Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  When the hippies finally did come knocking, in other words, the gates swung wide open, creating the illusion, as Milius puts it, that the citadel was empty. But this was only an illusion, and a dangerous one at that. The citadel was filled with land mines and booby traps. And although the decade of the ’70s contains shining monuments to its great directors, the cultural revolution of that decade, like the political revolution of the ’60s, ultimately failed. As writer-director Leonard Schrader, Paul’s older brother, puts it, “This group of people started to make really interesting films, and then just took a toboggan ride into the gutter. How the hell did that ever happen?”

  How indeed?

  One:

  Before the Revolution

  1967

  • How Warren Beatty created a scandal with Bonnie and Clyde, while Pauline Kael made America safe for the New Hollywood, Francis Coppola blazed a trail for the movie brats, and Peter Fonda hatched trouble.

  “We’re in the Vietnamese War, this film cannot he immaculate and sanitized and bang-bang. It’s fucking bloody”

  —ARTHUR PENN

  Warren Beatty may well have been the first man to kiss Jack Warner’s feet, certainly the last. The story goes, Beatty was trying to get Warner to finance Bonnie and Clyde, a movie Warner had no use for. Warner didn’t like Beatty, his endless phone calls, his grousing and bitching. Not a day passed that Beatty didn’t want something. So far as Warner was concerned, he was just another pretty face, on his way to blowing a promising career on a bunch of artsy-fartsy “films.” Even Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, his first picture, the one that put him on the map, never made any real money. Bill Orr, Warner’s son-in-law, was right. He had fallen asleep at a screening. In fact, Beatty never had had a real hit. He thought he was too good for the pictures he was offered, and he even turned down the President of the United States. John F. Kennedy wanted the studio to turn John F. Kennedy and PT-109 by John Tregaskis into a movie, wanted Fred Zinnemann to direct it, and Beatty to star in it. Not only did Beatty refuse to play Kennedy, he told Pierre Salinger to drop the project because the script “sucked.” Warner was not used to being told his scripts sucked, and he kicked Beatty off the lot, shouting, “You’ll never work in this town again,” or something to that effect.

  “He always hated me,” Beatty recalls. “He said he was afraid to have a meeting with me alone because he thought that I would resort to some sort of physical violence.” But getting physical was not Beatty’s style. He was, after all, an actor. One day he cornered Warner in his office, fell to the floor, grabbed him around the knees: “Colonel!”—everyone called him “Colonel”—“I’ll kiss your shoes here, I’ll lick them.”

  “Yeah, yeah, get up, Warren.”

  “I’ve got Arthur Penn, a great script, I can make this movie for one six; if nothing else, it’s a great gangster movie.”

  “Get up, get up!”

  Warner was embarrassed. He barked, “What the fuck you doin’? Get OFF THE FUCKIN’ FLOOR!”

  “Not until you agree to make this movie.”

  “The answer is NO!” Warner paused, caught his breath. It was not much of a risk at $1.6 million, compared to, say, the $15 million he was spending on his pet project, Camelot. Besides, he was thinking about selling his stake in the studio, calling it a day. With any luck, by the time the picture came out, he’d be far away, in the south of France at his palace on the Riviera, far richer even than he was now. Why not indulge the meshuggener guy. He asked the star for a letter putting the budget in writing. He never got it, but Beatty got his deal.

  Beatty insists none of this ever happened, but it’s a story told over and over by people who swear they were in the room, witnessed it with their own eyes. It’s one of those moments that should have happened, because it’s so ripe with irony, bleeding with meaning, a genuflection at the feet of the Old Hollywood by a symbol of the New at a time, the mid-’60s, when no one had the foggiest notion that such a distinction would ever come to pass.

