Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Going head to head with Malick had taken a lot out of Schneider, as well. Actor Bruce Dern, on his way back from Florida to LA after shooting Black Sunday, ran into him on a plane. Leaning back in his seat and speaking of himself in the third person, Bert said, “He’s out, Derns, he’s out, the Schneids, it’s passed him by.” Recalls Dern, “This was only 1976, and he just looked so tired.”

  Schneider had good reason to be tired. He dedicated his professional career to freeing himself from dependence on the studios, but without the studio system to sustain him, he had to invent the wheel every time he produced a movie. “I burned out on the movie business,” he has said. “In order to have the kind of freedom to work comfortably, I would have had to continue to do what I was doing, which was to gamble my entire life on every movie. That got tiresome after a while. The second reason is that I really didn’t have that much to say anymore. People make movies and people make movies. Some care, and some really care, have passion and commitment and so forth, and once that wanes—for me, if I’m not juiced up, I don’t want to do it.” Even the building on La Brea, once the hub of all that was hip and happening in Hollywood, had a dilapidated, down-at-the-heels air about it, the movie posters and blown-up stills of historic movement moments yellowing on the walls. By the second half of the decade, it seemed like a museum piece from another era: Head Shop, c. 1970. Schneider eventually sold it to Redd Foxx.

  TAXI DRIVER was shot in the hot, humid streets of New York, in the summer of 1975, when Jaws was depopulating the beaches of America. De Niro borrowed Schrader’s clothes for his characterization, lending credence to the suspicion that had the writer not been into masochism more than sadism, he could well have been Travis Bickle. Michael Chapman was the DP. Scorsese had liked his work in The Last Detail. The style was all Godard—and that of his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, the poet of the pavements—down to a close-up of a glass of Alka-Seltzer, a homage to a notorious shot from Two or Three Things I Know About Her. “Godard was the great freeing influence for all of us,” says Chapman. “He said, Look, you don’t have to worry about this or that, you can do absolutely anything you want. There’s a scene where De Niro drives the cab into the car barn on 57th, he gets out of the car and starts walking one way, the camera pans around the other way, and meets him when he gets to where he’s going. The crew was scandalized by that. It was as if we were saying, ‘Don’t follow this guy, but look at the world he lives in.’”

  Jodie Foster, then a mere twelve and a half, was cast as Iris, and Cybill Shepherd as Betsy. “We had been referring to that role as the Cybill Shepherd role,” recalls Schrader. “Just as a kind of prototype.” It never occurred to them they could actually hire her on their dirt-cheap budget. One day they got a call from Mengers. “At that time, after Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love, she was so cold she had icicles forming on her body,” says the agent. She had even contemplated suicide. Continues Mengers, “Cybill had become a joke. She needed that role. She needed to work with a director with that cachet.” Mengers said to Scorsese, “I hear you’re looking for a Cybill Shepherd type. Why don’t you hire Cybill?”

  “We can’t afford her.”

  “Well, she’ll do it for what you can pay.” “Thirty-five thousand?”

  “Yeah.”

  Marty and Paul were nonplussed. When they got her they weren’t sure they wanted her, weren’t sure she was a good enough actress. Paul said, “We always said we were looking for a Cybill Shepherd type. How much worse can she be than a Cybill Shepherd type?” Finally, they decided she would give the film some legitimacy. “But,” said Schrader, “she was always a Cybill Shepherd ‘type-’”

  There was, however, a glitch. By that time, Cybill was such box office poison that Begelman had refused to let Bogdanovich cast her in his next picture, Nickelodeon. Peter and Sue went so far as to leak a story to the press to the effect that he and Cybill had separated in the hope that it would prompt Begelman to change his mind. But the studio head was obdurate, and warned Peter that if Peter didn’t give in on Cybill, he wouldn’t approve her for Taxi Driver. Peter was bitter; his two male leads, Burt Reynolds and Ryan O’Neal, wouldn’t stand behind her. Nickelodeon was Peter’s last picture with Ryan.

