Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  The script was tailored for Nicholson (Buddusky), and Rupert Crosse, a talented black actor whom Towne had met. Ayres started looking for a director. He sent the script to Altman, and then to Ashby. “I thought this was a picture that required a skewed perspective, and that’s what Hal had” says Ayres. “He felt to me like a brother in the fraternity of the self-styled underground of the early ’70s. He was distrustful of people from the studios he considered bombastic or authoritarian. But if somebody came to the door and said, ‘I’ve been driving a bus, and I’ve got a great idea for a scene,’ he’d say, ‘Okay, do it.’”

  At first, Ashby turned it down, muttered, “Oh yeah, white sailor, black failure.” But after reading the script a second time, he changed his mind. Studios distrusted Ashby for the very same reasons Ayres liked him. He was barely verbal, never made much effort to communicate with the executives who hired him. He made Columbia nervous. Still, the budget was so low it was barely a blip on the screen. The studio approved him.

  The project was considered a daring one for Columbia, and the studio was balking at the torrent of obscenities in the script (unlike the novel), which contained lines like, “I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker.” It refused to commit until Towne cleaned it up. Recalls Guber, “The first seven minutes, there were 342 ‘fucks.’ At Columbia, you couldn’t have language, couldn’t have sex. If you made love, it had to be at 300 yards distance, no tongues.” Says Towne, “Now that movies were opening up, this was an opportunity to write navy guys like they really talked. The head of the studio sat me down and said, ‘Bob, wouldn’t twenty “motherfuckers” be more effective than forty “motherfuckers?”’ I said, ‘No.’ This is the way people talk when they’re powerless to act; they bitch.” Towne refused to change a comma, and Nicholson backed him up.

  The project languished for eighteen months waiting for Nicholson, who wouldn’t be available until he finished his latest picture for BBS, The King of Marvin Gardens. Guber told Ayres, “I can get Burt Reynolds, Jim Brown, David Cassidy, and a new writer, since this Towne won’t clean up the screenplay. We’ll give approval for production right away.” Ayres demurred, and Columbia, after some grumbling, agreed to wait. Says Guber, “They were afraid that the film would go somewhere else, to another studio, and they had already suffered that fate with Young Frankenstein and other films.” Ashby’s bust didn’t help. Continues Guber, “If it had emerged more publicly in the press, it would have really injured the company and they might have closed the picture down. Nicholson’s fierce loyalty to Hal made a big difference.”

  THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS featured, in addition to Nicholson, Ellen Burstyn and Bruce Dern. Bob Rafelson directed, from a script by Jake Brackman. It told the story of two brothers, the older one a flamboyant confidence man with an eye to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, full of scams and tricks. The younger one, quieter, more introverted, earned his living as a Jean Shepherd-style late-night radio DJ who soliloquizes into the wee hours, getting lost in the tangle of his own memories.

  It was a powerful script, and there was every reason to believe it would yield another triumph for BBS. Nicholson was loyal to Rafelson, and chose his projects based on the director. He considered Rafelson, with some reason, to be an auteur. So did Rafelson. After Five Easy Pieces, “Bob certainly saw himself as heading for that international pantheon,” says Brackman, “creating a legend for himself a la John Huston.”

  Nor had the double success of Five Easy Pieces and Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show done anything to moderate Rafelson’s confidence in his casting instincts, which knew no bounds. Initially, Nicholson was to play the older brother, Dern the younger, but Rafelson immediately realized that the more surprising, original way to go would be to cast Jack in the quiet role of the DJ, and Dern as the flamboyant con man, let him, in effect, play Jack. His theory was, as he puts it, “take away the audience’s presuppositions, their props, so that violence becomes more violent, beauty becomes more beautiful, sex becomes more sexy. Everything gets amped.” Burstyn played Dern’s lover, and Julie Robinson her companion, a girl young enough to be her daughter.

