Altman shrugged off Beatty’s objections, saying, “Warren was infuriated, he is still infuriated, and he’ll just have to stay infuriated.”
But it wasn’t only Beatty who couldn’t hear it. One weekend, during the shoot, editor Lou Lombardo came up. According to Litto, “Bob had a lot of guys that just said yes. Lou had no fear. When Bob did something he didn’t like, Lou would say, ‘It’s shit.’ ” Lombardo edited for Sam Peckinpah as well as Altman, and once when he was being interviewed by a pert, fresh-faced young entertainment reporter who asked him to compare the two directors, he leaned back as if to deliver a profundity, and said, “Sam Peckinpah is a prick, and Robert Altman is a cunt!” Altman showed him some rushes, asked him how he liked them. Lombardo loved what he saw, but hated what he heard; the sound, he said, was “fucked.” Altman blew up. “He stormed off into his bedroom, slammed the door, and never came out,” recalled Lombardo. “I was trying to tell him the fucking sound is bad, and it still is bad.... He never changed it. I think he accomplished what he wanted to do with sound in M*A*S*H—where it was audible but it was overlapped.... But on McCabe, it was recorded in there—a dirty track, a muddy track. It was like trying to get an out-of-focus picture in focus.”
Beatty complained about the track to the studio, but didn’t get much satisfaction. The new Warners regime had very little product, and was anxious to get the film out. Besides, it considered itself helpless before the new power of the Auteur. Says Ashley, “You think we could’ve gotten them to redo it? This was an individual who presumed himself to be an artist.” Adds Beatty, “Things had progressed to such anarchy in the studio system, and filmmakers were treated with so much respect, if we had photographed the movie in darkness, they would have thought that was an interesting approach, and hoped they could exploit it in the marketing.” The star had to be satisfied with looping some of his lines, which didn’t make the track any more audible and irritated Altman. “I can hear it every time I see the picture,” he says. Nobody was happy.
The press screenings in New York and L.A. on June 22, 1971, at the Criterion and the Academy theaters were a disaster. Recalls Altman, “When the picture opened in New York, there was a big preview at one of those huge Broadway houses for all the critics. And there was something wrong with the soundtrack. It wasn’t checked by my editor and I was told that it had been checked. And so that bad soundtrack, on top of the design of the sound, really made it impossible to hear. I screamed, ‘You’ve got to shut it off, there’s something wrong with the soundtrack.’ They said, ‘Oh, that’s the way you did it.’ Well, it wasn’t the way I did it. I left the goddamned theater and went someplace and had a steak. I was ready to get on a plane and go to Alaska.”
Kael quite rightly raved, called it “a beautiful pipe dream of a movie,” went on The Dick Cavett Show and talked it up. But the daily critics were less enthusiastic, and Beatty’s efforts to revive it, as he did Bonnie and Clyde, failed. McCabe was a much different, more difficult picture. For all the scandal it created, Bonnie and Clyde was still a star vehicle, with a conventional, if episodic narrative. The love story was a little bent, but it was still a love story. Although McCabe shares Bonnie and Clyde’s distaste for authority and cynical mistrust of the “system,” de rigueur for any New Hollywood movie, it went further than Bonnie and Clyde in undermining the traditional romance, and boasted of an unabashedly unhappy anticlimax photographed in cold long shots. Like Hopper, Altman was going down the road of genre deconstruction, which, it seemed, the box office would not support. Says Altman, “It still hasn’t grossed a million dollars. And it was the last time I worked for Warner Brothers.”*
Altman felt Beatty stabbed him in the back. “He was really a bit of an asshole,” he says. “He was quite brutal about it when it came out, and of course blamed me for its defects. Warren is a very self-oriented person. Many people think it’s his best film, but it didn’t succeed, so he didn’t like it. He’ll never mention it.”
For his part, Beatty blamed the bad sound for the picture’s failure to perform. “It prevented it from having a tremendous commercial potential because the audience was confused,” he says. “If it hadn’t had to meet a certain date in the summer, it would have been remedied by Altman. I don’t think he intended to screw it up.” But once again, Beatty paid a price for not producing. As he puts it, “Had I been the producer I would have killed Robert Altman.”
