woman?’ It was one of my favorite things in the picture. But the fact is that the audience knows that he’s this terrible womanizer and they laugh.” Laugh-inducing shots of the aroused Burton grinding on the possessed Blair were also re- moved. Boorman: “I’ve made [Burton] into a psy- chologist, which he wasn’t before. This gives him more authority.” Hence, a brief exchange cut from Burton and Fletcher’s first scene together was reinstated:
TUSKIN: Are you a psychologist? LAMONT: Yes.
Some of the biggest audience chuckles were heard in the vignette where Regan cures an au- tistic girl. The entire scene couldn’t be cut be- cause it demonstrated Regan’s “healing powers.” But Boorman was able to quiet some laughs by dropping the mother’s overplayed lines: “You’re talking! She’s talking! Oh, God. Her father would never forgive me if he didn’t hear her! I’ve got to take her home!”
Pace was added to the climax by cutting shots of: Tuskin bathing her kids; Tuskin treat- ing a bloody accident victim; a bus driver eating a sandwich and delaying Lamont and Regan; Tuskin comforting a nervous man on the plane; Tuskin and Sharon talking to their cab driver; and Sharon slowly burning in flames. Finally, a dance track (heard in the trailer) was mixed over the end credits.
Up until June 29, Boorman continued to alter his movie and begged the studio to print and ship his newest version to US theaters. The direc- tor said, “I’d offer the new version to critics, too, with humble apologies.” But since the grosses had already dropped disastrously and irreparably, the studio refused to gamble $75,000 on creating new prints. Boorman: “I’m going to be the first direc- tor in the history of failures not to say that his picture was badly distributed.” Vincent Canby of NEW YORK TIMES wrote: “I suppose there’s nothing unethical about this sort of fiddling with a film after it has opened and been reviewed—if a film can be improved at any point, so much the better. Yet how is a member of the public to know whether he’s seeing ‘an early edi- tion’ EXORCIST II, a partially reedited version, or a completely reedited version? Who edited the version that was reviewed? Are these directors admitting that the original versions were no damn good, or are they simply trying to cater to critics
U
and the public to make a buck? What does this have to say about the artistic autonomy of direc- tors?” (Canby also noted that SORCERER, the expensive new film by EXORCIST director William Friedkin, had also just opened to bad reviews and poor grosses and Friedkin was trying to convince Universal Pictures to let him do a new cut.) Boorman told FILM COMMENT: “I don’t think that it’s a better picture, particularly, this new ver- sion, but I think it’s a picture that would satisfy audiences better. Play better, maybe... When I think that I was having screaming fits because there was one shot, really a minor shot, where the lab broke the negative and we had to lose a frame. I went out of my mind! I was down at Technicolor tear- ing my hair out and screaming at everybody, and here I am, three weeks later, chopping great chunks out of it... In hindsight, I think there are two different pictures one could have made. One could have gone for straight horror, flat out. The other approach would have been to do a kind of send-up, a picture that audiences could laugh at... I felt, misguidedly, that you could take a kind of captive audience and characters that they knew about and had some concern about and lead them into a movie that was adventurous in a way that you couldn’t if you were starting from scratch. I felt, in this case, we had such a tremendous cap- tive audience that one could take them into a kind of spiritual adventure that would be a tremendous opportunity to take these ideas and themes to an enormous audience. And, of course, that was obviously a mistake.”
By mid-July, Warners was desperately trying to attract audiences to THE HERETIC by pairing it in some venues with the re-released horror hit IT’S ALIVE. For the week ending July 20, the film was down to #20 on the VARIETY chart and was even surpassed by GODZILLA VS. THE COSMIC MON- STER, which was playing in far fewer theaters. By the end of that month, THE HERETIC was com- pletely off the VARIETY chart and the studio was allowing some big theaters to drop the sequel af- ter only one month into the three-month guaranteed run.
In Atlanta, where the original EXORCIST had been a huge hit with black audiences, a top ex- hibitor complained “theater owners were hurt real bad... EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC was a disas- ter.” THE HERETIC was often mentioned with other “blind bid” flops like LUCKY LADY, MIDWAY and NICKELODEON when several states started pass- ing laws requiring studios to let theater owners view a film before having to bid on the right to screen it.
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