Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Bulworth opened Friday, May 15, 1998, four years after Love Affair, on 1,800 screens; the highly anticipated Godzilla was released five days later on 3,310 screens. Fox claimed that opening its picture against Godzilla was “creative counter-programming,” but Godzilla, released by Sony, just squashed Bulworth, and Beatty regarded the peculiar timing as Fox’s effort to bury it, by no means an improbable surmise given Fox owner Rupert Murdoch’s tilt to the right.

  The reviews, invoking Preston Sturges and Network were, with some exceptions, glowing. They gave Beatty high marks for risk taking, praised him for bravery for heaping ashes on his image and allowing himself to look foolish. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised the picture as “the kind of imaginative, anything-goes escapade that movie audiences, in the days before the pre-sold, pre-fab blockbuster, had the luxury of taking in stride.” Doubtless referring to his last movie, she called him “a magically revitalized Warren Beatty, who has directed this political satire with jubilant wit and energy.” Nor were the reviewers insensitive to the irony involved in Murdoch’s studio releasing such an incendiary picture. As Joel Siegel put it on Good Morning America, “For Warren Beatty and 20th Century-Fox to make a movie like this is like getting Bambi to do a 30-second spot for the National Rifle Association.” From a political point of view, it was Reds all over again, albeit on a smaller scale.

  Not all the reviews were favorable, especially in the black press, where Beatty got worked over by some prominent activists and social commentators. He was a little taken aback, asked Pikser, “What should we say to these people?” but generally handled himself well. Jesse Jackson nailed him for cynicism and defeatism. Halle Berry defended the picture on the Today show, saying, “Spike Lee could make the same movie and they would say he’s just an angry black man. I feel really proud that someone like Warren would speak for us. And, as hurtful as it might be to some people, the reality is that this is the country in which we live, and let’s take a look at it, let’s not sugarcoat it and pretend it’s not out there, because it is.”

  Others took the opposite tack, arguing that the picture sentimentalizes blacks in the tradition of liberals like Norman Mailer, whose cele–brated essay “The White Negro” was published in 1957. In Bulworth, the black underclass is the repository of sexuality, vitality, and truth, while whites are repressed and hypocritical. It’s only when Bulworth is able to tap into the life force of the streets that he is able to liberate himself from the straitjacket of opportunism. For them, when Nina says, “You mah niggah, Bulworth”—later mocked in an episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm—it was the last straw.

  Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books, zeroed in on the scene in which Bulworth gets some street kids to eat ice cream instead of selling drugs, and takes their side against the cops. He wrote, “This makes the dread crime lord L.D. (Cheadle) conclude that, hey, if one senator is going to be a truth-teller, then he’ll change his evil ways, let Nina’s brother off if he’ll work for the senator, and bless the interracial union of Bulworth and Nina. Of course, that dream gets smashed when the sole truth-teller is shot. But it was a goofy and escapist dream all along.”

  Pikser admits, “We were aware that it was kind of thin ice. A lot of people were upset that Halle Berry would have been with Warren, saying, ‘Why should our black queen be with some old white guy?’ If you do a movie which is to a large extent about racism, in which the hero is a white guy, that’s gotta be racist to a degree, because it’s saying that the solution to the problem has to be some white guy, instead of saying, the real hero for this situation should have been Don Cheadle. But Warren Beatty is our star. That was a given.

  “I also think you have to cop to the fact that the Baraka character is the magic Negro. But at the same time you could also say it’s an enduring theme of American history that the soul of our politics has relied on black people to give it progressive force. Sure, right-wing racists call it a cliché, because they don’t want to hear it. But we were turning Amos ’n’ Andy on their heads. Instead of having black people being funny because they’re trying to be white people, wear white clothes and say highfalutin words they don’t understand, this is a white senator who’s trying to sound black, and being ridiculous in the process. The real question is, Who’s the joke on? In this movie, the joke is not on the black people. Ever! The joke is always on the white people. And to me that’s what makes it antiracist.”

