Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  “Oh, Sheesus, Ben always says that. He always worried about words. Lemme phone old Ben.”

  Half an hour later Ford called back. “Peter, he’ll do it.”

  “Well Jesus, whaddya say to him?”

  “I says, ‘Ben? D’ya wanna be Duke’s sidekick for the rest of your life?’

  “ With Johnson on board, Peter attended to his novice cast. He had seen scores of young actresses for the role of Jacy Farrow. No one seemed right. Like Altman, Peter and Polly were not looking for stars. One day, while they were standing on the checkout line of a supermarket near their house, Polly pointed to a face staring at them from the cover of Glamour. “She had funny little spit curls, she was very impertinent, and Southern-looking, blue eyes,” recalls Platt. “She looked like she had a sexual chip on her shoulder, as if she were daring you to try something.”

  Peter asked Marion Dougherty, who was casting the film, to find her. He met Cybill Shepherd at the Essex House on Central Park South in New York. She was big (five foot nine) and robust, radiating health and wholesomeness. With blond hair, pert nose, and creamy complexion, she was stunningly beautiful. Casually dressed in bleached jeans, a matching jacket, clogs, and no makeup save for the pale blue eye shadow that set off her china blue eyes, she had an unspoiled, coltish look. Bogdanovich was entranced. She sat on the floor, told him she was reading Dostoyevsky, but when he asked her which book, she couldn’t remember the title. As she searched her memory, he couldn’t help but notice that she was toying with one of those flowers that come in the small vase with breakfast. “There was something so casually destructive about it,” he decided later. “It seemed to imply the kind of woman who doesn’t mean to be cruel to men, but who is.”

  Peter asked Dougherty to call her in again, said, “You’ve got to see her nude. I have to see if she has any stretch marks or anything because there’s nudity involved.”

  “She doesn’t have any stretch marks, for chrissakes. She’s seventeen or eighteen.”

  “Have her come in with the tiniest bikini you can find.”

  Says Dougherty, “He was falling in love with Cybill, and Polly was having a baby. You could feel the vibes.”

  The BBS guys were dubious; after all, Shepherd had never acted before. Nicholson was delighted. He hit on her at every opportunity. Platt had intimations of trouble. Pregnant with her second child, Alexandra (Sashy), she threw herself into preproduction in L.A. Cybill had a boyfriend back in New York who tried to talk her out of doing the nude scenes. He called constantly, torturing her over the phone. One night, after a particularly painful argument, Peter offered to drive Cybill home. “I knew,” says Polly. “The tone of his voice, it was familiar, and I just knew.”

  “Polly accused me of being crazy about Cybill the day we arrived on location, before it even occurred to me,” says Bogdanovich. “It irritated me enormously.” He turned to Polly, snapped, “That’s ridiculous. I’m not infatuated. She’s funny, I like her. She’s an actress in the picture. She’s never acted before. I’m helping her. What is the problem here?” Cybill was flattered by his attentions. “Peter made making movies seem to be the most exciting activity in the world,” she said. “A lot of people thought I had to be dumb. I had an agent who would slow his speech when he spoke to me. Peter didn’t. He never talked down to me.”

  Timothy Bottoms, a rising young star who would years later distinguish himself by peeing on Dino De Laurentiis’s shoes during the production of Hurricane, had a crush on Cybill, and couldn’t understand why Peter, who already had a wife and children, was hitting on her. They fought throughout the production, and eventually, Bottoms got his revenge: he gave Cybill a novel by Henry James called Daisy Miller.

  BOGDANOVICH AND PLATT took time out from preproduction on The Last Picture Show to watch the 1969 Oscars, which fell on April 7, 1970. The big studio musicals that year—Universals Sweet Charity, Paramount’s Paint Your Wagon, and Fox’s Hello, Dolly!—had all bombed, although one, Hello, Dolly! was improbably nominated for Best Picture, along with Anne of the Thousand Days, Z, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. New Hollywood films like Easy Rider and The Wild Bunch were largely ignored; only Midnight Cowboy got a Best Picture nomination. The fault lines were most apparent in the contrast between two of the nominees for Best Actor, John Wayne, for True Grit, and Dustin Hoffman, for Midnight Cowboy. (Jon Voight was nominated as well, for the same film.)

