The situation was delicate, with Beatty trying to get the best out of Hal, but also directing through him. Anthea Sylbert puts it this way: “It was a collaborative effort, with Warren at the helm. One day, Warren said to me, ‘I want you to watch that scene there.’ So I watched it. Then he came to me and he said, ‘Well, how was it?’ ‘Just okay.’ He said, ‘Go tell Hal.’ I said, ‘I’m not telling Hal anything. You go tell Hal.’”
Towne rewrote as they went along. “There were three of us behind the camera,” he says. “If one of us wasn’t satisfied with a take, it was done over. In the celebrated scene between Warren and Goldie where she asks, ‘Were there other women?’ and he replies, ‘Well, there were a few times at the shop—let’s face it, I fucked them all...’ Originally he said, ‘Grow up, everybody fucks everybody.’ Warren was towering over Goldie, so it seemed like he fucked everybody and then was lecturing her about it. I called for a reshoot. Hal thought it was okay, and Warren, being the prudent producer, was reluctant, but I insisted, and then he got mad at me for not having realized that it was fucked up before we shot it. I went for a walk with my dog, Hira, and realized that Warren had to be sitting down and Goldie towering over him, and that this speech had to be personal. It had to be torn out of him, so I did a rewrite.”
Beatty was leery about starting The Fortune without a break, thought he might be making a mistake, but Nichols reassured him, told him it would be all right, he would make it all right. But Eastman’s script had no third act. When Jack returned from shooting The Passenger in Spain, the reality sank in. Not only was the 240-page script unfinished, it never would be. Eastman refused to rewrite, refused to touch a word. She had an extremely high opinion of her abilities, regarded herself as a Virginia Woolf. She didn’t like Nichols any more than she liked Rafelson. As Hank Moonjean, the line producer, puts it, “If the director had been Jesus Christ, I don’t think she would have been pleased.” They tried to hammer her, said, “You’re being completely unprofessional, Carole.” But she wouldn’t give an inch, shot back, “I like being an amateur, I don’t want to be a professional.” Nichols panicked, tried to get Jack to lean on Carole, but it was no go, she would not write an ending. Nichols said, “We’re never going to have a complete script, we’re going to start anyway.”
The only thing Nichols could do was try to reduce the length. He had hired Polly Platt to design the production, and she was in on the meetings between Nichols and Eastman at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “He kept cutting all the good stuff out of the movie,” recalls Platt, who took Eastman’s side. “She would suffer over it, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She had this curious habit of putting both of her hands inside of her T-shirt and grabbing each of her tits, like she was protecting herself. Mike was trying to make the movie for a price—he’d gone very far over budget on those other movies, and they were flops—so this time he was going to prove to the studio that he could bring it in on budget.” Platt argued with Nichols, as was her way, and he fired her, hired Dick Sylbert.
Nicholson had broken up with Michelle Phillips. “Jack always has the same dynamic with women,” says Gittes, “tremendous push-pull. He was pulling away for the first three fourths of the time. Then eventually the girlfriends pull away—who can have a relationship with an actor who goes on location with beautiful women, wanna fuck ’im?—and he started chasing them. The key word is control. As soon as he lost control of his women, he went out of his mind.” He liked to sleep with women, but he didn’t like them. After Shampoo, Beatty began seeing Michelle, who had a cameo in one of the party scenes. During the production of The Fortune, she hung around the set, “didn’t know whose lap to sit on,” as Dick Sylbert puts it. Beatty and Phillips were not well matched. She was in many ways the opposite of Christie, used to living the high life, going to Aspen for Christmas. He had never taken a vacation in his life. She allowed Beatty to gratify several interests at once, one day letting him accompany her on a visit to her gynecologist. The doctor obligingly let him share the view.
TRUE TO FORM, as Shampoo was coming to a close, Ashby dumped Dyan Cannon, whom he had been seeing, and got involved with one of Nicholson’s exes, Mimi Machu, whom Hal had met at the Chinatown wrap party. Mimi was house-sitting for Nicholson; she and Hal spent a lot of time there, drove to the beach together in Mimi’s battered U.S. mail truck. He plunged quickly into Bound for Glory, a biopic based on the life of Woody Guthrie, for UA.
