Timothy is going to be in Possessed which is a project for Showtime. This project will be filmed in Toronto beginning on October the 4th 1999, which is a tentative date. It will be written by Michael Lazarou and directed by Steven E. de Souza . The offer was made to Timothy around the time that Cleopatra premiered. It is the true story of an exorcism which was performed on a 14 year old boy by a Jesuit Priest in 1949. We are all excited as it is nice for us to have a new project to look forward to and we would like to take this opportunity to wish Timothy every success for Possessed also.

I would like to say a big special thank you to Mary for giving me this information which has excited so many. I would also like to say a special thank you to Timothy's Manager in Los Angeles for confirming this for us.

The Cast

• Timothy Dalton as Father William Bowdern
• Jonathan Malen as Robbie Mannheim
• Christopher Plummer as Archbishop Hume
• Piper Laurie as Aunt Hanna
• Henry Czerny as Father McBride

The Story

The Screenplay is based on the book Possessed, The True Story Of An Exorcism by Thomas B Allen. The credit for the screenplay goes to Steven E. de Souza and Michael Lazarou, and I have already mentioned Steven E. de Souza is also Directing the movie. I can tell you also that Timothy is nearly in every scene of Possessed once the family in it move to St. Louis and that he has plenty of dialog too, and when it airs it will be 2 hours long.

I would like to say here that Possessed is not a remake of The Exorcist, and it is not a slavish adaptation of the book Posssessed - The True Story either, but it is a film about the actual events that it was based on.

America, the early 1950's: frightened citizens are watching the skies for nuclear missiles. Senator McCarthy is looking under beds for Communists. And in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Catholic priests are looking for an explanation for the satanic behavior of one little boy.

When inexplicable and frightening events begin to take place around 11 year old Robbie Mannheim (played by Jonathan Malen), his parents Phyllis and Carl, find both science and medicine unable to provide either answers or help. Robbie also has a great Aunt called Hanna who lives with the family and who works the spirit board with him. The family moves from Baltimore to St. Louis. They begin to notice strange noises in the house and some poltergeist occurances in Robbie's bedroom and classroom. Robbie has an abrupt changes in his personality. Welts and claw like marks on his body prompt the parents to get help from a minister, who takes Robbie into his home for observation. The first night the minister almost dies from a wound that Robbie inflicts. The minister survives but advises the family to seek out the Catholics, who are familiar with excorcism. In desperation they turn to Father William Bowdern, S.J., played by Timothy Dalton. But Father Bill has his own problem; devastating flashbacks to his military service as a Chaplain in World War II. These flashbacks become so debilitating that they threaten his ability to serve both his university students and his congregation. Father Bill nonetheless agrees to attempt the exorcism even though his own mental stability, let alone Robbie's, may be at risk. Father William Bowdern lectures in Theology, he is good looking though and one of his students during one of his lectures passes him a piece of paper with an arrow through the heart drawn on it for which she has written "What a Waste!"

Before this collision of good and evil is over, Father Bowdern finds himself challenged not only by demonic forces but by a powerful Archbishop (played by Christopher Plummer) as well. And as the possessed child weakens, the allegiance of Bowdern's best friend, Father McBride (played by Henry Czerny), begins to waiver, along with Bowdern's own courage.

About Steven E. De Souza

STEVEN E. DE SOUZA has written some of the most popular action films of all time, including 48 HRS. starring Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy; Commando and Running Man both starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Die Hard and Die Hard 2, starring Bruce Willis. Steven E. de Souza has also co-written the comedy The Flintstones, and the Jean-Claude Van Damme starrer Street Fighter, which Steven E. de Souza also directed. He is also wrote the screenplay for the Peter Guber-production of Flash Gordon. A native of Philadelphia, Steven E. de Souza began publishing fiction while still in high school. He attended Pennsylvania State University and subsequently worked as a director for local television, before moving to Hollywood.

In addition to his screenplays, Steven E. de Souza has directed HBO's Tales From the Crypt,written 62 teleplays and produced over 120 hours of network television. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and periodicals including Premiere and Mouth 2 Mouth. He has taught and lectured at UCLA, USC and the American Film Institute, and served two terms on the board of directors of the Writer's Guild of America, West.

