The Man Who Preferred Custard Pies to Pea Soup Vomit

Introduction

There was something of a grand paradox to the life of writer William Peter Blatty, who died January 12, 2017, age 89. First and foremost, Blatty will forever be remembered as the original author and Oscar-winning screenwriter of what is regarded as the scariest motion picture of all time - 1973's "The Exorcist" - but, according to The New York Times' Amisha Padnini, in her obituary for Blatty, he 'just wanted to make people laugh. Before Mr. Blatty wrote The Exorcist, he was a master of comedy."


"If someone has been murdered here, please let it be Clouseau."

William Peter Blatty was born in New York City, the fifth and youngest son of Lebanese immigrants. The father abandoned the family when William was six, and the mother supported herself and her brood as a street vendor peddling tart quince jelly. Blatty would recall his childhood of multiple changes of address as "comfortably destitute."

Blatty was educated at various Jesuit-based schools, including Georgetown University, where he graduated in 1950. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, Blatty was employed by the United States Information Agency in Beirut, Lebanon. His experiences there became the comic fodder for his debut novel, 1959's Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (From Brooklyn to Beirut: The Adventures of an American Sheik).

He returned stateside for a public relations job in Los Angeles, where he hoped to continue his career as a writer. Blatty would later claim that in the mid-1950s, he auditioned for a role in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic "The Ten Commandments" but was turned down because his eyes were blue. Never mind the fact that Moses himself, Charlton Heston, as well as costars John Derek, Debra Paget, and Vincent Price, had blue eyes.

In 1961, Blatty turned up as a contestant on Groucho Marx's popular TV quiz program "You Bet Your Life." Behind sunglasses, Blatty (pictured below) presented himself to Groucho as an Arab prince living in Minnesota, declaring he had 34 brothers. The faux Middle East dialect dropped when Blatty's Bronx-ese took over as he told the host, "You bet your life, Groucho!"

"You're no more Arabian that I am," Groucho drily told Blatty. "I know, I used to have an Arabian horse, and I know what they look like." Blatty was visibly touched when Marx admitted to reading Which Way to Mecca, Jack? and praised it as a genuinely funny book.

Blatty and his beautiful co-contestant succeeded in splitting the show's $10,000 grand prize ($5000 would equate to over $40,000 in today's economy). Blatty quit his day job, became a full-time writer, and never had a regular job again.

In the mid-1960s, Blatty wrote the humorous novels John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, I, Billy Shakespeare, and Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane. Invoking the name of famed American humorist S.J. Perelman (and a personal idol of Blatty's), a critic for The New York Times declared Blatty "writes like Perelman run amuck."

The books were well received critically, but sales were lacking. Blatty began a collaboration with filmmaker Blake Edwards. In 1964, they took a stage farce titled "A Shot in the Dark" by playwright Harry Kurnitz and rewrote it as a slapstick comedy to accommodate Peter Sellers' character of the bumbling French detective Jacques Clouseau he had previously played in "The Pink Panther."

William Luhr, a professor of English and film at St. Peter's University in Jersey City and a co-author of two books about Blake Edwards said Blatty gravitated toward the absurd in comedy, particularly in the form of slapstick, which is why he was initially drawn to Edwards, himself a specialist in that brand of broad humor. "What Blatty brought to the mix was a razor-sharp verbal wit that Edwards always attributed to Blatty's Jesuit training," Luhr stated. "It's a rigorous grounding in logic, in what makes sense. Once you've established what makes sense, you know how to deviate from it." Referring specifically to "A Shot in the Dark," Luhr said, "The audience has to be rooted in a strong set of expectations and then go, 'Whoa, where is this going?'"

Peter Sellers prepares to wreak havoc on George Sanders' billiards
table in "A Shot in the Dark," regarded by fans as the funniest,
hence the best, of the "Pink Panther" comedies.

Blatty wrote the script for "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" (1966) a service comedy directed by Blake Edwards and starring James Coburn and Dick Shawn.

James Coburn cavorts with Giovanna Ralli in "What Did You Do
in the War, Daddy?" According to film critic and documentary
filmmaker Myron Meisel, Coburn mimicked many of director Blake
Edwards' mannerisms throughout the production.

