The star William Friedkin desperately wanted for ‘The French Connection’: “He costs too much money”
William Friedkin spent most of his career proving people wrong. To be fair to the studios and producers who discounted him, though, his first decade in Hollywood was undeniably rocky. He began with documentaries before taking a stab at feature filmmaking. Unfortunately, that first feature, 1967’s Good Times, was a musical starring Sonny and Cher that was a messy pastiche of Old Hollywood. The director would later call it “unwatchable”, which was barely an exaggeration.
From there, he moved on to more serious fare by adapting an unfinished Harold Pinter screenplay into The Birthday Party and then took yet another left turn with the period musical The Night They Raided Minsky’s. Following a young Amish woman who runs away from home to become an exotic dancer, it was another disappointment for the director. However, he followed it up with 1970’s The Boys in the Band, a daring statement at the time given that it focused on queer men without villainising or pathologising them. Its subject matter was controversial, which only served to further mark Friedkin as a dangerous proposition for producers.
So when he buckled down to make The French Connection a year later, it was not surprising that few people in Hollywood had faith in the project. The first backer dropped out, but he was finally able to get it financed by Fox for a measly $1.5million.
When it came to casting, however, Friedkin was not so fortunate (or so he thought). His first choice to play the role of the unpredictable narc Popeye was Paul Newman, a bonafide movie star who had just made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But producer Richard Zanuck reined him in. “You’ll never get Paul Newman,” he told Friedkin. “He costs too much money. Just go out and cast it with the best possible actors.”
The actor he went for, of course, was Gene Hackman, who was already in his 40s and had been working hard at his craft for nearly two decades. Even though he had already been nominated twice for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscars, Hackman had been pigeonholed into the category of “character actor”, and he seemed destined to play peripheral characters for the rest of his career.
The French Connection changed all that. As Popeye, Hackman is explosive, cruel, and volatile, a magnetic central figure in a film known for its documentary style and riveting chase sequences. Without him, it could easily have been a gritty action-driven movie without an anchor, but thanks to Hackman’s performance, its breathless action setpieces only serve to deepen the complexity of his character.
There’s no question that Newman was a stellar actor completely independent of his celebrity, but he also had a type of movie star charisma that could never be hidden completely. Even when he played scruffy characters like the titular jailbird in Cool Hand Luke or the washed-up hockey coach in Slap Shot, he was a magnetic presence that oozed glamour no matter how scruffy his five o’clock shadow. It’s hard to imagine him bringing the necessary level of ice-cold menace to the role of Popeye, so it’s just as well for Friedkin that his salary was out of reach.
The French Connection might have required producers to risk their careers for the unpredictable director, but he finally proved his potential with the film. When he won ‘Best Director’ for his work (just one of the five Oscars it won that year), it paved the way for his next project—a little horror movie called The Exorcist.
