Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Calley and Wells brought them in for a forty-five-minute meeting. Paul was impressed. He recalls, “They turned off the phone. They were really interested in what we thought young people wanted to see. ‘What kind of movies do you wanna make now?’ There was nothing that was too outrageous, because everything was up for grabs.” Afterward, as the brothers made their way off the lot, Paul said, “You saw those guys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In ten years, I could be sitting in that chair!”

  Says Leonard, “That’s where I realized the difference between my brother and me, the desire for power. If you’re the older brother, you don’t have to work for power, and getting it doesn’t seem that hot a deal. All I wanted was, ‘Thank you for the money, I want to make a good film.’ My brother had a different agenda. Power was everything.

  “There was an auction, sixteen bidders, it was the highest amount for original script ever sold at that point: $325,000. We got the money, and we went out to the desert and got the car. We didn’t take no bus, we took a taxi.”

  When the dust settled, instead of an equal three-way split, The Yakuza money was split 40-40 between Paul and Hamilburg, with Leonard getting only 20 percent. “I became the older brother, and I was dictating the terms,” says Paul. “I would break down the story, he would write the interim things, I would rewrite him. I used him as a sounding board.” Most importantly, “I wanted to have that sole screenwriting credit, so I made him take shared story credit.” Leonard looked the other way, pretended it hadn’t happened.

  Suddenly Paul had money. Milius accompanied him when he bought an Alfa Romeo. “The salesman took one look at him, and said, ‘Ya know, with a new car, people have the most accidents in the first eight hours,’” recalls Milius. “Sure enough, Paul took the Sunset exit off the freeway too fast, went over the embankment, and totaled the car.”

  “When he sold his first script, Yakuza, his ego really went bananas, nuts,” recalls Sandy Weintraub. “He was waving a gun around, and he seemed loaded a lot. He seemed crazy to me.” In March, Paul used some of his money to buy a sprawling home in Brentwood on Carmelita, near the house in which Marilyn Monroe died. The living room was so big it accommodated four sofas. He bought two Wurlitzer juke boxes, which he put in the living room, and stocked with ’45s from the ’50s and ’60s. Otherwise, the house was essentially bare, except for the table with the scarred butcher block top. He lived there with Leonard, who had an office in the back. Paul had an office in the front. Paul would write all night, Leonard during the day. De Palma would stay there when he was in L.A., and they used to gather at 6:00 A.M. to watch the Watergate hearings just starting in Washington. Every Tuesday, Paul and Leonard got letters from their mother, containing Sunday’s sermons, three of them, one from each of the services they had attended. She knew they had strayed, wrote, “Father and I will miss you in heaven.”

  Somewhere Paul had gotten hold of a crown of thorns fashioned in brass. The thorns were so sharp that when he pressed it down on his head, they broke the skin, making a ring of pinpricks that trickled blood. It was a perfect accessory for the Schraders, a little memento mori of their youth. Paul kept the crown on the butcher block table alongside his .38. “Beer bottles would come and go, ashtrays come and go, but there would always be the crown of thorns—and the pistol,” says Leonard. “Whenever strangers came over, it was empty, but when the strangers left, it was loaded. Pick your yin/yang opposites: sadism/masochism, homicide/suicide.”

  Paul was given an office at Warners. Despite his newly minted success, Paul was still very much the bad boy. You could dress him up, but you couldn’t take him out, especially to a studio. At the entrance, “he would point his car right at the wooden gate to see if the guy would raise it in time,” recalls Milius. “Often he wouldn’t, and Paul would snap it right off.”

  Schrader had contempt for those who weren’t making it, like Kit Carson, who in 1973 had a nervous breakdown, ended up selling his blood for pennies. Later, he recovered sufficiently to do a piece for Esquire on the New Hollywood. He interviewed Schrader at his office. “The first thing he said, when he sat down at the table, was, ‘I thought you were dead.’ It wasn’t like, ‘I knew you were having a hard time and I was trying to find you and help you,’ it was like, ‘I’m surprised that you’re still alive.’ People were getting a number put on their foreheads, a ranking. As soon as the ranking disappeared from your forehead, people just cut you right off. You were dangerous to have around, you might affect the number on their forehead. There was such a marketplace frenzy at that time, that people wanted to protect their position.”

