Ashley was born in a tenement in Brooklyn, and worked his way up from the William Morris mailroom. “Ted is ruthless, but he simulates niceness better than any person I have ever known,” said an executive at another studio. “With Teddy, the operative phrase is, ‘Love me or I’ll kill you.’” At five foot four and 138 pounds, Ashley was a gnome of a man, but he had a reputation as a serious stud. He was, as producer Don Simpson, who started his career at Warners, puts it, “the pussy freak of all time.”
Ashley didn’t waste any time before he cleaned house. Of the Hymans’ twenty-one top executives, he fired eighteen, and put together his own team. Calley, thirty-nine years old, was on the set of Catch-22, having breakfast with Tony Perkins, one of the featured actors in the film. They were in the middle of the eggs, when he got the call. He took it, returned to the table. “I just got the weirdest call.”
“What was it?” wondered Perkins.
“It was Ted Ashley, asked me if I wanted to be head of production at Warners.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I just can’t imagine myself doing that.” In his mind’s eye, Calley saw middle-aged men in beautifully tailored suits easing their custom-bodied Bentleys into their own parking space surrounded by guards. “I just can’t make the connection. I said I’d think about it overnight.”
“Don’t be an asshole. How many guys get a chance to be head of production? What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“I can fuck up.”
“So what else is new? They all fuck up. Harry Cohn? Look at the shit he made. You gotta do it.”
“Yes, of course, you’re right. What a schmuck I’d be not to have that experience.” Calley called Ashley back, said, “I’d love to.”
The young production head had learned how to make deals at the knee of his father, a car dealer-salesman-hustler. As a youth, Calley had few expectations. He talked his way into a job as a messenger at NBC, and then climbed up through the ranks. By 1969, he was a producing veteran, having been in charge of films like The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, and The Americanization of Emily for Martin Ransohoff’s Film ways.
Calley got romantically involved with Elaine May, and through her he met Mike Nichols. Calley and Nichols became the best of friends, which is how Calley brought Catch-22 to Filmways, and produced it. The story goes that Ransohoff loved Calley like a son. When he realized that Calley had signed a contract barring him from the set, he went berserk and fired him.
Ashley also hired Frank Wells, a Rhodes scholar and Clint Eastwood’s attorney, to head business affairs. Nessa Hyams, out from New York, headed casting. Tony Bill was the in-house producer. Ashley held on to Warners veterans Dick Lederer, who was upped to vice president of production, and Joe Hyams, who in turn hired Simpson, a kid from Alaska, of all places. Calley hired two more young story editors, first Barry Beckerman, twenty-three, and then Jeff Sanford, twenty-five. Ashley also threw in a wild card, music entrepreneur Fred Weintraub, forty-one, making him VP of creative services, based in New York.
Under Calley, Warners became the class act in town. Urbane and witty, he gave the impression that he was somehow above it all, slumming in the Hollywood cesspool. As one wag put it, he was the blue in the toilet bowl. Calley immediately bought the guest house of the old Barrymore estate, with its heated kennels and Renaissance sundial in the pool. He was so hip he didn’t even have a desk in his office, just a big coffee table covered with snacks, carrot sticks, hardboiled eggs, and candy. Lots of antiques. His style was English gentleman. He had a green thumb with money, played the gold market, loved to buy and sell expensive cars and boats. His deal gave him a new car every year, and he bought the most expensive ones. He had half a dozen Mercedes Gullwings in storage as an investment. “He knew where every yacht of any size in the world was, what its tonnage was,” says Buck Henry. “He never bought anything he didn’t sell for more money than he bought it for.”
Calley created an atmosphere congenial to ’60s-going-on-’70s filmmakers. The production executives put in long hours, but they dressed in work shirts and jeans instead of suits. Even Wells wore jeans. Sanford wore sandals, and fixed his long hair in a ponytail. “You went to Universal and they all looked like cutouts,” recalls Nessa Hyams. “Once you got to Warners, you were in the middle of Woodstock. Five o’clock in the afternoon, instead of the clinking of ice in a glass would be the aroma of marijuana wafting down the first floor.” Adds Sanford, “It was sort of an asset to be into pot and acid. We were all hippies.”
