Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  In the middle of this scene, Tanen arrived in his limo. “I was wearing my MCA suit, there on business to talk to him about this movie,” he recalls. “I walked in, and this enormous orgy was going on—I mean, full-blown. My God, I couldn’t even imagine how many people. Buttocks and boobs going in all directions.” Schiller, an overweight, slovenly young man with greasy black hair, was shooting the party. “I went to Dennis and said, ‘Can I talk to you?’ ” continues Tanen. “Dennis was out of his bird, totally gone. In the corner of my eye, I saw this guy pointing a camera at us. I said to him, ‘Would you please not do that?’ He kept going. I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to have to ask you again.’ He ignored me. I said, ‘Please, I’m going to ask you one more time.’ He was still doing it, so I grabbed the camera, threw it through the window and grabbed him, this enormous fat man, and I said, ‘You fuck, I’ll kill you, fucker!’ Dennis said, ‘Man, get me a camera! I want to shoot this!’ The tits and asses were still going in all directions, and I was thinking, What can I do to get out of this business? Although that picture almost put me out of the business.”

  Hopper was still a celebrity. He was on the cover of Life June 19, 1970. The intense aura of expectancy that surrounded The Last Movie had reached a fever pitch. Tanen knew the truth. He had screened the movie with Dennis and Julie Stein at the executive screening room at the top of the Black Tower, that housed the executive offices at Universal. When the movie was over, there was dead silence. The two executives were in shock. Then, through the wall, clear as a bell, they heard the projectionist say, “They sure named this movie right, because this is gonna be the last movie this guy ever makes.” Recalls Tanen, “We had a thing called catastrophe—not disaster—catastrophe. This was a full-blown earthquake on the nine level and there was nothing you could do. You couldn’t cut it, you couldn’t add to it. This was what the movie was, there was nowhere to run.”

  Universal was gingerly conducting test screenings on campuses where The Last Movie could be expected to find its audience, if audience there was. The film was screened at the University of Iowa at nine o’clock in the morning. “I figured, Well, how much trouble can we get into? Who’ll be awake?” recalls Tanen. They took a United Airlines flight to Iowa City. “As we were landing, Dennis was flushing drugs down the toilet on the plane,” Tanen continues. They arrived at a theater near the campus. Tanen feared they’d draw a hayseed crowd, and was pleased to see an audience of freaks. He thought, This might be okay. But after the screening, Hopper got up to talk to the audience. Tanen recalls, “They were throwing things, screaming abuse at him—It’s the worst piece of shit...’ This wasn’t just hostility. I was getting really uncomfortable feelings, something could happen here that’s not going to be good, like this could be Suddenly, Last Summer. So I finally dragged him from the theater, and we were going through the lobby, where there was one of these old-fashioned popcorn machines, and the most beautiful eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl sitting behind it. Adorable. Classy, Midwest. ‘Mr. Hopper,’ she said. I looked at her and thought, Oh Jesus! If only we can get to our car. Dennis said, ‘Yes, my dear?’ She answered, ‘Can I talk to you? Did you make this film?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ He was being very flirtatious, very charming. She hauled back and popped him from about six inches away, right in the nose. Blood started streaming out and she started screaming at him, ‘You sexist fucking pig!’ I grabbed him. I said, ‘They’re going to eat us, they’re going to devour us and we’re never going to be seen again!’

  “I got him to the airport. I had to call Wasserman, who was waiting for a report on the preview. I called him from this phone booth, thinking my life was over. He picked up, said, ‘Well, how did it go?’ I’m looking out the window and there was Dennis holding his nose, blood all over his shirt. I said, ‘Well, Lew, we have a little work to do!’”

  The Last Movie won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and Universal opened it at the Cinema I in New York. It was roasted by the reviewers; no one went, and after two weeks, it died. Hopper thought the studio had dumped it. He was bitter. “I won the Venice Film Festival, and they say, ‘Recut it!’ ” he complained. “I overestimated my audience. I’d gone around to universities selling Easy Rider, and everybody was saying, ‘We want new movies.’ I said, ‘Boy, have I got a movie for you.’ In point of fact, what they really wanted was 1940-opiate kind of movies where they didn’t have to do a whole lot of thinking—what Spielberg and Lucas came up with.”