In 1967, Blatty and Edwards co-wrote "Gunn," based on the late 1950s series "Peter Gunn," which Edwards had created. Craig Stevens, the star of the original program, returned as the private detective for the feature film, which unsuccessfully attempted to jump on the Bond-wagon.

Despite the come-on "...Number One!"
the "Gunn" franchise didn't catch on.

As producer, Blake Edwards originally wanted William Friedkin to direct "Gunn," but the future director of "The French Connection" thought William Peter Blatty's script was an awful hodgepodge of old television episodes. Edwards directed the movie himself. Blatty was impressed with Friedkin's honesty, and when he produced the screen version of his novel The Exorcist, he asked Friedkin to direct.

Aside from working with Blake Edwards, William, credited as Bill Blatty, wrote the screenplay for the 1963 credit card-mixup comedy "The Man from the Diners' Club," directed by former "Looney Tunes" animator-turned-filmmaker Frank Tashlin and starring Danny Kaye. Again billed as Bill Blatty, he scripted the 1966 bedroom comedy "Promise Her Anything," directed by Arthur Hiller (best known for "Love Story") and pairing Warren Beatty with Leslie Caron.

Here's something you don't see everyday - Warren Beatty chatting
with a bevy of beautiful women, in "Promise Her Anything."

In 1965, Blatty adapted his '63 novel John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! for a noisy if not noisome farce starring Shirley MacLaine. Blatty's book, which he originally conceived as a screenplay, spoofed the Cold War face-off between the U.S. and Russia after American CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers' spy plane was shot down in Soviet air space. Blatty's take depicted a onetime footballer nicknamed "Wrong-Way" Goldfarb (Richard Crenna) whose U-2 plane crashes in a fictional Arab kingdom, igniting an international diplomatic crisis.

The idiotic, lecherous ruler of the fictitious Middle East kingdom (overplayed by a mugging Peter Ustinov in an incredibly racist caricature), whose princely son was cut from Notre Dame's football team, forces Goldfarb to coach a team of Arabs for a game with the Indiana university's Fighting Irish. At the same time, an investigative reporter (played by MacLaine in an incredibly sexist caricature) imbeds herself in the king's remarkably caucasian harem for a tabloid exposé.

This was an actual cover story for the magazine's
July 20, 1964 issue, proclaiming, "Shirley MacLaine
Gallops 99 Yards Against Notre Dame."

The annoying, excruciatingly humorless comedy was produced by Shirley MacLaine's husband, Steve Parker, and directed by J. Lee Thompson, a filmmaker better known for "The Guns of Navarone," "Battle for the Planet of the Apes," and "Death Wish 4" than for madcap romps. The production holds the ignoble distinction of being the only motion picture sued for defamation by the University of Notre Dame, which initially delayed the film's release, claiming the studio, 20th Century Fox, "knowingly and illegally misappropriated, diluted and commercially exploited for their private profit the names, symbols, football team, prestige, high reputation and goodwill of the university." The lawsuit was ultimately decided in favor of the studio. (James Brolin had a bit part as one of the football players, and somewhere in the huddle is, as well, "Adam-12's" Kent McCord.)

The only moments in the film that come to life with a modicum of
William Peter Blatty's previously mentioned "razor-sharp verbal
wit" are scenes involving the inept government brain trust back in
Washington, played by veteran character actors Harry Morgan,
Jim Backus, Fred Clark, Jerome Cowan, Richard Deacon, and
Dick Wilson (Mr. Whipple in the old Charmin TV ads) - obviously
inspired by the writer's experience with bureaucratic doublespeak
in the U.S. Information Agency in Lebanon.

In 1969, Blatty wrote the screenplay for "The Great Bank Robbery," a zippy western farce about rival outlaw factions plotting to steal a cache of gold from an impenetrable bank in a Texas town called Friendly. Zero Mostel portrayed a bogus preacher whose band of thieves included Kim Novak ("Vertigo"), Sam Jaffe ("The Asphalt Jungle"), and John Fiedler ("The Bob Newhart Show's" Mr. Peterson). Clint Walker costarred as a stalwart Texas Ranger - who gets stoned on peyote - in a cast that also featured Akim Tamiroff and Larry Storch as Mexican bandits, Claude Akins as an outlaw who hates killing but does a lot of it, and Mako as a secret service agent. It was efficiently but unremarkably directed by prolific TV director Hy Averback, who executive produced the series "F Troop."

