by Marc Eliot
They were back together a week later.
It was obvious almost from the start that Jack was in trouble as a director. Normally the coolest cat on the set, he was in over his head. As Karen Black recalls: “The production was disorganized and because of budget problems they couldn’t give Jack enough people to do all the other work. There were not enough hats to let Jack concentrate only on directing. This had to be done, that had to be done, and Jack wound up doing most of it and he just couldn’t handle it all by himself. It’s the plague of independent filming, and also part of what makes independent filmmaking so exciting, like that old Chinese saying, ‘The worst part of you is also the best part of you.’ ”
Despite the production’s cost escalations, Schneider, who was in charge of the budget for this film, said nothing and kept paying the bills. In the spring of 1971, he finally showed a rough cut of Drive, He Said at Cannes, where it was hooted at by angry audiences. When Jack was brought out as the director after the screening, he was booed off the stage. It didn’t help that any moral antiwar conviction the hero might have had was lost by his attempted rape of an innocent woman, a metaphor of America’s involvement in Vietnam that didn’t work at all. Drive, He Said’s moral imperative about the war came out exactly the opposite of what Jack had wanted it to be.
Besides its weak script, the film lacked two essentials needed to become a hit. One was Jack’s onscreen presence. He might have been able to pull off one of the two leads and generate sufficient box office to have the film at least break even. Both Tepper and Margotta had zero presence. The other was timing. What had seemed relevant and dramatically justifiable in the sixties simply didn’t resonate the same way in the seventies. The American public had grown weary of Vietnam, and the reaction at Cannes was a harbinger of things to come. Drive, He Said never gained traction at the box office, and it was finally released June 13, 1971, on the bottom half of a double bill with Columbia’s rerelease of Paul Mazursky’s 1969 hugely popular ode to free love, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.
Jack had arrived at Cannes with a big smile plastered on his face and the gorgeous Michelle Phillips, late of the Mamas and the Papas. Michelle had since married and divorced Dennis Hopper not long after she had shown up at the Oscars with him for Easy Rider. A few days later after the wedding they’d had a fight that ended with Hopper punching Phillips, and she ended their eight-day marriage. Phillips dropped her line back in the water. The two were first introduced by Lou Adler, who had originally signed the Mamas and the Papas to his Dunhill Records and made them stars. He did it in the hopes that Michelle might be able to turn off Jack’s Mimi-driven obsession. He was right. Jack was dazzled by Michelle’s hippie/glam look, dropped Mimi for good, and started going with Phillips.
Jack took Michelle to Cannes with him. As soon as John Phillips, Michelle’s ex, heard about it and that Mimi was available, he tracked Mimi down and began sleeping with her. And everyone from Malibu to Melrose knew it. Including Jack, which was exactly what John Phillips wanted.
IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING Drive, He Said, Henry Jaglom asked Jack to play a small part in his first directorial effort, A Safe Place, and with nothing else on his plate he said yes.
Jaglom had played a small role in Drive, He Said, and now, as payback, Jack took the role of Mitch in Jaglom’s A Safe Place. Jaglom couldn’t pay anything. Jack didn’t mind. Jaglom had taken SAG minimum for Drive, He Said. Jaglom gave Jack a color TV for his services. He could use it to watch Lakers games, the only thing on television he watched.
Jack improvised all of his scenes in one day. There was no written script for his character, so he worked off descriptions fed to him by Jaglom. The good part was that he was going to co-star opposite the luscious Tuesday Weld and the great Orson Welles. Welles had long been a pariah at the studios and was perennially in need of funds to produce his own movies. Jaglom gave him a chance to flex for the screen, something he all too rarely got the opportunity to do.
A Safe Place is simply beyond comprehension. There is so much “filmmaking” going on in it that the whole movie gets buried behind zoom shots, single-take shots, tracking shots, shots of reflections through water, high-angle shots, low-angle shots, everything but shots that offer a narrative continuity to tell the film’s plot. A Safe Place made Drive, He Said look like Gone with the Wind (and Drive, He Said made Easy Rider look like The Birth of a Nation).
