Looking back on the experience, neither Bradley nor Cooper regrets investing their time and effort. “We were into the Bulworth fantasy,” says Cooper. “I had a great time. Who wouldn’t want to be Warren’s valet, let alone his political consultant. I’m flattered that he took any of my ideas seriously. Who was not going to love that?”
Being a movie star means never having to say you’re sorry, and Beatty never apologized to Cooper and Bradley for wasting their time with the Bulworth bubble. Says Cooper, “At no point did he say, ‘Shit, guys, I just couldn’t pull this Fox thing together with Bulworth, we need to ditch this.’ I didn’t lecture him, ‘You’ve been a bad boy, Warren.’ This is the way he operates, and what difference does it make what you say? He’s going to go on like this no matter what. How does he make these transitions? He doesn’t. That’s how he makes all his transitions, by not making them. What does he care, right?” He continues, “At some point, Bill and I said, ‘Fuck this Bulworth thing.’ We turned it into a joke because we knew Warren. To this day, Bill and I say, ‘If we start now, we can get Bulworth 2016!’ For all I know, Warren still thinks the Bulworth book is happening.”
DURING THE nine-month hiatus on Town & Country, when Beatty wasn’t teasing his political supporters, he and Buck Henry et al. worked on the script. “I was at one or two of the meetings with Buck and Warren and Peter about how to rewrite and end the movie,” says production head De Luca. “Those started to get depressing, not because there was a lot of acrimony in the air, although there might have been, but it started to feel like this was a sinking ship, we don’t know how to fix it. It was all about creating a mea culpa on the part of Warren’s character that would be so astounding that all would be forgiven, and you could believe that his wife would take him back. The burden of the mea culpa fell on Buck, but it became clear that there was nothing Warren’s character could say that was gonna make an hour and a half of philandering okay with the audience.”
The re- and additional shooting continued sporadically throughout the hiatus, while they were waiting for the principal actors to return. On March 31, 2000, at the premiere of Boiler Room, New Line studio head Shaye sought out Harris “to tell me,” in her words, that “I was ‘the laughing stock of Hollywood’ and was ‘lucky to have a job.’” Henry ran into Shaye at a party one night. “He was quite loaded, he dropped to his knees, and said, ‘Can’t you help end this nightmare?’ Warren was at the same party, he was standing on the other side of the pool. I pointed to him.”
On March 26, 2000, Bening was up for Best Actress for American Beauty but lost to Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry, and Beatty received the Irving Thalberg Award. For him, it was a bittersweet experience. He appreciated the recognition, but it was an honor reserved for the elder statesmen of the industry, and entering the award season of his life was an indication, if any were needed, that his career was on the wane.
During postproduction, Peter Chelsom went off to work on Serendipity, yet another romantic comedy about star-crossed lovers who find each other in the end, dumping Town & Country in Beatty’s lap, not that it wasn’t there already. “Postproduction was endless,” says Harris. “Recutting the movie and recutting the movie and recutting the movie.” At the time, Karsch told The New York Times, “It reminds me of a great line of Truffaut’s. He said that making a movie is like taking a stagecoach across the old American West. You start out hoping for a fantastic ride and then you pray just to reach your destination.” De Luca recalls, “It was just us, with Warren and [editor] Claire Simpson and anyone else who wandered into the editing room trying cut after cut, and making it worse. At that point, Peter was an absentee director. We did everything we could to stop the bleeding and finish the movie and still have something you could sell. And nothing we did worked.”
Henry remembers, “Warren was really bitter about the final cut. To my way of thinking he was absolutely right. It was everything Warren was against. He wanted the story to be about a guy who accidentally becomes an adulterer. It’s in keeping with his idea of himself, of the characters he plays, as basically innocent guys. Warren has always steered away from his own reputation as a lothario. Their cut suggests that he’s having a big affair at the very start of the story.” By opening the picture with the scene in which a nude Kinski plays the cello for Beatty, New Line merely made a bad problem worse, diminishing whatever sympathy the audience might have had for his character.