Bedecked solely in daisies, Sister Lyda (Kim Novak) distracts
the guards with her Lady Godiva act in "The Great Bank Robbery."

The last collaboration between William Peter Blatty and Blake Edwards was 1970's "Darling Lili," a World War I-era romantic musical (underscored with dark comedy) with the ludicrous premise that British music hall singer Julie Andrews is actually a German spy who falls in love with American ace aviator Rock Hudson. Possibly inspired by the escapades of real-life exotic dancer and Kaiser spy Mata Hari, the troubled production far exceeded its budget, suffered from undue interference from the studio (including editing the final film without director Edwards' input), and was a box-office flop. Edwards later satirized the fiasco in his 1980 anti-Hollywood comedy "S.O.B."

Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson relax on the set of "Darling Lili."

"What an excellent day for an exorcism."

Then along came 1971, and nothing would ever be the same again. Published in 1971, the novel The Exorcist was a fluky endeavor by William Peter Blatty that immutably sidetracked the writer's creative path. The story of a 12-year-old girl's possession by the Devil was based on a 1949 news report about a boy who was said to have been freed from demonic possession by a priest.

"Like so many Catholics, I've had so many little battles of wavering faith over the course of my life," Blatty said in an interview. "And when I heard about this case and read the details that seemed so compelling, I thought, 'My God, if someone were to investigate this and authenticate it, what a tremendous boost to faith it would be.' I thought, 'Someday, I would like to see that happen...I would like to do it.'"

The book sold more than 13 million copies in the U.S. and was translated into over a dozen languages. It topped The New York Times bestseller list for 17 weeks and remained on the list for 57 consecutive weeks.

Over time, Blatty would offer various accounts of what led him to try his hand at a horror tale. He sometimes said that the market for his kind of comedy had waned in the late 1960s, and he felt ready to move on. He also said that his mother's sudden death in 1967 led him to a renewed commitment to his Roman Catholic faith and to a soul searching about life's ultimate questions, including the presence of evil in the world.

Some readers were so frightened by Blatty's book that they kept
it in a separate part of the house: a closet, a garage, even a freezer.

At first, Blatty (pictured above, in 1971) envisioned the book as a modest-selling thriller about a girl, a demon, and a pair of Catholic priests, but, he admitted to People magazine, "I knew it was going to be a success. I couldn't wait to finish it and become famous."

Indeed, The Exorcist made him the foremost writer in the new hybrid genre of theological horror. It was an onus he was never completely comfortable bearing. He declined his publisher's entreaties to write an immediate sequel and instead wrote a highly personal, elegiac memoir about his mother titled I'll Tell Them I Remember You. As he put it, "The bookstores were really hostile."

Blatty remarked, "The sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career; it expunged all memory of its existence." Which isn't to say the work is devoid of any comedy elements, at least according to William Paul, a professor of film studies at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy, who cited a moment when Father Karras smugly confronts the possessed girl for his mother's maiden name, only to have her suddenly vomit on him. In Paul's unique perspective, "It's basically a custard pie to the face."

By 1972, William Peter Blatty was in a position to produce the screen version of his novel, for which he, as well, wrote the script. Initially, the studio, Warner Bros., approached Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Mike Nichols to direct, but Blatty insisted on William Friedkin, who had recently won an Oscar for directing "The French Connection," a production that had an energy level Blatty wanted for his picture.

The pivotal role of the head-pivoting girl, Regan MacNeil, went to 13-year-old Linda Blair, who was a child model and had a recurring role in an obscure daytime drama called "Hidden Faces." "The Exorcist" was her third feature film, after making her screen debut in a 1970 drama titled "The Way We Live Now" (pictured below, with Nicholas Pryor).

Released the day after Christmas 1973, "The Exorcist" became a runaway box-office hit. It was certainly unlike anything moviegoers had witnessed before. Even those who thought they had seen it all were dumbstruck by the R-rated assault of projectile vomit, blood, urine and the ghastly sight of unearthly eyes, rotting teeth, and unsettling head-spinning, courtesy of special-effects makeup maestro Dick Smith (the man who transformed thirty-something Dustin Hoffman into a 121-year-old white man raised by the Cheyenne in "Little Big Man" and who gave Marlon Brando his droopy jowls in "The Godfather").

