist movies? Dang. This is crazy, and could prove to be fascinating if they release both movies on DVD. Yeah if they sold Schrader's version to Showtime or did an international theatrical release, they could re-coup some of the money. But still man, after spending $40 million, the producer spent more on making a whole other movie just because the first one was too "cerebral?" That's strange.
A devil of a time
Three directors, six writers and two stars later, an 'Exorcist' prequel is ready to open. Source: Los Angeles Times
It was wintertime in Rome when the curse of "The Exorcist" befell Renny Harlin. In December 2003, the director was two weeks into filming "The Exorcist: the Beginning," a prequel to William Friedkin's landmark 1973 horror classic, when he was hit by a car as he stepped onto an Italian street. Harlin's leg was shattered and required the surgical insertion of 14 pins. Worse still, production on the film — which even in the disaster-ridden annals of Hollywood ranks as one of the most troubled ever — ground to a halt for two weeks while he convalesced. Returning to the set, he directed the remaining six shooting weeks on crutches — and with a newfound respect of the shadowy beyond.
"Not to sound ridiculous, but I think it must have been a warning from somewhere," Harlin said. "If you want to talk about a curse, ominous things happened throughout filming and post-production. There are dark powers in the world. And these are things you can't take lightly."
Despite his physical injuries, he may have gotten off easy.
Fourteen years after its inception, three directors, six screenwriters, two supporting casts and two leading men later, Harlin's "Exorcist" will receive widespread theatrical distribution this Friday. For the horror movie to reach theaters at all, reputations have been tarnished, egos bruised, a sizable personal fortune has been spent — twice — and enough mud has been slung that the movie's bad press threatens to overwhelm any discussion of the possible merits of "The Exorcist: the Beginning." (Warner Bros., the film's distributor, chose not to screen the movie for review.)
Its original director, John Frankenheimer, was hospitalized for spinal surgery during preproduction in 2002 and died of a stroke a few weeks later. After principal photography in Africa and Italy wrapped in February 2003, his replacement, Paul Schrader, had the film taken away from him by Morgan Creek, the production company that financed the movie. Then in October, the highly unusual decision was made to essentially scrap Schrader's film and bring in Harlin to film an almost entirely different version with a nearly completely new cast.
Morgan Creek's president, James Robinson, said that Schrader's version of the film cost more than $40 million and that Harlin's cost even more, not including prints and advertising. That means more than $100 million has been spent to bring "The Exorcist: the Beginning" to the screen. At some point, Schrader's version will also receive a limited release. "But not, obviously, at the same time we release Renny's," said Robinson, who had previously said Schrader's version likely would debut only on cable TV or video.
One constant in both films is Stellan Skarsgard, who played the lead, Father Lankester Merrin, for the two directors. "That guarantees me a place in a trivia game, doesn't it?" Skarsgard said.
In the beginning, before there were two versions of "The Exorcist: the Beginning," there was a single script. In 1990, after "The Exorcist III: The Legion" turned a modest profit, Robinson commissioned "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" writer William Wisher to create an "Exorcist" prequel. The resulting screenplay flashed back 30 years to tell the story of Father Merrin (the Max Von Sydow character who clashes with Satan in the original) as a young priest who confronts the devil — and his faith — in post-World War II Kenya.
But it languished in the studio's vault for 10 years until bestselling historical novelist Caleb Carr, who had been hired by Morgan Creek to work as a script doctor, stumbled upon the screenplay and drummed up new excitement for the project.
"For a year-and-a-half, I would go to them and say, 'Please let me work with this. I think you really have something here if you take a different approach with it,' " Carr said. "I pleaded with [studio executives] to let me rewrite it and sketched out this whole new concept for them."
Carr's treatment was to serve as a high-minded antidote to previous "Exorcist" sequels: John Boorman's 1977 "Exorcist II: The Heretic," which came to be ranked second by the Golden Turkey Worst Movie of All Time awards, and original "Exorcist" writer William Peter Blatty's disjointed "Exorcist III," which was savaged by critics. Carr's movie begins "Sophie's Choice"-style in Holland in 1944, when a young Father Merrin is forced by an SS officer to select some of his parishioners for execution. From there the plot jumps to East Africa three years later, where Merrin, no longer a priest and burdened with intense spiritual anguish, is an archaeologist. There, he uncovers an ancient religious site — a place of percolating evil.