  Schrader was turning out scripts like so many sausages. He wrote fast, ten, twelve pages a day, so that in ten days or so, he had a completed draft. He kept the .38 beside the typewriter. When he got stuck, he would nervously pull on the trigger: click, click, click. He was writing like a machine, and although he didn’t know it then, he was writing himself out.

  One of the scripts he wrote was Déjà Vu, later called Obsession, to be directed by De Palma. The two men had developed Obsession during the course of a long afternoon. It was a mixture of Vertigo, a film they both loved, and Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, which Paul forced Brian to see. Says Paul, “Before video, it was a lot easier to knock things off because no one else had seen them.” But they had a particularly disagreeable falling out, and Schrader threatened to take his name off it.

  At Christmas, the Schraders’ parents came out for a two-week visit, stayed at the house on Carmelita. Despite their conviction that movies were the devil’s business, Calvinists have a great respect for money. “We didn’t have to say a word, let the house talk for us,” recalls Leonard. “There was my father, president of an oil company, came out to California where real estate was two, three times more than it was in Michigan, and his son’s house was two, three times bigger than his. There were so many bedrooms my parents could have brought out everybody they knew, and they’d all have a room.” When they left, Paul turned to Leonard, said, “I don’t want the house anymore. I only bought it so that I could say to mom and dad, ‘See, I’m not a failure.’” In the spring, Paul put it on the market.

  Scorsese, meanwhile, had settled into a small, Spanish-style house off Mulholland, the wrong side of Beverly Glen, overlooking the Valley, west of the Brando and Nicholson homes. His doctor told him he had to live above the smog line. Sandy decorated it. She hired a muralist to paint an Arizona sunset that ran the length of the master bedroom. The windows were covered by orange, red, and yellow miniblinds that changed colors when they were opened or closed. The dining room walls were covered with paint dribbles. Marty and Sandy were broke; they bought a washer, but they couldn’t afford a dryer, so Sandy took wet clothes and hung them on the line out back.

  Marty and Sandy were not getting along. She was bored by Marty’s total immersion in movies. She told him, “I don’t give a fuck about the movies. I just want us to be together.” They split up; they got back together. They argued, they fought, often in public.

  Marty asked Sandy to accompany him to Cannes in the spring of 1974, with Alice. She didn’t want to go. She knew she’d be left on her own while he hustled contacts and people fawned over Marty, telling him he was a genius. Finally, she said, “Okay, I’ll go with you to Cannes on the condition that we find some time alone for the two of us. I’m sick of all these people coming at us all the time.” He said, “Fine, I promise you I’ll make some time.” But when they got there, he could not seem to find a moment for her. One spectacularly sunny day, when they were planning to drive out of town to have a romantic lunch by the sea, he came to her, apologetic. Dustin Hoffman asked him to lunch, and he just couldn’t turn him down. Sandy flipped out. They were in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel, the hub of the festival. The walls were hung with oversized movie posters, hundreds of people were milling about, looking to score. “That’s it, I’m leaving,” she screamed as heads swiveled. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

 
“Please, please forgive me,” Marty implored her. “I’ll do anything.”

  “You’ll do anything? I want you down on your knees and beg me to stay.” He fell to his knees in the middle of the Carlton lobby and begged her to forgive him.

  Meanwhile, Schrader continued to write furiously. He desperately wanted to direct. “Somewhere in between how Obsession and Yakuza turned out I realized that if you were a critic or a novelist, you lived by your words,” he says. “When you’re a screenwriter, that didn’t happen. You’re half an artist. If you wanted to be in control of your own life, you had to be a filmmaker.” He rewrote the Taxi Driver script, wanted it to be an American Notes from the Underground, an American Pickpocket. He read the diary of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace. He discussed the project with Kael, who didn’t think De Niro could carry a movie. One night, in a New York hotel, he picked up a girl in a bar. When he got her to his room, he realized that she was “1. a hooker, 2. underage, and 3. a junkie. At the end of the night, I sent Marty a note saying, ‘Iris is in my room. We’re having breakfast at nine. Will you please join us?’ A lot of the character of Iris was rewritten from this girl who had the concentration span of about twenty seconds.”