(Top) Dick Smith contemplates his canvas - the face of teenaged
Linda Blair - before metamorphosing her into the demon-scarred
spawn. It would be another seven years before the Academy Awards
created the category honoring Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Smith
did win the Oscar for his work on 1984's "Amadeus," and in 2011,
he was given an honorary Academy Award for his life's career.

From showings across the world came news stories of audience members sobbing, puking, fainting, suffering epileptic seizures, waving rosary beads at the images, even charging the screen in anger. Others walked out on the film. Reverend Billy Graham posited that the physical celluloid itself was evil. A British youth who committed a murder blamed the movie.

Some theaters provided souvenir
"Exorcist barf bags," this one
autographed by Linda Blair.

Decades later, "The Exorcist" was named the scariest movie of all time by Entertainment Weekly. In a 2011 interview, William Peter Blatty commented, "When I was writing the novel, I thought of it as a supernatural detective story, and to this day, I cannot recall having a conscious intention to terrifying anybody, which you may take, I suppose, as an admission of failure on an almost stupefying scale."

Despite winning the Academy Award for his screenplay - "The Exorcist," which also won the Oscar for Best Sound, was nominated, as well, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Ellen Burstyn), Best Supporting Actress (Linda Blair), Best Supporting Actor (Jason Miller), Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, and Best Editing - Blatty continued to lament his success because, as previously stated, it effectively erased the first part of his career from people's minds. St. Peter's University Professor William Luhr, cited earlier, noted, "If the name William Blatty means intense, religious, horrific films, people will say, 'Oh, I don't want to hire Blatty for comedy. We can't sell that with a name like Blatty.'"

Blatty did attempt a return to humorous fiction in the 1996 novel Demons Five, Exorcist Nothing, a farce about a former hotshot filmmaker forced by a devious producer to direct a trashy horror flick called "The Satanist." Blatty's barbed satire of Hollywood struck readers as too self-absorbed. Library Journal, calling it "as clumsy as its title," dismissed the book as "silly without being funny," while Publishers Weekly compared the "madcap narrative" to "watching monkeys frolicking behind glass at the zoo."

William Peter Blatty was not at all involved with the astoundingly awful 1977 film sequel "Exorcist II: The Heretic," with Linda Blair reprising her role as the unaccountably still-possessed adolescent Regan and boozy Richard Burton as a priest who lost his faith (in a pasty-faced rehash of his role as a liquor-soaked defrocked minister in the 1964 screen version of Tennessee Williams' "The Night of the Iguana"). The pretentious claptrap was produced and directed by the otherwise reliable, visionary filmmaker John Boorman. William Friedkin would enjoy recounting a tale he heard of a sneak preview for the sequel attended by studio heads; within a few minutes of the screening, someone in the audience stood up and pointed at the suits, exclaiming, "The people who made this piece of shit are in this room!"

Richard Burton and Linda Blair are caught off-guard on-set for
"Exorcist II"...Dick is probably looking for a way out of the film. 

In 1978, William Peter Blatty revisited his 1966 novel Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane, fleshing it out and republishing it as The Ninth Configuration. Set during the closing months of the Vietnam War, the story gathers a group of officers who have exhibited psychotic behavior for psychiatric observation at a secluded castle in the Pacific Northwest, dubbed "Center 18" by the military.

In the 1980 movie "The Ninth Configuration," Colonel Kane, a stoic U.S. Marine psychiatrist with a mysterious past (Stacy Keach) arrives to take charge of the asylum, where he befriends one of the inmates, Captain Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), a former astronaut who aborted a moon launch and had to be removed screaming from the spacecraft.

According to Blatty, this same astronaut appeared in a scene in "The Excorcist." Early in the film, at the Georgetown residence of Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), a popular priest, Father Dyer (played by real-life Jesuit Reverend William O'Malley) is regaling guests at a party where he engages the astronaut in conversation, asking if he can come along as the "first missionary on Mars."

Character actor Dick Callinan (left) portrays "Astronaut Guy" in
"The Exorcist," chatting with Father Dyer (Father William O'Malley).

Later, Regan, in her sleepwear, wanders into the party. She simply stares at the astronaut and says, "You're gonna die up there," before urinating on the floor. The presence of the astronaut and the continued search for goodness in an insane world led Blatty to proclaim that The Ninth Configuration was, indeed, the sequel to The Exorcist.