On the strength of the script, Frankenheimer, the award-winning director of 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate," signed on and Liam Neeson won the role of Father Merrin.
"It was smooth sailing," Carr said. "It was a happy group of people. Everybody liked each other and got along." Shooting was scheduled to begin in the summer of 2002. But the 72-year-old director was in frail health, and following spinal surgery, he dropped out of the project. Neeson quickly followed suit. Nonetheless, Morgan Creek executives remained committed and hired Schrader, the provocative auteur who wrote the screenplays for "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" and who had had a run of box office luck directing modestly budgeted indies such as "Auto Focus" and "Affliction." Although he hadn't been entrusted to make a studio movie since his 1982 flop, "Cat People," the studio took a chance.
It was an awkward marriage of sensibilities — Morgan Creek, whose biggest hit had been "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," handing the reins of a high-brow horror movie written by a serious author to the former party animal who wrote "The Last Temptation of Christ."
"What was ultimately appealing to me about it — that it wasn't really a hard-core horror movie — proved to be my undoing," Schrader said. "I felt you couldn't get very far with the horror angle since the original was so well known and had been copied so many times. And the mantra at the time was: no pea soup, no spinning heads."
Acclaimed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who also ended up shooting Harlin's version) signed on, and Schrader hired Skarsgard, who is one of Lars von Triers' franchise players, to play Father Merrin. Carr, however, was made aware that his services would no longer be necessary.
"Paul and I had a three-hour phone conversation," Carr said. "And it became very clear that A) Paul doesn't think much of the script and thought he could improve it with his shooting of it, and B) he didn't want me around when that happened."
Schrader said he made a few cosmetic changes to Carr's script but that he tried to stay faithful to the source material.
"The Frankenheimer/Carr script was a bit too talky, too dialectic," Schrader said. "Long conversations between Merrin and the devil. I made an attempt in a small way to make it more taut, less intellectual and a little more frightening. But it was the same script I was given."
In late 2002, Schrader and company moved the production to Morocco (standing in for Kenya in the movie) for five weeks of shooting. Then came the first hints that Morgan Creek's Robinson was dissatisfied.
"Things were going well," Schrader said. "Then Jim came and saw dailies and said, 'It isn't scary enough.' " He tried to amp up the movie's scare factor while still adhering to the original script. But after shooting for five more weeks at Rome's Cinecitta Studios, communication between director and producer broke down — Robinson stopped speaking to Schrader.
Schrader hastily edited the film, a moody period piece Skarsgard calls "a $40-million art film" and then saw his editor fired by Morgan Creek. He oversaw a subsequent edit but had final cut taken away from him.
"I said, 'The problems you have with this film are not editing problems,' " Schrader said. " 'They are story problems. You can't reedit this film because the material was never shot. You have to go back to the writing stage if you want to change this.' So then they realized no amount of editing is going to make this cow a camel, and they wanted to bring in a new director."
After more than a month of legal wrangling, Schrader was given his walking papers. Despite appearances, Robinson insists the director was never outright dismissed.
"I never fired Schrader," he said. "How could I have 'exorcised him' like the press reports say, if I let the guy direct the whole movie and gave him three cuts?" (Schrader says he was given two.)
In October 2003, Robinson met with Harlin, the Finnish director of commercial thrillers such as "Deep Blue Sea" and "Die Hard 2: Die Harder," but also the bomb "Cutthroat Island," to discuss constructing another film using bits and pieces of the earlier movie.
"They were wondering: What can we do? Can we insert a few scenes and spice it up to make it more suspenseful?" Harlin remembered. "I said, 'The only way to have a scary film is to start from scratch.' " Soon he was given the go-ahead by Morgan Creek.
Harlin began working with screenwriter Skip Woods to retool Carr's prequel in an effort to answer some of the questions he felt lingered from the original "Exorcist." Woods had committed to another project, and Alexi Hawley was brought on to complete the script that would eventually be shot.
"There was a little bit of hesitation about what to do," Hawley said. "There was a lot of criticism out there that Morgan Creek just wanted more gore, which is not fair. There was a sense that it needed to be a scary movie — if I, as an audience member, pay to see this movie, I want to be scared." Father Merrin's backstory — defrocked priest brought in to do archaeological work on an ancient crypt in Kenya — was kept. But the rest of the film was restructured, characters were rewritten and then recast. English actor James D'Arcy replaced Gabriel Mann, who plays a piously heroic priest in Schrader's version. And a doctor character, played by French actress Clara Bellar in the original, was rewritten for former Bond girl Isabella Scorupco.
