[fatherbowdern]

dsea, good point on the CGI “modeling effect” as that is really getting to the heart of our question. A small snippet from youtube on 3D facial modeling using one-shot 2D images is here. The graphic artists added teeth behind the mouths and facial expressions that worked their way into the cheek, jaw, and nose areas (of course, the computer does it at the command of the graphic artists, but it’s very effective).

In thought, making Linda R. Hager’s mouth the way they did (albeit it’s very short), CGI artists isolated each frame and increased the mouth to open with blood pouring from it. Watch the two scenes in slow-mo just as dsea did. You may want to turn the sound off as it is distracting when you’re doing an imagery comparison.

Also, just think about Forrest Gump and how they changed JFK’s mouth to look so real when he was giving the award to Gump. JFK is saying something entirely different than the line, “He said he’s gotta pee,” while they added Tom Hanks to the scene where he didn’t exist at all. (Probably through blue-screen isolation by melding the original film with the one already in existence.)

howdy, the snake-like filming was filmed, but it was after Linda R. Hager did her contortionist work. I wrote, “Oh, and the snake-tongue flicking out of Regan’s mouth was done after she (Hager) flipped around. IOW, after Linda R. Hager finished her scene …” Hager finished the flip and then the quick edits are put into place showing Blair with the snake-tongue flicking out of her mouth. Therefore, Hager was not involved in the snake-tongue scene because it would have looked like her instead of Blair.

The question that was asked by the 13-y-o in the posting I supplied from the Exorcist FAQ by William Friedkin is the one in which she asked Friedkin if there was an alternate spider-walk scene where Regan was slithering down the staircase in a snake-like fashion. That’s where Blatty responds with, “There was no alternate scene filmed.”

Also, I was “beta” member of The Exorcist’s 25th Anniversary re-release. On that official site, there is a statement about The Spider Walk:

THE SPIDER WALK
One of the most widely talked about “missing scenes” from The Exorcist is the eerie “Spider Walk” which appears in both Blatty’s novel and screenplay, but which was never included in the finished film. According to the director William Friedkin, “It was quite early in the story, and we hadn’t yet seen any of the massive manifestations that were to come. At that point in the narrative, I just thought it was too much.”

The entire sequence was filmed however, on April 11th, 1973, as special effects man Marcel Vercoutere remembers:

“According to the script, Regan was supposed to be at the top of the stairs where she would turn over, like a crab, and walk down the stairs upside down, with her arms moving about like a spider. She would come all the way down the stairs, then run into the foyer, chasing after Sharon and Chris.”

“Well, one of the New York people said they had figured a way to do this scene using a fishing pole and a rig. He went out and bought this very expensive, deep-sea fishing pole with a big giant reel. Then they got this gal [Linda R. Hager] who was a contortionist, and they turned her upside down and strapped this thing onto her. I told them it wouldn’t work, but they didn’t believe me, so this grip stood on the landing with this fishing pole, and the poor girl went down the stairs, and she crashed and got rapped pretty good!”

“So then I took over. I made a rig that was in the exact same position as the stairs, but up in the overhead. Then I put a carriage up there, put the girl into a harness, and connected them with flying wires. That way, she stayed perfectly level as she went down the stairs, and all she had to do was to let me know how high to have her so her hands and feet would just be touching the stairs.”

“We shot it that way, until she got to the landing at the bottom of the stairs, then all I had to do was release the rig and let her loose. I would let her go at just the right moment, and she would turn over, out of the rig and then finish the shot the right way up. We did it quite a few times, and as I remember, every time we shot it, it came out pretty good.” [Ahh, a repeat of the same scene, no blood, Mr. Vercoutere? 🙂 ]

In going back to Vercoutere’s original statement in his 1986 account about things getting “kinda bloody,” he doesn’t mention the blood in the re-released version nor in The FoG. Everyone is entitled to a brain fart! 🙂

Now, maybe WB will go back and fix Linda’s mouth when she says to Karras, “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell,” because the mouth and vocals don’t even come close! 😉

[ReganMacNeilfan]

Is one of the figures rarer? Cause I got the blood version for xmas and hope to get non blood version tomorrow at sometime. 🙂

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