About Michael Lazarou

Height 6' 2" Married with three children. Michael was born in Wiesbaden, West Germany on 17th March 1963. In 1963 his family moved to Fort Bragg, NC, and then to Los Angeles in 1965. Michael is a graduate of UCLA and Columbia, he is the winner of the Writers Guild of America Award, CEBA Award and Heat Wave was the winner of two Emmy Awards and four Cable Ace Awards including best picture.

Other Movies by Michael Lazarou

• Dreams of Home (1999)
• The Stanford Prison Experiment (1999)
• Criminal Law (1998)
• Satin Doll (1994)
• Heat Wave (1990)
• Take The 'A' Train (1990)

Michael also appreared as a limo driver in an episode of Melrose Place in 1992 entitled Simply Shocking. I would very much like to thank Margaret for the above information.

The Actual Events That Inspired Both Possessed and The Exorcist

Film's Background: The bestselling novel by William Peter Blatty, a Georgetown University graduate, was inspired by a reported exorcism of a young boy that took place in Mount Rainier, Md., in 1949. Before writing the novel, Blatty talked to a Jesuit at Georgetown. He told him of a priest at the seminary he attended, who, in his thirties, had shock-white hair and was said to have performed an exorcism. Blatty wrote to this man, who turned out to be the priest who had exorcised the demon from the Mount Rainier boy. The priest, Jesuit William F. Bowdern, was from St. Louis, Mo., and not a local priest. Though he had pledged to keep the exorcism from being publicized, Bowdern said that he and the priest who had assisted him had kept a diary and assured Blatty that what he witnessed was "the real thing." Blatty kept in touch with the priest until his death. Other than the possession syndrome, according to Blatty, everything else in the book was made up. The book isn't the story of what happened in Maryland, it "came entirely out of my head," he said. About 13 million copies of the novel were sold in the United States.

The 1949 exorcism that inspired William Blatty to write The Exorcist, recounted in admirably restrained and documented fashion by an unlikely source: military-expert Allen (Merchants of Treason, 1988, etc.). Unlike Blatty's possessed teenage girl, 14-year-old Robbie Mannheim (a pseudonym) of Mt. Ranier, Maryland, doesn't swivel his head like a top or levitate. But when fruit and then a vase fly through the air in his presence, his middle-class parents call on an M.D., a psychologist, and finally a minister for help. The minister suspects a poltergeist, but when bloody scratches appear on Robbie's body, the reverend tells the family, ``You have to see a Catholic priest. The Catholics know about things like this''- -advice that leads the Mannheims to a local priest whose exorcism of Robbie aborts when the boy slashes him with a mattress spring. The distraught parents take their son to St. Louis, where they meet Fr. William S. Bowdern, a 52-year-old Jesuit attached to St. Louis University. It's Bowdern who conducts the successful weeks-long exorcism, involving nightly incantations by the priest and several assistants as Robbie--who claims to be possessed--spits, urinates, writhes, cackles, and manifests words in blood (``HELL''; ``CHRIST'') on his body until the ``demon'' departs shortly after Easter. To his credit, Allen reports the more sensational aspects of Robbie's ordeal with a poker face, focusing instead on the spiritual and emotional issues involved, providing brief histories of the Jesuits, poltergeists, and possession. In an afterword, he weighs--without judging--the likelihood of Robbie having been possessed, and he discusses his sources, including one eyewitness and, crucially, a hitherto unrevealed daily journal of the exorcism kept by one of Bowdern's assistants. One can't blame Blatty for sleazing up Robbie's plight, but it's good to have Allen's levelheaded account, which allows the apparent facts of this influential case to speak for their own--and compelling--selves

About The Exorcist Movie

To this day The Exorcist stands as one of the most horrifying movies ever made, a legendary cinematic venture that graphically portrays an epic struggle between human lives and demonic forces. Adapted from William Peter Blatty's best-selling 1971 novel of the same name, the film was released by Warner Brothers on December 26, 1973 and immediately played to packed movie theaters across the country. The ensuing media blitz focused its attention on both the movie's hard-to-stomach scenes that depicted a child possessed by the devil and the fact that author Blatty had based the story on a supposedly real event that took place in the Washington, D.C. area back in 1949. The film was nominated in 1974 for ten Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and was the recipient of two: Best Screenplay Based On Material From Another Medium William Peter Blatty, and Best Sound Robert Knudson and Chris Newman. The Exorcist has retained a faithful following since its debut and to date has grossed over $165 million (making it the thirteenth top grossing film of all time), with video sales and rentals still bringing home healthy sums.