When Glory fell into his lap, Ashby related to it right away. Having grown up on a farm in the ’30s, he felt a real kinship with Guthrie. “He loved that sense of freedom that Woody Guthrie had, never tied down to anything,” says Machu. “He loved to roam.” Shampoo had taught Hal the virtues of surrounding himself with allies, and he persuaded Mulvehill to work with him again on Glory. “It’ll be just like old times,” he said. Mulvehill agreed, but right away noticed a difference. The success of Shampoo made Hal much more sure of himself, much more confrontational. According to Mulvehill, “Hal said, ‘Fuck you, this is what I’m gonna do, if you don’t like it, stick it in your ear.’ He was also more into publicity for himself, his image as a filmmaker.” He went way over budget, from $4 million to $7 million. The shoot was scheduled for seventy days, and went to 118. “We shot and shot and shot,” says Mulvehill. “Frankly, it was the start of Hal’s inability to deal with his success.”
Ashby had neglected his health. “Hal’s lungs were very weak,” says Machu. “He was asthmatic from years of smoking.” He was still smoking a couple of packs of long, thin Shermans every day, as well as vast numbers of joints. He was also doing a lot of coke. His behavior became increasingly erratic, gentle and soft-spoken one minute, loud and abusive the next. Haskell Wexler was the DP. He was Ashby’s favorite DP—they did four films together. Wexler shot what he called “dirty” films, films that had a gritty look. But he was getting tired of dealing with Hal’s mood swings. “Hal was snorting,” says Wexler. “He fired me, for no reason. All of a sudden he said, ‘You’re fired.’ ‘Whaddya mean I’m fired?’ ‘You’re fired.’ Then he started to scream and stomp. I went to Hal and I said, ‘You’re not the Hal Ashby I love and respect. You’re the Hal Ashby who’s doing something to himself up his nose, and I’m not going to accept it.’ I really chewed him out for being a doper, and he backed off.”
Finally, Hal came down with a bad, raspy cough that got worse and worse as the production progressed. The doctors thought he had lung cancer, and it gave him a bad scare. He gave up the Shermans, started on four- and five-day fasts to purify his system.
The Last Detail received three Oscar nominations, Randy Quaid for Best Supporting Actor, Towne for Screenplay, and Nicholson for Best Actor, as Begelman anticipated. But by the time he re-released the picture in the spring of 1974 to take advantage of them, whatever heat it had generated during its initial release in December had dissipated. It was a shame, because it is a marvelous movie, full of the kind of funny, raunchy throwaway lines only Towne could write, and only Nicholson could say. Watching Nicholson talking Towne was like listening to Bob Dylan playing with the Band. There were a million ways to have ruined this picture, by patronizing or sentimentalizing the not very bright working-class characters, by shedding tears over Meadows’s fate, by overemphasizing the fleeting moments when the movie’s themes crystallize, before dissolving again into the blurred gray landscapes glimpsed through the windows of fast-moving trains, but Ashby’s touch is delicate and sure.
Ashby was good at putting trouble, both personal and professional, behind him. He had moved on to Shampoo and then to Glory without looking back, and when The Last Detail died, he hardly seemed to notice.
Seven:
Sympathy for the Devil
1073
• How bad boy William Friedkin made The Exorcist, joined Coppola and Bogdanovich in the Directors Company trying to take over the world, while Altman got himself in trouble.
“There’s a darkness in my soul, a profound darkness that is with me every wa
king moment.”
—BILLY FRIEDKIN
On December 8, 1969, a scant four months after the Manson murders, twenty-three miles east of San Francisco at the Altamont Speedway in the white trash town of Livermore, Alameda County, 400,000-plus long-haired flower children gathered on a chilly fall afternoon to hear the Rolling Stones in the West Coast’s answer to Woodstock. Security was augmented by a couple of hundred Hells Angels, who were accustomed to performing such chores for Bay Area bands like the Grateful Dead in exchange for free beer. They came rolling in on their chrome Harleys like squat toads atop gleaming steeds, accompanied by the loud thrum of the three-stroke engines and the smell of gasoline. They were accessorized with brass knuckles, knives, and leaded pool cues. The crowd, having sat through sets by the Jefferson Airplane and watched the Angels beat up Marty Balin, was growing impatient for the featured act. Finally, Mick Jagger burst upon the stage wearing gold, skintight velvet pants, thigh-high red boots, and a red and black ruffled shirt with flowery sleeves. The band broke into “Sympathy for the Devil,” shortly to be celebrated for cineastes by Jean-Luc Godard, in his film of the same name. Suddenly there was a commotion at the foot of the stage. Then, as the band played “Under My Thumb,” a young black man in a Day-Glo green jacket made the mistake of leaning against one of the choppers. As a pack of Angels surrounded him, he incautiously brandished a .38. Three Angels jumped him, and then he was dead, knifed in the back, neck, and face. It was all caught on film, of course, immortalized in the Maysles brothers’ documentary Gimme Shelter. The ’60s had ended again, and again badly. By the time William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist, based on an ostensibly true story, appeared in bookstores two years later, Americans were ready for a creepy tale of demonic possession and pure evil, especially after the bloodletting of Vietnam, Kent State, and Manson. It became an instant bestseller.
