Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Evans and Towne were never ones to live within their incomes, and both were chronically broke. Evans had been paying a lot of the preproduction costs out of his own pocket. The writer’s living expenses were running about $50,000 a month, and he needed cash to furnish his new home. Once again, Evans assembled the old gang. Sylbert came on to design. Caleb Deschanel, who shot part of Personal Best, was the DP. Nicholson insisted that Harold Schneider line-produce. The Two Jakes was set to begin principal photography on Monday, May 5, 1985.

  If the notion that Towne could direct was questionable, the idea that Evans could act was ludicrous. Evans promised Towne three weeks of rehearsal. In Personal Best, Towne had extracted a passable performance from Patrice Donnelly, a nonactor, and was confident he could do the same for Evans. But Evans left for Tahiti to have Alain Delon’s plastic surgeon work on his face. He wanted an exotic look, and brought along Polaroids of cats. He returned looking like “a Jewish Chinaman,” as one source put it, and in his screen tests he was wooden and stiff. He was protective of his “image,” refused to let his hair be cut for a ’40s look—he reminded one person of a Las Vegas croupier—and worse, when his hair was cut, the sutures in his scalp became visible. During rehearsals, Kelly McGillis, who had a role, was openly giggling at Evans’s lame attempts at acting. As the first day of principal photography approached, reality began to sink in, and Towne had second thoughts. “Evans had always said to me that he was the worst actor he ever knew, but it was really painful to watch,” recalls Sylbert. “He had all the mannerisms of Faye Dunaway. He was a disaster. And there was no way we were going to get through a movie with Towne, who couldn’t help him.” Using Evans might easily make the picture days, even weeks, late. The overages were supposed to come out of Towne’s cut of the profits, and he had just been through that on Personal Best. It finally dawned on the director that the amusing decision to cast Evans might cost him a fortune.

  Towne went to Nicholson, said, “Jack, I don’t think I can make it work with Bob.”

  “Oh, man, you don’t think you can get him through it?”

  “I don’t think I can get him to it.”

  “He’s gonna go crazy. Just let him do it, and if it doesn’t work out in a few weeks, shitcan him.”

  “I’m on the hook for completion. Three weeks, I’ll be broke forever.”

  According to Evans, Towne had told Nicholson that Evans was backing out because he didn’t want to play a Jew. That night, Towne was supposed to join Sylbert at Deschanel’s for an eight o’clock dinner of barbecued salmon. He finally showed up at 10:00, while everyone was cleaning the bones, looking exhausted. He announced, “I’ve fired Bob Evans.” Recalls Sylbert, “Evans went crazy. He went crazy. The calls, the screaming, the threats. He wanted to kill Bob Towne. Jack wanted to beat the shit out of him [Towne] for doing what he did that night.”

  On Saturday Towne broke the news to Paramount. Mancuso and Tanen were aghast, rushed over to Evans’s house for a meeting. Towne was there, represented by his lawyer, Bert Fields. They went ‘round and ‘round. Towne insisted that Evans was out. Nicholson, who had not in fact agreed to replace Evans, vehemently insisted he was in. In the middle of the meeting, the phone rang. Tanen’s ex-wife, Max, had committed suicide. Their two daughters had found the body. Tanen left. Finally, Nicholson stood up. “Listen, Beener,” he announced, using his nickname for Towne, “With Evans, I take nothin’. Without him, I want my six mil against 15 percent of the gross. Is that clear?” Then he offered to buy the script from Towne for $2 million. Towne refused.

  Monday morning, they went up to the Pacific Palisades for the first day of shooting. The location was the Bel Air Bay Club, a sprawling structure built in 1928 up on the hills of the Pacific Palisades. It was a virgin location, never before used for a film, and it would not be, at least that day. Nothing was shot. Tanen desperately wanted to hold it together. For a moment, it looked like a compromise had been reached: all three principals, not just Towne, would guarantee the overruns. Towne and Evans agreed, but Nicholson balked, realizing he was the only one of the three with money and would be left holding the bag. Finally, Mancuso called Towne, told him he was pulling the plug.

