William Gerrity, the initial 1st AD on The French Connection, recalled that shooting in 1970s New York was far more difficult than it is today. "It was tough getting permits," he said. "Before they streamlined things, you had get permits from every single department. Water Department, Gas Department, and if one backed up you never got your permit. The cops we used as security were also never paid to work, so they'd sometimes get a little upset if there wasn't something specific on the permit. If you had a permit saying you'd be shooting on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue, and you went on the northwest corner, they'd say, 'No, you got to go to the other side.' But Billy [Friedkin] had a good way with the police and I knew a lot of them from working so many years on the TV show Naked City."
However, even those 'connections' weren't enough to get the job done. "We had one sequence where the bad guys get away from the cops over the Brooklyn Bridge," Gerrity explained. "The police wouldn't let us hold up traffic. So we had one of our extras park his car right at the exit and put his hood up and make believe there was something wrong with his car. We blocked traffic practically back to Brooklyn from the New York side and we got our shot."
Gerrity was replaced during the shooting by Terence A. Donnelly who said that The French Connection team were the guinea pigs for the first use of a Motorola walkie-talkie. Prior to that communication involved waving different colored handkerchiefs ('green' for action, red for 'cut') or, at night, using flashlights to signal.
"I couldn't have done that chase scene without those walkie-talkies," Donnelly said. "I can hardly call them walkie-talkies because they were 10-pound bricks of circuitry with a huge battery. But since it was all Motorola had, they were certainly welcome."
Unlike today's walkie-talkies, those early Motorolas were single channel units. For Donnelly to have one channel dedicated for his stunt men, another for his other assistant directors and another for the police helping with security, he had to have three separate "bricks" hanging off of his Eddie Bauer coat. "It was a little sketchy at best, but it did start the use of walkie-talkies in modern filmmaking and, God knows, today we couldn't do without them," he said.
Donnelly feels one of the biggest responsibilities in the AD job description is to keep people safe, and The French Connection's famous car chase proved particularly challenging. "Anytime you shoot in New York City you can't expect to have total crowd control," Donnelly said. "There's just too many people and automobiles. Fortunately we had some very talented stunt people that made it safe for us, and a terrific stunt coordinator, Bill Hickman, who did a lot of the driving for [Gene] Hackman in those sequences in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn."
Donnelly, who now produces long form television, is impressed with today's crop of ADs. "A lot of things that we, as ADs, didn't concern ourselves with and probably should have concerned ourselves with back then, are now being addressed with great vigor by the ADs I've been working with," he said. "They are extremely conscious of keeping a set safe. It's so easy for somebody to get hurt on a movie set and I laud them for it. Today, there's just so much more concern paid to the cast and crew in that regard."
