William Friedkin's SORCERER Q&A; - July 14th, 2014 - Warren Oldtown Theatre, Wichita, KS!

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William Friedkin's SORCERER Q&A; - July 14th, 2014 - Warren Oldtown Theatre, Wichita, KS! Approximately 50 minutes. At the start of this video William Friedkin says I am the "SORCERER fan of the year!", but just as Ving Rhames couldn't in good conscience accept his Golden Globe for his amazing work in DON KING: ONLY IN AMERICA and ended up giving it to Jack Lemon for his performance in the William Friedkin directed 12 ANGRY MEN, I simply can't accept this title solely on my own but instead would like to share it with co-SORCERER-uberfans Tim Holder and Toby Roan. Tim drove 7 hours from Little Rock just to attend the Q&A; screening in Wichita while Toby has been writing a blog about SORCERER for the last several years endlessly spreading education and awareness of the film and lobbying for the film's restoration and eventual BluRay release. Thanks for coming to the movie Tim and thank you Toby for all the work and love you've dedicated to this great film! You can see Toby's blog here: http://sorcerer1977.wordpress.com/ PLEASE NOTE: We apologize for the rough technical presentation of this program. We had multiple issues with the Skype program resulting in a wide variety of audio dropouts, glitches, pops, distortions and sync problems. I've edited out some of the more problematic areas but have worked to keep the vast majority of the 50 minute program despite some considerably less than perfect quality. This video is now a Frankenstein-ish patchwork of varying pieces of video and sound pulled from 4 different recordings, all running at different frame rates, much of it originating largely out of sync. That said, the Wichita, KS screening of SORCERER was a huge success and a genuinely wonderful experience! The first night's Q&A; with director William Friedkin ("Bill") was just fantastic making it truly a night to remember. (Watch the video and see for yourself - the guy is simply great!) We sold out both of our 7pm shows and the 10pm shows also had excellent turnouts far outselling all of the new movies on the other screens at the Warren Oldtown! Thanks to Gary Miller and Aaron Wisdom for providing some of the video for this posting. And huge thanks to Mike, Kevin, Jameson, Dan, Josh Chapman, and the rest of the crew at the Warren Oldtown Theatre, Derek Richardson at Hero Complex Games and Entertainment, Logan Jonker at JX12 MEDIA, Mike Marlett and Jeremy Webster at F5, Rod Pocowatchit at the Wichita Eagle, Fletcher Powell at KMUW, Adam Williamson at We Know Motion, Shade Rupe for connecting us with Paramount Pictures and my wife Samantha for their unending support on these screenings and of course to William Friedkin and everybody who came out and supported this lost classic! To clarify a couple things about the Q&A;: I asked about the "wind" in the bridge crossing sequence hoping Friedkin would talk about the point where he decided the wind machines were not providing enough gust so he brought in two helicopters to hover above the trucks just out of frame. They had powerful rain towers blasting water, a few giant wind machines roaring away, water being pumped from other rivers to augment the water level, 100 production assistants were upstream throwing tree branches and debris into the river, and two helicopters hovering just overhead creating hurricane like gusts. Man I'd love to see some behind-the-scene footage from those days of shooting. I bring up the STAR WARS effect and my wanting to see SORCERER too after seeing the mesmerizing trailer on TV ultimately to say that I didn't know what the hell was wrong with audiences back then. I still believe the enormous success and phenomena of STAR WARS did hurt SORCERER but I don't really understand why because even as an 8-year-old kid I wanted to see both! I asked why he named it SORCERER, as this is the question I've received most about the movie, and I figured many in the audience would be wondering the same thing. One explanation he didn't offer was about fate being akin to an "evil wizard" or a "dark sorcerer" who refuses to let man change their destiny. And regarding what my wife said about THE EXORCIST playing on a 48 hour loop at our house: Back in 1996 I was working on a micro-budget horror film. To save money we moved into our basement and made the entire upstairs an FX lab to build all the monsters, so we had an odd commune of aspiring FX artists living with us and working around the clock. Instead of listening to music while we worked we often played movies for background noise and at one point had put on THE EXORCIST. As many know, those old Warner Bros. discs will only sit on the menu for a couple of cycles before they start playing the movie again automatically. After the second day Sam finally asked us to change the movie.