  BEATTY NEEDED Bonnie and Clyde. After making a splash with Splendor in 1961, his career had indeed faltered, a result of poor choices and a youthful cynicism about Hollywood combined with certain romantic notions with regard to the women in his life, who perhaps absorbed more of his time than they should have, an attitude excusable in that this was not a glorious era in the business. The men Beatty admired, Kazan, George Stevens, Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, were in decline. The old order was dying, but the new one had not yet been born. Beatty had spent the last three years with Leslie Caron, whom he had met in early 1963 at a dinner party thrown by her agent, Creative Management Associates (CMA) head Freddie Fields, at the Bistro, a popular Beverly Hills restaurant, to promote her Oscar prospects for The L-Shaped Room. Beatty had seen all her films—An American in Paris, Lili, and Gigi— and had a fan’s crush on her. He asked her if he could see her home. At the time, Caron was married to Peter Hall, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, but husbands were never much of an encumbrance in Hollywood, and she embarked on a discreet, but passionate affair with the charismatic young star.

  Beatty had just finished Mickey One, an opaque and pretentious American “art” film with a European flavor directed by Arthur Penn. When it wrapped, he flew down to Jamaica to visit Caron, who was there shooting Father Goose, with Cary Grant. At night, in Caron’s bungalow, she and Beatty discussed his career problems. He saw himself as an heir to James Dean, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, but couldn’t understand why they were taken seriously, while he was treated like a playboy.

  Beatty began noodling around with a film that would eventually be titled What’s New, Pussycat?—after his signature phone greeting to female friends. “I wanted to do a comedy about the plight of the compulsive Don Juan,” he says. He got into business with a friend of his, an agent turned producer, Charles Feldman. Handsome and debonair, Feldman had founded Famous Artists and represented stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and John Wayne. “Charlie taught Warren a lot, like you don’t put anything in writing, you don’t sign contracts, you can walk out at any time,” says Richard Sylbert, whom Feldman also mentored. Sylbert was a young art director who, like Beatty, had begun his career with Kazan, designed Splendor, as well as Baby Doll and A Face in the Crowd, in addition to many of the most important pictures of the day, including The Manchurian Candidate and The Pawnbroker. Continues Sylbert, “Charlie would not be denied. He was a seducer, just like Warren. Warren would always say, ‘You don’t have any friends; just make the best deal you can.’”

  Beatty intended to star in What’s New, Pussycat? and wanted Feldman to produce it, but he stipulated a condition. Feldman was known for casting his girlfriends in his movies. His girlfriend of the moment was the French actress Capucine. Beatty wanted assurances that a Capucine-like character would not find its way into the script. “Fuck you,” retorted Feldman, who did not relish being told what to do. But eventually he agreed, and work on the script proceeded.

  Back in New York, Beatty and Feldman realized they needed a good joke writer, and one night they went to the Bitter End, a club in the Village owned by Fred Weintraub, to catch a comedian they heard was funny, Woody Allen. They liked what they saw, and Feldman offered Allen $30,000 to work on the script. Allen said, “I want forty.” Feldman said, “Forget it.” Woody replied, “Okay, I’ll take thirty if I can be in the movie.” Feldman gave in. So a movie that had once featured Warren Beatty, now featured Warren Beatty and Woody Allen. Allen went to work. But as draft followed draft, Beatty began to notice that the girl was taking on a European, specifically French cast; he could see Capucine coming over the brow of the hill. But worse, he noticed that his part was smaller, while Woody’s was growing larger.

  Feldman and Sylbert, who was associate producer, were staying at the Dorchester in London, when Beatty arrived for a meeting. He confronted Feldman, accused him of violating their agreement, creating a role for Capucine, letting Allen write him out of the script. Recalls Sylbert, “Warren
said, ‘Charlie, I’m not going to do it.’ Charlie was in shock. Furious. He was not a man you do that to lightly.” Adds Beatty, “I finally walked out in a huffing bluff or bluffing huff, thinking they wouldn’t let me go. But they were only too happy to let me go.” Continues Sylbert, “Warren went back to do a picture with some bimbo at Universal. I said ‘Are you kidding me? You’re gonna turn out to be George Hamilton when you grow up!’”

  What’s New, Pussycat? became a big hit, and a turning point for both Beatty and Allen. “Woody was very unhappy with the movie that was finally made,” continues Beatty. “I was even unhappier, because I would have gotten rich off it. After that, Woody was always in control of whatever he did. And so was I.”