  Meanwhile, on the Taxi Driver set, Shepherd was indeed treated as a Cybill Shepherd type, which is to say, badly, especially by De Niro. Bogdanovich says he hit on her, and was rejected. “He treated Jodie Foster like she was a queen,” says one source. “He treated Cybill like a pile of dogshit. It was really hot. One of the grips or somebody gave her a little electric fan because she was in this really hot dress. De Niro would kind of like go—‘the princess’ kind of a thing. It was horrendous to watch. The truth is, Bobby treated people badly if he decided they were not up to snuff.”

  Marty and Sandy stayed at the St. Regis, because that used to be Orson Welles’s favorite hotel. “The pressure was enormous,” she says. “I remember opening up the nightstand and finding vials [of coke] for the first time. When we started Taxi Driver, I felt like I was being sucked up by this energy, and kind of losing myself. So I said to him, ‘I don’t want to work on your next movie. I want to do some of my own stuff.’ That was sort of the beginning of the end for us because he needed that devotion. His dilemma was that he wanted a woman who had her own mind and her own ideas and was independent and smart. But then he wanted her totally devoted to him. Everything was for the movie. If you weren’t there for the movie, you couldn’t be with him. I don’t think that Marty would have a woman in his life unless it was absolutely necessary. The last thing he wanted to do was to have a real life. This was his life.” He once summed up his relationship to women when he said, “They put up with us until they find out who we are, and then you have to get another one.”

  Sandy was spending a lot of time in L.A., while Marty was in New York. One day, a freelancer named Julia Cameron showed up at the hotel. She was attractive, petite, with reddish hair. Cameron was a political writer from Washington, D.C., and was doing a story for Oui. She interviewed Schrader, and hung around his suite after they were finished. He couldn’t get rid of her, and told Michael Phillips about her, who said she had come on to him too. Schrader left for L.A., and when he returned to New York, Phillips said, “Guess what?” She had moved in on Marty, they had become an item.

  Cameron says Scorsese gave her a script first thing. “I sat down and went, ‘Your political speeches don’t work, none of your campaign headquarters stuff works,’ so I wrote that stuff all over again, ‘and your cab driver stuff doesn’t work,’ so I wrote all the ambience of the cafeteria. I don’t know if Paul knew where my scenes came from. He might have thought that Marty just wrote them.” Cameron was not credited. She says, “Bogdanovich took Marty aside, and said, ‘You know, if you give Julia writing credit, Pauline [Kael] will find great fault with your movies,’ which is probably an accurate assessment. She was very possessive of the directors over whom she felt she had some sway, and the minute a woman appeared, she became very competitive. She had said things like, ‘Oh my God, you look like a pornographic Angela Lansbury.’ And she said to Marty, ‘Whatever you do with this girl, don’t marry her just for taxes.’ There was a certain amount of mucking going on.” (Bogdanovich says he has no recollection of any such conversation.)

  Cameron was not popular with Marty’s friends, to say the least. They felt she was trying to come between them and him, and they disliked her for it. Says Amy Jones, who was Scorsese’s assistant, and would later become an editor and director, “Nobody liked her. She was kind of the aggressor in the relationship. There was a heat-seeking missile quality about her.” According to Mardik Martin, Scorsese’s longtime collaborator, who would find himself in competition with her rewriting New York, New York, she was “insanely jealous of anybody who came next to Marty, very possessive. Marty was easily fooled by women. He loved them, he more than loved them, he worshipped them. A lot of my conversations with him went, ‘Jesus, what’re you listening to her for? She�
�s crazy.’” Says one source, who blamed her for getting Scorsese deeper into drugs, “She was a real nutcase, a real two-gram-a-day abuser.” But, as Chapman puts it, “How do you push somebody who’s jumping?” Says Cameron, “I was just madly in love.”

  Sandy didn’t go quietly. She mangled the windshield wipers on Marty’s Lotus. Scorsese and Cameron wed on December 30, 1975. Marty couldn’t believe he was getting married in a place called Libertyville—her hometown, in Illinois. It was as far as he could get from Little Italy; it represented the ultimate assimilation to the American heartland, the ultimate in self-denial.

