A reason the key Christmas dates were suddenly available, of course, stemmed from our studio’s Godfather problem. Intended to be the big holiday blockbuster, The Godfather would not hit its dates because of substantial re-editing. Suddenly prime theaters like the Village in Westwood had become available, but Harold and Maude was not suited for “big barns.” It needed to be nurtured in select art theaters where it could be “discovered” by discriminating filmgoers. This was especially true since the studio had failed to come up with a distinctive ad campaign—indeed any ad campaign.
Frantic, Ashby broke his usual zone of silence to call Yablans in protest. The way to sell Harold and Maude, he argued, was simply to explain what it was—namely a comedic love story between an eighteen-year-old boy and an eighty-year-old woman. Yablans didn’t want to listen.
The opening reviews didn’t help. The first was written by Variety’s Art Murphy, a conservative Catholic who was at war with what he felt to be the corrupt values of the youth culture. To Murphy, Harold and Maude “had all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage.” The film, he wrote, “joins the inventory of contemporary comedies, witless efforts which make one feel embarrassed for those involved.” Several favorable reviews emerged from the big city critics, but they were all but drowned out by the publicity accorded the big Christmas movies like A Clockwork Orange from Stanley Kubrick, Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood, and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital.
Audiences in most major cities simply didn’t show up. Once again, Ashby was on the phone to point out that in those markets where the film was strongest, exhibitors had thrown out the Paramount ads and were vamping on their own. In Baltimore, for example, the local theater owner had substituted his own simple campaign emphasizing the Harold and Maude love story. And it was working.
My own sense of frustration easily matched that of Ashby. The Palo Alto screening had convinced me that there was an audience out there for Harold and Maude. When I screened it for friends in Los Angeles, they embraced it too.
With earlier films like Goodbye, Columbus and Rosemary’s Baby, I had surreptitiously hired Stephen Frankfurt, the star of the Young & Rubicam ad agency, who had come up with brilliantly innovative campaigns, but my initiatives caused utter rage within the studio. Now with Frank Yablans, a selfproclaimed marketing wiz, I had been warned not to reach outside the company again.
Yablans, though gruff by nature, tried to be sympathetic. “I know this is a passion project for you,” he told me, “but give it up. Let it go away. A year from now no one will remember it ever got made.”
I listened to him, but I was not prepared to forget this movie. On the other hand, I never would have suspected its immortality.
Harold and Maude was a momentary failure, but it would live forever as a cult classic. Some theaters played the movie for over a year, while others revived it once a year. And over time, scores of people have told me where they were when they first saw Harold and Maude, who they were with, and what happened as a result.
Hal Ashby would go on to make several more distinguished films, like Shampoo and Coming Home. Years later we were to work together once again on Being There—yet another film that achieved its own special immortality.
A month before he died, in 2001, Hal paid me a visit, and even then, gravely ill, he peered at me, adjusted his granny glasses and said, “I’ll never understand why Harold and Maude failed. It deserved a better fate, didn’t it?”
“It didn’t fail, Hal. It will live forever.”
CHAPTER 9
Hard Lessons
At some moment during my first few months at Para mount, two facts crystallized for me: First, that Evans and I (indeed, the studio as a whole) were being all but suffocated by the onrush of projects already in the pipeline. And second, that the only way we could inject our own movies into the studio bloodstream was by stubborn advocacy, bordering on corporate demagoguery.
I felt a growing urgency to act on this conclusion. Every weekend Evans and I would watch one or two movies that we had inherited and that theoretically were now ready for distribution, and Evans finally turned to me at the end of one screening and asked, “Would you pay to see any of these movies?”
My response was instinctual: “I’d pay to avoid seeing them.”
