Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  During their meeting, Truffaut also suggested Mickey One’s Harrison Starr (whom neither Wright nor Jones knew) as a possible associate producer who might be able to help them secure financing. For his part, Starr wasn’t happy to learn that the Bonnie and Clyde treatment already had producers attached; he had clearly had separate conversations with Godard and Truffaut about producing Bonnie and Clyde himself and, eager to prove his suitability for the job, had taken the initiative to meet with Mike Frankovich at Columbia to see if he would be willing to fund the film as part of a new program of low-cost European-style ventures the studio was setting up.7

  After Benton and Newman returned to New York, they began work in earnest on turning their treatment of Bonnie and Clyde into a screenplay that incorporated everything they had learned from Truffaut and from Texas, reshaping their descriptive passages into scenes with dialogue. They also went back to Esquire (where Benton was no longer art director but had become the magazine’s special projects editor) to oversee the completion of their grand statement of pop principle, “The New Sentimentality,” the magazine’s cover story in July 1964. Lofty and exuberant, hilariously arrogant, and irresistibly presented as an infallible index of taste, the article was a cultural call to arms—out with the old (except for those elements of the old approved by the young), in with the new. The “Old Sentimentality,” exemplified by the Eisenhower era and values like “Patriotism, Love, Religion, Mom, The Girl,” had given way, Benton and Newman argued, to a “New Sentimentality” about “you, really just you, not what you were told or taught, but what goes on in your head, really, and in your heart, really.”8

  “The New Sentimentality” was really about what was going on in Benton’s and Newman’s heads and hearts, which wasn’t hard to decode. Breathless’s Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo were a “Key Couple of the New Sentimentality,” and their description of them (“He was destroyed because he let love carry him away…she was fragile, but hard”) could have come straight from their Bonnie and Clyde treatment. Other favored representations of the New Sentimentality included L’Avventura, Malcolm X, Alfred Hitchcock, and, of course, Truffaut, who was shamelessly referenced four times. “He is Style over Content,” they wrote, meaning it as high praise. Consigned to the ash heap as relics of the Old Sentimentality were The Sound of Music, Gene Kelly, and John Wayne. “What we were talking about,” Newman wrote later, “was what is now known as ‘the Sixties.’ But as we were in the midst of living through them at the time, we didn’t have a chronological name for what was happening.”9

  “The New Sentimentality” slowed Benton and Newman’s work on Bonnie and Clyde, but not significantly: By August 1964, they had completed their first draft of the screenplay. Wright and Jones read what they had done and “flipped over it,” says Wright. “It was just marvelous.” The young producers were ready to spring into action, even though they weren’t entirely sure what they were supposed to do next. “We really didn’t have any idea other than that, if we got a budget together and then told [attorney] Bob Montgomery about it, we’d go to the major studios and tell them about François Truffaut and they’d come rushing to us,” says Wright.10

  Their first shock came when Wright, using the skills he had acquired in his production management class, went through Benton and Newman’s script page by page, only to realize that the $350,000 they had tossed around as a budget was a fantasy. “I broke it down, added it up, and to my horror, it came to the catastrophically high figure of a million three,” he says. “I kept checking my addition, thinking, ‘This is terrible!’”11 Wright’s math was correct: He and Jones hadn’t taken into account the fact that Bonnie and Clyde would require period automobiles, doubled and tripled costumes to account for all the blood and bullets the script now contained, and multiple locations. The film was no longer viable as the on-the-fly independent production they had envisioned.

  The second, far worse piece of news came in a letter from Truffaut to Elinor Jones on September 7, 1964. “I have had the new script…read to me in French,” he wrote of Bonnie and Clyde. “I thought all the modifications are excellent. I am, unfortunately, obliged to reply to you in the negative.” Three weeks earlier, Truffaut had warned Helen Scott in a letter “that I want to curb the enthusiasm of Elinor Jones.” Now, he was offering Jones a variety of reasons for turning down the film: He had decided that La Marié Était en Noir (The Bride Wore Black), a French-language adaptation of an American suspense novel, would be his next film; moreover, he wrote, Lewis Allen was insisting to him that his first American film would have to be Fahrenheit 451, which was now scheduled for production in the summer of 1965.12

