Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  A few weeks later, Warner went to New York, where he announced the sale of his stake in the studio to Seven Arts Productions, a tiny film packager for television, for $183,942,000, a case of the minnow swallowing the whale. Warner personally cashed out with $32 million. Eliot Hyman became the new CEO; his son, Kenny, who produced The Hill and The Dirty Dozen for MGM, became head of production, with a three-year contract. The new owners retained Benny Kalmenson, Warner’s number two, as well as marketing executive Richard Lederer and Joe Hyams, who worked for Lederer. Kenny Hyman immediately announced he would woo directors by giving them more artistic control. He picked up Sam Peckinpah for two films, The Wild Bunch and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, after the director had been virtually blackballed for drunkenness, disrespect, and other crimes against the studio system. And he gave a young in-house writer a shot at directing a Fred Astaire musical, Finian’s Rainbow.

  IF BONNIE AND CLYDE was one of the last pictures of the old Warner regime, Finian’s Rainbow was one of the first pictures of the new Hyman regime. Just as Beatty was finishing up, Francis Ford Coppola, who had gone to film school at UCLA, set to work. The year before, Coppola had directed his first serious feature, You’re a Big Boy Now, from his own script, adapted from a novel by David Benedictus. Says John Ptak, who also went to UCLA and became an agent, “Ninety percent of the directors started as writers because there was no way that you were gonna be a director. Nothing. Nada. The only thing that these guys really had was the ability to tell a story.” You’re a Big Boy Now was regarded as nothing less than a miracle. “In those years, it was unheard of for a young fellow to make a feature film,” Coppola recalled. “I was the first one!” Those who followed worshipped him. “Francis was our idol,” says actress Margot Kidder. “If we could meet Francis, that was as close to God as one could get.”

  When Coppola had gone to UCLA in 1963, the film departments were ghettos for slackers and shirkers. USC’s was housed in an old stable; UCLA’s was quartered in Quonset huts left over from World War II. “It wasn’t considered a serious major,” recalls screenwriter Willard Huyck, who entered USC in 1965. “You’d be walking by the film school, they’d grab you and say, ‘You want to be a filmmaker?’ It was very easy to get into.” The other motivating factor was, of course, the Vietnam War. Explains sound designer Walter Murch, “We had all gone to film school because we were interested in film, but it was also this bubble of refuge from being drafted.”

  At the age of twenty-eight, Coppola was a hefty five foot eleven, bearded, wore horn-rims with glass-brick lenses. He was terminally rumpled, as if he had slept in his clothes. This was his Fidel Castro phase, and he generally wore fatigues, boots, and a cap. He took Finian’s Rainbow, which came with a rock-bottom budget for a musical, a cast already in place, and a strong producer, against his better judgment. He explained, “Musical comedy was something that I had been raised with in my family, and I thought, frankly, that my father would be impressed.”

  One day in the summer of 1967, he noticed a slight, reticent young man of twenty-three, also bearded, hanging about the edges of the set, watching the ancient crew totter about its job. He wore the same outfit every day: jeans and a white shirt with a button-down collar, tails out. George Lucas was the USC star whose student short, THX:1138:4EB/Electronic Labyrinth had taken first prize at the third National Student Film Festival in 1968, and whose Warners internship allowed him to do essentially whatever he wanted on the lot for six months. Lucas intended to apprentice in Warners’ legendary animation department—Tex Avery, Chuck Jones—but like most everything else at the studio, it had been closed down, and he gravitated to Coppola’s set, the only sign of life on the lot.

  Lucas was almost pathologically shy—particularly with adults. When he began dating the woman he would eventually marry, Marcia Griffin, it was months before she could extract his place of birth. “It was really hard to get him to speak at all,” she recalls. I used to say, ‘Well, George, where’ya from?’

  “ ‘Hmm. California.’

  “ ‘Oh, okay, where in California?’

  “ ‘Umm... Northern California.’

  “ ‘Where in Northern California?’

  “ ‘Just up north, the San Francisco area.’ He would never volunteer anything about himself. Very private, very quiet.” But with Coppola, Lucas could talk movies, and Francis recognized a kindred spirit. He was the only other “beard” on the lot, the only other film student, the only person under sixty—almost.

