Beatty asked Laughlin to approach Diane Keaton about playing the part of Ellie. She was puzzled. At lunch with Laughlin at Mr. Chow, she asked, “Why doesn’t Warren just pick up the phone himself and call me?” It was Julie Christie redux. As Buck Henry thought when Beatty hired him to co-direct Heaven Can Wait, “Their relationship was so edgy, he knew he was gonna have to have somebody who could talk to her without her getting irritated.” Keaton joined the cast, although she didn’t seem thrilled. “Not that there was overt hostility, but certainly Diane at that time wasn’t exactly on the best of terms with Warren,” says Karsch. “She was very disengaged, didn’t participate in the meetings. It was give her the pages, bup-a-bup. She wanted to do the part of Ellie and leave. There wasn’t a lot of communication between Diane and Warren.”
Keaton required a “stop date,” a day when the production had to let her go, finished or not, to direct her own movie, Hanging Up. New Line accepted her condition. After all, the date was April 16, 1999, a long way off. There was no way they wouldn’t be finished, or at least that’s the way it seemed at the time. Beatty, whose own productions went on forever, knew enough never to accept stop dates. “It’s a chancy thing to do,” he says. But he was not the producer.
New Line was pleased. “The reason we all liked Diane and Goldie was because they gave us a First Wives Club feel,” explains De Luca. (Both actresses were in that movie.) “Since the movie was targeted at that demographic, we thought anything that would recall that movie and that kind of audience would be a good thing. And we also thought it was also a neat nod to Shampoo, and the other movies that Warren had done with either Diane or Goldie.” Which is to say Town & Country was Shampoo twenty years later, as if George Roundy had married Jackie, with Keaton in the Christie role, one ex-girlfriend standing in for another.
At last, New Line breathed a sigh of relief. Explains Harris, “We felt, Warren’s signed on to this script, he’s signed on to this director, we’re gonna go shoot this movie in forty days, or fifty days, whatever, and we’ll have a great Warren Beatty movie.” It was left to Beatty to sound a note of warning. Karsch recalls, “I was talking about the people we assembled, and how we’d have a great time, and Warren said, ‘If it’s a great time, it ain’t gonna be any good.’” That proved to be a prophetic remark.
As soon as Beatty and Chelsom began working together, it was evident that they were ill matched. For one thing, the director was starstruck. Laughlin was still working on the script, coming up with new scenes. According to him, “Peter would read it, and say, ‘Oh, this is great! Please, I beg of you, let me take credit for this with Warren!’ Imagine being inside that person’s head, the insecurities—it’s terrifying.” To several of the participants, it seemed evident that Chelsom was seriously overmatched by Beatty. Laughlin continues, “He was threatened by Warren. He was uncomfortable with Warren. He worried that he might be in the position of the director of Love Affair. Peter wanted to protect his turf.”
Gradually, it became clear that the production had to begin in June 1998 or not at all. Says Karsch, “We had stop dates and pay-or-play commitments with absolutely everybody, and we couldn’t push it any further. Suddenly it was pulling out of the station and Warren had to get on. But he just never focused on it because he’s such a master at pushing movies back, he never thought it was going to roll when it did. So Warren said, ‘But we don’t have a script.’ And we started having script meetings. And things started changing.”
According to New Line’s Harris, “Had the original Laughlin script been shot word for word, it would have been a delightful little movie. It was filled with holes, for sure, but it was sexy and daring and fun.” Karsch agrees, “It wasn’t that there wasn’t a script. These actors committed to something for a reason. These aren’t easy people to get on board, and they weren’t going to sign on just because of Warren. Certainly not Diane.” One source says, “It seemed as though perhaps Warren hadn’t read the script all that carefully before he got involved. When he did, he got nervous. He started rejiggering.”
Like many of the other writers the star worked with, Laughlin didn’t want to play Beatty’s game, where every word is up for grabs. He says, “I didn’t want to defend anything,” he recalls. “It’s in such bad taste to try to put the writer in the corner and say, ‘Okay, now tell us again why this is good.’ Don’t ask me to explain the jokes. End of conversation.” But not with Beatty. He continues, “Warren is just an indecisive actor who wants to talk about everything. He has the ability to drive people to distraction. To chew on the discussion endlessly. I always tried to keep him in the world that he’s in with women—you see the girl, you want her, you get her.” Or, as Buck Henry puts it, “I don’t think he second-guesses himself about life as he does about art.”
