Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Beatty once admitted, “I can be obnoxious. I knew I would be hard to take in a one-on-one dialectic with Arthur, that finally he would say, ‘I just can’t take it anymore.’” So it was that Towne, who had developed a bond with Penn, acted as a buffer between the two men. “For example, Arthur had this scene that he wanted to do with Bonnie and Clyde pretending what it would be like when they were dead,” he recalls. “Warren came to me and said, ‘You can’t write that fuckin’ scene, ’cause it’s a fuckin’ pretentious piece of shit.’ I thought, Well, maybe I’ll try and make it work; it’s only paper. But Warren kept yelling at me about it. ‘We can’t pamper him! How can you do this?’

  “My theory about that was—there’s this joke about the guy who gets VD during the Korean War. The American doctor says, ‘This particular form of VD is just untreatable, and the only thing we can do, ’cause you’re going to get gangrene, is amputate it.’ The guy says, ‘You can’t do that.’ He hears about some medicine man in the hills, finds him and shows him his problem. The medicine man says, ‘The American doctors, they say cut?’ He says, ‘Yeah, yeah. No cut?’ The medicine man says, ‘No, no, wait two weeks, fall off by itself.’ What I felt was, in two weeks it would fall off by itself. Once Arthur had a chance to see the dailies and gain some confidence, he would not want to shoot the scene. And he didn’t.”

  Although Beatty was always careful to pay obeisance to Penn in public, it seems that their battles were at least in part rooted in a basic disagreement over whose movie this was, which played itself out as an abstract argument over the auteur theory, which is to say, how movies are made, who controls them, and whether they reflect a single sensibility or a group process. Beatty had been burned chasing directors. As he put it in 1967, “I am just beginning to climb out of this cavalcade of crap that says, ‘Just do what the director says. Do anything he tells you.’” Not yet a director himself, as a star and now producer, Beatty had a stake in overthrowing their authority. According to the French auteurists via Andrew Sarris, the director “comes in with eighteen cans of film under his arm the way that Sinclair Lewis would come in with a novel. Well, that’s bullshit,” he continued. “Suddenly, it’s Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown. The directors are the stars. Then it becomes stylish to say that a film must be the expression of a single man’s vision. Twenty million dollar visions. You don’t hear much about Fellini’s writers, do you? They’re there.”

  Penn, needless to say, saw the process differently. He subscribed to the auteur theory in “that film is really one man’s form,” he claimed. “Warren’s concept of the group as such is a way of making good, successful pictures. [But] I would put the emphasis on successful.… People in the entertainment world… work together and make a good show. But a movie may be a very bad show and be a wonderful movie.… Godard’s films are not good shows, in that they are not consistently high level in entertainment.… But they are damn good movies.” Indeed, Penn is sensitive to the imputation that Beatty, not he, directed the picture, or even the suggestion that Beatty had an inordinate influence over it. “No, it’s just plain not true,” he says, hotly. “I make my own movies. Good or bad, I directed Bonnie and Clyde.”

  Sylbert, on the other hand, says, “When Warren makes a picture—I don’t care who else is involved, I don’t care what they call themselves—it’s his picture. Bonnie and Clyde is Warren. Arthur’s never been that good, but you got near Warren at the right time, he’s going to make you better. Not merely better, but dramatically better. There would be no Bob Towne if there were no Warren Beatty, or Dick Sylbert, or whoever it is.”

  Penn, who wore dark glasses to ward off the blazing Texas sun, and invariably had a cigar clenched between his teeth (he’d learned something from the Old Hollywood, after all), enjoyed working with Beatty. “Warren was wonderful,” he says. “He was playing a man who was impotent. He embellished on that, bumped his head on a car door when she accused him of not performing. He brought this to rehearsal. He’s a damn creative actor. He was learning all the time, camera angles, techniques. A man that intelligent is not going to sit there like a mushroom on a log.”

  Several sources say that Beatty was so focused that he surprised them by swearing off women, or nearly so, over the course of the production. He once told screenwriter and future friend James Toback, “You should not have sex at all.… The film will be better if you never come. On Bonnie and Clyde, I never fucked once.” However, according to the Dallas Morning News film critic, recalling the shoot many years later, “Even in the SMU campus newspaper office, word filters down that women are visiting the Bonnie and Clyde set.”