Skarsgard was a bit skeptical about having to revisit his character. But he agreed to return once Harlin was on board. From there, the production returned to Morocco and Cinecitta, where extensive sets had to be rebuilt. But this time around, conforming to Harlin's shooting style, special effects, green-screen and computer-generated imagery were incorporated into the film.
"Everybody said, 'Ciao bello!' when I returned to Rome," Skarsgard said. "The crew and the clothes were the same. That was a strange feeling." Although Robinson characterizes Harlin's film as a reworking of Carr's original script, Hawley and Harlin say their film is 95% different from Schrader's.
"In terms of material, in a two-hour movie, there are maybe 20 seconds of landscape shots that we didn't shoot," he said. "We used a couple of landscape shots of Africa."
Schrader attributes Morgan Creek's remake of his movie to an expensive case of buyer's remorse.
"They went out and bought one thing, then realized they had made a mistake," he said. "They bought a Lexus and said ... I shoulda bought a Hummer!' Then they went out and bought a Hummer. Now there's a Lexus and a Hummer parked side by side in the Morgan Creek garage."
Robinson, whose personal fortune bankrolls Morgan Creek, disputes the characterization. "I never said I didn't like that Paul Schrader film! He directed the script we all agreed to, but when it came in, it was too cerebral. Too tame. But I have a lot of money invested in. Why would I not try to put it out there?"
"One piece of idiocy is not made better by two pieces of idiocy," Carr observed.
Ultimately, Robinson knows exactly what it will take to make his big gamble worthwhile. "I get out with my money if we open at $40 million," Robinson said, hoping for a debut weekend that not even the modest hit "Alien vs. Predator" managed to reach. "If we hit that, nobody wins, nobody loses." In the final analysis, Robinson said, he feels he made the right decision.
"Granted, you probably never heard anybody going back to reshoot a movie," he said. "But I did it. I did it because I thought 'The Exorcist' needed to continue on as a highly commercial, scary franchise.
"Paul gave it his best shot. I gave it my best shot. Renny gave it his best shot. I'm not looking back saying, 'I wish I had done things this way and that.' That's how it is in life: we try, and hopefully the public will embrace one of these movies."
On Saturday, Schrader says he knows what he will be doing. "Me and Blatty are going to see the movie," he said, breaking into a chuckle. "Stellan says he wants us to take a picture in front of the theater!"
Now I'm all dissapointed. I don't really know what to think... but then again... it's probably not possible to make a prequel as good, or better, than the Excorist original.
this film needed
1) more CGI
2) more guns
3) more flashbacks
4) more blood
5) more cursed children
666) more exorcising
Quote from: Cinephile666) more exorcising
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come on and join the masquerade!
^ now that chin on Travolta's face is far from perfect
Hey, folks, let's all be good movie-goers and not pay to see The Exorcist: The Beginning.
Morgan Creek was hoping to make back their $40 million over last weekend; to date, they've made less than $20 million. Let's do our part to keep it that way, what say you? Don't vote with your dollars for the fucking travesty committed against a) The Exorcist legacy and b) Paul Schrader's movie, which might've actually been good.
I'll make a deal with you. Buy/see/support whatever format Schrader's original is eventually released on. Tell Morgan Creek they fucked up, that we wanted Schrader's, whatever that might've been. Hit 'em in their all-important bottom line.
I know I can trust all of you to do the right thing.
:evil:
Quote from: MeshI'll make a deal with you. Buy/see/support whatever format Schrader's original is eventually released on. Tell Morgan Creek they fucked up, that we wanted Schrader's, whatever that might've been. Hit 'em in their all-important bottom line.
I believe they're going to package it with the theatrical one.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
It's what I'd do if I were Satan.
so let's all buy the two pack and burn renny's version to nothingness
i'll just rent the schrader version on netflix. most likely it's a two disc package. give the second disc more rentals. i might actually be dragged to see the harlin version over the weekend... ugh...
From The Digital Bits:
Warner Bros. has revealed that it will release Exorcist: The Beginning on 3/1 (SRP $27.95). We can't be sure at this time (we're looking into it), but it unfortunately looks like this will only include the theatrically released version of the film directed by Renny Harlin, and not Paul Schrader's full unreleased version.
