Archive | Book Matters

I first saw “The Exorcist” when I was 13 and home alone. This, of course, was a mistake. By the time Mike Oldfield’s iconic “Tubular Bells” ran over the credits, I knew I’d never sleep that night, or possibly ever again. But it was not just the circumstances in which I viewed this film that made it so terrifying. Forty-five years after its release, the adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 eponymous novel is still the most horrific of all horror movies, complete with a tween whose head spins backward.

It’s a dark miracle that it was even made. At the time of publication, the book seemed unlikely to ever achieve a mass audience, let alone be adapted into the ninth highest grossing film of all time (when adjusted for inflation). Until then, Blatty, who also authored the screenplay, was best known as the comedy screenwriter who’d given us the Inspector Clouseau mystery “A Shot in the Dark.” A devout Catholic, he’d fictionalized a Jesuit priest’s account of a 1949 exorcism, but even his fancy Hollywood credentials couldn’t save it from being sent back to the publisher in droves. Only when a mysterious set of flukes landed him on the Dick Cavett Show for a full 45 minutes did the “The Exorcist” catapult to the New York Times best-seller list. It remained there for 57 weeks. Continue Reading →

When “Wag the Dog” hit theaters on Christmas 1997, nothing could have seemed more cleverly prescient. About a fake war staged to draw focus from a first-term U.S. president’s sex scandal, the film was released a month before then-President Clinton was accused of having sex with intern Monica Lewinsky and an Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan was subsequently bombed by the U.S. Viewed ten years later, this dark comedy seemed even more relevant. Though the world was verging on an economic meltdown after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, the media was distracted by Britney Spears’ nervous breakdown and Brangelina’s growing brood. Only today does this adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel American Hero read as depressingly dated — if only because we have entered a new era of fake news and governmental deception. Continue Reading →