Before director William Friedkin settled on Michael Oldfield's music to be the theme for "The Exorcist", he had originally commissioned a score from Lalo Schifrin, who had famously done soundtrack work for Nick mano fredda (1967), Ispettore Callaghan: il caso Scorpio è tuo! (1971), and the instantly recognizable Missione impossibile (1966) TV show theme. Schifrin's atonal Exorcist score was very much in the vein of Krzysztof Penderecki (whose "Cello Concerto No. 1" of Polymorphia was used in the film's final edit) with the addition of Bernard Herrmann-esque "fright stabs. Shifrin spoke of the incident recently to Score Magazine and how traumatizing it was to him: "The truth is that it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, but I have recently read that in order to triumph in your life, you may previously have some fails. What happened is that the director, William Friedkin, hired me to write the music for the trailer, six minutes were recorded for the Warner's edition of the trailer. The people who saw the trailer reacted against the film, because the scenes were heavy and frightening, so most of them went to the toilet to vomit. The trailer was terrific, but the mix of those frightening scenes and my music, which was also a very difficult and heavy score, scared the audiences away. So, the Warner Bros. executives said Friedkin to tell me that I must write less dramatic and softer score. I could easily and perfectly do what they wanted because it was way too simple in relevance to what I have previously written, but Friedkin didn't tell me what they said. I'm sure he did it deliberately" Friedkin, who was a notoriously mean and crazy puppetmaster, did not tell Schifrin to rework the old score, which is what the Studio executives told him to do. Instead he commissioned Michael Oldfield to write a new score behind his back.

Film

Nessun dato in archivio