  Lucas was thrilled to meet Coppola, who was already a legend among the USC film students. Says Murch, “Because of his personality he actually succeeded in getting his hand on the doorknob and flinging open the door, and suddenly there was a crack of light, and you could see that one of us, a film student without any connections to the film business, had put one foot in front of another and actually made the transition from being a film student to being somebody who made a feature film sponsored by one of the studios.”

  But after two weeks watching Coppola struggle with Finian’s Rainbow, Lucas decided he’d seen enough. Coppola was annoyed: “What do you mean, you’re leaving? Aren’t I entertaining enough? Have you learned everything you’re going to learn watching me direct?” He offered him a slot on the production. Lucas, too, fell under Coppola’s spell.

  However, Coppola was under the thumb of producer Joe Landon. The young director hated the idea of shooting on the lot, wanted to go on location in Kentucky where the story was set, but of course the studio refused, and unlike Beatty, he didn’t have enough clout to get his way. Toward the end of production, he broke free, went up to the Bay Area with some actors, a skeleton crew, and shot guerrilla style.

  Coppola’s methods were so unorthodox, he always felt his days were numbered. Recalls Milius, “Francis had this closet in the producer’s building. He was stealing film stock and equipment and putting them in there. He said, ‘Someday when they finally throw me out of here, we’ll have enough and we can make another film’”

  BONNIE AND CLYDE was finished early in the summer of 1967. The studio guys had snickered through the screening of the rough cut, and Lederer knew they were going to bury it. It wasn’t even on the schedule. The head of distribution was a man named Morey “Razz” Goldstein. Without having seen the picture, Goldstein decided to release it on September 22 at a drive-in in Denton, Texas. “September, in those days, was the worst time of the year to send out a picture,” says Lederer. “It was just throwing it away.” One day in New York, Lederer got a call from a guy who worked at the studio doing trailers for him. He said, “I just saw a rough cut of Bonnie and Clyde; it’s dynamite, a special movie.” Lederer went to Kalmenson, said, “Benny, listen. Don’t lock in Bonnie and Clyde just yet. Let’s take a look at it before we make our decision. There’s a rough cut available. Warren will scream, but I can get it sneaked in overnight.”

  The next afternoon, Lederer screened the picture for himself and his staff. He was knocked out. He went over to Goldstein’s office, found the four division managers in a meeting. Goldstein said, “Dick, we’ve seen the movie, and we’re sticking with our original schedule. But I tell you what we’d like to do, one of those great country premieres in Denton. You get the old cars and raise hell, and you bring Warren, and Arthur and Faye, and we’ll have a great time.” Lederer was furious. He turned to the division managers and said, “Listen. No problem getting the old cars, but that’s about all I can get. The only place Warren is gonna go when he hears what you’re doing is into this office with a knife, to cut off your balls, one by one.” He got up and walked out.

  Meanwhile, the first public screening was held at the old Directors Guild building on Sunset. Beatty invited the giants of Hollywood, the men he had cultivated—Charlie Feldman, Sam Spiegel, Jean Renoir, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Sam Goldwyn, Bill Goetz, and so on. It was a nervy thing to do, and his friends told him he was crazy because there was nothing this crowd liked more than sticking it to some poor schmuck w
ho was starring in a movie he was producing—must be some kind of vanity thing. The day before, Rex Reed’s nasty “Will the Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up” had appeared in Esquire. Beatty was humiliated, and still depressed about the piece. He sat through the film out of sorts, barely looking at it. Bonnie and Clyde concluded with its balletic ambush. “In those days, people were not getting their heads blown off with hundreds of thousands of squibs in every scene,” says Beatty. “It was as violent a piece of film as had ever been in movies.” There was a long silence, which seemed to him like an eternity. Then the entire audience erupted in cheers. Ten rows behind him, somebody stood up and said, “Well, Warren Beatty just shoved it up our ass.”

  On the basis of this and other screenings, Beatty fought for better playdates. Goldstein was obdurate, said, “You guys are all crazy with this movie, give up on it already.” But Beatty did not give up. Joe Hyams persuaded him and Penn that the Montreal Film Festival was the appropriate place for the premiere. “I remembered they had a picture called Mickey One, a piece of shit, and the only place in the world it succeeded was in Canada,” recalls Hyams. “I said, ‘That picture made it in Canada! This picture can make it in Canada!’ “Bonnie and Clyde premiered worldwide at the Montreal International Film Festival at Expo ’67, on Friday, August 4.

