“How much?”
“Well, 40 percent.”
“Fine.”
Although the deal would be a disaster for the studio, it didn’t look so bad at the time. Modestly budgeted pictures like Bonnie and Clyde were breaking even at about twice their cost. Warners didn’t expect Bonnie and Clyde to do very well, and according to their deal, Beatty wouldn’t see any money until the movie made almost three times the negative cost,† leaving a small cushion of profit for Warners.
Benton and Newman, babes in toyland, went out to L.A. in July 1966 for ten days to work on the script. They went up to Beatty’s penthouse suite in the Beverly Wilshire, aptly called El Escondido (the Hideaway), where he lived alone. It was small, consisting of two rooms filled with a disorder of books, scripts, records, half-eaten sandwiches, and a slew of room service trays piled against the door or buried amid the debris of phone messages and crumpled typing paper, and a piano. Outside was a good-sized terrace covered with Astroturf on which he lay in the sun reading, or looking out over the shopping district of Beverly Hills and, on a clear day, the sprawling homes rising above Sunset Boulevard in the distance. Beatty drove them around in his black Lincoln Continental convertible with red leather upholstery, one of four cars with which the Ford Motor Company supplied him every year. Every time he turned on the radio, they’d hear “Guantanamera.” At the time, Beatty was seeing Maya Plisetskaya, the Russian ballerina. She was older than he, and stunningly beautiful, great bone structure, no makeup, no jewelry, dressed simply and unpretentiously in plain blouses and slacks. As Stella Adler, Beatty’s former acting teacher is reputed to have said, “They’re madly in love, but of course neither can understand a word the other is saying.”
Beatty shepherded Benton and Newman through their encounters with Mac-Ewen. “Warren said, ‘He’s going to say this, I’ll say that, then he’s gonna say this, then Arthur will say that,’” recalls Newman. “We went in, and it went exactly the way Warren said it was going to happen. It was like the Twilight Zone.” But Warner tried to back out at the last minute. He was unhappy that Penn and Beatty had populated the cast with unknowns. He memoed Mac-Ewen, saying, “Who wants to see the rise and fall of a couple of rats. Am sorry I did not read the script before I said yes.... This era went out with Cagney.” About a month before they were to begin production, Penn, too, tried to back out. He felt the script problems had not, could not, be solved. Beatty refused to let him go, and brought in Towne for a polish.
ROBERT TOWNE, three years Beatty’s senior, was born Robert Schwartz in 1934, and spent his early years in San Pedro, just south of L.A., where his father, Lou, had a small ladies clothing store called the Towne Smart Shop. His mother, Helen, was a great beauty, something of a trophy wife. He had a brother, Roger, who was about six years younger. San Pedro, a blue-collar fishing port, was a romantic venue for someone like Towne, and years later in interviews he always gave the impression he grew up there, but in fact, his father, who changed the family name to Towne, had gotten into real estate and reinvented himself, becoming a successful developer. He moved the family to Rolling Hills, a gated community in the most affluent part of affluent Palos Verdes, where everyone had horses. Towne went to an exclusive private school, Chadwick, and then moved to Brentwood as a teenager. He grew up to be tall and athletic, but it took him a while to find his look. By the ’60s, his hair had already begun to thin. He grew it long and brushed it to the side, concealing his receding hairline. Towne’s melancholic, hang-dog expression and pale, feverish eyes, along with the Talmudic slope of his shoulders gave him a rabbinical cast he could never entirely shake.
Towne had an appealing personality. He was a sweet, gentle, self-effacing man. In a town full of dropouts, where few read books, he was unusually literate. He had a real feel for the fine points of plot, the nuances of dialogue, had the ability to explain and contextualize film in the body of Western drama and literature.
Before the ’70s, screenwriters were disposable. If a project was going badly, the studio would throw another writer on the fire. Even they didn’t take themselves seriously. Towne’s was the first generation of Hollywood writers for whom scripts were ends in themselves, not way stations on the road to the great American novel. Towne’s forte was dialogue. “He had this ability, in every page he wrote and rewrote, to leave a sense of moisture on the page, as if he just breathed on it in some way,” says producer Gerald Ayres, who would hire him to write The Last Detail. “There was always something that jostled your sensibilities, that made the reading of the page not just a perception of plot, but the feeling that something accidental and true to the life of a human being had happened there.”
