Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: For 'Rampage' director Friedkin, verdict on capital Date: Wed, 4 Nov 92 16:16:30 EST Message-ID: \SE D;LIFE \HD For 'Rampage' director Friedkin, verdict on capital punishment is in \BY Gary Arnold \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES William Friedkin cut a notoriously sleek and calculating figure in the early 1970s, when "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist" combined to make him the hottest director in the business. But his brilliantly manipulative directing skills proved unequal to the conceptual pitfalls of two projects in the late 1970s: "Sorcerer," a portentous but expendable remake of the French suspense classic "Wages of Fear"; and "Cruising," a grotesquely muddled murder thriller that earned Mr. Friedkin the enmity of New York City homosexual activists for invading their turf in a spirit of dazed ignorance that he now candidly acknowledges and regrets. The William Friedkin in Washington recently to promote "Rampage," a compelling polemical melodrama about the trial of a mass murderer, proved a far mellower presence than the hotshot of 20 years ago. Portly and pleasant and ruminative at the borderline elder statesman age of 53, he seems to have transcended all the unattractive aspects of burning ambition and blazing success. "Rampage," a thinly fictionalized account of a murder case recalled by a former Sacramento, Calif., district attorney named William P. Wood, was a book that came to Mr. Friedkin's attention when he was questioning his own avowed opposition to the death penalty. He was feeling even graver doubts about the wisdom of permitting the insanity plea to become an escape hatch for convicted murderers. Mr. Friedkin purchased the novel, adapted it and shot the film version five years ago on locations in Stockton, Calif., with Michael Biehn starring as the equivalent of prosecutor-author Wood. He hadn't foreseen the financial misfortunes about to capsize his producer, Dino De Laurentiis. A few weeks before a scheduled theatrical release in 1987, "Rampage" ended up a pawn to bankruptcy proceedings, one of about 20 movies facing obsolescence while the De Laurentiis creditors sorted out their claims. "My general outlook tends to be fatalistic," Mr. Friedkin says, "so I had resigned myself to the likelihood that the movie would never see the light of day. Certainly not as a theatrical attraction." "One of the movies in the same fix, 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure,' did manage to wriggle out while it was still new, but most of us were stuck. Typically, it takes years before the lawyers representing all the creditors resolve the ownership rights to unreleased movies. They all have about 50 other cases on their minds on any given day. But most films can't survive delays that remove them four or five years from their time frame. They're relics by then." Mr. Friedkin was convinced that "Rampage" was an exception to the pattern. "I now believe the delay was a blessing in disguise in our case," he insisted. "Not because 'Rampage' ever promised to be a big commercial draw. It was meant to be thought-provoking, and the issues it dramatizes probably have more currency now, as a result of high-profile mass murder cases, like the Jeffrey Dahmer case, which coincided with an immensely popular movie about a serial killer, 'Silence of the Lambs.' "My original motivation," he says, "grew out of a contradiction that was growing more troublesome all the time: On one hand, the crime rate, certainly in every big American city, was going off the chart; on the other, the criminal justice system had grown more lenient about punishing violent crime. I couldn't make sense of that contradiction. It wasn't what ordinary people wanted." Mr. Friedkin has numerous friends and acquaintances in the law enforcement community, dating professionally from his police thrillers, "The French Connection" and "To Live and Die in L.A." Personally, the ties go back even further, to a legendary uncle named Harry Lang, a former Chicago cop whose personality and lore fascinated the young Billy Friedkin when he was growing up in Chicago and hung around the saloon Uncle Harry operated after retiring from the force. At any rate, Mr. Friedkin met prosecutor Wood through mutual acquaintances and incorporated a few other elements into his dramatization of the original case, tried in Sacramento in 1978. Mr. Friedkin had followed the trial that obliged a friend, writer Dominick Dunne, to testify against the killer of his daughter, Dominique. "As a matter of fact, I took a scene directly from that trial," Mr. Friedkin says. "The business where the prosecutor forces the courtroom to observe three minutes of silence, corresponding to the minutes that ticked down for the victim. The fella who killed Nick's daughter did three years by being able to obscure the process with an insanity plea. That doesn't balance the scales. He's out. Gone. She's irreplaceable." Mr. Friedkin wanted to balance a somewhat grudging acceptance of the death penalty with frank outrage about manipulation of the insanity plea to evade justified punishement. While still in his early 20s and working on documentary projects for WGN-TV in Chicago, Mr. Friedkin attracted international attention with "The People vs. Crump," which pleaded for mercy in the case of a convicted murderer, Paul Crump. "I used to be absolutely opposed to capital punishment," Mr. Friedkin says. "That film did accomplish its purpose and save a particular man from the electric chair. I don't regret it, but I was very young at the time and the argument was very much in the abstract for me. Once you become acquainted with people who've been victimized, it's very hard not to feel as they do: that certain crimes deserve an ultimate punishment." No longer absolute on the issue, Mr. Friedkin believes that capital punishment is justified "in certain rare cases, where there's no doubt as to guilt or innnocence, no trace of a reasonable doubt." The case in "Rampage" definitely meets that revised standard: "The bodies, or remnants of the bodies, are found in the guy's basement. He acknowledges the killings but just refuses to accept moral responsibility for them. I wouldn't lose any sleep over an execution in those circumstances. I think it would be idle to argue that it's more humane to spare his life. It's certainly not more humane to the victims' relatives or law-abiding people in general." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM