Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Casting M*A*S*H, Altman avoided stars, save for his two leads, Elliott Gould, coming off an Oscar nomination for Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Donald Sutherland, both of whom were basically character actors. As Altman puts it, “It was more exciting to work with an unknown cast than it was to do a picture with whomever the reigning stars were at that time. Because then you’re just taking orders.” Of the twenty-eight speaking parts, only half the actors had had previous screen experience. Like other New Hollywood directors, for Altman the picture was the star, which is another way of saying, the director was the star. Many ’70s directors (Altman, Scorsese, Woody Allen) developed, in effect, repertory companies.

  Altman created a casual, low-key environment that most of the actors loved. Dailies, to which everyone was invited, were run in a party atmosphere, with cast and crew unwinding from the day, drinking, and smoking pot. Still, some of the actors didn’t trust him. “I love his work, but he can be pretty mean and cruel and manipulative,” recalls comedy writer and performer Carl Gottlieb, who had a small role as Ugly John, the anesthesiologist. “And contrary to popular belief, he hates actors. He doesn’t pay them—everybody works for scale—and he doesn’t allow them a complete performance. He always breaks it off.”

  On the thirty-ninth day of the shoot, Litto came to the set, said to Altman, “Another week, you’ll be finished here.”

  “I’ll be finished in two days.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t wait to get the fuck outta this fucking studio.”

  Altman’s problems with the hidebound Fox bureaucracy continued into the post-production. One day, Altman was in the editing room with his editor, Danford Greene. The head of post-production walked in, saw Altman, and said, “Get away from the Moviola. You can’t touch that machine, you’re not an editor.” Altman retorted, “I can touch any goddamned machine I please,” and continued running film. Altman and Greene had some pinups on the wall, and the next day they got a memo that required all pictures of naked women be removed from the editing room walls of 20th Century-Fox, effective immediately. Altman marched into the recording studio, put the memo on tape, and used it in the movie in the form of a loudspeaker announcement: “Attention, attention. Please remove all pictures... by order of the commandant. Thank you.”

  There were a lot of other things in M*A*S*H for the Fox executives to hate. The two producers were looking at the dailies the same time they were watching the rushes from Patton. It was a long way from George C. Scott to Gould and Sutherland. M*A*S*H was the anti-Patton. Zanuck and Brown sat in the back of the screening room, looked at each other, and groaned. They were appalled by the fuzzy focus, the raw language, the nudity, and the rivers of gore that flowed through the operating room sequences. “It was the first time you saw guys during an operation covered with blood saying, ‘Nurse, get your tits out of the way,’” says Litto. It was the first major studio movie in which “fuck” was used.

  “Zanuck had a list of thirty notes, cuts, and changes,” continues Litto. “He practically wanted to reedit the picture.” The executive wanted to go up to the Bay Area for a Stanford game, so Preminger convinced Zanuck to do a preview in San Francisco. Continues Litto, “I was sitting behind Dick and David Brown. It was all very strained, because they were saying, ‘When this screening’s over, we’re going to cut this picture up.’ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went on first. Then we went on, and during the operation that opens the movie, like five people walked out, and then in a few more minutes another five, and then about twenty people more. I was sinking down in my seat and I had this pain in my stomach. I said to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, I thought this picture was great. Why are they all walking out?’ Finally there’s the scene where they steal the jeep, and the audience loved it. Big applause. Then something else, more applause. Then at a certain point there was practically a standing ovation and the audience just went wild. About twenty minutes into the picture, Dick turned around and he said, ‘George, we’ve got a hit.’ I got back up in my seat and I said, ‘All right fucker, now pay that percentage.’”

  Some of the Fox executives thought Altman had packed the house with friends, so there was another screening in New York for Zanuck, père. Recalls Altman, “Darryl Zanuck had these two young girls with him, these two bimbos over from France, in their twenties. And he said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to cut all this,’ and they said, ‘No, this is a great picture,’ and that is how M*A*S*H was allowed to be released the way it was.”