  Bulworth took in $10 million on the first weekend. Exit polls showed the audience was mostly men over twenty-five. Young African-American males were not showing up in sufficient numbers to make the film a hit. Godzilla, which grossed $44 million on its opening weekend, was doubtless siphoning off blacks (and whites) who might otherwise have gone to see it.

  In truth, the picture had problems that had nothing to do with race. Beatty had followed a tried-and-true formula that other filmmakers—both left and right—had used in the past for message movies, namely, to arrange a shotgun marriage between message and genre. Beatty himself had done it before and largely gotten away with it. But in Bulworth, the marriage didn’t quite take. The first two-thirds of the picture, in which the premise is laid out and Bulworth’s character is revealed, is an achievement of the first order, as rapier-sharp a political satire as has ever been seen on American screens, with nearly every line a zinger. We watch agog, bystanders at a slow motion, multicar collision, as Bulworth crashes and burns on a pyre of straight talk. But in the last third, Beatty paid the price for his Faustian bargain with genre: the plot takes over, and the picture is held hostage to its conventions, with the clanky machinery they demand—a clutter of chases, assassins, and the like. Pikser was right: there is way too much business, too many shadowy figures lurking at the periphery atop buildings or behind parked cars, confusing the audience by smothering the sparks struck by the friction between truth and hypocrisy that fuels its fire.

  Bulworth also has too many false endings, which brings us back to the issue of the “real” ending. Beatty is a subtle man working in an often unsubtle medium, at least as practiced by the studios, so it’s no wonder he sometimes had difficulty ending his movies. But the problem over the ending of Bulworth goes deeper than that, speaks to Beatty’s own ambivalence about how well or how poorly democracy is working, as well as his mixed feelings about playing a more prominent political role than he has. He may not have intended that the message of this film be that those who stand up for what they believe will invariably suffer for it, even unto death, but this is the message that emerges. (It’s possible that the inverse is also true: throughout Beatty’s career, he has been famous for his secretiveness, as if secretiveness, withholding himself, will protect him from death.)

  Indeed, Bulworth’s transformation, his truth telling, is predicated on his impending death, his suicide, in effect, as if only through death is he able to defy the powers that be. Like the 1960s icons Bulworth surrounds himself with in the opening scenes, he has to die. As history has shown, heaven can’t wait. There appeared to be no place for truth speaking in the twilight of the American Century. Despite the aura of ambiguity that Beatty sought to protect, innocent heroes die too regularly in his films for it to be an accident.

  At its heart, Bulworth is about the clash between innocence and experience, the structuring axis around which many of his films revolve. It is an iteration of a Hollywood staple, the story of a man who rediscovers his youth, who grows younger as he grows older. Children in Bulworth are pitted against corrupt adults of both races: whites with their money, blacks with their drugs. As he sheds the hypocrisies of the grown-up white world, and gives himself over to pleasure, Bulworth, appropriating ghetto styles, comes to look like an overgrown child, wearing a cap, baggy shorts, and sneakers, while nibbling on an ice cream cone, always the talisman, the signifier of innocence in Beatty’s world. In the Rousseau-like ideology of this picture, the ghetto is no jungle, but a garden, a state of nature, a refuge where he’s safe. At the very least, as so
meone who came to fatherhood late in life, Beatty was well aware of the magical ability of children to keep their parents young, while at the same time by their very youth, dramatizing the inevitability of their parents’ deaths. Isabel Ashley Beatty was born January 11, 1997. When Ella, his youngest child, born April 8, 2000, turns eighteen, he will be eighty-one. Beatty would come to say repeatedly to those late-marrying bachelors in his circle, “Don’t do as I did, don’t wait as long as I waited.”

  Beatty and Pikser were nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Bulworth’s sole nomination. As it turned out, Bulworth was shut out. But Beatty remains proud of Bulworth, as he should. “Was there something this radical before that from the mainstream? I don’t think so. If you go back and you examine the Capra movies, I cannot tell you where his social or economic interests lay. Nor could I tell you anyone else’s, really. Very few movies about politicians make a decision to go ideologically in one direction or the other, because of the common assumption that you lose half your audience. It would be considered financially quixotic to take a position.”