Despite the strains in the Beatty-Altman marriage, the two men, different as they were, exerted a certain amount of influence on each other. A few years after McCabe, Altman made his own Bonnie and Clyde—Thieves Like Us. McCabe, in turn, had a significant impact on Shampoo, which is much more an ensemble piece than Beatty had ever made before, and much more episodic.
McCabe’s indifferent performance, coming right after Brewster McCloud, tarnished the golden reputation Altman had earned with M*A*S*H, and did little to help him get his next film launched. Images, an impenetrable, dreamy excursion into what Altman imagined the female mind to be like, flopped as well. But Litto managed to get him a three-picture deal at United Artists. Altman made two of the pictures, The Long Goodbye, and Thieves. The orphan of the three would turn out to be, if not his most successful, his best film, the fullest realization of this talent: Nashville.
Four:
The Moviegoer
1971
•How The Last Picture Show became another jewel in the BBS crown and anointed Peter Bogdanovich, while Bob Rafelson scored with Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Movie destroyed Hopper and his hopes.
“Bogdanovich was arrogant, but he was talented, smart, a very good director. He knew what to say and when to say it. He had the world by a string. Nothing bad had happened yet.”
—ELLEN BURSTYN
One hot, airless night in August 1968, around the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago, Bob Rafelson saw Targets. He told Bert Schneider, “I just saw a movie that sucks, but the guy who made it knows how to make movies, get him in here.” Henry Jaglom heard Peter Bogdanovich’s name mentioned, perked up, said, “Hey, I know that guy from New York, I’ll call him,” and did. Bert got on the phone to Peter, said, “We really loved your picture, man, let’s find something each of us likes.” Peter sent a book called The Looters. They read it, but Bert was unenthusiastic. “I don’t think this is really something that you’re dying to do,” he said.
“Yeah, it is.”
“Naah, it’s not really something we wanna do with you. Somethin’ else. You’ll like somethin’ else. You don’t wanna do this kind of thing, a thriller.”
One night, Peter and his wife, Polly Platt, were over at Bert and Judy’s for a small dinner party. Their house on Palm Drive, in the flats of Beverly Hills, was not cool and hip like Toby and Bob’s; Judy had “decorated” it—Westchester cum Beverly Hills—with cut flowers in the bathrooms, fresh bars of soap, neatly folded guest towels. Despite what he said to Bogdanovich, Bert was unsure about Peter. He worried that the director was too straight to fit into the hip, counterculture atmosphere of the company. “I don’t want to work with Bags,” he had complained to Rafelson, using Nicholson’s nickname for Bogdanovich.
“Why?”
“He’s boring. He’s boring.”
“Ain’t we had enough tsuris with all these crazos we’ve been working with?” replied Rafelson, alluding to Dennis Hopper. “Why can’t we make one film with one guy who will actually go out there and make the thing without driving us crazy?”
Bogdanovich was annoyed that Bert had dismissed The Looters. Respectful of directors to a fault, he thought producers were the scum of the earth. Bert wondered if Peter had any other ideas. Polly piped up: “There’s Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show.” Bert asked Peter to get it for him; Peter told Bert to go buy it. Arrogant himself, Bert respected arrogance in others. Far from put off, he called Peter about a week and a half later, said, “Ya know, it wasn’t easy to get a copy of that book. ‘Go buy it.’ I did.”
�
�Well?”
“It’s very good. Let’s make it.”
Schneider proceeded to explain the BBS idea to Peter: Bert would retain final cut, but there would be no interference, no visits to the set. He told Peter there would not be a lot of money up front, only $75,000, but he would give him a fat chunk of the back end, 21 percent of the net. He asked him to make sure there was some nudity in the script. Peter had to use Harold Schneider as his line producer, had to hold the budget under $1 million, and stay within an eight-week shooting schedule. Peter agreed to the terms. The Last Picture Show was a go project.
PETER BOGDANOVICH was born on July 30, 1939, in Kingston, New York. His father, Borislav, was a Serb immigrant and a talented pianist. In Yugoslavia he was forced to take students to make ends meet. One of them was a thirteen-year-old girl named Herma, from a wealthy Jewish family that had fled Austria a step ahead of the Nazis. Borislav and Herma married, then left for America in 1938. Herma was pregnant with Peter.