  Peter and Polly were rooting for Wayne and True Grit; they had no use for Hopper, who had been nominated, along with Fonda and Southern, for Best Original Screenplay. One evening, a few months earlier, Danny Selznick had invited them to dinner at the house of his father, David O. Selznick, and his wife, Jennifer Jones. The other guests included Dennis and Brooke, and George Cukor. Dennis, drunk and pugnacious as usual, turned to Cukor, poked a finger in his chest, and started on his usual refrain, saying, “We’re going to bury you. We’re gonna take over. You’re finished.” Cukor, considerably better bred than Hopper, politely murmured, “Well, well, yes, yes, that’s very possible, yes, yes.”

  Peter and Polly were mortified. Says Polly, “We never forgave him for it. He disrespected one of our heroes.”

  By the time the ceremony came around, Hopper had forgotten all about the awards, and had to be reminded to show up. Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture, but Hopper et al. lost, as did Peter’s sister, Jane, who had been nominated for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Jane flashed a clenched fist to the crowds on her way in.) Wayne beat out Hoffman and Voight. Hopper, who had played a bad guy in True Grit, went over to congratulate him. He was Wayne’s in-house communist. Whenever some dramatic antiwar action occurred, Wayne would hold him responsible, and come looking for him. When the two were working on True Grit, Wayne once flew his helicopter in from the minesweeper he kept at Newport Beach, landed on the Paramount lot, swaggered onto the soundstage with his.45 hanging from his belt, and bellowed, “Where’s that pinko Hopper? That goddamn Eldridge Cleaver’s out there at UCLA saying ‘shit’ and ‘cocksucker’ in front of my sweet daughters. I want that red motherfucker. Where is that commie hiding?” Hopper concealed himself in Glen Campbell’s trailer until Wayne gave up.

  Toward the end of that same month, Nixon invaded Cambodia, and four students were shot to death on May 4 by the National Guard on the campus of Kent State, in Ohio. On May 29, the Appellate Court of California ordered a new trial for Huey Newton, and on August 5, he was released on bail. Bert met Huey for the first time in September. The producer knew a star when he saw one, and Huey was a star. Brackman recalls, “Huey was beautiful like the way Belafonte was beautiful. He was a fantastic specimen of health and clarity and physical and personal power.”

  Bert was mesmerized by Huey. Ironically, while his friends and protégés looked to him for support, regarded him as a guru, he himself hungered for someone to follow. After he met Huey, he explained, with the disarming naïveté of a bedazzled teenager, “How can I put it? He’s my hero. If he’s not Mao, I’ll eat it.”

  Hopper assumed that BBS would finance his next movie. But he was so difficult, even Rafelson wasn’t interested. Bert too was wary. “He just had this instinct that after the success of Easy Rider, Dennis’s ego would be so inflated that it would be completely uncontrollable, and he was right,” says Richard Wechsler. Only Blauner was eager, thought they would be crazy not to.

  The Last Movie was an inspired Pirandellian meditation on Westerns, colonialism, and death. It focused on “a stunt man in a lousy Western,” as Dennis explained it: “When his movie unit goes back to the States, he stays on in Peru to develop a location for other Westerns. He’s Mr. Middle America. He dreams of big cars, swimming pools, gorgeous girls.... But the Indians... see the lousy Western for what it really was, a tragic legend of greed and violence in which everybody died at the end. So they build a camera out of junk and reenact the movie as a religious rite. To play the victim in the ceremony, they pick the stunt man....” In Hopper’s mind, it was a “story about America
and how it’s destroying itself.” As in Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, the doomed “hero” meets a dire end, expires in a flash of violence.

  Hopper had once intended The Last Movie for Montgomery Gift, but by this time Gift was dead. He started testing people for the lead. One day, he walked into BBS, announced, “I can’t find anybody, I gotta play the part myself.” Blauner exploded, “Kiss my François Truffaut, motherfucker.” Blauner buttonholed Bert: “The only way the picture works is the way it’s written. This is a guy when it’s over for him, he’s a broken-up stunt man, it’s Joel McCrea or somebody, but it’s not Dennis, some young guy that you can’t feel sorry for him, so go getta job. Dennis wants to play it? It’ll ruin the picture.” Bert, from his producer’s perch, agreed. “When we got involved in making the movie to begin with, it was with the understanding that he was not going to try to do both jobs,” he has said. “When Dennis came in and said he really couldn’t do it without playing the part, I gave him a big hug and a kiss. I didn’t want to deal with the heartache.”

