Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Sorcerer was a major disaster, grossing only a piddling $9 million worldwide. Friedkin was dumbstruck. He could not believe the public didn’t like it. He could not believe the critics didn’t like it. Says Smith, “He probably put more into Sorcerer than any other film he’d ever done—time, energy, labor, and thought.” The picture is punctuated by some striking images, but it is self-consciously arty and pretentious, ironic in view of the way Friedkin had once put down film art in favor of commercialism, derided Coppola and Bogdanovich for their artistic aspirations.

  Friedkin says now, “I probably shouldn’t have done Sorcerer, ‘cause it was written to be a star-driven vehicle, and there were no stars in it. I made a big mistake with McQueen. I didn’t realize that the close-up is more important than the wide shot. A shot of Steve’s face was worth more than any landscape I could have shot. That was great hubris on my part. But the mere fact that the studio didn’t want me to make it kept me persevering and overlooking all of these things.”

  Fatally trapped between America and Europe, commerce and art, Friedkin had finally achieved the worst of both worlds, an American remake of a French classic that was too episodic, dark, and star-challenged for a late ’70s American audience that was very different from the audience that flocked to The French Connection. Like many Hollywood directors of the ’70s, he wanted to be Godard, Bergman, or Antonioni, but he was never able to find an idiom that melded American subjects with a European sensibility, the way Beatty and Penn had with Bonnie and Clyde, Bogdanovich with The Last Picture Show, or Rafelson with Five Easy Pieces.

  Nairn-Smith had met Jules Stein and his wife, now in their eighties, through Friedkin, but they’d remained friends after the split. She would see them at the home of Mervyn and Kitty LeRoy. “The four of them would be sitting there talking about their plots at Forest Lawn,” she recalls. Every time he’d see her Stein would say, “Your William cost me $20 million.” And then he died. Adds Friedkin, “For a while I was regularly invited to Wasserman’s house, but then, after Sorcerer, that stopped.”

  Friedkin took refuge on Jeanne Moreau’s farm in the south of France. They had been married in February, in Paris. Burstyn read about it in a magazine. “I thought I was still going out with him,” she recalls. “He didn’t tell me. Let’s say, he auditioned us both, and she got the part.” The marriage made a certain amount of sense, at least from his side. If he couldn’t wed Clouzot or Truffaut, Moreau, the star of so many Nouvelle Vague films, was the next best thing. After he took her out for the first time, he said, “God, I’ve wanted her ever since I saw Les Amants [The Lovers].” He liked older women, perhaps a residue of his attachment to his mother. In 1977, Friedkin was forty-three, Moreau fifty. He worked, she cooked. When they were together, he would pull her down into his lap, kiss her breasts, and say, “Jeen, Jeen,” in his atrocious French accent.

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK opened on June 21. It was a darker movie than UA wanted. They thought it was going to be some sort of breakthrough musical of the old MGM school. Marty refused to change a frame. He was stubborn, and convinced of his own vision. The picture didn’t fare much better than Sorcerer. The plot was ragged and desultory, overwhelmed by the big, static production numbers. Even the critics, whom Scorsese had always been able to count on, deserted him. The lukewarm reception of New York, New York devastated him. He had gone from hit to hit. This was his first taste of failure, and he didn’t like it. He says, “I was angry, especially about being treated as if I had gotten a comeuppance—for what? For making Mean Streets? Alice and Taxi Driver? It wasn’t the criticism, it was a lack of respect, so what I did was to behave in such a way that you could be guaranteed no respect at all.” Later he admitted, “I was just too drugged out to solve the structure.” He was put on lithium in an effort to dampen his anger and control his violent outbursts. He took it for four months, but his drug of choice remained coke. It was as if he were lost in another world, Luke Skywalker stumbling about the ice planet Hoth in the opening scene of The Empire Strikes Back, lost in a blizzard of snow.

  Not even De Niro could bring him back. He was still carrying around his well-thumbed copy of Jake La Motta’s book, which he brought to Irwin Winkler. Winkler agreed to produce it, if they could get Marty to commit. But De Niro had a hard time getting his attention. Scorsese read a couple of chapters, gave the book to Mardik. He had no interest in boxing, never went to fights. Besides, La Motta wasn’t much of a boxer. His singular talent lay in his ability to absorb punishment. Mardik read it, told Scorsese, “The trouble with Raging Bull is that the damn thing has been done a hundred times—a fighter who has trouble with his brother and his wife, and the mob is after him. I don’t want to do another brother-fighter story because that was done in Champion. And Rocky is out, same company. Same producers! Plus, I think this book is full of shit. It’s made-up stuff, looks like a PR job.”

