On November 16, 1977, Coppola flew to Washington for a shindig at the Carter White House with Spielberg and Lucas. Among them they represented three of the top grossing films of all time. Spielberg referred to them as the Billion Dollar Boys. He described to them the trip around the world he took after Jaws. India and Russia were the only countries he visited where people weren’t wearing Jaws T-shirts. In Washington the directors stayed at the Watergate. A photographer from Amercian Film magazine took a picture of the three of them. It reminded Francis of another group shot, this one taken in 1974 when he posed with Bogdanovich and Freidkin. Peter and Billy had fallen by the wayside. Francis was the last man standing.
LIKE COPPOLA, by the end of the decade Beatty had gotten to the point where he could do anything he wanted. What he wanted to do was Reds, a sprawling epic about John Reed, the American radical journalist, the only American buried in the Kremlin, that would be shot in six countries over a considerable period of time. This was a project he had been noodling for nearly a decade, and after two comedies, and Christie’s gibes ringing in his ears, it was time. Reds was deeply personal. “Warren sees himself as John Reed,” ventured Jerzy Kosinski, who played Zinoviev, at the time. “In his movies so far, Warren has been as socially insignificant as John Reed before he began writing about the revolution. What could Warren possibly do... that would be revolutionary, truly qualitatively different from what Brando or Eastwood or Reynolds has done?” Kosinski was more than a little patronizing and wrong to dismiss Bonnie and Clyde and Shampoo, but he was correct to the extent that Beatty regarded Reds as the crowning work of his career.
Unlike Coppola, Beatty was not about to undertake a production of this magnitude without the backing of a studio. He was at the height of his power, and nothing symbolized it more than this project; only Beatty had the clout to launch a major motion picture that would dramatize the Russian Revolution from a not unsympathetic perspective—and get a studio to pay for it.
Still, it wasn’t easy. Reds was an expensive pill for Paramount to swallow. It was no low-budget trifle, a Days of Heaven. Says Simpson, “Even Barry Diller passed on Reds. He said, ‘We’re not making a picture about communists. We’re not glorifying them.’ Warren said, ‘You owe it to me to have a meeting with Charlie and yourself.’ Now Charlie really loved Warren—he was such a starfucker—and Charlie’s the one who committed.” But Bluhdorn was far from wild about the idea. Not only was it an expensive picture about a communist, Reed doesn’t go off with the girl, and he dies at the end. Bluhdorn did everything in his power to dissuade Beatty from proceeding, even said, “Do me a favor, take the budget, $25 million. Go to Mexico. Keep twenty-four million for yourself. Spend the one million on a picture. Just don’t make this one.” As Evans puts it, “Warren could dictate what he wanted to make. It was his come shot after Heaven Can Wait.”
The picture was rushed into production to meet the schedules of the huge, high-profile cast. It immediately became clear that the budget had been wildly underestimated. “I got very frustrated,” said Diller. “My knee-jerk reaction was to get angry with Warren. At the worst stage, I refused to talk to him.” He stopped taking Beatty’s calls. Then, at Christmas 1979, he saw five hours of footage in London, realized he had been wrong, and apologized. From then on, Paramount was fully behind the picture.
In early 1979, the trades reported the astonishing news that Pauline Kael had made a production deal with Paramount. She took a five-month leave of absence from The New Yorker, moved out to L.A., and was set up in an office on the lot. Kael and Beatty had a history. Her review of Bonnie and Clyde had been key to both their careers, she had loved Shampoo, and over the years a relationship developed. But she had disliked Heaven Can Wait, deriding it as a “prefab” picture, “image-conscious celebrity moviemaking,” and nastily described Beatty’s character as “the elfin sweet Jesus,” accused him of turning into a “baby-kissing politican.” For his part, Beatty disparaged her and the Paulettes as “Ma Barker and her gang.” But if Kael thought Beatty was “Jesus,” he would shortly appear to her in an altogether different guise, and offer her the apple that might have ended her career.