There are pot scenes, seminude orgy scenes, hippie clothing, and lots of candles, all of which displaces the film back to the sixties, in a script loaded with words, words, words, camera angles, camera angles, camera angles that mean nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is also notable as the first film in which Jack’s hair loss is visible, as well as a slight but hard-to-miss weight gain that he would now battle throughout the rest of his career. In A Safe Place he is shot in basically two modes; moving across a rooftop in medium close-up as the camera pans left to right, keeping him in frame, and in a two-shot in bed with Weld (rumors ran rampant on the set that they were having sex with each other throughout filming). Jaglom uses a soundtrack peppered with Édith Piaf and Charles Trenet, suggesting some kind of connection to the nouvelle vague, but the only time the film has any vibrancy, Welles’s presence notwithstanding, is when Jack appears onscreen. His magnetism is undeniable, even in a pretentious mishmash like this.
Here, in his own words, is how Jaglom conceived A Safe Place: “I personally had two very different influences—improvisational theater, which I started out in, and European films, including Fellini, Godard, Bergman, a new kind of cinema … I first did it as a play at the Actors Studio in New York in 1964, with Karen Black playing the Tuesday Weld part and I played the part that Jack played. Philip Proctor did the same part on stage and screen … Karen Black was my girlfriend at the time. I got connected to Tuesday Weld and wrote the play about a character who is one third Tuesday, one third Karen, and one third me … I was interested in exploring the inner, unexpressed life of women … who were not represented in Hollywood films … After the success of Easy Rider I went to Bert Schneider and told him that I wanted to make a film too. He said okay and I told him it was going to be based on my play A Safe Place and he said ‘Fine.’…
“Jack comes in, fucks the girl, fucks the picture, and fucks the audience, and then disappears, like the Orson Welles character, the magician … it’s about the magic of our lives …”
A Safe Place did nothing at the box office. Jack’s only official comment on his one-day shoot for A Safe Place was, “My stuff was great.”
THAT SUMMER OF 1970, Helena Kallianiotes showed up at Jack’s doorstep with an unexplained black eye. He asked no questions, but figuring Kallianiotes was the victim of some sort of physical abuse, perhaps from her broken marriage, he let her move in. “Pick yourself a bedroom,” he told her. In return for running the house and handling the daily chores, he told her she could stay as long as she wanted. She was, in many ways, Jack’s perfect nonwife. She wasn’t the only houseguest Jack had ever had, but the most permanent. His door was always open to all his friends: Dernsie, Bob Evans, Roman Polanski. Whenever they needed a place to be discreet, Jack’s was it. They also loved to come over and hang by the pool, get stoned, and trade film-business stories.
Jack especially liked Helena’s social ease and popularity. She was connected to the Hollywood hip and took him along to places he hadn’t been before, out of the coffeehouses and bars to more interesting places. She introduced him to Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, and John Lennon, all regulars at places like the Chateau Marmont and the Beverly Wilshire bar Hernando’s. Through her he met and had affairs with several of L.A.’s most coveted women, including folk/rock goddess Joni Mitchell.
Not at all bothered by Kallianiotes’s residency in Jack’s house, Michelle, never the jealous or possessive type, rented a house near Jack’s for herself and her daughter, which suited him just fine.8 He could be free and involved at the same time. Jack also called Dennis to tell him he was
seeing Michelle. The last thing Jack wanted was to have Hopper hear about it from someone else (which he probably already had, since everybody in Hollywood knew everything Jack did) and come after him, or the both of them, with a gun. He was capable of it. Plus, the permanent paranoia resulting from the recent Tate/LaBianca murders, the handiwork of the infamous Charles Manson and his band of followers, had made everybody in Hollywood acquire guns, and Jack was sure Hopper knew how to use his. For a time, Jack slept with a hammer under his pillow.
Hopper only laughed when they finally spoke, telling Jack that Michelle was his headache now.
Jack had known Sharon Tate and occasionally had dinner with her and her husband, director Roman Polanski, at El Coyote, a popular Hollywood Mexican restaurant. A year after the murders, in 1970, the trial began, and Jack managed to secure passes to watch the proceedings in person. He was fascinated by Manson’s persona and the crazy way he looked during the proceedings. The whole ghoulish thing was run like a public circus. It amounted to courtroom pornography, and Jack, who was there almost every day, couldn’t get enough of it.