But we had to see them—we were being paid to do so. They were an odd mix: Some consisted of European films that Bluhdorn or other colleagues overseas had impulsively acquired for U.S. distribution. They ranged from The Stranger, directed by Luchino Visconti, an opaque adaptation of the classic Albert Camus novel, to Fraulein Doktor, a clunky spy movie from director Alberto Lattuada. Though they ranged widely in ambition and quality, the one element these pickups had in common, as we were to learn, was that American audiences had no interest whatsoever in them.
By and large, Paramount seemed to be missing out on the truly transformative films emanating from Fellini or Truffaut while it was locked into a second and third tier of semiexploitational fare.
This phenomenon became all the more alarming when several new and very expensive overseas epics, also Bluhdorn deals, began to arrive with a series of loud thuds. Waterloo, a $100 million broad-canvas Italian-Russian-British coproduction starring Rod Steiger as a blustery Napoléon, was a total flop. Another Euro epic, The Red Tent, starring Sean Connery and Peter Finch, which dramatized a 1928 dirigible disaster in the Arctic with extravagant effects, also found no audience in the U.S.
There were two exceptions to this chain of disasters: One was a French gangster film, Borsolino, starring Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo, which played like a vivid homage to Hollywood’s Cagney-Bogart genre movies. The second was Franco Zeffirelli’s English-language lyric imagining of Romeo and Juliet, which succeeded in winning a young audience back to Shakespeare.
If the work of the foreign filmmakers was proving difficult to introduce, the response to the U.S. films commissioned by the previous studio regime proved equally dismaying. For reasons I will never understand, Paramount had decided to make an expensive deal with the famously dictatorial German-born director Otto Preminger, giving him total autonomy over the choice and casting of his pictures.
The results were appalling. The humorless Preminger ground out two numb comedies called Skidoo and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The latter’s principal characters were a gay cripple, an epileptic, and a girl with a disfigured face, all of whom left a hospital to start a new life together. Preminger’s effort at melodrama consisted of Hurry Sundown, a lifeless racial drama starring Jane Fonda and Michael Caine.
After the initial screening of Junie Moon, Preminger threw a lavish dinner party at his Bel Air home, serving pounds of the finest caviar wrapped in potato skins and adorned with sour cream and onions. I had never savored such fine caviar and I was enjoying the evening until the director suddenly confronted me. “Were you not moved by these amazing characters?” he demanded, taking on the demeanor of a German officer confronting a junior aide.
Not knowing how to reply, I inadvertently dropped my potato skin on his shoe. It landed with a splat. Preminger wheeled and stalked away.
Between Preminger’s misbegotten efforts and the steady flow of films from overseas, the Paramount distribution pipeline was all but groaning, and so were Evans and I. One morning when I picked Evans up on the way to the office, he started humming softly. Usually, the Evans hum—it’s a low and slightly ominous monotone—portends trouble.
“What’s bugging you, Bob?” I asked.
Evans kept humming for a few beats. Finally: “Two more Paramount pictures are opening this weekend,” he said. “They’re both unwatchable.”
It was too good an opening. “If we don’t want to see them, who will?”
Evans started humming again and I was getting a headache. “Look, Bob, we’ve got to start jamming our own movies into the goddamn pipeline,” I said. “Even if some are misfires, at least they won’t be Otto Preminger’s.”
Evans remained silent the rest of
the trip. He didn’t even hum.
That week I started making offers—different kinds of offers. Instead of buying finished films for distribution, we started buying the rights to screenplays, novels, and plays, and suddenly, literary agents who had been ignoring Paramount were lining up with their submissions. The studio was in business again. But it was an entirely different style of business.
The timing was propitious. By 1967 it had become vividly clear that filmgoers were buying tickets again, but their tastes were difficult to chart. Paramount, like every studio, had its dogmatic marketing gurus who claimed they could analyze which movies were commercial and which were not, but even these folks were shaken by the obvious changes in the pop culture. Sure, Elvis Presley movies still had their loyalists and The Sound of Music was registering record business around the world, but the five films nominated for Oscars in February 1968 were Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night—a group representing a mind-boggling spectrum of generational sensibilities.