WARNERS WAS LOOKING for someone to direct The Exorcist. Calley had lined up the usual suspects, but every one of them had a reason why he didn’t want to bring the novel to the screen. He asked Mike Nichols, who said, “I’m not going to stake my career and the picture’s success or failure on the performance of a twelve-year-old girl.” He asked Arthur Penn, who was teaching at Yale and declined. He approached John Boorman, who didn’t like the novel, thought it was a story about torturing a child. Blatty, who wrote the script, and was also a producer on the movie, sent a copy to Bogdanovich. Flattering the powerful director, he wrote an inscription on the flyleaf: “If you don’t make this movie, nobody will.” But it wasn’t Peter’s kind of picture, and he turned it down, naively thinking Blatty meant what he said, that therefore it would never be made. Then Blatty remembered William Friedkin, whom he had met some years earlier when the director had called a TV script of his “the worst piece of shit I ever read in my life.” Blatty laughed, thinking, This guys got balls.
Since then Friedkin had developed a reputation. As one producer put it, “Billy was a tough critter. He didn’t give a fuck about anybody else that walked the face of the earth. He was a guy, you’d known him for thirty years, saved his ass by putting together the deal, he’d turn to you and say, ‘Get off the set.’” Blatty didn’t know anything about this, just recalled that Friedkin was somehow unfettered by the usual Hollywood inhibitions, and willingly jeopardizing his chances to direct by speaking his mind. I can trust him, he thought. He also recalled that Friedkin was known for his documentaries. “Someone who could give the film a sense of reality was what the fantasy absolutely needed,” he says.
Blatty sent Friedkin a copy of the novel with the same inscription he had used for Bogdanovich. Unlike the others, Friedkin jumped. “A good part of my motivation was to make a better film than Francis,” he explains. “We were ambitious and competitive. Someone would always raise the ante.” At the time, The Exorcist seemed impossible to make, the special effects—levitation, possession, poltergeists—were way beyond the state of the art. Blatty says, “It was all very well for the reader’s imagination when it’s on the page, but to have it mashed into your face like a custard pie on the big screen and say, ‘This is it,’ I mean, it could have been ludicrous. He could have been a laughingstock. But nothing daunted him.”
Friedkin received $325,000 for directing. Blatty gave him five points from his share; Warners gave him another five. Friedkin says he had final cut. He hated Blatty’s 226-page first draft, complained the writer had strayed too far from his own book. There were lots of flashbacks and flashforwards. Friedkin accused Blatty of doing to himself what his own worst enemy wouldn’t. He said, “I just want you to tell a straight story from beginning to end, with no craperoo.” Blatty listened, and started over.
The director and the writer hit it off immediately. Friedkin found Blatty to be a nervous guy with a facial tic, jet black hair, and olive coloring. He had such a Levantine cast, that when he first came to Hollywood he passed himself off as a Saudi prince. The two men had in common an inordinate attachment to their mothers. Both had recently died, and Blatty was writing a book about his. “My grief could be described by an outside observer as neurotic, overdrawn, and one might describe Billy’s reaction as the same as mine,” said Blatty. “Who knows what deep psychic effect it had on both of us.”
For his part, Blatty found Friedkin immensely charming and entertaining. “There was a certain element of danger about him,” he says. “Billy was extremely fluent socially. He knew something about everything, especially the film business. He had a hale, convivial presence that I enjoyed immensely.” Friedkin surrounded himself with characters out of Damon Runyon, cops and gangsters he met through Jimmy Breslin.