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Awful cover...they could've at least had Stellan Skarsgard on the cover.
that is stellan skarsgård.
AHHHHH SPOILERS!!!!!! :idea: :idea:
Sure doesn't look like him :?
sigh, that's the joke.
from The Movie Blog (http://www.themovieblog.com/archives/2005/02/paul_schraders_exorcist_the_beginning_to_get_premiere.html)
Paul Schrader's Exorcist: The Beginning to get Premiere
We'd heard talk that the Paul Schrader version of Exorcist: The Beginning was going to be included in the DVD release, yet the first release didn't mention it at all. However, the good news is that Scraders version of the movie is going to get a premiere at the International Festival of Fantastic Film in Brussels in March. According to the BBC:
The film, directed by Paul Schrader, will be screened on 18 March at the International Festival of Fantastic Film in Brussels.
They also provide a concise summary of the events:
Principal footage was shot in Morocco and Rome at a reported cost of $32m. However, in August 2003 it emerged that producers Morgan Creek were shelving Schrader's version of the film, having complained it was not scary enough.
As well as replacing Schrader with Harlin - the director behind Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger - the producers also changed most of the cast, but Swedish star Skarsgard stayed in the Merrin role.
Harlin's film, released in the UK in October 2004, received lukewarm reviews but went on to make over $76m (£40.7m) worldwide.
The festival screening will be the first time that Schrader's film has been seen in public. Reports that it will be released either in cinemas or on DVD have yet to be confirmed.
We can but hope that rumours come true and that it premieres to a good reception, providing the Studio with a reason for a more general release, or at least adding it to a special DVD release.
We're all avoiding the most important question here: was Vittorio Storaro the DP for both versions?
Quote from: lamasWe're all avoiding the most important question here: was Vittorio Storaro the DP for both versions?
I believe so.
I have no immediate proof to back that up.
But I believe so.
SCHRADER VERSION TRAILER AND PICS:
http://exmk.mkforces.net/exorcistthebeginning/schraders/
edit: sorry looks like the trailer isnt up right now. hopefully it'll pop up somewhere else soon. you can still see more pics though.
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those pics look scary as fuck.
Quote from: Stefenthose pics look scary as fuck.
yeah word to that shit, but i can't get to the trailer (why is it a zip file?) i can usually get them but i think this is a wack hosting place.
thank you very much for the caps. i'm going to go and choke the bishop. i'll back in five minutes.
Quote from: mogwaithank you very much for the caps. i'm going to go and choke the bishop. i'll back in five minutes.
you break me quick
Blocked EXORCIST May Be Resurrected
While audiences are already familiar with Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning, Paul Schrader's original version may now make it to the big screen. Source: FilmStew.com
In 2004, Warner Bros. and Morgan Creek Productions released the Renny Harlin-directed Exorcist: The Beginning. The film finished its domestic box office run with only about $40 million stateside and about $40 million overseas as well. While it did break even, the film was neither a critical or box office success.
What many fans might not have known, however, is that Paul Schrader, the writer of films such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, had filmed his own version of The Beginning, which he completed in 2003 with a $35 million budget. That film, which had been scrutinized by Morgan Creek head James Robinson, has been buried in the Warners vault. But now, according to a report by Fox News entertainment reporter Roger Friedman, the film may get the big screen treatment.
Friedman reports that Schrader was originally hired to make the film in 2002, and Stellan Skarsgard was set to star. When completed, the film was too psychological for Robinson and did not feature the gore associated with the original Exorcist. The studio then turned to Renny Harlin to re-shoot the film, and he did so with Skarsgard reprising his role. That's the film that made it into theaters.
Then last week, according the Friedman, Schrader, with his own money, took the film to the Brussels Fantasy Film Festival, where it received rave reviews. The trick worked, however, because Warner Bros. and Morgan Creek will now reportedly be releasing the Schrader version of the film sometime in the next two months. An exact date has not yet been announced.
So the question is... how do they market this so it's succesful enough to let the stuidos understand that it's okay for a movie to be good? that they don't have to remake it into a piece of shit?
