Sylbert took eleven bulldozers off a construction site about twenty-five minutes from Laayoune and leveled a square mile of sand. He says, “That cost them a few bucks, and more time.” But according to artistic consultant Phillip Schopper, “None of that happened. If they’re crawling across the desert, it has to look like the Sahara, but the land was hard-packed, so we trucked in a lot of sand. But we didn’t take any dunes down. Paul Sylbert and Elaine were hostile to each other. He will say nothing but horrible things about her. Paul is out of the side of his mouth nasty.” Several other crew agree that there was no bulldozing. “Elaine was nobody’s fool, and she was too smart to do stupid things like that,” says Scharf. “Sylbert hated her.”
But others concur with Sylbert’s assessment of May. Says Wooll, “She would change her mind about anything—anything and everything: setups, locations, costumes. If you’d ask her, ‘Black or white?’ she’d say, ‘Yes!’ Nothing suited Elaine. Ishtar was a really difficult film. They went crazy in Morocco.” May’s indecision may in part have been strategic. As one crew member put it, “Directors control in different ways, and she controlled by creating mass confusion.”
There was a “what planet are you from” aura about May. Once, while she was engaged in an intense discussion about a shot, she was peeling an orange and making a neat pyramid with the pieces of peel. She separated the sections, methodically laying them out in a straight line. Then she proceeded to leave the sections and eat the peels.
If it was Beatty’s purpose to enable May by surrounding her with the best of the best, he succeeded all too well. Be careful what you wish for. Storaro had four camera operators, one of whom was named Enrico. She called them all “Enrico.” “She completely neutralized Storaro,” says Sylbert. According to Wooll, “One problem was that she had no idea where to put the camera. She relied totally on Storaro. But if Storaro said, ‘Why don’t you put the camera here,’ she wouldn’t listen.” Storaro, who instantly located the finest Italian restaurant in Morocco and managed to be the best-dressed human being in the Sahara desert, wearing gossamer-thin cashmere sweaters when everyone else wore T-shirts and jeans, would constantly complain about her. According to Hoffman, he said, “Elaine, I love her, but she drive me crazy.” He loved to tell the story of how he outsmarted her. He would arrive at the location having to match a shot from the day before, meaning the light would have to be the same. He’d say something like, “Elaine, I’m going to put the camera over here today, and they come over that dune.”
“Vittorio, no, I’d like the camera on the opposite side, 180 degrees, over there. And they’ll come over that dune.”
“Every day, the desert, she look the same. Every direction, dunes, dunes, dunes. Elaine, there no good reason for this, the sun will be—”
“No, Vittorio, trust me!”
“Elaine, is no going to match. We get the shot off, the sun, it will be coming from front of them, when yesterday was behind them. The dune, she looks like the same dune.”
“No, no, Vittorio, that was the dune they were coming over.” She waved her hand vaguely at the horizon.
“But nobody know the dune, they know the sun.” This would go on for days. She would always say the same thing and he’d reply, “But Elaine…” and get more upset. Eventually, he thought to himself, Today I put the camera where I no want the camera. She say, No. I move the camera opposite, where I want it. Which is what he did. As Sylbert puts it, “We all figured out ways to work these people. If you can’t intimidate them, which you do if you can, manipulation is the name of the game. You stack the cards. If you don’t, they’ll fuck up your work, there’s no question about it.”
May relied on Schopper in her fights with Storaro. “The notion of her eccentricity is greatly exaggerated,” he says. “Eccentricity is in the eye of the beholder.” From May’s point of view, Storaro was designing shots with an eye to their composition, their beauty, whereas she was composing for comic effect. In the beginning, Storaro looked to Beatty to take his side. But respectful of his director, Beatty was not about to intervene. Recalls Nicola Pecorini, Storaro’s steadicam operator, “Warren never pushed her to make a decision. We spent days and days doing nothing. Vittorio took the job very seriously, but after a week or two, we just worked on our suntans. Vittorio sat in his chair and pulled out a book. That’s when he discovered Rudolph Arnheim. He was always sorry that he’d taken the job.”
