It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (5 page)

Slade in Flame
was an unpredictable gem, but back in those innocent days before the internet and easy access ‘international journalism’ it was still possible to be genuinely surprised by movies – for better or worse. Today, net-nerds upload reviews of films which aren’t even finished yet (which serves studios right for relying on audience test screenings) and the box-office takings of every new release are splashed across the web before its opening weekend is through. Try as you might, in this culture of twenty-four-hour Infotainment it’s increasingly hard to see a movie without some prior knowledge of its form, history and financial performance. Some may see this as an empowering process, enabling the consumer to refine their viewing choices and to know
exactly what they’re getting before shelling out for a ticket. But it also removes the element of risk which played such a positive role in my early filmgoing years.

Listen – if I’d known what a downbeat stodge of a movie the Charles Bronson Western
Breakheart Pass
was going to be in advance, I would never have stumbled upon the supporting film
Jeremy
which affected me so deeply that I simply couldn’t concentrate on the main feature. The story of an awkward misfit’s fumbling first relationship with a graceful ballet student,
Jeremy
was a melancholic forerunner of
Gregory’s Girl
, a film which so perfectly captured the poignant anxieties of young love that you felt like you’d been personally wooed, seduced and then dumped by the movie. During the final reel, as Jeremy said a tearful airport goodbye to Susan whose parents had suddenly decided to move to another city (bastards!) I found my heart breaking into a thousand familiar pieces – this despite the fact that I had never
had
, let alone
lost
, a girlfriend in ‘real life’. In many ways, Susan
was
my first girlfriend, and the eighty-six minutes we spent together in the Odeon that Sunday afternoon in 1975 have stayed with me to this day.’Promise you won’t forget me,’ Susan cried as she prepared to board the plane, and I found myself replying out loud ‘I won’t!’ A few embittered cynics in the audience snickered at my outburst, but I didn’t care; I think Susan heard me. And she knew, she
knew
…

Decades later, I was in a record store in London with Todd Haynes, director of
Velvet Goldmine
,
Far From Heaven
, and the adventurous Bob Dylan ‘non-biopic’
I’m Not There
. We were filming a piece for
The Culture Show
which required
a backdrop of vintage vinyl and inbetween set-ups we’d both started compulsively browsing through the random second-hand selection. By strange serendipity our eyes alighted at exactly the same moment on a dog-eared soundtrack LP for
Susan and Jeremy
(the alternative US title, apparently) the cover of which bore a photo of the girl I had loved and lost all those years ago. It was an ickily Proustian moment which made me shriek with surprise, a reaction made all the more powerful by the fact that Todd Haynes did exactly the same thing. As our hands reached out to grab and cradle the LP, we turned to each other in joyous disbelief, both babbling something along the lines of ‘Oh my gosh I can’t believe you love this movie
too
, I always thought it was just
me
!’ If truth be told, I also felt a little pang of jealousy that Susan had been charming other men while I had devoted myself so singularly to her (overlooking a minor crush on the dark-haired girl out of
Lost in Space
which didn’t count because you could only ever
flirt
with a TV show –
love
was for the big screen). In fact, it transpired that she had been unfaithful with the whole of the Cannes Film Festival where
Jeremy
had been a minor hit in 1973, which perhaps explains how this 16 mm indie oddity found its way on to the mainstream B-feature circuit in the first place. But such rivalries aside, a bond was formed between Todd and I at that moment which was in no way diminished by the fact that the LP cover turned out to be
empty
, the record itself having long been lost amongst a mountain of scratchy black vinyl. No matter; we agreed to purchase the empty sleeve anyway (‘Er, 50p mate?’) and then let Susan decide whose home to
grace with her tattered snapshot presence. It would be indiscreet to say whether she chose Todd or me, but let me just say that she looks very happy to be where she is – sandwiched snugly between Joan Baez and the soundtrack to
Rollerball
. (Which reminds me – another reason I admired Jason Isaacs so much as a kid was that he made up a playground game of ‘Rollerball’ which involved being dragged along behind a pushbike on a skateboard and attempting to pick up a tennis ball before falling off and hurting yourself really badly while everyone stood round and solemnly hummed Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’. It was brilliant!)