  Only one year shy of thirty, Beatty was looking for a project that would turn his career around. One evening, he and Caron had dinner with François Truffaut in Paris. Caron wanted him to direct her in the life of Edith Piaf. Truffaut wasn’t interested, but he mentioned he had been sent a lively script called Bonnie and Clyde, which had a great role for Beatty. Truffaut said Beatty should get in touch with the writers, Robert Benton and David Newman.

  THE BONNIE AND CLYDE light bulb had gone off in the heads of Benton and Newman two years earlier, in 1963, when both men were working at Esquire magazine. Like any reasonably hip young man or woman in the early ’60s, they were less interested in magazines than they were in the movies. “All the time, everywhere we went, the only thing any of us talked about, was movies,” recalls Benton. He and Newman had just seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and couldn’t get it out of their heads. But most of all, they loved Truffaut. “Within two months, I saw Jules and Jim twelve times,” recalls Benton. “You cannot see a movie that often without beginning to notice certain things about structure and form and character.”

  In the early ’60s, film schools virtually did not exist. Benton and Newman educated themselves by simply going to the movies at the art houses (the Thalia on 95th Street and Dan Talbot’s New Yorker on Broadway between 88th and 89th), the new New York Film Festival that burst onto the scene in 1963, and the Museum of Modern Art, where a kid named Peter Bogdanovich was programming retrospectives of Hollywood directors. “Bogdanovich did two brilliant monographs, one on Hitchcock and one on Hawks,” continues Benton. “Those were the closest things we had to a textbook.”

  One day, Benton and Newman came across a book by John Toland called The Dillinger Days, which touched on the escapades of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who cut a swath of bank robberies and mayhem across the Midwest and South in the early ’30s. Benton was no stranger to the legend of the outlaw couple. He had grown up in East Texas. “Everyone knew somebody who had met them or seen them, and kids used to go to Halloween parties dressed up as Bonnie and Clyde,” he recalls. “They were great, great folk heroes.” Better, they spoke directly to the antiwar generation. Says Newman, “Being an outlaw was a great thing to want to be, whether it was Clyde Barrow or Abbie Hoffman. All the stuff we wrote had to do with épater le bourgeois, shaking society up, saying to all the squares, ‘We don’t do that, man, we do our thing.’ But the thing we loved about Bonnie and Clyde wasn’t that they were bank robbers, because they were lousy bank robbers. The thing about them that made them so appealing and relevant, and so threatening to society, was that they were aesthetic revolutionaries. In our view, what kills Bonnie and Clyde is not that they broke the law, because nobody liked the fucking banks—but that they put a tattoo on C.W. Moss. His father says, ‘I can’t believe that you let these people put pictures on your skin.’ This is what the ’60s turned out to be about.”

  Working at night, with the banjo picking of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on a Mercury record blaring scratchily from the stereo, they wrote a treatment. With the nothing-to-lose bravado of neophytes, they set their sights on their patron saint, Truffaut, to direct it. After all, they felt they had written a European film. “The French New Wave allowed us to write with a more complex morality, more ambiguous characters, more sophisticated relationships,” says Benton. Truffaut waltzed the two writers around the floor, dithering about his other commitments. After sending them to Godard, with whom they had a brief flirtation, Truffaut finally told them he would direct their movie. The script, with the director attached, went out to the studios, which worried that the main characters—killers, after all—were unappealing, and that Truffaut was ill-suited to direct this material. Their chances were not helped by the fact that their script featured a ménage à trois: Bonnie was in love with Clyde, and Clyde with Bonnie, but he needed the stimulus of C.W. Moss to get off. This was in keeping with their notion of Bonnie and Clyde’s transgressive style, as well as the experimentation that was becoming a defining characteristic of the sexual revolution of the ’60s. Benton and Newman got turned down all over town. They became afraid they were going to grow old and die peddling the script.

