fourak

Supposedly the MTA Public Relations guy was fired because of the Subway scene in The French Connection. What really happened??? I got this excerpt out of William Friedkin Memoirs: Their main offices were in lower Manhattan. We met with the head honcho, a middle-aged African American. With me were D’Antoni and Kenny Utt, our production manager. We had no script of the chase, but I described the concept as D’Antoni and I worked it out on our walk. The TA guy listened with interest, occasionally nodding, sometimes frowning. When we finished, I asked him how fast an El train could go at top speed. “About fifty miles an hour,” he said. “Great—that means a car going full speed could theoretically catch up to it.” He nodded. “I suppose so.” Phil jumped in. “Is it possible we could use one of the two lines—either Myrtle Avenue or Coney Island?” The TA guy smiled. “Your idea is far-fetched. No one’s ever jacked a train, and we don’t want to give people ideas. What you’re asking would be difficult, damn difficult.” I started to think how I might “steal” the sequence. Phil and Kenny told the TA guy it was the most important scene in our film, and we might have to go to Chicago to shoot the whole picture, which would take a lot of New Yorkers off the clock. That was bullshit, of course—we could never move the production out of New York—but we were trying to appeal to the guy any way we could. He shook his head. “Awfully difficult.” It seemed hopeless. We thanked him and asked if he’d let us shoot the subway cat and mouse between Popeye and Charnier. “That could be arranged,” he said. We didn’t want to push our luck further, so we got up to leave. As we got to the door, he said, “Just a minute.” We turned back. “I said it would be difficult, not impossible.” “What would it take?” Kenny asked. Without hesitation the Transit Authority guy said, “If I let you shoot what you just described, I’d be in a world of trouble.” “Right,” said Phil. A long pause. Remember, Phil is a Sicilian from the Bronx. “What would it take?” “Forty K and a one-way ticket to Jamaica.” “Why one way?” Kenny Utt asked. “’Cause when your film comes out, I’ll be fired.” And that’s what it took. We had a total budget of $1.5 million, that was tight, but Dick Zanuck understood. He approved the extra forty grand and Kenny put it in a separate account so it could be paid under the table. When the film opened, the honcho was fired, and I hope he lived happily ever after in Jamaica. Even though we got a green light, the Transit Authority placed a number of restrictions on how and when we could film. There was no way we’d be allowed to stage a train crash. Owen and I came up with a simple solution: we could park the front car of our train directly behind the rear of another, and pull away quickly, filming in backward motion, eight frames per second instead of twenty four. This gave the illusion of a subjective view of hurtling into a stationary train. What makes it believable is the sound on impact which we added later; also, the next immediate shot was a handheld angle showing the passengers falling and thrashing around as Nicoli is thrown to the floor of the train and loses his gun. We were allowed to use a section of the Stillwell Avenue line from Bay Fiftieth to Sixty-Second Street in Brooklyn. For most of the action we used El car number 6609, which is now in the Transit Authority Museum on permanent display. We could only film from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon to avoid rush hours. The chase was filmed over nonconsecutive days from December 1970 to January 1971.