He was a maverick of American cinema in the late sixties and seventies, one of the leading auteurs of the New Hollywood whose groundbreaking films include The Exorcist, The French Connection, and To Live and Die in L.A. Now, Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin looks back at his life, his career, and the movies and events that have shaped his life and ours.

The Friedkin Connection is a remarkable journey through the numerous chance encounters and unplanned occurrences that led a bored young man in a poor neighborhood to opportunity and success. A masterful director and gifted raconteur, Friedkin takes readers from the streets of Chicago to the suites of Hollywood studios, the movie set to the editing room. With keen wit and cunning intellect, he offers a candid look at the Hollywood of the sixties and seventies when traditional storytelling gave way to the rebellious and alternative; when filmmakers like him captured the paranoia and fear of a nation undergoing a cultural nervous breakdown.

As fast-paced and thrilling as his acclaimed movies, The Friedkin Connection is a wonderfully cinematic look at an artist and an industry that has transformed who we are—and how we see ourselves.