The conversations between the astronaut and the psychiatrist in "The Ninth Configuration" allowed Blatty to explore the existence of God over the contention that human life on Earth was just a random coincidence.  "In order for life to have appeared spontaneously," Kane matter-of-factly asserts, "there first had to hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration. But given the size of the Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance? Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in a god."

Kane: "You're convinced God is dead because there's evil in the
world." Cutshaw: "Correct." Kane: "Then why don't you think
He's alive because of the goodness in the world?"

Cutshaw, the fallen astronaut, who didn't want to go into space because it's "so cold, so far, and so very lonely...oh, so very lonely...just empty space," maintains that only an instance of ultimate self-sacrifice could convince him of the existence of God. A shepherd must willingly surrender his own life for the good of his flock. And thereby hangs a tale.

Prior to production of "The Exorcist," William Peter Blatty had already adapted Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane into a screenplay which he hoped would be directed by William Friedkin, but the two were unable to interest a studio. It was after "The Exorcist" that Blatty decided to rewrite the novel itself and further develop the theological implications. In a 1999 interview, the author admitted he preferred the first version of the book, recalling it as "infinitely funnier and wilder, and stranger and more of a one of a kind...I allowed the comedy to carry me...I loved the characters and it was a pleasure to write."

In fact, the first half of the film "The Ninth Configuration," which Blatty ended up directing himself, plays out predominantly as a farce, paraded across the screen by an array of incessantly wisecracking inmates of Center 18, including: actor-playwright Jason Miller (Father Damien Karras in "The Exorcist"), as a lieutenant trying to stage a production of "Hamlet" with an all-dog cast; George DiCenzo (best known as prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in the 1976 TV film "Helter Skelter"); Moses Gunn (who played Cairon, herald to the Childlike Empress in "The NeverEnding Story"); and Robert Loggia (ill-fated drug dealer Frank Lopez in "Scarface"). Blatty has an amusing cameo as a deadpan officer masquerading as one of the asylum's doctors.

Joe Spinell (pictured below), an actor recognizable for his role as Mob henchman Willie Cicci in the "Godfather" movies ("When the boss says push a button on a guy, I push the button") begged Blatty for a part in "The Ninth Configuration." His character wasn't in the script, and he ad-libbed all his lines as "Spinell," Jason Miller's "assistant director."

Other standouts in the cast were Ed Flanders as the medical officer at Center 18, and Tom Atkins (Nick Castle in John Carpenter's "The Fog") and Neville Brand as two of the center's guards.

Toothy, raspy and marvelously homely, veteran character actor Neville Brand (pictured above, with George DiCenzo and Stacy Keach) was a familiar face (and voice) to longtime TV viewers for his roles as Al Capone on "The Untouchables" and Texas Ranger Reese Bennett on "Laredo." What made Brand's character of the often bewildered old-school major in "The Ninth Configuration" all the more intriguing was the fact that the actor was in fact, a highly decorated combat soldier in World War II.

One Marine you don't want to douse with a bottle of beer...

The film takes a somber turn in its second half, as Kane and Cutshaw delve deeper into discussions of faith and sacrifice, culminating in a show-stopping barroom brawl that has Kane singlehandedly dispatch a biker gang. This was one of Stacy Keach's favorite roles, and his expertly nuanced interpretation of the tortured Kane was matched note for note by Scott Wilson's spirited performance. Originally from a small town in Georgia, Wilson made his screen debut playing a murder suspect in 1967's "In the Heat of the Night," followed later that year by a memorable turn as convicted killer Richard Hickock in "In Cold Blood." He is best known more recently for his three-season run as the moralistic Hershel Greene on AMC's "The Walking Dead."

Jason Miller and Scott Wilson warily eye newcomer Stacy Keach.

Scott Wilson was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for a Golden Globe Award. The film itself was nominated as Best Motion Picture, and Blatty won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. At the time, the movie was titled "Twinkle, Twinkle, 'Killer' Kane." The distributors never really figured out what to do with the picture, and it has been released in a number of versions with alternate scenes and endings.

In its most popular incarnation, "The Ninth Configuration" ends on a wondrously life-affirming note, which was what William Peter Blatty intended for "The Exorcist," as well. In a 2000 interview, he said it was essential that people understand the point of "The Exorcist" is "that God exists and the universe itself will have a happy ending."