Do they try to tell the whole story about the film in one trailer? or do they just pretend that the last one never happened and hope people don't think it's the same piece of shit they already wasted eight bucks on?
yes, this is going to be a very interesting mess for the marketing dept. to figure out. i'm guessing it will only come out in a limited arthousey release. if they open it wide, consider me very surprised. but it'll be hard for it to suck more than the harlin version which i actually watched 2 nights ago. i was actually surprised at how restrained the first hour or so of the movie was. so restrained it was a bit of a bore, but then when all the signature exorcist stuff started happening it just got bad. it was actually the first sequel i've seen but one of these days i'll get around to seeing the other two suck-fests.
Exorcist 2 is a spectacular train-wreck. It's so bad it's incredibly watchable. Richard Burton is completely shitfaced throughout the whole thing, and James Earl Jones is the Locust King! Also, you might feel dirty leering at teenaged Linda Blair.
Quote from: Weak2ndActAlso, you might feel dirty leering at teenaged Linda Blair.
And sometimes it's all the same in the end... :yabbse-wink:
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PHOTOSHOPPED!
Quote from: RegularKarateSo the question is... how do they market this so it's succesful enough to let the stuidos understand that it's okay for a movie to be good? that they don't have to remake it into a piece of shit?
it'll hav to be a trailer with a bit of backstory. backstory to the backstory :yabbse-undecided:
"the version we thought u wouldn't like!"
Schrader puts 'Exorcist' tale in perspective
BRUSSELS -- Director Paul Schrader insists that, if nothing else, his Hollywood odyssey has been unique in film history. Speaking at the premiere of his ill-fated "Exorcist" prequel at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film, Schrader noted that "film schools will now have the easiest example of a compare-and-contrast question."
Said Schrader: "In that sense, this is an asterisk in the history of cinema."
Schrader had been brought in to shoot "Exorcist: The Beginning" after the original director, the late John Frankenheimer, fell ill. But producer Morgan Creek felt Schrader's version was too tame. They shelved it on delivery and hired Renny Harlin to reshoot the entire movie, which came out last year.
After almost two years in Hollywood purgatory, Schrader allowed himself a moment of vindication at the Brussels Festival which ended Saturday. "If you've made a film that had been shot, and you've been fired, you've been tarred with a brush and it's almost impossible to get that tar off of you," he said. "You can explain until you're blue in the face about how you actually made a good film, and no one will ever believe you, because no one throws away a $35 million good film. It had to be a stinker."
Schrader said it was a close call that his work -- now tentatively named "Paul Schrader's The Exorcist: The Prequel" -- wasn't entirely junked. "The fact that this film exists owes itself to two phenomena that were not present 10 years ago," he said. "The first is DVD. We were able to say to the financier, 'Don't throw away that film: There is money to be made down the road in DVD.' The other thing is the Internet, whereby through use of fan-based Web sites you can keep talk about the film alive so that the subject never quite dies. Were it not for the Internet, it would have been forgotten."
It was partly because of the horror fan base that Schrader chose Brussels for the screening. "I approached the festival because it was low-key enough that I might get away with Morgan Creek letting me do it. Also, in a more high-profile festival, I would just be in a sidebar somewhere, and here I'm the centerpiece," he said.
"This is a specialty festival," said Schrader -- screenwriter of "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull," and director of "Auto Focus." "The two times Merrin kissed the girl, they were like, 'No, don't kiss her! She's gonna turn into the Devil!' These people are so far ahead of you in the genre: You have an audience that cheers when a woman gets a screwdriver stuck in her eye."
Despite the relief at finally being granted a premiere, Schrader also admits to a certain discomfiture about seeing it. "There are some painful moments watching one's own movie," he said. "Although I can see the good bits, I also see the mistakes. And so there are two thoughts that go through my mind when seeing my work on the screen, neither of them positive. The first is, 'That was really good: Whatever happened to my talent?' The second is, 'That was no good: I never had any talent.'"
Quote from: MacGuffin"You have an audience that cheers when a woman gets a screwdriver stuck in her eye."
hmm.... that actually sounds LESS restrained than the harlin version.
Quotenow tentatively named "Paul Schrader's The Exorcist: The Prequel"
Worst title ever
Schrader's Exorcist Set
Retooled horror prequel set for release.
Warner Bros. has set the retooled Paul Schrader version of Exorcist: The Beginning for a May 20th big-screen release. Yes, that's just one day after Star Wars: Episode III debuts in theaters – not exactly a vote of confidence.