Still, the message of the movie is more mainstream than first appears. Read biographically, Town & Country is a cautionary tale wrapped in the trappings of a bedroom farce. As De Luca and the others took it to be, it is indeed a sequel to Shampoo, the final chapter in the lightly fictionalized, multi-film (auto)biography of a rake reformed, one who discovers—perhaps too late—that he is best suited to a monogamous marriage, a role Beatty apparently played with more finesse off screen than on. Town & Country is a comedy of middle age, a reluctant valedictory to philandering. In it, promiscuous sex equals death, or at least, emotional emptiness.
The consequence of the additional photography as well as the protracted postproduction was that the budget, already the size of the Hindenburg, just went up in flames. Many people, including the DP, Bill Fraker, and his crew, were still on salary, and those who weren’t, in addition to the actors, collected overages when they finally returned. Says Henry, “They didn’t have any idea of how much money they were spending.” He was hired for ten weeks’ work, and ended up working over twice that number, twenty-two weeks. “Around the twenty-first week, one of the producers came to me and said, ‘Are we still paying you?’ I said, ‘Gee, I hope so.’ He said, ‘Can you give us some relief?’ It was a little like the scene in The Godfather, ‘Can you help me out?’ As they’re hustling him into the car to kill him.’” Says Karsch, “He will live until the day he dies on that money. It was millions.” Henry won’t say, but it was rumored that he bought a house in L.A. on the money he made from Town & Country, said to have been in the neighborhood of $3 million.
The budget overrun was not merely the customary 10 percent, or even 20 percent, but more like 150 percent or 200 percent, depending on the baseline—$30 million or $40 million—but in either case, according to De Luca, ending up at $90 million, maybe more. At the time, New Line admitted to $75 million, undoubtedly low, but several publications, most notably Variety, Salon, and Liz Smith’s syndicated column, reported that the budget had ballooned to $120 million, probably too high. And this for a film with a small cast, few locations, and lacking expensive special effects. (The average budget for a feature at that time ran to $59 million.) According to Michael Laughlin, producer Fred Roos just shrugged. He’d worked on most of Coppola’s pictures, and his attitude was, “All these movies get out of control. They just do.”
As a result of the additional shooting, the release was postponed until the fall of 2000, then it was put off yet again. “Part of it was getting it away from competition, part of it was that the film had to be put somewhere where it wouldn’t impact the quarter for New Line,” De Luca says. “It became a business decision of where to hide it.” As one principal at New Line put it, “When you move your release date several times, the picture starts to stink. Warren will tell you that the studio kept moving the release date, and that it was their fault. What he won’t tell you is, he also felt the picture wasn’t ready, and he had a lot to do with the studio moving the release date. What I kept saying was, ‘The more time you give them, the more time they will take.’ They would be recutting the movie to this day if we hadn’t set a release date and stuck to it.” De Luca, who presided over the train wreck, along with other money losers like Little Nicky with Adam Sandler, was fired in mid-January 2001, before the picture was finished.
After Love Affair tanked, Glenn Gordon Caron claimed that Beatty blackballed him. From the star’s point of view, if true, he did no more than share his opinion of Caron with others who might have wished to employ him, a common practice in the industry, although a more pre
ssing motive, protecting his own reputation, cannot be discounted. So far as the Town & Country fiasco went, Beatty blamed Chelsom. “After Town & Country, the talk was that this was Warren’s last great Titanic, that he brought this shit down on De Luca’s head,” recalls a source close to Beatty. “His counter story was it was all because of Peter Chelsom. John Cusack was going to do Serendipity with Chelsom, and he asked Warren what he was like, and Warren said, ‘He was a horror show on Town & Country.’ But Cusack did it anyway. For him to work with Chelsom after that implicitly supported the story that Warren was the great disaster in Town & Country. He never liked John Cusack thereafter.”
New Line had decided on a drop-dead March release date. When the picture finally opened a month later, it was indeed redolent with the stink of rotten eggs. The New York Times weighed in with an in-depth examination of the picture’s travails under the headline: “Stumbling Toward a Theater Near You.” Wrote Rick Lyman, “Now, almost three years later, the movie… is finally arriving in theaters… [accompanied by] a pervasive sense of doom like none that has attached itself to a major Hollywood release in a long time.”