But De Luca says that Beatty was right, there were script problems. One was fairly minor, the race of a baby that his character was supposed to have fathered. It was Asian, proving—in a jokey way—that he couldn’t be the father, but according to De Luca, they agreed it was “corny and objectionable. We always knew we wanted to change that.” But once the skin of the script was pricked, it started to bleed, and the trickle of blood quickly turned into a hemorrhage. Continues De Luca, “That started a series of rewrite conversations that upset the apple cart, and we were rewriting when we were into preproduction.”
Beatty also didn’t like the third act. In Laughlin’s script, Porter, accompanied by a new girlfriend, Eugenie, who would be played by Andie MacDowell, has returned to New York from Aspen to get a divorce from Ellie. But no sooner do they arrive than Eugenie, a fast-talking type A who turns out to be a pathological liar, dumps him, leaving him devastated. (MacDowell, a slow-talking Southerner who radiates niceness, was miscast.) As his life unravels, he comes to his senses, but now has to campaign to get his wife back, because she has waded into the dating pool herself. Eventually, continues De Luca, “they come back to each other after they both have been unfaithful. They both have affairs—there’s a balance.” But, says Karsch, “Warren didn’t want to do it, him getting Ellie back again.”
In other words, Beatty’s reputation for vanity was so pervasive that at least some of the principals suspected the worst. “I don’t think that Warren would ever play somebody who needs to get Diane Keaton back,” says one source. “That’s where he doesn’t separate himself from the character. I never knew where Porter began and where Warren ended.” Whatever the reason, fiddling with the ending may have been a mistake, and more, a mistake that sank the movie. Says De Luca, “One of the biggest changes, and probably the most damaging change, was that we rewrote the script so that Diane’s character has no affairs, and therefore the sympathy for Warren’s character goes out the window.”
Speculates Laughlin, “I was in a meeting with Warren and Goldie, and they were talking about how fabulous they both looked. And maybe Warren thought Diane didn’t look as wonderful as they did. And maybe at that moment, he decided—and they had a past together—I don’t want to remarry her at the end of the movie. That minute, the ball game was over.”
From Beatty’s point of view, rather than stopping the train, he was only trying to get it on track. He would say, “I’m only trying to make the script better. It’s not my fault that this is happening.” Indeed, De Luca doesn’t remember Beatty objecting to having to win Keaton back or remarrying her. “Warren never brought up not having the husband get back with the wife at the end of the movie. To this day I don’t know what Peter Chelsom liked about the original script, and what he liked about what we turned it into with these rewrites. I never heard him say, ‘No, let’s not rewrite it this way, ’cause the movie’s about that’—he just kind’a went with the flow. It was weird.”
While Town & Country was being rewritten, Beatty was flirting with Mazursky and his writing partner, Leon Capetanos, about a script called Hot Friday, which Capetanos had written, about a tough private eye working his last job in L.A. before retiring to a fishing town in
Oregon. Mazursky had the money, $22 million. “I was ready to go and excited,” he says. He just needed Beatty to say yes. But Beatty would never say yes, or, as Mazursky puts it, “He wouldn’t say yes to doing it, even though he had said yes.” Instead, he would say, “Can’t we fix this little thing, and change that little thing?” Mazursky and Capetanos went to work, and for several months they fixed this little thing and changed that little thing. “And then it started to become different than I wanted it to be,” recalls Mazursky. “Leon and I both agreed that we just couldn’t stand some of these changes. So I just said, ‘Let’s forget it, Warren.’ The movie never happened. I haven’t spoken to him since. He just stopped calling. The script is still around. I think, now and then, he calls Leon: ‘Who’s got the rights to that?’” Beatty and Mazursky were not close, but they had known each other for a long time, and it was the end of a friendship. “He’s a funny bird,” Mazursky concludes. “But I bear him no ill will. I like him, I admire him, and I wish I still saw him. But it’s hard to deal with that.”