  Schrader’s shrink pointed out that his suicidal fantasies were all the same: they involved shooting himself in the head. Indeed, his head was filled with demons and bad thoughts, and many of them ended up in Taxi Driver. Schrader and De Niro discussed the meaning of the story. De Niro told Schrader that he always wanted to write a script about a lonely guy who walked around New York with a gun. He used to sit in the General Assembly of the United Nations, fantasizing about assassinating diplomats. Schrader said to De Niro, “You know what the gun is, don’t you Bobby? It’s your talent. At that time in your life you felt you were carrying that huge talent around and you didn’t know what to do with it. You felt embarrassment. You knew that if you ever had a chance to take it out and shoot it, people would realize how important you were, and you would be acknowledged.”

  On the basis of his performance in Mean Streets, Bernardo Bertolucci offered De Niro 1900, which was shot in Parma, Italy, while De Palma was in Florence, shooting Obsession. Then Alice came out, to excellent reviews, and De Niro won his Oscar for Godfather II. What with that, and Burstyn’s for Alice, added to the one the Phillipses got the year before, the Taxi Driver package wasn’t looking so bad. Julia lobbied Begelman, who had always detested Schrader’s script, at every opportunity. She assured him that if Scorsese messed up, Spielberg, who had Jaws out by this time, and was prepping Close Encounters, would take over. She persuaded him she could bring in the picture for $1.5 million, and Begelman finally gave in. (Ultimately the budget rose to $1.9 million.) Scorsese got $65,000, Schrader $30,000. Says Michael Phillips, “What really made it happen was, after Bobby won his Oscar, he could have demanded several hundred thousand, which would have been enough to make Marty and everybody escalate their salaries, but he still agreed to honor his original deal and work for $35,000. He was a saint.”

  THE 1975 OSCAR for Hearts and Minds marked the high point of Bert Schneider’s career. (He used to take the speech out at dinner and read it to people.) Shortly afterward, he led a trip to Cuba—the one that had been delayed by Artie Ross’s death—that included Bergen, Coppola, and Terry Malick. Brackman had introduced Malick and Schneider, and in Cuba they began conversations that would lead to Days of Heaven, a story of three migrant workers who end up in the wheatfields of Texas.

  Malick had already failed to get a bankable star for Days of Heaven—neither Dustin Hoffman nor Al Pacino would do it—and realized that with Schneider’s name they could go ahead without one. Schneider agreed to produce, but as usual insisted that Malick hire his brother Harold to look after the nickels and dimes. They lined up a cast that included the young Richard Gere, playwright Sam Shepard, and Brooke Adams.

  Diller had been wooing Bert, and the producer set up Days of Heaven at Paramount, where Sylbert then headed production. Diller was in the early days of his long tenure at the studio, and had nothing much in the way of hits to show for himself. He was not a warm and cozy person, and had earned a reputation for being smart but combative. He rarely lost his temper, but his sarcasm was withering, and he could lower the temperature in a room twenty degrees with a few well-chosen phrases. His note pads with his name at the top he apparently found too casual: when he dispatched a sheet to his minions, he put a slash through “Barry.” He was particular about his clothes and cutting about the sartorial lapses of others. At the office, he wore conservative dark suits and thin Egyptian cotton shirts—pressed jeans on weekends. He took his own pillow with him when he traveled, in a Louis Vuitton carrying case. When he first came to the studio, he was in the habit of driving himself to the airport, abandoning the car in front of the American Airlines terminal, and leaving his secretary to deal with the consequences. Diller once barged into a meeting with outside vendors, was introduced around the room by a middle-level studio executive, became furious, and later told the malefactor, “Never introduce me to anyone I do not know.”