  Reflecting on Hopper’s experience, Nicholson, who was now seeing Michelle Phillips, was also disillusioned. Corman once told him that European movies only became voguish because of their sexual explicitness, and that when American movies caught up, the European pictures would fade away. Now Jack had come to the conclusion that Corman was right: “All the American audience’s supposed greater education, through Jules and Jim, 8lk, and so on, to more sophisticated formal approaches to viewing narrative, character, observations about humanity, seems to have evaporated. It now seems that the reason for the success of Blow-Up was that it included the first beaver shot in a conventional theater. It’s a success such as Antonioni had never had before and hasn’t had since.”

  The Last Picture Show was about the end of an era of motion pictures; The Last Movie was much more thematically ambitious and apocalyptic. Hopper, inflated by the sense of destiny that fueled the counterculture, was making a statement about the death of the Western, of national expansionism and spiritual expansiveness, and therefore of the American Dream. But it turned out to signify the end of his own career, instead. It was a devastating personal defeat from which he didn’t begin to recover for two decades. Says Hopper, “I was there before everybody. I saw Lucas come and Lucas go, Spielberg come and Spielberg go, Scorsese come and Scorsese go. There were seventeen years when I couldn’t do anything. I was stopped from making movies.” Like a firefly, Hopper flashed brightly for a brief three years, then went dark.

  Although Hopper didn’t direct again for over a decade, he did do some acting, and directors learned to work around the drugs. One director wouldn’t use him after lunch, when the alcohol kicked in. Another knew that Dennis would grab whatever was around—uppers, downers, what have you—and worried that, say, if Dennis took one drug during a long shot in the morning and a different one during a close-up in the afternoon, the energy levels would be different, making it impossible to cut them together. The two men went through the script and agreed on what drug Dennis would use in each of his scenes. When Hopper got the next day’s call sheet, there was a notation at the bottom indicating the appropriate drug.

  The failure of The Last Movie was also a blow to the kinds of films people like Hopper and Nicholson hoped to make. In fact, Tanen’s whole slate suffered, particularly in light of other New Hollywood pictures that flopped, like Coppola’s The Rain People, and the success of Old Hollywood formula films like Universal’s own Airport, which had been a top grosser the year before. Rudy Wurlitzer’s script for Two-Lane Blacktop had been hailed on the cover of Esquire as the best script of the year, and Universal agreed to let Wurlitzer direct a film in India. He went over there to scout locations. When he returned, The Last Movie lay in ruins. “There was no way they were going to do this crazy movie with a first-time director in India after they’d gone through the Hopper fiasco in Peru,” he says. “You felt that there’d been a big shift. They weren’t going to take those kinds of chances anymore. For three or four years there was a kind of romance going on that quickly led to disillusionment and cynicism.” Or, as Hopper’s line producer Paul Lewis puts it, “The freedom that we were allowed was over with The Last Movie, The Hired Hand, and Two-Lane Blacktop. The end of the ’70s began at the beginning of the ’70s.” Adds Oliver Stone, who was just coming out of NYU Film School in 1971, “The Easy Rider period was over. You couldn’t make those films anymore. They really nailed us.”

  In fact, none of Tanen’s pictures did any business. There was a fatal flaw in the whole idea. The pictu
res may in fact have had audiences, but they never had a chance to find them. They were released through the studio’s marketing and distribution divisions, which, like the departments of physical production, were still in the dark ages, geared to big-budget mainstream movies. The fifty-something executives didn’t have the foggiest idea how to market pictures like Hopper’s, and worse, didn’t care.

  “I saw coming events casting their shadow when Ned decided to do Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid, with Burt Lancaster,” says Selznick. “It wasn’t what our unit was all about.”

  “ ‘Don’t you understand? Our films aren’t working, Danny, with no film-makers and no stars. I’m gonna be hung in effigy in the public square.’”

  “ “I’m sympathetic, but if we make a violent picture with Burt Lancaster and Robert Aldrich, the unit is dead.’”

  “‘It is dead. You might as well face it.’”

  “ ‘Look, we still have Graffiti in the can, it isn’t out yet.’”

  “ ‘Do you really think the fortunes of this unit are gonna be changed by a little picture called American Graffiti? The verdict on this unit is in, and Lew Wasserman’s made it.’”