Risible as they may have been, there was nothing funny about May’s clashes with Storaro. They exacerbated the tensions on the set and probably worsened May’s estrangement from Beatty. Despite Beatty’s hesitancy, recalls Hoffman, he would eventually agree with Storaro, “one of the great DPs of the world, about the placement of the camera. She probably felt ganged up on by the two of them. Elaine became suspicious, and less collaborative. She wanted to make her movie.” Hoffman thought it was ironic that when he had reservations about the script, Beatty brushed them aside and persuaded him to put himself in May’s hands, but once they got to Morocco, it was Beatty who had the problems. “Paralysis descended on the set,” Hoffman continues. “When the tension started, I didn’t want to be in there at all. I just wanted to do my shit and go back to the hotel.” Neither Beatty nor May would give Hoffman any direction. May, who probably didn’t know what to tell him, said nothing. Beatty, who probably did know what to tell him but didn’t want to usurp May’s prerogatives, also said nothing. Recalls Hoffman, “I would have to ask, ‘Elaine, what do you want me to say?’ I’d go to Warren, ‘What do you want me to say?’ There were times there when I was the go-between. Me, of all people!—who had my own reputation—was going back and forth, saying ‘C’mon, guys!’”
As if things weren’t bad enough, Adjani wasn’t happy either. She didn’t seem to get along with May, appeared to feel that May didn’t like her. Her character was disguised as a boy throughout most of the movie. “Isabelle’s greatest attribute are her lips, and they were covered up by a shmatta,” observes one crew member. “I’m sure she wasn’t thrilled. Elaine kibitzed with Dustin, a New York kind of thing, and she had her relationship with Warren, but she didn’t have one with Isabelle, who was an equal star. She didn’t give her the attention that Isabelle was entitled to from the director. Elaine should have related to Isabelle directly, but she let Warren [handle it], and Isabelle probably thought Warren would go to Elaine on her behalf, but who knows if he ever did.”
With little else to do except watch the director hither and dither, people speculated about the reasons she shunted Adjani aside. Says Sylbert, “You know why Mikey and Nicky went on for as long as it did? Because Elaine was the meat in a sandwich between two men she was crazy about, Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. She went on the longest double date in history. And you had the same situation on Ishtar. But there was no other woman in Mikey and Nicky. When there was another woman, she paid for it. Elaine buried Isabelle, because her whole thing was what she got by being between these two guys. It was a sex fantasy.”
According to Hoffman, the relationship between Beatty and Adjani was strained to the breaking point. “There wasn’t a lot of speaking there either,” he says. “I think that it was painful, God knows, for Warren. Because on the one hand he’s having trouble with one of his closest friends and colleagues, and on the other hand he’s got a girlfriend who’s [unhappy]. He was holed up in his suite. He would not come out—I was in the pool with my kids, but I never saw him out there. I’d call him up sometimes, ‘C’mon, Warren, why don’t you come swimming?’ He was kind of in seclusion. Then he’d say, ‘Let’s have dinner.’ Lisa and I would go to dinner with them at the Mamoonia, in Marrakech, and there wasn’t two sentences between them, they would be looking in opposite directions. It was awful.”
“He was very cold [to Adjani], at least in public,” says Pecorini. “He had to feel free to go after other women. For Isabelle, it was her first, or one of her first American productions. She made it as a choice to fuck Warren, and therefore she would take an
ything as long as it was getting her somewhere.”
Pecorini’s girlfriend was visiting the set. He continues, “Warren was turning to her between set-ups, flattering her, charming her. I was just a minion. He couldn’t have cared less [about me.] But she dismissed him, rudely. That pissed him off.” As if following the script of the movie, “she fancied Dustin,” he continues. “Warren couldn’t believe it, as if Dustin shouldn’t even be in competition. She told him, ‘He’s funny.’ Warren couldn’t understand that a woman would go for fun, not for beauty. He was furious! He was like a kid, kicking the sand.”
Storaro wasn’t the only one flummoxed by May. So were the editors. They grasped at anything that might give them a clue to her intentions. Usually, when a director watches dailies with an editor, he or she will whisper something approximating, “I like take 3 and take 5,” while the editor takes notes. May didn’t do that. She took notes herself and wandered away with her pad, instead of sharing what she’d written with them. There was no Staples in Laayoune; pads and pencils were in short supply, and it wasn’t long before they started to run out. Thinking he was being clever, one of the assistants tied May’s pencil to her clipboard and the clipboard to the chair she was sitting on. At the end of one screening, she ran off after Storaro, clipboard in hand, yelling, “Vittorio, Vittorio,” dragging the chair with her. Even she noticed the impediment to her forward motion. She cried, “Why is this chair coming after me?”