It was a truly eccentric family. Borislav turned to painting, and covered the walls of their dark, cavernous apartment on Riverside Drive and 90th Street in Manhattan—a few blocks uptown from Rafelson’s building—with his gloomy canvases. He loved the colors of decaying fruit, and the rooms were filled with mildewed oranges and pears spotted with patches of fuzzy mold he used for his still lifes. Borislav’s room was painted red; he always wore pajamas while he worked, and a hat with the crown cut out that allowed his frizzy hair to stand straight up on end, like a cartoon character. He was sensitive about his hair; Herma was not allowed to touch it, and in the course of their marriage never did, not even when they made love. He cut his hair himself, and kept it in the bottom drawer of his dresser.
Peter was a bookish boy who had to be prodded to come out of his room. His father generally ignored him, but Peter was the focus of his mother’s disappointments and thwarted ambitions. Herma had given birth to another son, Antony, who died the year before Peter was born. She had accidentally spilled boiling soup all over him. Borislav and Herma rarely spoke of it, and Borislav never forgave Herma her carelessness. Nor did she forgive herself. For Borislav, Peter could never replace Antony; for Herma, on the other hand, Peter had no alternative.
Precocious in the extreme, young Bogdanovich took acting lessons with Stella Adler when he was fifteen. Some kids collect baseball cards, Peter accumulated 3 × 5 index cards recording the vital statistics—along with his own impressions—of every film he saw. He went to six or eight movies a week, and liked to claim that between the ages of twelve, when he started the cards, and thirty, when he stopped, he put away 5,316 in all. Later, Peter would boast to Bob Benton, among others, “I’ve seen every American film worth seeing.” His favorites—Red River, Citizen Kane, Rio Bravo— he saw over and over again. It was Citizen Kane, he said, that made him want to become a director.
In his early twenties, Bogdanovich got a job programming films at the New Yorker Theater. He recalls, “One of the first movies we booked was John Cassavetes’ Shadows, which played on a double bill with The Magnificent Ambersons. We had lines around the block. Shadows was the beginning of the New Hollywood.”
One day in January 1961, Bogdanovich was holed up in his tiny, windowless third-floor office above the theater writing notes for The Forgotten Film series. He had that film nerd’s sallow complexion, but with his thick dark hair, regular features, and obvious intelligence, he was not unappealing. It was a time when most American cineastes, like Benton and Newman, were sitting at the feet of the French New Wave directors, but on the wall, underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas had scrawled a defiant aphorism of Peter’s: “The best movies are made in Hollywood.”
Bogdanovich was in a particularly good mood. One of his programming coups, Freaks, was playing that night, and the Museum of Modern Art had just called, asking him to do a monograph on one of his heroes, Orson Welles. He looked up from his desk to see in the doorway a lively face framed by bleached blond hair, almost white. The face said, “Mr. McDonovich?”
Polly Platt was an army brat, and on her mother’s side, a descendant of American bluebloods. She had had a difficult childhood. Her parents were both alcoholics, and her mother, who suffered from bouts of mental illness, knocked her around. Her father was Dutch, and she grew up in the shadow of one of those dreary, repressive Protestant religions. Her first husband was killed in a car accident after they’d had a fight. At Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, she decided she wanted to study scenic design for the theater. She was told, “You’re a woman and you cannot study scenic design. Design costumes instead.” She did, and introduced herself to Bogdanovich as someone who was going to work with him in summer stock that June.
Although not a great beauty, Polly could make a striking impression. Having lived in Arizona, she favored clothes from the Southwest—concho belts, knee-high Navajo kaibab boots made of rawhide with silver buttons up the sides—that made her decidedly exotic among the Jackie Kennedy look-alikes in New York. Displaying a bohemian disregard for convention, she liked to go without shoes and underwear. Bras and panties were just two more things to wash, and she felt sexier without them.
Peter certainly thought so. He courted her with lines from Clifford Odets, speeches from Cyrano de Bergerac, diverted her with his appalling impressions of Jerry Lewis. He initiated her into the mysteries of the cinema. For her part, widely traveled and already a veteran of one marriage, she opened up the world of the senses to a young man who was still living with his parents and had spent nearly all his life in dark theaters watching shadows on a screen.
