Given the fact that the Medical Center was a fluorescent-lit environment, Roizman decided to take advantage of the built-in lighting and merely supplement it with his own fixtures. "I was strictly trained that color temperatures always had to match," he says. "But we just had the standard cool-white tubes, which didn’t match anything else temperature-wise. Instead, we’d just take a common fluorescent bank and clamp it to a C-stand. That setup worked fine as a key or fill, because fluorescents generally give off more light than you can see with the eye."
Location sites in Georgetown included the Key Bridge, Georgetown University, the narrow flight of 75 steps at Prospect and 36th Streets that lead down to M Street, the house near the top of the steps on Prospect Street, and Dahlgren Chapel, the last of which provided Roizman with one of his biggest lighting challenges on the show. He explains, "It was a big chapel full of stained-glass windows. Friedkin wanted to show the entire interior in an establishing shot, which required extensive lighting to give the place an ’available light’ look." The solution was to utilize the windows, simulating daylight with Brute arcs mounted on 30’ parallels.
Scenes shot on the Georgetown University campus included the "filming" of Chris MacNeil’s motion picture, during which Blatty and Roizman make fleeting cameos with Ellen Burstyn under the glare of Brute arcs. The cinematographer states with a laugh, "I don’t know if anybody really notices it, but I purposely lit that scene to make it look lit. Maybe they think I just screwed up! I rarely used lights outside back then, but I just wanted to do something that looked like we were making a ’movie,’ so I thought to mount a big arc on a crane with a camera, which we see in another shot. As for my bit part in the scene, I just pantomimed some stuff with Blatty. It was my one brief moment, and I didn’t even get screen credit."
The Exorcist contains many indelible images, including the sinister nighttime shot of Father Merrin arriving at Regan’s home to perform the exorcism a sequence shot outside the location house on Prospect Street. Arriving by taxi, the priest pauses outside as a dense fog swirls around him. The mood is further enhanced by an unearthly shaft of light which emanates from the second-floor window of the possessed girl’s bedroom and falls upon Merrin’s silhouetted figure. "That’s the film’s signature shot," remarks Roizman, who notes that it also became the film’s famous key art. "We spent two nights setting it up. Interestingly, the still photograph used for the poster was taken during a rehearsal. It’s a wonderful shot, but that’s not the way the scene looks in the movie.
"Technically speaking, it’s interesting how we had to do the lighting, because Billy insisted that the shade on the window be pulled down. Well, if the shade is down and it’s opaque, how are you going to get a shaft of light out of it?"
The wing supposedly containing Regan’s room was actually a partial facade added to the location house, so Roizman and his crew had some options in dealing with Friedkin’s idea. The cinematographer recalls, "We wound up building a platform behind the window frame, and we put a Brute arc on it. We then backed the shade away from the window about six feet and lit it separately. By putting the arc to one side between the shade and the window frame, I could get a clean shaft of light that looked as if it was coming from the shade although it was actually coming from between the shade and the frame.
"The shaft didn’t quite hit Max von Sydow, though, so I had a 2K lamp put down in the street directly behind his final position and aimed right at the camera it’s actually in the frame. As he stepped into position, we brought it up on a dimmer. That created the aura, or halo, around him.
"When we did the rehearsal and the still photographer snapped his picture it was so foggy that you couldn’t see this backlight lamp until we brought it up. But as soon as we went for our first take, the wind blew away a lot of the smoke and you could see it. After the take, Friedkin asked, ’How’s that for everybody?’ I said, ’I’d like to do another one. We should get more smoke in here. We lost the feeling of the shaft and the fog’ His response was, ’Ah, it looks great, let’s move on.’ So we only did one take on that shot because Billy didn’t want to do it a second time, even after spending two nights on it."
Fortunately, the take was perfect almost. Roizman remembers, "In the dailies, the 2K lamp was clearly visible in the picture before we brought it up on the dimmer. It’s right there. My crew and I said, ’Uh, oh,’ but nobody else ever noticed it. I never said a word about it, and to this day, nobody’s ever said anything.
"In my mind, there is no shot in any film that’s unimportant," he adds. "The director may think, ’This is a throwaway, let’s move on to something bigger and better.’ That’s where a director would sometimes have to hold me back to keep me from taking too long, because I want to make every shot perfect."
The prologue set in Iraq was the last segment of the film to be shot, and after spending the better part of a year working in Georgetown and the stages in New York, Roizman admits that he felt "a great deal of relief" when it was made clear that he would not be joining the skeleton production crew headed for the Middle East. His replacement was director of photography Billy Williams, BSC, who brilliantly rendered the country in blazing desert tones which offered a distinct counterpoint to the overall coolness of the rest of the picture. "I was very pleased with what Billy Williams did," Roizman says. "It was different from what I’d done, which was just the way it should have been."
Unfortunately, due to his commitments to a subsequent picture, Roizman was unable to do the color timing on The Exorcist, and didn’t see a final print until the film’s premiere. "Billy did a wonderful job of overseeing the timing," he maintains. "I was very excited by what I saw." The cinematographer adds, however, that at the time, because color-reversal internegatives were used to make release prints, "the only really good prints came from the original negative the others were really a crap shoot. Sometimes you got lucky, but sometimes"
After opening in limited release on December 26, 1973, The Exorcist became a huge popular success and played for months on end, grossing over $165 million domestically ($416 million when adjusted for inflation) during its initial run. A $12 million, major-studio production, the film almost single-handedly lifted the horror genre out of the low-budget dungeon where it had languished since the heyday of Universal’s The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula and Frankenstein.
Among its many honors, The Exorcist earned 10 Academy Award nominations, including nods for Best Cinematography and Best Picture. However, the film only earned Oscar statuettes for Best Adapted Screenplay (William Peter Blatty) and Best Sound (Robert Knudson and Chris Newman).
For the film’s 1979 re-release, 70mm prints were struck in order to take advantage of the stereo sound processes that were then only available in that format. Roizman was not able to oversee the blow-up, and recalls with a laugh, "I just went to see it at the theater as another Joe Schmoe in the audience."
Questioned about the condition of The Exorcist’s original negative, Roizman responds, "I don’t think it’s been mishandled, but it isn’t in very good shape. The 35mm print we screened at the Chinese Theater was done at YCM in Burbank, but it had to be made from the original negative because the dupe negative that had been made some time ago was a disaster. Unfortunately, the original has a lot of dirt, tears and scratches, but it’s scheduled to be restored by YCM, and a new dupe negative will be made.
"The print we used for the recent screening was not a final approved print," he notes. "Both Billy and I had a lot of notes regarding corrections that still had to be made, but because of time considerations we went with what we had. Fortunately, the print was pretty good; it looked close to what it should look like."
Asked to assess his working relationship with Friedkin, whose tempestuous nature has been explored in several "tell-all" books about 1970s Hollywood, Roizman offers, "There was a chemistry there for producing good work. I always felt as if I contributed a tremendous amount to the two pictures we did together. I have always thought of myself as sometimes being a pain in the ass to a lot of directors because I would get into their area by making comments about the performances and suggestions about shots. A lot of directors wanted to make all of those decision themselves, but my feeling was, ’I’ll make the suggestion and they can take it or leave it.’ At the same time, Friedkin made major contributions to what I was doing by letting me do my work and encouraging me to do my best."
This article contains material from an interview that previously appeared in AC Feb. 1974. The author thanks film historian Trevor Wilsmer for his enthusiastic support.
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