  Robinson had a lovely, pale face, ethereal and vulnerable, a real heartbreaker. “She was luminous,” recalls Burstyn. “You looked in her face you felt you could fall into her eyes.” She had a major drug habit, had been on the Magic Bus with Ken Kesey, and she had had a small part—and brief affair with Jaglom—in his first film, A Safe Place, also produced by BBS. But she was a terrible actress, stiff and halting. According to Dern, Rafelson became infatuated with her. “It was open adoration, very definitely the whole syndrome of, I’m making a movie star—a director takes an unknown and she blossoms under his tutelage,” says Dern. “It was just the way he touched her, the way he moved her around, like she was a possession. Toby was standing there every day, and he would just carry on as if it were OK. Bob truly loved her. I think it destroyed his marriage.” (According to Rafelson, they did not have an affair. Robinson later died in a fire.)

  “Nobody wanted him to cast Julie,” says Brackman. “Bob had a wild hair up his ass, an instinct that he was going to go with. He had a hard time acknowledging that his instinct was incorrect. Bob did have a thing for her, but her performance destroyed it. By the time he was seeing the dailies, he was no longer in love—if you could call it that—with Julie. Bob was realizing that he, the great caster, had made a mistake, which was horrendous to him. He felt like she’d tricked him. He was overreaching and overestimating himself.” At the same time, he continued his affair with Paula Strachan. Everyone knew about it but Toby. Says Brackman, “Toby would fly in and Paula would be flown out.”

  Principal photography began around Thanksgiving 1971 and spilled over into the winter of 1972. Bob was almost as much into the idea of being a director as he was into directing itself. Very much the poseur, he strode onto the set with a viewfinder dangling from his neck, surveying his domain. “Bob was a very cerebral director,” says Burstyn. “He had a lot going on in his head. On the set he was remote, aloof. He was more result-oriented than Bogdanovich, who was involved in the process of acting, the nuts and bolts. Bob told you where he wanted you to get to; he didn’t care so much how you got there.”

  Marvin Gardens got a tepid reception at the New York Film Festival, and was perfunctorily released by Columbia in the fall of 1972. Nicholson even had a hard time getting a limo to take him from interview to interview. Columbia was having a very bad year. Ironically, it was still putting out the kinds of big-budget trash the other studios had abandoned after Easy Rider, and in 1972, it lost millions on 1776, Nicholas and Alexandra, Oklahoma Crude, and Lost Horizon. It was on the brink of financial disaster.

  Nor was BBS still cruising from hit to hit. Jaglom’s A Safe Place, Drive, He Said, and Marvin Gardens had flopped, and a Jim McBride project, Gone Beaver, had aborted one day before the beginning of principal photography. It was clear that Bert Schneider’s heart was no longer in the company. Says Brackman, “On Marvin Gardens, he basically was as completely removed from everything as somebody at a studio. I doubt if he ever read the script.” Adds Dern, “I was watching a company start to come apart. It appeared to me it was through a lack of interest. That’s what shocked me. Bert didn’t give a shit.” Schneider decided to take a sabbatical from the picture business.

  BBS was starting to feel more like an albatross than the creative haven it once was. “At one point Bert turned to me and said, ‘You collect the rent, I’m tired of this shit,’” recalls Rafelson. “We encouraged people to come and camp out, weird documentaries were being made, strange directors. Any time some Japanese or Indian or Yugoslav director came to America the first place he would arrive was there. We didn’t give a fuck-all; we’d let anybody have a screening. People were getting shot in the building because of the politics, the Black Panther stuff, busts and cops and God knows what. I didn’t know who the fuck was in that building. None of them could pay. I didn’t want to produce anymore. I felt I
was burned out. I rather suspected by this point that I was famous enough that I could get a gig just by walking in the door of a studio. Boy, was I in for a rude awakening! It didn’t work that way, and it happened within weeks of the decline of BBS.”

  Schneider was spending more and more time and resources on the Black Panthers, who were moving away from confrontation toward a more realistic appreciation of what was possible. They organized a Survival Conference at which they gave away food and shoes. Bert footed the bill, to the tune of $300,000. Ashby put some money in as well.

  On June 13, 1971, the New York Times had published The Pentagon Papers, a devastating internal history of the government’s conduct of the war leaked by a former Defense Department analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon decided to prosecute Ellsberg, and Schneider had become deeply involved in his defense effort, called the Pentagon Papers Peace Project. “That was a major turning point,” he said. “I had been involved with the peace movement for a long time, but that finally pushed me over the edge.”