Often, neither Beatty nor May would show up to watch the dailies. It was forbidden to start without them, so Pecorini and the others killed time by playing charades. “Then we said, ‘Okay, let’s go and have a drink.’ It was a bit of a joke, because we were working such light hours. The more Coca-Cola was spending, the happier they were. We would do 15 hours overtime, and they would pay us for 25. We went to Nigel Wooll, one of the stingiest guys on the planet, and said, ‘There must be some mistake.’ He’d say, ‘There’s no mistake. You want to give it back?’ It was the best money I ever made.”
There were extravagances great and small, including, reportedly, two 727s to fly the crew to Marrakech when only one was needed, because Hoffman insisted on his own. He thought Beatty had one of his own. The other end of the spectrum included Evian water and toilet paper Fedexed from Los Angeles to Morocco.
Like Beatty, May did a great many takes. For one scene, she did something like fifty, employing three cameras. It is said, doubtless in jest, that a snake charmer walked into the production office in Marrakech one day with a limp cobra draped over his arm. He burst into tears, claiming the cobra had endured so many takes it had had a heart attack and died. He wanted $2,500, but settled for $150.
Beatty and Hoffman worked differently. According to Pecorini, “They were always out of sync, never at their best on the same take. Warren needed forty-five takes to warm up, and Dustin had given his all by take five. He would get bored, and drag his feet. There was not much sympathy between them. Each was making the other nervous.”
Hoffman complained, “Warren would never learn his lines. He would be getting warmed up by the time I was running out of gas. We’d be shooting—forty takes—it was brutally hot, and he’d be learning the script on camera. Which would have been fine if I wasn’t there too. It was hard, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’ve had other actors be the same way. Brando was a brilliant actor and could have his lines written on the ceiling. You can’t argue with them, because you can’t say, ‘You’re supposed to know your lines.’ There’s a spontaneity that’s the most important thing in making a movie, so when they’re searching for their lines, many times it looks like really good acting. ’Cause they’re really thinking. It is harder to be fresh and spontaneous over and over and over again if you know the lines cold. [But]—and I’m guessing—Warren was not coming from a good place. I was coming from a hotel where my marriage was, but he was ending a relationship. It hangs on, both parties know it’s over, but they’re still together. It’s always the worst that way. It must have been hard for him to concentrate.”
May was feeling the pressure. Coca-Cola’s money or no, there were tens of thousands of dollars at stake with every passing minute. According to Sylbert, one day “she leaned against me, and she said, ‘Oh, I’m making so many mistakes.’ It was really sad and touching. That pitiful utterance was just this little crack that appeared with me, because I’d worked with her before, but she didn’t want the world to know.”
The simmering tensions came to a head when it was time for May to shoot the battle sequences. “Warren put himself in a tough spot, where he couldn’t do much with Elaine once things started to go down the sewer,” says Sylbert. “Then he had a moral choice to make. The day he made it was the day the biggest showdown came, when she would not shoot the battle scene. She knew nothing about action sequences. A battle scene for this woman who had done everything by improvisation? You can’t improvise a battle scene.
“One night, I got a call from Warren, and he said, ‘Listen, all she wants to do is do pickups on the stuff she’s already done.’ She wanted to go backwards. Money was just pouring out at this point. She knew he couldn’t let her do that. She was afraid. He told me, ‘Do me a favor, do some sketches so we can show her how to do it.’ I made the sketches, brought them to a meeting in Warren’s trailer. We tried to show her, get her started. She was fighting us. She was in the same state she was in with ‘Who said anything about dunes?’ This was ‘Who said anything about battle scenes?’ I said, ‘Look, you can put the camera here, put the camera there, you can bring them in from here’—she wouldn’t move. She fucked up everybody, neutralized everybody with her fears. There was always some little thing she would put in your way that made you just grind to a halt. She could have said to him, ‘I’ve never shot a battle scene before, could we discuss it, could you give me some help with this?’ But Elaine wouldn’t ask for help. She was paranoid. She was locked up, stubborn. Nobody could get anything out of her. She was like a black hole. Swallowed everything, nothing escaped. Except her fears. And that little utterance, ‘I’m making so many mistakes.’
