Beatty, who did not yet have a studio deal, went ahead and lined up key members of the crew and cast. He filled the production slots with his own people, leaving Ashby with none of his regulars, save for editor Bob Jones, who had cut The Last Detail. Anthea Sylbert, married to Dick Sylbert’s identical twin brother, Paul, designed the costumes. She had never worked with Beatty before. Her first impression was, “He’s always answering a question with a question, and he already knows your answer.”
As his line producer, Beatty hired Charlie Maguire instead of Ashby’s Chuck Mulvehill. Ashby wanted to hire Haskell Wexler as his DP, but Beatty resisted and hired Laszlo Kovacs, who had shot Easy Rider, Paper Moon, and a slew of other New Hollywood films. Dick Sylbert was the production designer, instead of Bob Haller, who had done several of Ashby’s films. Sylbert was one of the few allowed to read Beatty’s script: most of the actors received only their lines. “Everything is very secret,” he said, attributing Beatty’s guardedness to pressure, overwork and “paranoia.… Everybody’s against him. Everybody’s trying to harm him.”
Using himself as a magnet, Beatty set about attaching key cast, calling in favors from people he had worked with or had relationships with. He usually managed to get them for very little money, especially on a production like Shampoo, which was essentially an ensemble piece. He himself was the single biggest above-the-line cost, and he would defer his salary, as he did on Bonnie and Clyde. In this way he was able to keep the budget down while assembling a marquee cast, practically guaranteeing any studio—not to mention himself—a fat profit. It was a shrewd strategy and nearly foolproof. “Anyone who can get people to work for him for nothing without any contracts, like Julie and Goldie, is a brilliant producer,” says Bob Evans, although Don Devlin, who would shortly co-produce The Fortune and disliked Beatty, took a dimmer view. “He exploits everybody,” says Devlin. “On every picture he makes he cajoles and charms and gets people to work for incredibly low amounts of money, and they all think they’ve done him this extraordinary favor, and he will make it up to them, but as soon as he’s completed one picture, he’s off doing that to the next guy, ’cause that’s just the way he operates.”
It was a foregone conclusion that Christie would play Jackie, George Roundy’s ex-girlfriend. Goldie Hawn played Jill, his current one. For Lester, the fat-cat GOP fund-raiser George hits up to invest in his business despite the fact that he’s sleeping with his wife, Felicia (Lee Grant), and his daughter, Lorna (Carrie Fisher), Beatty settled on actor Jack Warden. Tony Bill played a TV commercials director, Johnny Pope.
It was Fisher’s first film role. Her father was singer-actor Eddie Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds, the pert, squeaky-clean star of Singin’ in the Rain and 1950s comedies like The Tender Trap and Tammy and the Bachelor. Beatty’s old friend George Furth brought her to the set and introduced her to him. Beatty, who didn’t believe in auditions, just chatted with her. Fisher was then seventeen and still a virgin. Nevertheless, she was thoroughly infected by the counterculture, and worried that she’d be tarnished by her too-straight mother’s sunniness. She took pains to distance herself from Mom, which she demonstrated with her potty mouth—she took pride in being the virgin who talked like a truck driver, which Beatty appeared to enjoy. She recalled that Beatty hired her, not Ashby.
Because she was underage, Beatty had to obtain the blessing of her mother. The part called for Lorna to say to George, “You wanna fuck?” But Reynolds was squeamish about it, and according to Sylvia Townsend in her book with Dick Sylbert, Designing Movies, she wanted Fisher to say “screw” instead. Beatty drove over to their rented home in Brentwood, and played the piano for her. Said Fisher, “Warren could get anybody to do anything. Even my mother, ‘Tammy,’ who was really conservative then, he even got her to agree to have me say the ‘F’ word.”
Beatty even began to build the sets with his own money before he had a deal. He would have had to pay hefty penalties to the actors out of his own pocket if the production didn’t start on schedule. In order to hold the actors, Beatty and Ashby had to begin shooting in six weeks, by the end of January.
Although Towne was again on board, he was still dragging his feet. He was tired of the script and angry with Beatty, who was more than impatient. Says Beatty, “Robert’s failure to deliver on time kept a host of highly paid people on contract waiting.”