  There is a famous scene in Taxi Driver where a gun dealer appears in Travis Bickle’s apartment with a case of pistols. Recalls Sandy, “I told Marty that not only do I know a guy who could play the part but he could bring his own guns.” Having worked for her father, Sandy had known “little Stevie” Prince since childhood. “He had been doing heroin on and off for years,” she continues. “He had black circles under his eyes that went down to his elbows.” Later, he became indispensable to Marty. “He was the guy with the gun,” recalls Martin. “If something went wrong, hopefully he was sober enough to take care of it.” Says Taplin, “He was like a bodyguard, the doorkeeper. Sometimes—like that Dirk Bogarde movie, The Servant— you had the feeling that he could appeal to Marty’s paranoia in such a way that he could make Marty do things. In that sense he had quite a bit of power.”

  Even though Schrader suspected Scorsese of wishing to deviate from the text, Marty was determined to preserve the integrity of the concept. The studio “would have turned it into a love story” says Scorsese. “That’s why I fought everybody and everything to get it made. I was ready to destroy the picture rather than have it compromised. I became obsessed with the film, and was quite unpleasant to be around when I was making it, because I had to fight. Every day was a battle to get what I wanted.... I came to realize the kind of film director I had become.... I was going to compromise? I might as well have made another genre film for Roger Corman.”

  SHAMPOO opened in early 1975. Begelman saw it for the first time at a screening room at Goldwyn. He was appalled by the notorious exchange in which B movie producer William Castle, who plays the fat cat sitting next to Julie Christie at a Republican fund-raiser, says, “I can get you anything you’d like, what would you like?” and she says, “Well, first of all,” looking at Beatty, and diving under the table, “I’d like to suck his cock.” He asked Beatty to remove it, and of course Beatty refused, it being the best line of the movie, in his opinion the very point of the movie. “It wasn’t just a dirty moment where she says a dirty line,” he says. “The subject of Shampoo is hypocrisy, the commingling of sexual hypocrisy and political hypocrisy. The reason Julie’s line made for such an explosive moment was because it shredded that hypocrisy.” Towne saw Beatty’s character, George Roundy, as an innocent, a natural child, the only figure in the movie whose goal is pleasure, not money. He doesn’t seduce anyone; he lets himself be used. He’s the girl, the dumb blonde.

  Shampoo turned out to be a huge success, pulling in about $24 million in rentals in its initial U.S. run. Despite the changes that were overtaking the country, the incipient move to the right, Shampoo was able to tap into the climate of disillusionment following Watergate. As Beatty puts it, “Vietnam polarized the town. Shampoo’s audience was the audience that didn’t want to go to war, that used every means to end the war.”

  Begelman disliked Shampoo so much he was distressed when the raves started coming into his office from the East Coast reviewers over the teletype. Kael compared it to Renoir, Bergman, Ophuls. Beatty and Towne had been courting Kael, who some thought was sliding rapidly down the slippery slope from reviewing to advocacy to fraternization and favoritism. They concluded that she was susceptible to the blandishments of stars, especially star auteurs and glib writers who practiced on her vanity, dazzled her with their attention. Says Buck Henry, “Towne had Kael wrapped around his finger.”

  Kael was allergic to the sun, and when she came out to L.A., she was swathed in veils and wore white gloves. Towne and Julie Payne, his companion, took her out to dinner at Trader Vic’s. She also had dinner with them and Beatty and Christie after the critics’ screening of Shampoo. Indeed, Towne, rather than Beatty or Ashby, was the hero of her review. He has a cameo in the picture, and she flattered him by writing that he looked like Albrecht Dürer. He started dropping her name in a way that suggested to some people that he and Kael were intimates, that he had explained his views to her, that Shampoo was a version of Smiles of a Summer Night. When her review came out, it was sprinkled with references to Bergman’s film. No one could prove it of course, but people were suspicious. “You think Kael recognized what was behind Shampoo?” continues Henry. “He told her.”

  Towne says he showed Kael the script for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and years later, Tequila Sunrise. After Tequila came out, director James Toback says Kael complained, “Towne sent me the script, I told him what to do, gave him advice, he didn’t listen to me, and fucked it up.” Toback claims she asked him to send her scripts, but he refused. According to a Kael profile in Time, producer Ray Stark sent her the script for Annie and she spotted some flaws in plotting. Says Towne, “I just loved her because she was the one person in the last half of the twentieth century who raised criticism to the level of art. But if you got good reviews from her you were resented by the other reviewers. Vincent Canby always hated me because of her.” Kael admits to reading Greystoke and Tequila Sunrise, but denies seeing any others. She says, “I didn’t review things I’d been involved in in any way. I was never a great buddy of directors.”

