Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Hopper and his friends were seized with a millennialism that seemed to be sweeping everything before it. As he put it, “I want to make movies about us. We’re a new kind of human being. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries.... We want to make little, personal, honest movies.... The studio is a thing of the past, and they are very smart if they just concentrate on becoming distributing companies for independent producers.”

  It wasn’t only the feverish, drug-crazed Hopper, high on his success, who was talking like his. He was the collective voice of the new generation. No one could have been less like Hopper than George Lucas, but Lucas said, “The studio system is dead. It died... when the corporations took over and the studio heads suddenly became agents and lawyers and accountants. The power is with the people now. The workers have the means of production!”

  Recalls Peter Guber, who was then rising fast through the ranks at Columbia, “Everything seemed different after Easy Rider. The executives were anxious, frightened because they didn’t have the answers any longer. You couldn’t imitate or mimic quite as easily, churn them out like eggs from a chicken. Every day, there was a new person being fired. If you watched where the furniture truck stopped, in front of some producer’s building, or some executive’s office, you knew before he knew that he was dead. My inexperience, lack of contacts and relationships were not handicaps. Because of my youth, people asked, ‘Well, what do you think?’”

  Perhaps the most concrete result of Easy Rider’s success was the legitimation of the Raybert idea, and the transformation of the company into a significant cultural force. It not only made a big movie, it defined a sensibility, opened Hollywood to the counterculture. As Schrader, who lost his job at the Free Press by panning Easy Rider, summed it up, “BBS fired a cannon shot across the bow. Coppola and Lucas would sink the ship.”

  Shortly before the picture was released, Raybert became BBS (Bert, Bob, and Steve), with the addition of Blauner. Blauner had become an enormous, intimidating three-hundred-pound bear of a man, bluff and plainspoken, with a bushy red beard. As an executive at Screen Gems, he favored expensive, flashy suits. After he joined BBS, he was said to have taken the suits out and burned them, become a hippie, wearing beads and ripped clothes.

  With Rafelson doing the negotiating because Schneider hated Columbia so much he couldn’t bear to do it himself, BBS concluded a deal that allowed it to produce six films without interference, so long as each cost under $1 million. BBS had final cut, but final cut came with a price. Schneider, Rafelson, and Blauner personally guaranteed the cost of the negatives. If the picture went over, the money came out of their pockets. BBS and Columbia went 50-50 on the net. “Normally, net means nothing,” says Blauner, “but we came from the counting rooms, so it was, ‘Don’t fuck with us.’” BBS realized it had a good thing in Nicholson, who was the de facto fourth partner, and he was automatically considered for every project.

  Harold Schneider would be the unit production manager on all the BBS pictures. Harold was the mad dog in Bert’s basement, the Doberman, as he was called. If Bert was ice, Harold was fire. He flew into rages, screamed, blustered, and threatened, growing red in the face, the veins in his neck popping out like ropes, a fine plume of saliva erupting from his mouth. With Harold, there was no middle ground between normal conversation and apoplectic rage. Harold was jealous of Bert, and the two men didn’t get along well, but Bert trusted him—he was family—and knew he would keep the budgets under control. Harold could glance at a scene on the page and tell what it was going to cost to within a penny. He already had plenty of experience; he had worked on, and been fired from, more pictures than he could count.

  Under the BBS umbrella, Bert, Bob, and Steve decided to move off the lot. Columbia bought them a four-story building at 933 North La Brea. On the top floor were the executive offices, each decorated by the respective wives. Bert’s office was vast, as intimidating as the most conventional executive office at the most conventional studio, one difference being the secretaries spent a good deal of their time rolling joints for the guys. The office contained a pool table, a huge desk, a 1948 Wurlitzer juke box on loan from Jaglom, and a Tiffany chandelier. Bert could press a button on his desk and his door would swing open or closed. There was a sauna and a shower in the little hallway between his office and Bob’s—which contained an antique piano. Silver trays with bowls of pot on them sat on tables. Almost any young, attractive woman who went up to the offices would get hit on. They kept score.

