Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  The bad taste left by the aftermath of the THX fiasco worked like a slow poison on the friendship between Francis and George. Lucas felt Coppola had let him down, wasn’t there to help him fend off Warners. He also felt that Francis had charged Zoetrope expenses against the THX budget, all the more galling because it was the kind of thing that studios routinely did. As Zoetrope wound down, Lucas was often on the phone, hustling editing gigs for his wife, Marcia, and laying the groundwork for his next movie, American Graffiti. One day, Coppola’s majordomo, Mona Skager, opened the phone bill and flipped out. She confronted Lucas, saying, “You’ve run up an $1,800 bill with all these calls, and none of them are about Zoetrope business.” George was angry and humiliated. He had to go to his father—surely no easy task, since he was a conservative businessman and disapproved of his son’s choice of career. Marcia came in and gave Skager a check. When Coppola found out about it afterward, he was furious. “It’s not my style,” he says. “I would have never done that to a friend, Mona was way out of line. I always believed that that incident was one of the things that pissed George off and caused a breach.”

  “I needed to go and develop another project, I couldn’t rely on Zoetrope to do that for me,” says Lucas. “It fell apart.” Coppola was both heartbroken and angry. “I had always regarded George as my heir apparent. He’d take over Zoetrope for me while I went out and did my personal films. Everybody utilized Zoetrope to get going, but nobody wanted to stick with it.” For all intents and purposes, Zoetrope was dead.

  Just when Zoetrope’s prospects looked gloomiest, Coppola got a message from Paramount. They wanted him to direct a picture based on a book by Mario Puzo called The Godfather.

  THE MCCABE CAST and crew flew up to Vancouver in mid-October of 1970. Beatty and Christie rented a beautiful glass house up above the bay. Altman found a nice home for himself as well, which became the focal point for endless parties. He loved to bet on football and bought three or four TV sets so he could watch several games at once.

  Altman had never worked with a star like Beatty, who wasn’t like Sutherland and Gould. They complained and bitched, but finally did what they were told. Beatty wasn’t about to do anything he didn’t want to do. He was used to controlling the production. As Towne put it, “If the director was indecisive, Warren would absolutely destroy him. He’d ask so many questions—and he can ask more questions than any three-year-old—that the director didn’t know whether he was coming or going.” On the other hand, Beatty had never worked with a director quite like Altman before, freewheeling and irreverent, also used to getting his own way, and moreover enjoying the confidence of coming off a huge hit. But the two men liked, or at least respected, each other, agreed on an approach to the material, and the odds were even they could get through the production without killing each other.

  “We had a director who was at the top of his form and a really good cast,” says Beatty. “But there was one problem: there was no script.” Based on a novel by Edmund Naughton, the script, by Altman pal Brian McKay, was very much a conventional Western, the story of of a mysterious stranger riding into a godforsaken turn-of-the-century town in the Northwest, a gunslinger with a past.

  Altman too was unhappy with the script, as he was unhappy with most scripts. “It was one of the worst Western stories you’ve ever heard,” he said. “It had all the clichés. This guy was a gambler, and she was a whore with a heart of gold, the three heavies were the giant and the half-breed and the kid.... I said, ‘You really wanna make this film?’” Continues Beatty, “So we started frenetically taking it apart scene by scene, and I realized that Altman just wanted us to improvise this movie. I believe in improvising, but I don’t believe in improvising from nothing, and I just wasn’t going to do it. So I had to write a script. I had to go down into the basement of this house, where I worked to make sure there was something we could say to each other every day. I worked quite a bit more on the script than he did. I think Altman was much more happy with a kind of hit-or-miss approach. My approach was more linear.”

  In the hands of Altman and Beatty, any resemblance to a traditional Western ended the moment McCabe rides through a drenching rain into the town of Presbyterian Church. The character became a flummoxed antihero, in keeping with both Altman’s cinema of helplessness and Beatty’s inclination to play with and subvert his own star persona. Clyde Barrow and McCabe “shared a sort of foolishness,” explains Beatty. “They were not heroes. I found that to be funny, and Altman found it to be funny; we really agreed on that.” What they didn’t agree on was credit. Altman took a writing credit on the picture, after apparently trying to get his friend McKay’s credit removed. Says Thompson, “Bob didn’t want to split the credit with the writer. He wanted to be the auteur.”

