On this week's episode, we remember William Friedkin, who passed away this past Tuesday, looking back at one of his lesser known directing efforts, Rampage.

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From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

Originally, this week was supposed to be the fourth episode of our continuing miniseries on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films. I was fully committed to making it so, but then the world learned that Academy Award-winning filmmaker William Friedkin passed away on Tuesday. I had already done an episode on his best movie from the decade, 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A., so I decided I would cover another film Friedkin made in the 80s that isn’t as talked about or as well known as The French Connection or The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A.

Rampage.

Now, some of you who do know the film might try and point that the film was released in 1992, by Miramax Films of all companies, and you’d be correct. However, I did say I was going to cover another film of his MADE in the 80s, which is also true when it comes to Rampage.

So let’s get to the story, shall we?

Born in Chicago in 1935, William Friedkin was inspired to become a filmmaker after seeing Citizen Kane as a young man, and by 1962, he was already directing television movies. He’d make his feature directing debut with Good Times in 1967, a fluffy Sonny and Cher comedy which finds Sonny Bono having only ten days to rewrite the screenplay for their first movie, because the script to the movie they agreed to was an absolute stinker. Which, ironically, is a fairly good assessment of the final film. The film, which was essentially a bigger budget version of their weekly variety television series shot mostly on location at an African-themed amusement park in Northern California and the couple’s home in Encino, was not well received by either critics or audiences.

But by the time Good Times came out, Friedkin was already working on his next movie, The Night They Raided Minsky’s. A comedy co-written by future television legend Norman Lear, Minsky’s featured Swedish actress Britt Ekland, better known at the time as the wife of Peter Sellers, as a naive young Amish woman who leaves the farm in Pennsylvania looking to become an actress in religious stage plays in New York City. Instead, she becomes a dancer in a burlesque show and essentially ends up inventing the strip tease. The all-star cast included Dr. No himself, Joseph Wiseman, Elliott Gould, Jack Burns, Bert Lahr, and Jason Robards, Jr., who was a late replacement for Alan Alda, who himself was a replacement for Tony Curtis.

Friedkin was dreaming big for this movie, and was able to convince New York City mayor John V. Lindsay to delay the demolition of an entire period authentic block of 26th Street between First and Second Avenue for two months for the production to use as a major shooting location. There would be one non-production related tragedy during the filming of the movie. The seventy-two year old Lahr, best known as The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, would pass away in early December 1967, two weeks before production was completed, and with several scenes still left to shoot with him. Lear, who was also a producer on the film, would tell a reporter for the New York Times that they would still be able to shoot the rest of the film so that performance would remain virtually intact, and with the help of some pre-production test footage and a body double, along with a sound-alike to dub the lines they couldn’t get on set, Lahr’s performance would be one of the highlights of the final film.

Friedkin and editor Ralph Rosenblum would spend three months working on their first cut, as Friedkin was due to England in late March to begin production on his next film, The Birthday Party. Shortly after Friedkin was on the plane to fly overseas, Rosenblum would represent the film for a screening with the executives at United Artists, who would be distributing the film. The screening was a disaster, and Rosenblum would be given carte blanche by the studio heads to save the film by any means necessary, since Friedkin was not available to supervise. Rosenblum would completely restructure the film, including creating a prologue for the story that would be retimed and printed on black and white film stock. The next screening would go over much better with the suits, and a mid-December 1968 release date was set up.

The Birthday Party was an adaptation of a Harold Pinter play, and featured Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee. Friedkin had seen the play in San Francisco in 1962, and was able to get the film produced in part because he would only need six actors and a handful of locations to shoot, keeping the budget low. Although the mystery/thriller was a uniquely British story, Harold Pinter liked how Friedkin wanted to tell the story, and although Pinter had written a number of plays that had been adapted into movies and had adapted a number of books into screenplay, this would be the first time Pinter would adapt one of his own stories to the silver screen. To keep the budget lower still, Friedkin, Pinter and lead actor Robert Shaw agreed to take the minimum possible payments for their positions in exchange for part ownership in the film.