One of the most interesting behind-the-scenes facts about "The Ninth Configuration" is that Budapest, Hungary, filled in for the American Pacific Northwest, while Center 18 was actually the 12th-century Castle Eltz in Germany's Rhineland.

Actor Tom Atkins (pictured below, with Robert Loggia and Stacy Keach) recalled in a 2009 interview, "I have always believed that a movie about the making of that film would have been much better than the actual movie turned out to be. It was kind of a zoo from the very beginning."

"William Peter Blatty," Atkins explained, "financed part of it by selling a home that he had in Malibu. His idea of getting a good ensemble effort from his actors was to take people over to Budapest for two months...All he ended up getting was 22 really upset, angry and drunk actors who had a lot of trouble showing up for work...I think a lot of us took the job because we would be able to go to Prague and Moscow and bounce around Europe when we weren't working."

In 1983, Blatty wrote a straightforward follow-up to The Exorcist titled Legion. The book was popular, but the author sued The New York Times for six million dollars, claiming that Legion had been purposely excluded from the Times Best Seller list due to negligence or intentional falsehood, insisting it should have been included based on sales. The court ultimately sided with The New York Times, which maintained that the list was not a mathematical register but was editorial in content and protected as free speech.

Blatty had initially conceived of Legion as a film to be directed by William Friedkin, who dropped out of the project over conflicting opinions with the writer. Blatty turned the story into the novel, and after briefly approaching director John Carpenter (of "Halloween" fame), decided to make the screen version himself.

In the 1990 release, George C. Scott starred as Lieutenant William F. Kinderman, the detective portrayed by Lee J. Cobb in "The Exorcist." Another returning character was the gregarious Father Dyer (who, as mentioned, had originally been played by Father William O'Malley), portrayed here by Ed Flanders. Other cast members from "The Ninth Configuration" appearing in the new movie were Scott Wilson, George DiCenzo, and Jason Miller (as a mysterious patient who strongly resembles Miller's character from "The Exorcist," Father Karras).

Two great actors - Ed Flanders and George C. Scott - portray
friends and fellow film buffs in "The Exorcist III." Sadly, less than
five years after the movie's release, Flanders, suffering from a chronic
back injury caused by a 1989 car accident and from a lifelong battle
with depression, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1995.

In a desire to make the film more marketable, studio executives changed the title to "The Exorcist III," which infuriated Blatty because it implied a connection to the dreadful "Exorcist II: The Heretic," a picture Blatty was not involved with at all. He unsuccessfully pitched a title of "Exorcist 1990."

The studio, Morgan Creek Productions, also demanded Blatty shoot the last-minute inclusion of an exorcism scene for the story's climax, which involved adding a new character, a priest played by Nicol Williamson, and tacking on an additional four million dollars to the budget. Morgan Creek further altered the film in post-production. (George C. Scott allegedly joked that the studio would only be satisfied if Madonna came out and sang at the end.) The released version differed significantly from Blatty's vision.

Blatty (pictured above, on the set of "The Exorcist III") long desired to reconstruct the film as he intended, but the excised scenes were considered lost. In October 2016, however, a "director's cut" was finally released on Blu-ray by home video distributer Scream Factory, which utilized "various film and video tape sources" to put together "a version that will be close to Blatty's original script."

"The Exorcist III" would be the last time Blatty stepped behind a camera. In a 2010 interview, he said, "The only other time I have been offered a directing job was when I got a call from the makers of 'Pumpkinhead 4'...I didn't do it, nor have I much confidence in how well I would do when directing somebody else's screenplay." All for the best anyway, since "Pumpkinhead 4" (aka "Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud"), shot on the cheap in Romania, went straight to the SyFy Channel.

One thing is for sure - or, make that two things - is that William Peter Blatty had nothing to do with the odd couple of "Exorcist" prequels released back-to-back in the summer of 2004 and early 2005. Director Paul Schrader ("Cat People") had completed filming a prequel, but Morgan Creek Productions, the same company that rehashed Blatty's "The Exorcist III," fired him because his footage lacked "any of the bloody violence the backers had wanted." Schrader, for his part, had desired to create a psychological drama instead of a gory bloodbath.

Morgan Creek Productions hired director Renny Harlin (the filmmaker whose notorious box-office bomb "Cutthroat Island" virtually capsized a studio), who basically reshot 90% of the movie, with the rest cobbled together from Schrader's footage. Released in 2004 as "Exorcist: The Beginning," the picture was a critical and financial howler.