  Pauline Kael loved M*A*S*H, inaugurated a half-decade-long critical love affair with Altman, calling it “the best American war comedy since sound came in.” She lobbied the critics within her orbit to give it good reviews. Kael became good friends with Bob and Kathryn. She would hang around his offices when she was in L.A., go out to eat with him. “They were very thick,” says Thompson. “She loved Bob, Bob adored her. She was one of the gang.” Concurs Joan Tewkesbury, “Bob would cultivate her. She would come to the sets.”

  M*A*S*H pulled in $36.7 million in rentals, putting it third for 1970, behind Love Story and Airport. It got five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and did especially well in Europe, where it fed off anti-American sentiment. Despite the fact that it was set in the Korean War, it was perceived as a slap at U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

  Preminger only produced one more movie. The business was changing, and now it would be the directors who selected their producers, not the other way around. Indeed, M*A*S*H was a full-fledged “Altman” film, announcing the director as an “auteur,” in the French sense, not all that surprising since he had been experimenting and refining his approach in television for over a decade. There were the themes, the “anti-s”: militarism, clericalism, authoritarianism. (The New York Times noted that it was “the first American movie openly to ridicule belief in God.”) There was the improvisation, the ensemble acting, the self-consciousness that drew attention to the filmmaking, the loose-knit narratives that dispensed with the traditional beginning, middle, and end, where the energy of the individual sequences carried the piece. And finally, there was the layered soundtrack with overlapping dialogue. Hopper had liberated Easy Rider from the prettifying aesthetic of technical excellence, but until now, nobody had done the same for sound. Based on M*A*S*H and the films that followed, Altman became the quintessential New Hollywood director. The irony, of course, was that he was a good twenty years older than, say, George Lucas.

  In the heady atmosphere of a smash hit, Altman took the opportunity to rewrite some history. If he was truly going to be an auteur, he had to write the script as well or, since he wasn’t a writer, at least derogate the contribution of the writer. True, a screenplay for Altman was generally no more than a point of departure. But even though the actual dialogue rarely corresponded to the script, the writers created the characters which the actors inhabited, providing them with a basis for improvisation. Although he had initially praised Lardner’s script in interviews, Altman now implied that he had discarded it and started from scratch. “Bob was never one to acknowledge a writer’s contribution,” says Litto. “The movie was 90 percent Ring Lardner’s script, but Bob started saying he improvised the movie. I said, ‘Bob, Ring Lardner gave you the best opportunity you had in your life. He’d been blacklisted for years. What you’re doing is very unfair to him and you ought to stop it.’”

  Litto went to Zanuck to get his points back, said, “Dick, we got screwed. Come on, you guys, we had 5 percent, we had a deal. Listen, you can’t penalize me or Bob for being smart enough to do this picture. We should all enjoy the benefits now, you can’t keep all the money.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Zanuck replied. “I’m not saying no. Let me talk to Ingo, and we’ll see what we can do.” Litto thought Bob was going to get his five points, which would have set him up for life, even at the rate Altman flushed money. Meanwhile, the director, convinced he had been cheated, excoriated the studio at every opportunity. One da
y, Zanuck sent Litto the headline of an interview Altman had done with a note on it. The headline was a quote, attributed to Bob: “Fox is going broke and I’m glad.” The note said, “Thank Bob Altman for this and forget about the percentage.” Litto called Altman, said, “Bob, do you realize how much fucking money you just cost me and you?” Without missing a beat, Altman snapped back, “Fuck him and the studio and the horse he rode in on.” Then Altman went off to shoot Brewster McCloud in Houston.

  WARNERS HATED LUCAS’S FIRST FEATURE, THX 1138. It pictures a bleak futuristic landscape in which people are admonished to “work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.”

  THX had worried the studio. For one thing, Coppola insisted on keeping Warners and Lucas apart. He would be the go-between. Francis told Warners, “You’ve got to understand something, I can’t get Lucas involved in working with a studio about developing a script. He trusts me, we can do it together, he and I, it’ll be great, but stay out of it. We’ll bring you the finished film.”

  Lucas shot the film on a shoestring, edited it in the attic of his home in Mill Valley. The picture was screened on the Warners lot in May 1970. At the screening was the gang from the studio—Ashley, Calley, Wells, Lederer, Beckerman—and Coppola. One executive was appalled. He said, “Wait a minute, Francis, what’s going on? This is not the screenplay we said we were going to do. This isn’t a commercial movie.” Francis appeared to be as shocked as the executive, replying, “I don’t know what the fuck this is.” This was about as apologetic as Francis got.