  Hollywood, inured to every kind of scandal and catastrophe, had never seen anything quite like this highly public meltdown. Rumor, paranoia, and wild speculation swirled around the unlucky principals. Everyone agreed that Evans would have been a disaster. But it was Towne’s handling of the situation that left people wondering. Evans wasn’t needed for a month to six weeks. The consensus was that Towne should have started shooting, and then let Evans go. With several weeks’ film in the can, the studio would have been helpless.

  Said Harold Schneider, “I think Towne didn’t want to do the film because he didn’t think he could direct. I think he was chickening out, and Evans was the excuse, the fall guy. Towne got lockjaw, his brains fried.... He was in a fetal position under the couch screaming, ‘I can’t go on. They’re out there, and they’re gonna kill me.’” Says Kael, “Towne has really blown his gift. It’s tragic. He’s got everything going for him except common sense.” People whispered that Nicholson let it fall apart because he wanted to direct the film himself, which he did, several years later.

  The Two Jakes was like the proverbial string that, once pulled, unraveled the skein of friendships, woven in the ’60s and ’70s, that these men held dear. Both Evans and Towne (not to mention Rafelson, Mike Nichols, and Ashby), were dependent on Nicholson’s loyalty and resurgent box-office clout to free them from their respective albatrosses: The Cotton Club and Personal Best. Towne’s friendship with Nicholson snapped. He says now, “Jack was one of the most important people in my life. We grew up together. He taught me how to write by watching him act. I swore he would become a movie star, and I would write for him, and one day that happened. He was the closest friend I had. I haven’t spoken to Jack for ten years.”

  The Two Jakes fiasco sent Evans hurtling into the abyss. Although he avoided indictment in the Radin affair (he has always denied any wrongdoing), Evans had become an endless embarrassment to the studio. Evans was abandoned by his pals. Says Bart, “Bob was a Gatsby-like person. He only wanted to know important people. He didn’t have friends, didn’t have buddies.” Evans too sank into depression. All day, he lay on his bed in a fetal position, refusing to go out of the house. On May 19, 1989, he checked himself into a depression clinic at the Scripps Memorial Hospital, just north of San Diego, afraid he would commit suicide. He was put in a barred room, shot full of sedatives. He realized right away he had made a mistake—the doctors were contemplating electroshock therapy—and when he wanted to leave, they wouldn’t let him out. Three days later, he escaped. Evans eventually did get a second chance at Paramount, but he failed to make much of it.

  When The Two Jakes was finally made in 1989, it ended Nicholson’s twenty-five-year-old friendship with Bert Schneider. After Broken English, Schneider stopped trying. His world was falling apart. Not only had he seen his dreams of revolution come to nothing, but many of the people closest to him, first his brother Stanley, then Artie Ross, died. Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, and Huey Newton was ignominiously gunned down in a drug-related killing on a dark street in Oakland the same year. “When Huey went, I think a good piece of Bert went at the same time,” says Rafelson. “Dying like a gangster with a bullet in the brain, it was a bad way for Bert to see his pal go.”

  There was no place for people like Bert in the Reagan-Bush ’80s. In the early ’70s, BBS thought it was riding the wave of the future, but a decade later, reality had set in. “Despite Easy Rider’s gigantic success, I always thought of us as—for want of a better term—minority communicators,” Schneider has said. “We were in touch with a very small segment of the population and had to make inexpensive movies, because that was how we could survive. Our movies didn’t have to reach a lot of people.” In 1979, the MPAA reported that 90 percent of ticket buyers were between the ages of twelve and thirty-nine
. But this was no longer a counterculture audience. It was a Porky’s audience. Despite his flaws, Schneider’s authority was such that for those who knew him, his self-imposed exile even now stands as a rebuke to the Me Generation that followed him.

  One night, Nicholson was bemoaning the fact that he was never going to be taken seriously as a director. Bert suggested he revive The Two Jakes and direct it himself. He offered to executive-produce, watch Jack’s back with Paramount. Harold Schneider would manage the production. But Paramount, already burned once, drove a hard bargain, said it didn’t need an executive producer. Schneider expected Nicholson to pay him out of his cut. Says Blauner, “Bert was pissed that Jack wouldn’t eat this. Bert made Jack. Jack would still be doing bike movies if it wasn’t for BBS.”

