Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  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.”

  Most audacious, without a doubt, was the inspired notion of having Bulworth rap. By embedding the messages in ghetto rhythms, and making them funny, scandalous even, the audience actually heard them instead of rolling its collective eyes and tuning out, as was so often the case in message movies that simply preached. The risk was, of course, that he’d be laughed off the screen. But, as Pikser observes, “They were never supposed to be good raps.” The cadences and rhymes were closer to Edward Lear than Biggie Smalls or Jay-Z. Robert Kennedy nephew Bobby Shriver introduced Beatty to Russell Simmons, head of Def Jam Records. He began hanging out with the stars of the rap world, Suge Knight, Tupac Shakur, and Dr. Dre. His reputation as a cocksman eased his way. “Warren Beatty is a mack,” Simmons said, impressed. “He’s been with a lot of women.”

  They had always had a big problem with the character of Nina. Originally, she was the hit woman. But they decided that nobody who was mature enough to be attractive to Bulworth would be stupid enough to kill a senator. And if they kept her scheme secret—they didn’t want to tip off the audience—it gave her less to do, which made for a hole in their female lead. Eventually, Beatty decided her role was to lure him into a trap, that is, she became an accomplice, not the killer herself, throwing Pikser into despair. He said, “We need to rewrite everything to make that work.”

  “No we don’t. We only need a few small changes.”

  “That doesn’t help you, because you’re still not getting enough of the character. Besides, there are too many assassins, would-be assassins, faux assassins. It’s gonna confuse the audience.”

  “No it’s not. It’s really very simple.”

  “Are you going to be in the audience to explain it to everybody? ’Cause it may make sense, but nobody’s gonna be able to get it from watching the film.”

  And so it went, draft after draft. Pikser was being paid by Fox for one draft, which was supposed to take about six weeks. “But the problem with Warren is that there is only one draft—one draft that gets rewritten ten thousand times until the movie is completed,” he explains. “And Warren’s notion of loyalty is that once you’re in, you stay in. And you keep working until the film is shot and he’s happy.” Pikser had been writing drafts from June to September in L.A. His wife and young children were back in New York. After fourteen weeks on what was ostensibly a six-week job, he told Beatty, “The contract is over.”

  “We haven’t finished a draft yet.”

  “I’ve written twelve drafts, and you’re calling it all one draft. We’re going over the same stuff again and again. We’ve come to an end three or four times, you’ve shown something to the studio, and I’m not getting paid. So my work is done. I want a contract for another draft.”

  “You’re betraying me,” Beatty replied, furious. To Pikser, it was déjà vu. He thought, Just like Reds. He drives you crazy, and then when you say you can’t take it anymore, he says, “You’re quitting on me.” But this time he told Beatty:

  “If you don’t want to pay me, I will continue to work for free, but from home, in New York. I’ll fax you pages, we’ll keep talking, on the phone.”

  He went back to New York, sent Beatty a bill, and Fox paid it. They continued to talk, but the conversations dribbled away.

  Beatty would fly in occasionally, try to persuade him to resume work. One such trip occurred in April 1996. Beatty said, “Why don’t you come back and work on this. You know, I’m just going to get somebody else.”

  “Then get somebody else. Or, you’re gonna have to pay me. Make me an offer.”

  “I can’t make you an offer. What I would offer you would be an insult, and I won’t do that.”

  “So, insult me.”

  “No, I’m not going to insult you.”

  “Then, I’m going to Europe. With my family, a vacation.”

  Pikser was as good as his word.

  IN AUGUST 1996, Pikser heard from Beatty for the first time in months. On the phone, the director told him, “We’re gonna start shooting this thing in September,” and asked, “Do you want to be part of it?”

  “Are you gonna pay me?”

  “Of course I’m going to pay you!”

  By that time, most of the cast had been selected. Beatty met with actor Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) for the aide, the part that went to Oliver Platt. “He always said ‘flop sweat’ was the key ingredient in the character. He wanted somebody who could really do flop sweat,” says Lerner. Beatty told him, “I’m not an actor, I’m a reactor. So you have to drive the scenes.” Then he didn’t hire him, said he was too old.