EARLY IN 1971, Jack was nominated for Best Actor for his performance as Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces and this time he made it his business to be there. To celebrate, Jack bought a brand-new super-expensive $23,000 Mercedes-Benz 600, to park next to his 1967 yellow Volkswagen. His friend Harry Gittes noted, “You can tell Jack’s mood by which car he uses. One part of him is definitely a street person [the Volkswagen], a guy who loves to go to Lakers basketball games and harass the opposition, or prowl dingy bars on Santa Monica Boulevard. The other part is the show-biz celeb [the Mercedes]… trying to make time with the world’s most glamorous women.” He also began picking up everyone’s tab whenever he ate with them: breakfast, lunch, or dinner. He became addicted to expensive Cuban Montecristo cigars, which he bought by the boxload whenever he was in Europe or Canada, smuggling them home in his luggage. And Jack became more of a user of cocaine because, as he told Playboy, “Chicks dig it sexually.”
The 43rd Annual Academy Awards were held on April 15, 1971, once again at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. This time thirty-two stars shared the hosting duty, in an attempt to liven up the proceedings (it didn’t). Besides Jack’s nominations, Five Easy Pieces received three other nominations: Karen Black for Best Supporting Actress, Rafelson and Joyce (Eastman) for Best Original Screenplay, and Rafelson and Richard Wechsler for Best Picture.
The overwhelming favorite that year in all the categories was Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton, old Hollywood’s seemingly never-ending celebration of World War II. George C. Scott’s performance in the title role was a testament to his ability as an actor, and everybody in the house, including Jack, stylish in a black custom-tailored suit with a black tie and black shirt, with Michelle in an eclectic yet lovely outfit by his side, knew it. Scott won but didn’t show up, and he refused the Oscar when he received word it had been awarded to him. He was, reportedly, at home in New York City watching a hockey game when someone called to tell him the news.
Scott may not have cared, but Jack was disappointed. He was 0 for 2 now at the Oscars and beginning to wonder if the Academy establishment was ever going to recognize him.
BBS MANAGED TO take Bogdanovich away from Corman by offering him more money. Bogdanovich wanted to make a movie out of writer Larry McMurtry’s semiautobiographical novel The Last Picture Show, and Bert Schneider gave him the money to do it.9
Schneider thought the thirty-one-year-old Bogdanovich was a legitimate talent and a great addition to BBS’s expanding corral, which included Jack, Carole Eastman, Henry Jaglom, Robert Towne, and Rafelson. In a way, BBS had turned itself into a higher-class version of Corman’s operations. If Corman had pioneered the independent movement in the Hollywood of the 1950s, BBS in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s brought it into the mainstream.
The Last Picture Show, a look at a dying Texas town as seen through the eyes of three young boys, was released on October 22, 1971, four months after Drive, He Said, and grossed more than $29 million in its initial domestic release. The following year it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including one for Best Director (Bogdanovich), and won two, Ben Johnson for Best Supporting Actor and Cloris Leachman for Best Supporting Actress. Despite the failure of Drive, He Said (released after Five Easy Pieces), it kept BBS at the top of its game. But it wasn’t destined to stay there much longer. The wheels of pop culture were turning, and BBS was about to start rolling downhill and take the first wave of independent movies with it.
DENNIS HOPPER HAD also wanted to make his own film, something called The Last Movie. He boldly walked into BBS’s office and demanded that Schneider let him make it for him. As Hopper later explained to Peter Biskind, the film was about “a stunt man in a lousy Western. When his movie unit goes back to the States, he stays on in Peru to develop a location for other Westerns. He’s Mr. Middle America. He dreams of big cars, swimming pools, gorgeous girls … But the Indians … see the lousy Western for what it really was, a tragic legend of greed and violence in which everybody died at the end. So they build a camera out of junk and reenact the movie as a religious rite. To play the victim in the ceremony, they pick the stunt man …[it’s] a story about how America is destroying itself.”
To his shock and amazement (but nobody else’s), BBS turned him down. Rafelson, especially, had had his fill of Hopper and felt no need to reenter that particular filmmaking asylum. It marked the end of Hopper’s association with BBS.
