On May 2, 1989, it was public. Liz Smith reported that Warners wanted Spielberg to direct, with Sydney Pollack producing and Nicholson playing Hughes.
Beatty’s account differs radically. He says when he was at the Directors Guild screening Reds in 1981, Spielberg approached him on the stage, said, “I beg of you, let me direct Hughes.” Beatty demurred. Time passed. Then one day Spielberg showed up on the set of Dick Tracy, fell to his knees, and implored him to give him Hughes. According to Beatty, he said, “You did Reds yourself, what do you want to be the hero for?” Beatty said, “Okay.”
Mab recalls that one night, Beatty, Isabelle Adjani, and she and Goldman had dinner with Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw. According to her, at one point Beatty said, referring to Spielberg, “Well, should we give the kid a chance?” This would seem to indicate that Beatty was still friendly with Spielberg, and would seem to corroborate Beatty’s version. On the other hand, she recalls thinking at the time, He’s in danger of losing the project, so he’s trying to be magnanimous.
For Beatty, as Bo Goldman puts it, Hughes “had been an obsession.” For Spielberg, it was just another ball in the air, and eventually he lost interest, especially when Beatty reportedly asked Nicholson to turn down the role—which Beatty denies. According to him, “Spielberg and Bo didn’t get along. Steven didn’t get Bo. He told me, ‘I’m not gonna make the movie. Do you want it back?’” Of course, Beatty answered yes. According to Berg, “There are elements of truth in both Warren’s and Bo’s account. I just don’t remember.”
Goldman got an offer from Penny Marshall to write a script about her mother, called Time Step. “Warren was pissed off about it,” Goldman recalls, “but he had to let me go, because he wasn’t paying me.”
With Beatty deep into cutting Tracy, he apologized to Goldman, saying, “I want you in the editing room.” Says Goldman, “His obsession has to become your obsession.” The writer refused, thinking, Being in the editing room with Warren will be a horror. He’ll drive me nuts. He recalls, “I purposefully went to Taos to write a picture, lived in the Holiday Inn, trying to get far away from him, I swear.”
FROM A marketing point of view, the problem with Dick Tracy was that it wasn’t Batman, which had come out almost exactly a year before, and which was going to be the yardstick by which Tracy would be measured, not because it was anything like Batman—Dick Tracy was already history, while Batman was still being published and boasted of a TV show to boot—but merely because Beatty’s picture was a tent pole wannabe based on a comic strip. As Press puts it, “The question for me was, Who knows who Dick Tracy is? I had no idea except that he talked into a watch.” The studio had to create awareness, make the square-jawed crime stopper a household name.
Disney did its best, pulling out all the stops. It made a huge marketing push to turn the picture into an “event.” The P&A budget skyrocketed from $10 to $30 million. There were merchandising and clothing tie-ins galore, including a $300 wristwatch pager jointly developed by Motorola and Timex. McDonald’s participated in the campaign, while Disneyland announced several new rides inspired by the movie. The studio published three graphic novels in hopes of introducing a new generation of kids to the cartoon detective familiar only to their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. Clothing stores even stocked Day-Glow yellow raincoats.
“To Warren, on some level it represented everything awful that the movie business had become, but at the same time it was everything that he craved to make sure his movie got out,” says Press. Moreover, millions of people had stayed away from Ishtar because of what they heard or saw about it in the media, and he realized that he could no longer afford to shun the press. Says Pat Caddell, “He could not again refuse to be part of the debate; he had to at least try to set the terms, structure the dialogue.”
Adds Beatty, “I finally realized that if you don’t control it, they will give you bad publicity. Our making and selling of movies is much, much too similar to a political campaign. ‘On November 4, they’re going to vote, so don’t sodomize that giraffe until November 6.’” Instead of playing catch-up, as he had with Ishtar, with Tracy he was determined to be proactive.
As he did on Ishtar, he antagonized the press by trying to control it. He came to blows with 20/20 because he wanted to use his own crew, while they, of course, wanted to use theirs. Although he was on the cover of Premiere, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone, he said nothing.
There was a downside to the single-minded corporate focus on Tracy. It was all very well for Beatty, who was used to and expected red-carpet treatment. But Tracy sucked the air out of the Disney balloon, and the rest of its slate suffered. “The entire company’s efforts and energies went into this movie,” adds Press. “It was the first time I had ever seen what one movie can do.”