  Paul Sorvino played the lobbyist. Beatty flattered him, saying, “You’re one of the truly greatest actors in the world of your age.”

  “So how come I have no money, Warren?”

  “Because you haven’t learned to eat shit yet.”

  Beatty considered Tupac Shakur for the part of Darnell, Nina’s brother, but thought he was unreliable. When he was killed in the middle of production, Beatty’s comment was, “God, can you imagine?” Ice Cube was another candidate, but Don Cheadle was so impressive in Devil in a Blue Dress that Beatty gave him the part. Writer Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) was cast as Rastaman the griot, a sort of one-man Greek chorus.

  The most difficult part to cast was Nina. For a long time the role was going to go to a prominent black actress, but then Beatty started talking about Halle Berry. According to Pikser, he said, “I need to play it with someone I could really fall in love with, and I believe I could really fall in love with her. And I don’t so much believe I could fall in love with [the other actress].’” Why he felt as he did is unclear, although several times he said of the original actress something like, “I hear she eats a lot of pussy, more pussy [than I do!]” (If indeed Beatty found bisexuality unromantic, that did not prevent his reported interest in gay women. According to Sandra Bernhard, “Rumor had it that he liked to sleep with lesbians.”)

  Beatty was alive to the significance of every detail in his movies, and he not only surrounded himself with the best of the best—the Sylberts, Canoneros, and Storaros—he also considered the semiotics of the crew. On Reds, he had hired Zina Voynow, Eisenstein’s sister-in-law. He always thought of Bulworth as a Frank Capra film, so he was at pains to give it the Capra imprimatur. He hired Frank Capra’s grandson, Frank III, as first AD.

  Pikser flew out to L.A., drove up Beverly Glen to Beatty’s office, where he had been working before on a borrowed desk in a storeroom. He recalls, “I walked in, and there was Aaron Sorkin! Nobody had even told me that Aaron had been working on it, which was a violation of Guild rules. He had a whole office set up, with his own desk—it was the Aaron Sorkin suite! I had never had anything like that.” Sometime in the spring of 1996, Beatty presumably put Ocean of Storms on the back burner and asked Sorkin to do a pass on Bulworth.

  But Beatty and Sorkin were not a good match. According to Pikser, the star complained that Sorkin was impossible to work with. Sorkin said the same of him. “I could tell that Warren and Aaron had had a rough time together,” Pikser recalls. “As far as I knew, Aaron didn’t even realize that I’d ever worked on the first draft.” Sorkin seemed to be as surprised to see Pikser as Pikser was surprised to see him. Pikser continues, “He was like, ‘What is this guy doing here and why is he discussing the third act? I’ve taken a lot of abuse from you, and now you bring this guy in? Who’s gonna rewrite me? In my face? Fuck it!’ And then the next day, Aaron was gone.”

  Like Beatty, Sorkin wa
s a Democrat, but his work presented a sunny, wish-fulfillment take on American politics that was almost comically at odds with the reality. “We threw out 90 percent of his script, even though it wasn’t that different,” Pikser continues. “His ending, his third act, had Bulworth back in his office in Washington. He’d come to his senses. Everything was the same, except that he had a photograph of Nina on his desk. The implication was he’d be more liberal now, because he had a black girlfriend—and somehow that constituted a happy ending. I said to Warren, ‘If you do his ending, I will find you and I will kill you.’ It would have been an enormous sellout and would have led to a really ugly fight if he had stayed around.”

  Toback, who should have known better, having had more experience than Pikser navigating the treacherous Beatty waters, was also surprised to discover that Sorkin had space in the offices. But, as he puts it, “Warren always likes to have an alternative universe.” The scrum of writers threatened to make the writing credit arbitration process a nightmare. Beatty had his way with Toback, convincing him not to contest the dual Beatty-Pikser credit.

