Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  “When he got divorced, George came to me and wanted to be my friend,” recalls Francis. “He apologized.”

  The ’80s were not kind to Lucas. He threw a party, and nobody came. Locating an expensive, state-of-the-art post-production facility so far from L.A. just didn’t make sense, and until the recent spate of effects-heavy movies finally made Industrial Light and Magic a profit center, it was always a struggle to make ends meet.

  Worse, he didn’t seem to enjoy running it. Instead, he discovered that what he actually bought with all that money was a huge burden. Shouldering the responsibility for the hundreds of people on his payroll was oppressive, and he resented them, was cold and distant. He sabotaged his own business, hiring and firing executives, starting up in L.A., closing down, moving north, moving south. The Indiana Jones movies, which Lucas produced, were phenomenally successful, but Spielberg seemed to get all the credit. When his few attempts at filmmaking, most notoriously, Howard the Duck, and then the ridiculous Willow failed, he became increasingly bitter. In 1987, Aljean Harmetz, writing in the New York Times, called him “almost a total recluse.” Says Milius, “Francis really tried to do things with his power. He made movies with Wim Wenders, produced The Black Stallion, produced George Lucas. George built Lucasland up there, his own private little duchy—which was producing what? A bunch of pap.”

  Coppola had always complained that the success of The Godfather derailed his career. Says Lucas, “The same thing happened to me.” Like Coppola, his aspirations were inflected by the market. Says Marcia, “George would have remained an experimental filmmaker if it had not been for Graffiti leading to Star Wars.” He always vowed he would never return to Star Wars.

  The great irony is that Lucas is the only New Hollywood director who succeeded in establishing his financial independence from Hollywood, the only one who is in the position to do whatever he wants, and yet he is imprisoned by the very Hollywood films—the Star Wars trilogy—whose success gave him that independence in the first place.

  Lucas used to regard his career as a failure. He had a fantasy that when he died, God would look down on him and say, “You’ve had your chance, and you blew it. Get out.” Now he’s reconciled to spending the rest of his life churning out Star Wars prequels, tending the pea at the bottom of the inverted Lucasfilm pyramid, as Marcia puts it.

  When Darth Vader begs Luke to serve the Empire and join the Dark Side at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, saying, “It’s your destiny,” Luke defies him, taking a risky plunge into nowhere. But real life is different. When Lucas’s self-created empire begged the producer-director to serve it, he gave in. “It took a long time for me to adjust to Star Wars,” he says, bemusedly. “I finally did, and I’m going back to it. Star Wars is my destiny.”

  ON DECEMBER 12, 1981, Evans announced, with the fanfare he was so good at orchestrating, a new project called The Cotton Club. He described it as “The Godfather with music,” or, more pungently, a movie with “gangsters, music, pussy.” Evans intended to direct himself. But after months of struggling, the script was in disarray, and he found himself strapped for money. He called Coppola. His voice shaking, he said, “I really need your help, my child is in trouble.” Francis thought he was talking about his boy, Josh, so he said, “Yes, Bob, yes, I’ll do anything I can. What happened?” Evans explained he was talking about his movie. One thing led to another, and Coppola, against his better judgment, became the director. He was still living in the shadow of bankruptcy; as Sylbert puts it, “the IRS was in his wife’s jewelry drawer.” Recalls Francis, “I didn’t want to do The Cotton Club, it was a nightmare, it was already $25 million over budget, there was no script, I had Richard Gere in a gangster movie who didn’t want to play a gangster, and I had to start in a month.”

  Evans knew he was going to need more money, and he fell in with Laynie Jacobs, an attractive, thirtyish blonde and a mid-level coke dealer, who introduced Evans to Roy Radin, an overweight, sleazy promoter from New York. But Jacobs and Radin fell out over Jacobs’s standing in the project, and Radin disappeared on his way to meet her for dinner at La Scala. A few weeks later, the missing person’s case turned into a murder when his body was found in a canyon north of L.A. Evans fell under suspicion. LAPD homicide investigators interviewed Evans for four hours, and emerged from his office with autographed copies of the Chinatown script clutched in their hands.

