Friedkin told Edwards, “Your script is a piece of crap.”

Edwards yelled, “What do you know? You’ve only done two lousy pictures.”

Blake finally shook hands and told Friedkin, “You’re an interesting person.”

In the parking lot, a man who was at the meeting, stopped Friedkin and said, “I wrote the script, even though it has Blake's name on it. And I know it’s bad. I admire you for being truthful even though it cost you a job.”

Four years later, Friedkin gets a novel, typed on paper, in the mail from the same man.

Friedkin tells the story:

I said to myself ‘It’s from that guy who wrote that terrible script.’ I sat down and read it in one sitting, and it ‘zombied me out’.

I called the man; William Peter Blatty, and said, ‘I love your book The Exorcist and I want to do it. But why did you pick me?”

“Because you’re the only person in Hollywood who never lied to me. However, there are three other directors that the studio wants; Stanley Kubrick, Author Penn and Mike Nichols.

Weeks later, Kubrick said that he only wanted to direct his own materiel. Author Penn had just finished directing Bonnie and Clyde and didn’t want to do any more violence. And Mike Nichols told the studio, “You’ll never find a 12-year-old girl to do those things.”

At first, the studio didn’t want me. But a few weeks later, my movie, The French Connection, was released and was an instant hit, so the studio changed their minds.

When The Exorcist was released the first call I got was from Mike Nichols asking, “How did you get that girl to do all of that?”

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