  In addition to Bert’s other problems, his relationship with Candy Bergen had fallen on hard times. It had been frozen into a form that would destroy it: Bert the teacher, Candy the student. Bert built her up, Bert tore her down. Candy was closed, uptight. Bert was open, in touch with his feelings. He talked more and more about “sexual nonexclusivity.”

  “What do you mean by that, exactly?” asked Candy.

  “Where two people feel secure enough and free enough to explore sexually with other people.”

  “What do you mean, explore sexually?”

  “I’m sorry it’s so threatening to you, Bergen, but you have to understand that I’m a love object for every woman who walks into my office.... Start dealing with that. It’s time you began growing up.”

  Partly as a result of his activities with the Pentagon Papers Peace Project, Schneider decided that what the country needed was a really good documentary on the war. Rafelson suggested Peter Davis, who had made a name for himself with a CBS documentary called The Selling of the Pentagon. The new film would be called Hearts and Minds.

  JUST AS The Last Detail was about to go into production, Rupert Crosse was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Ashby postponed the shoot, waited for him to decide whether he wanted to do the film or not. “Most movie companies drive the wagons right over the grave,” said Nicholson. “Hal delayed the start of The Last Detail for a week so an actor could come to terms with the knowledge that he had a terminal illness.” When it became clear he didn’t want to do the picture, he was replaced with Otis Young. The ever-geeky Randy Quaid, looking like a cartoon character, a pasty-faced doll awkwardly fashioned out of soft cheese, was perfectly cast as the kid, Meadows.

  Haskell Wexler was slated to shoot it, but he couldn’t get a union card for an East Coast production, and Ashby upped Michael Chapman from camera operator to DP, in the same way he had made Mulvehill a producer on Harold and Maude, and would later turn his editor, Bob Jones, into a writer. His approach was in keeping with the ’60s distaste for the rigid hierarchy and pigeonholing that characterized an industry in which someone might be an assistant director his whole life, never a director.

  Like other New Hollywood directors, Ashby was getting a reputation for being a producer killer. “A lot of times producers never even showed up,” says Mulvehill. “Hal wouldn’t deal with them. So after a while, they said, ‘Fuck it.’ He particularly disliked the creative producers who brought scripts to him. It really frustrated him that he couldn’t originate material. By getting rid of them, he could assert authorship over the project.” Ayres, who was an acquired taste anyway, was no exception. You loved him or hated him. The first time he met Mulvehill he extended his hand, said, “Hi my name is Jerry Ayres, and I’m an alcoholic bisexual.” Mulvehill wondered, Is this a proposition, or what?

  The Last Detail finally began principal photography in November 1972. Actors, at least those who didn’t much like to be directed, loved Ashby. Nicholson called him one of the greatest “nondirectors” of all time. “He would become their dad,” says Mulvehill. “He’d stroke them, he’d try things, he’d let them try things, he created an atmosphere that was totally permissive—and yet he was no fool, he knew when something wasn’t working, he’d move it along as well.” He’d let them try almost anything they wanted, saying, “I can get behind that.”

  Ayres had recommended his pal Bob Jones as an editor. His father had edited Gentleman’s Agreement, Panic in the Streets, and some other films for Kazan, and Jones had edited Cisco Pike. Initially, he didn’t want to work for Ashby. “I’d heard what a crazy man he was, worked twenty-five hours a day, worked in his house,” says Jones. But they hit it off, and Jones took the job.

  By the time they were ready to wrap, Ashby and Mulvehill were barely speaking. “Chuck took a lot of crap from Hal,” says Jones. “He bore the brunt of much of Hal’s craziness. At the end of the shoot, Chuck said, ‘Never again.’” Ashby was rarely angry in public, but by himself, it was another story. “He would come to a slow boil, get back to some private space—a car, and fucking explode, start cursing. He could be mean, sarcastic,” says Mulvehill, who lived by Hal’s suffrance. Although Ashby had made him a producer on Harold and Maude, he hadn’t been able to get into the Producers Guild, and what Ashby gave, Ashby could take away. “I didn’t have any other relationship, I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Mulvehill says. “I was in a totally vulnerable position. I was doing what I was doing because of my relationship with Hal, and he knew that.