As was his wont, Beatty used his charm to create allies within the various divisions who could feed him inside information and grease the studio wheels. “There were women inside Disney who fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” says a Disney executive. Says another high-up Disney source, “There was this corporate executive dressed in these ass-tight blue jeans, red cowboy boots, and this white frilly blouse. You’d come into a room and these women—these ball-busters during the day—were actually sitting on his lap.”
Disney was wary of Madonna and excluded her from many of their promotions, but there was no question that she was an asset to the movie. She put out two new albums (Like a Prayer and I’m Breathless: Music Inspired by and from the Film Dick Tracy) through Time Warner, and plugged the movie relentlessly on her “Blond Ambition” tour, which she kicked off in Tokyo on April 13. “I have a much bigger following than Warren does and a lot of my audience isn’t even aware of who he is,” she said. She was on course to make $14 million from the soundtrack.
Beatty failed to put in an appearance for the opening of the American leg of the tour in Houston on May 4. She had sent a private jet to ferry him from L.A., and held up the show for half an hour in hopes that he would materialize, but he didn’t. He called afterward to explain that he was snowed under with work preparing for the release of Tracy, and knew she would understand. She didn’t. She threw the phone down, and sequestered herself in her hotel room. He did put in an appearance when she played L.A., and she was abusive. He was backstage, trying to be invisible, when she shrieked, “Don’t hide back there, Warren. Get over here. You stink, you pussy man. Can you believe I have to do this every night? Are you going to be nicer to me now, Warren?” A few weeks later, when she played New York City, she refused to let him and Nicholson into her dressing room, claiming a headache.
WHILE GOLDMAN was working with Spielberg, the decision on the credit arbitration for Tracy came down from the Writers Guild. Goldman lost. This was no small matter. Writers live and die by their credits. Screenwriting demands a lengthy investment of time, especially when working for Beatty. Unlike actors, who can do several movies in the course of a year, a writer is lucky to do one. Says Goldman, “And not only was it credit, quite a bit of money was taken out of my pocket, the bonus you get for credit. You probably double your fee.” He was angry and bitter. “It wasn’t enough for him that he was the producer, the star, and the director of the movie, he wanted a writing credit as well. Through his greed, I completely lost credit and my bonus for eighteen months’ work on Dick Tracy.”
Beatty offered him a “creative consultant” credit, but the Guild rejected it. One Saturday while Goldman was at the track, Mab, on her own, called Beatty. According to her and her husband, the conversation went like this: “You know, Warren, Bo was happy working with you. He feels a sense of accomplishment, particularly after Hughes. The two of you can do better work together than you can do apart. You’ve got to make some gesture to Bo, because this is really a terrible thing that you engineered his credit away. You ought to give him one of your points, and not your monkey points.”
“So this is about money?” replied Beatty coldly. “I thought Jeff Berg was Bo’s agent. You’
re his agent now?”
“Yes.”
“You’re trying to renegotiate your husband’s deal. Is that what you’re doing? How much do you want?”
“How’s 50 cents?” Mab replied, furious, and slammed down the phone. She recalls, “I was so enraged that he couldn’t get out of his own fucking way to understand that the best work that he could ever do in the future would be if he could have a relationship with Bo. I really liked Warren, a lot. He was gentlemanly, courtly, loyal. I was heartbroken.”
Shortly after the conversation, Berg called her. She continues, “Warren probably called him off the tennis court, and told him, ‘How can this bitch call me and say this to me? Don’t you have control of your clients’ wives?’” According to her, Berg said, “I just learned that Bo lost his writing credit, and I feel terrible about it. As the author of this relationship, I sometimes want to kill myself!”
Andy Karsch, who was friends with both men, was puzzled by Beatty’s behavior. “Somebody of Warren’s stature, you think, Why would he need to have a credit on Dick Tracy so badly when it’s gonna cost Bo so much. It’s something other writers have had a good deal of trouble with as well. Warren was so the engine of this movie, he just knocked Bo off the train altogether. It just seemed unjust. And probably emotionally irrevocable. I’m always amazed by the kind of person who really cares about where they sit in a restaurant. He’s so of that world.”
