SCREEN(PLAY) TEST

What’s it like when William Friedkin summons you to Hollywood to ‘write a story’?

It’s August 1996 and I’m sitting opposite William Friedkin in his office at Paramount Studios. Billy’s in a funk. He’s reading my notes for a screenplay he wants me to write, scattering the pages onto the floor. My shirt is sticking to my chair.

He’s starting to yell. “Listen, Stephen… the only explanation for certain kinds of horrors and atrocities is the existence of the Devil! There’s no other rationale!”

He’s getting shrill. “Listen, Stephen, you’ve seen The Exorcist?

An extraordinary film, OK? And I’ve read The Cormorant. An extraordinary book! So write me a story I like and we’ll make a film, OK?”

A week ago I was a horror novelist in Wales, odd-jobbing as a tour guide in Caernarfon Castle. I’d had a call from Thom Mount, ex-president of Universal Studios. “William Friedkin loves your book. He wants you over here, in Hollywood… to write him a story and a screenplay, as brilliant as his Exorcist, as dark and sinewy as your Cormorant… for immediate production.”

I’d said yes. Two days later, a stretch limo picked us up, me and my wife, from our house inside the medieval walls of Caernarfon – it had a bit of trouble getting through a gateway, built in 1283 – and we were flying first class to LA and into a flower-filled hotel suite on Sunset Boulevard.

Now, Billy’s ranting. But I’m OK. I’m enjoying being a screenwriter in Hollywood, even when the infamously volatile William Friedkin is telling me how badly I’m doing.

He tosses my pages across the desk. “Too much lore! Too much history! Too much of everything! Go away! Go away and work out the beats!

Do the carpentry!”

I unpeel the back of my shirt from the chair and stand up. He puts an avuncular arm around my shoulders. “Back to the drawing-board, old bean. God bless.”

For the next few weeks I work in my office in Museum Square, on Wilshire Boulevard. It used to be Frank Sinatra’s office – his custom-built putting green is on the balcony outside my window.

At last, one blissfully serendipitous morning, one of my ideas hits the spot with Billy. He yanks up another chair

so that we sit face to face with our knees touching. “Say it again, Stephen! That thing you just said! It’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for!”

And then, “Go away! Go and read T.S. Eliot, read Gabriel García Márquez… work out the beats!”

Back in Sinatra’s office, I re-write my outline in three pages. Billy likes it enough to send me away and re-write it as 30 pages. The following week, as a 90-page novella. And then, as three pages again. Doing the carpentry.

We have meetings with executives. Billy holds court. He tells stories about himself and The Exorcist. We all laugh, me and Thom Mount and Denis Pregnolato, the vice president of Spelling Films. Relishing his notoriety, he recounts a time when he was shooting a film in the mountains of Central America. “All the villagers ran off and hid in the jungle because they were so afraid of me,” he says. “They’d heard a rumour that the man who made The Exorcist had arrived!”

In a bantering good humour, he teases me about the life I’ve left behind. “A few weeks ago, Stephen was eating gruel in Wales, and haunting some kind of castle…”

Another month goes by. Thom sends me and my wife to Mexico for a break. And then, back into an oceanfront apartment in Santa Monica.

Back to work in LA. I’m getting used to Billy Friedkin, anticipating his moods and tantrums. I think he’s getting used to me, too. He rants at me and then calls me “a trouper” for sticking with him and keeping my cool. He’s cranky, but I’m growing to like him.

It’s another three months before I’ve got anything like a finished script. I write and re-write in my office, go putting on Sinatra’s balcony. It’s a process known as ‘development hell’.

Sometimes I’m ‘right on target’. But too slow. Billy’s beginning to fidget. He’s got his mind on other projects… directing an opera in Venice, doing opera at Glyndebourne… and my hellish little horror story and clunky script are niggling him.

Until, enough’s enough. Time to say goodbye.

“OK Stephen, time to go home and eat gruel in your castle in Wales.” Big hugs. “Good luck, old bean… you’ve been a trouper.”