Would They Ever Release The Footage Of Linda Undubbed?

Hey howdy, I did post that trailer in an entry on here (I have no idea where). It was the original theatrical trailer and, quite frankly from what I can remember, Linda’s voice with the sound effects added, did not go over well when audiences heard it in the theater. Friedkin was just brilliant in being dissatisfied with Blair’s voice with the stupid “echoing” sound that the sound guys added. It sucked and he put Mercedes voice in place of Blair’s.

BTW, I read an article years ago where Mercedes said that Friedkin was full of crap about the, “McCambridge came into my mind’s eye …,” when he was talking about “his unique abilities of thinking about her.” In fact, she said Friedkin’s contact with her came only AFTER Executive Producer, Noel Marshall, her friend, suggested it. Friedkin is such a egotist and car salesman 🙂

From the official The Exorcist 25th Anniversary website:

“Throughout the filming of THE EXORCIST, with all the visual challenges entailed, one issue had never been resolved — how to make Regan MacNeil’s voice sound as powerfully horrendous as Blatty’s screenplay demanded. Even before shooting began, sound recordist Chris Newman and audio expert Ken Nordine had attempted to find a way to distort Blair’s own naturally childish tones and twist them into something demonic and overpowering. The results were poor, producing merely an electronic growl with none of the threatening subtleties implied in both the novel and script.

As Friedkin now candidly admits; “When I started making THE EXORCIST, I had no idea how we were going to do the demon voice. Bill Blatty gives you a clue in the novel, saying that it’s something horrific, horrendous, shattering, booming, whatever…but how do you actually achieve what those adjectives suggest? When we were filming those scenes, Linda Blair did all the original dialogue, which Chris Newman recorded. Then we went back and forth with Ken Nordine doing some experimentation, both with Linda’s voice, and with his own voice, fed through a computer, distorted and amplified. When I listened to the result I was extremely disappointed because it just sounded like a man’s voice dubbed onto the face of a child. I just couldn’t figure out how to fix it, because I knew I wanted a voice that was neutral, neither male nor female, but with both male and female characteristics. Who the hell sounds like that? Who has ever sounded like that? In the end I just threw myself on the mercy of the movie god and the name Mercedes McCambridge came into my head.

“McCambridge was a great actress who had won an Academy Award™ for her work in ALL THE KING’S MEN but before that she had done a number of memorable radio programs for people like Orson Welles. It turned out she was in Dallas, Texas, doing WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF on stage. I spoke to her on the phone, and to my joy she sounded exactly as she had sounded thirty years earlier on the radio. I told her about this project that I was working on, and she agreed to come and see it.”

“We flew her out to Los Angeles and she watched the picture and said; ‘OK, I’ll have a crack at it. In fact I think I can do most of it with my own voice.’ So then we went into a sound-stage at Warner Bros. where she worked for maybe three weeks doing the demon voice. And she really went for it. She was chain-smoking; swallowing raw eggs; getting me to tie her to a chair; all these painful things just to produce the sound of that demon in torment. And as she did it the most curious things would happen in her throat. Double and triple sounds would emerge at once, wheezing sounds, very much akin to what you can imagine a person inhabited by various demons would sound like.”

“It was really something else. She’d just sit there in that chair looking at the screen and go ‘Aaaaaaaarghh’ and you would hear these things multiplied in her throat; these strange counterpoint noises; little skittering whistles and strange creaking rattles. When she was done, we took the speech that she had dubbed to Linda Blair’s mouth, and occasionally we enhanced it, adding animal noises and sounds. But basically she performed it, under great duress. She knew exactly what was needed to go out and produce this effect, and I was stunned at what she put herself through, and what she allowed me to put her through in order to accomplish this. It was way beyond the call of duty, and if you were going to say that there was a single element that really made the film, then it could well be the sound quality that she achieved. It was pure inspiration.”

The involvement of Mercedes McCambridge on the soundtrack of THE EXORCIST later became a source of heated controversy when Warners failed to credit her on the first run prints of the movie. Exactly why McCambridge’s name was initially omitted from the credits is unclear: Friedkin claims she specifically declined any on-screen acknowledgement, while McCambridge insists she fully expected it. Whatever the truth, her name appears on all but the first thirty-odd prints of THE EXORCIST, although not specifically as “The Voice of the Demon” as she would have preferred; instead her credit reads simply “And Mercedes McCambridge”.