  Meanwhile, Coppola hired novelist William Kennedy for a ten-day polish. Every once in a while, Coppola’s mania would peep out from under the blanket of lithium. Driving around New York one day, he passed the Chrysler Building and told Sylbert, “Gee, I’d like to have an office in there. I’m going to buy that building.” On another occasion, at a screening of a recently restored print of Abel Gance’s 1927 masterpiece, Napoleon, which Francis was releasing under the Zoetrope imprimatur, at the moment when the single image becomes three, filling the wide screen with a breathtaking, panoramic vista, Francis turned to the person next to him and exclaimed, “I want to be him.”

  “Who, Gance?” she replied.

  “No, Napoleon!”

  The Cotton Club shoot, which started on August 28, 1983, was a disaster, lasting twenty-two months. Payrolls were missed. Kennedy’s ten-day polish lasted eighty-seven days, the length of the production, at $12,500 a week. He wrote twenty-eight drafts. The budget more than doubled, from $20 to $48 million.

  Evans was replaying The Godfather. But this time there was no happy ending. Coppola banned Evans from the set. “I wanted to pick him up and throw him, the fat fuck, outta the fuckin’ window,” says Evans.

  From Coppola’s point of view, the situation looked considerably different. In exchange for agreeing to direct, he says, Evans was supposed to relinquish creative control. But, he claims, as soon as Evans raised the rest of the money on the basis of his name, Evans tried to interfere. The Cotton Club opened on December 8, 1984, in New York, and disappeared shortly thereafter.

  For Coppola, worse was yet to happen. Two years later, in 1986, during the production of Gardens of Stone, a story about the relationship between an old soldier and a surrogate son who will die in Vietnam, Coppola’s twenty-two-year-old son, Gio, was killed in a boating accident.

  Like Friedkin, Coppola eventually became a director for hire, even stooping to direct a John Grisham movie, The Rainmaker. He, too, feels he never really became an auteur. “Woody Allen sits down, writes the script, goes out and makes the movie, one after another. He would never do a Grisham book. His career is the one that I most respect. I always wished that I could have done that.”

  In the ’90s, Coppola went into the wine business in a big way, and turned his vineyard into a tourist attraction. He sits outside at a long wooden table, the padrone, greeting tourists, autographing the labels of wine bottles, and having his picture taken with pretty young things from the Midwest sitting on his knee. There is a sadness about him, the sadness of a man who had greatness in him, but only intermittently achieved it.

  BY 1984, when the Schrader brothers made Mishima, a study of the right-wing Japanese writer who committed hara-kiri in a sensational act of political theater, death was in the air. Paul’s group was being decimated by drugs, which cast a lengthening shadow over the Hollywood community. His friends were getting sick as well, cancer here, pneumonia there. Howard Rosenman had gone to medical school, still followed the journals. “I started warning people. I kept saying, ‘Something terrible is going to happen to us.’ I told Paul about it, and he thought I was paranoid, said I should see a psychiatrist. But I was right. AIDS killed everything, shattered it into a thousand billion fragments.” (Adds Schrader, “Howard claims that he’s only still alive because he had hemorrhoids.”)

  Mishima, despite the drama of the story, was a cold, stylized script that attracted little interest. Paul persuaded Coppola to produce it, and he in turn asked Lucas to finance it. Lucas surprised everybody by instantly agreeing. If he wasn’t going to make these kinds of movies himself, he was apparently
willing to support others who were. “If you compare people like Francis and George to Spielberg, there’s a world of difference,” says Schrader, who had never forgiven Spielberg for Close Encounters. “Francis and George were always willing to risk their fortune and their fame for other people. Spielberg is a very conservative man. He probably still has the first dollar he ever made—screwed to the wall.”

  But during the course of the production, the festering, if subterranean, resentments between Paul and Leonard surfaced. Admits Paul, “I had always treated Leonard badly. Taking sole screenwriting credit on The Yakuza wasn’t very nice. Treating him as an employee wasn’t very nice. Throughout all that, he had one thing that I didn’t have, which was Japan. And then came Mishima, and I stole Japan from him. To do Mishima was his idea. He had all the connections. But once I got there, I took the big suite in the hotel because I was the director, and he had the small room. I was having all the meetings, and my friend Alan Poul, who was fluent in Japanese, was my first lieutenant, and Chieko, Leonard’s wife, was the interpreter for the actors. Leonard was out of the loop. Rarely did he ever come to the set. Looking back, I was too busy trying to make this goddamn movie to really care that he was obviously just sitting there stewing.”