New Line finally dumped Town & Country onto 2,200 screens on April 27. There were few advance screenings, no glitzy premieres, no press campaign, no party. The reviews were mixed. Wrote Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly, “The hermetically wealthy, tastefully neurotic, abalone white characters who populate Woody Allen’s Manhattan-based comedies of manners are models of realism and diversity compared with the expensively dressed humanoids scuttling across sterile landscapes of privilege in Town & Country.” More forgiving, Stephen Holden in The New York Times called it a “patched-together but still entertaining movie.”
It is indeed a pleasure to see three sleekly skilled actors—Beatty, Keaton, and Hawn—circle the track, but it has to be admitted that the picture doesn’t work. Beatty’s character comes off half hapless and half predatory, a reflection, perhaps, of the actor’s role in the production. His attempts at slapstick are embarrassing, and the less said of Heston’s demented gun nut, the better. Ditto Andie MacDowell’s daffy nympho, who is unaccountably (and unfunnily) attached to her stuffed animals. Garry Shandling seems so uncomfortable in his own skin that he’s hard to watch. As the picture dashes madly along, the quirky quickly becomes the precious. The First Wives Club audience may have been turned off by adultery rampant and apparently unpunished, but the fact remains that a romantic comedy has to be affecting and funny, and this one is neither. Like its two unhappy predecessors, it smacks of self-regard, as if the pleasure of watching Beatty, Hawn, and Keaton put themselves through their paces were enough.
The movie was a disaster at the box office. Even in a season of horrendous flops, it was a standout. “In this commencement season, the now infamous ‘Town & Country’ is graduating to the record books as Hollywood’s biggest modern-day flop,” reported Variety in the beginning of June. “New Line’s Warren Beatty starrer leaves U.S. theaters this week after a month-long run that reaped about $6.7 million—a shadow of its reported $85 million production cost. That’s no small distinction. ‘Meet Joe Black,’ ‘Battlefield Earth,’ ‘What Planet Are You From?’—take your pick, they all topped ‘Town’ in terms of budget-to-gross ratio. Overseas receipts, which total $500,000 from several territories, aren’t likely to salvage the film’s fortunes.” Even if Beatty was not to blame, once again a movie in which he was involved left a trail of wreckage in its wake, as had Dick Tracy, Ishtar, Bugsy, Love Affair, and Bulworth.
HOW DID it happen? Movie business decorum dictates that after a train wreck like this one, the engineer doesn’t throw stones, just dusts himself off and goes home without looking back. Indeed, Beatty blithely shrugged the whole thing off, saying, “It was fun. You know, I didn’t produce it, direct it, or write it. I was a hired actor on it. I had a good time with a cast that was terrific.” Initially, at least, New Line too played by the rules. A piece for Inside.com was headlined, “New Line Says Town & Country Is Just Fine, and Don’t Blame Beatty for the Awful Mess.” De Luca took pains to exculpate Beatty, albeit in a somewhat backhanded way. “As things started to go wrong with the movie, there were a lot of unfair, cheap shots directed towards him, just because of what his reputation had been coming off those other movies.” Uncharacteristically for a studio executive, he blamed himself.
But walking the high road was too much for New Line’s Bob Shaye. He delivered a rant to Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times, saying that Town & Country was “one of the worst mistakes of my life.” He accused Beatty of seducing De Luca into starting before the script was ready. Says Karsch, “Categorically untrue. New Line started the movie before Warren was ready. Shaye was never around and doesn’t have any understanding about what went on with this movie.” Beatty’s attorney Bert Fields sent Shaye a “cease and desist” letter. According to De Luca, “Bob felt crazy that it was slipping away, and getting more and more expensive. He felt like it must be Warren pulling a Jedi mind trick on me to make this happen. Bob was more of a believer in the reputation—this must be Warren’s fault. I think he distanced himself from his own responsibility. The script was green-lit by Bob and Michael Lynne. They were there every step of the way. I was not authorized to make decisions above a half million dollars. Everything that happened was New Line–approved.”
