Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  But others recall Beatty himself as having an aversion to Clyde’s bisexuality. Mart Crowley, author of The Boys in the Band, had worked briefly for Natalie Wood in the mid-1960s and knew Beatty through her. “I remember running into Warren in the Daisy nightclub one night, and I said, ‘Listen, Clyde Barrow was gay—are you gonna do anything about that?’ And the sense I got from him was, ‘Are you kidding? That’s not the kind of picture we’re doing.’”13 And Newman wrote soon after the film’s release that “Warren was adamant about [the bisexuality] being removed for two reasons, the first being that it was not such a terrific thing for his image and the second being that it ‘just wasn’t working,’”14 a point he reiterated in 1997.15

  Penn may have claimed responsibility for the decision in order to protect Beatty, but he also wanted to solve what he called the problem of “the script turning too dark too early, when they introduced this big, oafish third figure that Bonnie was hitting on while we were dealing with Clyde’s homosexual tendencies.”16 No matter who ultimately made the call, it must have been completely obvious to everyone involved at the time. To imagine otherwise would be to ignore the reality that a homosexual or bisexual protagonist in a Hollywood movie was then unthinkable, and the makers of Bonnie and Clyde knew it. The Production Code had maintained a complete ban on the subject until a few years earlier and now permitted homosexuality to be depicted only as an “aberration.”17 When homosexual characters began to show up in a handful of studio movies, they were seen only as mincing, effeminate sissies in comedies and as murder or suicide victims in dramas like Advise and Consent and The Children’s Hour. Characters who were incidentally gay, or heroic and homosexual, simply didn’t exist, nor did any kind of movement to lobby for more positive portrayals.18 In a lengthy essay published at the beginning of 1966, Time magazine (whose movie critics used the word fag in their reviews without a second thought) spoke for and to much of America when it called homosexuality “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life…it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.”19 The following year, when Mike Wallace’s CBS report The Homosexuals aired after three years of preparation, the documentary’s subjects were photographed in silhouette and the tone was so clinical and grim that one reviewer wondered whether even a moment could have been spared for “the minority viewpoint that homosexuals are just as normal as anyone else.”20

  By insisting on the ménage à trois and introducing it early in the film, Benton and Newman knew that they might damage something that was just as important to them—an arc of audience identification in which moviegoers would take Bonnie and Clyde’s side at the outset and have bonded to them by the time their adventures turned disorientingly dark and violent. The writers liked the idea of weaving a sexual component into Clyde’s frustration and appetite for violence, and Penn’s suggested solution—that they make Clyde impotent—“fit right in with all that phallic gun stuff,” wrote Newman.21 Beatty thought impotence worked better than bisexuality, but he pushed Penn for a scene, late in the movie, in which Clyde finally manages to complete sex with Bonnie; Penn resisted but ultimately gave in. 22

  Its politics aside, the decision to eliminate the ménage à trois benefited the script in other ways; it allowed Benton and Newman to rewrite the character of C. W. Moss, the wheelman. A thick, dull stud-for-hire in the first version of the screenplay, he now became a puckish, slightly dopey kid brother—this “lovable little guy,” says Penn—an important comic element in the movie’s lighthearted early scenes and an ideal part for Michael J. Pollard, a friend of Beatty’s from their days working together in the play A Loss of Roses and on the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. “The only other person I ever thought about was Dennis Hopper,” says Beatty. “I thought he would be funny, and a very good actor. But Michael J.—you just look at him and he’s fun.”23