Kael had given Toback’s Fingers a rave, and when Beatty was trying to decide whether or not to produce Toback’s next film, Love and Money, he flattered her by asking for advice. Recalls Beatty, “I thought he was off his trolley, and I was going away to do Reds. She said, ‘Do Love and Money. Forget Reds. Why make a film on the communist party?’” He replied, “You tell Fellini how to make movies. If you think it’s so easy, you ought to try it yourself.” She replied, “Maybe I should.” So he hired her to produce Love and Money. Says Beatty, “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I told her there was one condition: she would meet a lot of people in Hollywood who would appear dumb to her. And that if she decided to go back to reviewing, she could not write about them, because she would destroy them. And she agreed. She immediately became completely competitive with Toback, rewriting the script over and over. Finally she said, ‘What should I do? Should I give him the money?’ I said, ‘Yes. You’re the one who convinced me what a genius he is.’ And she still hadn’t given up on Reds. She even called Diane Keaton, called my fucking girlfriend to get her to persuade me not to do Reds!” Adds Toback, “After six weeks of working with her, I couldn’t stand it. I said to Beatty, ‘Either I’m going or she’s going. I just cannot do this movie with her around.’ I was polite in the press, making it seem as if it were a mutual decision, but it wasn’t a mutual decision at all. I had her fired from Love and Money. I got rid of her.”
No one could figure out exactly what all this was about, but the Warrenologists in Hollywood, who always looked for deeper motives, couldn’t help seeing Beatty’s move as the pièce de résistance of the campaign to finesse Kael. “Because of her power, executives used to be terrified of her,” says Paul Schrader. “There was a feeling in the industry that Warren was the only one who could bring Pauline down. The ultimate smooth move was to flatter her to death, give her a little power, and put her in an office until she was gradually exposed as being one of us and therefore not dangerous. I really believe he brought her out there to humiliate her, maybe not consciously, but some part of him did. He gathered a lot of respect from the industry for that.”
Adds Buck Henry, “We’re talking about manipulation on a level unknown to man. This is so Machiavellian, even I can’t quite believe it, except that it was Warren. He knew he was going to make Reds, and he knew that Kael was always incredibly patronizing about him, and he knew she adored Toback. I think he thought, I’ve got to find a way to get her to back off. If I put her together with Toback, and make her think she’s part of a company, even if I dump her in a year, she can’t come back and slam me.”
If that was Beatty’s intent, it almost worked. After she got fired from Love and Money, she sat in her office twiddling her thumbs until her contract ran out. She used to go over to director Richard Brooks’s office, complain that she had been compromised and put out to pasture, and weep. She never knew what hit her. Beatty introduced her to Diller, who offered her a production deal that would enable her to work out of her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. “They were really wonderful to me,” she says today, although she turned Diller down. “Don Simpson was head of production, and he would have had no interest in any projects of mine.” However, when she finally got back to The New Yorker, she wrote the very article Beatty says she promised she wouldn’t, a scathing and prescient analysis of the future of the movie business. Although she didn’t mention Paramount by name, those in the know could read between the lines. And when Reds came out, she gave it a bad review.
APOCALYPSE WAS CUT and recut. Says one member of the team, “For months, Francis would just sit in the screening room at night, look at cuts of the film, get stoned, and trip on music.” Says one editor, “We’d be working for months without feedback, and then we’d get an insane note from his office in the penthouse, ‘Francis would like
you to recut the scene to the Doors’ “L.A. Woman.”’ He was in another world.” Adds another editor, “I’d ask Francis, ‘Whaddya want me to do with this scene?’ He would go into this exegesis of The Golden Bough, the father killing the son, and I’d be sitting there mesmerized by his wonderful eloquence, and then he’d leave, and I’d think, Yeah, but what am I supposed to do with this scene?” Apocalypse was to have been UA’s big Christmas movie in 1977, after having been pushed back from April. But Christmas came and went without a Coppola movie in the company’s stocking. A new date was set, April 7, 1978, Francis’s thirty-ninth birthday.