  “What a reaction. It was incredible,” recalls Lederer. “There were fourteen curtain calls for the stars, there was a standing ovation. After it was all over, Warren was on the bed in his suite with a girl on either side, dressed, but cuddling up to him. There was this nice young French girl who was the macher of the film festival. Warren said to this girl, ‘Listen, honey, where is the wildest spot in Montreal? I want to go there tonight.’ She said, ‘Mr. Beatty, this is the wildest spot in Montreal!’”

  In New York, Bonnie and Clyde opened at the Murray Hill and the Forum, on 47th Street and Broadway, on August 13, right in the middle of the Summer of Love, a few weeks after riots leveled the ghettos of Detroit and Newark. Bosley Crowther had seen the picture in Montreal, and hated it. His review in the New York Times was devastating. He called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

  Print critics had considerably more influence then than they do now. Movies opened slowly, starting in New York and L.A. and moving outward to the hinterlands at a leisurely pace, like ripples in a pond, and therefore their success depended on reviews and word of mouth, as well as print ads. Still, movie reviewing was not taken seriously. It was a gentleman’s sport, dominated by Crowther’s middle-brow taste. A bad review from him could kill a picture. Lately he had been on a tear against violence in movies, slagging not only Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, but John Boorman’s Point Blank for their lack of redeeming social value. Crowther repeated his attack on Bonnie and Clyde on two successive weekends in the Sunday Entertainment section. “I was scared to death of his power and the fact that his review made me look bad,” says Lederer. “It really hurt me.”

  Benton and Newman and their families had rented a house in Bridgehampton for the summer. Benton told Sally, “Look, it’s just another movie. It’s been a big part of our lives, but you can’t expect anything.” Then he read Crowther’s attack and thought, “It’s not even going to last two weeks.” The rest of the notices—especially the influential Time and Newsweek reviews—were nearly as savage as Crowther’s. Joe Morgenstern, writing in Newsweek, called the film “a squalid shoot-’em-up for the moron trade.” But the Times began to receive letters from people who had seen the film and liked it. What’s more, Pauline Kael loved Bonnie and Clyde.

  Kael was a tiny, birdlike woman, who looked like she might have been the registrar at a small New England college for women. Her unremarkable appearance belied a passion for disputation and a veritable genius for invective. Her writing fairly crackled with electricity, love of movies, and the excitement of discovery. Emerging in middle age from the shadows of Berkeley art houses where she wrote mimeographed program notes for a coterie of whey-faced devotees, Kael blinked in the glare of the New York media world, then went to work. She shunned politics, but something of a New Left agenda nevertheless found its way into her reviews. Her version of the antiwar movement’s hatred of the “system” was a deep mistrust of the studios and a well-developed sense of Us versus Them. She wrote about the collision between the directors and the executives with the passion of Marx writing about class conflict.

  Kael was very much the activist, very much the filmmakers’ advocate. Like Sarris, she was not merely writing service pieces advising readers how to spend their Saturday nights. The two reviewers were waging war on “Crowtherism,” as they called it, soldiers in a battle against Philistinism. At the same time, they would convince the intelligentsia that Hollywood “movies,” which had always been déclassé—William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald had gone slumming when they went to Hollywood—could be art.

  What Kael was saying was fundamentally sensible, but her sympathies left her vulnerable to the ballad of the helpless artist, a sad song that more than one director, hungry for a favorable review, was ready to sing. Says writer-actor Buck Henry, “Everyone knew that Kael was feedable, that if you sat next to her, got her drunk, and fed her some lines, you could get them replayed in some other form.”

  Kael saw right away that Warners was too hidebound to understand what they had in Bonnie and Clyde. It was a situation tailored to her talents. She weighed in with a nine-thousand-word review that The New Republic, for which she was writing at the time, refused to print. It ended up in The New Yorker, and secured her a regular spot there. In her review, she said that “Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it.” But more than that, she conducted a campaign to rehabilitate the film. Kael had acolytes—critics who followed her lead and would later be dubbed “Paulettes”—and she mobilized the troops. Rumor had it that she persuaded Morgenstern to see the picture over again. A week later, he published an unprecedented recantation.