  Beatty and Penn turned to New York for the rest of Bonnie and Clyde’s cast, populating the film almost entirely with inexpensive stage actors. For the role of Buck’s nervous, chattery wife, Blanche, Beatty had been interested in Elia Kazan’s wife, Barbara Loden,24 but Penn wanted Estelle Parsons, an actress who had worked in television (including as a cub reporter for the Today show) but had had only one tiny movie role. “I was not having a good career at that moment,” says Parsons, who had packed up her New York apartment and two children in order to join a San Francisco repertory company, only to have the job fall through before she got there. “I was doing a Murray Schisgal play with Gene Hackman and Dusty Hoffman up at Stockbridge, for Arthur [at the Berkshire Theatre Festival]…. I was thinking, what am I doing in this ridiculous business? I really do tragicomedy, and nobody hiring for a rep company wanted that. But Arthur’s rehearsal technique was so exciting, it really turned me around. It was impossible to work for him and not be 100 percent fully engaged. I would have gone anywhere with him.” Parsons signed on to play Blanche for $5,000. For the role of Clyde’s brother, Buck, she suggested her stage costar Hackman—“People always thought we must be lovers because we had the same rhythm, the same way of acting,” she says. “And of course, Gene wanted to be a movie star, always.”25 Penn was enthusiastic about him, and so was Beatty, who had shared a scene with Hackman in Robert Rossen’s Lilith and came away thinking, “This guy’s such a good actor, he’s making me look good.”26 And Penn brought in Evans Evans and Gene Wilder, with whom he had worked at the Actors Studio, to play a young couple briefly swept up in the Barrow gang’s joyride.27

  The ensemble Beatty and Penn pulled together was made up of newcomers and outsiders, and the crew was light on experience as well: Neither Theadora Van Runkle, the costume designer, nor Dean Tavoularis, the production designer, had made a film before. “I waited three hours to meet Warren Beatty, and he breezed in and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Sorry, kid, you can’t do the movie—I talked to the Costume Designers Guild and you’re not in the union,”’ says Van Runkle. “So I did something uncharacteristic—I leapt across the room and grabbed him by his shirt and said, ‘I’ve got to do the movie!’ He said, ‘Okay, okay,’ and got the head of the guild on the phone, and they swore at each other for about half an hour, and I was in.”28 Editor Dede Allen had overseen the cutting of only a few films, but they included Kazan’s America America and Rossen’s The Hustler, which was enough of a recommendation for Beatty. The sole veteran behind the scenes was Burnett Guffey, a sixty-one-year-old cinematographer who had begun his career as an assistant cameraman in 1923 and had shot more than eighty films, among them All the King’s Men, From Here to Eternity, and Birdman of Alcatraz. Guffey had been nominated for four Academy Awards and won once, but these days, he went where the work was, whether it was episodes of Gidget or Dean Martin’s Matt Helm movies. “My impression was that people were down on their luck,” says Parsons. “It was more or less like doing an independent movie. I mean, Gene hadn’t done much, I had not really done a movie before, Warren and Arthur had done that Mickey One, so they were both kind of down…and Faye had not really done anything, or anything that people had seen.”29

  Dunaway was among the last of Bonnie and Clyde’s principals to be cast. Beatty had thought a great deal about his former lover Natalie Wood and discussed the part of Bonnie Parker with her more than once. “Here’s how out of touch I was with the movie world,” says Van Runkle. “When Warren said he wanted to cast Natalie Wood, I said, ‘No, she can’t be Bonnie—she doesn’t have enough class!’”30

  A reunion of the two stars of Splendor in the Grass would have gone a long way toward selling the film to audiences, and Wood, though her romantic relationship with Beatty was long over, was interested. “All during the time I was directing her in This Property Is Condemned,” says Sydney Pollack, “she was trying to decide whether to do it or not. That’s how I met Warren. He kept after h
er.”31

  But Wood’s emotional state was fragile, and Robert Towne was quietly urging Beatty to look elsewhere. “I remember feeling that he should not go back to Natalie, and I’m sure I expressed that, because I felt that this script really needed someone different,” he says. And Beatty himself stopped short of directly asking Wood to take the part. “There is that point,” says Towne, “when he would have just thrown himself at a prospective Bonnie’s feet and said, ‘Please do it, you’re the only one.’ I don’t know that he ever did that—I don’t know that he ever felt it.”32

  Beatty looked at Sharon Tate, the young starlet who was about to be cast in Valley of the Dolls. He wondered if Ann-Margret might be good for the part, or perhaps Carol Lynley, who had just played Jean Harlow in a biopic and might have had the right period look. And he gave serious consideration to Jane Fonda, who years earlier had been François Truffaut’s first idea for the role. “I thought that Jane would be very, very good in it,” says Beatty. “But Jane had worked on The Chase, and because that was not a good experience either for her or for Arthur, that sort of negated that.”33