Meanwhile, Don’t Look Now was slated for a December 9 release. Paramount owned the U.S. rights. It contained a hot scene between Christie and Sutherland, and rumor had it that they actually had had sex. There may have even been a reel floating around town that everyone was looking at. According to Dick Sylbert, he threw a party at which Beatty ran into the director Nic Roeg. “Warren saw Nic, said, ‘Nic, come outside, I wanna have a talk with you.’ They went outside. Warren was gonna beat the shit out of him.”
Evans, who at that point was nearing the end of his tenure as head of production, recalls, “I got the picture at my home, and we ran it on a Saturday night. Warren grabbed my arm, said, ‘You can’t show that picture.’
“‘What are you talking about?’
“‘He’s fucking her! He’s fucking her in the movie!’
“‘What can I do about it?’
“‘Nic tricked her into it. She’ll go crazy.’
“‘Whaddya mean she’ll go crazy, she did it!’
“‘Bob, you… can… not… let this picture come out this way.’
“‘I have no control over it.’
“‘Bob, she’ll have a nervous breakdown.’
“‘Warren, don’t be naive. She did the scenes. She didn’t have a double do it.’
“‘Well, Nic used to go with her, and he talked her into it. He said it would only be subliminal.’
“He called Julie and made her fly out here. She saw it, and got hysterical, crying, [and said to me,] ‘I’m losing my mind.’
“‘Julie, look. You didn’t have a body double…’
“‘Well, Nic, he promised.… You’ve gotta help me.’
“‘How can I help you?’
“‘I don’t know, but you’ve got to get that scene out of the movie.’
“I did it. I called the guy at the rating board, and said, ‘You’re gonna get a picture. Give it an X.’ ’Cause in the contract it had to get an R. I could’a been fired for doing that. They gave it an X. Nic Roeg was furious with me, because he knew it was a setup. I did this as a favor for Warren. Pretty big favor, I’d say. Did he thank me?” (Roeg has no recollection of these incidents.)
HAL ASHBY was pleased to have gotten the plum director’s slot in Shampoo, but he quickly found himself in the middle of the stormy relationship between Beatty and Towne, during which a few drags on a joint might have come in handy. Once he had hired the director, Beatty claimed pride of place and sat down with him to work on the two drafts. Ashby instructed his assistant, “Don’t tell [Towne] I’m working with Warren.”
Beatty recognized that there were a lot of good scenes in Towne’s draft, so with the help of Ashby and Helen Feibelmann, Beatty’s secretary (no relation to Pete Feibleman), he combined his draft with Towne’s and showed the hybrid to the writer, saying, “I’m gonna make this picture whether you like it or not, do you wanna do it?” Towne read it, agreed to come back on board.
In December, Beatty, Ashby, and Towne got together at the Beverly Wilshire for ten days or so to crash the script. They were all aware that the January start date, a mere six weeks off, was bearing down on them. They started at nine in the morning and worked till eleven at night. They talked—or rather shouted—through the pages, and then Towne, who was not happy, went into the next room to write. He says, “Warren used his political power to control creative situations,” and he recalled that the process was fueled by “adrenaline and rage.” He and Beatty hurled abuse back and forth, as in, “You motherfucker!” Then they would turn to Ashby, who would say quietly, “Well, what if you did it like this?” Beatty said the script never would have bee
n finished were it not for Ashby’s placid demeanor.
Given the volatility of the sessions, they were all surprised that the result was as good as it was. Beatty called them “the most creative ten days of my life, probably.” Towne gave Beatty credit as well. “Warren is the kind of person who, once he makes up his mind to do something, after procrastinating seemingly forever, is hysterically committed to it. He’s like a sergeant blowing his whistle and going over the top and leading the troops into the machine guns.”
According to Towne, one morning over breakfast Beatty casually asked for a co-screenwriting credit. He felt he had been shortchanged by Altman on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Without missing a beat, Towne said, “Okay,” agreed not to go to arbitration. A friend to whom Towne told the story was outraged, asked him, “Did Warren really write any of it?” The writer said something like, “Naa, ya know, what he did was cross out a lot of stuff that I wrote, and he told me to do this and that, and we usually fought about it, and sometimes he really fucked things up.”
“How could you let him get away with that?”
“Oh, you know Warren. Unless you do things like that, you’re not gonna get the other stuff you can get from Warren.”
