After my mom saw The Exorcist in ’73, she swore off horror films for good. That movie traumatised her, and she spent the next decade telling me how terrible horror movies were, and that she hated everything about them. Which probably explains why she side-eyed me when my head spun 360 degrees as a toddler a couple of years later. It also arguably explains why I love them so much. Especially The Exorcist.
Before William Friedkin directed The Exorcist, he made The French Connection in ’71. Over the span of just a couple of years, he directed two films that helped set the tone for the next twenty years of gritty action and horror cinema. That car chase alone became the benchmark every action director measured themselves against. Friedkin included.
But the decade after those peaks was rough. Sorcerer, The Brink’s Job, Cruising, Deal of the Century, each one further from the spotlight than the last, and by 1985 Friedkin was badly in need of a win. He found one in a novel by Gerald Petievich, a former Secret Service agent who’d written a crime story about chasing counterfeiters through Los Angeles. The two of them co-wrote the screenplay, Friedkin shot the whole thing on location with a stripped-down crew and a six million dollar budget, and it opened at number two behind Death Wish 3. It went on to gross over seventeen million, comfortably his biggest hit in a decade.
To get the counterfeiting process right on screen, Petievich even arranged to have a real counterfeiter paroled from prison to consult on the production, and the bills they made were so convincing that they leaked off set and alarmed the actual authorities. Those were the counterfeiter’s own hands in the close-ups instead of young Willem Dafoe.
Friedkin specifically sought out Wang Chung to score the film, the London post-punk duo who’d had a decent run on the US charts with Dance Hall Days, but were considerably less visible in their own country. In 1986, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” went to number two on the Billboard charts, while barely scraping into the UK top eighty. British bands that are better known in North America fascinate me. It’s a quirk that happens very rarely, but you get the odd phenomenon like The Outfield, or even Def Leppard.
Wanting to ‘Wang Chung Tonight’ eventually became a bit of a catch phrase, and honestly, I still Wang Chung fairly regularly. I’m Wang Chunging right now.
This is also one of my go-to 80’s neo-noirs, if you’re in the mood to visit the underbelly of 1985 Los Angeles without getting too much of it on you, this was Friedkin finally back in full form, critics and audiences finally agreed. It was also a movie my mom could enjoy.
-Pop
To Live and Die in L.A. arrived on Home Video this week in 1986, after a November 1st, 1985 theatrical release.