  Still, we need to ask the question, Is Bulworth Beatty, or better, how much of Bulworth is in Beatty? It is a question that would come up subsequently, in “real” life, with semiserious consequences.

  MICHAEL LAUGHLIN’S script for Town & Country began with Porter Stoddard, a successful, over-groomed architect on the wrong side of fifty, heading to France for his wedding. The hook was that we don’t know which of several preternaturally lovely women he intends to marry. The film is devoted to a flashback that works its way through the twists and turns of serial infidelity back to the opening, when the audience is surprised to discover he’s remarrying his former wife, Ellie, a similarly successful and well-appointed fabric designer. Porter and Ellie appear to be the perfect pair, with two perfect children, living in the perfect apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Needless to say, it enjoys majestic views of leafy Central Park. They also summer in a grand home in the Hamptons the size of the Winter Palace—we’re a long way from Reds here. But for Stoddard, apparently, too much is not enough. He is having an affair with a cellist, pictured early in the movie playing her instrument in the nude, the cello cradled suggestively between her thighs, while he eyes her from the bed, transfixed. One dalliance leads to another as surely as summer follows spring, and when Ellie finally discovers the awful truth, she tells him to take a hike and steps out on her own.

  Laughlin, from a wealthy Illinois farm family, came out to L.A. in the early 1960s to go to law school, but the lure of Hollywood proved too much, and he ended up as a producer—of B-movies, albeit superior B-movies. Laughlin’s star blinked dimly on the far periphery of the Beatty galaxy. He married Leslie Caron when she was on the rebound from the young heartthrob, and lived with her in the U.K. in the mid-1960s. Later, he married former Beatty assistant and ex-wife of Dick Sylbert, novelist Susanna Moore.

  Laughlin wrote the script with Beatty in mind. “It had to do with Warren’s deep tenderness towards his past girlfriends,” he says. He was “someone who bounced amusingly from woman to woman. They were all morally sophisticated, adorable creatures.” The writer gave his script to Beatty’s office mate Fred Roos, who was producing on his own. (He had been Francis Coppola’s casting director and then producer for many years.) Roos passed it along to Andy Karsch, who was partnered with Sidney Kimmel, an apparel millionaire, now making movies. Karsch took the script to Beatty’s agents at CAA.

  “When Warren told me he was going to do Bulworth before Town & Country, I was in total panic,” recalls Karsch. “I thought Bulworth was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard; it’s going to end his career. The stocking cap and the rapping, yadayada? You’d picture it, and think, My God, no. I desperately wanted him to direct Town & Country. But after Bulworth, he wasn’t going to do it. It’s just a lot of work.”

  At least, Karsch thought, it was a “go” movie. While Beatty was making Bulworth, CAA had set it up with New Line, a former independent company which by then was a mini-major owned by Warner Brothers and run by co-chairmen and co-CEOs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne. In the light of future events, New Line’s decision would appear problematic, but at the time, there was a certain logic to it. A fan of Beatty and protégé of Shaye, the division’s precocious young production head Mike De Luca seemed to have a charmed life. He was a likable, gregarious man enjoying a spectacular run of cheap hits like The Mask (1994), Se7en (1995), Blade (1998), and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), as well as cult favorites like Boogie Nights (1997) and Dark City (1998) that made him virtually untouchable. Like many young executives of that generation, he had missed the highs and lows—mostly highs—of the 1970s, and regarded the survivors of the New Hollywood with awe. (The executive did his best to hold up the banner of that storied decade; in April 1998, he made headlines by being caught getting a blow job at a William Morris party.)

