Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  As a result of his string of flops, Altman had a hard time setting up Thieves, which, like most of his movies, had an unhappy ending. Even though George Litto had made a three-picture deal with UA, David Picker, who ran production, balked at Thieves. By 1973, UA was a company in trouble. Arthur Krim and Bob Benjamin had sold it in 1967, when it was churning out hit after hit, to a conglomerate called Transamerica. Financially, the two men did very well for themselves and retained effective control over day-to-day operations, but the hot streak turned cold. Christopher Mankiewicz, son of Joe, nephew of Herman, worked there in the ’60s, and again in 1978. From Transamerica’s point of view, he says, “there was a lot of resentment, because UA had had twelve, fifteen years of success, then the Jews had taken the goys for a fortune, and suddenly UA stopped being successful.” In 1974, Krim tried to buy the studio back. Transamerica chairman John Beckett not only turned him down, he put someone over Krim, effectively demoting him to number two in the company he had built. The Krim team found the new management guidelines intolerable. Transamerica challenged Mike Medavoy, who became head of West Coast production in 1974, on his company car, a Mercedes, de rigueur for someone in Medavoy’s position in Hollywood, but unthinkable in the culture of a corporation that only allowed Fords and Chevys to senior VPs of its subsidiaries.

  There was bad blood between UA and Altman. When The Long Goodbye, the first film in his UA deal, opened weakly, the company pulled the film and redesigned the marketing campaign, in an unusual effort to give it a second chance. But regardless, Altman denounced UA to the New York Times. “When he went to the press and shit all over us and took credit for getting us to do something that we had volunteered to do, I was totally offended by it,” says Picker. Confrontational as ever, Altman was doing himself no favors.

  Picker wanted Altman to direct a film about Nashville, based on a script they owned adapted from a book called The Great Southern Amusement Company. Altman didn’t like the script, said, “I won’t do this, but I’ll make you a Nashville movie if you’ll finance Thieves.” Picker agreed, but according to Litto, refused to pay Altman, who was broke, until the film was delivered. When Altman and script supervisor Joan Tewkesbury arrived at the airport near the location in Jackson, Mississippi, they learned that the deal had fallen through. Picker had taken exception to Altman’s budget, $1.3 million, slashed it by $500,000. Tewkesbury looked at Bob, and said, “Yeah, but we’re all here. We have to continue.” Bob agreed. He was already financing preproduction out of his own pocket. “Bob always did that,” says Litto. “Get them a little bit pregnant; he intimidated them into going ahead.” Litto had to kick in some of his money to make up the difference. Picker’s behavior left a bad taste. There wasn’t even any money for dressing rooms. The production assistants had to go from door to door, offering locals $5, $10 for use of their bathrooms so the stars could change into their costumes.

  Louise Fletcher had a major role in Thieves, which her husband, Jerry Bick, was producing. They and the Altmans were close. Fletcher hadn’t acted in over a decade, and Altman persuaded her to take the role of Mattie. “There was this wonderful atmosphere on the set,” says Fletcher. “He did everything possible for an actor to find the truth. But he had a split personality, fucked you after it was over. You don’t exist anymore, you’re dead. Bob insisted on getting his going rate, but asked everyone else to sacrifice and take scale. He rails against this industry, like in The Player, but he’s part of it. Like a lot of directors, they have their eye on the prize.” Adds Tommy Thompson, Altman’s AD for a decade, “He’d always position himself for his money. Look at him now, a lot of failures, but he’s always done fine.”

  Altman treated Bick badly. He had the typical New Hollywood director’s attitude toward producers: he wanted to do it himself, and he did. Says Thompson, “Jerry was desperately trying to produce, trying to have some say, and Bob didn’t want it. It was just an annoyance to him.”

  It was on Thieves that Bob first hired Scott Bushnell, who eventually came between him and his most loyal collaborators. She came from the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco. Bushnell was a woman of medium height, thin, with shoulder-length black hair, black eyes, and long yellow nails who wore hippie-ish granny dresses. She didn’t like to have her picture taken. Scottie was widely disliked. Behind her back, people called her a witch.