Of course, my love affair with Susan (and Jeremy) would never have happened if I had been one of those flibbertigibbets who only showed up for the main feature, and who could be found loitering in the foyer while the adverts and trailers were playing – often the most invigorating part of the programme. I well remember the earnest discussions which led cinema chains to agree not to show trailers for movies with adults-only certificates before child-friendly fare for fear of encouraging younger viewers to try to ‘bunk’ into AA and X-rated movies. In the days before such censorious enlightenment, however, trailers were a glorious free-for-all which gave audiences of all ages a tantalising taste of the most grown-up ‘Coming Attractions’. I remember being taken to see the Magic Roundabout feature
Dougal and the Blue Cat
at an impressionable age and sitting through a terrifying trailer for
An Investigation of Murder
which consisted of a POV shot of
a man getting on a bus and then apparently slaughtering anyone who saw his face – which was
everyone
. Time for bed, Zebedee! I also saw memorably disreputable trailers for
Enter the Dragon
,
The Godfather
,
The Last Detail
and (as I mentioned previously)
Cabaret
, all of which titillated my young imagination in ways which I shudder to recall. But the trailer which had the most profound effect upon my developing consciousness was, of course, a discreet teaser for the greatest movie ever made –
The Exorcist
.

Not surprisingly, I can remember
exactly
where I first saw this trailer – it was at the Classic cinema in Hendon, in Screen Two, before a performance of Woody Allen’s
Sleeper
which I’d gone to see on the strength of its comically sci-fi inflected poster. I already knew something about
The Exorcist
because I’d seen a story on the BBC magazine programme
Nationwide
in which it was reported that American patrons had been swooning and vomiting at screenings, and being carried out on stretchers only to recover and rush back in to test their endurance once again. In a three-minute segment, Sue Lawley quickly recapped the film’s plot (a young girl in modern-day Washington DC becomes demonically possessed), recounted tales of stateside hysteria, questioned the involvement of teenage actress Linda Blair, and wondered whether the film shouldn’t be banned in the UK.

I was engrossed, not least by the whiff of physical endangerment that surrounded the film – the sense that this was something so scary that it might actually
damage
its audience, permanently. Certainly that was the line that evangelist Billy Graham was toeing when he declared that
there was something evil trapped within the very celluloid of the movie, a demonic force which was unleashed each time the film passed through a projector. Soon, stories began to circulate of punters being driven mad by
The Exorcist
: of grown men throwing themselves at the screen; of pregnant women miscarrying; of sleepless nights and admissions to asylums. Most of it was clearly nonsense but that didn’t matter a jot – by the time
The Exorcist
opened in England in March 1974, armies of nuns had been corralled to sprinkle holy water on to punters queuing to see the film and hand out leaflets giving them a number to call if they felt troubled by the devil in the sleepless nights that would inevitably follow.

All this madness was in the air when that trailer started to work its weird magic as I sat there innocently waiting for Woody Allen to make merry in the Classic Hendon. The trailer started innocuously, unannounced, with a view of a darkened street and car headlights moving slowly toward the camera. A strange noise hung in the foggy air, a noise which it transpires was made by soundman Ron Nagle and composer Jack Nitzsche running their fingers over the tops of wine glasses, a popular party trick put to skin-crawlingly eerie use. I vaguely recognised the street but had no idea why. As the headlights moved closer the vehicle was revealed to be a black and red cab which swung round to the left and stopped, its rear passenger door opening to let a man step out into the night, battered valise in his left hand, hat on head, his increasingly familiar silhouette illuminated by an unearthly light shining from the first-floor window of
a colonial-style house. The effect was like watching an explosion in reverse – seeing a group of disparately shattered elements being drawn inexorably together, reconfiguring themselves into something horribly recognisable …

And then the voice began; quiet, low-toned, serious.

‘Something almost beyond comprehension is happening to a young girl on this street, in
this
house …’

I didn’t like the sound of this at all.