  De Luca was thrilled by the opportunity to do a Beatty film, particularly after failing to get the actor into Boogie Nights. De Luca explains, “I felt that Town & Country was a comedy of manners about how hard it was to maintain a marriage at that age—not having been married myself or yet at that age.” More to the point, The First Wives Club had come out of nowhere to mint money that year (it would gross $105.5 million domestically before its run ended), and the production head thought those numbers, in his words, “showed that there was a demographic that was underserved by most Hollywood movies.” The picture was budgeted at around $35 million. Beatty’s cut was $10 million, a lot of money for someone at that stage of his career—he was now fifty-nine—just to act, and it doubtless influenced his decision to commit.

  At first, everything proceeded swimmingly. Says Lynn Harris, the New Line executive assigned to the picture, “After Bulworth, I think Warren was genuinely looking forward to just being an actor.” But it wasn’t that simple. As a result of nearly forty years of filmmaking, his numerous hits, Oscars, Oscar nominations, and a gossip sheet more twisted than Mulholland Drive, he had become the very definition of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. No one understood this better than Beatty himself. He knew that if an extra sneezed during a take or a gaffer fell off a ladder, he would be blamed. He knew he had to protect himself. If anything untoward happened at all, according to Karsch, “It was clear to Warren that he was going to be the fall guy.”

  For Beatty, it was a dilemma. “It’s a tough thing when people know that you can direct and you can write and you can produce, and act in a movie,” he says. “You have to be very, very careful, if you sign on as an actor for hire, because you don’t want people to think that you are in there trying to do those other jobs. On the other hand, you want to participate. You have to walk a very, very fine line.”

  Beatty found himself some protection by securing two more sets of eyes. “One of his stipulations was that I be on the set all the time, almost like one of the Witnesses in Reds,” Karsch says. “If I wasn’t on the set, he wasn’t on the set.” The star also requested that Lynn Harris, as a representative of New Line, also be there every day from call to wrap for the length of the entire shoot.

  The next step was to find a director. Needless to say, it wasn’t easy. Recalls Karsch, “People just didn’t want to take Warren on, given what had happened with Glenn Gordon Caron.” As he had on previous films, Beatty had, according to Harris, “approval over the director, writers, cast, and what-not.” Karsch and company came up with lists, placed phone calls, had lunches.

  Then, one unlucky day, Laughlin had a brainstorm, Peter Chelsom. He says ruefully, “I feel kind of responsible.” With several moderately successful lighter-than-air comedies to his credit, Chelsom wasn’t an absurd choice. “We’d all seen Funny Bones and we’d all seen Hear My Song,” continues Karsch. “They were great.” Their comfort level was raised by the fact that Leslie Caron had been in Funny Bones. Laughlin continues, “Leslie spoke highly of him. I talked to Warren and put him in the best possibl
e light.” They hired him, along with his producing partner, Simon Fields. It turned out to be Leslie Caron’s revenge.

  Beatty populated Town & Country with friends and people he had worked with before and trusted. And as in the past, they were first-class actors. He went to Mazursky, asked him to take a minor part. Mazursky read the script, said, “I don’t think you should do this unless it’s rewritten. There’s just not enough here, Warren.” He recalls, “My words were harsh, and he was a little pissed. He shouldn’t have done it. He’s too good for that. He’s the guy who made Bonnie and Clyde, Reds, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait. What did he need that one for? He did it anyway, and it was a terrible movie.”

  Beatty recruited Goldie Hawn to play his best friend’s wife. Andie MacDowell and Nastassia Kinski signed up to play Porter Stoddard’s girlfriends. Charlton Heston came on board as MacDowell’s father, a colorful gun-toting lunatic. Then Gérard Depardieu, who was to play the best friend, broke his leg in a motorcycle accident and was replaced by Garry Shandling. Shandling, who had appeared in Love Affair, was still close to Beatty. He was about to do What Planet Are You From?, which he had written for himself to star in and direct. By some accounts, one of the reasons he took the part in Town & Country was because it was small, requiring no more than fifteen days’ work over a period of three weeks, at most a month. (Somewhere along the way, the sexual orientation of his character was reversed from straight to gay.) Beatty also saw to it that Billy Fraker, who had shot Heaven Can Wait, was hired.