The release of Minsky’s was so delayed because of the prolonged editing process that The Birthday Party would actually in theatres nine days before Minsky’s, which would put Friedkin in the rare position of having two movies released in such a short time frame. And while Minsky’s performed better at the box office than Birthday Party, the latter film would set the director up financially with enough in the bank where he could concentrate working on projects he felt passionate about.

That first film after The Birthday Party would make William Friedkin a name director. His second one would make him an Oscar winner. The third, a legend. And the fourth would break him.

The first film, The Boys in the Band, was an adaptation of a controversial off-Broadway play about a straight man who accidentally shows up to a party for gay men. Matt Crowley, the author of the play, would adapt it to the screen, produce the film himself with author Dominick Dunne, and select Friedkin, who Crowley felt best understood the material, to direct. Crowley would only make one demand on his director, that all of the actors from the original off-Broadway production be cast in the movie in the same roles. Friedkin had no problem with that.

When the film was released in March 1970, Friedkin would get almost universally excellent notices from film critics, except for Pauline Kael in the New York Times, who had already built up a dislike of the director after just three films. But March 1970 was a different time, and a film not only about gay men but a relatively positive movie about gay men who had the same confusions and conflicts as straight men, was probably never going to be well-received by a nation that still couldn’t talk openly about non-hetero relationships. But the film would still do about $7m worth of ticket sales, not enough to become profitable for its distributor, but enough for the director to be in the conversation for bigger movies.

His next film was an adaptation of a 1969 book about two narcotics detectives in the New York City Police Department who went after a wealthy French businessman who was helping bring heroin into the States. William Friedkin and his cinematographer Owen Roizman would shoot The French Connection as if it were a documentary, giving the film a gritty realism rarely seen in movies even in the New Hollywood era. The film would be named the Best Picture of 1971 by the Academy, and Friedkin and lead actor Gene Hackman would also win Oscars in their respective categories. And the impact of The French Connection on cinema as a whole can never be understated. Akira Kurosawa would cite the film as one of his favorites, as would David Fincher and Brad Pitt, who bonded over the making of Seven because of Fincher’s conscious choice to use the film as a template for the making of his own film. Steven Spielberg said during the promotion of his 2005 film Munich that he studied The French Connection to prepare for his film.

And, of course, after The French Connection came The Exorcist, which would, at the time of its release in December 1973, become Warner Brothers’ highest grossing film ever, legitimize the horror genre to audiences worldwide, and score Friedkin his second straight Oscar nomination for Best Director, although this time he and the film would lose to George Roy Hill and The Sting.

In 1977, Sorcerer, Friedkin’s American remake of the 1953 French movie The Wages of Fear, was expected to be the big hit film of the summer. The film originally started as a little $2.5m budgeted film Friedkin would make while waiting for script revisions on his next major movie, called The Devil’s Triangle, were being completed. By the time he finished filming Sorcerer, which reteamed Friedkin with his French Connection star Roy Scheider, now hot thanks to his starring role in Jaws, this little film became one of the most expensive movies of the decade, with a final budget over $22m. And it would have the unfortunate timing of being released one week after a movie released by Twentieth Century-Fox, Star Wars, sucked all the air out of the theatrical exhibition season. It would take decades for audiences to discover Sorcerer, and for Friedkin, who had gone some kind of mad during the making of the film, to accept it to be the taut and exciting thriller it was.

William Friedkin was a broken man, and his next film, The Brinks Job, showed it. A comedy about the infamous 1950 Brinks heist in Boston, the film was originally supposed to be directed by John Frankenheimer, with Friedkin coming in to replace the iconic filmmaker only a few months before production was set to begin. Despite a cast that included Peter Boyle, Peter Falk, Allen Garfield, Warren Oates, Gena Rowlands and Paul Sorvino, the film just didn’t work as well as it should have.

Friedkin’s first movie of the 1980s, Cruising, might have been better received in a later era, but an Al Pacino cop drama about his trying to find a killer of homosexual men in the New York City gay fetish underground dance club scene was, like The Boys in the Band a decade earlier, too early to cinemas. Like Sorcerer, audiences would finally find Cruising in a more forgiving era.

In 1983, Friedkin made what is easily his worst movie, Deal of the Century, an alleged comedy featuring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines and Sigourney Weaver that attempted to satirize the military industrial complex in the age of Ronald Reagan, but somehow completely missed its very large and hard to miss target.