For those unfamiliar with the Exorcist prequel saga, or those of you thinking, "Didn't that get released last year?"... Paul Schrader was hired to helm the film after original helmer John Frankenheimer dropped out due to illness. Schrader aimed to make a prequel worthy of the original Exorcist, preferring psychological suspense and spiritual themes to blood-and-guts horror. But soon after production ended, backers Morgan Creek and Warner Bros. were unpleasantly surprised by the filmmaker's creative choices – someone, apparently, didn't get the memo.
Schrader was given the axe and Renny Harlin was hired to reshoot the entire film. The studio spent an additional $35 million on the picture and released it last year to lackluster reviews and a stunted box office take. Ultimately, Schrader was called on again by editor Tim Silano who was preparing a bonus cut of the movie for the impending DVD release. The director was given the opportunity to finish his film and debuted it to positive critical response at the Brussels Fantasy Film Festival earlier this year.
"Schrader's intelligent, quietly subversive pic emphasizes spiritual agony over horror ecstasy, while paying occasional lip service to the need for scares," wrote Variety. "Schrader has delivered a 100 percent Paul Schrader film, drenched in the spiritual and moral angst that's watermarked his career."
Now, while most moviegoers are flocking to see the final installment of George Lucas' Star Wars prequels, horror fans will have a chance to check out Schrader's version on the big screen. Given the unfortunate release calendar placement, they're guaranteed a good seat in the theater.
I really feel like everyone should go see his version a bunch of times. Send a message to the studios that we want smart films instead of what they think we want. I really feel like despite generally favorable reviews that his version will receive it will ultimately rake in a small sum and be forgotten by the general public.
Such is life.
From Ebert's answer-man column:
Q. I noticed that you did not review the prequel, "The Exorcist: The Beginning" that came out last year. Do you have something against the movies that continue the story of the original "Exorcist"?
Dan Harris, Brookings, S.D.
A. It was not previewed for critics, and I never caught up with it. I have, however, just seen Paul Schrader's original "The Exorcist: The Prequel," which was shelved by the studio, reportedly because it was "too serious." Renny Harlin was hired to make a version that replaced three of the four leads, spent $50 million on top of Schrader's $30 million, and the movie scored only 11 percent on the Tomatometer.
The Schrader version is a very good film, strong and true. It is intelligent about spiritual matters, sensitive to the complexities of its characters, and does something risky and daring in this time of jaded horror movies: It takes evil seriously. It will have a limited theatrical run next month before a DVD release.
'Exorcist's' twin spawn
The behind-the-scenes story of Morgan Creek's two prequels is enough to make your head spin.
Source: Los Angeles Times
Under normal circumstances, the marketing strategy would hardly raise an eyebrow: a trailer for one horror film turning up on the DVD of another.
But the recent Australian DVD release of director Renny Harlin's "The Exorcist: The Beginning," a prequel to William Friedkin's epochal horror classic, "The Exorcist," contained a puzzling bonus feature. It housed a movie trailer for an alternate version of "The Exorcist: The Beginning" — the one directed by art-house auteur Paul Schrader that had been shot earlier and shelved in favor of Harlin's prequel.
"I don't know how or why it showed up there," Schrader said. "It was the same trailer they used for Renny's version but with different shots — with shots from my film instead of Renny's."
On May 20, little more than nine months after Harlin's "Exorcist" prequel completed its underwhelming $41-million theatrical run, Schrader's film, newly retitled "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist," will roll out in limited release on 110 screens.
Morgan Creek, the company that produced both films, acknowledged the strangeness of the situation — and that the company might have made an expensive mistake. "Right now, we're saying, 'We could have been wrong,' " said Brian Robinson, senior vice president of worldwide marketing. "That takes a big company to admit."
Both versions of the film feature Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard as Father Frank Lankester Merrin (a younger incarnation of Max von Sydow's character in "The Exorcist") battling Satan in colonial Kenya. And both were shot in Rome's Cinecittà Studios by renowned cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
Taken together, the competing versions represent one of the most torturous production tales in Hollywood history. In 2002, a version based on a script by bestselling historical novelist Caleb Carr was given the go-ahead by Morgan Creek. During pre-production, the project's first director, John Frankenheimer, suffered a stroke and died. Schrader, who is best known as the screenwriter of edgy morality thrillers including "Taxi Driver," stepped in.