  But the testosterone level on the set was so low that Beatty felt comfortable inviting his parents, Ira and Kathlyn, to visit. His mother was then a two-pack-a-day smoker. “So here was this dignified, lovely woman coughing up a storm, with a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth,” Beatty recalled. “And I asked her, ‘Do you love me?’ My mother looked embarrassed. She said, ‘Well, of course I do. Why do you ask such a thing?’ I said, ‘Then do me a favor. Put out that cigarette and never smoke again.’ She paused. Then she said ‘OK.’ She put out the cigarette and never took another, in front of me or anyone else.”

  Still, it was a tense production, if for no other reason than it brought together a group of unusually gifted, ambitious people around a film they believed in, and dumped them into a pressure cooker of financial and scheduling constraints. “I don’t think anybody got along very well,” recalls Parsons, who complained that Hackman made her cry. “Everybody on that film was beginning movie stars. They all wanted to get somewhere with it. Except me. It was beyond my comprehension that anybody could be as good an actor as Gene Hackman was on the stage and want to be a movie star. I think he was in some sort of competition with Warren. He wanted to be noticed.”

  Beatty had little patience for Dunaway’s behavior, his responsibilities as a producer for keeping the picture on schedule and budget outweighing his natural sympathy for actors. All the tics that later drove Roman Polanski crazy during the Chinatown shoot, the constant summoning of hair and makeup just as the camera was ready to roll, were already in place. Bob Jiras, who did Wood’s makeup on Splendor in the Grass, did the same for Dunaway. “[After every take,] she yelled, ‘Hey, B.J.!!’ at the top of her voice. He yelled back, ‘Falling in,’ with a little lisp, and rushed over, carrying a big tray with the puff. She was slowing down the pace of the production.”

  Having difficulty shedding 25 pounds to get the lean and hungry look she needed for the Depression drama, she was in torment. Recalls Penn, “The first days of Bonnie and Clyde were hell. She was testy, no question about it, testy. She and Warren had a hard time. Because she was quite heavy, and she was on a total fast. She really ate nothing for several weeks, just drank water.” Even a former hog farmer who had built a soundstage used by the production, Bill Stokes, reported that Dunaway was difficult. “She wouldn’t ride out to the set in the same car with Warren. She was really something else.”

  Towne didn’t have much patience for her either, and he shared Beatty’s aggravation. One day Penn corralled the two of them, said, “Sit down, we gotta talk. I had a conversation with Faye, and told her she was having an adverse effect on the crew. She’s just frightened, and sensitive, and you’ve been very unfair, very insensitive to her needs. I’d urge you, please, please, to support this woman.” He made them feel awful. A couple of days later, he took them aside again, said, “Remember what I said the other day? Do you mind if I take it back?”

  Given the dynamics of the set, it was unlikely that Beatty and Dunaway would have become lovers, and by all accounts, they didn’t. When it came time to shoot the love scene, where Clyde finally manages to deliver, Beatty found Dunaway the night before, and said, casually, “We need to talk about the before-fuck and the after-fuck.” It didn’t get any more intimate than that.

  Next to managing Dunaway, Penn’s biggest challenge was the DP, Burnett Guffey, a veteran of doze
ns of pictures. “Bernie fought everything that he was being forced to shoot,” remembered Dede Allen. Like most studio cinematographers of the day, his goal was to light it so they could show it at the drive-ins, from which the studios raked in a good income. That meant blowing the light out as if Bonnie and Clyde were a Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedy. Like all the Hollywood craftsmen of his generation, Guffey was a practitioner of the well-made film. Anything less he dismissed as sloppy work. As director Curtis Hanson, then a journalist who was on the set, recalled, “I was there when they shot the scene in the cornfield. There were these enormous dark clouds that kept passing by. Bernie wanted to wait for continuity’s sake, so the weather would be one way or the other, and Arthur said, ‘Let’s shoot it, and not only was it beautiful, but it also felt like what was happening to those characters, that a dark shadow was coming over their lives.” Finally, Guffey just threw up his hands and quit (everyone was told that he had had a heart attack). He was replaced by someone even more conventional, and had to be persuaded to return. Subsequently, after MacLaine saw the film, she asked him to shoot Sweet Charity, saying, “I’d like you to shoot it the way you shot Bonnie and Clyde.” He replied, “Like Bonnie and Clyde? Get somebody else!”