  IN THE SPRING OF 1971, Bogdanovich called Benton and Newman in New York. He told them he wanted to do a modern version of Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby. Thrilled, they flew out to Hollywood to start work on What’s Up, Doc? They called Peter and Cybill at their apartment in Sunset Towers, a posh address in a deco building on Sunset Boulevard where George Stevens lived. “We had seen The Last Picture Show, so we knew Cybill was this great dish,” says Newman. “And she was great to look at, a vanilla ice cream sundae. She came out of the bedroom, sat on Peter’s lap. Peter goes, ‘Hi, honey,’ nuzzling, while Benton and I sat there.” Peter marked up TV Guide, indicating the movies she should watch. She bought popcorn and candy, pizza and Coke, and they trooped over to the Warners lot where Peter could arrange screenings of anything he wanted. Continues Newman, “She was being tutored to be a Peter Bogdanovich girlfriend. She said, ‘I’m going off to UCLA to see—’ She opened the schedule. ‘... there’s an Allan Dwan at three o’clock, and at five-thirty, should I stay and see that Frank Borzage?’ She came up with her little reports on these different auteur films. Once in a while he’d go out of the room and she’d roll her eyes, and go, ‘He just wants me to know everything about the movies.’”

  As the start date for Doc rolled around, Calley was growing increasingly nervous. He recalls, “We were pay-or-play with everybody. I mean we had Barbra, we had Ryan, big numbers. It was a nightmare.” The script, in Calley’s opinion, was “a terrible piece of shit. We were supposed to start in three weeks. I was sitting by my pool reading it on a Saturday. I wanted to blow my brains out, it was just awful.” He called Buck Henry, asked him to rewrite it. But Calley still had to convince Bogdanovich to go along with the idea. “Bogdanovich’s arrogance was monstrous,” says Calley. “He had Last Picture Show about to come out, so he was unbearable.” Peter told Calley to relax, he’d make it up as he went along. “I’ll be the conductor,” he said. Calley responded, “Forget it. This is dreck, you’ve been developing it for six months, we can’t make it, and you’re going to have to work with Buck.” Henry rewrote the script in two weeks. “It was not the greatest comedy ever made, but it worked,” Calley adds, “and we were able to make some dough with it.”

  Peter was a little bit in awe of Streisand, so he held himself in check. Doc was filled with wonderful New York character actors supplied by Nessa Hyams. “Using New York actors appealed to Peter’s ego,” she says. “It was a thing in the ’70s to discover new people. After Midnight Cowboy, it was like, ‘Get me another Jon Voight. Make me another movie star.’”

  Altman wanted to use one of Peter’s actors, Michael Murphy, in Images, his next picture after McCabe. But Bogdanovich refused to release him. “He kept him for one scene, to stand on the street with a suitcase for a long shot,” Altman recalls. Altman never forgave him, and thereafter referred to him as the “Xerox” director, alluding to his irritating practice of speaking of each of his films in terms of the great directors, as in, “Picture Show was my Ford picture, What’s Up, Doc? was Hawks.” Said Altman, “I can pretty much do without Peter Bogdanovich.... I’ve never seen a film of his that was passable.”

  But Bogdanovich was not losing much sleep worrying about Altman’s opinion of his films. The Last Picture Show premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1971. The festival also showed Bogdanovich’s AFI documentary, Directed By John Ford. Peter flew in from the set of Doc to attend, with Cybill. Afterward, he and Cybill, Bert and Candice, Jack, Bob and Toby et al. ate Italian at Elaine’s to celebrate the film’s success. Bert, confided, smiling, “I slipped another one by them.”

  Bogdanovich flew back to the set of Doc. He was in his dressing room on a stage at Warners, shooting the banquet sequence when Bert called: “Are you sitting down?”

  “I am now.”

  “I’m gonna read you the opening sentence from Newsweek.... ‘The Last Picture Show is a masterpiece.... It is the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kernel’ Are you there, Peter?”

  “Are you making this up?”

  “‘... it is the finest film of an otherwise dreary season.... ’”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Irritating Cybill, Bogdanovich took Polly to the L.A. premiere at Filmex. He had managed to have an affair with his estranged wife during the production of Doc, while Cybill was in New York, shooting commercials.