READY OR not—and it was “not”—production on Town & Country began in June 1998. “This was not a happy set,” says Harris, in a gross understatement. “Peter and Warren were a lethal combination. They did not see the same movie, or even the same scene, pretty much ever. Warren is very articulate and can see every side of every issue and every angle of every conversation. Peter’s an extremely English public school boy, very polite, well mannered, but not so good about saying what’s on his mind, so you have two people coming from an aggressively passive-aggressive place. If there is a tiny chink in the armor, Warren is incredibly adept at finding it, and he’s not a person who has a great deal of tolerance for insecurity in his director.”
First there was the “fairy dust” incident. In the script, the characters are described as behaving as if they were sprinkled with fairy dust. For reasons best known to himself, Chelsom apparently took this literally. “I was going through the prop list one day and I saw these canisters that were marked ‘fairy dust,’” Karsch recalls. “Warren didn’t even believe me. Then we discovered that he was going to blow particles of paper—‘fairy dust’—all over everything. It was Peter’s sense of whimsy.” Buck Henry, who would be hired to do rewrites, adds, “The keynote of Peter’s work had been a kind of English whimsy. I don’t think whimsy relates to anything Warren does or thinks about.”
Karsch and the other producers considered replacing Chelsom, while Beatty stayed in the background. Laughlin explains, “Warren thought it would reflect badly on him.” And Karsch, “Warren said it was up to me and Fred to do that. He was an actor.” Comparatively speaking, Chelsom was a nobody, nothing. Even if Beatty declined to flex his muscles, Chelsom worked at his sufferance and knew it. The natural assumption—apparently shared by New Line—was that Town & Country was Beatty’s picture.
New Line could have fired Chelsom, but at that moment the company was being loudly assailed by Tony Kaye, a British director with whom it had tussled over American History X. Kaye said the New Line crowd, “raped” his picture, tried to have his credit replaced by “Humpty Dumpty,” and had taken double truck attack ads in the trades that had left the company shell-shocked. Says Karsch, “New Line was reluctant to make any changes, because they didn’t want to be seen as a company that was director-unfriendly.”
According to De Luca, “I was aware during production that the relationship was getting a little frayed, but if I called Peter [Chelsom] and Simon [Fields], and said, ‘How’s it going with Warren?’ they’d say, ‘Warren’s Warren, but it’s gonna be fine.’ It was always like, ‘It’s gonna be fine.’ Warren raised the red flags periodically, but once it was rolling, the thought of pulling the plug on a runaway, and eating the tens of millions of dollars—you hate to do it, although in retrospect, that would have been the right move, 100 percent. But when I was faced with those decisions, I had the hope that it might still work.” Without New Line’s blessing, Karsch’s hands were tied. In the end, nobody did anything, while Beatty was getting increasingly frustrated.
At eight one morning in July 1998, Harris got a frantic call at home from Michael Davison, Beatty’s assistant. He asked her to come to the set immediately. When she arrived at the actor’s trailer, a full-scale firefight between Beatty and Chelsom was in progress: “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you don’t know what the movie’s about, there’s no script,” Beatty bellowed.
“Of course there’s a script.”
“Then what’s it about, what’s my character about?”
As Harris describes it, “The three stooges—Fields, Roos, and Karsch—were sitting on the couch with their fucking breakfast burritos saying nothing.” Trying to be palliative, she said something innocuous, straight out of Corporate Speak 101, or maybe Cool Hand Luke, like “I think what’s happening is that you two have very different ways of working, and right now, you’re not finding a way to communicate.” According to her, “Warren flipped out. He turned to me and said, ‘This little girl is saying that we’re two boys fighting in a sandbox, and neither one of us wants to give up our toys.’ He lost his shit and stood up, and went around the room jabbing his finger in the air, and said, ‘You and you and you and you and you can take this fucking movie and shove it up your fucking asses,’ stormed out of the trailer, and slammed the door. So now we were sitting in his trailer with his cook and his breakfast burritos, and he’s not there. We looked at each other, ‘Okay, what do we do?’ About forty-five minutes later he came in and apologized for losing his temper. And said, ‘Let’s get back to work.’ I think it was a horrible moment for him—it was a very childish temper tantrum. Because he was not in control of the movie. He knew, ‘If I’m in the movie and it spirals out of control, it’s my fault, because I’m Warren Beatty.’ Knowing that the finger was pointed at him, it gnawed at him, he felt that really deeply.”