  BBS quickly became a hangout for a rag-tag band of filmmakers and radicals of various stripes. There was no hipper place in Hollywood, no hipper place anywhere. Sitting in the BBS screening room watching Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, the wild, surreal cult film that ran as a midnight movie in New York and Berkeley throughout the ’60s, and smoking a joint with Bert and Bob, Dennis and Jack was the ultimate high. Schneider stayed very much in the background, but he was in many ways the Godfather. “Bert brought Columbia very successful product, with the music end of things, the Monkees, and then Easy Rider” says Jacob Brackman, a screenwriter who worked with BBS. “People thought he really had taste and integrity and energy and was making very creative kinds of deals. His reputation was basically, he’ll take care of you. All these people got little pieces of Easy Rider, down to the secretaries. It was almost unheard of. People really looked up to him. He could do just what he wanted.”

  Adds Jaglom, “Orson [Welles] always said that Hollywood had been ruined by Thalberg, who invented this idea of the creative producer, the producer who told the director what to do. That lasted from the ’30s to the ’60s. Bert reversed that. It was going to be a Hollywood Nouvelle Vague. The choice was no longer between doing it their way or not doing it at all. The possibility opened up that you could really do serious and interesting work, and survive commercially. We wanted to have film reflect our lives, the anxiety that was going on as a result of the war, the cultural changes that we were all products of,” he continues. “The original idea of BBS was that we were all hyphenates. We were all writers, directors, and actors, and we would work on each other’s movies, giving people points, making movies inexpensively, with everybody working at scale, everybody participating. We were all running in and out of each other’s offices, reading each other things that we had just written. Anybody who was eccentric and strange enough, people said, ‘Okay, what do you want to do?’ And it all came out of a sensibility that nobody was supposed to exploit anybody else, we were all supposed to be sharing, working collectively. But make no mistake, there was one person who was in charge, that was Bert Schneider.”

  Still, there was a contradiction at the heart of BBS; it walked the line between being a countercultural powerhouse and a conventional production company. Says Jim McBride, an underground filmmaker known for a film called David Holzman’s Diary, who admittedly had a bad experience with BBS, “The truth is, they were very schizophrenic. We used to call them the ‘Hollywood sperm,’ because they were all children of successful Hollywood people. They had beards, but in other ways, they didn’t seem all that different. These were very rich guys who were playing at being hippies. But Bob sure had great dope.”

  WHATEVER WYATT MEANT when he told Billy, “We blew it,” the words would shadow the decade. Indeed, those with an ear for such things had no trouble hearing the ominous minor chord behind the ’60s Top Ten score of Easy Rider. In her essay “The White Album,” Joan Didion, describing the ambience of the late ’60s, writes: “I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.”

  In the wee hours of Saturday morning, August 9, 1969, with Easy Rider in theaters for less than a month, Charles Manson’s gang ventured forth from the Spahn Ranch and murdered Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, in a Benedict Canyon house at 10050 Cielo Drive she and Roman Polanski had rented after it had been vacated by Candice Bergen and her companion at the time, Terry Melcher. Four other people were killed as well, incl
uding the hairdresser Jay Sebring, and two friends of Polanski’s, Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski.

  A pervasive sense of dread and paranoia settled over the town like smog, shot through with sharp currents of shock and unease. “On August 9,” writes Didion, “I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s home.... I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

  Despite the relative obscurity of the victims, the murders hit home. No one was untouched. Everybody knew them. They had had their hair done by Sebring, like Beatty and Towne, or had been invited up that night and had begged off because they were too tired, too stoned, or had something better to do, like Bob Evans. The sense that “it could have been me,” haunted the hills. Just a few months earlier Polanski had tried to get Beatty to take over his lease. Beatty recalls, “I went up to look at the house, and thought, Yeah, I’ll stay here for a while, because I wanted to get out of the hotel, but then Abigail and Voytek walked out from another part of the house, and said that Roman had told them to take the house. They said, ‘There’s plenty of room for everybody,’ but I thought, No, I don’t want to be in a house with other people.” Towne, whose Hutton Drive home was near Cielo Drive, and remotely situated at the end of a long driveway, locked it up and moved elsewhere. Rumors flew that Manson had a celebrity hit list which included the names of Elizabeth Taylor and Steve McQueen.