Principal photography took place in Morocco and Italy, wrapping in early 2003. But Schrader's $40-million production was essentially scrapped by Morgan Creek CEO James Robinson, who concluded during the editing phase that the film was too cerebral. Schrader was dismissed and Dutch action movie ace Harlin, director of "Die Hard 2: Die Harder," was brought on to amp up the fright factor. He, in turn, persuaded Robinson to start over from scratch. Although elements of Schrader's version remain, "The Exorcist: The Beginning" was rewritten, recast (with Skarsgard persuaded to return) and re-shot — at an additional cost of nearly $60 million.
While Schrader's film has languished at Morgan Creek since late 2003, fan interest in the project never waned, largely due to the director's tireless campaigning on horror fan websites. "Through these, I was able to keep the myth of the movie alive," he said.
The Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film proved to be a turning point. Screening there in March, Schrader's version received some flattering reviews, convincing Morgan Creek that the film's time had come. "The critical acclaim warranted a theatrical release," Brian Robinson said.
"Dominion" will be distributed by Warner Bros. and hits theaters the same weekend as the hotly anticipated "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" — a risky but strategic counter-programming plan.
The strategy also poses an unusual marketing dilemma for Morgan Creek. In marketing two versions of the same movie, is it better to emphasize the films' shared lineage? Or their differences?
"Therein lies the problem," said Brian Robinson. "How do you make them so they're related but show their differences in a 30-second TV spot?"
Morgan Creek's marketing campaign for the movie is still being finalized, but tentative plans exist to use a blurb from Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert that pays tribute to the Schrader version while also distinguishing it from the Harlin version of the film.
Brian Robinson said Morgan Creek is not afraid of looking silly for its earlier business choices.
"If ['Dominion'] takes off and everybody goes crazy and it's the 'Exorcist' everybody wanted to see — because a lot of people didn't like the Renny Harlin version — then we'll have to say, 'We had it all along and didn't need to shoot the Renny Harlin version.' "
Anticipating his remarks at the press screenings of "Dominion" planned in Los Angeles tonight, Schrader made light of the whole imbroglio. "I know what I will say before the movie starts," he said, chuckling. " 'Welcome to Paul Schrader's class in comparative film at the Morgan Creek School of the Arts.' "
Schrader exorcises Hollywood demon with 'Dominion'
When Paul Schrader's prequel to "The Exorcist" debuts next week, the veteran screenwriter and director finally will see a Hollywood demon lifted from his soul.
Schrader finished the movie in 2003 only to see it taken away by the producer, reshot by an action director to add gore and distributed as "Exorcist: The Beginning" last year.
So when his "Dominion: A Prequel to the Exorcist" opens in theaters on May 20, movie fans will have two versions of the same film, both prequels to the 1973 classic "Exorcist" about a girl possessed by the devil.
"My feeling now -- more than vindication, more than revenge -- is relief. I don't have to spend the rest of my life explaining what my film was like," Schrader told Reuters.
"Dominion" focuses on a spiritual crisis by the Father Merrin character of the first film and lacks the projectile vomiting and head twisting of the original.
Schrader said the decision to eschew gore led the film's backer, Morgan Creek Productions, to conclude "Dominion" needed spicing up to draw its target audience of mostly young men.
Morgan Creek hired director Renny Harlin to add human-eating hyenas, leeches, maggots and lots of blood-letting.
A Morgan Creek spokesman was unavailable to comment.
Critics panned "Exorcist: The Beginning," and it went on to earn an unremarkable $77 million worldwide despite opening No. 1 at box offices last August. It cost around $105 million to make and market, according to tracker boxofficemojo.com.
GREED HAS WON
Schrader said he found "The Beginning" so bad that he left the theater smiling because he thought "Dominion" might have a chance at being released.
"From the time I left that screening, I began a long campaign to come to this day," Schrader said.
He has spent his own money on promotion and publicity, called in favors to finish music scoring and editing, and even received some money to finish "Dominion" from Morgan Creek.
Schrader said the production company decided the movie might be able to recapture some of its original investment, principally due to DVD sales.
"Thankfully, greed has won," Schrader said with a laugh.
Schrader, 58, knows a lot about the business of show business. His 1976 screenplay for "Taxi Driver" vaulted director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert DeNiro to stardom.
He penned the scripts for Scorsese's "Raging Bull," and wrote and directed the 1980 hit "American Gigolo."