Meanwhile, many of the people whom Coppola had inspired with his passion fell away. It was all too insane, the self-indulgence, the megalomania, the false hopes Francis held out to people, the drama between Francis and Ellie. “It was like walking on eggshells, seeing the personal side, and then trying to carry on a professional relationship,” says Bottoms. “The key to that was to put on blinders. You just didn’t see it.” He adds, “One of his big dreams was that we’d all work together in harmony for the good of the project, like communists. That’s why I was attracted to him in the first place. But like any utopia, the truth is there is one person who gained, and everyone else suffered. He was living like a king—the cigars, the limos, the mansions—and complaining he didn’t have any money. When someone’s abusing their power to the point where they become inhuman, lashing out at people, criticizing people who were working for nothing, where’s the humility there? After Apocalypse Now, it was like, ‘I only make commercial movies, I don’t even write my own scripts anymore.’ So because of that illness—not wanting to share—he never was really able to tap into the fledgling artists. I learned that I couldn’t wait for someone like Francis to take me by the hand anymore, because guys like him can’t even take care of themselves.”
“Part of the dynamic of the place which I found difficult to be around, was an elitism, the sense that we’re all really special,” says Mathison. “Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. They were just making movies, and there isn’t anything that special about that. I’m sure a lot of people who were part of the ‘we,’ felt like they suddenly became a ‘you’ or a ‘them.’ and that was hard to take.”
UA acquiesced to a mid-August date—1979. There were different versions, with different endings. Coppola says Lucas came to him, asked to use his spectacular helicopter footage for More American Graffiti. Francis knew Lucas’s picture would come out first, and at that juncture, he felt that the helicopter footage was all he had. He was on the brink of disaster and refused his friend’s request.
Apocalypse was taking so long that UA was collapsing under him. In late January 1978, Arthur Krim and company shocked the industry by exiting—taking Medavoy with them—to form a new company, Orion. In a scramble for credibility, Transamerica reached deep into the company and came up with Andy Albeck, a lifer who had worked for Krim forever. Albeck was not part of the club, and would become the perfect scapegoat in the disaster that would soon be upon the company like an on-rushing locomotive. When the dust settled, production was headed by two kids with little experience, Steven Bach and David Field.
Bach and Field were hungry for product. In the summer of 1978, the buzz on the street was all about The Deer Hunter, scheduled for release in the fall. It had cost $15 million, twice the budget going in, and director Michael Cimino’s cut was three hours and four minutes, over which he was involved in a brutal fight with Universal. In August, Cimino’s agent, Stan Kamen, approached UA with a pay-or-play deal for the director’s next movie, tentatively entitled The Johnson County War, with a modest $7.5 million price tag. UA executives screened The Deer Hunter in New York on Wednesday, August 16, at their headquarters, on Seventh Avenue. Wrote Bach in his book, Final Cut, “We didn’t know what it meant to Cimino—politically or otherwise—but we knew what it felt like was, well... poetry.”
About a month later, Bach met with Cimino and his producer, Joann Carelli, at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. Cimino was short and stocky. His large head, set off by a dramatic mane of dark hair, sat atop his shoulders like a melon. He dressed casually in a black leather jacket and jeans. Carelli handed Bach a script she described as “a passion of his [Cimino’s].” Bach read it, liked it. It struck him as another exercise in genre revisionism like The Godfather, or better, The Missouri Breaks, except that it dealt with large themes that had to do with cattlemen hiring mercenaries to slaughter immigrant homesteaders. His only reservation concerned the ending, in which all the major characters were killed.
By that time, word was out on The Deer Hunter, and other studios were beginning to swarm around Cimino. On September 25, Bach and Field called Kamen and gave Cimino the deal he asked for. The Johnson County War— eventually known as Heaven’s Gate—was theirs.