  Scorsese, depressed, was more than willing to be discouraged. All the New Hollywood directors believed that being an auteur meant making personal movies. If they didn’t generate their own material, they couldn’t proceed until somehow they had made it their own. Through his affair with Cybill Shepherd, Bogdanovich experienced the vertigo of adolescence, which was the subject of The Last Picture Show. Francis Coppola became the Godfather. “I really didn’t want to do Raging Bull,” Scorsese says. “I had to find the key for myself. And I wasn’t interested in finding the key, because I’d tried something, New York, New York, and it was a failure.”

  WHEN EVERYTHING WAS IN, Star Wars cost only $9.5 million, with an additional couple of million for prints, ads, and publicity. It took in over $100 million in only three months. The novelization, released quietly by Bantam, reached number four on the paperback best-seller list, selling two million copies by August 25. In November, Star Wars bested Jaws to become the biggest money-maker of all time, racking up an astounding $193.5 million in rentals.

  Star Wars made Lucas’s friends rich, or at least some of them: Huyck and Katz had gotten two points. He gave out quarter points to Ford, Fisher, Hamill, and sound wizard Ben Burtt. The point trading had reached such a pitch that Lucas gave Milius points in Star Wars in exchange for points in Big Wednesday, which he was prepping. Big Wednesday was supposed to put Milius on the map. He was Mr. Surfer, and if anyone could capture that scene, it was presumably Milius. (Spielberg gave him a point on CE3K in exchange for one on Big Wednesday, as well.) Pollock, speaking as Lucas’s lawyer, said, “Why are you doing this? You’re going to feel like an idiot.” George’s response was, “Look, the studios are going to cheat us out of everything anyway, what’s the difference, it’ll give us all a rooting interest in each other’s movies.” (Later, after Big Wednesday flopped, Lucas asked for his points back.)

  Ironically, Lucas was not pleased with ILM, and punished the effects crew by passing them over. Nelson did not get any points, nor did Dykstra, although some people got bonuses. Nelson and Dykstra were furious. Dykstra left to start his own company, taking much of the staff with him. Lucas moved the remaining six or so loyalists up north to Marin County.

  When it was clear Star Wars was going to be a gigantic hit, Lucas came to Coppola, said, “Oh, I’m gonna have all this money, we can do all the dreams we always wanted to, and I want to do it with you.”

  “Well, George, you wait until you get the dough, and then see if you still feel that way.” George took him to a few meetings. They talked about buying the Mann theaters, had a great deal on them, $25 million. They talked about buying Fox. “But now I was clearly in the subordinate position,” says Coppola, “and then about six months later there was less of that talk, and then there was a period of falling out. I never understood what it was about.”

  Coppola wasn’t the only one. The money changed everything. Says Milius, of Spielberg as well as Lucas, “These guys got too good for everyone. Everybody got very, very distant. George had his entourage around him. Could do no wrong. Everything was for George. And Steven you can’t talk to. He’s not a hum
an being anymore.”

  Star Wars put Fox on the map. Suddenly, Ladd was a genius. He had seen something in Lucas’s Star Wars script where no one else had. Like Calley, Tanen, and Evans, Ladd wanted to attract talented directors, and the Star Wars profits made it possible for Ladd to shelter Altman during the second half of the decade.

  Buffalo Bill and the Indians had been a major disappointment for Altman. It had a hefty budget, a big star (Paul Newman), and an interesting cast, but still it flopped. Even Kael didn’t like it. One problem may have been that when Altman did use stars—witness his treatment of Beatty in McCabe—he still couldn’t curb his subversive instincts. He somehow neglected to introduce Newman until the second reel, and then withheld close-ups of the famous blue eyes and grin.