  “I would like you to know that, of all the scripts I have turned down in the last five years, Bonnie and Clyde is the best, but I hope that you will fully understand my reasons and that David Newman and Robert Benton will also understand them,” Truffaut wrote. In fact his explanation was slightly slippery; it’s not clear why he would suddenly have accepted a dictum from Lewis Allen, with whom he had now had a long and testy relationship, about the start date of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was, at the time of his letter, going through some problems he didn’t share with Jones: He was in the middle of a divorce, and his latest film, La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin), had opened to poor reviews and mediocre business in France.13 In the letter, he sounded self-conscious, formal, and somewhat overinsistent about his lack of remorse. “I do not think that I have caused you to waste too much time, nor have I broken my word,” he wrote, “since I had always made it clear I would make my final decision when the second version of the script was finished.”

  But Truffaut seemed to know how crushing his abrupt about-face would be, because he had taken the time to arrange an extraordinary second chance for the movie. He had given Benton and Newman’s script, he said, to Jean-Luc Godard, who “greatly liked” it, was “a very fast worker,” “speaks English fluently,” and “might well give you an American Breathless.” Truffaut didn’t say whether he had ever talked with Godard about the possibility of taking over Bonnie and Clyde when both men were in New York. But he was telling the truth about Godard’s reaction: Before he broke the news to Jones, he had sent the script to Italy, where Godard was showing his newest movie at the Venice Film Festival, and Godard had promptly cabled him back: “Am in love with Bonnie and also with Clyde. Stop. Would be happy to speak with authors in New York.”14

  Benton and Newman didn’t have the time or the inclination to be devastated. They were now exchanging one leader of the French New Wave for the other, and hesitation was a luxury they couldn’t afford: Two of Godard’s newest movies were showing at the New York Film Festival the following week, and the director wanted to meet them during his visit to New York and make a decision about Bonnie and Clyde on the spot.

  The festival, sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, was only a year old in 1964, but under the guidance of its respected and influential program director, Richard Roud, it was already starting to assert itself as an annual summit meeting for the world’s leading filmmakers. Besides Godard, who was showing A Woman Is a Woman and Band of Outsiders, that fall’s invited directors included Bernardo Bertolucci, Abel Gance, Luis Buñuel, and Satyajit Ray. An invitation extended to an American director signified approval by the auteurist critical community—thus the inclusion of Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe and Robert Rossen’s Lilith (the latter making its long-delayed and poorly received debut).15

  As Truffaut had said, Godard worked fast: In the four years since Breathless, he had directed seven features as well as shorts in three different multidirector omnibus films, a format that enjoyed brief popularity in Europe in the early 1960s. “That was very much a Nouvelle Vague thing—get in there and do it quickly,” says Elinor Jones. “Even Truffaut thought that way. But with Godard, it went to extremes.”16

  When he arrived in New York, Godard began his flirtation with Bonnie and Clyde by meeting with the two producers for lunch at the Algonquin. “Godard was somewhat cool,
somewhat distant, but he said he was interested in the script,” says Wright.17 There was a bit of polite, detached discussion in which Godard advanced some of his ideas for the film and Jones and Wright discussed their own. Harrison Starr, whom Godard brought along to the meeting, says it didn’t go well. “I literally saw the gate close in Jean-Luc’s eyes, and that was it. I knew that he wasn’t going to work with them.”18

  At lunch, the conversation turned to Arthur Penn’s 1958 film, The Left Handed Gun. “We were all interested in how a western could be made a different way,” says Wright. “And Godard turned to me and said, ‘Could you arrange a screening for me by tomorrow?’ I thought, this is a challenge—Godard is saying, I wonder if this kid has enough clout to set up a screening on short notice.” Wright managed to book a showing of Penn’s film, after which he says Godard warmed toward them a bit.19 For their part, Benton and Newman had quickly transferred their enthusiasm to the director—whom, after all, they had already labeled a pillar of the New Sentimentality. “I think they were just so enamored of his work and of the possibility of getting another one of their film heroes,” says Jones.20

