The Exorcist/Trivia

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The Novels

• Write What You Know: Chris MacNeil is based on William Peter Blatty's friend Shirley MacLaine, and her marital situation on MacLaine's then-husband having left for Europe determined to not live in his wife's shadow. What's weird, is that nobody even cares to try and contact him because of his daughter's worsening health to the risk of DEATH.
  • This caused Sachiko MacLaine a bit of trouble, as numerous people had heard Blatty had based Chris on Shirley and assumed that Sachiko had been sick or possessed.

The Exorcist Film Series In General

• I Am Not Spock: Linda Blair.

The Exorcist (film)

• Billing Displacement: Max von Sydow only appears in the movie during the prologue and the last twenty minutes, but is billed second, despite Jason Miller and Linda Blair's characters being the main focus of the film. The reason for this error is likely because von Sydow was already well known, and Miller and Blair were screen newcomers.
• Enforced Method Acting: Many times. The director was kind of a wingnut about that.
  • Special mention must go to the shot where Ellen Burstyn is "thrown" by Regan across the room and her back hits the tallboy. Burstyn to be forcibly thrown and dragged with a wire harness, giving her a spinal injury that's plagued her her whole life. Her scream of pain is real.
  • The real reason Father Dyer is shaking while he's administering last rites to Father Karras is because William Friedkin slapped him just before the take.
  • Linda Blair had to endure the freezing cold bedroom set wearing only thin nightgowns.
• Troubled Production: William Friedkin was on full Prima Donna Director mode, abusing the cast and crew (see also Enforced Method Acting above) and leading the film over budget and past schedule. To make it worse, incidents such as a fire and the deaths of two actors lead people to believe the set was cursed.
  • One of those actors was over eighty years old. The other died of a vicious strain of flu that had killed many people in England.

Exorcist II: The Heretic

• Enforced Method Acting: John Boorman filmed the scene on Regan's balcony, which isn't a set, knowing full well he had no way of catching her if she fell. Her screams of fear are real.
• Old Shame: For both director John Boorman and Linda Blair, Blair even going as far as calling it "one of the big disappointments of my career."
• Troubled Production: Well let's see, director Boorman contracting a dose of San Joaquin Valley Fever which cancelled production for over a month, footage being over-saturated and necessitating re-shoots, the rapid deaths of locusts imported from England for the film’s climactic scenes (2500 locusts were shipped in, and died at a rate of 100 a day); original film editor John Merritt quitting the production (replaced by Tom Priestley); and stars Kitty Winn and Louise Fletcher both suffering from gall bladder infections, to say nothing of the constant script re-writes, sometimes even as they were shooting the film.
• What Could Have Been: William O'Malley was contacted to reprise his role as Father Joseph Dyer from the first film. However, O'Malley was busy and could not take up the part, and the character of Father Dyer was changed to Father Philip Lamont. Jon Voight, David Carradine, Jack Nicholson and Christopher Walken all were considered or offered the part of Father Lamont, who John Boorman initially conceived as a younger priest in awe of Father Merrin's writings. Eventually the choice was made to age the character, and Richard Burton was signed for the role.

The Exorcist III

• Actor Allusion: Lee Richardson states that his favorite movie is The Fly.
• Executive Meddling: The ending was reshot at the insistence of the producers, because they wanted an actual exorcism in the film. They also forced William Peter Blatty to title the film The Exorcist III instead of his preferred title, Legion.
  • Test audiences wanted someone from the original film to appear, so they hired Jason Miller and reshot the Patient X scenes. In this case, it worked, since there was a clear division between The Gemini Killer and Father Karras.

Exorcist: The Beginning

• Executive Meddling: Took place to a savage degree with Paul Schrader's original cut, which was entirely junked by the studio and refilmed from scratch by Renny Harlin.

Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist

• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: It eventually got released one year after Harlin's version.