The Hook: The daily "Random Film of the Day" featured A Shot in the Dark (1964) by Blake Edwards with Peter Sellers. I caught one detail that usually goes unnoticed in the credits: among the film's screenwriters is William Peter Blatty, the very same man who nine years later would write the novel The Exorcist and the screenplay for the scariest film in Hollywood history. A bridge you don't see right away: the same person traveled from light comedy about an inspector who crashes through doors to a possessed twelve-year-old girl in Georgetown. This film is also a perfect illustration of how Peter Sellers hijacked a franchise from the screenplay itself and from the entire industry's Blu-ray box sets: the film was conceived without Clouseau, but Sellers, invited for a bit part, issued an ultimatum — either Clouseau becomes the lead or he walks. And he would have walked. Checked the archive — blatty, exorcist, and clouseau franchise origin don't appear together. The topic isn't about AI, doesn't repeat, and has a rare socio-engineering cross-section: how the big Hollywood machine sometimes loses the battle to one stubborn comedian, and how a comedy screenwriter transforms into someone who terrifies the entire world.
In 1963, Mirisch studios was preparing a screen adaptation of Harry Kurnitz's Broadway hit "A Shot in the Dark" (1961), which he in turn had adapted from Marcel Achard's French play "L'Idiote" (1960). The screenplay was initially written by Alec Coppel and Norman Krasna. No Clouseau in the project — it was a standard detective comedy with the plot "innocent maid keeps ending up next to corpses." Budget — Mirisch, distributor — United Artists, director — Anatole Litvak.
Sellers was invited for a bit part (analogous to how in the first The Pink Panther from 1963 he played Clouseau as comic accompaniment to Niven's jewel thief). Blake Edwards had already shot that first picture and, according to Pink Panther historians, had a special rapport with Sellers: they improvised scenes on the fly together, and a significant portion of the best gags in the first film weren't from the screenplay. When Walter Mirisch invited Edwards to replace Litvak, he refused — and only agreed under three conditions:
Edwards and his wife, screenwriter Maurice Richlin, tore down Coppel/Krasna's original screenplay and wrote a new one where Inspector Clouseau — lumbering, incompetent, in a terrible wig — becomes the center of the plot. This made Walter Matthau drop out (he was playing the lead role and didn't want to become "second tier"). Three weeks before shooting, Sophia Loren withdrew — throat problems. Shirley MacLaine declined. Romy Schneider signed on but was forced to leave due to obligations for Good Neighbor Sam (1964) — and then Elke Sommer entered the game, literally buying herself out of a German contract with part of her fee to sign with MGM.
Filming started November 18, 1963 at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood. Four days later Kennedy was shot in Dallas. And a few weeks after filming wrapped, Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers swore never to work together again — their relationship had become that heated. The vow lasted exactly four years: in 1968 they made The Party and triumphantly returned to Pink Panther in 1975 with The Return of the Pink Panther.
Here's that non-obvious detail: a film "about Clouseau" started as a film "without Clouseau." And not just anywhere, but at the level of screenplay, budget, and casting. Sellers didn't just hijack a franchise — he hijacked a separate film inside the franchise. This is the rarest case where an actor changes the contract of reality so deeply that the studio is forced to write off losses on Matthau, reassemble the cast in a week, and completely rewrite the tone of the picture. Edwards later said in interviews that 60% of what Sellers does on screen wasn't in the screenplay — it was improvisation, rehearsed overnight or born between takes.
And here's where William Peter Blatty appears.
By 1964, Blatty was a Lebanese immigrant, former USIA journalist, Oscar nominee for a short film, broke in Hollywood. By 1963 he'd already sold several screenplays, but none became hits, and he was frankly struggling. By his own recollection (in his autobiography Cries and Silences, 1988), he worked as a copywriter and wrote at night, dreaming of something bigger. The Harry Kurnitz adaptation was for him his first notable work in the mainstream — the screenplay was signed by Blake Edwards and Blatty (according to other sources — Edwards, Blatty, and the original playwright Harry Kurnitz remained in the credits, which is typical for theatrical adaptations).
The film made $12.3 million in the US — a solid result for 1964 (US population — 192 million, ticket — $1). Blatty got a check and went back to the desk. From this point he began a collaboration with Edwards: What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Gunn (1967), Darling Lili (1970) with Julie Andrews — none of these films became hits, and Blatty in the early '70s considered himself "a writer whose career never materialized."
Then — 1971. The novel "The Exorcist" comes out. It holds on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 consecutive weeks (17 of them at number one), selling 13 million copies in the US alone. Blatty himself adapts the novel into a screenplay and wins the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (1974). William Friedkin's film grosses $441 million worldwide on a $12 million budget — one of the most profitable films in history at that point, and it becomes the first horror film nominated for Best Picture.
This is the bridge I didn't expect to see in a random film of the day. The same person in nine years traveled from a screenplay about an absurd Frenchman who crashes through the doors of his own apartment to a possessed girl from whom a priest exorcises a demon according to the 1677 protocol. Both there and here — the structure of possession, ritual, investigation of what's hidden beneath the surface, and — importantly — the priest as detective, slowly unraveling clues to an invisible crime.
At first glance — nothing. One is funny to hiccups, the other frightening to the bone. But if you look at the structure, the similarity is strange and almost parodic.