  Altman always hated beginning a picture, kept postponing the start date. Wednesday became Thursday, Thursday became Friday, and then it was, “Let’s get a fresh start on Monday.” Even then, he might throw away the first day’s shooting: “Let’s shoot the second day, and go back and reshoot the other stuff.”

  The town became a character in its own right. Altman had the cast and crew live in the settlement in which the drama would unfold as it was being built. Says Beatty, “Bob had a talent for making the background come into the foreground and the foreground go into the background, which made the story seem a lot less linear than it actually was.”

  To the new bag of camera tricks Beatty and Penn, Hopper and Fonda brought to Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, Altman added the zoom lens, an affront to Old Hollywood cameramen, because focus is always at risk. Actors don’t like it much either. They regulate their performance according to how far they are from the camera, but the director would stage a master shot packed with people, and then would reach through the crowd with the zoom for close-ups so that the actors were unsure if they were one face among twenty, or all alone. But under the influence of the verité documentarians, the street style of filmmakers like Godard, and the low-budget resourcefulness of Cassavetes, a technique like zooming was becoming more acceptable. It was key to Altman’s innovative style, an unusual melding of fiction and documentary, lending his films an unprecedented sense of life.

  Another Altman touch was the film’s mellow yellow hue. He says, “One of the big problems was that the lenses were so sharp, and the stock was so good, that it was going to look like a Christmas card unless I worked constantly on how to achieve a look that fit the subject, and if working on the film stock was the way to do that, that’s what I had to do. I was trying to make a painting that didn’t look like somebody else’s painting.” He used to walk around the set with an enormous Polaroid Land camera, wearing an old yellow velour sweatshirt. One day he pointed the camera toward his stomach, snapped a picture, then took another of the set, creating a double exposure with a yellowish cast. He went to the director of photography (DP), Vilmos Zsigmond and said, “This is what I want the film to look like, and we can achieve this by flashing the film.”* Says Beatty, “It was considered a very bold thing to do. You flash the positive, but you don’t flash the negative, because then you can’t do anything about it if it’s fucked up.”

  As the production proceeded, the relationship between Altman and Beatty began to fray. Altman complained of Beatty’s “nit-picking, the way he pushed and bugged me.” Beatty wanted to know the purpose of every setup, of every camera move, entrance, and bit of dialogue. The two men had radically different ways of working. Beatty was meticulous. As Nicholson put it, “He’ll chew something till the cows come home.” He was used to big-budget productions where money was no object. He invariably did take after take, slowly working his way into his performance. Altman, who never had any money and came up doing industrials and television, liked to shoot and run. Often, he did no more than one or two takes. He believed that too many takes spoiled the spontaneity of the performance.

  According to Altman, the problems had to do with Beatty’s and Christie’s contrasting work methods. He says, “Warr
en wouldn’t start rehearsing until the camera was rolling on take four or five. Julie was always the best on her very first take, and after a while, she started losing interest, and you could see it. So I had one actor who was getting better, and another who was getting worse. So finally I tried to put the camera on her first, and then try to get him in.

  “Warren was great in the film, and there were no bad relations, but it was a touchy situation. He once said, ‘Tell anybody this and I’ll call you a liar, but this picture is about me as a movie star and Julie second, and then all the rest of the people in this picture, who don’t count.’ And he was a little upset that I was spending so much time building up an atmosphere. Because he had never made films that way. Warren is basically a control freak. He wants to run the show.”