Towne was a wonderful talker, but he could be didactic and long-winded, and many found him self-absorbed. Says David Geffen, who came to know Towne well, “Bob was a very talented writer, although an extraordinarily boring man. He always talked about himself. He used to go to Catalina to write, and he would describe to you in endless detail watching the cows shit.”
Towne broke into the business writing for television, then wrote for Roger Corman, who was producing exploitation flicks for American International Pictures (AIP) and became celebrated for allowing many of the movie brats to pass through his shoot-today-edit-tomorrow low-budget motion picture academy. Towne claims he and Beatty, then in their twenties, first met as one was entering, the other leaving the office of Dr. Martin Grotjahn, their common psychoanalyst. Towne had a script, a Western called The Long Ride Home that Corman wanted to direct. Beatty happened to read it, thought about playing the lead. Recalls Towne, “He set up a meeting with Roger, which was unusual, because Roger was doing his quickies with five-day production schedules, and Warren had worked with Kazan. He asked to look at an example of Roger’s work. Roger showed him The Tomb of Ligeia that I had written for him. This was not something that endeared Roger, as a director, to Warren. Warren said, ‘Look, I feel like I’m about to get married, and the bride is just beautiful, but then I learn she’s been a hooker for eight years.’” Beatty declined the picture, but liked Towne, and they came to be fast friends. They talked on the phone daily, sometimes more.
Both Towne and Beatty were great students of medicine, and Towne became a fast draw with the PDR (Physicians’ Desk Reference), the bible of pharmaceuticals. At one point, the two men, along with Jack Nicholson, semiseriously entertained the notion of finding an outstanding premed student, putting him (even better, her) through medical school, and then maintaining him as their own personal doctor, always on call.
Famously hypochondriacal in later years, Towne was worrying about his health even then. He had backaches and allergies. When most people get a cold, they ignore it. Towne was at the doctor in a wink, before the phlegm surfaced at the back of his throat, worried that his sniffles might portend something worse, a cat’s-paw for the murky nimbus of illness that he imagined surrounded him. His allergies were so debilitating he said they kept him scriptdoctoring, too weak to write originals. He was allergic to different things at different times. One day it would be molds and spores, then soy, the carpets in his home, an acacia tree in the backyard, which he insisted be chopped down. He thought he had a thyroid disorder. He was allergic to wine and cheese, even damp weather. Later he bought a special air filter, the kind hospitals use in burn rooms to keep out bacteria.
Towne started work on Bonnie and Clyde, and labored for three weeks during preproduction. “Both Warren and Arthur judged the script to be in trouble,” he recalls. They objected to the ménage a trois. Beatty liked to play against his image, but he said, “Let me tell you one thing right now: I ain’t gonna play no fag.” He thought the audience wouldn’t accept it. “They’re going to piss all over my leg,” he said, using one of his favorite expressions. Benton and Newman didn’t get it. “We were trying to make a French movie, and those were issues that never bothered Truffaut,” says Benton. But Penn told them, “You’re making a mistake, guys, because these characters are out there far enough. The
y kill people and rob banks. If you want the audience to identify with them, you’re going to lose that immediately if you say this guy is homosexual. It’s going to destroy the movie.” Benton and Newman came around, made Clyde impotent instead. Towne agreed. “None of us felt we had to avoid a taboo,” he says. “We just felt we couldn’t dramatically resolve relationships that complex, and still rob banks and kill people. You just run out of time. You look at Jules and Jim, and it takes a whole movie to go from Tinker to Evers to Chance. Without the action and the violence.”
Towne’s primary contribution was to move some scenes around. There’s a pivotal moment in which the gang picks up an undertaker (Gene Wilder). They’re all fooling around in the car, high on the excitement of robbing banks, until someone asks the man what he does. He tells them. The disclosure palpably dampens their spirits, underlined when Bonnie says, “Get him out of here.” The scene originally appeared toward the end, after Bonnie visits her mother. Towne moved it up, to a point before she sees her mother, so that it emphasizes the dark cloud of doom that hovers over the gang, and makes the subsequent reunion with her family a bittersweet occasion, not a happy one, the way Benton and Newman had it. He also wrote a tag line for Bonnie’s mother, a cold shower on the sentimentality of the sequence. After Bonnie expresses their desire to settle down nearby, Mother Parker says, “You try to live three miles from me, and you won’t live long, honey.”