  BBS passed, and Hopper had to look to the studios for a deal. To Calley, at Warners, life was too short; Dennis was simply a wacko. Not even Columbia was interested. Their deal was with Bert, whom they saw as the creative force behind Easy Rider. They regarded it as a movie waiting to happen. “If Hopper hadn’t done it, Easy Rider would have happened a minute later or an hour later or a day later with some other film,” says Peter Guber.

  Hopper had once dated Jules Stein’s daughter Susan—every father’s night-mare—but Stein had handled it with equanimity. Universal was an unlikely home for Hopper. By the end of the decade, it was a studio that was making millions churning out television product, but its movies were a joke. “It was a miserable place to be,” says Tony Bill, who produced The Sting at Universal. “It was the coldest and most impersonal experience I’ve ever had in the business. They gave a giant victory party for The Sting, and told me I couldn’t bring my children. I refused to go.”

  Wasserman couldn’t figure out why Easy Rider and The Graduate had become hits. “It was frightening,” says production executive Ned Tanen. “These were aging gentlemen who did not remotely understand where their audience had gone. They looked at a movie like Easy Rider, and they said, ‘What in the hell is this?’ It’s against everything they thought was a value in this country; they were still worshipping the grand ol’ flag. But suddenly they were looking at these movies where everybody was dropping acid, was fucking in the park. Even I, who was much younger, didn’t know who was a star anymore. Robert Redford made movies that worked and movies that didn’t.”

  Recalls Danny Selznick, who worked for Tanen, “Wasserman said, We’ve got to find out.’ And indeed, research proved there was a new generation of young people that didn’t care who was in movies, that seemed to want movies about real people and real situations. In fact, if you had a star in a movie, it might hurt the picture, because it would make it not very credible. You saw Gregory Peck in a movie, you thought it was Gregory Peck.”

  Wasserman may have been out of touch, but he was smart enough to know it, and in 1969, he started a new unit, a youth division, making Tanen its chief. Like Schneider, Tanen was a maverick. A native Californian, he had a filial love-hate relationship with Wasserman, with whom he shared a hair-trigger temper. Along with MCA, TV executive Sidney Sheinberg, whom Tanen did not like, Wasserman was grooming him as his successor. Tanen was given to wild mood swings; when he was down, he was very, very down, everything was awful, his movies, his job, his life, life on earth. He was the original guy with the dark cloud over his head. Says Don Simpson, “He was clinically manic-depressive.” But Tanen was smart and, according to Steven Spielberg, who didn’t have much use for him, “Like Sid, he was one of the few people in Hollywood who was not afraid to speak his mind.”

  Borrowing a leaf from Schneider’s book, the idea was to produce films for under $1 million, preferably $750,000. “For $5 million they could have five pictures, five chances at a breakthrough,” says Selznick. The talent would be paid scale, but they would be given a hefty chunk of the back end, as much as 50 percent. Universal offered final cut, an extremity from which even BBS shrank.

  “When the companies started making these movies, they didn’t go gently into them,” explains Tanen. “They said to kids who could not have gotten an appointment on the lot two weeks earlier, ‘It’s your movie, don’t come back to us with your problems, we don’t even want to know about them.’ These were not movies where the studios were dealing with someone they trusted. They were dealing with kids whom they didn’t trust, didn’t like their arrogant behavior, didn’t like the way they dressed, didn’t want to see ponytails and sandals in the commissary while they were eating. They viewed them with absolute dread. Beyond dread. It was like they just wanted to send them to a concentration camp. But the studio left them alone because they thought they’d screw it up if they interfered, and the movies didn’t cost anything. They realized that here was a fountain of talent. That’s how, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, it became a director’s medium.”

  The first two films out of the gate from Tanen’s unit were Diary of a Mad Housewife, directed by Frank Perry, and Taking Off, directed by Milos Forman, and starring Buck Henry. They were critical, if not commercial successes. Tanen also financed Peter Fonda to direct The Hired Hand, and Monte Hell-man to do Two-Lane Blacktop. Later there were Cassavetes’s Minnie and Moskowitz, Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, and Lucas’s American Graffiti.

