Posts tagged the exorcist
reblogged from theexorcist:
Did you know? This is Paul Bateson. Paul was a 38 year-old x-ray technician at NYU Medical Center where the arteriogram sequence in The Exorcist was shot, and landed himself a bit-part in the film as the radiologist’s assistant.
In 1979, Paul was convicted after confessing to the murder of film critic Addison Verrill by crushing his skull with a frying pan and then stabbing Verrill multiple times in the heart. While in custody and awaiting trial, Paul bragged of killing other men “for fun,” dumping the bagged remains of his victims in the Hudson River.
After reading about the events in the paper, William Friedkin then arranged to meet with Paul at Rikers Island Penitentiary - a big change from their last encounter on the set of The Exorcist. After interviewing Paul and learning the facts of the case, Friedkin went on to direct Cruising. Released in 1980 and starring Al Pacino, the film was inspired by the series of “bag murders” of ‘77 and ‘78.
The Celluloid Moron
Time has not been kind to The Celluloid Closet but then, Vito Russo never had much time for Time, either. Writing in 1981, Vito complained that no gay writer had produced any meaningful criticism of homosexuality in the movies, but actually, Parker Tyler had done just that, and nine years previously, with his tellingly-titled twentieth book, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies.
Tyler’s first book, The Hollywood Hallucination, was published in 1944, two years before Russo was born, and Richard Dyer’s Gays and Film came out in 1977, before Russo had constructed a closet for it to come out from. Thomas Waugh’s essays in Jump Cuts, such as “A Fag-Spotters Guide to Eisenstein,” were published in the late 1970s, and Robin Wood’s 1977 lecture at London’s National Film Theatre, “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic”was printed as an essay in Film Quarterly in January 1978.
Still, Russo declared that it was he who would get the ball rolling. “We have cooperated for a very long time in the maintenance of our own invisibility,” he wrote, “and now the party is over.” While the first part of that sentence is contentious, it’s hard to find fault with the second part, as it introduces the 350 coma-inducing pages of examples of Russo’s single point: some movies had gay characters in them and those characters didn’t represent gay his preferred way.