Produced by William Peter Blatty himself and directed by William Friedkin (who received a 1971 academy award for Best Director for the movie The French Connection), the movie tells the harrowing tale of diabolically possessed 12-year-old Regan MacNeil (portrayed by Linda Blair) and the ensuing battle waged by her mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), Father Karras (Jason Miller) and the exorcist Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) to free her soul from the devil's grasp. The movie, set in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., deservedly achieved its widespread notoriety for its gut-wrenching scenes of Regan's colorful exhibitions. She vomits, curses, spins her head around and commits various grotesque acts of blasphemy. Mixed in with her ill-mannered behavior are healthy doses of sensational levitation and additional special effects designed to send the weak-at-heart heading for the exits. While critics acknowledged the film's box-office power, reviews seemed equally divided between those who loved the movie and those who hated it. The Exorcist is a disturbing 121-minute film that leaves its audience pained, drained, and entertained.

Emphasis on Blatty's inspiration for The Exorcist intensified after the novel was released in May 1971, went to the top of the best-seller lists, and began receiving movie offers from Hollywood. The first of many major publications to consider Blatty's literary sources was The New York Times, which weighed in with an article by Chris Chase on August 27, 1972 titled "Everyone's Reading It, Billy's Filming It. The article chronicles how director William Friedkin became involved in the project and touches upon the fact that Blatty based his novel on a local story of demonic possession that he learned of while attending college. Soon after the movie achieved worldwide success, Blatty released the book William Peter Blatty On The Exorcist From Novel To Film (New York: Bantam Books, 1974) and filled in the gaps on how he devised this literary project. He writes that as a 20-year-old English Literature major at Georgetown University he spied an article in the August 20, 1949 Washington Post (Bill Brinkley, "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held In Devil's Grip"), that told of a 14-year-old Mount Rainier, Maryland boy who had been freed by a Catholic priest of possession by the devil through the ancient ritual of exorcism. For years the notion of demonic possession stuck in his mind though he failed to incorporate the information into his work product.

Blatty went on to become a screenwriter-author, responsible for screenplays for several movies including A Shot In The Dark; John Goldfarb, Please Come Home; and What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? He began writing The Exorcist in 1969, drawing upon the material he had discovered some twenty years earlier, and finished his project during the summer of 1971. His creative process in researching and finishing both the novel and movie is detailed in his 1974 book. The most interesting aspect of this work is that Blatty tells of a letter he composed to the priest who conducted the actual 1949 exorcism. Blatty prints a censored version of the exorcist's response, revealing for the first time the existence of a diary kept by an attending priest that recorded the daily events of the ongoing exorcism. Blatty writes that he requested to see the diary but the exorcist declined. Blatty decided to ease the exorcist's anxiety and change the lead character from a 14-year-old boy to that of a 12-year-old girl. In this book Blatty goes on to mention that five copies of the diary were known to exist at that time: two were in the possession of people who watched over the boy; copies were in the archives of two separate archdioceses; and one was in the files of an unnamed public city hospital where the boy had stayed. (It has since been determined that there are several other copies floating around out there among private collectors.) Blatty maintains that he did indeed eventually read the diary and based much of his book and movie on that material, though he does not reveal how he came upon his copy.