According to a source, neither Shaye nor Lynne would stand up to Beatty. “They would swear up and down about how awful Warren was, what a pig, what a nightmare, and when Warren looked them in the face and said, ‘Do you Bob Shaye or do you Michael Lynne believe that I am responsible for any of the problems that have occurred on this movie?’ they backed down.”
Karsch blamed Chelsom for pretty much everything. “I found him to have the most unpleasant personality of anyone I’ve worked with.” For the few things for which Karsch doesn’t blame Chelsom, he blames New Line. “I’ve never seen a company quite so passive,” he says. “It never tried to rein the movie in, until the very, very end, which was precisely when it shouldn’t have. It created its own Frankenstein. Had Warren directed it, it would have been one of the truly memorable American romantic comedies.”
For his part, Chelsom blamed Beatty for much that went wrong. He generally refused to comment, but in a rare interview from the battlefield in 1999, he said, “It is a mess. I have never seen so much money wasted. I’m just a kid from the North of England so you go from being nervous with these big stars to being bored by their behavior.” He accused Beatty of playing “mind games”: “When you enter Warren’s World it is more complicated than any world you will ever enter. Nothing is easy. It is so complex and so unnecessarily complex.” Says Henry, “I’m sure Peter would make the case that Garry and Warren were woefully unprepared a lot of the time, because they thought they could do better than the script—and I’m sure in some cases they did. But would I work with Warren again? You bet! You forget the pain.”
The issue of who was to blame will perhaps never be settled. It was a group effort. Says Harris, “It’s an incredibly difficult question to answer. If you know Warren—you know all you need to. Have you ever gotten a direct answer? He can put the brakes on things, and it’s all so ethereal and ever changing and contradictory, he can deflect the blame elsewhere. He is at the same time brilliant and creative and amazing, and also oddly self-destructive.” Says one source, “He’s brilliant enough to twist a room of not incredibly stupid people around so much that when you ask, ‘Was it really Warren’s fault,’ and they answer, ‘Yes, it really was,’ and you ask ‘How?’—then they can’t fucking tell you how.” All Harris can say is that “Mostly it was sheer torture for three years.”
Midway through the production, one of Harris’s friends asked her, “If Jeffrey Katzenberg was moved to write a twenty-page memo on why it’s a bad idea to be in the Dick Tracy [i.e., the Warren Beatty] business, why on earth did any of you think you’d be any different?” Looking back on New Line’s decision to finance the movie, Harris says,
“We should all have reread that memo. But we thought, people change. We heard Warren was a womanizer, but I never witnessed anything during the three years we were together on this movie that indicated to me anything other than the fact that he was very devoted to his wife and to his children, and that’s great. The fifteen million women who dated him before Annette didn’t have that experience, but Annette did. So yes, there was the Glenn Gordon Caron experience, there was the Dick Tracy experience, but we were naive enough to think that if somebody looks you in the eye and says, ‘I don’t want to produce, I don’t want to write, I don’t want to direct, I just want to act’—Great! This is gonna be easy.”
14
HE’S BEEN UP SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE DOWN TO ME
How Beatty made a virtue out of a necessity when he plunged into family life after he became virtually unbankable.
“I believe that I can get any movie made. I always have felt that and I’ve never had a movie I couldn’t get made.”
—Warren Beatty
BEATTY’S DOWNWARD SLIDE had gradually been gaining momentum throughout the 1990s. Town & Country was the tipping point, or rather, the Humpty-Dumpty moment, when it all came crashing down. All his assets—his enormous intelligence, his drive, his instincts—became debits. Even his looks, now beginning to reflect his age, seemed to lock him in a leading man prison. Way back in 1995, after Love Affair, with Howard Hughes still unmade, Dick Sylbert observed, “Warren is in trouble. He no longer counts in this town. His fangs have been pulled. In fact, he pulled his own fangs, which is more than interesting.”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 69