  Polanski was in Europe scouting locations for Day of the Dolphins, which he was supposed to direct. A few days before the murders he was in Paris at a club called Circus, in high spirits, rating women with a friend, as in “I just saw an 8,” “No, she’s a 6.” He and Sharon were not getting along particularly well. Roman wasn’t about to let marriage curtail his sex life. He had lately slept with Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas. Sharon knew that he was fooling around. The day of the killings, he was in London with Beatty and Sylbert. He got on the next flight back to Los Angeles. “Roman was sitting on my lap on the way there, crying,” says Sylbert. The police assigned two cops to guard him, and gave the director no peace, questioned him relentlessly. Even though he was in London when it happened, he felt they suspected him. “He suspected a lot of his friends,” says Sylbert. “He had either fucked their girlfriends or their wives.” Polanski wondered about Papa John Phillips, Michelle’s husband, who, according to Phillips, threatened him with a meat cleaver.

  “Roman was a brilliant man, the best read, most cultured director I have ever met in my life,” says Paramount’s Peter Bart, who worked with him on Rosemary’s Baby. “But in those days, people who were close to Roman had a tendency to die. He was always at the edge of the flame.” At Rafelson’s, Buck Henry entertained Nicholson, Schneider, Hopper, et al. with a ghoulishly embroidered account of what the police had found. “The breast was in the breadbox, the cock was in the glove compartment of Sebring’s car...” There was a brisk sale in pistols and guard dogs. Intimidating automatic gates that had heretofore been beneath contempt in the Age of Aquarius, became de rigueur.

  People scrambled to get on the I-almost-got-killed bandwagon. “If half the people who were supposed to have been there that night, had been there, it would have rivaled Jonestown,” says Henry. It was as if people wanted to have been part of it, slaughtered like animals for some dark purpose of their own. This wasn’t death at the hands of the “pigs,” as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, and Easy Rider had fantasized it, it was a much better, more frightening, more compelling script: Manson was themselves, a hippie, the essence of the ’60s. If Hollywood was the forbidden planet, he was the monster from the id. “It was, ‘I’m famous, I’m a celebrity, I don’t deserve it, somebody’s going to kill me, or my wife or my family,’” continues Henry. “To me, it was the defining event of our time. It affected everybody’s work, it affected the way people thought about other people.”

  Manson wanted Hopper to star in the film version of his life. Hopper didn’t want to meet him, because Sebring was a good friend of his, but curiosity finally triumphed over scruple. “I walked up to the courthouse, where he was in a cell, and all the little girls were camping in tents outside,” he recalls. “He’d cut himself, a cross on his forehead. I asked him why. ‘Don’t you read the newspapers, man, all my followers have cut themselves like this so when the black revolution comes, they’ll know which ones are mine.’ I figured he wanted me ‘cause he’d seen Easy Rider, but he proceeded to tell me, he’d seen me on a TV show, The Defenders, where I killed my father, ‘cause my father had brutalized my mother.” Manson missed his calling. It was inspired casting—he should have been a producer—but Hopper never did do the movie.

  The great irony, of course, was that the murders happened a brief two years after the Summer of Love, a week before Woodstock, the celebration of all that was supposed to be best about the ’60s. It was as if, at the moment of ripeness, the dark blossoms of decay were already unfolding. Psychedelics were on their way out, acid had been laced with speed to make a paranoia-inducing drug called STP. Haight-Ashbury was already being decimated by speed and smack, and Hollywood was getting ready to take a fast ride down the cocaine highway. There was a sense of closure, that an era was over, that people had gotten away with a lot for a while and, for the more apocalyptically minded, that the Grim Reaper was going to cut them all down. “It was the end of the ’60s,” says Sylbert. “All over town you could hear the toilets flushing.”

