Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Peter dogged publicists for invitations to screenings, especially when they were accompanied by food. He would come back for seconds and thirds at Directors Guild of America buffets, and stuff his pockets with rolls. But they knew a lot of people, mostly the Old Hollywood directors who appreciated their admiration. Peter wore Jerry Lewis’s cast-off suits, and Lewis even gave him one of the Mustangs in his fleet, saying, “Take the one without the phone; you don’t need a phone.” Director Fritz Lang invited them for breakfast every Sunday morning, told Polly that Peter was not to be trusted, that eventually he’d leave her. They saw Hawks and Ford regularly. Predictably, Hawks liked Peter; Ford liked Polly. When their friends went away, they house-sat. Like X-rated Goldilockses they went through the closets of Beverly Hills mansions trying on clothes and fucking in every bedroom.

  Platt felt threatened by the Hollywood beauties on every corner. She and Peter were at dinner one night at the Flying Tiger on Ventura Boulevard with Hawks and Sherry Lansing (now chairman of the motion picture group at Paramount), then a drop-dead gorgeous starlet who played the love interest in Rio Lobo, when Hawks leaned across Polly toward Peter, and shooting a glance at Sherry, said, “If you really want to be a director, this is the kind of girl you should be with.” Peter nodded sagely. It didn’t do much for Polly’s disposition. Once during a fight, Peter got so angry he put his fist through a plasterboard wall.

  One day, Bogdanovich went to a screening of Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels in Hollywood. Roger Corman was sitting behind him. Someone made introductions. Corman knew his byline from Esquire, asked him if he would be interested in writing for the movies. Bogdanovich was, and Corman hired him as his assistant director on The Wild Angels, the picture that made Peter Fonda a star, of sorts. Bogdanovich recalled, “I went from getting the laundry to directing the picture in three weeks. Altogether, I worked 22 weeks—preproduction, shooting, second unit, cutting, dubbing—I haven’t learned as much since.”

  Corman was pleased with his work. “Do you want to direct your own picture?” he asked. Bogdanovich replied, “Are you kidding?” Targets was a sniper story loosely based on the recent rash of mass murders, like the one of August 1966 in which Charles Whitman perched on top of a tower on the campus of the University of Texas, and picked off students with a high-powered Remington rifle. The budget was a mere $125,000. Corman instructed the young director, “You know how Hitchcock shoots, don’t you? Plans every shot, totally prepared. You know how Hawks shoots, don’t you? Doesn’t plan anything. Rewrites on the set.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, on this picture, I want you to be Hitchcock.”

  Targets was shot in April 1967, in twenty-three days. Bogdanovich got a lot of help from his friends. Director Sam Fuller told him to pinch his pennies and spend them all on a big ending. He did, using ideas he had soaked up from other movies. “The ending of Targets was based on Bonnie and Clyde” says Bogdanovich. “Except that we didn’t have them shot up.” Peter and Polly collaborated on the script and editing, which was done in the kitchen of their home on Saticoy Street. She designed the costumes and sets, wrote the checks. They were a great team. He was the enthusiast, she the critic. He thought they were succeeding; she thought they were failing. He was verbal, she was visual. He typed, she talked; then he talked, and she typed. “He’s the locomotive, I’m the tracks,” is how she put it.

  “Polly was a very strong driving force behind Peter,” says Paul Lewis, the unit production manager. “She did not let his ego get in the way as it later did. She would say, ‘Don’t be an asshole about things,’ and he would respect and listen to her. He would listen to anybody in those days.”

  Peter and Polly continued to socialize. They would invite Hawks, Ford, Renoir, Welles, Odets, Cary Grant, Don Siegel, Irene Selznick, and others to dinner, which they would consume under the walnut tree in their small back-yard. Hawks had little sympathy for the antiwar demonstrators battling police in the streets of Chicago. “If I was in charge,” he said, “I’d arrest them all, cut their hair off. Shoot ’em!” Platt, who opposed the war, was appalled: “You know, Howard, they have a point. We have no business in Vietnam.” She looked at Peter, across the table, his face in his hands. He had no political convictions to speak of. He always said, “It has nothing to do with us. We’re artists.” She thought, You won’t support me. You have to become your own man, you can’t just be a carbon copy of Howard. He’d be impressed if you stood up to him. But you won’t; you’re a coward. Later she would say, “I think that was the day I stopped loving Peter.”

