William Friedkin Obituary, American Movie Director Has Passed Away

William Friedkin Obituary – Friedkin fought some real heavyweights to win the Best Director Academy Award for The French Connection in 1972. That year’s nominees included Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), and Norman Jewison (Fiddler on the Roof). He will face more formidable opponents in The Exorcist two years later. That year, George Roy Hill won for The Sting, beating out George Lucas (American Graffiti), Ingmar Bergman (Cries & Whispers), and Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris).

The late 1960s and early 1970s film director William Friedkin, who died at the age of 87, was a little older than the “movie brats” group (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and others) who are credited for redefining US filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Friedkin, like Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet, began his career in television and documentaries, but he had a big impact on the American new wave.

Two of his blockbuster films from the first half of the 1970s, The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), received critical praise and box office success that made them pop-culture icons. They were also successful in hiding all else he accomplished.However, describing his career as one of rise and fall would be misleading. To Live and Die in LA, a cop-and-counterfeiters thriller released in 1985, was unquestionably his best effort.

Later in life, his 2011 version of Tracy Letts’ southern-fried noir drama Killer Joe was a moderate success. Those early hits, though, demonstrated his steady hand, timing, and financial ability. The French Connection took the American policier to a level of authenticity and roughness that the genre continues to strive for today with its fondness for hand-held, vérité-style camerawork and on-the-fly sound recording, sometimes at the expense of intelligibility.