Morgan Creek Productions subsequently paid Paul Schrader a measly $35,000 (for subpar visual effects and post-production work) to finish his version, which the company released in spring of 2005 as "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist." The audience and critical reactions to Schrader's film were more favorable than those garnered by Harlin's. Roger Ebert noted that "Dominion" "does something risky and daring in this time of jaded horror movies: it takes evil seriously."

Both versions featured Swedish-born actor Stellan Skarskård as a young Father Merrin, the character played by fellow Swede Max von Sydow in "The Exorcist." Both films were based on the same screen story by William Wisher Jr. and Caleb Carr, both were photographed by multiple Academy Award-winner Vittorio Storaro ("Apocalypse Now"), and both featured music composed by Trevor Rabin.

Blatty, who allegedly risked being ejected from the premiere of Renny Harlin's picture for laughing loudly, said that watching "Exorcist: The Beginning" (pictured above) was his "most humiliating professional experience." On the other hand, he called "Dominion" (pictured below) "a handsome, classy, elegant piece of work."

Morgan Creek Productions is also responsible for the Fox TV series "The Exorcist," which premiered in September 2016. Again, Blatty had no involvement in the program, which features Geena Davis as the adult Regan (pictured below, with series costar Alan Ruck), now named Angela Rance (an anagram of "a clean Regan").

Whether reluctantly or willingly, William Peter Blatty's subsequent fiction continued to abut on if not outright embrace the occult. Elsewhere, published in 2009, concerned the investigation of a supposedly haunted house, 2010's Dimiter was deemed by Publishers Weekly "a haunting tale of vengeance, spiritual searching, loss, and love," and Crazy (2010) was a nostalgic reminiscence of 1940s New York with supernatural undertones.

In 2015, Blatty wrote a highly personal memoir titled Finding Peter: A True Story of Providence and Evidence of Life After Death. Born in 1987, William's son, Peter Vincent Galahad Blatty, died from a rare disorder at age 19. The father believed that during their grief, he and his wife witnessed strange if not supernatural events that convinced them their son was sending messages from the afterlife. Blatty dedicated the book to "those who have lost a loved one to that liar and fraud named Death."

Stacy Keach, William Peter Blatty's "Killer" Kane from "The Ninth Configuration," noted, "Much more than an eloquent and oftentimes very funny autobiography, Finding Peter is...a very moving expression of the loss of loved ones. A must-read for all who want to believe that Providence works miracles in our lives, often inexplicably."


Some Last Words

To be truthful, since the 1973 release of "The Exorcist," William Peter Blatty expressed degrees of disappointment with director William Friedkin's final cut of the motion picture. A year after the film's release, Blatty enumerated his perceived flaws in the book William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel to Screen. In 2000, 27 years after its premiere, "The Exorcist" was re-released with 11 minutes of restored footage, along with new shots and scenes enhanced with "nearly subliminal" special effects; it was either Blatty or Friedkin who once said that if you remember seeing a subliminal image, it wasn't subliminal. Nevertheless, Blatty gave the 2000 version his unequivocal stamp of approval.

William Friedkin, Ellen Burstyn, William Peter Blatty, and Linda
Blair attend the 2000 premiere of the restored "The Exorcist."

A decade later, Blatty, Blair, and Friedkin showed up at a 2010 screening of a digitally remastered release of "The Exorcist" (pictured below).

Admittedly, the Moviehouse isn't saying that's the same black shirt
Billy Friedkin was wearing a decade ago, but he does prefer the look.

After Blatty succumbed to multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells, Stephen King tweeted, "RIP William Peter Blatty, who wrote the great horror novel of our time. So long, Old Bill."

On his official website, Stacy Keach confessed that Blatty's "influence on my early career left an indelible mark on my soul. My experience with him on 'The Ninth Configuration' marked an important milestone in my life. I came to know Bill as, not only a great writer and director, but also as a loving and compassionate friend...Bill was always supportive of his actors, and his devilish sense of humor was infectious. We remained good friends through the years and his passing leaves me sad, but I am so grateful that I had the honor and the pleasure of working with him and knowing him."

William Friedkin (pictured above, with Blatty) posted on Twitter: "William Peter Blatty, dear friend and brother..."