Every day, after lunch, the Warners executives screened “art” films. They watched all the Kurosawa they could get their hands on, as well as Fellini, Truffaut, Renoir, Ermanno Olmi, René Clair. Brand-new prints. Ross had given Ashley a free hand. Ashley did the same for Calley, who says, “If McQueen and Streisand had walked into Ted’s office and said, ‘Here’s our script, we’ll work for nothing, Barbra sings twenty-five songs, we’ll take off all our clothes, da-da-da,’ he would say, ‘I’m thrilled, but you gotta go see John Calley.’ He franchised me.”
Ashley had hired Calley at least in part because of his relationships with directors, and it was to them that Calley turned. “We started doing pictures without producers almost immediately,” he says. “The studios felt directors were madmen. When we made the deal with Kubrick for Clockwork Orange, everyone was excited about getting him, but then the panic set in: ‘How can we control him?’ The studio would buy somebody because of his gifts and then make it impossible for him to use those gifts. I never felt that. I was the only person in a position of power at a studio that had ever worked on a film. I was really comfortable with directors. If this is the guy who is looking through the camera, and evaluating the lines, he better be in charge. We started doing pictures without producers almost immediately. Directors had to run the fucker.”
Calley drew up a list of twenty or so directors with whom he wanted to be in business. Kubrick and Nichols were at the top, but there were also Sydney Pollack, Mark Rydell, and Billy Friedkin. Then there were the Brits, John Boorman, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Jack Clayton. Calley inherited Sam Peckinpah and Luchino Visconti from the Seven Arts regime.
Practically the first thing he did when he got to the studio was call Arthur Penn and say, “Listen, Arthur, I’d like you to reconstitute Left-Handed Gun. It’s a tragedy and it should never have been—” Penn said, “Great!” Calley called Rudy Fehr, the elderly head of editing who had been at the studio as long as anyone could remember. He said, “I want the outtakes from Left-Handed Gun because Arthur is going to recut it.” Fehr said blithely, “Oh, ve vere able to throw avtervards out all dat shit!”
Calley and Wells made the perfect good guy-bad guy team. Wells was a hardnose, very careful with the nickels and dimes. Calley would always say, “If it was me, I would back your project, but Frank, or Ted, he just doesn’t like it.” Says an executive who worked with him, “Calley is a genius at being on the side of whoever it is he’s talking to, and the other guys are the bad guys.” Often it was true. Calley brought the talent in, and Wells drove it out.
The new regime’s first hit, Woodstock, was brought in by Weintraub. Fred was a large, jovial man, who wore his hair long, in a ponytail, topped with a soft, blue John Lennon-style hat with the short bill. He was a colorful character who owned the Bitter End Coffeehouse in the Village, where Beatty and Charlie Feldman saw Woody Allen, and Bob Dylan played. Ashley and Weintraub had become tight when Ashley was still an agent.
“Nobody supported me,” recalls Weintraub. “They sat me down, said, ‘There’s been twelve festival films, all of them were bombs, why do you want to do another bomb? Calley did not want to do Woodstock. I said, ‘I’m gonna quit unless you guys do it.’” Calley thought, There’s so little money involved here, they could turn the film stock into guitar picks if the film were no good. He gave in. Woodstock, which cost Warners a ridiculously small sum, took in $16.4 million in domestic rentals when it was released in 1970. Ashl
ey rewarded Weintraub by bringing him out to L.A. Fred’s new office looked like an ashram, complete with a beaded curtain in the doorway, incense, and, of course, the odor of grass. Woodstock gave Weintraub considerable clout at the studio, where he seemed to be the executive in charge of alternative lifestyle.