Since the days of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty had operated as an independent producer on his personal projects. He realized that if he used his own money to develop his films and hire the talent, he could both maintain control over them and get a better deal from the studios by playing them off against one another. Beatty had spent $1.4 million without having a deal. “He was so courageous at what he did, taking these tremendous risks,” says Dick Sylbert. “He could’a really come a cropper, and he almost went into the shithouse on Shampoo. He nearly outsmarted himself.”
Shampoo was a hard sell, and Beatty was having a difficult time setting it up. Lester “the Investor” Persky was putting together a package of films he was financing for Columbia. He says, “It was very hardhitting, and the studios didn’t think a film named Shampoo about a hairdresser who was pretending to be gay, and was making out like a bandit with all the wives and girlfriends of his friends, was a sympathetic character, or believable. They thought it was awful.” Evans, on the other hand, would have bought belly button lint from Beatty and Towne, and the actor knew it. He took it to Paramount first. Evans was staying at the Carlyle in New York. Beatty flew in with the script, sat there while he read it. It was about the world Evans knew well. He was eager to do it and named a figure. But Beatty had no intention of taking the first offer he got. He brought the project to Warners, where he already had a deal for Heaven Can Wait, a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, with Muhammad Ali attached as the boxer. He talked numbers with then president Frank Wells, who topped Evans. Meanwhile, says Evans, his boss, Frank Yablans, overruled him and yanked his offer. Beatty cannily went after executives new to their posts who had, as was the custom in Hollywood, wiped their predecessors’ slates clean and consequently were desperate for product to fill the pipeline. “Warren knows how to ingratiate himself with any new administration,” says Evans. “He would do it with Diller [on Reds], then Katzenberg [with Dick Tracy] when Katzenberg went to Disney. Most of his pictures are made with new administrations.” Evans claims that Beatty called him and said, “Look, Bob, I’m bringing it to [Columbia head] David Begelman, and I want to tell him that you want it. He offered me three million four. I want to tell him that you offered four million.” Evans says he demurred.
“I can’t do that Warren, because we have a deal amongst the guys that we can’t lie—”
“Hey, come on, Bob, it’s me. Begelman calls you, I want you to tell him you’re offering $4 million for it.”
Indeed, Beatty would not be denied, and Evans, a star-fucker before he was anything else, says he gave in. Begelman made an extremely sweet offer, almost twice as much as Warners, way more than was prudent given Columbia’s parlous financial condition, and given the fact that Begelman hated the script, thought it was cynical and offensive. By the time the endless backing and forthing was over, buyer’s remorse set in, and Begelman welshed on the deal. Recalls Beatty, “He turned out to be off his trolley,” adding, “People thought Columbia was going into Chapter 11 at that point, and he simply reneged on it, because the deal was bigger than he should have offered.” Towne added, “Up to a week or so before we were shooting Warren had literally assumed the burden of the picture himself. At that point, because of very complex difficulties with Columbia it appeared as if he was going to have to pay personally for a $4 million movie.”
Beatty continues, “When Begelman reneged, I went back to Warners.” But Wells knew that Columbia had fallen through and that Beatty had nowhere else to turn. The actor recalled, “I had to go back on my hands and knees. [Beatty said], ‘I think you were offering such and such.’
“‘Yes, but that was then.’
“‘Oh, what is it now?’
“‘Half of that.’”
Beatty was in deep trouble; as Sylbert said, he had nearly outsmarted himself.
On the other hand, Beatty says “it’s not true” that Yablans nixed Evans’s offer. Yablans recalls, “Everybody hated Shampoo. The girl saying, ‘I wanna suck your cock’? Oh my God! They didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it, but it was a movie I would have made. I would have made anything with Beatty. As an actor, a hired gun, he had a tendency to walk through. But when he believed, there was no one like him.”
Wells and Begelman may have been putting the screws to Beatty, but, according to Medavoy and Persky, he had an ace up his sleeve: The Fortune. Begelman was desperate to get the film, with Beatty and Nicholson, and Mike Nichols attached. If Begelman wanted The Fortune, he would have to take Shampoo as well. But Columbia didn’t have nearly enough money to do either film, much less both, and in what turned out in hindsight to be a move of stunning stupidity, Begelman laid Shampoo off on Persky.