  “The Pauline Kael review was the best thing that ever happened to Benton and myself,” recalls Newman. “She put us on the map. This was a genre gangster film in its broad outline, not a highly respected genre. What she did was say to people, ‘You can look at this seriously, it doesn’t have to be an Antonioni film about alienated people walking on a beach in black and white for it to be a work of art.’” Adds Towne, “Without her, Bonnie and Clyde would have died the death of a fuckin’ dog.” Giving a major share of the credit to the writers, Kael slighted Beatty, dismissed him as a middling actor. He called Kael, charmed her. When she finally met him, some time later, at a screening of a documentary on Penn, she says “he came on very strong to my daughter, who was a teenager at the time.”

  Benny Kalmenson, a holdover from the Warners regime, was a former steel-worker, a squat, heavyset man who, like many Warners executives, dressed like a mobster from one of the studio’s famous gangster pictures. “He was always saying, fuckin’ Warner this, fuckin’ Warner that—every other word was fuck, fuck, fuck,” recalls Lederer. “He was a streetfighter.” When Kalmenson finally saw the picture, his reaction was simple, “It’s a piece of fucking shit!” Furious, Beatty followed him into his office, said, “Let me pay you for this negative and I’ll give you a profit.” Kalmanson looked at him as if he were a termite, replied, “Ah, get the fuck outta here, Warren, where the fuck are you gonna get two fuckin’ million dollars?” Beatty said, “I can get it, don’t worry.” Later, Beatty thought, They’re beginning to take me seriously. They know they can get out of it if they want to.

  But it didn’t matter. Bonnie and Clyde opened in Denton, Texas, on September 13, went wide through the South and Southwest the next day. After two weeks, it was shoved aside by a high-profile Seven Arts production, Reflections in a Golden Eye, with Marlon Brando, that S
even Arts had booked into Bonnie and Clyde’s theaters before it had purchased Warners. (Coppola had worked on the script.) “In effect,” says Beatty, “to have kept Bonnie and Clyde going would have lost them the theaters for Reflections!”

  Bonnie and Clyde did no better than fair business in New York. Lederer went to Kalmanson, implored him to pull the rest of the September dates to give word of mouth time to build. “I really think this man was beginning to have an inkling that the business was passing him by,” recalls Lederer. “This was a watershed movie for him, because he knew he blew it. But he was stubborn, a man of iron will. I thought he’d kill me. He cursed me—‘I don’t want to hear any more about this fuckin’ Bonnie and Clyde, I’m not taking anything out of release, I’ve got eighteen pictures to put out, it’s gonna stay where it is, goddamn it!’ And it did. And it died. It was finished by the end of October. I was discouraged by that September opening, after we’d broke our asses, so I gave up on the picture. I had done my best; I never felt it could be resurrected. I really didn’t.”

  •

  AROUND THIS TIME, Peter Fonda was in Toronto attending a Canadian exhibitors convention, doing his bit to flog his latest AIP picture, The Trip, from a script by Jack Nicholson. At the time, he was the John Wayne of biker flicks, having starred in AIP’s biggest hit, The Wild Angels, which had pulled in a nice $10 million gross on a $360,000 budget. Fonda, looking elegant in a custom-made double-breasted suit, despite the conspicuous absence of socks and shoes, was seated next to Jacqueline Bisset. “I’d always wanted to fuck her,” he says. “She asked me, with this devastating smile, ‘Peter, how come you don’t have any shoes or socks on?’ I smiled back at her and said, ‘It’s because I can put my foot up under your dress, Jackie,’ and my foot was on its way up her leg. ‘Don’t!’ she shrieked. ‘Stop it!’ Then I heard, ‘Gentlemen, Peter Fonda.’ ‘Excuse me, Jackie. That’s me.’” Fonda made his way to the podium, made a few halfhearted remarks, accepted an engraved gold Zippo lighter, and retreated to his red-flocked room at the Lakeshore Motel to sign hundreds of glossies for the wives, children, and friends of the exhibitors.