  While Altman was still in Mississippi, he asked Tewkesbury to go to Nashville and keep a diary that would be the basis for a script. Months afterward, Altman himself visited Nashville, along with Tewkesbury and Platt, whom he had asked to work on the picture. The Watergate hearings were on television and Bob, who was obsessed with and detested Nixon, would not leave his room.

  When Altman submitted Tewkesbury’s script, which had nothing to do with the book, Picker wrote him a note that said, “This is not a script.” Recalls the director, “He hated it, so they threw it out.” Altman, who was still aggravated by what he considered to be the slipshod marketing campaign the company had done for The Long Goodbye, had yet another reason to be angry. UA had just brought Eric Pleskow over from European distribution and made him president of UA. The company threw a big bash for him at Chasen’s, to which were invited all the UA brass, plus their stars and directors, including Altman and Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah had too much to drink, as usual, and took a swing at producer Jerry Briskin, against whom he had apparently nursed a grudge for a decade, over Major Dundee. Not to be outdone, and similarly well lubricated, Altman got into an argument with Picker. Picker said, “Fuck you,” Altman said, “Fuck you too,” and the upshot was, Altman was free to take Nashville elsewhere, which he did, to Jerry Weintraub at ABC Pictures. (Picker has no recollection of this confrontation.)

  The Lily Tomlin character, Linnea Reese, was based on Fletcher, whose parents were deaf, and Fletcher was supposed to play it. “Nashville was in development, and my parents came from Birmingham to visit the set of Thieves,” says Fletcher. “He witnessed Jerry not being able to communicate with them, and I was sort of the go-between, the interpreter for them with everybody. He got this idea to write a character who has a deaf child, and the father isn’t able to communicate with the child, and that was going to be my part. So, one day, when we were back in L.A., Bob’s wife, Kathryn, called me on the phone, and said, ‘Guess who came into the office today? Lily Tomlin.’ I said, ‘Oh, great. What part’s she going to play?’ There was a silence. She said, ‘Bob hasn’t called you?’ I said, ‘No, Bob hasn’t called me.’ It turned out that it was my part. He took my family identity, then to treat me in that way. I stopped speaking to him, because he hurt me so bad.

  “That was the same year I made Cuckoo’s Nest,” continues Fletcher. “One morning, I was at the Sherry Netherland being interviewed by Aljean Harmetz from the New York Times in the coffee shop, and Bob was in another booth. I didn’t know it, until he verbally attacked me, in a loud voice, saying, ‘You don’t speak to me, after all I did for you. You don’t speak to me.’ That was the last straw. Jerry had already produced two of his movies, and he was like a broken man over working with Bob. Kathryn picked up the pieces. People work for him for a certain amount of time, and then they say, ‘I can’t.’”

  Platt never did do Nashville. “I hated the way Bob treated his wife. He infuriated me, kind of reminded me of Peter.”

  PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY began on The Exorcist on August 14, 1972, in New York, where Friedkin still had his apartment and was at a safe distance from the studio. The schedule called for 105 days of shooting. Two hundred days later, in March 1973, when Coppola had already wrapped The Conversation, they were still shooting.

  Wells tried to dissuade Blatty from hanging around the set “producing,” but Blatty, who wanted to learn the business, wouldn’t listen. Almost immediately, he collided with his new best friend. “I didn’t know what a producer was supposed to do, but I knew one thing, I was supposed to watch the budget,” he recalls. The budget was of more than academic interest to Blatty, bec
ause after a certain point, he would begin to see dollars. If the budget grew too large, his cut would recede, become smaller and harder to see. “Then one day I was in the production office, when the phone rang,” he continues. “One of the production assistants puts her hand over the mouthpiece and looked around. There was no one else there. No production manager, no Friedkin, just me. I was the producer, so she looked to me to produce.” She said, “Mr. Blatty, Ellen Burstyn is calling from the airport. She doesn’t want to take a taxi. She wants a limo. But Mr. Friedkin said no limos for anybody. What should I do?”

  “He said no limos for anybody? Well, no limos for anybody. And I have to go. I have an appointment.”

