Before Justice League, there was the Exorcist Prequel

[larsknudsen]

Okay, getting tired of seeing a bunch of posts about how the Snyder Cut of Justice League is unprecedented. It's happened before with the Exorcist Prequel.

Warner Bros. and Morgan Creek spent $30 million on a version directed by Paul Schrader. The executives felt that it wasn't "gory" / scary enough, so they spent another $50 million on re-shoots with director Renny Harlin. This included re-casting two major speaking roles, new scenes, and extensive CGI. After the Harlin version bombed at the box office, Morgan Creek allowed Schrader to "complete" his version, which was also released in theaters and on home video.

Both versions are available in the Exorcist Anthology.

Here's an excellent article about what happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/m...st-take-2.html

When "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist," directed by Paul Schrader, opens nationally on May 20, some filmgoers may have the strange feeling they have seen it before. "Dominion" bears a not at all coincidental similarity to Renny Harlin's "Exorcist: The Beginning," a disappointment at the box office last August.

Mr. Schrader's film, the "original" prequel, was shelved by Morgan Creek Productions, an independent film company, in 2003 for being insufficiently scary. The company then hired Mr. Harlin to remake it. Morgan Creek, which had a distribution deal with Warner Brothers at the time, released the Harlin version with a single screening for critics the night before, usually a bad omen.

Perhaps someday a cinemathèque will present both versions in a simultaneous, side-by-side screening. The dueling films could provide fodder for a textual analysis of the auteur theory, with almost identical material yielding wildly different results in the hands of two temperamentally opposed artists: Mr. Schrader, the thoughtful, restrained art-house filmmaker ("Affliction"), and Mr. Harlin, the vigorous director of Hollywood action films ("Cliffhanger").

Both prequels star the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard ("Breaking the Waves") as a young version of Father Merrin, the Roman-Catholic priest played by Max von Sydow in William Friedkin's hugely successful 1973 film based on William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel. And both tell the story of Father Merrin's first encounter with demonic possession when, working for the Vatican in the years after World War II, he investigates the discovery of a perfectly preserved Byzantine church buried in the East African desert.

How these two movies came to be made is a story as tortured and complex as any Hollywood thriller. The notion of an "Exorcist" prequel dates back several years to when Morgan Creek, the owners of the franchise, commissioned a script from William Wisher, a writer of "Terminator 2." That script was rewritten by Caleb Carr, the author of the best-selling novel "The Alienist," and attracted the attention of the Hollywood veteran John Frankenheimer. Frankenheimer signed on to direct and had begun casting the film when he died in July 2002 at 72.

Rather than abandon the project, James G. Robinson, the Morgan Creek chairman, turned the film over to Mr. Schrader. As the director of "Light Sleeper" (1992) and "Auto Focus" (2002), and the writer of "Taxi Driver" (1976) and "Raging Bull" (with Mardik Martin, 1980), Mr. Schrader possessed impeccable art-house credentials, but had not directed a mainstream genre film since "Cat People" in 1982.

Mr. Schrader shot on location in Morocco and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. But when the rough cut was screened for Mr. Robinson, he was reportedly disappointed to find that Paul Schrader had made a Paul Schrader movie, rather than a hyperkinetic action picture filled with gore and scary effects.

As was widely reported in the trade papers at the time, Mr. Robinson brought in Mr. Harlin for a couple of weeks of retakes with Mr. Skarsgard and the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The original script was rewritten by Alexi Hawley to introduce more shock sequences.

"It wasn't really a script," Mr. Skarsgard said of the rewrite, by telephone from his home in Stockholm, "but just a bunch of ideas about how to make film scarier, basically by throwing in unmotivated scares in every second scene. I didn't like it and I didn't want to do it. But then Renny Harlin came on, who I've worked with before, on the 'Deep Blue Sea,' and who is a friend.

"In many ways, he's the opposite of Paul Schrader, so it was hard to imagine him working with Paul Schrader's material. But gradually Renny turned it into another movie, and got Morgan Creek to reshoot the entire film -- or rather, make an entirely different film."

Mr. Harlin's manager said he was traveling and could not be reached for comment for this article.

Using the standing sets of the church interior at Cinecittà, Mr. Harlin created an R-rated film of rapid cuts, expressionistic camera angles, extensive computer-generated imagery and a strong dose of sex and violence. Mr. Schrader's film, also R-rated, featured a demure leading lady, Clara Bellar (cast by Frankenheimer), who was replaced by the former Bond girl Izabella Scorupco. Father Merrin went from a withdrawn, tortured man suffering a crisis of faith to a sort of swashbuckling hero with a gun in his hand. The climax of Mr. Schrader's film, in which Father Merrin has a theological discussion with a preternaturally handsome demon (the pop star Billy Crawford) gave way to an apocalyptic free-for-all in Mr. Harlin's film.

"Exorcist: The Beginning" received largely negative reviews ("singularly fails to deliver any palpable shivers," Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times) and went on to earn a disappointing $41 million in domestic gross, not much for a film that cost a reported $80 million ($30 million for the Schrader version and $50 for the Harlin one).

In a recent e-mail exchange, Mr. Blatty, the author of the original novel, recalled going to see the Harlin version with Mr. Schrader at a multiplex in Bethesda, Md.: "After a slam-bang opening sequence, Harlin's prequel deteriorated into what was surely the most humiliating professional experience of my life, particularly the finale. I don't blame Renny Harlin, for he gave Morgan Creek, I promise you, precisely what Morgan Creek demanded: not shocking obscenity, but shocking vulgarity."

(Mr. Blatty had his own experience with Morgan Creek in 1990 when he directed an adaptation of his nonsupernatural novel "Legion" for the company. After much wrangling and reshooting, and the last minute addition of an exorcism, the film was released as "The Exorcist III." Mr. Blatty subsequently lampooned the experience in his satirical novel "Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing.")

Last fall, Mr. Schrader heard from the film editor Tim Silano that Morgan Creek was trying to reassemble his version, with an eye toward releasing it on DVD or on cable. The director volunteered to work with Mr. Silano, and with a minimal budget they assembled a score and completed a sound mix. In March, the movie received good notices at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film, good enough to interest Morgan Creek and Warner Brothers in a theatrical release.

The tricky job of positioning "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist," as Mr. Schrader's version came to be called, has fallen to Brian Robinson, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Morgan Creek, and a son of the producer who originally rejected it. Rather than give "Dominion" the 2,803-screen release that "Exorcist: The Beginning" received, he decided to aim the film at the specialized audience that has long supported Mr. Schrader.

"It's on a limited release pattern of 110 screens, so the plan is to release it and see how it plays," Mr. Robinson said. "The Renny Harlin version was a much more commercially shot horror film, and this one is much more cerebral. The masses that want to see these 'Alien vs. Predator' movies want to see much more graphic violence. Paul's version is much more about the terror that resides in your own mind."