Ron DeSantis Announces He Will Live As Slave For One Year To Prove It Not Bad

“‘I’m going to be put on the auction block and sold away from my family to a cotton plantation where I will work all day, every day for one calendar year to show how it’s not that big of a deal,’ the presidential hopeful said during a campaign stop in Iowa, explaining to his supporters that instead of complaining afterward, he would simply be grateful to have had the opportunity to learn the value of hard work.”

He was really riding high in the early 70s, when he was 30-something. His most famous directorial efforts, The Exorcist and The French Connection, came from that era. His last major success was the 1997 remake of 12 Angry Men, but he soldiered on until the present day. According to Variety, “His final film, ‘The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,’ starring Kiefer Sutherland, is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival.”

Here is a tidbit I didn’t know: Friedkin’s first feature-length theatrical film was a spoof starring Sonny and Cher. I don’t remember that film at all. Roger Ebert wrote, “It is not another “Hard Day’s Night,” in part because Sonny and Cher are not the Beatles, and in great part because the director, Chicagoan William Friedkin, is not Richard Lester. Good Times is no classic, but in ambition and achievement it’s better than most movies of its type. Adults may find it diverting, and the kids, I suppose, will go because they want to see Sonny and Cher singing all those songs.”

From the comment section:

Exorcist & French Connection are two of the best movies ever made, but I saw nothing else from him that came anywhere near that level of greatness.

He also made the unbelievably bad decision to release French Connection on DVD with a purple tint and fake film aging like speckles & spots. He even filmed an intro for it in which he said “This is now the definitive version; this is how I always intended for it to be seen.” When I got it, I seriously thought something was wrong with my player or the DVD. It was so horrifically unwatchable that they took it off the market within months & replaced it with the normal version. That made me think, either this guy has gone crazy, or he deliberately fucked it up for some twisted reason.

He did do good DVD commentary though. Intelligent, articulate, humorous, brutally direct. Considering his talent, why he never made anything as good as those two classics will always be a mystery.