“You could see Warren was getting very angry and frustrated, but he never blew up. But he finally challenged her: ‘Something’s got to be done,’ blah, blah… She said, ‘You want it done? You shoot it!’ He was stunned. At that moment, he had to make a decision. He knew he had no move on the chessboard. If he stepped in then, he would have had to take over the movie.” Beatty had not hesitated to nudge Hal Ashby aside on Shampoo, nor Buck Henry on Heaven Can Wait. But it would have embarrassed him to step in for May, when the whole point of Ishtar, so far as he was concerned, was to empower her. As Sylbert puts it, “His instincts saved him: ‘I’m the one who brought her into this, so I’m the one who has to live with it. I gotta take the responsibility.’ He couldn’t become one of those producers who fired the director. Although he was right on the edge. But it was too late. It wouldn’t have saved the movie to do it at that point anyway.”
Moreover, Beatty’s instinct for self-preservation was up there with his libido, and he was nothing if not shrewd about his limitations and options. He was looking ahead at what remained to be shot. Ninety percent of the Morocco portion had been finished. He hadn’t done any prep work for the upcoming New York shoot. The city was May’s hometown; she would be more comfortable working there than he would. Especially since he had his acting and producing to worry about. “It was just too hard,” explains Sylbert. “He would have been walking into a real shitpot full of trouble. His energy was dying. I don’t think he wanted to take the risk. I think he was depressed, in a quandary. We saw rushes, and they weren’t funny. They were confusing. But people in this business—they pump themselves up to get going the next day. They put their heads down and just go. Here’s a guy who has nothing to do with velocity. If you watch him run with the football in Heaven Can Wait, you realize, this guy is no Jesse Owens. This is a guy who is all about momentum. He’s like a locomotive. It takes a world of energy to get
him started, but he ain’t easy to stop once he gets going. He had to support her, but it cost him a bad movie.”
Beatty knew he had no choice but to let her alone. Says Pecorini, “In any other circumstances she would have been fired.” Sylbert continues, “She solved the problem of the battle sequences by getting rid of them, the same way that she solved the problem with dunes by getting rid of them. The jeep pulls up, they get behind it, take out the weapons, go bang, bang, bang, and the helicopter turns around and leaves! What the hell is that!”
Beatty had put together an extraordinary cast and crew for Reds, a vast undertaking. He was very shrewd about talent and people with talent, particularly May, whom he knew as well as he knew anyone. How could he have misjudged her so badly? How could he have made, in effect, a $40, $50 million blunder? “Warren did not have an easy time on Reds because of Keaton,” says Peter Feibleman. “Elaine was always there when he wanted her and needed her. She so directed his hand in terms of story line and structure—she corrected him constantly—he would have had to be Solomon to guess that she would not know how to do it herself. Warren and Elaine were locked into a kind of dance of death.” Adds Sylbert, “Great composers are not very good conducting their own music, like Stravinsky. I once said to Elaine, ‘How are we going to do this scene?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, I just typewrite.’ When she said, ‘I typewrite,’ it meant that everything is her ear. You’re listening to the radio. Small movies that depend largely on talk. She’s not visual at all. She really cannot see. And they gave her the Sistine Chapel. It was just much too big for her.”
Despite his extraordinary difficulties with May, Beatty never complained about her—except once. He and Hoffman were in the desert, along with 150 odd extras. He took his co-star aside and started venting. “Warren was going off about how painful it was to make this movie with Elaine,” Hoffman recalls. “He said, ‘I was going to give this gift to Elaine, and it turned out to be the opposite. I tried this and I tried that… ’ He was so passionate, but in the middle of it—it’s like he had eyes in the back of his head—because there was some girl walking by, maybe fifty yards away, in a jallaba. He turned and froze, just watched her. I mean, this was while he was producing, and everything was going in the toilet. But he couldn’t help it. Finally, he turned back, said, ‘Where was I?’
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