Warners’ next hit was Summer of ’42, which took in $14 million in rentals. Wells, their Eastwood connection, brought the star over from Universal for Dirty Harry. Kubrick came aboard, and made A Clockwork Orange. Pollack made Jeremiah Johnson. Alan Pakula made Klute. Friedkin would make The Exorcist. Truffaut directed Day for Night, and Visconti, The Damned and Death in Venice. Warners picked up an independent production called Billy Jack which became a money cow, and also grabbed a film by Scorsese called Mean Streets that no one else would touch. Some of the projects, like Deliverance, directed by Boorman, surprised even them. Barry Beckerman urged Calley to buy it, but his colleagues thought he was crazy, said, “Wait a minute. Three guys with canoes go into the country for the weekend, and a braindamaged boy plays a banjo solo on a bridge and then one of them gets fucked in the ass—you think that’s a movie?” Calley was ready to flush it, but Beckerman came into his office, said, “You asshole, you gotta do this movie.” Calley said, “You’re right, I’m being a schmuck. I’m not trusting my instincts.”
Prior to Deliverance, Boorman had made Hell in the Pacific for ABC Films in 1968, and the producers had changed the ending without telling him. “It was so traumatic that I vowed I would never make a picture again without having final cut.” A year or so later, everything had changed. Recalls Boorman, “I worked with James Dickey on the script, gave it to Calley, and he said, ‘Okay.’ There were no notes, just a general conversation. The director was in charge.” Calley also allowed Boorman to produce, which gave him a further measure of protection. Throughout the decade, producing credit would become de rigueur for successful directors. It was at once an expression and a guarantor of their power.
Calley had hardly forgotten that M*A*S*H had buried Catch-22, so he put Altman high on his wish list of directors. Which is why, when he had the opportunity to finance a picture directed by Altman with Beatty and Julie Christie, he jumped.
A LAPSED CATHOLIC, Robert Altman had been a rebel from the word go. He was born into a prominent Kansas City family on February 20, 1925. Bob was the oldest child, the only son, with two sisters. His father, B.C., sold insurance, and cut quite a figure, gambling, whoring, and drinking. The family was comfortable; there was always a safety net, which may have fueled the financial and emotional brinkmanship Altman practiced in later life. Altman enlisted in the air force at the age of nineteen, and served as a co-pilot flying B-24s against Japan during the final days of World War II.
He married LaVonne Elmer. Right before the wedding, the lovebirds had a bad car accident. Her jaws were wired shut, and during the ceremony, she had to mutter her wedding vows through clenched teeth. Altman walked away unscathed, which would become the story of his life. The couple moved to L.A., where he tried to scrape together a living. He had a variety of odd jobs, including tattooing identification numbers on dogs. He relaxed by going to the movies. He saw David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, which awakened in him an interest in pictures. He started writing scripts and stories. But Bob just couldn’t seem to take hold. He separated from LaVonne and moved back to Kansas City, where he got a job working on industrials at the Calvin Company.
L.A. had given him a taste for glamour and glitz. He sent his favorite leather jacket there to be cleaned, and he contrived to approximate what he imagined to be a Hollywood lifestyle in Kansas City—no mean trick—with generous portions of girls, gambling, and booze. During lunch he would repair to the home of a hooker for a quick $2 blowjob. “Altman had this idea that was a very Hollywood thing to do,” said Richard Peabody, the friend who accompanied him, “to get your cock sucked on your lunch hour.”
In 1954, Altman met and married his second wife, Lotus Corelli, a former model. This marriage lasted three years, and the Altmans had two boys, Michael and Stephen. A year later, he made a low-budget feature, The Delinquents, that was financed by a small Midwest exhibitor. He was determined to edit the picture in L.A. The exhibitor refused to pay his airfare, so in the last week of August 1956, he dumped the dailies into a ’56 Thunderbird that he had finessed from the production, and headed west, accompanied by an Iranian friend, Reza Badiyi. Altman turned his back on Kansas City for good, leaving behind two marriages, a couple of kids, his parents, and his sisters. During the trip, they listened to the Republican convention, which nominated Eisenhower and Nixon. Altman was a Democrat, supported Adlai Stevenson.
