[granville1]

You’re a great audience… I’ve probably addressed just about everything I can remember… here’s another one, nothing earth-shaking.

A panel of people involved with the film was on a TV talk show – maybe Mike Douglas, I can’t recall exactly – and Fr. William O’Malley was one of them. He made a pitch for the reality of possession, something like, “As a Christian, I believe that there is a spiritual realm where God and spirits and angels and saints and people who have died live. For example, I believe that my dead loved ones go on living in heaven after death. Our spirits do go on living. But not all of them have to be good.” It was a short step from that assertion to the claim that some evil spirits can influence our world of the physically-living, including possessing some of us.

At about this time, The Catholic Digest (then a moderately conservative Catholic popular magazine similar to Reader’s Digest) ran a several-page article on O’Malley training Jason Miller for the Karras role, with anecdotes about movie-making vis-a-vis The Exorcist.
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If anyone is interested I would be happy to dig around amongst my old movie memorabilia to see if I have any contemporary accounts about The Exorcist. If memory serves, I might have that Commonweal issue I mentioned in another post – and maybe some other stuff. If I still have it, it’s probably in a musty box along with my “Jaws” clippings…

[Blizzi]

Dear me… Do you have the article? Tha would be gold…

[granville1]

I’ll look for the stuff and post it over the weekend if I can find it. Thanks for the interest.

[Blizzi]

Very, very appreciated.

[granville1]

Thanks, Blizzi – I will be posting a couple articles from the 70s in the “other topics” section this weekend. Thanks for your continued interest.

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