The Exorcist (film) shot that obscured his face, as Friedkin felt that Vandis's face would be connected with his previous role in the Woody Allen film "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)". Vandis had previously played Milos Stavros, an Armenian shepherd who was in love with a sheep. Warners had approached Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, and Mike Nichols, to direct, all of whom turned the project down. Originally Mark Rydell was hired to direct, but William Peter Blatty insisted on Friedkin instead, because he wanted his film to have the same energy as Friedkin's previous film,
Literature in the 1970s such as those of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Books discussing sex such as "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)" were popular as authors took advantage of the lifted censorship laws on literature in the sixties. Exposés such as "All the President's Men" were also popular. Self-help and diet books replaced the cookbooks and home fix-it manuals that topped the sixties's charts. After the experimentation and sexual offence subject matter that exemplified some of the sixties' most definitive works of literature, the early '70s brought a return to old-fashioned