William Friedkin stops by to see how the trucks are coming along. Via
“I DON’T SHOOT FUCKING INSERTS!” screamed William Friedkin at a studio executive who suggested perhaps seeing a close-up of the mileage gauge might help the audience understand what’s happening more at the end of his yet-to-be-released film Sorcerer. This alcohol-fueled outburst, chronicled in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, details William Friedkin’s ultimately disastrous journey through perhaps his greatest film.
I waited in line to meet Friedkin at Amoeba Records in Los Angeles a few years ago and fully planned on asking him to yell “I don’t shoot fucking inserts!” at me. But by the time I got up to meet him the only thing I could blurt out was a shy, “Sorcerer is my favorite movie….”
To which Friedkin replied with a wink, “Mine too!”
A lot has been written about this lost masterpiece over the years by film scholars and fans alike, all of whom wanted to know, what happened? Why wasn’t this a bigger hit? Even in immediate retrospect the failure of Sorcerer was hard to unpack.
First and foremost, it was made by Friedkin, one of the greatest critical and box office hitmakers of the 1970s. He had come off a one/two punch of hits that’s rarely matched. His film The French Connection (1971) not only was a smash success at the box office but it also won him Best Director and Best Picture Oscars making him one of the youngest people ever to do so. Two years later Friedkin helmed another smash, The Exorcist, which was not only one of the highest grossing films of the 1973, it remains even fifty years later atop many lists as the scariest horror movie of all time.
With that sort of success Friedkin could literally shoot anything he wanted next. What he wanted was a remake of a French film that was an art house gem. The Wages of Fear, a 1953 black and white cult classic by Henri-Georges Clouzot, followed four men in a decrepit South American village hired to transport an urgent shipment of nitroglycerine without the equipment to make it safe.
While Friedkin kept many elements from Clouzot’s classic, the biggest departure was the makeup of the men’s character. While Wages of Fear had heroic men to root for, Friedkin’s version had characters of extremely low moral compass.
How low?
The four men from all over the globe consisted of a corrupt French banker, an Arab terrorist, a Mexican hit man, and a low-level Jersey mobster who commits a violent robbery … of a church.
All four of these men find themselves living on the lam in the same Columbian jungle when a unique opportunity arises for them to change their fates. An American oil well is on fire and the only thing that will blow out the fire is nitroglycerin which is wisely stored hundreds of miles away. Since the nitro is far too volatile to be flown, it must be driven through a treacherous jungle filled with everything from natural disasters to lethal bandits. All of that is nothing compared to what will happen if the truck hits a bump jostling the nitro. Is essence, it’s a suicide mission, one that only someone with nothing left to lose would even consider.
Enter our four antiheroes split into two groups.
Each duo gets a truck, assuming one of them won’t survive. The money is more than enough to change their lives but what’s more, it’s a chance to do good, a chance at actual redemption.
What follows I almost don’t want to spoil.
With so much attention paid to the stunt-heavy and circumstantially challenged films of the Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises it’s usually hard to compare anything made before CGI. But Sorcerer is a rare exception. The bridge sequence was shot with very few tricks and remains, in my opinion, the greatest action sequence ever put on film.
What is the bridge sequence?
The overused term “edge of your seat” barely describes it. After dodging literally hundreds of things that could easily blow them to bits each truck must cross a raging river, with a manual one-ton truck, filled with unstable nitroglycerin, over a rickety ancient wooden rope bridge, during a hurricane. While I feel somewhat guilty describing this scene, the film’s marketing team unwisely chose this image for the movie poster so I guess it’s okay. This is a blood-draining white knuckled sequence that has never really been matched on screen ever. It cost over a third of the film’s entire budget and took two countries and three months to shoot, but man does it ever deliver!
So why have some of you never heard of this film? It was a monumental flop. Moviegoers simply never really got the chance to try it on. There’s a lot of reasons for this and all of them combined created the perfect storm for Sorcerer to fail.
First, it came out in June of 1977. On paper this is usually the best possible time to release a movie. Kids are out of school and summer was prime movie going time for families. A June release is still to this day a coveted slot for filmmakers. The problem was a high-concept B-movie sci-fi fantasy film that came out a few weeks earlier called Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars, A New Hope).
When Star Wars was pushed out of theaters for Sorcerer, movie houses showed a notable dip in revenue. This was quickly corrected by rebooking Star Wars and booting out Sorcerer. No one in the industry predicted the sheer blockbuster that was Star Wars and I often wonder if Sorcerer came out a year earlier if it wouldn’t have caught on, or perhaps even won another Best Picture Oscar for Friedkin.
But the release date wasn’t the only obstacle toward audiences embracing the film. The movie begins, much like Friedkin’s previous film The Exorcist, in a foreign country, a few of them to be exact. The situations are seemingly non sequitur with subtitles in Spanish, Arabic, and French respectively. This left some confused theatergoers questioning whether they were in the right movie or not. To combat this confusion the studio had posters made explaining the subtitles are normal.