•
EVANS HUNG ON in the shadow of Diller’s whiz kids—Michael Eisner and Don Simpson, with Simpson’s assistant Jeffrey Katzenberg lurking in the wings—a throwback to a bolder time. Still under the protection of Bluhdorn, he could always go over Diller’s head when he needed to, and he continued to behave as if he were head of the studio. “Eisner was scared of him,” says Simpson. “Evans believed he was this living legend. He would come in with his sunglasses and his black clothes, and Eisner freaked. He would buzz me. He’d go, ‘Don, Don! You gotta get in here!’ I’d say, ‘What’s wrong?’ He’d say, ‘Evans is here.’ Like I was the witch doctor that could deal with this maniac. When I was first head of production, he had to work for me as a producer. He would invite me over to his office, and he couldn’t sit at his desk for more than ten minutes without going to his bathroom and reemerging with a mountain of white substance all over him. Later on, when I got to know him better I’d say, ‘Bob, you can’t go out in public with a fuckin’ ounce of blow on your chest.’ He’d sit there and basically try to bribe me, said if I helped him with his project, he’d get me pussy. It drove me crazy, not that I was any paragon of virtue, because he was so sleazy.”
Evans wanted to do a picture based on the Popeye comic strip. The studio was less than enthusiastic, but when Disney agreed to defray half the cost, Eisner finally agreed. Evans got a tubful of turndowns, but finally talked Altman into doing it. Evans had often expressed his preference for hiring a good director after a flop, and Altman neatly fit the bill. He had a good thing going with Ladd, who would have backed one of Altman’s laundry stubs so long as the director kept the budget down. But none of these films had prospered. “Princess Grace was on the board of directors of Fox, and they had their annual meeting at Monaco,” the director recalls. “Princess Grace said, ‘Why would you allow Mr. Altman to make such a terrible film with such a great actor, Paul Newman,’ talking about Quintet. And Laddie said, ‘Oh, why don’t you go fuck yourself,’ or something like that. And got up and left, left the company.” (Actually, it was more probable that Ladd was forced out by his rival, CEO Dennis Stanfill, who took advantage of the unfavorable deal Ladd had negotiated with Lucas for The Empire Strikes Back to embarrass him with the board.)
To say that Altman’s name stirred little enthusiasm at Paramount is an understatement. Says Simpson, “None of us really wanted to make Popeye, and we hated Altman, who was a true fraud. I used to go into Altman’s bathroom at Lion’s Gate at six o’clock at night and there would be an empty fifth of scotch—that was from lunch till then, he was such an alcoholic. He was full of gibberish and full of himself, a pompous, pretentious asshole. I guess Evans wanted him, because Evans thought they could party together. So the fucking director was beyond a fucking drunken disaster, and then we had Evans, who didn’t even know what a fucking setup was. The two of them together were a dangerous combination.”
The studio had scheduled Popeye for Christmas 1980, to go up against Heaven’s Gate and Scorsese’s Raging Bull. The fall of 1979, from October to New Year’s, was spent casting. Shelley Duvall, one of Altman’s regulars, was the spitting image of Olive Oyl, but Eisner preferred G
ilda Radner, who was hot from Saturday Night Live. Altman didn’t want to make the picture without Duvall, so for him it was a deal-breaker. He showed a twelve-minute reel of Duvall’s work to Bluhdorn and the other Paramount executives, who came over to Lion’s Gate to see it. Recalls the director, “After the reel finished, Simpson stood up and said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to fuck her. And if I don’t want to fuck her, she shouldn’t be in the movie.’ I was appalled. Simpson was a bad guy, a bum. That was the kind of guy who was taking over the studios. It’s a big plus to our industry that he’s not here anymore. [Simpson died suddenly in 1996.] I’m only sorry he didn’t live longer and suffer more.”
Popeye was shot in Malta. “There was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drugs going around,” recalls Altman. “Everybody was shipping stuff in.” In January 1980, Evans flew out to the location. Right away, Simpson got a call, at home, midnight. He was in bed.
A hoarse voice whispered, “Don, Don.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Robert... Evans.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Malta. I got a problem. I need your help.”
“Bob, could we talk about it tomorrow?”
“No, we can’t. They lost my bags.”
What Simpson wanted to say was, “I’m president of production. I’m not in charge of bags,” but instead he said, “Gee Bob, I’m sorry.”
“You understand.... They lost my bags... and everything in them.”
“Yeah?”
“Don. I had things in them. Don, a lot of things, because I was helping Altman out too. This is for the film.”
“Holy shit!”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 55
