“Atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by [William] Friedkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].” — “The French Connection” cinematographer Owen Roizman basically wants to barf over the new Blu-Ray dvd transfer of his seminal 1971 film.
Jeffrey Wells is validated once more He’s been moaning and bitching about the new “French Connection” DVD for weeks now calling the new look, “sickly” and “anemic” and the original photographer — who was not consulted in the transfer process — basically feels the exact same way. He’s horrified how it looks now and Friedkin apparently did some heavy-handed revisionsim with its look and feel.
But this is pretty much de rigeur for Friedkin, still one of the most reviled men in Hollywood, years after his career collapsed and people already schadenfreude’d the hell out of all his rather-fast cinematic fall from grace in the late ’70s (“The French Connection” is amazing for several reasons, some of which include run-and gun, no permit shooting, real unplanned car crashes, and using camera men in wheel chairs racing alongside the action instead of dolly tracks – it broke all kinds of rules).
Maybe giving our cards away a little (or just totally blowing our chances), we totally want to write a book about Friedkin’s film career one day. If you’ve ever seen interviews with him or even have limited knowledge of his behavior over the years, you know that everything about him suggests (is) an amazingly arrogant hot mess that would be just an incredible read on paper. We’d be fair and honest too, we swear (give ’em enough rope…). Wait, now we’re never going to be able to interview Williams Friedkin are we. 🙁
Ok, well 1977’s “Sorcerer” is so incredibly underrated. The electronic score by Tangerine Dream is fucking hautingly awesome too.