  “After his father killed himself, Hal never worked through it,” he adds. “The end result was that he tried to keep himself from being rejected. He was always doing the rejecting, always ending relationships. You could predict when the girlfriends would come into his life, and when they were going to leave his life. When he was in post-production, getting rid of a movie, he would be getting rid of his relationships. His old friend or girlfriend would be leaving, and he would have struck up a relationship with somebody new. Hal was passive-aggressive. He would not confront you—Hal hated confrontations—and at that time I didn’t want to confront anything, either.”

  Once again, Ashby edited at home, on Appian Way. He sat in front of the KEM with preternatural concentration, lighting up joint after joint, sometimes with a roach stuck to his lower lip, chewing sugarless gum and snacking on dried figs, nuts, small bowls of rice, running the footage, back and forth, back and forth. He had been a vegetarian since 1968. When he had been a kid on the farm, he had observed the routine cruelty inflicted on animals by the farmhands. He was tormented by dreams in which cows and hogs were slaughtered for food. The editing took forever, as was usual with Hal, as he slowly sifted through the footage. The studio would call, and he would lock himself in the bedroom and refuse to come to the phone. At one point, he flew to London. The very next day, the head of editing called Jones, said, “We’re coming up to take the film.”

  “What do you mean, coming to take the film?” replied Jones, incredulous. “It’s a corporate decision, we’re coming up to take the film.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  Gradually, the calls would come from executives higher and higher in the Columbia food chain, until John Vietch, head of physical production, got on the line: “You don’t have any choice. We’re taking it.”

  “I do have a choice, I have the key to the house. I’m locking it up, and sending everybody home. If you want to take it, you’re breaking and entering.”

  Jones made good on his threat, called Hal in London, who in turn made Columbia call off the wolves.

  Towne dropped in periodically while Ashby and Jones were editing. He didn’t like what he saw, didn’t like Hal’s pacing. “The good news about Hal was that he would never allow a dishonest moment between people,” says Towne. “But gentle soul that he was, he almost considered it a moral imperative never to interfere with the actors. He would never pressure the performers, provoke a clash on the set. He left his dramatizing
to the editing room, and the effect was a thinning out of the script.”

  Ayres was still tight with Towne. The producer had left his wife, Ann, two children, and a Frank Lloyd Wright house to move in with his male companion, Nick Kudla. “Bob Towne has always been a very cool character, very politically astute, very careful in his moves,” says Ayres. “He was always lecturing me, because I’m an impetuous person, ‘Jerry, be the last one to stick your

  head aboveground.’ Well, I was always the first one to stick my head aboveground, and he was always the last.” One day, Towne came over with his dog, Hira, to see Ayres. “He came in, I said, This is Nick...’ ‘Oh hi, Nick,’ I showed him around the place, ‘This is my work room,’ and he saw the room had no bed in it. He noticed the other room had one double bed in it, and I saw as clearly as a shoe dropping, his mind going click, click, click.

  “About a week later, Bob said to me, ‘Jerry, just one thing about this coming-out-of-the-closet thing, you know, these guys won’t understand this, it will ruin your reputation,’ and so on, and I said, ‘Bob, I don’t want to live in shame anymore, you know?’ I got furious at him. He and Warren were so intimate, they were twisted together like a knot, so I said, ‘Listen, you and Warren squabble on the phone every day like a couple of lovers, go all over the world fucking the same women in the same room. If you two guys aren’t lovers you’re the next thing to it.’ He got furious at me, and we didn’t see each other for years.”

  THE OSCARS WERE HELD on March 27, 1973. The Godfather, which had been nominated for ten Oscars, won only a disappointing three: Best Picture, Best Actor (Brando), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Coppola and Puzo). Coppola lost Best Director to Bob Fosse, with Cabaret Brando scandalized the audience by sending Sacheen Littlefeather, on behalf of an organization called the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee (which he appeared to have made up) to decline his Oscar, in the name of Wounded Knee.