frame numbers for the cut.” The snipped print (with a slight sound jump caused by the splice) was first screened at the Westwood Village at the 5:40 p.m. screening—a mere 24 hours after the packed but disastrous first-night show.
By Monday the 20th, the film had grossed over $6.7 million. The studio took out a full-page ad in VARIETY boasting that EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC had “The Biggest Grossing Week-End In Warner Bros. History!” It was the top-earner for the week in both New York City and Los Angeles. Nation- wide, it was the 2nd-highest grosser of the week just after THE DEEP and just ahead of STAR WARS, which hadn’t yet opened wide. VARIETY reported excellent results in every city where the film was playing and described the early grosses as “daz- zling,” “fat,” “robust,” “happy” and even “hotsy.” But the trade paper also noted: “... on the open- ing day, Friday, patrons at the Hollywood Pacific Theater actually threw things at the screen. Much the same response, laughter and booing, has been reported from across the country.”
Desperate to appease disgruntled exhibitors and save their sinking sequel, Warners decided to make Boorman’s new alteration the official end- ing for all prints of THE HERETIC. On the morn- ing of Tuesday, June 21—four days after the film had opened—the studio’s distribution office con- tacted all 707 theaters that were screening THE HERETIC to inform them that new final reels with a modified ending were being printed and would begin shipping immediately. By the end of the day, 15 new end reels were flown to the bigger houses in New York City. The remaining theaters received new prints in time for the weekend. The 117m film now ran 114m. (Projectionists were instructed to return or destroy the obsolete ending, but a number of those reels ended up in private collections.) Meanwhile, Boorman—who thought the studio’s preparation of the new final reels was “slop- pily done”—wasn’t satisfied with just lopping off the ending. He once referred to filmmaking as “the process of turning money into light, and then back into money again.” And he felt that he could turn THE HERETIC back into money by rethinking the entire film and creating an entirely new cut.
n Tuesday, June 21, the director arrived in Los Angeles from Ireland and was immediately driven to the Hollywood Pacific Theater to watch THE HERETIC with an audience and notate which specific images and dialogue were causing laugh- ter. He told VARIETY, “To some extent, I’m allow- ing the audience to recut it. I’m considering our
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openings to be like 800 sneak previews, hopefully without damaging the integrity of my original con- cept. People think of cutting and recutting as a defeat, but it’s not... We’re victims of audience ex- pectation based on the first picture. The sin I com- mitted was not giving them what they wanted in terms of horror. There’s this wild beast out there, which is the audience, and I just didn’t throw enough Christians to it. I was terribly shocked and hurt by all this... I thought I’d produced a film which was thoughtful and beautiful and involving.” Boorman to WALL STREET JOURNAL: “It’s a fairy story, not a scary story. Audiences were laughing at all the wrong things, and they created a kind of hostility... I basically made the wrong movie. I mis- judged what audiences were bringing to the film, based on THE EXORCIST. [Audiences] loved [the original] for its raw sensation [or] looked on it as a kind of amusing joke. They felt cheated [by the sequel.]”
The director tried to add more horror into THE
HERETIC by inserting two shots of the possessed girl that were outtakes from the original EXOR- CIST. The only gore that Boorman could add from his own outtakes was an image of a bleeding cab driver. At this point, the director probably regret- ted not shooting the hideous, green-skinned de- mon that Dick Smith had created for the climax and not filming the scripted image of possessed priest Burton having “not a mouth, but a void filled with crawling locusts, gnawing him out from within.”
A new 110m cut was shown to a crowd of 500 at the Westwood Village Theater’s 8:00 p.m. show on Sunday, June 26—ten days into the film’s run at that venue. Boorman called the audience “far more appreciative. We showed the new version... and the response was entirely different. This time, they came to laugh. But instead they got absorbed in the new version, and they calmed down. There was widespread applause at the end.” There was also mild laughter at the screening and one male patron was especially boisterous. In one seat was Warner executive Ted Ashley, who said afterwards, “One thing I learned, I’ll never ever put a picture out again without previewing it.”
The exhausted Boorman referred to this ver- sion as “temporary” and “an experiment.” (The press called this cut EXORCIST III.) The director explained that he was working on yet another al- ternate cut which he dubbed “Mark IV.” “I’m not just recutting it,” he said. “I’m refashioning it.” Boorman noted that “more pace” would be added to the climax, which originally “ended on a note of unequivocal goodness. Evil was defeated. But, in
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