The Exorcist series

William Friedkin is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director. His film, Bug won the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Friedkin was born... in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Rae and Louis Friedkin, a semi-professional softball player, merchant seaman, and men's clothing salesman. After seeing the movie Citizen Kane as a boy, Friedkin became fascinated with movies. He began working for WGN-TV immediately after high school. He eventually started his directorial career doing live television shows and documentaries, including The People vs. Paul Crump which won several awards and contributed to the commutation of Crump's death sentence. As mentioned in Friedkin's voice-over commentary on the DVD re-release of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Friedkin also directed one of the last episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965, called "Off Season". Hitchcock admonished Friedkin for not wearing a tie while directing.
more

John Boorman was a British filmmaker who was a long time resident of Ireland and is best known for his feature films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, The General and The Tailor of Panama. Boorman was born in Shepperton, Surrey, England, the... son of Ivy and George Boorman. He was educated at the Salesian School in Chertsey, Surrey, even though his family was not Roman Catholic. He has directed a total of 22 movies. Boorman first began by working as a drycleaner and journalist in the late 1950s. He ran the newsrooms at Southern Television in Southampton and Dover before moving into TV documentary filmmaking, eventually becoming the head of the BBC's Bristol-based Documentary Unit in 1962. Capturing the interest of producer David Deutsch, he was offered the chance to direct a film aimed at repeating the success of A Hard Day's Night : Catch Us If You Can is about competing pop group Dave Clark Five.
more

William Peter Blatty is an American writer and filmmaker. The novel The Exorcist, written in 1971, is his magnum opus; he also penned the subsequent screenplay version of the film, for which he won an Academy Award. His most recent works include the novels Elsewhere , Dimiter and Crazy . He is... also featured in the upcoming 2012 Smoke And Mirrors anthology, featuring the teleplay "Hell Hospital" and the treatment "Faith". Blatty was born in New York City, the son of Lebanese parents who came to America on a cattle boat, Mary and Peter Blatty, a cloth cutter in a garment factory. His father left home when William was three years old. Raised in what he described as "comfortable destitution" by his deeply religious Catholic mother, whose sole support came from peddling homemade quince jelly in the streets of New York , he lived at twenty-eight different addresses during his childhood due to constant evictions by landlords for non-payment of rent.
more

Paul Joseph Schrader is an American screenwriter, film director, and former film critic. Apart from his credentials as a director, Schrader is most known for his screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of Joan and... Charles A. Schrader, an executive. Schrader's family practiced in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, and his early life was based upon the religion's strict principles and parental education. He did not see a film until he was seventeen years old, and was able to sneak away from home. In an interview he stated that The Absent-Minded Professor was the first film he saw. In his own words, he was "very unimpressed" by it, while Wild in the Country, which he saw some time later, had quite some effect on him. Schrader refers his intellectual rather than emotional approach towards movies and movie making to his having no adolescent's movie memories. Schrader received his BA from Calvin College, with a minor in Theology. He then earned an MA in Film Studies from the UCLA Film School graduate program upon the recommendation of Pauline Kael.
more

Renny Harlin is a Finnish-American film director and producer. He is best known for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master , Die Hard 2 , Cliffhanger , The Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea . His film Cutthroat Island is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest box... office flop of all time. Renny Harlin was born in Riihimäki, Finland to a nurse mother and a physician father. His mother often took him to see films at the cinema as a child, particularly those of Alfred Hitchcock, and he became enamored with the movies often citing Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch as one of his favourites. Harlin had a video camera from a very early age and made his first short at the age of 12. At the age of 14 he decided to became a film director after he saw Don Siegel and Charles Bronson in Helsinki for the filming of Telefon .
more