  Shampoo helped everyone connected with it, but some people felt it did not help them enough. Ashby grumbled that he hadn’t made as much on Shampoo—which nobody in the industry considered his picture—as he should have. However, it enabled him to add a silver Porsche and a Mercedes to his collection of cars, and a beautiful old pine and mahogany house in the Malibu Colony that had been built in 1925 for $350,000.

  For Towne, Shampoo was the capstone of a phenomenal burst of creativity. He would be nominated for an Academy Award again, as he was for The Last Detail and Chinatown, his third in a row. Calley, who was close to Towne, brought him over to Warners as a “consultant,” hiring Julie Payne to renovate Jack Warner’s old bungalow, which the two men would share. It included a magnificent deco steam room and bath with black marble sinks and toilets, gold-plated fixtures, peach-colored glass. There was even some green space nearby described on the plans as “Hira’s garden,” eventually removed because it seemed embarrassingly rich even in these regal circumstances. (Somebody once complained to Frank Wells that Hira was leaving industrial-sized turds in the grass; Towne sent the offended party a large bag of fertilizer.) For a mere screenwriter, Towne had arrived.

  But Towne felt he hadn’t made as much from Shampoo as he should have. Towne had 5 percent of the gross from the point where the picture earned four times the cost of the negative, which was $16 million. (The movie cost $4 million.) He figured he was owed in the neighborhood of $1 million, but he hadn’t seen anything near that. About a year after the picture was released, he met with Beatty at the Beverly Wilshire. According to Towne, Beatty explained for the first time that Begelman had forced him to accept a rolling gross deal, which meant less money all around. (Since Beatty produced Shampoo, Towne, like Ashby, Hawn, and Christie, was paid by his company.) “Beatty said, ‘Begelman fucked us.’

  “‘He fucked you, he didn’t fuck me. My deal was with you, and you neglected to tell me that this deal was worth less than half of what I thought it was.’

  “‘You know what they say about Hollywood. You don’t get rich on your last picture, you get rich on your next picture.’

  “‘That may have been true when I worked on Bonnie and Clyde for $8,000, but the future is now, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not gonna sue, and I’ll still be your friend, but I’m never gonn
a work with you again. This is absolutely chickenshit.’” Still, Towne’s deal was doubled twice, and his cut was bigger than Ashby’s, Christie’s, or Hawn’s. His agent must have known what kind of deal he had, and for his account to be true, it must be assumed that his agent never told him and he never asked.

  Despite the fact that Towne was making at least $500,000 a year throughout the second half of the ’70s, he took sizable six-figure loans from Beatty, apparently with little intention of paying him back because he felt Beatty owed him for Shampoo. The co-screenwriting credit also rankled. Says David Geffen, “Bob always said that Warren extracted credit from him that he didn’t deserve. I interceded on Bob’s behalf with Warren, and it was one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. I said, ‘You know, Warren, I really think that you’re out of line,’ and he went crazy, said ‘Who told you this?’ And I said, ‘Bob.’ He said, ‘I want him to tell you this in front of me.’ So at a party that Goldie Hawn had, Warren was so furious that he grabbed me, and he grabbed Bob, and he said, ‘Okay, he’s telling me that you said all this shit, say it in front of me.’ And with me standing there Bob said he didn’t do it. And the reason he didn’t have the guts was because it wasn’t so. Warren called me up that night, and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’”

  Says Beatty, “It was Towne that offered me the screen credit. I would have been happy to go to arbitration. The story had no political context with Robert, no Nixon, no nothing. All of that is 99 percent me, my work. We used to meet every fucking day and I’d have to tell him the goddamn story. It’s absolutely not true that every line of dialogue is his. It’s an outrageous lie. Both party sequences were written by me, none of those were in Towne’s original draft at all. That’s half of the movie.” He adds, “This idea of his being upset about credit is insane. Half the fuckin’ time the guy didn’t show up on the set, he’d be at the doctor.