Star

by Peter Biskind

  One day, Beatty told Pikser, “We’re having a contract hiccup on Hughes, I’m putting it on the back burner.” And Bulworth, not Town & Country, moved to the head of the line. Beatty took the project to Fox, which had committed to Dick Tracy in 1987 and backed out. The star had threatened to sue, but instead, he worked out a deal whereby the studio would do another film in its place, so long as it fell within specified budget parameters, about $35 million. Beatty wanted the picture, topical, timely, to be finished quickly, out by October 1996, in time to impact the presidential elections the following month. He didn’t mind if six months after the film was released it was stale. Fox, now owned by Rupert Murdoch, wasn’t wild about the idea, to say the least. Bill Mechanic, who had just been made head of production there, says his boss, Peter Chernin, “was trying to find a way not to make the movie, with budgetary restrictions and time restrictions. But Warren was the wrong person to play those kinds of games with, since he’s smarter than most of the people he deals with. So instead of getting him not to do it, Chernin just managed to get it pushed forward before we had a script that worked.”

  Beatty put Pikser to work on Bulworth, and hired Pat Caddell, both of whom had more interest in the subject than Toback presumably did. Pikser didn’t know whether a prior script existed. “The impression I had is that we were working from scratch.” Later, to his surprise, he stumbled across a 1965 Philippe de Broca film called Tribulations of a Chinaman in China, which Beatty had somehow neglected to mention. It was loosely based on a Jules Verne story of the same name. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a millionaire who discovers, as the film opens, that he has lost his fortune. He resolves to kill himself, but his Chinese counselor says something like, “Don’t kill yourself, we’ll take out an insurance policy on your life, I will arrange for you to be killed, and then you can leave the money to your fiancée.” He agrees, but then goes to a strip club, falls in love with one of the girls (Ursula Andress), and decides he wants to live. But his Chinese adviser has disappeared, and the remainder of the picture is devoted to Belmondo and Andress on the run from the thugs he has hired to kill him.

  Beatty’s inspiration was to take this plot and politicize it. Jay Billington Bulworth is the incumbent Democratic senator from California in the middle of the 1996 primary. He was once a Camelot-era idealist with lofty aspirations to change the world. We know this because his office is filled with photographs of the Kennedys, as well as Martin Luther King and a veritable pantheon of 1960s icons like Malcolm X and Huey Newton. As Toback points out, “Depression is the driving motivation behind Bulworth.” Bulworth indeed hates himself for the hack he has become. Plus, his wife openly flaunts her infidelity. In one of many funny moments, she stalks out of a photo op on the steps of the Capitol when he’s in the middle of a sentence. Bulworth, like Beatty, or at least as Beatty preferred to perceive himself or be perceived, is the slighted party.

  In extremis, Bulworth trades his vote on an issue dear to the hearts of the insurance industry for a $10 million policy to be paid out to his daughter in the event of his death, and proceeds to arrange a hit on himself. He then has something of a nervous breakdown, freeing him to reclaim his old self. He becomes a version of Dostoevsky’s holy idiot or Shakespeare’s fool. Like a condemned man with nothing to lose, and no longer obliged to pander to venal special interests to win an election, he becomes a truth teller. He ends up in a hip-hop club dancing with Nina, a stunning black girl from the inner city half his age. Bulworth is energized and redeemed by meeting Nina, who becomes his muse. Lighting up a blunt, he delivers his message in doggerel, his honky version of rap. Now in love, he tries to call off the hit, but finds that that is easier wished for than done.

  Beatty later said that the origins of Bulworth went all the way back to Shampoo, when he briefly considered having George Roundy open a beauty parlor with Richard Pryor in a black neighborhood. More to the point were the similarities with Heaven Can Wait. As in that picture, the comedy is ignited by the dissonance, the incongruity created by new wine in old bottles, in this case the reborn Bulworth in the old Bulworth’s body. Nina is another incarnation of Julie Christie’s Betty Logan.