  “Bob and David just wanted to get it made!” says Leslie Newman. “To have people like Truffaut and Godard coming in—oh, my God, these were their idols, the people whose movies they worshipped.”21

  But the producers had as many doubts about what Godard would bring to Benton and Newman’s script as Godard had about them. “The truth is that Norton and I didn’t want Godard—we didn’t like him for Bonnie and Clyde,” says Jones. “I think that particularly upset David.”22

  It was in this context—one of growing tension, unarticulated concerns, and intense time pressure—that the key players in Bonnie and Clyde gathered at Elinor and Tom Jones’s apartment on September 19 for a meeting that has since become one of the great gallows-humor moments in the film’s history, although decades of embellishment and retelling have blurred some of the precise details.23 Assembled in the living room were Godard, Jones, and Wright; Benton and Newman; and Helen Scott, who was continuing to act as a liaison on the project.*

  After some pleasantries, they got down to business. “Everybody remembers that meeting differently,” says Benton. But it began to go wrong almost from the start, when Godard, with little preamble, announced that he wanted to begin preproduction on Bonnie and Clyde in December—just three months away—and that he intended to shoot the movie in New Jersey in January, on a four-week shooting schedule. He also said he wanted to give the script to Columbia right away, information that took everyone by surprise.

  Nobody in the living room had very much to say as Godard talked, but after a few minutes, Norton Wright’s reservations boiled over into panic. “I said to him, you know, that’s really not the way to do it. This is a period piece, it’s an expensive piece, we should shoot it on location in the places where Bob and David had done their research. The spring would be good, or maybe the fall—but it’s snowy and cold and wet in New Jersey.”

  Whatever Wright’s exact words were—he had apparently referred to meteorological reports—they caused the temperature in the room to plunge dramatically. According to Benton, Godard stood up, said, “I’m talking cinema and you’re talking meteorology,” and walked out of the apartment.

  Others at the meeting don’t recall Godard’s departure as being quite so dramatic; he may have excused himself to use the restroom and said his good-byes and left soon after that. Norton Wright says Godard’s comment about “matters météorologiques” was made not at the meeting, but to Benton and Newman the next day; over drinks, just before Godard left for Paris, he told the two writers, “Call me when the script reverts to your ownership.” But nobody disputes the astonishing swiftness with which the meeting and Godard’s involvement in Bonnie and Clyde were terminated.

  Elinor Jones and her brother were ashen. Jones tried, the next day, to reconstruct what had gone wrong in a conversation with Helen Scott, who filled in a key piece of information that Godard hadn’t shared with them: He had been trying to get out of a contract to shoot the film Alphaville for Columbia, and in order to have a chance of getting the studio to agree to a switch in projects, he needed Bonnie and Clyde to replace it in the exact same spot on his schedule. Harrison Starr, who was still hoping that he might be able to produce the film if Jones and Wright fell out of the picture, felt it could have worked on Godard’s terms. “Mike Frankovich had worked in Europe, so he heard the beat of the drum—he could pick it up, that way of making movies,” he says. “We could have done the picture very well for $350,000, and that’s what Columbia was looking for.”24

  Godard, though nobody involved in Bonnie and Clyde knew it at the time, had been so serious about shooting the movie that, while in New York, he had met with Elliott Gould—then known only as the man who had recently married Barbra Streisand—and Buck Henry, who had both flown from Los Angeles to discuss making the film with him over dinner at the Algonquin. “I go into the restaurant, and there’s Jean-Luc Godard, sitting cross-legged on a banquette,” says Henry. “And we sit down and have a meal. It made no sense at all. Apparently, Elliott had talked to Godard about doing Bonnie and Clyde, and he was going to get him a writer to do it, and we had this strange conversation where I guess I told Godard how much I liked his films, and he said a lot of things to me that I didn’t understand at all, culminating in, ‘I will write things on legal pads and send them to you!’ I said, ‘Great.’ I went off, spent the night in Barbra and Elliott’s apartment, and I don’t think I ever heard about it again.”25