  But despite the moral and metaphysical aftershocks from the Manson killings, which lasted well into the next year as the trial dragged on and on, Hollywood returned to normal. Beatty held a small wake for Sharon in his penthouse apartment. After the funerals, the bizarreness of the murders gave way to the quotidian, the reassuring. The reception was at Bob Evans’s house, a barbecue. He served hot dogs. As the police searched for the Tate killers, Easy Rider roared across America’s screens through the long, hot summer of 1969, through the fall, and into the new year, the new decade. And what a wild ride it would be. The Manson murders may have been a sign, but most people would be too busy making movies, doing drugs, having sex, and spending money to heed it.

  Three:

  Exile on Main Street

  1971

  • How Robert Altman butted heads with Beatty on McCabe & Mrs. Miller, while John Calley revived Warners, and Coppola presided over the rise and fall of American Zoetrope.

  “Suddenly there was a moment, when it seemed as if the pictures you wanted to make, they wanted to make.”

  —ROBERT ALTMAN

  In the final throes of post-production on his eagerly awaited new picture, Catch-22, Mike Nichols and his producer, John Calley, decided to check out the competition, a picture Robert Altman had just finished that sounded a bit like their own. The two men sank into the plush seats of the screening room. That M*A*S*H represented a serious threat to Catch-22 was the furthest thing from their minds. Nichols, after all, coming off Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, was America’s hottest director.

  Right away, however, Nichols got a tight feeling in his chest as Altman’s darkly comic vision played out in front of him, recognizing that he had been blindsided. “We were waylaid by M*A*S*H, which was much fresher and more alive, improvisational, and funnier than Catch-22,” he says. “It just cut us off at the knees.” So it came as no surprise to Nichols that M*A*S*H became a huge hit. Nor to Altman either, who was acutely aware that he was chasing Nichols’s tail. He had a banner up in his office that said, “Caught-22.”

  Meanwhile, Beatty, tired of waiting for Towne’s draft of Shampoo, said to his agent, Stan Kamen, “Let’s find a picture I can do with Julie.” Kamen replied, “What about Robert Altman? He’s got a script called McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” Beatty had never heard of Altman, but he screened M*A*S*H, and appreciated Altman’s antic style. Like Arthur Penn, Altman was interested in
the relation between the medium and the message, but whereas Penn could often be portentous, Altman was playful, favoring narrative and visual puns. He was always reminding the audience it was watching a movie. Best of all, like Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H was a “fuck you” from the cool to the uncool.

  Beatty read the McCabe script, liked it well enough, but thought to himself, I just don’t know if Julie will want to do this. It’s an American woman, and really isn’t anything at all like her. “Julie never wanted to do anything,” he recalls. “She was the most selective actress I’ve ever met. She tested for Doctor Zhivago in a five-day screen test. She was totally unknown, they gave her the picture and initially she turned it down. So I had to really push her into doing this, because I thought she could be very funny in it.”

  Beatty called Altman from New York, where he was staying at the Delmonico on 57th Street, then flew to L.A. to meet the director, after which he agreed to do the picture. Altman was paid $350,000 to direct. The business was in such bad shape, that even though Beatty was in great demand, he had to forgo his customary salary up front in lieu of a cut of the back-end gross. The picture was financed by Warners.

  MCCABE WAS NOT the sort of project Jack Warner would have liked. Nor was the rambunctious Altman the kind of director he appreciated. But Jack Warner wasn’t at the studio anymore, nor were Eliot and Kenny Hyman. In 1969, Kinney National Service—a company that got its start in funeral homes and parking lots—bought Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. Kinney’s Steve Ross did not directly involve himself in the operations of the studio. He hired agent Ted Ashley, forty-seven, to replace Eliot Hyman. Ashley had been head of the powerful Ashley-Famous agency that Kinney had acquired two years earlier. He was the first of a long line of agents who would abandon the agencies in the coming decade in favor of the studios or producing.