Another obstacle lay with the title of the film itself. The title, taken from one of the trucks in the film, seemed deliberately mysterious. It was a normal conclusion to draw especially from the director of The Exorcist. People thought with Friedkin’s name above the title and a mystical moniker like “Sorcerer” the film must deal with the supernatural. Oddly the studio didn’t make a poster to dispel this notion as at that point they were happy to take any dollar they could get.
Yet another reason for the film’s failure was put forward by Friedkin himself.
He didn’t think Roy Scheider, who played Scanlon, the low-level Jersey hood, was a big enough star. Friedkin wanted Steve McQueen. He wanted him badly and McQueen was up for it saying it was one of the best scripts he’d ever read. So McQueen agreed to do it…provided Friedkin put his wife Ali MacGraw in the film. Friedkin said no and McQueen walked, a decision he’d later openly regretted saying, “…one of the most foolish decisions I ever made because a close-up of Steve McQueen was worth much more than any landscape in the world. I could easily have found deserted mountain areas close to the Mexican border, or made Ali MacGraw an associate producer, or written a role for her. How arrogant I was then.” He considered other actors such as Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, and Clint Eastwood – all of whom weren’t too keen on spending three months in the sweaty jungle – before finally settling on Scheider.
On this point I completely disagree with Friedkin. I think this is arguably Scheider’s best work and to blame his casting for the film’s failure is simply unfair.
Scheider had not only co-starred opposite Gene Hackmen’s Oscar award-winning performance in Friedkin’s French Connection, he had recently starred in Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws which up until Star Wars came out was the highest-grossing movie of all time. After Sorcerer Scheider would later be offered the lead in 1978’s Best Picture The Deer Hunter, unwisely turning it down, before taking over the part of Joe Gideon, from his former Jaws co-star Richard Dreyfuss, in Bob Fosse’s thinly veiled autobiography All That Jazz in 1979.
Also, if he wasn’t right for this film why is it still continuing to be rediscovered so many years later?
My biggest argument for Scheider is the sheer joy Scanlon has when conquering the death-defying bridge. His joy is our own knowing if he can beat that, he can beat anything. The money is all but in the bag. Scanlon is positively giddy and his sheer delight is contagious. As great as Steve McQueen was, I don’t think he’d ever expressed that kind of joy on screen.
Friedkin was wrong, Scheider had the goods.
Scheider had a previous falling out with Friedkin over not getting the role of Father Karas in The Exorcist which led to friction between the two men prior to shooting. Their onset relationship on Sorcerer didn’t fare much better with both men seemingly on their worst behavior throughout the filming process.
After Friedkin’s comments partially blaming Scheider for the film’s failure I often wonder if their relationship ever recovered. I wish they had worked together again before Scheider’s death in 2008. Friedkin, for his part, moved to France after the fallout from Sorcerer. He would later return to the States to helm The Brinks Job before taking on the still controversial Cruising with Al Pacino and the action classic To Live and Die in LA which I wrote about previously here.
In the end Sorcerer losing money was the ultimate Hollywood crime.
Its budget more than doubled during production and sadly failed to recoup. It cost nearly double Star Wars’ budget which became its inevitable and highly unfair comparison at the time. Studios watched in awe as Star Wars soared to historic profits the margins of which had never been seen before. Star Wars, for better or worse, ultimately changed the game for the entire film industry forever. If failing the industry bottom line wasn’t bad enough, critics weren’t kind at the time either. With a few notable exceptions it was panned. Leonard Maltin gave it two and half stars out of four.
But the passing of time has been extremely kind to Sorcerer. Since its initial release it has found many champions including Stephen King who placed it number one on his video rental list and Quinten Tarantino who considers it a masterpiece.
Luckily this film has some fairly good Blu-ray editions with great transfers and sound remixes that enhance not only the pelting rain and explosions but also the often-overlooked haunting score by Tangerine Dream.
Sorcerer is sometimes featured at special screenings and film festivals around the country. If one comes to your area, I highly suggest you give it a watch on the big screen, you won’t be disappointed. In Friedkin’s later years he became known for some hilarious “zero fucks” interviews, many clips of which are readily available online.
William Friedkin passed away on August 7th 2023 at the age of 87. He leaves behind a body of work that is rarely matched. In addition to Biskind’s marvelous book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls which isn’t always kind to the directors profiled, seek out Nat Segaloff’s biography of Friedkin, Hurricane Billy, as well as his own autobiography, The Friedkin Connection.
But if you really want to know his work watch his films and be sure to start with Sorcerer.
Fred Shahadi is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and author living in
Los Angeles. He is the author of the sci-fi JFK conspiracy novel Shoot the Moon.
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