“Why did he insist on getting writing credit when he didn’t really write?” asks Goldman rhetorically. “He wanted to be like Orson Welles, he wanted to be the consummate filmmaker.” If he had hopes to repeat, score four nominations, as he did with Heaven Can Wait and Reds, the screenwriting credit was crucial. “It’s a sad memory, and I’d never work with him again, but at the same time I’m glad I did work with him,” the writer concludes. “I’m still very fond of Warren. You can be very fond of people and still know they’re dangerous for you. He was so much a part of my life in so many ways, and yet I’ve had nothing to do with him for almost twenty years now.”
Beatty too felt real affection toward the Goldmans, and over the years made several overtures to them, but to no avail. Today, striking a conciliatory note and parsing his words carefully, Beatty declares, “I tried very hard to get Bo credit on Dick Tracy. [But] Bo might be right. I understand his feeling about that, that I cost him…”—he pauses, lets the sentence trail away to silence. “Did he not feel I had co-written that script with him? I was very frank with Mab, and that might have been unwise.” He says he is sorry that he asked for co-screenwriting credit, “because it knocked Bo out of the ball game.”
Like her husband, Mab is ambivalent about Beatty. “He’s an amazing person, full of wonderful qualities,” she says. “But Hollywood teaches you a devastating lesson, which is to play everything close to your vest. Control is a function of fear. The sad thing is that with all the genius that Warren has he doesn’t seem to understand that until you are fearless, you can’t really live. It is removing the masks that you put on to protect yourself that allows you to really stand naked in the storm of life.”
11
LETTING GO
How Beatty became the target of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s famous memo, said goodbye to all that when he met Bening while casting Bugsy, and turned in the best performance of his career.
“Maybe you should concentrate on mastering your own impulses, or you’re gonna spend the next twenty years of your life chasing tail like a bobcat after a squirrel, instead of giving us another half dozen great movies, and then finally meeting a woman who is your equal.”
—Robert Downey Jr.
DICK TRACY OPENED on June 15, 1990. Its fiercest competition would come from Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer’s Tom Cruise vehicle, Days of Thunder, slated to be released two weeks later. Simpson sent his friend Katzenberg a fax that read, “You can’t escape the Thunder!” Katzenberg replied, “You won’t believe how big my Dick is.” Tracy took the weekend, grossing $22.5 million on 2,332 screens. It led a fairly weak field, largely of sequels—Another 48 Hrs., Gremlins 2, Back to the Future Part III—a testimony to the depths to which the business had sunk by 1990. (Days of Thunder managed only $15.5 million on its first weekend.) Tracy made more money in ten days ($50.3 million) than any other film in Disney’s history. Beatty professed to be thrilled. “The numbers are great,” he said. “I really never expected anything like it. After all, Dick Tracy didn’t have a following from a comic book or a TV series (like Batman).” But he had also never had a film on so many screens before either, and the per screen average was approximately $10,000, which was respectable, but not huge. It did slightly less than half Batman’s opening weekend gross the year before, $40.5 million, with an $18,454 per screen average. The disparity between the box office of the two films was underlined by the asymmetrical merchandising figures. If Batman was the gold standard, Tracy fell far short, with its tie-ins grossing a mere $42.7 million to that film’s $500 million. Disney stock fell on the news.
On the other hand, the vast majority of reviews were favorable, not to say rapturous. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that Chester Gould’s world “has been gloriously reinvented,” and called it a “great uninterrupted grin.” In Newsweek, David Ansen called it “a class act—simple, stylish, sophisticated, sweet.”
Unquestionably, Tracy is great moviemaking, a feast for the eyes, a breathtaking marriage of nostalgia and violence, presenting a coldly expressionistic world that owes much to G. W. Pabst and Bertolt Brecht, but is also shot through with Dickensian and Chaplinesque sentiment. Beatty succeeded in crafting a generic world before branding, before advertising, before capitalism even, ironic in view of the massive marketing campaign that had been mobilized on his behalf. But if he did re-create the prelapsarian world of his childhood, it is no Eden, no Big Rock Candy Mountain. On the contrary, it is inhabited by a coven of infernal hobgoblins, putty-faced freaks, monsters from the id. By the time we get to Dick Tracy, with Reagan presiding over a me decade of rich-get-richer self-indulgence while restoring Cold War Manichaeanism with his Evil Empire rhetoric, even a liberal like Beatty was trafficking in right-wing moral fundamentalism. Evil lies within. With the storm of bad news that had broken over Beatty at decade’s end, it’s perhaps not surprising that his vision darkened considerably.