  Bulworth was the first and only picture Beatty ever made that focused on African-Americans. He was on good terms with black politicians like Jesse Jackson, and having grown up in the South, there was no way he could have been oblivious to racism. “I do remember the signs ‘Colored’ and ‘White,’” he said. “I went to the largest school south of the Mason-Dixon line but there wasn’t one black kid there. We thought Catholics were odd.” Beatty recalled for the press that his namesake, his great-great-grandfather, had been a spy for the Confederate army during the Civil War, and that his great-aunts, Maggie and Bertie, referred to it as the “war between the states.” He added, “They would never admit the war was about slavery.” But, he continued, “My parents would have been appalled if anyone had accused them of being racist.”

  Both his parents loved Franklin Roosevelt. Shirley MacLaine remembers as a child returning from the movies, climbing the steps to the back porch of their house, and being met by their mother. She was “ashen and crying. ‘President Roosevelt just died,’ she cried. ‘Oh, what will happen to us now?’” But, she goes on, father would “curse at the communists and bemoan the ‘niggers’ who ruined his lawn and often I’d see him reduced to tears in front of the television set at two o’clock in the morning while they played ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’”

  Still, Beatty rarely talked about race. In private, he delighted in shocking his liberal friends by using the Yiddish schvartzes to refer to blacks. “Warren is from fuckin’ Virginia,” says a friend. “I don’t think he has thought very carefully, or seriously or empathetically, about the black experience in the U.S.” Says Pikser, “I don’t think he set out to do a film about race. It was more of a political thing than a racial thing.” In the 1970s, especially after the Swann school desegregation decision in 1971 that cleared the way for busing, the Democrats came to believe that white voters were deserting the party over race. This was the issue they had really sold out over, the issue they were going to have to face if they were going to come out from under the shadow of the Republicans.

  Starting in June 1995, Beatty, Toback, Pikser, and Caddell spitballed ideas. They pillaged the headlines of that summer and fall, when Bob Dole was attacking Hollywood for its lack of moral fiber, and Louis Farrakhan’s march was swamping Washington with a million black men. Caddell more or less withdrew after the first couple of weeks.

  As usual, Beatty savaged the writers with a blizzard of withering scorn. Toback may have been nominated for an Oscar for his script for Bugsy, but that was then and this was now. “Jimmy took the worst abuse I ever saw,” Pikser continues. “Warren was really battering him for the stuff he had written, really being insulting. He would say, ‘What were you high on when you wrote it? Is that why you think it’s funny? Let me tell you it’s not—can I suggest something to you? The next script you write, don’t make it a comedy, okay? Because I don’t think you really have any idea what funny is.”

  One day, Toback, Pikser, and Beatty had a meal at E.A.T. on Madison Avenue in New York, just up from the Carlyle, where Beatty was staying. Pikser continues, “Warren was just laying into Toback, it was just unspeakable: ‘This is shit, this is garbage!’ When Warren went to the toilet, I asked Jimmy, ‘How can you take it?’ He said, ‘It’s not personal. It’s just that I’m sitting in this seat. If you were sitting in this seat you’d be getting it.’ Then one day Jimmy wasn’t there anymore. The way Warren has portrayed him to me, it would not be out of character for him to say, ‘I’m not interested in this anymore,’ and go home without even calling.” But before he disappeared, he made significant contributions, especially to the opening Washington section.

  When Toback left, Pikser became the sole writer. He asked himself, Why me? In this opinion, it was the same reason Beatty didn’t hire May, Kushner, or Gelbart. “Warren takes a script credit on eve
rything he’s directed,” Pikser says now. “He didn’t want anybody to take the limelight away from him saying, ‘This is not Warren Beatty’s film.’ I was the least threat. Nobody would say, He got all these ideas from Jeremy Pikser, like they would with Elaine. I would fight with him about stuff all the time. But there was no question about what we were fighting about: the best way to make a Warren Beatty film, not a Jeremy Pikser film.”

  Pikser was thrilled, but to some degree it was a case of, Be careful what you wish for. “My ability to get through Bulworth without killing myself or Warren proved that I had a core of mental health, because it was very difficult,” he says. As Toback had predicted, once he was on the hot seat, he found himself the target of abuse. Beatty may have been passive-aggressive in other areas of his life but, Pikser adds, here “he was just aggressive.” The writer continues. “He doesn’t whine, he doesn’t fight you through indirection. Giving writers breathing space to be creative is not much of an issue for him. I think he feels all you need to do is kick ’em in the ass. And it’s not just writers. I think he feels this about the industry in general: the main enemy of good art is people not wanting to work hard. Whenever Warren was yelling at me, was mad about something in the script, he’d say, ‘You have to take responsibility because you are the writer.’ The rest of the time ‘we’ were the writers.”