  But Leonard had been having success on his own. He wrote the script for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), which won him an Oscar nomination, became an art house hit, and went to the Cannes Film Festival the same year as Mishima. “I wanted Chieko to come to Cannes very badly, because we had an image problem,” continues Paul. “I wanted a Japanese presence so that the press would think this was more indigenous. But Leonard didn’t want to come, because he didn’t want to be the girlfriend staying in the background. And if he wouldn’t come, she wouldn’t come. But I got on the phone with her, said, ‘If Len wants to be self-destructive and throw a snit, that’s fine, but you have to come.’ So she came, adding insult to injury. I can only imagine how much that hurt. We haven’t spoken since Mishima. That was the end.”

  After Mishima, Schrader was rarely heard from again, and he never approached, either as a writer or a director, his films of the ’70s. Says Rosenman, “Stephen Sondheim says that all art is born out of anger, and in Schrader’s case I think it was true. But the demons, the beasts that drove him were quieted.” Perhaps it is as Kael says, “He’s smarter than he’s talented.” Ironically, his best film as a director was his first, Blue Collar, which he more or less disavowed. Says Leonard, “My brother finds Blue Collar embarrassing. One reason is, he hadn’t yet developed his polished-jewel Cat People style. The other is, he didn’t write it.” Meaning, of course, that Leonard wrote it.

  BY THE EARLY ’80S, Dennis Hopper had reached rock bottom. He would consume half a gallon of rum, twenty-eight beers, and three grams of coke—a day. His drink of choice had been rum and Coke, but he decided that rum and cranberry juice would be better for his liver, and made the switch. Despite his drinking and drugging, he felt he was able to function tolerably well. He pitied those who would fall apart after a couple of drinks or a line of coke. They were the ones who should join the twelve-steppers; he was fine.

  But Hopper was getting still more paranoid, if possible, and was convinced the Mafia had put out a contract on him. He decided to bring things to a head by pulling a stunt called the Russian Suicide Death Chair, at an art happening at the Big-H Speedway outside Houston. He lay down in a coffin made out of paper and surrounded himself with sticks of dynamite. It was the trick he’d seen done when he was a boy that he’d wanted to use for the beginning of Easy Rider. Hopper figured he’d either be killed by the dynamite or the Mafia, which would hear about it and then would find him. His friends flew in from all over to see if he would finally manage to do himself in.

  Still convinced the mob was on his trail, he pulled a “geographic,” ending up in L.A. shooting coke and heroin, and then on to Mexico, where he had an acting gig. Suffering from DTs and hallucinations, he stripped off his clothes and disappeared into the jungle. After he punched a Mexican detective, the film company put him on a flight back to the States. As he was boarding, however, he became convinced that two of his former directors, Coppola and Wim Wenders, were filming him from the plane. Somehow he crawled out on the wing while the plane was still on the ground, and when he eventually debarked in L.A., he ended up in a hospital in Century City, then a celebrity drug program called Studio 8, then a state hospital. As he puts it, “I checked myself in, but I couldn’t check myself out. The state was gonna keep me for two and a half years. They decided that I could not be allowed outside.” Bob Rafelson located him through his agent, visited him on Father’s Day, got him out, and took him over to Bert Schneider’s. Bert put him up until he got straight, even found a counselor for him. “I was taking these antipsychotic drugs that were making me shuffle, and she said, ‘What are those things?’ I said, ‘Those are my pills, I gotta take my pills, ’cause I’m a psychotic’ She said, ‘Gimme those fuckin’ things,’ and she took ’em, and she flushed ’em down the toilet. She said, ‘Fuck off, you’re just a fuckin’ alcoholic.’

  “When I was younger, I could never imagine a life without alcohol,” he continues. “My idea of retiring, of heaven, was to have a rocking chair with a bunch of scotch and some cocaine, some marijuana, and a lot of cigarettes. Drugs opened up some doors for you, but they closed rapidly, and pretty soon you were working for the drug, basing your whole life around where you could get it, who you could trust, and how you could avoid getting busted. The people you hurt worst are the people that love you, because those are the only ones who hang around. It’s a terrible thing.”