‘ …and a man has been sent to help her. This man is …’

Oh jeepers.

‘…The Exorcist.’

At which point the picture froze into that iconic image that had been emblazoned on posters in Tube stations and bus stops all over the country – the black and yellow image of Max von Sydow standing outside the house on Prospect Street in Washington DC where the scariest thing
ever
was playing five times a day to shrieking, incandescent audiences.

I was absolutely terrified – afeared for my very life.

Of course, the trailer, like the poster, contained
nothing
that was overtly upsetting or shocking, merely the sight of an old man getting out of a car on a foggy urban street. How scary could
that
be? But somehow the utter absence of anything even remotely frightening merely made it all a million times
more
frightening. While traditional horror posters and ads would usually feature blood-curdling screams and terrified faces aplenty, the marketing campaign for
The Exorcist
seemed to imply that what was going on ‘on this street, in this house’ was so far beyond the bounds of acceptable screen terror that even to hint at its existence
would be overstepping the mark. It was as if the film-makers were suggesting that the sight of this old bloke standing outside a house was the
only
thing they could show us without blowing our collective fuses. And in my case they were right.

I went home that night with a head full of hideous visions of demonic possession – I even remember waking up and checking to make sure that if I turned my head it wouldn’t go
all the way around
like I had heard happened to the girl in the movie! Nor was I alone in this kind of madness. In the weeks and months after the opening of
The Exorcist
the entire country went on a bananas possession jag, with all manner of strange and antisocial behaviour being explained away with the phrase ‘The Devil Made Me Do It!’ In the wake of a story in the
Daily Telegraph
headlined ‘Man jailed after
Exorcist
attack’ the film’s dangerous reputation was increased by a widely reported claim that sixteen-year-old John Power had
died
after seeing
The Exorcist
(it transpired that he had suffered an unrelated epileptic attack, but hey – print the myth). In October 1975, a full eighteen months after the initial furore, seventeen-year-old Nicholas Bell claimed in York Crown Court that his killing of a nine-year-old girl had been driven by the Devil who had entered him after a screening of
The Exorcist
(Bell later admitted that ‘he made up the story about being possessed by the Devil in the hope that the police would let him go’). My favourite piece of cuckoo courtroom baloney came in the case of a woman accused of stealing a jacket and trousers from Top Shop who admitted the crime but claimed that she had become ‘psychologically disturbed’
after a viewing of
The Exorcist
– a viewing not by
her
, but by her
teenage daughter
, a sort of trauma by proxy which had turned her into a demonic shoplifter. Brilliant!

Of course the film-makers exploited such insane publicity to the hilt. Stories of a demonic curse had long haunted the production of
The Exorcist
with supposedly supernatural occurrences ranging from the death of actor Jack MacGowran (whose character Burke Dennings dies in the film –
spooky
…) to the burning down of the house-interior set one Sunday morning. The film’s writer William Peter Blatty would regularly dismiss such rumours as ‘utter foolishness’ but when I made a documentary about
The Exorcist
for the BBC in 1998, Ellen Burstyn was still babbling happily about the deaths of nine people being somehow connected to the movie. Director William Friedkin also told me that he personally knew of a case in England in which a friend of one of the Royal princes, no less, had seen the movie and then run into the nearest church where he immolated himself upon the altar. I have never been able to find any record of such a case (and believe me, I have looked) and must conclude that it is just another of the bizarre urban myths which surrounded this most headline-friendly frightener.

As for me, it would be a full five years before I finally got to see
The Exorcist
, on a late-night double bill with Ken Russell’s fiery classic
The Devils
. I remember sitting in my favoured aisle seat in the Phoenix in 1979, waiting for the movie to start, my entire body crackling with anxious electricity; I was so wired up I thought I might actually
spontaneously combust. As the quiet opening credits began I remember looking around the cinema at the other punters in an attempt to reassure myself that we were all collectively going to be OK.’Look, there’s an old woman over there,’ the voice in my head said calmly.’She’s probably quite frail and
she
doesn’t look like she’s bothered. You’ll be
fine
…’