  But urged on by Stein, the first picture Tanen actually signed up was The Last Movie. Tanen had heard all the Hopper stories, and thought to himself, I know the studio is having a rough time, but this ridiculous person is going to save us with The Last Movie? He asked Stein, “Are you sure you want to get us into this? We’re going to have terrible problems here. Dennis may be gifted, but he’s not really there all the time. He’s erratic, unreliable, and he seems to have a problem editing, he can’t put a movie together. Who knows what we could end up making?” But Tanen thought, The whole world is waiting for Dennis’s next picture. Who are we to turn it down? This is where we start. He put up $850,000. Hopper got the Bonnie and Clyde contract, which is to say, he shared the risk with the studio. He was paid a pittance, $500 a week, but got 50 percent of the gross and total control over the movie.

  The BBS folks were tickled by the idea of Dennis at Universal. “I just was laughing,” says Rafelson. “Uh huh, I wanna see this work out. A lot of people who were at the studios were not interested in discovering talent. They were attracted to the success they thought the talent might bring. Let’s get anybody who worked at BBS and hire them, because it’s obvious they know who’s wired. Some executive called me after Dennis made the deal and said, ‘How do I talk to this guy?’ My answer was, ‘Are you crazy? Don’t. Do what we did. Give ’em the money and let ’em go shoot the movie.’”

  When Hopper, now thirty-four, decided to play the lead in The Last Movie himself, he shed thirty pounds, cut off his mustache and shoulder-length hair. It was Christmas. He sent a package done up with bright holiday wrapping to his daughter, Marin. She excitedly tore off the ribbons and colored paper to find an old Polaroid box filled with a hank of her father’s hair.

  The Last Movie was shot in Peru. Peter Fonda, Jaglom, and Michelle Phillips all had small roles. Sam Fuller played the director. At that time, Peru was the cocaine capital of the world, and every cokehead in L.A. wanted to work on the picture in order to smuggle drugs back up north. Hopper repeatedly got himself into scrapes with the Peruvian authorities. But he finally finished, informed Universal that he would need a year to edit the film (three months was standard), and he was going to do it in Taos.

  PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY on The Last Picture Show commenced in October 1970, in Archer City, Texas, just three weeks after Platt gave birth to Sashy. Orson Welles was the baby’s godfather. Archer City was where McMurtry had grown up; it even boasted of a yellow-brick hotel in which Bonnie and Clyde
once took refuge.

  Now a fastidious dresser, Bogdanovich self-consciously played the director. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, bell bottoms, and turned up his shirt collars, with the wings folded over like a paper airplane, Elvis-style. Trying to stop smoking, he always had a toothpick in his mouth, nervously broke the old one, inserted a new one. Platt, staring through large, oval shades with blue lenses, sat next to him behind the camera. They discussed every shot. Later, some people, including Ben Johnson, would whisper that she directed the movie as much as he did.

  Back on La Brea, Bert and Steve were not happy with the dailies. “We felt we had made a mistake with the subject matter, we should’ve had Peter do a caper movie, because this picture was too somber, too dark, too down,” says Blauner. They also couldn’t help but notice the absence of master shots,* and Bert was worried that the dailies wouldn’t cut together. He asked Rafelson to look at them, saying, “I can’t understand this fuckin’ stuff, man, what is this?” Rafelson checked out the dailies, told Schneider, “He knows exactly what he’s doing, it will cut like butter, and don’t bring me in here again.” Peter edited in his head, in the camera.

  Post-production head Jim Nelson says, “Peter was the only director I’ve ever worked with, you could send his trims† off to Bekins in an envelope.”

  The entire cast and crew was staying at the Ramada Inn, a tacky motel with a lobby out of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The floor was planted with a blood red rug; painted gold banisters flanked the stairs going up to Peter and Polly’s two-bedroom suite. Midway into the picture, Peter recognized he was falling hard for Cybill, said something like, “I’m not sure who I’m more attracted to, you or [the character] Jacy.” She broke off with Jeff Bridges, with whom she was having a production fling, and the romance blossomed. Peter returned from the set later and later each night. One night he did not come back at all, and Polly realized she could no longer deny to herself that the relationship between Peter and Cybill had become sexual. She confronted him, hysterical. Peter apologized, claimed he couldn’t help it, that he had never had a cover girl before, that he was in the throes of a sexual obsession. He said he felt old, and she made him feel young. “We thought it was just going to be for the picture,” says Bogdanovich. Polly tried to see it from his point of view, but it made her furious, anyway. Especially when he said, “I don’t know if I want to have a wife and children.”