  The historical Bonnie and Clyde had been killed thirty-two years earlier, on May 23, 1934, in an ambush orchestrated by Sheriff Hamer and the Texas Rangers. The two were caught in a hail of bullets on a deserted stretch of road near Gibsland, Louisiana. Bonnie died with a movie tabloid at her feet, a bacon and tomato sandwich in her mouth, and a Browning automatic rifle across her lap. Clyde was driving without his shoes. He never even reached the pistol he had concealed in the car’s door. When the law examined the car afterward, they found a second Browning rifle, three submachine guns, six automatic pistols, a .38 caliber revolver, two sawed-off automatic shotguns, a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition, fifteen automobile license plates, and Clyde’s saxophone. She was twenty-three, he was twenty-five.

  Beatty and Penn, Benton and Newman, downplayed the historical outlaws’ vast arsenal, and instead blamed the violence on the lawmen. With the Vietnam War very much on their minds, they wanted to dramatize both the inordinate firepower at the disposal of the authorities, and its asymmetrical, that is, disproportionate use against those who were (relatively) harmless, B-52s, say, against black-pajama-clad peasants. Says Penn, “The Vietnam War is not immaculate and sanitized. It’s fucking bloody. Bonnie and Clyde had to be in-your-face.”

  In the movie, the outlaw couple is mowed down in a hail of slow motion bullets like grotesquely tumbling marionettes. Penn explains, “There’s a lot more to this medium than was being used, so let’s not just repeat what the studios have done for so long. Remember, this was the time of Marshall McLuhan. The idea was to use the medium as a narrative device. I wanted to take the film away from the relatively squalid quality of the story into something a little more balletic. I wanted closure.” He added, “I thought we had to launch into legend, we had to end the film with a kind of pole vault, you know, some kind of great leap into the future, as if to say, ‘They’re not Bonnie and Clyde, they’re two people who had a response to a social condition that was intolerable.’”

  Penn wanted to heroize Bonnie and Clyde, killers yes, but more sinned against than sinning. Struggling to find a visual equivalent to the larger-than-life charisma of the outlaw couple at the moment of their death, their apotheosis, Penn drew variously on the much admired slow motion choreography Akira Kurosawa employed in The Seven Samurai, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s protracted, spastic death scene in Breathless, and even the Zapruder film, which he mimicked by blowing away a fragment of Clyde’s scalp in the manner of JFK’s assassination. This may seem like a stretch, but the national trauma was only three short years behind them.

  The principals agreed that the film’s violence—unexpected, sudden, and abrupt—should jolt viewers out of the complacency that protects mere voyeurs, spectators. The bullet hits were intended to hurt not only the characters, but the audience as well. “How do you make a picture about Bonnie and Clyde and not make it violent?” wondered Beatty. “It upsets people, but that’s good that it’s upsetting. I think the danger is violence that doesn’t upset people.” The best example is the famous sequence juxtaposing a comic scene in which C. W. Moss has trouble extricating the getaway car from a parking space, with one in which a bank officer hops on the running board. Panicked, Clyde shoots him in the face in close-up, splattering his blood all over the window. “In the [Production] Code, you could not fire at somebody and have them get hit in the same frame,” explained Penn. “You had to have a cut. I designed that scene so you didn’t have a cut.”

  Speaking about the ambush, which they called “the Jack Kennedy scene,” Beatty says, “In those days, people were not getting their heads blown off with hundreds of thousands of squibs in every scene. It was as violent a piece of film as had ever been in movies.” When the squibs were tripped by a current sent through wires under their clothes, they exploded like blossoms of blood. Four cameras were yoked together right next to each other, all going at different speeds—24, 48, 72, and 96 frames per second. The slower the motion, the faster the film moves past the gate, drastically limiting the length of each take. Penn continues, “The speed of some of the cameras was so great, that I was worried about running out of film, so I couldn’t say, ‘Okay, action’! It had to be split second. So we determined that the cameras would roll when Warren squeezed the pear. On the first take, he squeezed the pear, and then froze. Boom, boom, boom, boom—everything was going off, and he was just standing there while his squibs blew off, grinning at the camera. It was funny, but it wasn’t funny to me at the time.” Penn was at it for three or four days before he was satisfied. “That was one of those felicitous moments where I saw it just as it is on the screen,” recalled Penn. “I could not explain it to anybody. There was a lot of head shaking on the set, what the fuck is going on here?”