The Exorcist is truly a modern-day cultural phenomenon. A best-selling novel, one of the highest grossing movies of all time, and today a household word that instantly generates dark images of uncontrollable horror, The Exorcist has fostered an underground cult following that continues to embrace and attempts to trace the story's macabre origins. There have been dozens of newspaper and magazine articles that have tried to tell the "true" story. Books, television specials, and video documentaries on the subject have appeared, with the most recent offerings being the 1993 book Possessed: The True Story Of An Exorcism by Thomas B. Allen and the 1997 Henninger Media video In The Grip Of Evil. Most of the published works on this subject are poorly referenced and offer contradictory and even erroneous material. So much has been embellished and fabricated that it has become nearly impossible to differentiate fact and fiction. There is only one constant that seems to unite the biased writers who have tried to revise this story to suit their own agendas—none have ever actually talked with the possessed boy and none have ever interviewed anyone who grew up close to the family in question. I always felt the real story could only come from them.

The True Story of the Possession and Exorcism

My interest in The Exorcist tale gradually escalated during the 1992 to 1996 time period. Most of my spare hours were spent during those years conducting research for my book Capitol Rock (Riverdale: Fort Center Books, 1997). Consequently, for a lengthy chapter on blues-rock guitar great Roy Buchanan, I spent a great deal of time canvassing the city of Mount Rainier, Maryland—a smallish working-class community of approximately 8,000 residents quietly tucked away in Victorian homes and bungalows on the D.C. line. The town was known for two things: the home of the great Roy Buchanan—and the alleged site of the story behind The Exorcist.

Indeed, ever since the early '80s local high school teens had been flocking to what was then a vacant lot at the corner of Bunker Hill Road and 33rd Street right in the residential heart of Mount Rainier. Believing it to be the former site of the house where the possessed boy lived, these Prince George's County teens delighted in roaming the lot at all hours of the night, drinking beer on the premises, erecting wooden crosses on the property, and yelling and screaming until local police had to come and chase them away. Several local newspaper accounts had set the tale in motion and an urban legend was born.

As I logged hundreds of hours in Mount Rainier chatting with the town's oldest residents, one unsettling aspect of the Exorcist tale continuously reared its head. Without exception, the old-timers insisted that although their beloved town was given credit for being the home of the Exorcist story, the boy in question never actually lived in Mount Rainier. I found this to be very strange, since all of the sensational material printed on the subject placed him in Mount Rainier. Having spoken with members of Mount Rainier's largest, oldest, and most prominent families, I found it very odd that not one person knew either the boy's name or the names of any of his family members. Several told me that they had heard rumors that the boy in question was really from Cottage City, a small semi-isolated community just a short distance away. I felt I had hit paydirt when one lifelong Mount Rainier resident, Dean Landolt (today 70 years old), candidly told me, I was very good friends with Father Hughes, the priest involved in that case, as was my brother Herbert. Father Hughes told me two things one was that the boy lived in Cottage City, and the other is that he went on to graduate from Gonzaga High and turned out fine. If Mr. Landolt's information was accurate it would explain why nobody in Mount Rainier knew the boy's name. I felt that a serious, thorough investigation into this case was required to patch up the growing holes that were now so evident.

I went back and examined my files on this local subject. The various published writings on the 1949 possession case contained a great deal of conflicting and confusing information. Still, I felt it would be a tremendous personal challenge to conduct this investigation from an entirely different viewpoint and in October 1997 I began my pursuit. Unlike those who had tackled this case before me, I decided that I would present a completely objective and unbiased factual report on the case. In setting my investigative goals it was understood that proving whether or not the boy in this case was actually possessed was not on the agenda. I sought to explore new territories: I would examine the critical elements of the case and create a factual framework fro which to work, determine who the boy was and where he actually grew up, attempt to talk with him about his experiences, and interview friends from his hometown who grew up with him or knew his family. None of this had ever been done before.

Breaking the Story of the Haunted Boy

The following articles represent a large cross section of published material on this case. A careful reading will reveal many glaring inconsistencies in the basic story-telling, but I feel all are important for the raw data they offer. In scanning this material from 1949 to the present day one can discern the most common and widely believed scenario for this case of possession. Reporters to date have claimed that the 13- or 14-year-old boy was allegedly from Mount Rainier, Maryland. (It was later revealed that his date of birth was June 1, 1935, meaning he was actually 13 when the rite of exorcism was finally completed). Later accounts declared his home address to have been 3210 Bunker Hill Road. It is said the boy underwent a first exorcism at Georgetown University Hospital conducted by local priest Father E. Albert Hughes (where the boy allegedly slashed Hughes's arm with a bedspring), and then underwent a final and successful rite of exorcism by Father William Bowdern at Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri in the spring of 1949. The road linking this information together is a muddled trail indeed.