Both films are the story of a competent investigator going against obvious evidence. In A Shot in the Dark, Clouseau decides Maria is innocent despite fingerprints, lipstick on the shirt, and a gun in her hands. His superior Dreyfus is sure he's incompetent. Clouseau turns out to be right. In The Exorcist, Father Merrin and Father Karras doubt the diagnosis of "schizophrenia" (given by a psychiatrist) and insist on possession — against the opinion of doctors, relatives, and police. They turn out to be right. In both cases the official version (police / psychiatry) proves limited, and the person who "sees through the facts" is a fool in the system's eyes but a prophet in retrospect.
Both films are about an invisible crime. For Clouseau — it's a killer hiding in a house with ten suspects. For Merrin — it's a demon hiding in a child's body. In both cases the investigation requires a long, ceremonial ritual: in the first case — it's the famous "exposé" scene where Clouseau gathers all the servants and through facial expressions, small details, and intonations brings the killer into the open (in the film this is the climax). In the second — it's the exorcism rite itself, also long, ceremonial, with Latin, hyssop, and holy water. In both cases the resolution happens in one room, before the viewer, and boils down to the investigator naming who was hiding.
Both films are about possession in the most literal sense. Clouseau is possessed by the idea of Maria's innocence — so much so that he's ready to defend her despite facts, career, and sanity. The demon Pazuzu possesses Regan's body — so much so that it destroys furniture, vocal cords, and the very identity of the child. The word "possession" works in both cases, only in one it's comedy, in the other — horror. Blatty, apparently, embedded the same archetypal scheme throughout his career: investigation of possession, long ritual of exposure, investigator as prophet against the system.
There's an even subtler layer. Both Clouseau and Father Merrin are elderly and physically vulnerable men who know their method is ridiculed. Clouseau endures Dreyfus's mockery, Merrin endures the cardinal's distrust. And in the finale both go through a physical ordeal that costs them their health: Clouseau takes numerous blows and falls (the final scene in the house — a cascade of falls, destruction, and dog attacks, where he continues investigating with a battered face), Merrin dies of a heart attack after the decisive battle with the demon. The screenwriter is the same, and the theme — the body that pays for truth — runs through both pictures.
Between A Shot in the Dark (1964) and The Exorcist (1971/1973), nine years passed. During this time Blatty:
This plot of "the invisible writer who will later announce himself to the world" — deserves its own analysis. But in our specific case, something else is interesting: Blatty wrote the same structural bones twice, nine years apart and in two different genres. This says he had the same plot in his head — about possession, exposure, and the prophet-investigator — and in 1964 it was funny to write, and in 1971 it became frightening.
Compare with today's Hollywood machine. A screenwriter who today writes a comedy about a clumsy detective will in ten years write either a sequel or nothing — he'll be thrown out of the profession. Blatty had the opportunity to grow slowly because the studio system of the '60s allowed it: a 7-picture contract, long-term relationship with the producer (Edwards), time to find his voice.
Today such a path is almost impossible. If you write a comedy about Clouseau today — you're a comedy screenwriter about Clouseau, and no agent will let you "jump" into horror. Competition for slots is too high, production cycle too short, genre segregation too strong. But Blatty in the '60s could afford to grow because the studio system was ready to wait. And it's precisely this slowness that allowed "Exorcist" to happen — the novel, written in 1971, was the fruit of twelve years of accumulation.
Blatty himself spoke about this in a Criterion Collection interview: "I wasn't ready to write 'Exorcist' in 1964. I wasn't ready to write it in 1968. I was ready in 1971 — because by then I'd lived enough to understand what my work was really about."
One last thing. The film A Shot in the Dark is interesting not only as Blatty's entry point. It's a perfect illustration of how a big studio loses the battle to one comedian. Sellers didn't just ask for more screen time. He issued an ultimatum — either the film is about Clouseau or he walks. The studio chose Sellers. They chose Sellers again, and again, and again — the next 30 years of the Pink Panther franchise were built around his Clouseau (including sequels after his death in 1980, where he was replaced by other actors, and they all failed). One bit character, born as a gag in the first 1963 film, became the axis of an entire franchise for half a century.
This is a rare and instructive case for everyone who works with talented people. Sometimes one stubborn comedian with an improvisational bent knows more about the material than the screenwriter and producer combined. In Sellers's case it worked — Pink Panther became one of the most recognizable franchises in film history. In other cases (Robert Downey Jr. in studio action films of the '80s, for example) it ended in failure. The line between "brilliant hijack" and "actor terrorism" is thin, and Edwards and Sellers walked it their entire careers.
The random film of the day A Shot in the Dark turned out to be not a typical comedy about a clumsy Frenchman, but the entry point into the career of the man who nine years later would write the scariest film in Hollywood history. In the 1964 credits Blatty appears as one of the screenwriters; in the 1973 credits — as an Oscar winner. Between these two points — nine years, three failed screenplays, loss of his father, existential crisis, and slow realization of what he's really writing about.
In parallel, the film remains a monument to improvisational power hijack: Sellers literally rewrote the contract of reality on set, and the studio let him do it — because ultimately it turned out to be right. Pink Panther without Clouseau doesn't exist. Just as "The Exorcist" doesn't exist without Blatty — even if in 1964 nobody, including Blatty himself, knew yet what he was writing.