  As he had made clear from the start, Beatty wanted first writing credit, with Pikser second. “Annette once said I had been a great help to Warren in writing the script to Bulworth,” Pikser recalls. “Tell me the fucking pages that he wrote! I’ve got literally 1,500 different files on my computer for the Bulworth script. He has none.” Still, he says, “Warren is the author of it to a very large degree, or at least half of it. On Reds, Elaine May had a million ideas, so in a lot of ways he was reacting to her ideas. With Bulworth, it was much more Warren saying, ‘I have a vision of something like this. I want to capture this, I want to capture that.’ Beyond that there was a lot of, ‘This is shit, this isn’t what I meant at all.’ It was about what he wanted. Until you got what he wanted, you don’t have it. You’re writing to order, and in that sense it was his script.”

  13

  IN HIS OWN WAY

  How Godzilla stepped on Bulworth, and Beatty launched and then popped the Bulworth Bubble, while Town & Country almost ended his career.

  “Warren could have done everything, but he just kept getting in his own way. He fucked himself.”

  —Bo Goldman

  PRODUCTION BEGAN IN the fall of 1996, but Beatty realized the script still needed work, and he took a hiatus of several months to polish it further. (By the time the picture would be released two years later, the second Clinton election was history.)

  Pikser was afraid that Bulworth might embarrass both Beatty and himself. He knew that his friend had done many bold movies in his time, but none of them had been as dicey as this one. Allowing himself to look bad was one thing, but a middle-class white guy rapping was like wandering into heavy traffic wearing a blindfold. Beatty was no Eminem, and he was just inviting derision, hanging a sign on his back that reads, “Jerk!” Says Pikser, “Reds was doing something that was politically unheard of, but I don’t think there was any fear that he couldn’t pull it off, or that he would be ridiculed for it. With Bulworth, he was doing stuff where people might say, ‘What the fuck is this?’” And suppose, as May and Feibleman had said, it wasn’t funny. Pikser adds, “If they were right, we were fucked. And how do you know?”

  Bulworth’s big moment, his rap debut, occurs in front of a crowd at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Beatty blew out his knee sprinting from a church to his limo. When he arrived at the location he was in serious pain, unable to walk without a bad limp. The scene had to be shot in one day, and most of the time was devoted to recording his arrival, before he starts rapping. When he finally began to perform, he was rushed and clumsy. He couldn’t get more than three or four lines out in a row before he was brought up short. As they were leaving, he asked Pikser, “What do you think we got, on a scale of one to ten?” Pikser didn’t know what to say. He thought, That’s it, a total disaster, the picture’s gonna fail. But he said, “Seven,” thinking, It’s a two, but what’s the point of saying it? He’s not going to do it over again. But somehow, editor Bob Jones made it work, splicing together bits and pieces. At least half the verses were dubbed in later, over cutaways.

  Beatty was using a lot of actors he’d never used before, in important roles. With the exceptions of Sorvino and Richard Sarafian, everyone else—Christine Baranski, Don Cheadle, Oliver Platt, and Halle Berry were new to him. But he was warm and attentive, never critical, free, even effusive with his praise, and a good audience. Only Cheadle was uncomfortable, didn’t like playing a drug dealer, felt it was racial stereotyping. Cheadle used to say that he felt that the real motivation of the Bulworth character is that he is a white man after dark meat. And the rest of it was “bullshit.” Nicole Pecorini recalls that “Don thought that Warren was trying to make the black point of view his own, without succeeding, that it was a bit of a rape.” According to Pikser, Beatty felt that Cheadle wanted to be his sexual rival for Nina and couldn’t accept the fact that that wasn’t going to happen, but Beatty let him rewrite his own dialogue anyway.

  Like others Beatty has worked with, Pecorini was struck by his awareness of the camera. “He knows how to get the light exactly the way he wants it. There were scenes in the car where he had to look out the window, when he wouldn’t move his head because he didn’t want to show his bad side, his right side.”

