William Peter Blatty, best known for writing The Exorcist, died Thursday of myeloma - five days after his 89th birthday and missing Friday the 13th by one day. Blatty got lucky because his writing got a financial boost early on - he won $10,000 to finance it on Groucho Marx's TV game show You Bet Your Life in 1961. In 1964 he co-wrote the screenplay to the second live-action Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, and he was off and running. I am extremely critical of most fiction, but let me tell you The Exorcist kicks ass. My mother half-jokingly gave me her copy in the mid-'90s while I was in college, thinking I would enjoy a genuine artifact of 1970s pop culture. Damned if I didn't have that thing read in two nights, and then ran out to my local Blockbuster to rent a VHS copy of the movie, which didn't disappoint either. In Memoriam, here's a 1984 interview with Blatty and the The Exorcist cast on Good Morning America. Nice to remember a time when knowledgeable TV hosts actually did some research on their interview subjects and didn't fawn over them or adopt smug attitudes. And then on to Alpo!
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Walburgh's BlogMostly retro, mainly music, but generally whatever's on my mind. Archives
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