  “We talked about Jane Fonda, but she seemed too sophisticated,” says Penn. And for the director, Fonda’s fame, which was on the rise after the success of Cat Ballou, also worked against her: “I didn’t want a movie star.”34

  “Warren has an incredible way of making you think he’s offering you a part…and then not using you—and you never feel you’ve been rejected,” Fonda told Beatty biographer Suzanne Finstad. “That’s a gift.”35

  Beatty and Penn both say the only actress to receive a firm offer from them before Dunaway was Tuesday Weld—and she turned them down. Beatty had worked with Weld years earlier on Dobie Gillis when she was still a teenager; she was now a twenty-three-year-old new mother whose almost doll-like beauty and unconcealable streaks of wildness and neurosis might have made her a fascinating Bonnie. But she was nursing, overwhelmed by parenthood, and didn’t want to travel to Texas for the shoot. And, says Penn, “she didn’t like the script.”36 (“I refused to do Bonnie and Clyde,” she fretted later, “because down deep I knew it was going to be a huge success.”)

  By the time Dunaway’s name came up, Beatty and Penn were out of options, and the excited ingenue who had been signed to two multipicture contracts just six months earlier had already had a bruising introduction to the realities of Hollywood moviemaking. Dunaway’s debut in The Happening had been reasonably smooth, if somewhat rushed, but when she went from that into Otto Preminger’s southern melodrama, Hurry Sundown, in which she had a supporting role as the wife of a dirt farmer, the shoot turned into an ordeal that left the actress badly shaken.

  Preminger had assembled an impressive young cast, including Michael Caine, Jane Fonda, Robert Hooks, and Diahann Carroll, for the Louisiana shoot, “right in the heart of Ku Klux Klan territory,” Dunaway wrote. For Fonda, the besieged production represented a step in her political awakening: “I was still using the term Negro while the African-Americans in the cast were calling themselves black,” she wrote. “I listened to conversations between Robert Hooks, Beah Richards and others…about a burgeoning ‘black nationalism’…a growing sense that blacks had only themselves to depend on.”37 But for Dunaway, the shoot tapped into her innate competiveness: “Jane was the May Queen in this film. She was the bigger star, and Otto wanted her to be the main star of this movie,” she wrote.38 And Dunaway learned the hard way that Preminger’s reputation as a monster with actors was well earned. He was “autocratic and dictatorial,” she wrote. “It is difficult to understand the depth of the rage until the full force of it is turned directly on you.” When Preminger exploded at her one day “like a mad dog,” Dunaway kept her cool, finished her work on the movie, went back to New York, and told her lawyer to do whatever he had to do to get her out of the remainder of her multifilm contract. “It cost me a lot of money,” she wrote, “not to work for Otto again.”39

  It’s not clear how Dunaway came to the attention of Beatty and Penn. Some people have said that publicist John Springer, a confidant of Beatty’s, first suggested her. Theadora Van Runkle remembers sitting in a meeting where Beatty “scooted this catalog of actresses across the table and I opened it to Faye’s picture and saw her and said, ‘There’s the girl you should cast!’ She was perfect for the spirit of the thirties and the spirit of the sixties.”40 In her autobiography, Dunaway writes that it was Penn who got in touch with Creative Management Associates’ David Begelman and asked to meet her, although earlier, when she had wanted to audition for Fonda’s role in The Chase, she couldn’t get past Penn’s casting director, who said she “didn’t have the face for movies.”41