  “The money was not the point,” says Harry Gittes, who heard the story from Harold. “The point was, Bert wasn’t treated with the respect he felt he deserved. The point was, ‘You—Jack—made a fuckin’ blood bond with me, and you broke it, and you’re dead.’ That’s how Bert plays. ‘And you’re gonna let my brother, my kid brother, the Doberman, give me this news? It’s humiliating. How could you do this to me?’ And he was probably right, because Harold didn’t exactly wear a velvet glove.”

  The rift was compounded when Bert wanted Jack to do a cameo in a sequel to Easy Rider, written by Michael O’Donoghue. According to Blauner, Jack had once told Bert, “Whenever you want me for a movie, just tell me where to show up, I’m there.” Jack liked the script, and agreed to do it. At $1 million for three days’ work and a chunk of the gross from breakeven, it wasn’t much of a favor. Hopper and Fonda and key crew were all set to go. Bert sent Blauner to close the deal. But Jack wouldn’t commit. Blauner said, “Let’s cut the bullshit. Bert needs this!” Still Jack wouldn’t respond. Furious, Blauner jumped in his car and started down the driveway. Jack ran after him. “What’s the big hurry, Blautown? In and out?” Blauner barked, “What’s there to talk about?” and drove off. He says, “Jack didn’t stand up for Bert, like he doesn’t stand up for anyone. Jack has still got a lot of Jersey in him, all of Jersey in him.”

  Whatever was going on in Nicholson’s mind, it was plain he didn’t want to be pressured. Bert might have been able to get away with that twenty-five years ago, when he was on top of the world and Nicholson was a struggling young actor, but not now, and Jack just ignored him. Continues Gittes, “Jack is the king, and we bring to the king. Bert was one of the last guys that sort of held over him, ‘I’m Bert and you’re Jack. I’m the Godfather, and you’re the soldier. You’re close to the Godfather, you may be the star soldier, but you’re still a soldier.”

  Hopper was the go-between for Bert and Jack, but he and Bert also had a falling out, and Bert cut him off. “I love Bert,” says Hopper. “I’ll always remember what Bert and Bob did for me, but they’re mean-spirited. They’re just lucky that I passed through their lives.” Bert and Jack still go to Lakers games, but when they see each other, they don’t speak.

  Nor was Bert speaking to Harold when Harold died suddenly of a heart attack in the fall of 1994. Bert lost his mother the same year, and then his new, twenty-year-old French wife either committed suicide or OD’d.

  Lightning struck often around Bert, hitting people on all sides of him, but sparing the great trunk itself. Brothers, wife, parents, friends. Bert, who regarded himself as above history, was finally left behind by it. His strengths, his specialness, became his downfall, and he ended up a veritable recluse, very much the Howard Hughes figure, everyone around him disillusioned or dead. As Buck Henry puts it, “When the marriages began to fall apart, and people began to die of drug overdoses, and talent began to wither too soon, nobody knew where to go or what to do about it. Some just hid out.”

  A few years later, after a picture called Man Trouble on which Rafelson and Nicholson seriously feuded, the director bought a house up on Mulholland, adjoining Jack’s. Bob and Bert used to stand on the property line talking about the old days. They hollered, “Fuck you, Jack,” into the canyon, waiting for the echo, bouncing from ridge to ridge, to come back to them. They took out their dicks, something they had always been good at, and peed over the property line onto Jack’s land.

  THE DIRECTORS of this decade were not unusual in their self-absorption, ruthlessness, or cruelty. Such behavior goes with the territory. “Directors, in order to stay in the game, are among the worst people we’ve got,” observes producer Don Devlin, best known as the man who asked Lew Wasserman if he kept two sets of books. “You have to be absolutely ruthless. Many of them are sociopaths.”

