William Peter Blatty - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)

William Peter Blatty - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, Writer, Director, Producer, Actor.
January 7, 1928 - January 12, 2017 - American writer, screenwriter, and filmmaker
In 1959, Blatty, as a "black ghost", wrote the bestselling book, Dear Teen, for newspaper columnist Abigail van Buuren, who hosts the popular everyday advice column, Dear Abby. For this book, Van Buuren was named Mother of the Year, which inspired Blatty to write books under her own name. In 1949, the year of graduation from Georgetown University, one of the teachers of this Jesuit educational institution, Father Thomas W. Bermingham, invited his well-performing listener Blatty to take the problem of "the introduction of evil spirits into a person" as the topic of his diploma, and the future writer realized it. In 1951, he joined the military diplomatic service in the United States Air Force, with his corps stationed in Beirut, Lebanon. His first literary attempts date back to this time. His articles have been published in various magazines (The Saturday Evening Post, etc.). Gruvemuvestart After returning to the United States, Blatty served as Director of Public Affairs at the University of Southern California from 1957 to 1958. In 1959 he published his first book, the novel "Which Way to Mecca, Jack?" A year earlier, he starred in a small role as a policeman in the movie "No Place to Land." This was the beginning of his relationship with the big cinema, for which Blatty later wrote scripts for comedy films ("The Man from the Dining Club", 1963; "Shot in the Dark", 1964, etc.). He became one of the leading comedy writers in Hollywood. In the mid-60s, the author began collaborating with director Blake Edwards, for whom he wrote scripts for the films What Did You Do in the War, Dad? (1966), Gunn (1967), Lovely Lily (1970) .
Then comedies lost their former popularity, his career declined, and, unable to find a job as a screenwriter, Blatty rents a house near Lake Tahoe and starts working on a new novel. The history of its writing began long ago. In the late 1940s, Blatty, while a student at Georgetown University, first heard the story of the exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in Mount Rainer, Maryland. Then two Jesuit priests expelled the demon from the body of the boy, who had previously shown supernatural powers. He spoke fluently and swore in Latin, the bed under him moved around the room, and he also had great strength. An article by reporter Bill Brinkley about the incident was published in the Washington Post on August 20, 1949. According to one version, the beginning of the future book was given by a win of 10 thousand dollars on the Groucho Marx television show “You Bet Your Life”. And when host Groucho asked the winner what he was going to do with this amount of money, William replied that he was planning to quit his job to devote all his free time to work on the novel. But the novel took a long time to write, so at the time of writing, Blatty often lived on unemployment benefits. In another interview, Blatty says that he received the $ 10,000 in 1970 as an advance from Bantam Books .
After 9 months of hard work (14-18 hours a day) at the New York publishing house Harper & Row, to which Bantam Books sold the publishing rights, in May 1971 a circulation of 200,000 copies. an exorcism-themed book called "The Exorcist" was released and became a worldwide bestseller, staying in the tabloids for over a year. The Exorcist was published about a year later, in 1971, and although the publisher spent a lot of money to promote it, no one wanted to buy the book. Perhaps because the word Exorcist in its English name was not widely known at the time. After all, this is a Catholic term - Protestants traditionally did not stand on ceremony with the possessed and burned them at the stake. Sales only took off when Blatty got on the hit television talk show The Dick Cavett Show. He was only supposed to be on screen for a few minutes, but due to problems with the other guests (the program was broadcast live) Blatty got almost the entire program, and he talked about The Banisher for 45 minutes. When he explained plainly what Exorcist meant and what the book was about, they began to sell it like hot cakes, and it spent more than a year in the "tops" of bestsellers.
After that, the book was published in paperback with a circulation of 350,000 copies, and a cheap pocket edition - 4,000,000 in just the first six months. In subsequent years, 13 million copies were sold in the United States alone, and by 2006 it had withstood at least a hundred editions in many countries of the world. This was also facilitated by the successful film adaptation of the novel by director William Friedkin. The film "The Exorcist", released in 1973, became a classic not only of horror films, but also of world cinema. In it, the writer starred in a short role as a film producer for the main character. Since then, William Blatty has written mostly novels in which demons are present intertwined with non-standard turns of the human psyche, although, by the author's own admission, he was never attracted and is not attracted by horror and mystic novels. He had never even read such literature. Among his favorite authors, he noted Graham Green, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Nathan and Ray Bradbury. He wrote a work of a short form - a short story "Out there" (1999), in which he explained that the dead, being in the afterlife, do not understand that they are already dead. This 100-page novel was intended to be a novel, but Blatty did not expand on it. He wrote a script based on it.
Lived in Montecito, California, was married with seven children.

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Author: Jane Watson