  Platt gave birth to their first child, a girl named Antonia, after Peter’s dead brother, Antony. Targets was released in the summer of 1968, and flopped. Bogdanovich always thought it was a victim of Martin Luther King’s assassination, which made people leery of sniper films. Meanwhile, Peter watched his peers pull in front of him. “Coppola was ahead of us,” says Platt. “Peter didn’t know him yet, but he was ferociously competitive, and we were very jealous of the fact that he got to make Finian’s Rainbow and Rain People before us, while we were floundering around trying to get a foothold.”

  BBS, MEANWHILE, was raking in money from Easy Rider, and moving quickly into its next production, Five Easy Pieces, directed by Rafelson and featuring Nicholson, who was fast becoming BBS’s most valuable asset. “I thought I was real lucky,” says Rafelson. “I had bagged into a guy who didn’t even know he was a fuckin’ actor.” Bert treated him like a star, lent him money to buy an $80,000 house up on Mulholland. They had dinner together at least twice a week, and Bert was the one who got Jack into the position where he got points. “They were close like brothers,” says James Nelson, who did post-production for all the BBS pictures. “They’d fly together to Lakers games.”

  Jack wanted to direct, and Bert made it happen for him, acquiring Drive, He Said, based on a novel by Jeremy Larner, about college basketball ’60s-style. Jack was a sociable guy who’d been around the Hollywood block, and he trailed in his wake a coterie of old friends he had collected from earlier projects, acting classes, even high school. Bert didn’t want anyone whispering in Jack’s ear but him. His attitude was, “Jack has outgrown you, get outta here,” and he had no use for people like Fred Roos and Harry Gittes, whom he considered among Jack’s “lame-o” pals. Roos was an inspired casting director, the Marion Dougherty of the West Coast, who had produced a couple of Nicholson’s B movies in the mid-’60s and really put Drive, He Said together, a fact Bert refused to acknowledge. Gittes enjoyed the distinction of being the best of Jack’s best friends—there were many. When Jack became a star, Gittes was his reality check, the one who could say things to Jack that nobody else could. Nicholson would later borrow his name for the character he played in Chinatown, Jake Gittes. Harry had known Jack since the early ’60s, when Harry was enjoying a successful career on Madison Avenue producing commercials and Jack was a struggling actor. Both men grew up without fathers, and recognized each other as damaged people. “All we had was terrible memories of no one being there,” says Gittes. “The pain of the handicapped overwhelms everything else. They’ve got it all, you’ve got nuthin.’ Jack was full of rage all the time.”

  Bert Schneider was getting the reputation for being a killer negotiator, with ice water in his veins. He loved to read contracts, would sit at his desk with his arms folded across his chest, a hand on each shoulder, scanning the pages like a juicy novel. Occasionally, Gittes found himself in the unenviable position of having to negotiate with Bert. “I always felt it was a cat and a mouse,” he says. “Bert was the cat and I was the mouse. These BBS guys beat the living shit outta me. They were the meanest people I’d ever met in my life, brutal, inhumane inflicters. Respect and loyalty, that was the way BBS operated. They had a gangster mentality. This was the Jewish, Bugsy Siegel type of hipness—We are not the soft Jews.’ And believe me, these were not the soft Jews. These were the coldest, toughest Jews I’d ever met in my life. To another Jew! I said, ‘Landsman!’ They s
aid, ‘Get lost!’ Whatever your weakness was, Bert would be on it like stink on shit.”

  Jack resisted Bert’s efforts to separate him from his old friends. He was loyal, to a point. Continues Gittes, “I would’ve thought that Jack would’ve been watching out for me a lot more than he did. I don’t blame Jack, though, ‘cause Jack got the living shit beat out of him when he was starting out. But I have never forgiven Jack for getting involved with these guys. BBS brought out his mean side, the hardball side of Jack.”

  Larner often found himself at odds with Nicholson over Drive, He Said. “What was secretly true about Bert and Bob, and overtly true about Jack, was that they were comparing themselves to every other cock in town,” he says. “Bert would always line up behind Jack. He told me, ‘My job is to keep Jack happy. Jack wants to rewrite your script, I gotta support him; Jack wants to fire you, I gotta support him.’” (In fact, Nicholson did not fire Larner.)