  Coppola had seen a few reels the night before, while Murch was mixing the track, and he didn’t quite know what to make of it. He told Murch, “This is either going to be a masterpiece, or a masturbation.” But he wasn’t worried about the screening for the studio. All along he had reassured Lucas, saying, “Listen, George, we’re making the film for so little money, one of the luxuries that gives us is the ability to tinker with the editing. This is your first film, we’re all learning, we’re trying something new here, it would be crazy to think we’re going to hit the bull’s-eye the first time.” Both men regarded it as a work-in-progress. This was a miscalculation. The new Warners regime, having thrown out all its inventory, had something to prove, and quickly. The feeling was, Wait a minute, this film finished shooting in December and here it is five months later, we should be looking at a locked cut. These guys have been jerking off up there. Coppola was supposed to have supervised the production and he hadn’t even bothered to see the movie! Wells was outraged. It was clear to Warners that Francis had been telling the studio what he knew they wanted to hear—“I’m going to supervise him,” etc.—while telling Lucas what he wanted to hear—“Do your own thing, it’s gonna be great, they’ll love it.” Lucas must have suspected that THX would have an unfriendly reception, because, paranoid as always, he asked Murch, Robbins, and Caleb Deschanel, another pal from USC, to sneak onto the lot, saying: “You guys, wait near the base of the water tower, and as soon as the screening is done, go up to the booth, tell them you’re from the editorial department, and take the work print, so Warners can’t get it.” They did, keeping their eye on Theater A until they saw Wells and company filing out, at which point they grabbed the print, threw it into Robbins’s VW bus, and drove off.

  Warners claimed, as Ashley puts it, “We weren’t in the editing business. We didn’t automatically run for a pair of scissors and start cutting up people’s movies.” Nevertheless, after the May disaster, the studio took the film away from Lucas. “Wells could never let anything go—he was a good soldier, he had to make it work somehow,” says a source. “He talked to Fred Weintraub, who said, ‘I know exactly what to do with this fucking thing, you take this out and you take out that, and we put in this, and then it will work.’ Fred was always saying, ‘We’re taking it over, I can fix it, trust me.’ He was a bull in a china shop. The next thing I knew, they were recutting the film, really pissing George off.” As Lucas put it, “They were cutting off the fingers of my baby.”

  The thing Weintraub liked about THX was what he called the freaks, the hairy dwarfs who appear at the end, and later were transformed into the Wookiees of Star Wars. He told Lucas, “Listen, if you hook the audience in the first ten minutes, they’ll forgive anything. You gotta put your best stuff up front, so what I want you to do, George, is put the freaks up front, the end at the beginning.”

  “Put the freaks up front” became the shorthand Lucas would use derisively to refer to the studio’s stupidity, turning everything upside down in the interests of making a buck. For him, the “freaks” were the executives. Dealing with Weintraub was Lucas’s first exposure to the studio, unmediated by Coppola. “He had to sit in the same room as one of the monsters, one of the freaks, who had the power to tell him what to do,” says Murch. It was an experience Lucas never forgot. But it could have been worse. Weintraub never did succeed in making Lucas put the freaks up front. “George knows how to fight,” continues Murch. “He’s a Taurus, and he has that stubborn thumping his head against the obstacle, digging in his heels, becoming uncommunicative, ‘I will not do this,’ and it works. It does intimidate people.”

  Coppola took off for Europe, while Rudy Fehr, Warners head cutter, snipped four minutes out of the film. THX, which had been shot in 1969, cut and recut in 1970, finally opened—and closed—in the spring of 1971. Even Lucas’s wife, Marcia, didn’t think much of it. “I like to become emotionally involved in a movie,” she says. “I want to be scared, I want to cry, and I never cared for THX because it left me cold. When the studio didn’t like the film, I wasn’t surprised. But George just said to me, I was stupid and knew nothing. Because I was just a Valley Girl. He was the intellectual.”