  Diller was unhappy with his production head. Sylbert’s tastes ran to the literary, and Hollywood was fast moving in another direction, with Paramount at the head of the pack. Diller hired Michael Eisner, who had worked for him at ABC. Eisner was young and enthusiastic, the perpetual college kid. Recalls Sylbert, “When Eisner came in, the atmosphere at Paramount changed completely. They wanted to do what they had done for the network, manufacture product aimed at your knees.” A production head has to be a cheerleader, and Sylbert was decidedly otherwise. A year and a half after Sylbert hired Simpson, Simpson had his job.

  Days of Heaven was an anomaly, given Paramount’s direction. But by this time Schneider was a legend, and there was no downside for the studio. He made very much the same kind of deal with Paramount that he had struck with Columbia seven years before. He guaranteed the budget, was personally responsible for overages. “Those were the kinda deals I liked to make,” Bert has said, “because then I could have final cut, and not have to talk to nobody about why we’re gonna use this person instead of that person.”

  Production began in the fall of 1976. Malick was a director, like De Palma, who was very much inside his own head. The actors and crew thought he was cold and distant, and he was having trouble getting decent performances. Two weeks into the picture, lookng at the dailies, it was clear it wasn’t working, looked like bad Playhouse 90. Malick decided to toss the script, go Tolstoy instead of Dostoyevsky, wide instead of deep, shoot miles of film with the hope of solving the problems in the editing room.

  The production proceeded at a snail’s pace. The ancient harvesting machines were always breaking down, which meant that shooting often didn’t start until late in the afternoon, allowing for only a few hours of daylight before it got too dark to continue, although the footage, suffused with the golden glow of sunset, looked great, despite the fact that DP Nestor Almendros was slowly going blind. He had one of his assistants take Polaroids of the scene, then examined them through very strong glasses and made his adjustments.

  One day a couple of helicopters were scheduled to drop peanut shells that were supposed to look like locusts on film. But Malick decided to shoot period cars instead, keeping the choppers on hold at great expense, infuriating Harold, who was so angry he was virtually spitting blood.

  Bert saw Terry blithely pissing away his money—for what? Just to make himself look a little better?—while Bert had to worry about losing his home. Malick ran $800,000 over, which caused a serious rift between the two men.

  Then there was the editing, which took over two years—Malick was famously indecisive. Or just meticulous, depending on who’s footing the bill. Says Jim Nelson, who worked on Badlands, “Terry wouldn’t let go. He’d nitpick you to death.” As more and more dialogue ended up on the floor, the plot became incomprehensible, and Malick struggled with various ways of holding it all together, finally seizing on a voice-over. S
chneider showed a couple of reels to Richard Brooks, who was thinking of using Gere in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Days of Heaven took so long to complete that “Brooks cast Gere, shot, edited, and released the picture while Malick was still editing. ‘Cause Terry couldn’t find the movie.”

  Some of the angry scenes between them were almost like interventions, with Bert presenting long, lawyerly briefs listing all Terry’s broken promises, the deadlines he had violated, and so on. Terry would reply, “Well I didn’t know this guy was going to fuck me, the guy who was doing the effects ran off, did nothing, there were a lot of mitigating circumstances.” Bert, of course, didn’t listen to any of this; from his point of view, Terry had betrayed him, plain and simple.

  But Terry was similar to Lucas. He just dug in, frustrating Bert’s attempts to gain control of the production. Unlike Harold, Terry could not endure a volcanic blow-up with someone and have lunch with him an hour later as if nothing had happened. He kept things inside. He absorbed Bert’s assaults, and made a mental note to smack him over the head with a baseball bat in a dark alley sometime in the future. The elephant never forgets.

  Terry’s dilatory pace put Bert in the position of having to go to Diller, hat in hand, asking him to cover the overages. Bert had known Diller since the Screen Gems days, back when Diller was buying movies of the week for ABC, and this was something Bert did not want to do. He considered it groveling, and he resented Terry for putting him in that position. They cobbled together a demo reel, made their pitch—“We’re giving you so much more than you expected, we’re going to blow this up to 70mm,” etc., etc.—and Paramount bought it. Bluhdorn, in particular, was knocked out, and as a result, he gave Malick a very sweet deal at the studio, carte blanche, essentially.