  Could another group of directors have done it differently, broken the back of studio power, created little islands of self-sufficiency that would have supported them in the work they wanted to do? Could a hundred flowers ever have bloomed? Probably not. The strength of the economic forces arrayed against them was too great. “We had the naive notion that it was the equipment which would give us the means of production,” said Coppola. “Of course, we learned much later that it wasn’t the equipment, it was the money.” Because the fact of the matter is that although individual revolutionaries succeeded, the revolution failed. The New Hollywood directors were like free-range chickens; they were let out of the coop to run around the barnyard and imagined they were free. But when they ceased laying those eggs, they were slaughtered.

  As Coppola later recognized, the market selected and shaped these directors, snuffing out the careers of those whose films were not commercial, and boosting and molding the careers of those that were. Consider what might have been had Coppola dug in his heels, refused to direct The Godfather, made personal films instead. What if Spielberg had turned down Jaws, and had followed the path of Sugarland Express, made Bingo Long. Or if Lucas had followed THX with another dark, idiosyncratic picture. But of course, none of these “what ifs” was very likely. The rewards were too great for these filmmakers to walk away from them.

  Still, just when the future seems darkest, when a picture like the ridiculous Titanic has apparently legitimized the studios’ free-spending habits, a new generation of filmmakers, some inspired by the pictures of the ’70s, sometimes even mentored by ’70s directors, emerges at the bottom to inject new vitality into the system—the Oliver Stones and Coen brothers of the ’80s, the Quentin Tarantinos and Atom Egoyans of the ’90s. And there is always the hope that one of the great directors of the ’70s—an Altman, a Schrader, a Friedkin—will find the resources to make the masterpiece that has so far eluded him.

  Still, without a counterculture to nourish them, without a vigorous set of oppositional values, the independents are independent in name only, always at risk of being gobbled up and corrupted by the studios. It would be wonderful if Lucas’s fantasy of multiplexes all over America playing independent features were a fact. But he has probably not been to a mall lately, where the reality is that six screens of the local multiplex will be showing The Lost World or a Lost World equivalent. Unfortunately, this story may not have a happy ending, and the last word could likely be that of Altman, who says, “You get tired painting your pictures and going down to the street corner and selling them for a dollar. You get the occasional Fargo, but you’ve still got to make them for nothing, and you get nothing back. It’s disastrous for the film industry, disastrous for film art. I have no optimism whatsoever.”

  BY THE LATE ’80s, Ashby had cleaned up, kicked the drugs, was very much in a rehab mode. “You know,” he told producer Lester Persky, “I’ve lost eight years out of my life.” He’d had a rough half decade, two pictures in a row taken away from him during the editing, Lookin’ to Get Out and The Slugger’s Wife, written by Neil Simon and produced by Ray Stark. The story went that Ashby had showed them a 20-minute rough cut of the beginning of the picture that had almost no dialogue, none of Simon’s precious script, and that was that, they seized the film. Then came 8 Million Ways to Die, the picture on which he feuded with Towne. Recalls Chuck Mulvehill, “We finished shooting the picture, a f
ive-ton truck pulled up with a couple of palookas, they came up to the editing room, and they took the film away from him—the best editor in Hollywood—for the third time in a row. Hal fought it through the Guild, and in the end, he settled. They gave him some money, and he just said, ‘Ah, fuck it,’ and he left. He would never have done that in the ’70s—it would have been a fight to the death. The magic was gone.” Hal told friends, “I just give up. I can’t fight it, they’re scumbags.” Adds Bruce Dern, who lived down the beach from Ashby and had stayed in touch after Coming Home, “Hal said, ‘I can understand anything except not letting me edit something, particularly something I shot.’ I think he gave up then, and just let himself go. What happened to him, both what he did to himself, and they did to him, is as repulsive to me as anything I’ve seen in my forty years in the industry.”

  After years of reclusiveness, Hal started to appear at Hollywood parties wearing a double-breasted blue blazer, as if to send a message to the agents and producers in attendance: “I am no longer a drug addict, I am reliable, trust me.” He was talking hopefully about starting over, making a “Hal Ashby” movie, had several projects at various stages of development. Then, one night, Hal was at Beatty’s. He started to complain about an insect bite on his leg. “I got this on the other leg too, and it’s bothering me,” he said, showing what looked like a discolored bruise to Beatty, who replied, “I don’t like the way that looks. It looks to me like phlebitis.”