  The next day, Friedkin and Blatty had lunch at the Carnegie Deli, stuffed themselves with pastrami sandwiches, then ambled down Seventh Avenue. Friedkin started in on how badly and undiplomatically Blatty had handled Burstyn. Blatty defended himself. They had stopped at the corner waiting for the light, when Friedkin said, “Bill, if you don’t like it, why don’t you just fire me.” Blatty called him, replied, “Okay, you’re fired.” Friedkin turned on his heel, and strode away. “My intention was very simple,” recalls Blatty. “I was stupidly trying to do what I assumed a producer should do. I thought, Monday morning, Billy and I will patch it up and we won’t have any more of these ambiguities about who’s running what. But Monday morning, the studio sent in a team of seven attorneys for Billy, plus his agent, to hold his hand and assure him I had no legal right to fire him. I was defeated. I went to the Sherry Netherland where Billy was staying. If Billy didn’t want to cope, suddenly his throat was too sore and inflamed. He got psychosomatically ill, couldn’t talk. We patched it up, interspersed with spritzes of medicine from his spray bottle. I told Warners, ‘From this point on I am not responsible.’ And of course from that point on the budget went from four million two to twelve million something.”

  Right from the start, Friedkin raised the bar for himself. On the cloth back of his director’s chair to the left of his name was stenciled “An Oscar for The French Connection.” To the right of his name was the outline of another Oscar, with a question mark inside it. It also became clear that this would not be an easy shoot. The first shot inside the 20th Century-Fox soundstage on West 54th Street was a close-up of bacon cooking on a griddle. The scene called for the camera to dolly back, but there was a wall in the way, and everything ground to a halt on the newly built set until the problem was solved. Then Billy decided he didn’t like the way the bacon was curling. Once again, the production stopped while the prop master searched the city for preservative-free bacon (hard to find in 1972) that would presumably remain flat while it cooked. Friedkin was moving so slowly that when one of the crew returned to the set after being out sick for three days, the director was still on the same shot.

  Billy had a short fuse. He fired people in the morning, and rehired them in the afternoon. If he came up to someone and said, “Have you got a minute?” it was a sign that something unspeakable was going to happen. He would turn on anyone for anything at any time. Says one crew member, “He’s the only guy I ever saw shake hands with someone with gusto and a smile, and then turn as he was exiting past that person, and say, ‘Get this guy outta here.’” On the set he was known as “Wacky Willy.”

  Friedkin was a technical director, very involved with the lenses and the effects. He was not particularly good with actors, nor did he like them. He used to say, “I’d rather work with tree stumps than actors.” (He got his wish, in 1990, with The Guardian.) Or he’d scream, “You’re putting me in the toilet, in the fucking toilet!” He was fond of shooting guns to scare the actors, or playing tapes at high volume, anything from the soundtrack of Psycho to South American tree frogs. He often turned the camera on without telling the actors. He was ruthless and would do anything to get what he wanted. At the end of the film, as Father Karras is about to die, a priest gives him absolution. The director used a real priest, Father William O’Malley. O’Malley did take after take. Unsatisfied, Friedkin finally said, “Bill, you’re doing it by the numbers.”

  “Billy, I’ve just given my best friend his last rites fifteen times, and it’s two-thirty in the morning.”

  “I understand that. Do you trust me?”

  “Of course I trust you,” O’Malley replied.

  Billy belted him across the face with his open hand. It may not have been Stanislavsky, and it scandalized the Catholics among the crew, but it worked.

  “When I did the next take, my hand was shaking,” says O’Malley. “Sheer adrenalin.”

  Recalls Burstyn, “He liked to manipulate actors, he liked tricks. But he was always great with me, except when he permanently injured my spine.” At the climax of the scene where Regan, kneeling on her bed, her face and nightgown splattered with blood, jabs the crucifix into her vagina as a raspy voice speaking through her croaks, “Let Jesus fuck you!” and “Lick Me!” as she pulls her mother’s head toward her crotch, she wallops MacNeill in the face, knocking her off the bed and against the wall while a dresser lurches menacingly toward her. Burstyn had a rig around her midriff with a wire coming out of the back so the stuntman could jerk her off the bed onto the floor. They did one take, but Friedkin wasn’t satisfied. Ditto take two. The third time, Burstyn said to Friedkin, “Billy, he’s pulling too hard, ask him to lighten up.”

  “Well, it has to look real.”