The studio system was clearly in a state of confusion and, perched at its nerve center, I quickly determined to use that confusion to my advantage. The secret to getting a movie made at Paramount, I had found, was simply to keep putting it back on the table time after time. If protests emerged from distribution or elsewhere that the budget was too high, the star wattage too low, or the subject matter too arcane, I’d simply pull it, make a few adjustments, perhaps change the title, then put it back in contention. And since the flood of submissions had become so formidable, no one, I discovered, was carefully tracking them.
A degree of arrogance was intrinsic to this process, I realized, and that disturbed me. I was a journalist who was toying with the careers and passions of accomplished professionals in what was still an alien field. On the other hand, what was driving me was a sense of rebellion against the creaky studio mechanisms at Paramount and other companies when the wrong movies were being made for the wrong reasons.
With the support and encouragement of Evans, I felt I could help instill a modus operandi that was more responsive to the energies and passions of the moment. Movies had instantly become the most vital mode of expression for young artists. Rock ’n’ rollers wanted to make movies, painters wanted to shoot film, poets were pitching scripts. Suddenly, Hollywood was becoming a sort of pop culture mecca, or at least aspiring to be that.
As I began to assemble my cadre of new talents, my motivations were at once pure and self-serving. I wanted to find myself in the company of smart people. I didn’t want to deal with members of the club who merely wanted big paydays. I sensed that the top agents both distrusted and disdained me—I was the enemy who would likely be inhospitable to their packages and packaging fees. My name was noticeably absent from the lists of hot parties hosted by established producers in the community.
But amid all this I was beginning to have fun. An array of interesting projects was being paraded before me and I was trying to get my arms around them and also their potential traps.
The traps were abundant. I was the new boy in town and the old pros were eager to teach me a few lessons.
They didn’t have to wait long.
Lesson one was a project called Blue, which turned into a case study in the pitfalls of studio management. I sensed Blue was a problem from the start, but I allowed myself to be sucked into its vortex.
I came upon Blue through my casual friendship with a young producer named Judd Bernard. Judd was all the things a producer was expected to be: He was hyper, funny, and, like every gifted sociopath, had a habit of telling you what you wanted to hear. He knew my impatience with my studio’s attitudes, and confided that he was assembling a “hot” but counterintuitive package.
Robert Redford, who had just made a name for himself in Barefoot in the Park, wanted to star in a western. The director would be Silvio Narizzano, whose unexpected hit Georgy Girl, an urban comedy, had just been released. Bernard himself had just produced a successful thriller titled Point Blank starring Lee Marvin.
All the players in Blue were coming into their own. Moreover, the movie wasn’t mired in the usual cowboys-and-Indians formula but was a complex story about a young American who, having been raised by Mexican bandits, tries to settle down as a Texas farmer. Blue was attracting interest at other studios, Bernard told me. Paramount was not first in line.
I bit. Even though the script needed embellishing and Narizzano, a Canadian living in London, had never directed a western, I rationalized away these reservations and became an advocate.
Blue quickly ran into opposition from my colleagues. The “no” votes were emphatic, but I kept putting it back on the table. At a cost of slightly under $3 million, Blue didn’t represent much of a gamble, I argued. In due course, the deal was closed. Blue would start shooting in two months in Moab, Utah. Judd Bernard had become my best friend.
Then I began getting the dire signals. Redford, it seemed, had met with Bernard in New York and had expressed second thoughts about the screenplay. His character lacked nuance, the actor said. The dialogue was on the nose.
“Don’t worry,” Bernard told me reassuringly. “It’s just actor insecurity.”
Narizzano, meanwhile, remained home in London accepting accolades for Georgy Girl. He was a hot ticket in town and wasn’t eager to come to the U.S. to scout locations. Again, a “don’t worry” from the producer.