  The relationship between Beatty and Dunaway was so tense that Penn had to resort to sleight-of-hand to get the response he wanted from the actress. Bonnie and Clyde exchange a last look before they die, but Beatty and Dunaway were not looking at each other, rather at Penn, who says, “I told her: ‘Look at Clyde’—in the direction where Warren was supposed to be. At the last moment, I made Warren move to one side, and put myself there instead, so that she has this sweet, kind look.” He adds, “There was closer contact between me and Faye and me and Warren than there was between those two.”

  BY THE time Bonnie and Clyde wrapped its location shooting and returned to Los Angeles in December 1966, the production was weeks over. The arguments between Beatty and Penn, the multiple takes, Dunaway’s vapors, the Guffey hiatus, and the four days it took to shoot the ending all took their toll. The picture went approximately $700,000 over budget, ending up at about $2.5 million, making Jack Warner apoplectic.

  Beatty was exhausted. Little did he know the worst was yet to come. Still, wrapping the location work gave him a brief respite from the all-consuming picture, and freed him up to turn his attention to future projects. Towne, who punched up the script in the evenings and played tennis during the day under the hot Texas sun, had done little on Shampoo. Beatty, meanwhile, who had an affinity for things Russian, was toying with the idea of making a film about John Reed, whom he stumbled upon in 1964. He says, “When you’re very, very young, you hear, ‘John Reed, Harvard guy gets over [to Russia] and ends up being buried in the Kremlin wall,’ and then you find out later that he traveled with Pancho Villa, so after you read Ten Days That Shook the World, you read Insurgent Mexico.” Penn recalls that Beatty asked him to read Ten Days That Shook the World before Bonnie and Clyde, and Dede Allen remembers that Beatty mentioned putting Reed’s life on film while he was making it. They were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant when he asked, “Have you ever heard of Jack Reed?” Allen had been a labor activist during the union strife that rocked Hollywood in the mid-1940s, and her husband, Steve Fleischman
, a TV writer, had been blacklisted, so Reed’s name was familiar. She replied, “Yes.”

  “I’m going to do his story one day.”

  Against the wishes of the studio, Bonnie and Clyde was edited in New York, at 1600 Broadway, the old Studebaker Building, in a corner room on the tenth floor. With copper-colored hair, milkmaid complexion, rose-colored lipstick, and glasses that hung from her neck, Dede Allen was a striking woman with a bigger-than-life personality. Then forty-one, she started her career as a messenger at Columbia Pictures in the mid-1940s, and clawed her way up through sound editing to picture editing, for which she got her first credit in 1948. She had come up as a woman in a man’s business, and had no patience for the ways things had been done in the past.

  Penn and Beatty wanted to achieve the jagged, kinetic style of a filmmaker like Godard, who used taboo devices like jump cuts to create the kind of jack-rabbit velocity they wanted to drive Bonnie and Clyde. Both men kept pushing Allen to quicken the pace, admonishing her, “Cut it down, make it go faster, take another five minutes out of it, go deeper.” Allen hadn’t seen many Nouvelle Vague films, but she didn’t need to. She had supplemented her feature work by editing commercials and industrials. “You had 30 seconds to tell a story and sell the product,” she recalled. “The only way to do it was to break all the rules, pull out all the stops and use any trick you could think of to get the message across.”

  Allen recognized that audiences were literate in film grammar and didn’t have to be led by the nose. Her assistant, Jerry Greenberg, explains, “Dede was the first person I knew who jumped people through doors. Before her, you had to show somebody on one side of the door, opening the door, cut to the inside, and see that same person enter. She knew she didn’t have to show the door opening up. She was unapologetic.”