  One cold and dismal Saturday morning in February 1966, Benton’s phone rang. He picked it up. A voice said, “This is Warren Beatty.” Benton, thinking it was a gag, said, “Who is this, really?” The voice replied, “This is really Warren Beatty.” Beatty said he wanted to read the script, was coming over to pick it up. Benton thought “I’m coming over” meant sooner or later, a couple of days, maybe, a week, maybe never. But within twenty minutes, the bell rang. His wife, Sally, opened the door, and there was Beatty, who took the script and left. About a half hour later the actor called again and said, “I want to do it.” Benton was worried about the ménage à trois. He said, “Warren, what page are you on?”

  “I’m on page twenty-five.”

  “Wait till you get to page forty, then call me back.” Beatty called back an hour or so later, and he spoke words Benton had been waiting years to hear: “I’ve finished the script. I understand what you mean, but I still want to do it.”

  Beatty optioned the script for $7,500. Later, his company, Tatira (his mother, Kathlyn, was called “Tat” as a child; his father’s name was Ira), paid Benton and Newman a writing fee of $75,000. Beatty was unsure whether he wanted to star in the film himself. The historical Clyde was very much a runt, and he imagined Bob Dylan in the role.

  Having acted on impulse, Beatty started to worry he’d made a mistake—the story had been told before on film, the gangster genre was dead, etc. He returned to L.A., where he was living in the penthouse of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “He was walking around saying, ‘Should I do it?’” says writer-director Robert Towne, then a close friend. “He asked everybody, including the operators at the Beverly Wilshire.” Towne told him: “Go ahead.”

  In 1966, the way you controlled a picture was to produce it. After his experience with Feldman, Beatty was determined to do just that, even though he knew that there was little or no precedent for an actor actually producing a picture. But in this, as in other ways, he set a precedent. On March 14, 1966, he sent the writers a note, imploring them to cut the script down for the purpose of resubmitting it to the studios. “Some of these clowns may forget that they’ve already read it,” he wrote. “Please make yourselves really unhappy. Cut off arms and legs, etc.... Pick an image of some executive that Lillian Ross might have written about and try to make him happy.”

  Director after director turned Beatty down. Temperamentally cautious in the extreme, Beatty did not feel he was ready to direct it himself, especially when he was starring in the picture. He needed someone smart and talented, but also someone he could work with. Benton and Newman finally suggested Arthur Penn. They had been impressed by Mickey One, appreciated that it was an attempt to do a “European-American film.” According to Towne, “Penn was a court of last resort. Warren considered Mickey One highly affected and pretentious, but he thought quite rightly that Arthur was an immensely talented and intelligent man.” Beatty went to Penn not once but twice. He told Benton and Newman, “I don’t know if Arthur is going to want to work with me again, but I’m going to lock myself in a room with him and not let him out until
he says yes.”

  ARTHUR PENN WAS VIRTUALLY in hiding when Beatty called him. A slightly built, forty-three-year-old man of serious mien, he had come up in ’50s live television, and had achieved considerable success in the theater. He first went out to Hollywood in 1956, to Warners, where he made The Left-Handed Gun, a Billy the Kid story with Paul Newman and a Freudian spin. It was a dreadful experience for him. He recalls, “I finished shooting, they said, ‘Goodbye!’” He turned his footage over to an editor, and the next time Penn saw The Left-Handed Gun was months later on the bottom half of a double bill in New York.

  After Mickey One flopped in 1965, Penn’s movie career spiraled downward. Hollywood was not a place for intellectuals, no matter how talented, and Penn suffered the kinds of humiliations routinely heaped on directors. First he was brutally kicked off The Train by the star, Burt Lancaster. Then producer Sam Spiegel took The Chase away from him in post-production and recut it.

  Penn hit bottom, did nothing for a year and a half. It was at this moment that Beatty came knocking with Bonnie and Clyde. Like Beatty, he was hungry. “Beatty and I both had a sense that we were better than we had showed,” said Penn. Still, Penn did not much like the script. Beatty, however, would not be denied, and dragging his feet, Penn finally agreed.

  While Benton, Newman, and Penn were working on the script, Beatty made a deal with production head Walter MacEwen at Warners. He said, “Look, just give me $200,000, and I’ll take a percentage of the gross.”*