  Eventually, Altman learned to run around Beatty, rather than through him. There is a brief scene in which the actor is sitting in his office drinking, nothing complicated. As he reaches for the bottle, he knocks it over, catches it, and pours himself a drink. As Tommy Thompson recalls it, “We shot it once, we shot it again, we shot it about eight or nine times. After take ten, Bob said, ‘That’s good for me, print two, five, ten.’ Everybody was ready to go, it was one in the morning, and Warren said, ‘Wait, wait, wait a minute. I’m not happy with it.’ Bob said, ‘No, no, it’s fine.’ Warren said, ‘I want another one.’ Bob said, ‘Okay.’ Did another one. ‘You happy with that, Warren?’ ‘No, I want another one.’ ” Adds Jim Margellos, the production manager, “It was like a test of wills. There was so much tension between the two of them you could cut it with a knife.” Continues Thompson, “Finally, Bob said, ‘Look, I’m tired, and I can’t tell the difference anymore. Tommy will stay here with you, and you can shoot until you’re happy with it. Good night, guys, I’ll see you tomorrow morning,’ and he left. I don’t know how many we did, thirty, forty, till Warren finally said, ‘two, five, ten, eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-four, and forty,’ and we wrapped. It was four in the morning, but Warren was happy and Bob was happy.” Adds Joan Tewkesbury, who was the script supervisor, “The path to success is sometimes the one of least resistance: “ ‘You want to shoot the Taj Mahal? Fine. I don’t give a shit!’”

  For his part, Beatty says, “A lot of times, Bob would wonder why I was working so hard. I’m just a person that thinks, when you go to all that trouble to set up a movie and build a set and get dressed and go there, I don’t see any harm in doing a number of takes.”

  Altman got his revenge in the scene that ends the movie. McCabe, pursued through a blizzard by the company’s hired gunslingers, is fatally wounded and falls into a snowdrift. Recalls Margellos, “Warren was buried up to his ears, with snow blasting into his face from the wind machine. It was colder than hell. Bob kept saying, ‘Okay, one more time.’ They dug Warren out, put him back, and did it again. He must have done it twenty-five times.” As the film would evolve in the editing, Altman underlined his message. He cuts away from McCabe to the townies frantically trying to save the burning church, and to Mrs. Miller stoned on opium. As the wind howls and snowflakes slowly cover McCabe’s fallen figure to the mournful sounds of Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, they are all oblivious to the drama of his death. The crosscutting at once makes a bleak commentary on the empty pretensions of heroism, and underlines Altman’s contempt for stars.

  Before the shoot finally wrapped at the end of January 1971, Kael visited the set, had a couple of dinners with Bob.

  MCCABE HAD BEEN a physically exhausting shoot. Altman fled to Paris for R&R. Beatty went off on Sam Spiegel’s boat, where he began his own draft of Shampoo. Towne had finally turned in his draft the previous January. Reading it over, Beatty felt it was still shapeless. “Towne’s script didn’t have the structure it needed, so I put one in,” he says. “Now there were two versions of Shampoo.”

  During the period in which Towne was working on Shampoo, and shortly thereafter, he formed an attachment to a woman and a dog, not necessarily in that order. Towne had started seeing Julie Payne when he returned to L.A. after a stint in London in 1969. She moved into the Hutton Drive house with him. While Towne was sitting at the typewriter, enveloped in a cloud of cigar smoke, she was out in the yard digging up stumps and transplanting rose bushes. Towne used to call her Mammy Yokum, because of her powerful wallop.

  In the panic that followed the Manson murders, the writer acquired a large Hungarian sheep dog, named Pannonia’s Hira Vasak. Hira was a huge slobbering beast with matted dreadlocks. It looked like a dirty mop on legs. It was a perfect animal for him, a one-man dog that growled menacingly at other people, acting out the anger Towne was so good at concealing. It was a rare breed, a Komondor; there were not many in this country, and he loved to lecture people on its fine points. But he was devoted to the dog, and once he leapt into a neighbor’s cesspool to save Hira’s “fiancée,” who had fallen in. He emerged covered with shit; it was no small feat for someone so in love with cleanliness as Towne. Says Jerry Ayres, “Hira was so big he couldn’t get into the back of his car, so Bob sat it next to him in the front seat, while Julie sat in the back.” To Ayres, that seemed to sum up the relationship.