The following year he landed a job working for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This would be the beginning of a decade’s worth of television work, which repeatedly saw him make his mark with innovative methods. He would antagonize whoever there was to antagonize, and in high dudgeon, move on to something else. Along the way, like a snowball rolling downhill, he picked up people who would become part of his creative team. Among them was Tommy Thompson, whose claim to fame was that he had, in 1946 while working for the Armed Forces Radio Services in Tokyo, reported that Japan had been invaded by a Godzilla-like sea monster. This prank was something Altman could appreciate, and the two men became fast friends. Thompson began working regularly for Altman as his first assistant director (1st AD). He used to pick him up from his apartment in a grand old building on the northwest corner of Fountain and La Cienega in West Hollywood, to take him to work. Often, he’d knock on the door, no answer. He’d walk in and find Bob, passed out, an unfinished drink by his side. “He was like this big Pillsbury Dough Boy,” Thompson recalls. “I’d get him in the shower, dressed, down to the car, and we’d get out on the location. He sat in a high director’s chair, while I stood behind him. As they’d rehearse, he’d nod off, and I’d kind of poke him, and he’d wake up and say, ‘How was it?’ I’d say, ‘Run it again,’ and he’d say, ‘All right, let’s run it again.’ And he’d go back to sleep, I’d punch him, say, ‘Say, “Cut!” ’ ‘Cut! How was it?’ ‘Tell ’em to go faster.’ ‘Speed it up a little, guys.’ We’d run through the whole day like that.”
In 1959, at Desilu Productions, where he worked on a series called The Whirlybirds, he met Kathryn Reed, who would become his third wife. She was an extra, playing a nurse. It was a hot day, and he had a wet rag over his hair, which was thinning. He said his hair was in a race between turning gray and going bald. As Reed got off the bus, he asked, “How are your morals?” “A little shaky,” she replied, and walked away, over to the coffee machine. He followed her, said, “If you mix coffee with hot chocolate, it kinda comes out like cappuccino.” She thought, This guy’s really been around. He gave her a ride in a helicopter, and that was it. Both were in the middle of divorces. They got married in Mexico, and when their divorces became final, about a year later, they remarried in California. She had a daughter named Connie from a previous marriage. The three moved into an apartment in Brentwood. Two years later, they moved into a house in Mandeville Canyon, up above the chic section, in what Kathryn called the “Malibu slums,” where they lived for nine years.
Altman fought his way from producer to producer, series to series, eventually ending up at Warners, directing shows like Hawaiian Eye and Maverick, as well as Bonanza, shot on the lot, all the while complaining he was being cannibalized by his ex-wives for child support and alimony. He’d get calls on the set, and scream into the phone, “All right, put me in jail, will that do any good?”
After a stint directing Combat, a down-and-dirty, handheld, documentary-flavored war-is-hell series (Manson family member Sandra Goode once cited it as her favorite show), Altman left for the Kraft Suspense Theater, at Universal. As usual, Altman fell out with his boss, and was promptly fired. In September 1963, in a typical display of suicidal bravado, he gave an interview to Variety in which he called Kraft’s show “as bland as its cheese.”
It was at this juncture, when Altman was looking for a new agent, that George Litto entered his life. Litto was pugnacious, volatile, and funny, with the large ego of a short man. He was Sicilian, one of those guys who is always right, knows the best restaurants, makes the best deals. “I couldn’t fathom why the hell he was calling me, except that I guess everybody else was afraid to represent him,” Litto says. “We were from the same school, that Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, hard-drinking, hard-talking, take-no-shit thing. John Huston was our hero. But I also wanted to be involved with people who were going to do outstanding things.”
Litto took him on. “The truth of the matter is, he was a lousy business investment,” he continues. “He took up an awful lot of my time and I didn’t make that much money with him. But I enjoyed it because he was this bombastic-rebel, bomb-thrower, crazy son of a bitch. He was confrontational. He would get in your face and tell you to fuck off. He didn’t suck up. He could be a miserable prick. Bob could be whatever he felt like being, and as a matter of fact you almost couldn’t tell what he was going to be at any given meeting, which was the most engaging part.”
In 1963, Altman set up shop on the other side of town from BBS. Lion’s Gate, at 1334 Westwood Boulevard, was housed in an old Tudor two-story building two blocks south of Wilshire. The offices became a hangout for his crowd. There was the obligatory pool table, pinball machines, and barber’s chair. Two wooden spiral staircases led to the second floor. There was a courtyard in the back, and eventually Bob bought the upstairs on the other side, and turned it into an apartment. A bar was built into the wall of his office.
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