1985 would see a comeback for William Friedkin, with the release of To Live and Die in LA, in which two Secret Service agents played by William L. Petersen and John Pankow try to uncover a counterfeit money operation led by Willem Dafoe. Friedkin was drawn to the source material, a book by former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, because the agency was almost never portrayed on film, and even less as the good guys. Friedkin would adapt the book into a screenplay with Petievich, who would also serve as a technical consultant to ensure authenticity in how Petersen and Pankow acted. It would be only the second time Friedkin was credited as a screenwriter, but it would be a nine-minute chase sequence through the aqueducts of Los Angeles and a little used freeway in Wilmington that would be the most exciting chase sequence committed to film since the original Gone in 60 Seconds, The French Connection, or the San Francisco chase sequence in the 1967 Steve McQueen movie Bullitt. The sequence is impressive on Blu-ray, but on a big screen in a movie theatre in 1985, it was absolutely thrilling.

Which, at long last, brings us to Rampage.

Less than two months after To Live and Die in LA opened to critical raves and moderate box office in November 1985, Friedkin made a deal with Italian mega-producer Dino DeLaurentiis to direct Rampage, a crime drama based on a novel by William P. Wood. DeLaurentiis had hired Friedkin for The Brinks Job several years earlier, and the two liked working for each other. DeLaurentiis had just started his own distribution company, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, which we’ll shorten to DEG for the remainder of this episode, and needed some big movies to fill his pipeline. We did an episode on DEG back in 2020, and if you haven’t listened to it yet, you should after you finish this episode.

At this time, DEG was still months away from releasing its first group of films, which would include Maximum Overdrive, the first film directed by horror author Stephen King, and Blue Velvet, the latest from David Lynch, both of which would shoot at the same time at DEG’s newly built studio facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina. But Friedkin was writing the screenplay adaptation himself, and would need several months to get the script into production shape, so the film would not be able to begin production until late 1986.

The novel Rampage was based on the real life story of serial killer Richard Chase, dubbed The Vampire Killer by the press when he went on a four day killing spree in January 1978. Chase murdered six people, including a pregnant woman and a 22 month old child, and drank their blood as part of some kind of ritual. Wood would change some aspects of Chase’s story for his book, naming his killer Charles Reece, changing some of the ages and sexes of the murder victims, and how the murderer died. But most of the book was about Reece’s trial, with a specific focus on Reece’s prosecutor, Anthony Fraser, who had once been against capital punishment, but would be seeking the death penalty in this case after meeting one of the victims’ grieving family members.

William L. Petersen, Friedkin’s lead star in To Live and Die in LA, was initially announced to star as Fraser, but as the production got closer to its start date, Petersen had to drop out of the project, due to a conflict with another project that would be shooting at the same time. Michael Biehn, the star of James Cameron’s The Terminator and the then recently released Aliens, would sign on as the prosecutor. Alex McArthur, best known at the time as Madonna’s baby daddy in her Papa Don’t Preach music video, would score his first major starring role as the serial killer Reece. The cast would also include a number of recognizable character actors, recognizable if not by name but by face once they appeared on screen, including Nicholas Campbell, Deborah Van Valkenberg, Art LaFleur, Billy Greenbush and Grace Zabriskie.

Friedkin would shoot the $7.5m completely on location in Stockton, CA from late October 1986 to just before Christmas, and Friedkin would begin post-production on the film after the first of the new year.

In early May 1987, DEG announced a number of upcoming releases for their films, including a September 11th release for Rampage. But by August 1987, many of their first fifteen releases over their first twelve months being outright bombs, quietly pulled Rampage off their release calendar. When asked by one press reporter about the delay, a representative from DEG would claim the film would need to be delayed because Italian composer Ennio Morricone had not delivered his score yet, which infuriated Friedkin, as he had turned in his final cut of the film, complete with Morricone’s score, more than a month earlier. The DEG rep was forced to issue a mea culpa, acknowledging the previous answer had been quote unquote incorrect, and stated they were looking at release dates between November 1987 and February 1988.

The first public screening of Rampage outside of an unofficial premiere in Stockton in August 1987 happened on September 11th, 1987, at the Boston Film Festival, but just a couple days after that screening, DEG would be forced into bankruptcy by one of his creditors in, of all places, Boston, and the film would be stuck in limbo for several years.