  Pikser wasn’t even sure he was the only writer. The days when Beatty would put all his eggs in one writer’s basket were over, if they had ever really existed, and he had become more and more promiscuous, something that came naturally, or something that he may have learned from Charlie Feldman. The Beatty version was, as Pikser puts it, “serial monogamy in terms of writers,” as well as a couple of flirtations and dalliances that happened sub rosa.

  As usual, Beatty was consulting his political fellow travelers. “He was always coming in with new ideas, and I never knew where they came from,” Pikser recalls. In the fall of 1995, the star asked May and Peter Feibleman to read a draft of the script. Pikser was surprised, given Beatty’s and May’s ups and downs, and realized that he had lost track of where they stood: “They don’t speak and then they do speak. They stick knives in each other and then it’s all lovey-dovey. Hollywood is like that.” But their reaction made it clear. Pikser continues, “They did not think it was any good. We talked for three days, and the thing that was really devastating was that on the third day she said, ‘Wait a minute, this is supposed to be a comedy? I had no idea!’ She was pretending she didn’t realize it was supposed to be funny. That was pretty fuckin’ vicious. I’m such an Elaine idolator, I walked out of there devastated.” May remarked to Feibleman, “That Jeremy’s such a nice guy, what’s he doing working for Warren?” For his part, Beatty was bitter about her take on the script, thought it was in bad faith, thought she was trying to hurt them. She was working on Primary Colors, based on Joe Klein’s bestseller about Bill Clinton’s 1992 primary campaign, and Beatty said, “She doesn’t want us to make this movie.”

  Every day they started over on page one, even if they had reached page 70 the day before. “If something new occurred to him halfway down page one, we could spend the rest of the day arguing about it,” Pikser continues. “He’s very difficult to work with, but very rewarding. Occasionally I would say, ‘What about this?’—something he hadn’t suggested, and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s great, I love it.’ It’s not, ‘Oh, I didn’t think of that, so I’m going to say, “I don’t think that really works.” ’ He really will take ideas from anyplace. For me it was a great pleasure if I can make him laugh. There was a lot of juice in that.”

  The script didn’t take final shape until 1996, and by the time the picture came out in 1998, the second Clinton election was history.

  Bulworth was as different from Love Affair as was possible. In fact, although he would never admit it, Beatty must have understood what an unspeakable embarrassment Love Affair was. Consequently, he and his team set out to be, in Pikser’s words, “as brash and scabrous and shocking as we could at every turn. And to do it all as an expression of innocence.” As British critic Philip French put it, “The film’s hero is like a Mr. Deeds or a Mr. Smith afflicted with Tourette syndrome.” Terms like “pussy” were flung about with abandon. One rap song Pikser wrote for Bulworth goes, “Pussy, pussy, pussy, I like it really fine, When you’re a senator, you get it all the time.” Originally, it was “The loose ones, the tight ones, I really like them all, When you live in Washington you hardly have to call.” But, he remembers, “Warren thought that was over the line, bad taste, I had to pull that back. He went nuts for the expression ‘nappy dugout,’ which was ad-libbed by the actress Michele Morgan. It’s a hip-hop expression for cunt, as in, nappy hair, dugout, like a canoe. Warren wanted to use the expression every time he could.”

  Almost more shocking in a mainstream studio movie than “pussy” and “nappy dugout,” was “socialism,” as in “socialized medicine.” Beatty noted: “In America that’s like saying cocksucker.” Given how cautious he is in his public statements, many Beatty watchers were pleasantly surprised by how outspoken the picture was. “I was amazed that he’d go that far, because nobody goes that far,” says Pikser. But “one thing about Warren is that he always wants to do things that he thinks nobody else has done. It was no different from making a movie about a Communist. While we were doing it, he kept saying, ‘Let’s go further.’ He likes being bold.”