  When Beatty got back, he took his script to Towne, and said, “I’m gonna make this picture whether you like it or not, do you wanna do it?” Towne read it, agreed to come back on board. The two men patched up their differences and resumed their close relationship. Although Towne was far too politic to crow about his friendships with Beatty and Nicholson, and later with Paramount production head Robert Evans, he couldn’t resist dropping names. He had an ego to feed and care for, and was never entirely successful in submerging it in the sea of his ambition. Says Beatty, quoting Elia Kazan, “Never underestimate the narcissism of a writer.” Towne aspired to be treated as an equal by his movie star pals, and he was eager to show he could hold his own. He’d disappear for a week, then confide in a conspiratorial tone, “Don’t tell anybody, but I was in a hotel room in Houston rewriting Beatty’s picture.” The implication was, he was indispensable to Beatty. Says Evans, “Bob claims to have done a lot more writing for Warren than Warren says he did. If I had to bet, I’d bet on Warren. He has a clearer head.”

  Although Towne would rarely talk about Beatty, he occasionally let others overhear his end of a phone conversation with the actor, in which he made it clear Beatty couldn’t push him around. He would say, “You cunt... you’re just being a cunt... that’s more cunt stuff,” and so on for half an hour. Says screenwriter Jeremy Larner, whom Towne let listen to him talking to the star, “Towne was tremendously turned on by the conversations with Beatty. He had a certain relish for dealing with him. His attitude toward Nicholson was that Jack was this brilliant boy who you had to let indulge himself any way he wanted to, but with Beatty, here was somebody who was capable of being crafty, somebody more worthy of Towne’s mettle. Towne probably thought a lot more about Beatty than he did about Jack. He was more in love with Beatty. Most guys in Hollywood are more turned on by each other than they are by the women they fuck.” According to Evans, “Towne treated Jack as an equal, but looked up to Warren as a messiah.”

  Towne would very occasionally complain about how difficult Beatty was, but in fact, he was growing to resemble Beatty more and more. When Beatty grew a beard, Towne grew a beard. Their voices sounded alike, the syntax and emphases were the same. Like Beatty, he would call in the wee hours without identifying himself, just start talking in a barely audible whisper. They sounded so alike on the phone that Beatty would call Julie pretending to be Towne.

  “Towne was like this shadow image of Warren,” says Buck Henry, except he was “someone the girls just got away from, they went to the wrong restaurant.” The word around Hollywood was “Towne is Warren’s nigger.” He did some work on almost every picture Beatty did, sometimes without money or credit, and he didn’t even get to brag about it. Beatty is said to have induced Towne to work on the script of The Parallax View during the writers’ strike in the spring of 1973, an infr
action that would have blackened Towne’s name within the writing community had anyone known about it, and could have earned him a sizable fine, not to mention a suspension. Towne used to joke about his dependent position, called Beatty “Badge,” as in, “Badge can get me into the A-list parties,” and referred to himself as “Sharecropper.” But he resented it. “I always felt like one of those parrots at Hefner’s,” he says. “They would clip their wings, so they could fly a little, but not beyond the grounds of the Playboy Mansion.” In his mind, Beatty owed him an enormous debt.

  SINCE BEATTY had been away during the post-production of McCabe, Altman screened it for him when he got back. “I couldn’t hear what people were saying,” recalls Beatty. “The sound in the first couple of reels, in which one would ordinarily expect that the exposition would be laid down and had to be clear, was not clear.” Beatty was upset, not to say furious, over the muddy track.

  Why the track was so indistinct has always been a bit of a mystery. The weather had been terrible in Vancouver, where it snowed, rained, and the winds blew. The sound mixer had a tough time getting a clean recording. Not only did Altman dislike retakes, he also disliked looping the sound later in a studio. Altman thought the sound was fine, he’d gotten just what he intended, and dismissed Beatty’s complaints as the grumbling of a star. Says Thompson, “The principals thought every word out of their mouths was a pearl, and they didn’t want music, let alone other dialogue, obscuring it.”