About three months into production and increasingly desperate, Beatty and Karsch approached Buck Henry to write them out of the hole they were in. He was the perfect choice, except for the fact that he didn’t want to do it. Karsch recalls, “I worked and worked and worked on him, and finally he was like, ‘Okay, these are the conditions… ’ the central one being that he wouldn’t do the endless meetings with Warren, the meetings on Saturday, the meetings on Sunday.” Says Henry, “I’ve always hated the meetings, because they do nothing but make you crazy, and then when they’re over, people like Warren say, ‘Pay no attention to that meeting.’ Which I like, but then why did we have to bother in the first place?” Karsch continues, “‘Buck, I promise you you’re not going to have to meet with Warren.’ It didn’t hurt that New Line made Henry an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Henry thought, What the hell, I’ll just stay home in New York and send in the pages. But he hadn’t counted on Beatty, who started in on him: “You gotta come out here, you gotta come out here.” Henry said, “Okay, I’ll come out there, but I’m not coming to meetings.” Finally, Henry said, “Okay, I’ll go to meetings, but I’m not going to the set.” He continues, “inch by inch,” Beatty got his way. Beatty was one of those people who could burn your house down and then sell you another one. Henry even had a small role as the attorney who negotiates the terms of Porter and Ellie’s putative divorce.
Henry wrote over two hundred pages, of which perhaps a third were shot. He wrote one very funny scene set in Shandling’s antique shop, in which his character is trying desperately to come out of the closet to his friend Porter, but never manages to spit the words out because the two men are speaking at cross-purposes. Recalls Henry, “It was never going to be shot until one day Warren was looking at this pile of script pages he had, and he said, ‘What’s this? What’s this?’
“‘That’s the scene of yadayadayada. I wrote it a couple of months ago. Remember we read it once at the table?’
“‘Nah, I’ve never seen it before.’ So he read it, and says, ‘Oh, this is funny. Why don’t we do this?’ That’s the way things happened on that
movie. It might have been shot or not shot depending on the vagaries of the moment. Ultimately, Warren thinks he has all the money in the world, and all the time in the world to do it. The point is to get it right, or there’s no point doing it. It doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if it costs $2 billion and takes ten years to shoot. That’s why people’s hair turns white.”
Karsch recalls, “As the budget was escalating, whatever the amount was at that point, De Luca still loved Warren and loved Warren’s work. He said to me, ‘Thirty-five million dollars for a Warren Beatty movie isn’t bad.’ I said, ‘Big mistake. The problem? This isn’t a Warren Beatty movie, it’s a Peter Chelsom movie. And it’s a great deal of money for that.’”
LYNN HARRIS was still doing her best to move the picture forward, but it was impossible. “I had no power at all,” she says. “I literally had a bullet-less gun in my hand, I was the watchdog with no teeth, ’cause I was basically there at Warren’s request, to watch what was happening. I could say ‘No, no, no,’ but if the person above me wasn’t backing me up, there wasn’t a lot I could do. And it’s very difficult when you’re having a conversation with an Academy Award–winning writer-producer-director-actor who is telling you that you’re wrong. He does like people to disagree, and he does like to go away and think about things, process them, and come back, but we weren’t in development, we were in production.”
Beatty disputed his reputation for being a difficult actor. “Do you know the last time I was a hired actor?” he asked journalist Kim Masters, rhetorically, in 2000. “Nineteen seventy-five, in The Fortune,” he went on, answering his own question. “Ask Mike Nichols if I ever held anything up, demanded anything. When I’m a hired actor, I do what I’m told.” But Peter Chelsom was no Mike Nichols. And it wasn’t just professional pride on Beatty’s part. It was a bread-and-butter issue, even for him.
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