The media first became involved in this case when The Washington Post ran an article on August 10, 1949 titled "Pastor Tells Eerie Tale of 'Haunted' Boy. Written in an almost tongue-in-cheek style by reporter Bill Brinkley, the piece tells an out-of-this-world story of a local 13-year-old boy. The story came to light when an unnamed minister gave a speech before a local meeting of the Society of Parapsychology at the Mount Pleasant Library in Washington, D.C. According to the minister the family had experienced many strange events in their suburban Maryland home beginning January 18th: scratching noises emanated from the house's walls; the bed in which the boy slept would shake violently; and objects such as fruit and pictures would jump to the floor in the boy's presence. The minister, described as being intensely skeptical, arranged for the boy to spend the night of February 17th in his home. With the boy sleeping nearby in a twin bed the minister reported that in the dark he heard vibrating sounds from the bed and scratching sounds on the wall. During the rest of the night he allegedly witnessed some strange events—a heavy armchair in which the boy sat seemingly tilted on its own and tipped over and a pallet of blankets on which the sleeping boy lay inexplicably moved around the room. Curiously, the article described the minister as laughing as he related these incidents to his audience. He admonished the boy by saying, "Now, look, this is enough of this....The article ended by saying that the minister called in the family doctor, who prescribed phenobarbital for the whole family.

The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) followed up the Post's scoop with an uncredited article later that evening on August 10, 1949 titled Minister Tells Parapsychologists Noisy 'Ghost' Plagued Family." The Evening Star's account differed from the Post's in that the family was referred to as Mr. and Mrs. John Doe and their 13-year-old son "Roland. It also describes their house as a one-and-one-half story home in a Washington suburb" and refers to the events as the strange story of Roland and his Poltergeist." The article tells of the talk given by the minister before the Society of Parapsychology, and recounts his experiences with the boy. The minister told the reporter that Roland had made two trips to a mental hygiene clinic and that during an earlier trip to the Midwest the boy had been subjected to three different rites of exorcism by three different faiths Episcopal, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic. The article quoted Richard C. Darnell, president of the Society, as saying that Dr. J. B. Rhine, director of the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, called the so-called haunting the "most impressive manifestation he hasheard of in the poltergeist field. The article ended with the minister saying that things had been calm in the household for about the last two months.

The Times-Herald (Washington, D.C.) joined the fray with an article by William Flythe, Jr. on August 11, 1949 titled'Haunted' Boy's Parents Tell Of Ghost Messages. A basic rehash of the previous two accounts, this piece adds that the boy lived in the Brentwood section northeast and also tells that the family had found dermographic messages written in a rash on the boy's body. The article states that when the messages were brought to the attention of the minister involved, he could detect nothing more than an ordinary rash." The family reported that the boy was taken to St. Louis, where he returned to normalcy after experiencing visions of St. Michael chasing away the devil.

On August 19, 1949 The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) featured the article Priest Freed Boy of Possession By Devil, Church Sources Say. As the first account to provide any exorcism details to the public, the article opens by saying, A Catholic priest has successfully freed a 14-year-old Mount Rainier, Md., boy of reported possession by the devil here early this year, it was disclosed today. While names are withheld, it is revealed that the ritual of exorcism was given after the boy's affliction was studied at both Georgetown University Hospital and St. Louis University. The article went on to describe the exorcism process, but offered no other significant details. The next day the same paper ran a follow-up titled "New Details of Boy's Exorcism In Catholic Ritual Disclosed," though in reality few new details were revealed. It did cite church sources as saying that during the rite the boy had recited a stream of blasphemous curses, intermingled with Latin phrases. The article then recapped events that had earlier been printed regarding the minister at a meeting of the Society of Parapsychology.

