The Best Movies About Filmmakers, and ‘Boorman and the Devil’

Key takeaways

• The Exorcist II: The Heretic was a deliberate rejection of its predecessor, not a failed continuation. Director John Boorman didn't want to make a sequel, resisted the title "Exorcist II," and told Warner Bros. he wanted to explore transcendence rather than horror. Letts calls the result simply "not scary" and says Richard Burton, deep in alcoholism during the shoot, gives a checked-out, sweaty performance that sinks the film's ambitions.
• Studio negligence let a visionary director make an expensive disaster with zero pushback. Both hosts note that no one at Warner Bros. seemed to intervene despite dailies showing a movie with no scares, odd bug's-eye-view shots, and a "synchronizer" gadget that Letts says "looks like a tape recorder with a light on it." Fennessy frames this as the last gasp of New Hollywood-era trust in auteurs before studios clamped down after Heaven's Gate.
• The two disagree on whether artists should be judged by their failures or only their successes. Fennessy argues bad work deserves scrutiny because it reveals an artist's choices (citing Spielberg's The BFG and Hackman's paycheck roles); Letts counters that failures matter but shouldn't define a legacy—Boorman's eventual obituary, he predicts, will barely mention Exorcist II next to triumphs like Deliverance and Point Blank.
• Deliverance remains a five-star classic that's quietly fallen out of the cultural conversation. Letts notes younger viewers, including his 35-year-old actor nanny, have never heard of it, and pushes back on Tarantino's claim that casting novelist James Dickey as the sheriff hurt the third act; arguing Boorman was after mythic themes of masculinity, not suspense.
• The rise of "failure documentaries" reflects a broader shift in how cinephilia treats bad or unfinished films. The conversation surveys a subgenre including Jodorowsky's Dune, Lost in La Mancha, Lost Soul (Island of Dr. Moreau), and Best Worst Movie (about the cult favorite Troll 2), arguing these films now get the same reverent treatment once reserved for masterpieces.
• Letts distinguishes real on-set chaos from Hollywood mythology, saying he's rarely witnessed it himself. He recalls Matt Johnson laughing at how calmly he takes notes, and says Meryl Streep told him the same thing; dysfunction like Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando's reported behavior on Island of Dr. Moreau is rare enough that it becomes its own documentary subject.

Notable moments

• Letts recounts his brother seeing Exorcist II before ever seeing the original, hating it, then avoiding The Exorcist for decades before finally watching it and calling it "a freaking masterpiece."
• Fennessy jokes that Italian horror directors of the Fulci and Argento era seem to have "checked out Exorcist II" from the video store instead of the original, absorbing its operatic house-collapse and locust imagery wholesale.
• Letts on judging artists: "I don't think one out of ten is [bad]... if you make one great movie and you make nine, so it took you nine bad movies to get to the one great one."
• Fennessy highlights Ennio Morricone's score, noting Boorman asked him to strip out a melodic element to make it more "erratic, unusual, upsetting"; a rare unambiguous artistic win in the film.
• William Friedkin, per the documentary, held Boorman in open contempt for making the sequel and relished a story about a preview audience turning to point at the executives responsible.
• Letts singles out De Palma (the Baumbach/Paltrow documentary) as his favorite director profile, calling it "a big bowl of Oreos for me," and reveals his favorite De Palma film is Carrie.
• The hosts debate whether Bob Fosse or Ken Russell deserves a centenary deep-dive next year, with Letts favoring Russell since "everything is a swing" in his filmography.
• Letts describes narrowly avoiding cult-classic status himself, admitting he's never seen The Room and isn't sure he wants to experience its spoon-throwing theatrical rituals.

Time saved: 1 hour, 40 minutes.