Says Towne, “When I was a kid, I noticed four things about movies: the characters could always find parking spaces at every hour of the day and night, they never got change in restaurants, and husbands and wives never slept in the same bed. Women went to sleep with their makeup on and woke with it unmussed. I thought to myself, I’m never going to do that. In Bonnie and Clyde—although I don’t think it was my doing—Bonnie counts out every penny of change, and C.W. gets stuck in a parking place and has a hard time making a getaway.”
By the time they were ready to go on location, the script revisions were finished, and Towne’s job was done. Beatty asked him if he had any ideas for new projects. Ever since What’s New, Pussycat? got away from him, Beatty wanted to return to the same territory, the story of the compulsive Don Juan. Towne had been thinking about updating a Restoration comedy by William Wycherley called The Country Wife, which concerns a man who convinces his friends he’s been rendered impotent by his doctor, so they trust him with their wives, foolishly, as it turns out. Towne had met a friend of a friend, a hairdresser who was heterosexual, shattering his preconceptions about hairdressers. What better way to update Wycherley than to make the character a hairdresser, whom everyone assumes is gay. Beatty liked Towne’s idea, and hired him to write the script, for $25,000. Towne would accompany him to the set of Bonnie and Clyde in Dallas and write there. The working title was Hair. Later, it would become Shampoo.
Bonnie and Clyde was cast out of New York, the site of a revolution in casting almost single-handedly carried out by Marion Dougherty. When she started working, in the early ’60s, casting was still in the dark ages. “It was like ordering Chinese dinner,” says Dougherty. “They had all these people under contract, so you selected one from column A and one from column B.” By the late ’60s things weren’t much better. Explains Nessa Hyams, who was trained by Dougherty, “Most of the casting people were in L.A., and were middle-aged, ex-service-men, functionaries. Their idea of casting was to call the agents, who brought all the kids in—they were very similar in look and style, sort of nondescript, blond hair, blue-eyed kind of thing. Marion went to the theater, so she always knew who the new up-and-coming people were. There were a lot of young actors running around New York not yet discovered.”
Penn and Beatty didn’t need Dougherty, because both had worked in the theater and live television—which became the gene pool for the New Hollywood. The cast was filled with actors out of this milieu: Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, and Estelle Parsons. Outside of Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who had been hired to play Bonnie, none of the cast remotely resembled movie stars. Hackman had an average, Midwestern look; Parsons was plain; and by conventional standards, the rubbery-featured, moon-faced Pollard looked like a sideshow attraction. In short, they resembled real people.
From a casting point of view, the other turning point, being prepped around the same time, was The Graduate. In the book, the Braddocks and their friends, including the notorious Mrs. Robinson, were WASPs. Director Mike Nichols had indeed tried to go that route, offering Mrs. Robinson to Doris Day, who turned it down, saying, “It offended my sense of values.” He read Robert Redford and Candice Bergen. But Nichols’s instincts told him there was something off. “When I saw his test, I told Redford that he could not, at that point in his life, play a loser like Benjamin, ‘cause nobody would ever buy it. He said, ‘I don’t understand,’ and I said, ‘Well, let me put it to you another way: Have you ever struck out with a girl?’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ It made my point.” Nichols turned the families into Beverly Hills Jews, and gave the part to Dustin Hoffman instead. Choosing Hoffman over Redford was very bold indeed. The picture’s huge success launched Hoffman’s career, which in turn opened the floodgates for the ethnic actors from New York.