  Neither of Dunaway’s first two films was scheduled to open for several months, so Beatty and Penn asked Columbia if they could look at footage of Dunaway in The Happening, and they liked what they saw enough to fly her to Los Angeles. But the woman who walked into Beatty’s suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel bore little resemblance to the blond, gaunt Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde. Dunaway had gained weight during the making of Hurry Sundown; her appearance in the film, in which she gave a vivid, impassioned performance, was womanly, full-hipped, appropriately unglamorous. That evening, Dunaway shuttled between Beatty’s penthouse and Penn’s room several floors below; each man claims to have convinced the other to hire her. “I had a long meeting with her, and I was impressed by her energy and intelligence,” says Beatty. “And I also felt her toughness, which I thought was dramatic and funny.” Knowing how many times Penn had watched him blow hot and cold about an actress, Beatty called him and said, “‘I’ve gotta introduce you to an actress who I don’t think I want in the movie, but you should meet her because you’ll really like her.’ An hour later, he calls me and says, ‘I met Faye Dunaway. I think I want her in the movie.’”42

  Penn’s account is slightly different. “It got a little testy between Warren and me, because I had seen Dunaway in After the Fall in New York. Warren had a sense about her, that she was difficult, I think that was part of it. I don’t know what it was, but it made him keep her at a distance. But she was clearly beautiful and a damn good actress. And Benton and Newman were there, we were all up in Warren’s suite, and it got to the push-comes-to-shove point, and the three of us wanted Dunaway. And at that point Warren said all right.”43

  As Dunaway was coming on to Bonnie and Clyde, Benton and Newman were stepping away from the film. The project they had begun three years earlier had launched their careers; they now had a musical, It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman, on Broadway and a suspense drama in the works for Universal. For weeks, they had been traveling to Stockbridge, rewriting the script for Penn, and they had reached a dead end. “Benton and Newman, by then, were just exhausted,” says Penn.44

  “Arthur said to me at one point, ‘Look, I like these guys a lot, but would I be letting you down terribly if I don’t do the movie?”’ says Beatty. “This was in July of 1966, and I think we started in October! So, rather than be graceful, I said, ‘Yes, you would be letting me down—what the hell are you talking about?’” Beatty asked Penn if he wanted to work with Lillian Hellman or Arthur Miller on the script, offering to get in touch with them. Penn, not looking for a wholesale rewrite, said no.45 Then Beatty suggested that Robert Towne step in. Towne had already been serving as Beatty’s unofficial adviser on the movie; he had been a strong advocate for getting rid of the three-way: “Now they’re all in bed together, now they’re in bed separately—it took Jules and Jim a whole movie to resolve a ménage à trois without any gangster stuff going on,” he had said. Penn agreed to sit down with him and talk through the screenplay. When the two men met, says Towne, “I think it probably was within two to three weeks, maybe a month at most, of the time that the production actually went to Texas.”46

  Towne told Penn he thought the screenplay was still too episodic and suggested a vital reordering of scenes late in the movie. In Benton and Newman’s script, Parker and Barr
ow interrupt their crime spree so that she can visit her mother; in the following scene, the gang picks up a young mortician and his girlfriend and chats with the terrified couple for a while before dropping them off on an empty road. Towne suggested reversing the scenes; Bonnie’s revulsion at the scent of mortality once she realizes that she is in the car with an undertaker would now lead directly to her desire to see her mother one last time, and the change would suffuse the last third of the movie with a sense that death was approaching inexorably. He also suggested a substantial rewrite of the exchange with Bonnie’s mother, which Beatty says “had been sort of a plateau, the kind of scene that would give you a great opportunity to go to the candy counter.”47 Towne made a case for darkening the moment dramatically; in his revision, when Bonnie dreamily suggests that she and Clyde might soon move closer to her family, her elderly mother replies, “You try living three miles from me and you won’t live long.”

  “Look, anybody who sees this movie is going to know what’s going to happen at the end—they’re going to get killed,” Towne recalls telling Penn. “There’s no mystery involved in that. So the only dramatic element you’re going to have is when they’re going to get killed. That’s a potential element of suspense, and as a corollary, is there something that will need to be resolved between Bonnie and Clyde before that death that people are looking forward to?” Penn and Towne both felt that Clyde’s continuing struggle with impotence could serve as an unresolved, barely stated plot thread connecting the scenes, and Penn liked Towne’s argument that the end of the movie needed “a sense of the roads that they were traveling down closing off, so that there was only one end to the road that was coming.” By the end of the meeting, Penn asked Towne to sign on.48