Blatty wanted Brando for Father Karras, but the director vetoed him. Recalls Blatty, “His reason was that if he cast Brando, it would be Brando’s picture.” He had seen what had happened to Coppola, and did not want to share the limelight. He turned down Nicholson as well, eventually settling on a cast of solid, but not flashy actors, including Ellen Burstyn, fresh from Marvin Gardens, for the mother, Chris MacNeil.
Casting the part of Regan, the possessed girl, was harder. At the time she was interviewed, Linda Blair was twelve. Friedkin needed to make sure she could deal with the more outré requirements of the role. He asked her, “Did you read The Exorcist?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about a little girl who gets possessed by the devil and does a lot of bad things.”
“What sort of bad things?”
“She pushes a guy out a window and masturbates with a crucifix and—“ “What does that mean?”
“It’s like jerking off, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, do you know about jerking off?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Do you do that?”
“Yeah, don’t you?”
She got the role.
Once Friedkin started to work, he was demanding and autocratic. He had a furious temper that left him literally foaming at the mouth with saliva spewing from his lips. He threw phones, stamped his feet. “He never threw anything lethal,” says Evan Lottman, who was one of the editors on The Exorcist. “It was all calculated to terrorize and subdue.” A few days before he was scheduled to begin principal photography, he discovered that the set was not to his liking. Without a second thought, he fired his production designer, John Robert Lloyd, who had worked on several films with him, and ordered the set rebuilt, delaying the start date six weeks. The buzz on the set was that this was only a pretext, because Friedkin wasn’t ready, needed more time. He called Burstyn into his office to inform her that the start date was going to be pushed back. While they were talking, Billy’s secretary buzzed him, said, “Charlie Greenlaw’s on the phone.” He was Warners’ head of physical production. Despite the so-called greening of the studios, most of the young directors still saw them as the enemy, and Friedkin was not about to take any mouth from the front office. He says, “A lot of the guys running studios, they had never made a picture, they’d never written a film, prod
uced, photographed, tapdanced in a movie, let alone directed one, and I thought, These guys really don’t know what they’re talking about.” Billy knew exactly what Greenlaw wanted. Without breaking his stride, he said, “Tell him if he’s calling to fire me, I’ll take the call, otherwise I’m speaking to Miss Burstyn,” and went right on talking.
FRIEDKIN WAS BORN in Chicago on August 29, 1935. (He always managed to give the impression he was four years younger than he was.) He came from the kind of lower-middle-class family Rafelson wished he’d come from. “It was a fucking slum,” said Friedkin, referring to the old neighborhood and, as usual, scarcely bothering to mince words.
The Friedkins lived in a one-bedroom apartment. His mother Raechael (Rae), was an operating room nurse. “My mother was a saint,” he says. “I never heard her say one negative thing about anyone. She was like Florence Nightingale.” He fell in with a bad crowd, and credits her with saving him from the eventual fate of his companions—drugs, jail, death—by returning him to the straight and narrow after he had been arrested for armed robbery.
Louis Friedkin, his father, had been a merchant seaman and semipro softball player who ended up working for his older brothers in a chain of discount men’s clothing stores on the South Side of Chicago. Entirely devoid of ambition, Louis never made more than $50 a week, and was out of work for the last two years of his life. He died, indigent, on a gurney in a hallway in Cook County Hospital. Friedkin viewed his father with a mixture of affection and contempt for not making more of himself.
Despite the fact that he was only five foot eleven, Billy was a decent basketball player, a good shooter, dreamed of being All-Pro, another white hope like Bob Cousy. As a teenager, he started going to movies. Diabolique and The Wages of Fear made a big impression. He saw Psycho over and over, studied it. Television documentaries like Harvest of Shame, for CBS Reports, also made an impact. After he finished high school, his parents couldn’t afford to send him to college, and he got a job in the mailroom at WGN-TV in Chicago. He saw Citizen Kane at the Surf movie theater on the Near North Side. Like so many others, he said it changed his life, made him want to become a director. “He had Welles posters on his wall,” recalled Wilmer (Bill) Butler, a cinematographer who knew him well in those days, and would later work for Coppola, Spielberg, and Forman. “He admired his style, the way he held himself above everyone else. Welles didn’t have much time for fools. And Billy didn’t either.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 29