  Bert didn’t have a very high opinion of writers, had absorbed more of the studio attitude from his father than he would have probably cared to admit. During the editing of Easy Rider, he’d walked with Hopper past the writers’ offices on the way to Abe’s private dining room at Columbia, and amused himself by pounding on the doors, roaring, “Get out from under your desk, motherfucker, I know you’re in there. Why don’t you write something, turn something in, you jerk-off.”

  Indeed, Bert and Jack were well matched. When they were together, which was often, it was simple. Bert gave, and Jack took. For Jack, success meant never having to pay for yourself. He never picked up a check if he could possibly avoid it. His home was filled with freebies he’d hustled, or which had just appeared, unsolicited, manna from movie star heaven—bags of expensive golf clubs, heaps of fine Italian shoes. But Bert, who had a more highly evolved sense of power, paid for everyone, entangling his friends and acquaintances in a sticky web of indebtedness. Years later, when Jack became a superstar, and the power relationship between the two men shifted dramatically, Bert called in some of his notes. He tried to take, but Jack wouldn’t give.

  Five Easy Pieces was a small, personal film, European in sensibility, character-, rather than plot-driven. It focuses on a downwardly mobile pianist named Bobby Dupea (Nicholson), from a comfortable WASP family of musicians who is discovered at the beginning working on an oil rig. Stanley Schneider begged Bert not to let Rafelson do it because Head had flopped. But to Bert, this was just fuel for the fire. In the fall of 1969, Rafelson started on preproduction. The writer was Carole Eastman.

  Nicholson prided himself on his eye for talent, and Eastman was one of his discoveries. She broke in as an actress, then turned to writing, making a specialty of working-class characters. She had a great ear for the lilt and humor of blue-collar dialogue. A sensitive soul, nerves very close to the surface, she was striking to look at—tall, blond, rail thin, with a long neck, a skittish bird apt to take flight at the rustle of a leaf. Except that she had a fear of flying. “She wouldn’t step on a plane if you put a gun to her head,” recalls Buck Henry. “She was born to be an eccentric old lady.” Carole was a bit of an agoraphobe, wouldn’t leave Los Angeles, wouldn’t ride in someone else’s car unless she drove. She was phobic about having her picture taken, obsessive about food at the same time that she coughed continuously from chain-smoking. Even in L.A., she rarely went to places with which she was not already familiar. Her sexual orientation was a matter of endless debate; men hit on her all the time, but she never seemed to have a lover, of either sex.

  Rafelson was a bully, the kind of person who brought all sorts of things to bear on a situation to get what he wanted, threatened and badgered, bellowing, “You owe me!,” then proceeding to enumerate all the things he’d done for you. He was not about to take a back seat to Eastman, however talented she might be. Even though Rafelson had done little of note up to that point, it was an affront to his vanity if his name did not appear at least once among the screenwriting credits. Later on, he insisted to an interviewer, “No film that I have directed... started with material outside myself,” and modestly compared his style to that of the severe, minimalist aesthetic of the much admired Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. He knew everything; no one else knew anything. He was famous for once lecturing Ingmar Bergman’s legendary DP, Sven Nykvist, on lighting. Writers felt that, like other directors who didn’t write (as well as some who did), he would poach on their turf. Says Walon Green, who wrote The Wild Bunch (with Sam Peckinpah) and adapted At Play in the Fields of the Lord for Rafelson some years later, “If he wrote ten words, he’d say he wrote the whole thing.”

  Rafelson told Eastman his ideas, and she went off for six weeks with Richard Wechsler, an old New York friend of the Rafelsons. He baby-sat her until she came up with a script, whereupon she would have nothing to do with Rafelson. “She felt she would become polluted if she had to talk to the director,” says Wechsler. Rafelson made some script changes, and took co-story credit on the same card as Eastman. She was furious. Concludes Buck Henry, “If he could rewrite Shakespeare, it was nothing to ask a Carole Eastman for credit.”

  Rafelson would never discuss credit or money. He’d say, “Talk to Bert.” Bert would say, “You know Bob; I think he’s gonna lose his enthusiasm for the project, he’s not gonna wanna do the picture if he’s not the auteur. Between you and me, I’ll make it worth your while, you share the credit with him.”

  Still, “a lot of the ideas were Bob’s,” says Toby Rafelson. “The notion of a talented guy who rebels, and in a way wastes his talents until he’s left with nothing, had a lot to do with him and his perception of the people around him.” Indeed, the fantasy of downward mobility was entertained by Rafelson himself, and to some extent Schneider and Blauner, who affected the speech habits of truck drivers, and fancied themselves somehow of the street.