During DEG’s bankruptcy, some European companies would be allowed to buy individual country rights for the film, to help pay back some of the creditors, but the American rights to the film would not be sold until Miramax Films purchased the film, and the 300 already created 35mm prints of the film in March 1992, with a planned national release of the film the following month. But that release had to be scrapped, along with the original 300 prints of the film, when Friedkin, who kept revising the film over the ensuing five years, turned in to the Weinsteins a new edit of the film, ten minutes shorter than the version shown in Stockton and Boston in 1987. He had completely eliminated a subplot involving the failing marriage of the prosecutor, since it had nothing to do with the core idea of the story, and reversed the ending, which originally had Reece committing suicide in his cell not unlike Richard Chase. Now, the ending had Reece, several years into the future, alive and about to be considered for parole.

Rampage would finally be released into 172 theatres on October 30th, 1992, including 57 theatres in Los Angeles, and four in New York City. Most reviews for the film were mixed, finding the film unnecessarily gruesome at times, but also praising how Friedkin took the time for audiences to learn more about the victims from the friends and family left behind. But the lack of pre-release advertising on television or through trailers in theatres would cause the film to perform quite poorly in its opening weekend, grossing just $322,500 in its first three days. After a second and third weekend where both the grosses and the number of theatres playing the film would fall more than 50%, Miramax would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just less than $800k.

Between the release of his thriller The Guardian in 1990 and the release of Rampage in 1992, William Friedkin would marry fellow Chicago native Sherry Lansing, who at the time had been a successful producer at Paramount Pictures, having made such films as The Accused, which won Jodie Foster her first Academy Award, and Fatal Attraction. Shortly after they married, Lansing would be named the Chairman of Paramount Pictures, where she would green light such films as Forrest Gump, Braveheart and Titanic. She would also hire her husband to make four films for the studio between 1994 and 2003, including the basketball drama Blue Chips and the thriller Jade.

Friedkin’s directing career would slow down after 2003’s The Hunted, making only two films over the next two decades. 2006’s Bug was a psychological thriller with Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd, and 2012’s Killer Joe, a mixture of black comedy and psychological thriller featuring Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch, was one of few movies to be theatrically released with an NC-17 rating. Neither were financially successful, but were highly regarded by critics.

But there was still one more movie in him. In January 2023, Friedkin would direct his own adaptation of the Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial for the Paramount+ streaming service. Updating the setting from the book’s World War II timeline to the more modern Persian Gulf conflict, this new film starred Keifer Sutherland as Lieutenant Commander Queeg, alongside Jason Clark, Jake Lacy, Jay Duplass, Dale Dye, and in his final role before his death in March, Lance Reddick. That film will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in Italy next month, although Paramount+ has not announced a premiere date on their service.

William Friedkin had been married four times in his life, including a two year marriage to legendary French actress Jean Moreau in the late 70s and a two year marriage to British actress Lesley-Anne Downe in the early 80s. But Friedkin and Lansing would remain married for thirty-two years until his death from heart failure and pneumonia this past Tuesday.

I remember when Rampage was supposed to come out in 1987. My theatre in Santa Cruz was sent a poster for it about a month before it was supposed to be released. A pixelated image of Reece ran down one side of the poster, while the movie’s tagline and credits down the other. I thought the poster looked amazing, and after the release was cancelled, I took the poster home and hung it on one of the walls in my place at the time. The 1992 poster from Miramax was far blander, basically either a entirely white or an entirely red background, with a teared center revealing the eyes of Reece, which really doesn’t tell you anything about the movie.

Like with many of his box office failures, Friedkin would initially be flippant about the film, although in the years preceding his death, he would acknowledge the film was decent enough despite all of its post-production problems.

I’d love to be able to suggest to you to watch Rampage as soon as you can, but as of August 2023, one can only rent or buy the film from Amazon, $5.89 for a two day rental or $14.99 to purchase. It is not available on any other streaming service as of the writing and recording of this episode.

Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon, when I expect to release the fourth part of the Miramax miniseries, unless something unexpected happens in the near future.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Rampage and the career of William Friedkin.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.