Boorman and the Devil

First-time documentary feature director David Kittredge has done a great service by putting 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 the octogenarian star Louise Fletcher (both of whom would not live to see this documentary's release), as well as Steadicam inventor and cameraman 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, after 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 its time." Kittredge doesn't fully succeed in making a film that transcends 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 tired insistence that the 1970s were a better time for cinema because great directors were given free rein 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 were 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 entire life. In fact, the movie I saw prior to this one was Maggie Gyllenhaal's $90M Warn Bros release The Bride!, which is every bit as awful as Exorcist II, but with probably a far less interesting creation story.