The dissonant minor chords that marred the chorus of hosannas greeting Dick Tracy sounded a note of disappointment arising from the undeniable fact that Beatty relied on design, music, and costume to carry the picture. More, the naysayers accused him of failing to connect with his character, zeroing in on the passive, even passionless way that he portrays the eponymous hero. As he did so often, the actor underplays the role. Beatty’s Tracy was emphatically not Gould’s tough-guy crime buster. Jules Feiffer, who can rightly lay claim to being an expert on the subject of comic book movies, thinks he miscast himself—recall that Beatty too initially thought he wasn’t right for the part—that the picture needed a James Cagney–type. As Anthony Lane put it, writing in London’s Independent, “The other actors are camouflaged by make-up, but it is the clean-cut Beatty who reveals least.” Incessantly canvassing the opinions of his friends, perhaps Beatty was too much the politician to become the filmmaker he could have been. It was no accident that Caddell, the pollster, became one of his closest advisors.
It’s true that Beatty was quite clear that he was not making the movie they wanted him to make, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Unlike Shampoo, where he was at pains to deny the obvious parallels between himself and George Roundy, in the case of family-guy Tracy, he made sure that nobody missed them, with a blizzard of comments about how much Gould’s strip meant to him growing up. It was as if he were laundering his résumé with an eye to the family man he was about to become. It was out with the id, in with the superego. The Kid is a direct descendant of the nameless little boy who makes a cameo in the hospital at the end of Reds, as if Beatty were leaving a breadcrumb trail for those with the wit or interest
to see it. He was blazing a trail for a new life.
As an advertisement for himself, for the new Beatty-to-be, Tracy works almost too well; it’s too schematic, and therefore too bloodless to make much claim on the emotions of its audience. Perhaps he was getting ahead of himself. In real life, after all, he was still walking on the wild side, involved with Madonna, not Glenne Headly. If the star did fail to fully engage the role, perhaps it was because he wasn’t quite ready to change horses. Unlike Prince Hal, he had not shown any inclination to divest himself of Toback, his Falstaff, who was at that moment writing his next movie, the dark and Dionysian Bugsy that Beatty had yet to get out of his system.
BY THE time Tracy had finished its run, it had racked up a domestic gross of just under $104 million. But the picture cost about $46.4 million, a lot of money for a film in those days, especially for the penurious Disney studio, which then tacked on a very hefty $54 million in marketing costs. (Tracy added about $59 million in foreign box office for a total gross of about $163 million.) Disney professed to be pleased. The press reported that Beatty’s next movie would be at the same studio: The Doctor. Of the $8.5 million in overages, $4.5 million were approved, $4 million disputed. Beatty told Katzenberg he would consider doing The Doctor if the studio forgave the $4 million. Katzenberg did, and Beatty bailed anyway.
Alas, the honeymoon would soon be over. In December 1990, Katzenberg went to Hawaii for the holidays. Disney, which had been phenomenally successful only a few years before, riding high on the profits of pictures like Three Men and a Baby, Pretty Woman, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills (which Beatty had declined), had hit a rough patch. Katzenberg’s formula—low-budget pictures stuffed with bargain-basement stars who needed a hit—had ceased working. Thanks in part to his own success, as well as the growing power of Mike Ovitz at CAA to drive star salaries into the stratosphere, Disney’s budgets were creeping up, cutting into its profit margins, even when its movies were successful. Katzenberg’s gloomy mood was not helped by the relentless rain that confined him to the Kahala Hilton in Waikiki. Fearing that Disney had lost its way, he started putting his thoughts on paper, which eventually resulted in an 11,000-word, twenty-eight-page memo, intended for internal studio consumption only, in which he assessed the lessons of the last few years, mused on the future direction of Disney, and extrapolated his conclusions to the movie business in general.
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 54