The most remarkable thing about the production of Bonnie and Clyde was that it was shot on location in Texas, far from the heavy hand of the studio, and Beatty had to fight for it. He wanted to know the whys and the wherefores of everything Penn did, and he had plenty of his own ideas as well. Says Parsons, “Warren and Arthur would argue about every shot. We used to go to our dressing rooms and wait and wait.” Towne had become close to Penn as well as Beatty. “I was this sort of buffer between them,” he says. “For example, Arthur had this scene that he wanted to do with Bonnie and Clyde, pretending what it would be like when they were dead. Warren came to me and said, ‘You can’t write that fuckin’ scene, ‘cause it’s a fuckin’ pretentious piece of shit.’ I thought, Well, maybe I’ll try and make it work; it’s only paper. I kept trying to make it work, and it never looked particularly good, and Warren kept yelling at me about it. ‘We can’t pamper him! How can you do this?’
“My theory about that was—there’s this joke about the guy who gets VD during the Korean War. The American doctor says, ‘This particular form of VD is just untreatable, and the only thing we can do, ‘cause you’re going to get gangrene, is amputate it.’ The guy says, ‘You can’t do that.’ He hears about some strange medicine man in the hills. He finds the medicine man and shows him his problem. The medicine man says, ‘The American doctors, they say cut?’ He says, ‘Yeah, yeah. No cut?’ The medicine man says, ‘No, no, wait two weeks, fall off by itself.’ What I felt was, in two weeks it would fall off by itself. Once Arthur had a chance to see the dailies and gain some confidence, he would not want to shoot the scene. And he didn’t.”
When Beatty wasn’t acting, producing, or arguing with Penn, he was in his Winnebago. Girls clambered in and out at all hours of the day and night. The cast and crew watched it rock back and forth like a ship upon the sea.
Beatty and Penn, Benton and Newman had all agreed that the violence should shock. The bullets should hurt not only the characters, but the audience as well. “It used to be that you couldn’t shoot somebody and see them hit in the same frame; there had to be a cut,” explains Penn. “We said, ‘Let’s not repeat what the studios have done for so long. It has to be in-your-face.’”
But at the end, Penn wanted a different effect. The idea of doing the controversial climax, wherein Bonnie and Clyde are mowed down by the law in a hail of bullets in slow motion like grotesquely tumbling marionettes, was Penn’s. He explains, “Remember, this was the time of Marshall McLuhan. The idea was to use the medium as a narrative device. I wanted to take the film away from the relatively squalid quality of the story into something a little more balletic. I wanted closure.” When a piece of Clyde’s head is blown away by a bullet, Penn wanted it to remind audiences of the Kennedy assassination.
The production r
eturned from location in the spring of 1967. By June, the cutting was nearly done, and Beatty showed it to Warner at the screening room in the mogul’s palatial home on Angelo Drive. Warner wouldn’t sit in a warm seat, so if the room were used before he used it, his chair was off limits. He was famous for his weak bladder. “I’ll tell ya something right now,” he said, turning to Penn. “If I have to go pee, the picture stinks.” The movie was about two hours, ten minutes. They still needed to take about fifteen minutes out of it. The film started, and five or six minutes in, Warner excused himself. He returned to his seat for another reel, and then he relieved himself again. And again. Finally the lights went up, bathing the Renoirs and Monets hanging on the walls in a soft glow. There was a dead silence. “What the fuck is this?” asked Warner. Silence. “How long was that picture?” Son-in-law Bill Orr said, “Colonel, it was two hours and ten minutes.” Replied Warner, “That’s the longest two hours and ten minutes I ever spent. It’s a three-piss picture!” Beatty and Penn didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Beatty tried to explain the picture to Warner. He spoke with painful deliberation, his sentences swallowed by the ominous silence that filled the room. Finally, grasping at straws, he said, “You know what, Jack? This is really kind of a homage to the Warner Brothers gangster films of the ’30s, you know?” Warner replied, “What the fuck’s a homage?”
They screened the film for Father Sullivan of the Catholic Legion of Decency. He swore Dunaway didn’t have any panties on in the opening scene where she runs down the stairs. Recalled Beatty, “He kept running the film back and forth, saying, ‘Oh no, that’s her breast!’ And we’d say, ‘No, Father, it’s just her dress, it’s silk.’ And he’d say, ‘No, no, I see her breast! Wait, I think I see a nipple!’ We’d say, ‘No, no, that’s just a button.’”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 4