The Washington Post chimed in on August 20, 1949 with another Bill Brinkley-authored piece, this one titled "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip. At greater length than the previous published accounts, Brinkley recounts the family's entire haunting episode and reveals that only after 20 to 30 performances of the ancient ritual of exorcism was the devil finally cast out of the boy. He also tells that during the rite the youngster would break into violent tantrums of screaming, cursing, and voicing of Latin phrases. The exorcism, which according to Brinkley was conducted by a St. Louis priest in his fifties who accompanied the boy for two months, was first initiated in St. Louis, continued in D.C., and was ultimately completed back in St. Louis. The article states that when the last performance of the ritual was given, the boy became quiet and later reported witnessing a vision of St. Michael casting the devil out. The exorcism ritual was completed only after the boy had been taken into the Catholic church. It was this article that inspired then-20-year-old Georgetown English major William Peter Blatty to later write his novel of demonic possession.

The Parapsychology Bulletin (August 1949, Number 14), a periodical of the New York-based Parapsychology Foundation, weighed in with the uncredited Report Of A Poltergeist, an article that finally published the name of the anonymous clergyman of the haunted boy's family. He turned out to be Reverend Luther Miles Schulze and in this article his experiences with the boy were reported in detail. My own research revealed that Luther Miles Schulze was born on July 30, 1906 and at the time of this case served as the pastor of St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran Church (1611 Brentwood Road NE, Washington, D.C.).

More Information About the REAL Exorcism

In 1913, St. Louis became known as being the home to one of the most celebrated cases in the history of Spiritualism. A housewife named Pearl Curren claimed to have made contact with a spirit named Patience Worth, who said that she had been killed by American Indians nearly three hundred years before. Over the course of the next ten years, Patience dictated an massive number of stories, poems and novels through the Ouija board of Mrs. Curren. All of the works were said to have had literary merit and some critics claimed that one of her novels, Telka, contained not a single word that entered the English language after 1700. The "ghost writer" became enormously popular all over the world and even had her own fan clubs. The writings stopped with the death of Pearl Curren in 1937.

More recent stories tell of ghosts at the Cupples Mansion on the campus of St. Louis University and at the Bissell Mansion, which is now a restaurant. Another recent tale features that of an old St. Louis Firehouse at 14 North Newstead Avenue. It is now the home of V.I.P. Graphic and, according to the current owners, is still a very haunted place. The building was made famous in the 1960's by Gordon Hoene a ghost hunter who conducted investigations there and founded a group called the "Haunt Hunters". It has been claimed that his group was the inspiration for the film "Ghost Busters". This building proved to be one of their most interesting cases and it has continued to be a spooky St. Louis landmark.

The Real "Exorcist" Case: One of the city's most fascinating and mysterious cases involved an exorcism that took place at the old Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis in 1949. The case would be sensational and would be kept secret for many years until a diary of the case was found inside of a locked room at the hospital, just before it was torn down. This case would provide the inspiration for the book and the film version of "The Exorcist" and the Jesuit priest involved, Father Bowdern, the inspiration for the wise exorcist of the film.

The case actually began in Washington D.C. with poltergeist-like activity plaguing the family of a young boy. After that, the boy gradually changed into a powerfully grotesque creature that displayed many of the attributes of the girl in the film and book. It was enough to convince the Church to allow the first authorized exorcism in 100 years.

Strange writings on the back, chest and thighs of the boy convinced the family to take him to St. Louis, where some of their family resided. After first, the exorcism began in a home in Webster Groves and later the boy was moved to DuBourg Hall on the St. Louis University campus. His violent reactions to the exorcism ritual forced the priests to move him to the Alexian Brothers Hospital in the south part of the city. The nightmare continued for four months until the "demon" was expelled. The boy remembered nothing and the case was quietly buried. It wasn't until a few years ago that the case was opened again and the facts brought before the public. One of the exorcists involved in the case had kept a detailed diary of everything that had occurred and this diary was locked in the boy's hospital room at the end of the case. The room was never used again and the diary was not found until the room was cleared of it's furniture just before the hospitals destruction. The case is a fascinating one, whether you believe in possession or not, and I recommend "Possessed" by Thomas B. Allen as an interesting book on the case.