Boorman and the Devil

First-time documentary feature director David Kittredge has done a great service by puting so much love and effort into what could have just been a glorified Blu-ray extra. This is a loving exploration of how one of the most notoriously hated sequels, Exorcist II: The Heretic, was made. Kittredge managed to convince many of the major players, including the nonagenarian director, John Boorman, and octogenarian star, Louise Fletcher, (both of whom would not live to see the film's release), as well as Stedicam inventor and camera man Garrett Brown, and Regan MacNeil herself, Linda Blair. To get to spend time with all these folks as they talk at length about what went wrong with this picture, as so many decades, is a pleasure. Kittredge was clearly able to convey to all involved that he was not setting out to make the kind of documentary that would mock their work nor try to elevate their film to the status of a misunderstood masterpiece that was just ahead of it's time. Kittredge doesn't fully succeed making a film that transends the simple curiosity of a behind-the-scenes Hollywood retrospective, but he sure tries.

I can't say I can get behind Kittredge's attempt at an overriding thesis, that standard insistence that the 1970s were a better time for cinema because great directors were give free reign to take big swings. For one thing, Exorcist II was just as much of a big commercial studio picture as any other major Warner Bros release of 1977. But more to the point, it's simply not true that the '70s was the only decade where filmmakers had carte blanche to make their films their way. I've had to sit through countless studio-funded "big swings" by contemporary auteurs for my entirely life. In fact, the movie I saw prior to this one was Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, which is every bit as awful as Exorcist II, but with probably a far less interesting creation story.