Still, the outsize and unexpected box office success of Easy Rider prompted most of the majors to start so-called youth divisions that hopefully would turn out movies like Rider that would appeal to younger audiences, be made for less than a million dollars, and avoid using expensive mainstream stars. Universal’s new division was run by former MCA recording executive Ned Tanen and former TV executive Sidney Sheinberg. They signed up a slew of projects, the first being Dennis Hopper’s ironic (and prophetic) title The Last Movie, which was set to co-star Peter Fonda (as an actor only), Henry Jaglom, Michelle Phillips, and Kris Kristofferson. Tanen and Sheinberg, hoping to catch a part of the cultural tidal wave of Easy Rider, welcomed Hopper with open arms and pocketbook. They also signed Peter Fonda and his first post–Easy Rider project, The Hired Hand, and even a film by Jack’s old friend from the Corman days, Monte Hellman, Two-Lane Blacktop, which substituted ’55 Chevys for motorcycles and otherwise was essentially a copy of Easy Rider, with James Taylor and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys in the Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper roles.
The first three films released under the Tanen/Sheinberg banner were Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), Miloš Forman’s Taking Off, and Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. Housewife and Taking Off each did moderately well, critically and at the box office, and turned a modest profit because of their limited budgets. Two-Lane Blacktop did less well, grossing $800,000. Fonda’s film, which he directed and starred in, managed to break the million dollar gross feeding off the success of Easy Rider, but left no lasting impression on audiences and was quickly forgotten. The big blow came with the failure of The Last Movie. Originally budgeted at $850,000, the film’s cost escalated when Hopper decided to shoot most of it on location in Peru, and wound up grossing only $1 million, far below what it needed to break even. Released in 1971 to mixed-to-poor reviews, it confirmed to Universal that splitting up Fonda and Hopper was like using Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy. Variety was the first to declare that the new emperors of Hollywood had no blue jeans when it declared, with undisguised glee, that the Easy Rider “craze” was over.
Would-be independent filmmaker George Lucas remembers that, after the failure of The Last Movie, “I went to every studio in town [to get funding for American Graffiti] and nobody wanted anything to do with it. Eventually Universal picked it up, thanks to the very last vestige of one of those studio offshoots that had sprung up in the Sixties after Easy Rider. Universal decided not to make any more of those kinds of films. Denn
is Hopper had just made The Last Movie for them in the Andes [mountains of Peru] and pretty much killed off the whole thing he’d started with Easy Rider …”
JACK, MEANWHILE, was licking his wounds after the failure of Drive, He Said and hoping his directing fiasco didn’t damage the momentum of his acting career. He had promised Nichols he would do Carnal Knowledge, but now Nichols was not ready. Instead, Jack seriously considered playing Napoleon in a film bio to be called Waterloo, directed by Stanley Kubrick. “He had a lot of revolutionary ideas about how to approach a costume picture … a lot of his work on Napoleon went into Barry Lyndon. He called me on the phone … ‘I’m thinking of doing a film on Napoleon. And my plans involved having only English actors. But I broke my leg and while I was in bed I saw Easy Rider. Because of your performance I’m going to adjust the way I do the picture. Would you be interested in playing Napoleon?’ ” However, money problems plagued the project. Jack offered to help raise what Kubrick needed but was turned down by him. The project was fatally stalled.
Mike Nichols called to say he was now ready to begin production on Carnal Knowledge at Joseph E. Levine’s Avco Embassy, the same company that had made Nichols’s The Graduate. Jack said he was too.
Carnal Knowledge begins in the 1940s and spans twenty-five years in the life of two roommates at Amherst College, Jonathan (Jack) and Sandy, played by Art Garfunkel (“Art the Garf” in Jackspeak), who had temporarily broken away from Paul Simon and their megasuccessful pop duo Simon and Garfunkel to accept the role as the bombardier, Captain Nately, in Nichols’s film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s massively popular Catch-22. Nichols then wanted him back to co-star opposite Jack. Garfunkel had just the right combination of innocence and passivity, which deepened the contrast between Sandy and the conniving, perennially dissatisfied Jonathan.