  The movie was an equal opportunity abuser, taking shots at Bill “Don’t ask, don’t tell” Clinton, Newt “Contract with America” Gingrich, single-taxer Steve Forbes, media conglomerates, the insurance and health care industries, deregulation, etc. What is unprecedented about Bulworth is that Beatty names names—individual politicians, specific corporations, particular lobbies—something few, if any, American movies had ever done. Films with politics on their minds usually make sweeping attacks on generic targets, like “big business” or “Washington.” None of them was the smart bomb Bulworth proved to be, locking on to concrete targets, say, the Bank of America, or a sitting president. One example among many: “Clinton gets all weepy and Newt blames teenage moms…”

  The script was dense with insider and not-so-insider jabs at people Beatty knew or knew of. There’s a pushy reporter who asks Bulworth, who’s separated from his wife, “Aren’t you committing adultery?,” a question journalists asked Gary Hart. Beatty wanted to stress the notion that the press’s obsession with the sexual peccadilloes of politicians is equivalent to assassination by the pen, if not the bullet. Thus, the shadowy figure who haunts Bulworth throughout the movie, whom he suspects of being a hired gun, turns out to be a photographer working for the reporter who is trying to catch him in the act of adultery.

  No one was safe. Bulworth’s chief aide, Murphy, was loosely based on Caddell, who left Hart for Walter Mondale, whom he ostensibly hated. Murphy is portrayed as a person who could turn on a dime, could become furiously hostile toward the person he has devoted his life to serving. “I think Caddell thought he was giving us material about what those people were like from his wealth of experience,” Pikser goes on. “He might have been shocked to know that Warren was thinking specifically of him as that character.”

  Beatty didn’t stop with Caddell. He mocks Hart, as well as himself. In one scene, someone says of Bulworth, “If he didn’t chase quite so much pussy, he might have been president,” a line that could have applied to either of them. As Pikser explains, “There’s a certain kind of politician where if you couldn’t get your dick sucked by an intern, what would be the point of being a politician? Bulworth is a pussy hound, but ‘quite’ is the operative word, here. It’s okay to chase pussy, so long as you don’t do it so much that it distracts you, when it can become a problem. Warren was vehemently disgusted by Clinton’s behavior as president. But the idea that this behavior is scandalous, he thought was preposterous.”

  Bulworth might have made Borat envious, but not everyone was fair game. At one point, Michael Eisner’s
name came up. He had recently gotten a lot of bad press for his bloated salary; a figure surfaced comparing how long it would take a wage slave making Mickey Mouse dolls for pennies in Haiti to earn what Eisner made in minutes, or something to that effect. The answer was: a lifetime. Beatty vetoed the suggestion, saying, “I don’t want to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Mike Eisner is a friend of mine.”

  The writers came up with a blizzard of bitingly funny, politically incorrect scenes. The story opens, according to a title, in March 1996, after Clinton and Dole have wrapped up the nominations of their respective parties. Bulworth, unshaven, face puffy, eyes red and teary, is reviewing the TV spots for his campaign. He can barely bring himself to mouth the neocon bromides attacking welfare and affirmative action that are required of him if he is going to outflank his Republican opponent from the right, à la Clinton and the DLC: “I believe in a hand up, not a handout.” Moments later, on the campaign trail, Bulworth is in front of a black audience at Grace Church in South Central L.A., when he discards his fatuous canned speech—“We stand at the doorstep of a new millennium”—and instead tells them that the promises that were made to the black community in the wake of the South Central riots were so much hot air. When someone shouts, “You mean the Democratic Party don’t care about the African-American community?” he replies, “Isn’t that obvious? I mean, come on, you can have a Billion Man March. If you don’t put down that malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind somebody other than a running back who stabs his wife, you’re never going to get rid of somebody like me.”

  Bulworth moves on to a fund-raiser for Westside liberals. Hollywood being Hollywood, most of the deep pockets at the gathering are Jews, with some, like Stanley Sheinbaum, playing themselves. Bulworth tells them, “My guys are not stupid. They always put the big Jews on my schedule.… I’m sure Murphy put something bad about Farrakhan in here for you.” He caps it all off by asking them why they make so much “crap,” adding, “As long as you can pay, I’m going to do it all your way. Yes, money talks, and the people walk.”