William Friedkin was street-level master of suspense

CHICAGO — “No technique.”

“No style.”

Those are exact quotes from William Friedkin talking about William Friedkin, in the context of the filmmaker’s intentional lack of conventional artifice on what became his biggest hit and the most gruesomely influential horror film of the 1970s: “The Exorcist.”

The bloody terrors inflicted on Linda Blair’s Regan in that 1973 landmark? They’d be more frightening, and less easily dismissable, Friedkin said in a 1998 Guardian interview, if “I set out consciously to give ‘The Exorcist’ no style. Just, here it is.”

Chicago-born and bred, Friedkin brought his own array of documentary-honed techniques and sharp-edged honesty to that film and plenty more. He died Monday at the age of 87, at home in Bel Air, Calif., where he lived with his wife Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount Pictures head and a fellow Chicago native.

Like many famous directors, Friedkin had more flops than hits, and his fall from Hollywood heights was more conspicuous and painful than most. But his biggest successes, “The Exorcist” and, earlier, “The French Connection” (1971), changed the course of American commercial cinema, walloping audiences in ways unimaginable just a few years previously. Friedkin’s most conspicuous achievements set a new, street-level tone, and direction, for screen violence — screen blatancy, his detractors would say.

He grew up the son of Ukrainian Jewish emigrants whose family fled, in the face of antisemitic pogroms, in 1903. On Chicago’s North Side, he graduated from Senn High School, where he played some impressive basketball but wasn’t much of a student.

At 17, he got a job in the WGN-TV mailroom. By the late 1950s, he joined the production team at WGN and then WTTW-Ch. 11 as a director and writer. At WGN, he worked on “The Bozo Show” and a form-breaking array of nonfiction TV specials. He wrote for the stage in Chicago, often with Chicago Tribune writer Francis Coughlin; one 1957 historical collage, “Death of Caesar,” staged at the Hotel Sherman, combined Shakespeare, Plutarch and classical music.

In 1961, Friedkin made the news when the commercial sponsors of a concert special for WBKB, “Folk Song Festival,” censored a song titled “Free and Equal Blues” sung by Josh White.

“They cut the top song,” Friedkin later said, “(so) I took my name off the production. In my opinion, the cut was made for fear of offending bigots.”

The following year, Friedkin’s 52-minute TV special opposing capital punishment, “The People vs. Paul Crump,” single-handedly saved the life of a wrongly convicted man. As the Tribune’s Rick Kogan wrote in 2018, the director “had heard about Crump’s case from the death row chaplain at a party, and though he had never made a movie, he created on a shoestring a vivid, vibrant and compelling film. … In heart-pounding and visually exciting style, (Friedkin) re-creates the robbery and killing, ensuing arrest and, as Crump claimed then, his torture by (Chicago) detectives.”

It is, Kogan wrote, “impossible to forget.”

After relocating to Los Angeles to work for David Wolper’s documentary production company, Friedkin broke into features every which way, first with a Sonny and Cher showcase (“Good Times,” 1967), then a frantic burlesque tribute (“The Night They Raided Minsky’s,” 1968) and one of his many stage adaptations: Mart Crowley’s seminal gay mosaic “The Boys in the Band” (1970).

Then came the one that made his career: “The French Connection,” which won Oscars for best picture, best actor (Gene Hackman, who quit at one point during the grueling New York City shoot) and, for Friedkin, best director.

His Chicago documentary filmmaking years, Friedkin told Gene Siskel in 1980, served that project well, with the newly lightweight and highly portable cameras perfectly suited for a run-and-gun brand of street-level realism. Here, to be sure, was a style at work, following thug-detective Popeye Doyle’s relentless pursuit of heroin smugglers: grimy, pile-driving, nerve-rattling.

By the end of Friedkin’s golden decade, he’d already fallen in Hollywood’s eyes, after the failure of the pricey, ruminative 1977 suspense drama “Sorcerer” (a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic “The Wages of Fear”). That was the summer of “Star Wars.” And for a long time, and maybe permanently, “Star Wars” rewired America for light sabers, and a kind of perpetual adolescence.

He continued to work both within and outside the slowly dissolving studio system. Twice, he brought plays by Chicago-trained Tracy Letts to the screen, to intriguing results: “Killer Joe” and “Bug.”

Friedkin’s final project, also derived from the theater, premieres later this month at the Venice International Film Festival: a new adaptation of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” starring Kiefer Sutherland and the late Lance Reddick, who died shortly after Friedkin completed filming earlier this year.

Friedkin often came back to Chicago, for awards in his honor at the Chicago International Film Festival and other events. Another Chicago-born film director, Andrew Davis (“The Fugitive”), recalled one time he was eating at The Berghoff in the Loop. He spied Friedkin holding a corned beef sandwich two tables over.

“He told me he had a two-hour layover at O’Hare,” Davis told the Tribune Monday. “So he came downtown for corned beef.”

Late in life, Friedkin regaled audiences at festivals and screenings, including a “Sorcerer” presentation at the Chicago Film Critics Association, with memories of his favorites — everything from “Citizen Kane” to “The Band Wagon” to “Psycho.” To the end, when he spoke, he sounded like Chicago and nowhere else.