  Godard was a “strange, mad guy,” Helen Scott told Jones. But, she added, her and her brother’s inexperience was what had really caused the problem. Producers more schooled in handling directors with volatile temperaments would have read the situation correctly and just rolled with whatever Godard was suggesting; they would have understood that all decisions made now could be altered later. Had Harrison Starr been present at the meeting, Scott told her, he would have known how to handle Godard. The director “wanted simple enthusiasm from us,” Jones wrote in the notes she had begun to keep after important meetings. “But our cool response to giving the script to Columbia really turned him off, and the word ‘meteorologically’ really threw him…. He felt we were formal, slow, reserved [and behaved as if we were] ‘not sure we really wanted Godard.’”26

  When Truffaut heard what had happened, he called it “unfortunate.” Wright and Jones, he said, shouldn’t have shown their distress; “they should have known that Columbia would have decided when it could have been done.”27

  More than forty years later, Wright says, “I take great pride that I was the fella that prevented the movie being made by Godard, because he would not have made a good movie out of a marvelous, exceptional, groundbreaking script. We had just equated Truffaut and Godard with the New Wave in our minds, but the difference was immense—Truffaut had a huge humanitarian heart, and Godard was doing almost self-reflexive movies after that.” But at the time, Wright was mortified by the cave-in his innocuous comment had caused and, like Jones, wondering what their next move could possibly be.28

  Helen Scott encouraged Jones to shrug off the meeting, calling it “terribly funny.” “Don’t feel desolate!” she said. “You’ve had an experience with Godard.”29 But Jones and her brother were devastated; in the space of two weeks, Bonnie and Clyde had lost two directors. And Benton and Newman were no less glum. “After that, all the air seemed to go out of it,” says Leslie Newman.30 “It was really nobody’s fault,” says Benton, “but we thought, ‘That’s it. It’s over.’”31

  As the fall of 1964 began, The Graduate was no closer to finding a home at a studio than Bonnie and Clyde was. Larry Turman had pitched his movie to every studio executive on both coasts, assuring them that the film could be made for just $1 million, but he had overestimated the degree to which Mike Nichols’s involvement would be a selling point. “I couldn’t get to first base at the studios with Nichols,” he says. “The
y didn’t care about Barefoot in the Park—he had never directed a movie before.”32 The fact that Turman was trying to make a deal without having a script to show anyone may have made his task even more difficult. Paramount’s production chief, Jack Karp, turned him down flat; so did Mike Frankovich, who, focused on Europe, had never heard of Nichols. Even when Turman went to United Artists to talk to David Picker, who at thirty-three was one of the youngest and most forward-looking studio executives in the business (he had been the first to recognize the potential value of the James Bond franchise), he got a flat no: Picker looked at the novel’s sparse descriptions and uninflected dialogue and said, “What’s funny about it?”33

  While Turman was making the rounds, Nichols was in the middle of his own misadventure in Los Angeles, getting a taste of the difference between New York theater culture and the priorities of a Hollywood studio. He and Peter Shaffer had made good progress on the script for The Public Eye, working together in Nichols’s New York apartment at the Beresford every morning—or, given Nichols’s night-owl lifestyle, every afternoon. “He was so sweet,” says Nichols. “We had a great time. He used to get very pissed off at me for oversleeping—he’d be there waiting, and I’d be late to a meeting in my own apartment!”

  Nichols had not yet met the man who was to produce The Public Eye for Universal, Ross Hunter, the discreetly gay, indiscreetly extravagant, luxury-obsessed creator of what had become a house style for the studio’s “women’s pictures.” The prolific Hunter was probably Universal’s most important in-house producer at a time when the studio didn’t have much to show for itself: He would deliver several films a year, usually a mix of very lucrative Doris Day pictures, Tammy movies, and melodramas like the remake of Imitation of Life, most of which shared a deep passion for interior decoration, hair, costume design, makeup, and scores drenched in Mantovaniesque strings. Nobody, including Hunter, made great claims for the film’s scripts or performances, but his ability to deliver moneymaking movies had won him a measure of respect and power at the studio. “I have nothing against art,” Hunter once said. “Hiroshima Mon Amour is great, but I wouldn’t have produced it if I’d had the chance.”34 At Universal, there was no danger of that.