Director
William Friedkin's two most famous films,
The French Connection (1971) and
The Exorcist (1973), both begin in a foreign country, in which something in that country is brought over to
America and then dealt with by American "authorities" in that field.
The French Connection has drugs coming from France and then dealt with by American narcotics officers;
The Exorcist has a demonic presence (from an idol) coming from Iraq to America, and dealt with by American priests. Friedkin's memoir,
The Friedkin Connection, has just been published.
One of his five best books on film directors, as told to the
Wall Street Journal:
Elia Kazan: A Life
by Elia Kazan (1988)
This is a book I've read several times over many years—an inspiration to me in its frankness. Elia Kazan doesn't spare himself. After he directed his first feature, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," he returned to New York: "I sat alone in my room in the Royalton 
Hotel . . . ," he writes, "and thought how worthless my life was. . . . It was just another movie. . . . It was mushy. . . . The whole thing was poverty all cleaned up." His confessions are those of a man who is both humble and arrogant: "I am a mediocre director except when a play or film touches a part of my life's experiences." From his apprenticeship as a shy jack-of-all-trades with the Group Theatre in the 1930s to his emergence in the 1940s and '50s as the leading director of Broadway plays, including "Death of a Salesman" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," he went on to direct some of the best American films: "On the Waterfront," "East of Eden," "A Face in the Crowd." His odyssey reads like an epic of the 20th century itself.
Read about
the other books on Friedkin's list.
Elia Kazan: A Life is one of
Stefan Kanfer's five best books on remarkable Hollywood lives and
Richard Schickel's five best show-biz biographies.
--Marshal Zeringue
The Wu Ming Foundation is a collective of novelists based in Italy. They are the authors of several novels. As of springtime 2013, four of them are available in English: Q, 54, Manituana and Altai.self-appointed mundumugu (witch doctor) of the community, this is a dream come true. It goes without saying that things don't go as he expected, but after the predictable failure of the utopian programme, Kirinyaga becomes a much more intriguing book, a book on Koriba's return to a transfigured, futuristic Nairobi and the unrelenting utopian impulse which makes him a stranger in a strange city. He's got only two friends: an old man and a clone of Ahmed of Marsabit (the most famous elephant in the history of Kenya). When he achieves a creative synthesis between utopian impulse and death drive, he finds a way out.
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