  “I know it has to look real, but I’m telling you I could get hurt. He’s pulling me too hard.” Billy looked at the stuntman and said, “Okay, don’t pull her so hard.” Then she turned away, and out of the corner of her eye, she caught him shaking his head, instructing the stuntman to ignore what he had just said. This time when she was yanked to the floor she landed on her coccyx. She was in unbearable pain, and let out a bloodcurdling scream. Billy just moved the camera in on her. “I was furious when he did that, exploiting the pain I was feeling,” she says. “Since then I’ve always had trouble with my back.”

  While they were shooting in Washington, D.C., Bob Fosse’s Pippin opened at the Kennedy Center, on its way to New York. Friedkin and Blatty caught one of the performances. In the cast was a ravishing young dancer with magnificent legs named Jennifer Nairn-Smith. She had been a member of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. By the time she had her fifteen minutes of fame in Pippin, Nairn-Smith had been involved with Fosse, who in turn was seeing another of his dancers, Anne Reinking. Jennifer was from Australia. After leaving home at seventeen, she had studied with the Royal Ballet in London, and had a role as a snake dancer in the ill-fated Burton-Taylor Cleopatra. John Calley was in Rome producing a picture called Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. He sent her a telegram asking her to star in a movie. “I grew up in the ’50s, in the bush, all I knew was small towns and cattle,” she recalls. “My mother said to me, ‘Don’t go out with any dirty old Hollywood producers.’ So I wouldn’t let him touch me—it was a neck up and knees down kind of thing. He would say, ‘I’ve given up a weekend in Monaco with Betsy Drake and Princess Grace and you won’t let me touch you.’” According to one story, he told her he was dying of cancer, only had six weeks to live. “He pursued and pursued, and I finally went to bed with him years later in the Mayfair Hotel in London where they starched the sheets,” continues Nairn-Smith. “I finally gave my precious body to this person with the whole expectation of what that entails, and then he disappeared.”

  “Jennifer was stunningly beautiful,” says Blatty. “I had to meet her.” He called her, complained to Louis DiGiaimo, who cast The Exorcist, “Lou, she doesn’t know who I am.” DiGiaimo said, “Bill, who the fuck do you think you are? Frank Sinatra?” Blatty asked him to phone her. She didn’t return his call. Not only did she have Fosse, she was being stalked by someone who had threatened to kill the director, and she was seeing Raul Julia, Barry Bostwick, and several other men as well. When Pippin opened in New York, DiGiaimo phoned again, said, “Bill Blatty wants to meet you. Have breakfast with him.” This time she a
greed, and met him at the Palm Court at the Plaza. “He was morose, crying about his mother,” she recalls. He asked her if she would accompany him to a sound studio where he was trying to contact her spirit on the other side. She had never been able to resist serious weirdness, and she agreed to go. Blatty had read a book called Breakthrough: Electronic Communication with the Dead, by a Latvian psychologist, and thought he was having some success recording the disembodied voices of the dead on blank tape. Over at F&B Ceco, a production house on the West Side, a technician rolled tape. Blatty called, “Mother. Mother, if you’re there, come.”

  While Blatty was thus preoccupied, Friedkin sneaked into the hen house. He too thought she was a magnificent creature, and pursued her avidly, apparently turned on by the fact that she was in such demand. She had been warned against him, but it didn’t matter. “I partly went with him to get away from my stalker,” she continues. “But he was captivating, magnetic. He would seduce you with his ideas. He said every single thing I thought I wanted to hear. He had just won an Academy Award and was successful and famous, and he had a great mind. When he put his attention on me there was nothing like it.” She says Friedkin bought her a diamond engagement ring from Tiffany. It was tear shaped, with a diamond on each side mounted in gold. They went to the Algonquin to celebrate.

  Friedkin consumed culture with the voracious appetite of the autodidact. He took her to museums and concerts. But she could never get him to talk about his childhood. “William denied his whole background,” she says. “He hated being Jewish. Think Yiddish, dress British.” Adds Blatty, “My theory is that Bill was wounded over his Jewishness when he was young, because that would tend to foster an ‘it’s me against the world’ kind of an attitude, and therefore ‘anything’s fair for me to do, because they all really hate me and they’re my enemy.’”