But I was getting worried. Worry turned into outright alarm when Bernard called to say Redford had abruptly withdrawn from the movie. The actor did not seek a meeting to put forth his problems with the script. He did not express his regrets (this was true to form, I was to learn). He simply walked.
My first instinct was to absorb my losses and run, but Judd Bernard was not ready to accept quick defeat. Since I was no longer an advocate, he decided to go over my head and march directly into the office of the ubiquitous Charlie Bluhdorn.
“I have exciting news about Blue,” he told Bluhdorn. A hot young actor, Terence Stamp, had committed to his project.
“But Redford ... ?” Bluhdorn protested.
“Not needed anymore,” Bernard assured him. Stamp was coming out of a terrific movie called Billy Budd. He was a better “name.”
Bluhdorn considered Stamp to be a rising star in Europe. The fact that Stamp was a Brit who had never tried to master an American accent did not seem to worry him.
I summoned Bernard to a meeting at the studio to berate him for his tactics, but he was brimming with confidence. Terence Stamp would be perfect in Blue, he insisted. Indeed, he now wanted to present yet another great idea. Even as Blue was being shot, Bernard planned to produce a simultaneous movie to be called Fade In. This, too, would be set in Moab, Utah, and would be a touching love story involving an attractive film editor who was working on the movie and fell for a local rancher. Bernard had already elicited commitments from a promising young actress, Barbara Loden, and a young actor named Burt Reynolds, to play the leads.
“Think of the publicity buzz,” effused Bernard, who had started as a publicist. “This will be the first time in movie history that two intertwined films would be shot simultaneously. Audiences for the first time will understand what it’s like to be caught up in the tensions of creating a movie on location.”
In presenting his brainstorm to Evans, Bernard shrewdly described the first scene in his movie—Bob Evans, the glamorous studio chief, stepping off his private plane to visit the location and welcome his stars. It would be a great scene for Evans and, obviously, he would play himself.
A draft of Fade In was already being written by Mart Crowley, said Bernard, and Jud Taylor, a sharp young television director, was also interested. Everything was ready to go, and Bernard was even prepared to foot the bill if Paramount demurred.
Evans and I had the identical reaction. Judd Bernard registered a 10 on the index of sheer brashness. Instead of being on the defensive for losing his star (Redford) he was doubling his (and
our) bet by pitching yet another speculative movie to shoot alongside his first one.
Still, for $800,000 no one seemed willing to say no to Fade In. With Bluhdorn’s blessing, Blue was rolling ahead into preproduction. To kill Fade In seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
As principal photography drew closer, I felt a growing dread about these two adventures. I had stupidly started the ball rolling, and thus I should have done more to stop it. And as the dailies began to arrive my apprehensions grew into a quiet terror.
Silvio Narizzano’s solution to the problem of Stamp’s Brit accent was to eliminate almost all his dialogue. The English actor stood around, looking self-conscious and occasionally grunting. The lines enunciated by other actors sounded as though they had been translated from the Spanish. “No, my brothers,” one bandit said. “We only play games, the games of children or of madmen.”
The movie wasn’t playing. Neither was Fade In. The Loden-Reynolds romance, too, seemed stilted. Judd Bernard was creating the perfect nightmare: zero for two!
Months later, several of us gathered at the old Plaza Theater in Westwood for the test screening of Fade In. The theater was packed with filmgoers who had just paid to see another film and were now getting a “bonus.” By the time Fade In had been running for thirty minutes, half the theater was empty. By the close, only ten or fifteen filmgoers remained.
Four weeks later, the first screenings of “Blue” were even more disastrous. “These debacles are my damned fault,” I told Evans. “I should have shut them down.”
Evans changed the subject. Not long thereafter, I had the same conversation with Bluhdorn. I told him that I had messed up and was willing to take the fall. But the normally combustible chairman absolutely refused to play the blame game. That was not his style. “Blue is history,” he declared with fierce finality.
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