  ROBERT TOWNE STUMBLED along after Personal Best, involving Beatty and Penn in a script called Mermaid, but he took so long writing it that it was knocked out of the box by Splash. He also did some script doctoring, rewriting an Oliver Stone script called 8 Million Ways to Die for Ashby. But the director changed some details while he was staging a scene and, according to the producer, Steve Roth, “Robert went ballistic. Psychotic. He thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He was this raging egomaniac with a whole group of sycophants around him. He was envious of Hal being a big director, and he thought he did him this big favor in rewriting the movie. It was the ugliest fight I ever saw in my life. Hal was down on his luck at that point. All kinds of accusations about drug abuse had been leveled at him. Towne was vicious. Said he was over-the-hill and gone. A cripple. ‘I’m not gonna be fucked by this guy one more fucking time.’ What was sad was these guys genuinely liked each other. They took an entire relationship and threw it away. I don’t think they ever spoke again.”

  Bob Evans had promised Nicholson a dinner if he won an Oscar for his comeback film, Terms of Endearment. In the warm afterglow of the dessert—crème brûlée with grapes—Evans tearily toasted Jack, announced that Towne was almost finished with The Two Jakes, the second of what the writer conceived of as a trilogy. Whereas Chinatown, set in the ’30s, dealt with water and the oligopoly of old wealth, The Two Jakes would be set in the postwar era, 1947, where oil and real estate, which is to say, WASPs and Jews, struggled for dominion over L.A. Jake Gittes searches for Katharine Mulwray (Evelyn’s daughter by her father), to find that she is married to the second Jake, a character loosely based on Towne’s father, Lou. (The sequel was jokingly referred to as The Iron Jew.) Lubricated by generous amounts of booze and blow, the three friends decided that Evans, who had not acted in twenty-six years, would play the second Jake. It made a certain amount of sense. “Evans was that person, was the other Jake,” says a source. “A real sleazeball.” Besides, Jack would be there to help him.

  The other twist was that Towne would direct. Towne was in a bad way. Personal Best had been a commercial failure and had left a trail of lawsuits in its wake. And he had lost the two things he most cared for in life: Greystoke went to Warners and Hira died in his arms in 1982, sending him into seclusion. Geffen warned Nicholson against Towne, but the actor wouldn’t listen. Jack called Dille
r from Evans’s screening room, proposed they do it for scale, cap the budget at $12 or $13 million, and the three men, all producers who would organize their own company, Ten Productions (named for Towne, Evans, and Nicholson), would split the take with Paramount, after the picture hit $18 million. It looked like a win-win proposition, in which everyone shared the risk—and the profits, which were certain to be huge.

  But before they began production, Bluhdorn died suddenly on February 19, 1983. Martin Davis, a former PR man, won a vicious power struggle and succeeded his boss. He quarreled with Diller, who had supported him, over his bonuses. Diller abruptly resigned to go to Fox, and then Davis told the Wall Street Journal he was firing Eisner and Katzenberg while the two men were in the air on a commercial flight (the company jet having been refused them) on their way to renegotiate their contracts with him in New York. Eisner went to Disney, and took Katzenberg with him. Like a ’50s sci-fi movie, the diaspora of the Paramount pods had serious consequences for the rest of Hollywood. The high-concept formula they had evolved and so assiduously practiced, along with hands-on supervision by creative executives, infected the studios like an emergent virus, and the effects are still being felt today.

  Bluhdorn was buried a Christian. Says Evans, “There are more crosses around his crypt than there are around the Popes’.”

  Frank Mancuso, head of marketing, replaced Diller, and Tanen, who had left Universal, replaced Eisner. The executives were eager to hit the ground running, and embraced The Two Jakes as the kind of project they needed to put the all too successful Diller era behind them. The Two Jakes was scheduled for Christmas 1986. But Evans was having trouble getting the script out of Towne, who was getting engaged to Luisa Selveggio, formerly the hostess and wife of the owner of an Italian restaurant on Olympic. Evans promised to throw a wedding party at Woodland for the happy couple if Towne finished by the time of the ceremony, October 17, 1984. Towne made the deadline, and Evans was as good as his word, hosted 150-odd guests, although he complained about the cost for years after.