But despite Platt’s bohemian attire, she and Peter were boringly straight. They didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs. They were the prince and princess of the movie nerds, perfect for each other. Benton called them Mr. & Mrs. Right. Peter liked Howard Hawks, Polly liked John Ford. Their worst fights were over who was the better director.
Bogdanovich was wildly ambitious. “Peter’s father was a manic-depressive and a failure,” says Platt. “I think Peter’s drive must have come out of that—‘I can’t be like him.’ “ He worried his name was too long to fit on a marquee. He envied Wyler, Ford, and Hawks their no-nonsense Anglo surnames, and thought of shortening his to Bogdan. Polly consoled him by reciting the polysyllabic names of the great European and faux-European directors: Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Otto Preminger. They talked about the kinds of pictures they wanted to see, wanted to make. Platt continues, “I knew I didn’t want to see women wake up in bed with their lipstick and hair in place, and I didn’t want to see movies where I could tell way in advance how they were going to end.”
Peter and Polly got married at City Hall, a year after they met, in 1962, when each was twenty-three. Their apartment, near his parents, was crammed with a motley mix of hand-me-downs from both sides. She did some costume designing, but he became sulky when his dinner wasn’t on the table, so she stopped, and began translating and typing up articles on Hawks, Ford, and Frank Tashlin by Godard and Truffaut from the French bible of auteurism, Cahiers du Cinéma. She helped him interview directors, who would be impressed and flattered by their preternatural familiarity with their films. They could recite all the credits, recall each cut and camera move.
They would go down to Times Square and see five movies a day at 50 cents a pop. Polly carried a long hatpin with which she picked her teeth and warded off gropers. At night, they stayed home, watching movies on The Late Show. They lived on Fudgsicles, dropping the sticks behind the red velvet camelback couch. He drank Canada Dry ginger ale by the gallon, and developed a perforated ulcer, so serious he vomited blood and nearly bled to death. He gained prodigious quantities of weight as the doctors fed him milk, butter, and ice cream for his stomach. Later, he would become fussy and obsessive about food.
Soon, cracks appeared in the facade. He recalls, “Polly could be very abrasive. Very loud. Jumping in with her opinions when they weren’t asked for, alienating people. There were a lot of dark areas
in Polly’s life that I really didn’t understand. It was never a very romantic relationship. It was more that we enjoyed working together. I was very young, didn’t really know the difference between love, in love, sympathy, compatibility. I don’t think I knew what I was getting into.”
Peter and Polly met Esquire’s Harold Hayes at a dinner party in New Rochelle. Hayes was impressed by Peter’s passion for movies. He asked him to cover Hollywood for the magazine. “I watched Hawks do El Dorado, Hitchcock do The Birds,” says Bogdanovich. “There weren’t any film schools at that point; I learned how to direct by watching these guys. I saw a preview of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and I knew I was seeing the last great movie of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When that train goes away, I thought, that’s really it, isn’t it, the end of Ford. And the end of Ford was really the end of that era.”
Bogdanovich and Platt went to Monument Valley to do a story on Ford, who was shooting Cheyenne Autumn. On the set, they got close to Sal Mineo, who was the only person their own age. Mineo gave Polly a trashy-looking paperback by Larry McMurtry whose cover pictured a shirtless stud bestriding a scantily clad woman lying in the middle of a road. It was The Last Picture Show, and Mineo wanted to make it, starring himself. Polly read it, agreed that it would make a wonderful movie.
Despite his rapid progress as a writer about film, Peter was not getting any closer to making them. They realized they had to move to L.A. Owing back rent, they filled a shopping cart with books and sneaked them into the service elevator in the dead of night, and then into their car, an old, yellow, 1951 Ford convertible which they naturally called “John Ford.” They hit the road in June of 1964, with all of $200 in their pockets, her one-eyed spaniel, and their black and white TV set in the back seat. Once they got to L.A., they found a rental in the Valley, in Van Nuys, best known as the place where Robert Redford grew up.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 16