  But Ladd admired him. Once, Altman and Tommy Thompson were driving to the airport when Altman said, “Let’s stop at Twentieth. I had a dream last night, I want to sell it to Laddie. Keep the engine running, it’ll only take a minute.” Altman darted into Ladd’s office, made a deal for 3 Women, and was back in the car in time to make the flight. “Ladd left me totally alone,” he says. “When we finished 3 Women, I showed it to him and a bunch of guys in the studio. The lights came up and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know who you think you’re going to sell this picture to, but good luck,’” Of course, the economics more or less made sense from the studio’s point of view, because Altman worked nonunion and kept his budgets low. He made 3 Women, A Wedding, H.E.A.L.T.H., Quintet, and A Perfect Couple for Fox, all for next to nothing. (A Perfect Couple cost only $1.5 million.) In Florida, when he was shooting H.E.A.L.T.H., he was threatened with a Teamster picket. He proceeded to publish the cast and crew salaries in the local newspaper, showing the Teamster drivers at the top of the list.

  But the same success that gave Ladd new power, qualified it as well. As Spielberg puts it, “If you’re the executive, suddenly you realize that if you’re going to go into business with George Lucas, you are no longer in the 20th Century-Fox business, you are in the George Lucas business, and George is going to call every shot. You lose the power to say ‘No, I don’t like this, I’d like you to change it.’ ”

  In case Ladd didn’t get it, Lucas quickly drove the point home with the stingingly punitive deal he demanded for the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. Having seized the baton from his mentor Coppola, Lucas’s grand plan envisioned financial independence from the studios. He wanted to finance Empire himself, and insisted on 50, and then an unprecedented 77 percent of the gross after a specified threshold had been reached, ownership of the negative, and TV and merchandising rights. He enjoyed sticking it to the studio, explaining, “I got screwed in the beginning and now I’m able to do it to them.”

  Star Wars drove home the lessons of Jaws, that kids and young adults would come back again and again to a movie without stars. But unlike Jaws, it showed that a phenomenally successful movie could be made from original material. It woke up the studios to the potential of merchandising, showed that the sale of books, T-shirts, and action figures could be a significant profit center. Star Wars’s merchandising efforts, instead of merely promoting the movie, as had been the case in the past, took on a life of their own and sucked up well over $3 billion in licensing fees as of the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy in 1997, adding an incentive to replace complex characters with simple figures that could be turned into toys.

  Beyond its impact on movie marketing and merchandising, Star Wars had a profound effect on the culture. It benefited from the retrenchment of the Carter years, the march to the center that followed the end of the Vietnam War. As Lucas was the first to notice, audiences were exhausted by the Sturm und Drang of the ’60s, tired of being actors on a historical stage, exciting though that may have been for a while. As the pundits of the time put it, the activists of the ’60s turned to cultivating their own gardens. In an omnibus review entitled “Fear of Movies,” Kael echoed Lucas, but drew the opposite conclusions. She too noticed a reaction against the violence; people were tired of movies “that are all car crashes and killings and perversity,” she wrote. “Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art—of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theater. So we’ve been getting a new cultural puritanism—people go to the innocuous hoping for the charming, or they settle for imported sobriety, and the press is full of snide references to Coppola’s huge film in progress....” And there was no nicer art than Star Wars, which reestablished the family film.

  Blockbusters have to offer something for everyone, and like The Godfather, like The Exorcist, like Jaws, Star Wars did so, sending mixed, often contradictory messages to both the left and the right, the boomers who had lived through Vietnam, and the next generation, the baby baby boomers for whom the war was only a fading memory. On the one hand, despite the famous fairy-tale crawl at the beginning of Star Wars—“the galaxy far away”—Lucas’s picture was not so far from Vietnam as it appeared. Lucas was personally rather conservative—cautious, drug-resistant, and essentially apolitical—but his deep-seated anti-authoritarianism and his battles with the studios inevitably branded him a child of the counterculture, of Carlos Castaneda and Tom Hayden. If, as he insisted, the Emperor was Nixon, his trilogy could be taken as a distanced, but nevertheless transparent allegory of the tumultuous decade in which the director had come of age. The vast, powerful Empire could only be the United States (more specifically, Hollywood), and the raggedy band of rebels, with their improvised, patchwork, rubberband and chewing gum weapons, the Viet-cong (or the New Hollywood movie brats). What was subtext in Star Wars became text in the Moon of Endor sequence in Return of the Jedi, where the furry little Ewoks deep in the forest carry on guerrilla warfare with sticks and stones against Imperial Walkers and whatnot—the power of the people triumphant against the man’s technology, as the slogan went in the ’60s.