But his 1982 erotic thriller "Cat People" flopped, and since then his work has stayed mostly confined to art-house theaters where "Dominion" will likely find its chief audience, too.
Schrader is not known for making films that hit big at box offices. "Affliction," a 1998 film about an abusive father-son relationship, earned James Coburn an Oscar for supporting actor but sold only $6.3 million worth of tickets.
Schrader said he worries less about the money than about letting audiences see films such as "Dominion."
"Its commercial legs were cut out from underneath it by the other film," he said. "I benefit artistically, but I lose commercially, which, I guess, is sort of the damnation of my career, anyway," he said.
Did anyone else see this?
The best I can say about it is that yes, it has some good ideas, and yes, it takes evil seriously. But it's also pretty awful in its own right. A good story, marred by bad writing and equally bad direction. I feel bad saying that about Schrader, but it just doesn't work.
What's more, the print that's been released looks like it's been blown up from a DigiBeta tape (which is probably the case). And the CGI -- Jesus Christ, this movie has the worst special effects since Mortal Kombat 2. This should have been released to eBay, where it would have a lively life as a prized bootleg.
My full review is here. (http://www.road-dog-productions.com/reviews/archives/2005/05/dominion_a_preq.html#more)
The bad directing is almost expected, but the bad writing...that's too bad. Perhaps Schrader should stick to humanistic horror.
At least my expectations are low.
Um, yeah...thanks to all those that post nudity. :elitist:
When will I learn you guys can't be trusted when I'm at work? :cry:
Quote from: sundown all overI really feel like everyone should go see his version a bunch of times. Send a message to the studios that we want smart films instead of what they think we want. I really feel like despite generally favorable reviews that his version will receive it will ultimately rake in a small sum and be forgotten by the general public.
Such is life.
I dunno. It seems to me that Renny Harlin and Paul Schrader both made really bad movies. I think it's a bit glib to automatically classify a Paul Schrader film as being "smart." Paul Schrader is a smart person, but as a director his work is really obvious, which is to say that one can see right through it. There are so many things wrong with the ideas behind "The Exorcist" prequel, before any director gets involved, that it might have been doomed from the beginning (the open Africa setting, the lack of shock value vs. 1970s). Perhaps they should have just done another sequel. Neverthless, Schrader and Harlin are terrible choices to direct an "Exorcist" movie, sequel or prequel.
'Exorcist' author sues over sequel
Source: Hollywood Reporter
"The Exorcist" author William Blatty has sued Morgan Creek Productions for allegedly failing to pay him an agreed-upon fee for a recent sequel to the franchise. Blatty, in a suit filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeks $750,000, the amount he was reportedly guaranteed if the studio made a second sequel to the original 1973 release. According to Blatty's attorneys, payment for sequels was covered in an October 1996 settlement agreement, which called for a $930,000 payment for a first sequel and a $750,000 payment for each subsequent release. Blatty contends that he was paid for the first sequel, 2004's "Exorcist: The Beginning," but not the second, the recently released "Dominion: A Prequel to the Exorcist." Morgan Creek could not be reached for comment.
ownz0r
I'm starting to have no respect for Warner Bros. or Morgan Creek.
Title: Dominion
Released: 25th October 2005
SRP: $24.98
Further Details
Warner has announced the long awaited Paul Schrader directed film Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist which stars the likes of Clara Bellar, Gabriel Mann and Stellan Skarsgard. The film traces the story of Father Lankester Merrin back to his first encounter with the Devil in post-WW II Africa. The disc will be available to own from the 25th October, and priced at around $24.98. The film itself will be presented in anamorphic widescreen, along with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 track. Extra material will include deleted scenes, and a stills gallery. We've attached our first look at the official region one package artwork at the link below: http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?r=0&s=1&c=7425&n=1&burl=
i thought this was great. having read read reviews o9f people here and on tomatoes i was nervous. but come on, ho wcan the guy behind taxi driver, affliction, raging bull, etc. make somethign as bad as those critics [and the good people here] said it was. part o fme liking it does have to do w/ th wefactr that it was shevled and my anticipation only increased [you want what you cant have] but i fopund it scary, meditiative, and very beautifully shot and scored...but w/ angelo thats expected. :yabbse-grin: ....its does have its freaky moments. i think mod would give it 6 skulls and a half of a pelvis.
stellen owns ..thsoe swedes are swuave actors....
ya'll need to see this..trust me.