  The Last Picture Show was a hit, and a critics’ darling as well. As Peter sensed when he approached the project, coming of age in a small town in Texas was not something he knew much about. Not only had he grown up in New York, he had never even come of age, being one of those children who struck people as premature adults. But he had succeeded in making the material his own, if only by throwing himself headlong into an adolescent affair with Cybill that provoked the jealousy of Bottoms and Bridges, mimicking the mechanics of the plot. As Schneider and Rafelson had recognized, Bogdanovich was aesthetically, at least, quite conservative. Scorsese puts it this way: “The last person to make classical American cinema was Peter. To really utilize the wide frame and the use of the deep focal length. He really understood it.” In contrast to authority-bashing, adult-baiting pictures like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and M*A*S*H, The Last Picture Show is reverential toward its patriarch, Ben Johnson’s Sam the Lion, who is the film’s teacher, law-giver, fount of values. When he dies, an era ends, just as surely as it does in Ford’s elegiac Liberty Valance.

  Riding the Picture Show wave, Warners decided to go up against The Godfather, releasing Doc at Radio City Music Hall at Easter 1972. Streisand and Mengers saw it together at the first screening. They both thought it was a disaster. Barbra’s manager, Marty Ehrlichman, blamed Mengers. As they were leaving the screening, he hissed, “Are you satisfied? You’ve ruined her career!” Weeks later, Calley called Mengers at Klosters, in Switzerland, where she was vacationing. He said, “It’s a hit. It’s a smash.” After The Godfather, which broke every record, Doc would be the third highest grossing movie of 1972, $28 million in rentals against a budget of $4 million.

  When Bogdanovich returned to New York, his hometown, he felt like a conquering hero: “I grew up in Manhattan, and to come back at the age of thirty-one or thirty-two was exhilarating. Picture Show, which was being compared to Citizen Kane, was still playing on the East Side in one theater when Doc opened on the West Side in March. And it was being compared to Bringing Up Baby. I had it all at that moment. We broke the Music Hall house record the first and second weekend, a thirty-year record. I was at the top of the Variety charts with two pictures for most of that year, and the Oscars had just been announced, and Picture Show got eight nominations, including two for me. The biggest kick I got was seeing my name on the marquee when I hadn’t even asked for them to put it there. My name circled the marquee: PETER BOGDANOVICH’S COMEDY. It was t
he peak of my career. It was worth a lot of the shit that followed.”

  Five:

  The Man Who Would Be King

  1972

  • How The Godfather made Francis Coppola the first superstar director, while Paramount’s Bob Evans saved the studio, and Robert Towne and Roman Polanski fought over Chinatown.

  “We were going to be the new Godards and Kurosawas. Francis was gonna lead us. He wanted to ride in the car, but he still was at the head of the parade.”

  —JOHN MILIUS

  During the summer of 1972, agent Freddie Fields had a party attended by Bogdanovich, Friedkin, and Coppola. Francis and Billy, accompanied by Ellen Burstyn, who was about to star in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, left the party in the new Mercedes 600 stretch limo Francis had won in a bet with Paramount when The Godfather hit $50 million. Francis had a bottle of champagne which he spritzed over the car, christening it. They were all well lubricated, driving along Sunset on their way to an “in” diner downtown, singing “Hooray for Hollywood.” Peter had left at the same time, in a Volvo station wagon driven by Polly. By happenstance, the two vehicles pulled up alongside each other at a red light on the Strip. Billy stood up and poked his head through the sun roof. Seeing Bogdanovich, he shouted, “The most exciting American film in twenty-five years!” quoting a review of his own picture, The French Connection. Holding up five fingers, he added, “Eight nominations and five Oscars, including Best Picture!”

  Not to be outdone, Bogdanovich poked his head out the window of the Volvo, recited a line from one of his reviews which he had apparently committed to memory: “The Last Picture Show, a film that will revolutionize film history,” adding, “Eight nominations, and my movie’s better than yours.” Francis, large and bearded, thrust himself through the sun roof and bellowed, “The Godfather, a hundred and fifty million dollars!” Platt thought, These three guys know they’re being assholes, but it’s all in fun. This is the way Hollywood is supposed to be.