“I said, after reading the two scripts, I would forgo The Fortune and do Shampoo,” Persky claims. That was the reason they suddenly said they would do Shampoo. So it was a terrific, no-lose deal for them. Except that Warren made a very rich deal, 10 percent of the gross from first dollar. After the presumed break-even point, which was somewhere between $12 and $13 million, his share rather quickly went up to 40 percent of the gross.”
Beatty denies buying The Fortune, or yoking it to Shampoo. According to him, he bearded Begelman at a Democratic fund-raiser. The Columbia executive knew that Wells had stiff-armed Beatty, knew that the star had already spent a lot of his own money, thought that he had the upper hand. He blandly told Beatty, “I never made you any promises.” Beatty poked his finger into Begelman’s considerable chest, hard, backing him across the room, while saying in a loud voice, “You’re a liar. I know you’re a liar, you know you’re a liar, but we’re gonna forget that, and we’re gonna do this deal. You have zero, you need this picture. Just match my original deal with Warners.” Begelman, who was nothing if not self-possessed, was nevertheless getting red in the face. Flustered and defensive, he finally gave in. But Begelman was willing to offer only half of what he originally offered, indeed approximately equal to the original Warners deal. Pace Persky, Beatty says he couldn’t even get first dollar gross, and had to settle for a cut of the gross after the “rolling break,” or break-even. Nevertheless, he had his deal.
5
DON JUAN IN HELL
How six words—“I want to suck his cock”—turned Shampoo into a $60 million hit, while Beatty took up with Michelle Phillips, and finally bought a home.
“One-third of the audience walked out on Julie Christie’s line. Columbia thought they had the greatest disaster in their history.”
—Don Devlin
JUST BEFORE Shampoo was slated to go into production, Beatty astonished gossip columnists who had long scolded him about his nomadic living arrangements by finding a home, after a lengthy search conducted by Helen Feibelmann. It sat on five acres at the top of Mulholland Drive, and formerly belonged to Danish te
nor Lauritz Melchior. “The Viking,” as Melchior had called it, was a simple, whitewashed structure in the Bauhaus style, commanding a panoramic view of the San Fernando Valley. Beatty, who was being harassed by stalkers, explained that too many people knew he lived at the Beverly Wilshire, and that he needed more privacy. He complained that the recent new addition to the hotel enabled guests to look down on his patio. He may also have decided that his penthouse pad was no asset to a man with political ambitions.
The house, along the stretch of Mulholland dubbed Bad Boy Drive because it also boasted the homes of Brando and Nicholson, came with a pool and a guesthouse that Beatty initially intended to tear down to make way for a screening room, gym, and sauna. But he ultimately tucked the screening room into the lower level of the main house. (It had its own entrance, which was used, on occasion, by Orson Welles, who was too large to get through the front door.) After pondering his purchase, and inviting his friends, including Christie, to look at it, he paid $167,000.
What with the uncertainty over the financing, Shampoo didn’t begin principal photography until March 11, 1974, on Stage 7 of General Services Studio. Ashby may have been the director of record, but Beatty ran the show. As he had on Bonnie and Clyde, he found it difficult to do two jobs, much less three. “Being the producer and star is almost impossible,” he liked to say. “A good actor has to be childlike and maintain a feeling of make-believe. He has to learn to put himself out of control and respect that state. A good film-maker needs to be in complete control, so in doing both you pay a price.” Anticipating a sixty-day shoot, he felt the pressure too intensely to enjoy the process. Throughout, he rarely looked happy; his brow was always furrowed, his mouth set in a grimace of anxiety.
Feelings were raw, and tempers frayed. Says Lee Grant, whom Beatty had started calling two years before he actually began production, “We had a rough start. He put twelve years into that script, and he had very strong opinions.” On one occasion, she almost quit. There is a scene in which her character, Felicia, walks into her teenage daughter’s room to find her on the bed, while George is coming out of the bathroom. Beatty didn’t like her performance. “He said that I had a look on my face, as if I knew that he had slept with my daughter,” she remembered. “He said that women don’t know, that they immediately go into denial. Well, I got a migraine and went home for two days, and when I came back I told the director, Hal Ashby, that I couldn’t work like that and I had to quit. No one ever told me before what I was thinking.” Ashby’s response was, characteristically, “Okay.” Grant continued, “I started to leave. Warren saw my face and he asked what was wrong. So I sat down and I told him. He threw up his hands and said, ‘Play it your way. What do I know? I’m a man.’”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 24
