William Peter Blatty

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William Peter Blatty bigraphy, stories - Novelist, screenwriter

William Peter Blatty : biography

January 7, 1928 –

William Peter Blatty (born January 7, 1928) is an American writer and filmmaker. The novel The Exorcist, written in 1971, is his one well-known novel; he also penned the subsequent screenplay version of the film, for which he won an Academy Award. He also wrote and directed the sequel, The Exorcist III: Legion.

His most recent works include the novels Elsewhere (2009), Dimiter (2010), and Crazy (2010). He is also featured in the upcoming 2013 Smoke And Mirrors anthology, featuring the teleplay "Hell Hospital" and the treatment "Faith".

Career

In the 1950s, Blatty worked as the public relations director at Loyola University of Los Angeles and as the Director of Publicity at the University of Southern California. Blatty later wrote an article published in the Saturday Evening Post about meeting movie stars in Hollywood while posing as "Prince Xeer", a fictitious blacksheep son of King Saud of Saudi Arabia. To promote his first book, Which Way to Mecca, Jack?, Blatty was a contestant on the Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life, winning $10,000: enough money to enable him to quit his job and write full-time.

In 1959, Blatty ghost-wrote "Dear Abby’s" (Abigail van Buren’s) bestselling book "Dear Teenager," for which she was praised for her "matronly wit and wisdom" and for which she was named "Mother of the Year," twin honors that the author "to this day" has professed he still isn’t sure "how to feel about," and then in 1960 he published Which Way to Mecca, Jack?, which dealt humorously with both his early life and his work at the United States Information Agency in Lebanon. He then published the comic novels John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1963), I, Billy Shakespeare (1965), and Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane (1966). Though he achieved great critical success with these books — Marvin Levin in the New York Times, for example, led off a review with "Nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty, a gifted virtuoso who writes like (S.J.) Perelman", sales and commercial acceptance were lacking.

It was at this point that Blatty began a fruitful collaboration with director Blake Edwards, writing scripts for comedy films such as A Shot in the Dark (1964), What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Gunn (1967), and Darling Lili (1970), a musical starring Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson. Without Edwards, Blatty also worked on comedy screenplays as "Bill Blatty", two such credits being the Danny Kaye film The Man from the Diner’s Club (1963) and the Warren Beatty-Leslie Caron film "Promise Her Anything" (1965). Others were the film adaptation of John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! (1965), and The Great Bank Robbery (1969).

Later Blatty resumed novel writing. Allegedly retiring to a remote and rented chalet in woodland off Lake Tahoe, Blatty wrote The Exorcist, a story about a twelve-year-old girl being possessed by a powerful demon, that remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 straight weeks and at the Number One spot for 17 of them. It would eventually be translated by himself and director William Friedkin into one of the most famous and controversial mainstream horror movies of all time. According to Blatty, Friedkin edited the film in a New York Fifth Avenue office building with the number 666. Blatty would go on to win an Academy Award for his Exorcist screenplay, as well as Golden Globes for Best Picture (he produced the film) and Best Writing. He has made the claim that in its first weeks of publication, The Exorcist novel, despite excellent reviews and much advertising by the publisher, Harper and Row, was deemed a failure and was being returned by bookstores by "the carload" until what he calls "an extraordinary intervention by Fate" which he refuses to describe.