  Five Easy Pieces was shot on the BBS budget, forty-one days beginning in early winter 1969, spilling over into January, for $876,000. Rafelson tried to control the pacing of Nicholson’s performance by manipulating his drug in-take. “He’d say, ‘Do you think we should give Jack some grass or some hash for this scene?’ ” recalls Wechsler. Bob and Jack had brutal fights, but when they were over, they were over.

  Toby still had no idea that Bob was fooling around. “He covered his tracks very, very well,” she says. “I couldn’t have realized it consciously, or I wouldn’t have stayed with him.” Although there may have been an element of willful blindness on her part. She once said, “In Hollywood, if you’re married to a powerful guy, you don’t ask them if they’re cheating on you because they are, and if you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be there.” She had a recurrent nightmare, in which they were together with a group of people in a house of many rooms, or riding on a swiftly moving train. One moment he was at her side, but the next he would be gone. She anxiously made her way down the long hallways or corridors looking for him, throwing open doors, and invariably discovered him in bed with someone. They left her feeling miserable, but after all, they were only dreams.

  Rafelson, always a director first, producer second, was already growing un-comfortable in his role at BBS, worried he was spending too much time looking for new talent, digging up projects, helping to cast other people’s pictures. Indeed, he had suggested Ellen Burstyn to Bogdanovich. He envied Bogdanovich, thought, Why aren’t I making The Last Picture Show? It’s the perfect Bob Rafelson movie. Later, he would say, “I think it’s the best movie we ever made.”

  NOW THAT THE LAST PICTURE SHOW was happening, Bogdanovich finally got around to reading the book. He realized, to his chagrin, that it had less to do with the last picture show, or the end of movies, than with coming of age in the early ’50s—in a godforsaken, desolate Texas town, yet. The story revolved around the friendship between two young men, Duane, a charming roughneck from the wrong side of the tracks, and Sonny, the good boy trying to find his place in the world, and the damage inflicted on both of them by the rich, bored, Anarene femme fatale, Jacy Farrow. Thrown into
this mix is Sam the Lion, the elderly proprietor of the pool hall and run-down movie theater. Sam, rolling cigarettes and telling stories, is the sole repository of decency in the town, and when he dies, suddenly, of a stroke, it all goes to hell. As Sonny puts it, “Nothing’s really been right since Sam the Lion died.”

  Peter was in a funk. He was a New York boy; what did he know from small towns in Texas? Polly liked the book because it could have been her, had she grown up in the Midwest instead of Europe. “There were all these movies about this, but they were all fake,” she says. “Everything that’s in the book, the taking off of the bra, hanging it on the car mirror, the hands that were cold and the girl who would only let him touch her tits, just barely getting your hand up this girl’s leg, were experiences I’d had as a young woman. There were parts of a woman’s body that were completely off limits in America. These were things that it was just impossible to show in Hollywood films, whereas in European films, like Blow-Up, you saw pubic hair.”

  Just as Beatty and Penn, Benton and Newman saw Bonnie and Clyde as a French treatment of American themes, Peter and Polly saw that by 1969, in Polly’s words, at last it might be possible to “make the book in America the way the French would have made it, where these weird American sexual mores could be investigated.”

  Bogdanovich wanted to shoot in black and white, thought it would convey period better than color, but it was unheard of. Finally, he asked Bert. The whole idea of BBS was to empower directors, and Bert was as good as his word, said yes. “Don’t forget, at that point Easy Rider was still the success story of the hour,” says Bogdanovich. “If we said we wanted to shoot in 16mm and blow it up, they would have let us.”

  Once again, Peter and Polly collaborated closely. She would design the sets, supervise the costumes. They huddled with McMurtry in their house in Van Nuys and hammered out a script. Bogdanovich got his best ideas while shaving, and one day it occurred to him to cast John Ford stalwart Ben Johnson for the role of Sam the Lion, the owner of the Royal. Johnson didn’t want to do it. He didn’t like talking about the clap, which the script required him to do. “I’ve never had to say words like that,” he complained to Peter. “My mother’s gonna see the movie.” Bogdanovich called Ford. “Jack? Ben doesn’t want to do it. He says it’s too many words.”