  THX was the death knell for the Zoetrope deal. The scripts Coppola was supposed to be delivering weren’t being delivered, and those that were, outside of Apocalypse Now, the studio didn’t much like. “Coppola was developing this screenplay, The Conversation,” recalls Jeff Sanford. “We read it, and we told him that we didn’t want to do it. I remember him turning to me, because I was the only one in the room his age, and I had a ponytail, a beard, and I was wearing sandals. He said, ‘Jeff, you don’t like this?’ It was one of those historic moments. I must tell you,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this is going to be an interesting movie.’”

  Warners was still trying to get on its feet, and Wells was ranting and raving about overages. According to a source, the conversations with Francis went this way: Warners said, “Okay, we have a deal, you’re running Zoetrope?”

  “Yeah, I’m running it.”

  “But you’re fucking up.”

  “I’m an artist.”

  “But you said you were the executive.”

  “What are you talking about, I’m a fucking artist, you’re Philistines!”

  “You’re humping us...”

  Adds the source, “It was an old tune, but Francis played it more than most. He was the victim of a curious split—between an enormous gift and wild incompetence, the kind of incompetence informed by a sort of megalomania from one realm that so infected the other that it fucked him up. It gave him the confidence to do things that he should never have done. He wanted to be Harry Cohn, on some level, but he didn’t know how to do it.”

  At the same time Coppola wanted to tear down the studio system, he wanted to be a mogul. He was fascinated by the studio politics that his friends didn’t understand and couldn’t have cared less about. He used to say, “I’m not the oldest of the young guys, I’m the youngest of the old guys.”

  On Thursday, November 19, 1970, there was a final meeting among Coppola, Ashley, and Wells, which became legendary in Zoetrope lore as Black Thursday. Willard Huyck picked up Francis at the Burbank airport, because the director’s back was out. Francis was carrying his scripts fitted neatly into seven black boxes (one for each person at the meeting) whose spines were embossed with the American Zoetrope logo. Huyck and a few others waited down the hall in Beckerman’s
office. When Francis came out of the meeting, he was ashen. “Calley and Ashley had decided that they didn’t want to be in business with Coppola,” says Sanford. Adds Lucas, “They saw THX, went ballistic, and a couple of days later, they said, ‘We don’t want any of these scripts. And besides that, we want our money back.’ That’s when the shit hit the fan. We were rising, and suddenly it was the crash of ’29.”

  The collapse of the deal was bad enough, but from Zoetrope’s point of view, what really rankled was the $300,000 loan Warners demanded that Coppola pay back. According to the source, “Wells was calling those shots. If he had said, ‘Let ’em go, and fuck it if we made a bad deal,’ that would have been fine. But what happened was, Wells felt there was a deal, he wanted back what was owed, and he busted Coppola’s balls to get it. It was chickenshit; they were talking about a couple of hundred thousand dollars at the most. But that’s the way Wells looked at things. What I thought was creepy was I thought they had gotten on the wrong side of somebody who turned out to be a wonderful filmmaker.”

  Indeed, it was a colossal blunder on the part of Ashley, Calley, and Wells. As Coppola put it with only slight exaggeration, “They had turned down what became the whole ’70s cinema movement. They had the option for everybody, and they gave us this vote of no confidence.” Lucas was furious, and didn’t speak to Ashley for over a decade. He believed that Warners bad-mouthed him around town, made it harder for him to set up his next movie, American Graffiti. Years later, in order to bid on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ashley had to apologize to Lucas, and then Warners didn’t get the film anyway. In fact, Coppola and Lucas only rarely worked for Warners again.

  When Warners turned off the tap, the studio’s checks for $2,500 a month stopped, and Zoetrope faced imminent bankruptcy. Francis, on the other hand, blithely continued to pirouette over the void. He always had a cavalier attitude toward money, other people’s as well as his own. Haskell Wexler gave him $27,000 to buy him a KEM. It never arrived, and when Wexler demanded his money back, Coppola just shrugged. Says Wexler, “Francis was a gonif.” On the verge of bankruptcy, Coppola sent out elegant invitations on heavy bond paper to the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival. On the bottom of Lucas’s was a note: “This invitation cost $3 to print, type, and send to you.” Coppola’s flamboyant après moi le deluge gesture upset Lucas even more. Says Coppola, “George became very discouraged by my ‘bohemian’ administration.”