  As usual, there was little love lost between Beatty and the crew. Jones was there every day. “I think he feels he gets more from the crew if they’re intimidated,” he says. Then about sixty years old, Jones had edited three of Beatty’s pictures, and liked him. Still, he says, “He can be very cutting.” One morning the editor had oral surgery, and then went to a screening of some footage in the afternoon. Beatty was out of sorts. Jones recalls, “He said, ‘Look at Bob, he’s so old he can’t even keep up anymore.’ He said this in the projection room. In front of other people. My jaw was falling apart. I thought, Too old to work! Goddammit, Warren!” On the other hand, says Pecorini, “I would always work with Warren, regardless of his foibles. He has thickness, depth. He has a lot of culture in him, reads a lot, and he’s an extremely pleasant man to deal with.”

  The production wrapped in February 1997.

  THE ENDING of the movie had been a vexing problem throughout the script stage and production, and continued to be well into post. “For the two years we were writing this script, we never had him shot,” recalls Pikser. “We had all these other endings that Warren hated. They were all uplifting Capra endings. The only reason we wanted him shot was because we didn’t know what to do with him at the end. How do you fix a broken world in a movie? That’s the trouble with political comedy. If you really set out the problem in anything like its true dimensions, you can’t solve it in the third act. You can’t cure American politics, you can’t make this guy president and save America, that would be ridiculous.” Then producer Pieter Jan Brugge came up with the idea: he’s shot. (Beatty says there were never alternative endings; Bulworth was always going to be shot.)

  Still, the question remained, Does he live or does he die? As the picture stands, he lies motionless on the pavement. The intention seemed to be to indicate that he was still alive. As the film fades to black, Rastaman (Baraka) whispers, “Hold on, Bulworth, hold on,” but it’s so faint it’s barely audible. Beatty actually filmed an additional scene in which Bulworth is shown recovering in the hospital, but it was never used. (For years Beatty clung to the notion of making a sequel, which would begin with that scene.) When that scene ended up on the cutting room floor, it seemed that the “assassination” might be reshot, with Bulworth showing some signs of life, but Beatty didn’t think it was necessary. Pikser disagreed. He picked his fights carefully. “It depended on how worn down I was, how long we’d been at it, how badly I wanted to get the fuck out of the room, how important I thought the issue was.” In this case, he thought the nature of the ending was important enough to go to the mat over.

  “Do you want the message of this film to be, if you stand up and say what you belie
ve in, you will get killed! That’s what you may be putting out.”

  “It’s not clear that he’s dead.”

  Beatty wanted people to argue over whether Bulworth is dead or alive. Pikser felt that that was not the right question. He wanted Bulworth to be hovering between life and death, which would throw into relief what he thought was a more important question, namely, as Rastaman exhorts the senator, “Don’t be no ghost, Bulworth! Be a spirit!” that is, an inspiration. Pikser explains, “You can be dead, and be alive, and you can be alive and be dead. At the beginning of this movie, Bulworth is the latter, a ghost. At the end of the movie, Bulworth is a spirit. And that’s the meaning of the film for me.” Pikser didn’t think the ending was ambiguous so much as it was muddled. “But I’m fairly certain that Warren did not intend to say that if you stand up you’re going to be gunned down.”

  According to the terms of the settlement with Fox, Beatty explained that he gained total artistic freedom, while Fox retained marketing control. Still, he was unhappy with the campaigns for his last several movies, and he was not one to stand by passively while Fox messed up this one. Fox senior executive VP Tom Sherak confessed, “If you ask, ‘Will Warren phone you five times in a day,’ the answer is yes.” Commented Beatty, “I think that the company did not know what to make of the movie. The picture caused a strange sort of paralysis.” Mechanic says, “It was difficult to sell. A white guy in a black world, so who’s the audience? Certainly you’re not going to go inner city and think that Warren Beatty is important to them, and then you’re not going to go into the white world and say these are relevant issues, even if they should be.”

  Beatty campaigned for the picture on TV shows popular with black viewers, appeared on the black cable network BET, and the talk show Vibe. The rap soundtrack became a bestseller and hit the R&B charts. The picture was screened for a black audience in New York at Co-op City. Beatty was hoping that they would find the picture funny, and that that demographic would be the engine that drove the box office. But the surveys indicated that although most of the audience seemed to like it, they didn’t love it. That’s when Beatty began to suspect that he might be in trouble. The problem was compounded by the fact that Cheadle wouldn’t campaign for the movie.