The cinematographer Billy Williams made a brief but crucial contribution to The Exorcist (1973), helping to create in Iraq its 11-minute scene-setting prologue. He had worked in the country 18 years earlier, making an oil company documentary about the cultural history of Mesopotamia. His assistants then had become leading figures in the local film industry, and joined up with him to shoot the eerily atmospheric sequence set among excavations.
The film, which had been famously jinxed during its American shoot, now suffered one more piece of bad luck. The director, William Friedkin, and Williams could not find a huge packing case containing a fibre-glass statue of the demon Pazuzu. Without it there could be no film.
Eventually, Pazuzu was tracked down to Singapore, where it had been offloaded after being accidentally left on a plane.