  On the other hand, this Luddite strain in the Star Wars story existed cheek by jowl with the cold, clean, high-tech look of the film itself. As Milius rightly put it, Star Wars “brought kids out of the residue of the counterculture and interested them in American technology again.”

  Moreover, whereas the most sophisticated directors of the ’70s, like Altman, Penn, Scorsese, and Hopper, were deconstructing genre, Lucas, like Spielberg, was doing the reverse, gentrifying discredited genres of the past, in this case by yoking the dazzling special effects Kubrick pioneered in 2001 to the matinee serials of the ’30s, thereby revitalizing them.

  Lucas knew that genres and cinematic conventions depend on consensus, the web of shared assumptions that had been sundered in the ’60s. He was re-creating and reaffirming these values, and Star Wars, with its Manichaean moral fundamentalism, its white hats and black hats, restored the luster to threadbare values like heroism and individualism. At the same time, after half a decade of character- or theme-driven movies, unhappy endings, fractured narratives riven by flashbacks and psychedelic dream sequences, Lucas reasserted the pleasures of straightforward, unironic storytelling, along with accessible two-dimensional characters whose adventures ended happily. As Ladd put it, Lucas “showed people it was all right to become totally involved in a movie again; to yell and scream and applaud and really roll with it.” Lucas insisted that the actors deliver the improbable dialogue straight, without mugging or snickering. As he said, “It wasn’t camp, it was not making fun of itself.” Again, Milius summed it up: “What my generation has done is bring back a certain innocence.... It’s easy to be cynical. It’s hard to be corny.”

  But even the revitalization of narrative wasn’t the point of Star Wars. True, the set pieces were strung like beads along an easy-to-see thread, but it was the beads, not the thread, that was the point. As Lucas puts it, “I’m an advocate of pure cinema. I’m not that interested in narrative. The dialogue doesn’t have much meaning in any of my movies. I’m very much of a visual filmmaker, and very much of a filmmaker who is going for emotions over ideas.”


  Lucas and Spielberg were only six and seven years younger than Coppola, but they might as well have been on a galaxy far away. For one thing, Coppola was largely raised in New York, and if New York Gothamized Hollywood in the ’70s, Lucas and Spielberg were in the vanguard of the counterattack by small-town and suburban values that were to reclaim Hollywood as their own. More-over, Coppola was a child of the written word, drama and the novel. When he was helping Lucas write THX, he urged him to use Shakespearean themes, which he himself would employ to brilliant effect in the Godfathers, as he would turn to Joseph Conrad for Apocalypse Now. Lucas and Spielberg, on the other hand, had little use for literary tropes. “I love to tell the story graphically, not with people saying words,” Lucas explains. “Words are great in the theater, but that’s not movies.”

  Lucas’s genius was to strip away the Marxist ideology of a master of editing like Eisenstein, or the critical irony of an avant-garde filmmaker like Bruce Conner, and wed their montage technique to American pulp. Star Wars pioneered the cinema of moments, of images, of sensory stimuli increasingly divorced from story, which is why it translates so well into video games. Indeed, the movie leapt ahead—through hyperspace, if you will—to the ’80s and ’90s, the era of non-narrative music videos, and VCRs, which allowed users to view film in a non-narrative way, surfing the action beats with fast-forward.

  When all was said and done, Lucas and Spielberg returned the ’70s audience, grown sophisticated on a diet of European and New Hollywood films, to the simplicities of the pre-’60s Golden Age of movies, the era Lucas had memorialized so well in Graffiti. They marched backward through the looking glass, producing pictures that were the mirror opposite of the New Hollywood films of their peers. They were, as Kael first pointed out, infantilizing the audience, reconstituting the spectator as child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection. So thoroughly did Star Wars redraw the landscape of popular cinema, so thoroughly did it make the future safe for itself that the trilogy could, in 1997, be re-released in two thousand theaters and gross $250 million. The simultaneous re-release of The Godfather, an immeasurably better picture, paled in comparison. We are the children of Lucas, not Coppola.