Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  On May 2, Spielberg was at last ready to begin what would turn out to be an exquisitely difficult and costly production, with a raft of technical problems threatening the projected ten-week shooting schedule. The budget going in was $3.5 million. Zanuck and Brown had little idea how risky was the enterprise upon which they were embarking. No one had ever shot on the ocean in a small boat with a mechanical shark before. Then again, they had little idea how fortunate they would be in the outcome.

  Watching the first day’s rushes was “like a wake,” recalled De Palma, who was visiting the set. “Bruce’s eyes crossed, and his jaws wouldn’t close right.” On the third day, one of the three sharks sank. The crew took to referring to the movie as Flaws. The production shut down several times to accommodate repairs on the sharks. Delay followed delay. Spielberg worked slowly, was lucky if he got one shot in the morning and another in the afternoon. As they passed the June 30 deadline, hotel rates tripled for the summer season.

  The delays began to drive the actors crazy. Their ill-humor was compounded by the fact that none of them thought the film would amount to anything. “Jaws was not a novel,” Shaw told Time. “It was a story written by committee, a piece of shit.” Dreyfuss likewise told the magazine he thought it would turn out to be the “turkey of the year.”

  The script was still a mess. Recalled Spielberg, “I knew what I needed to do was... something that was very frightening to me, which I understand Bob Altman does quite a lot, you subjugate absolute control to meaningful collaboration. Everybody gets into a room to determine jointly what kind of movie we are going to make here.” As Scheider puts it, “Because we had nothing to shoot, we had so much time that we became a little repertory company. You had a receptive director, and three ambitious, inventive actors. Dreyfuss, Shaw, and myself would go up to Steven’s house, have dinner, and improvise scenes. Gottlieb would write them down, and the next day we would shoot. So in a strange way, the inability of the shark to function was a bonus. We seized this occasion to elevate the material into marvelous scenes among these three guys.”

  Spielberg was under an enormous amount of pressure. He brought his own pillow with him from home, and put celery in it, a smell he found comforting. He had no time for anything but work. A female friend of a friend was brought out from L.A. for recreational sex. She slept with him, and left.

  It felt like the production would never end. Sitting on the boat, waiting for a shot, Spielberg thought, I’m never going to finish this movie. This can’t be done. It was stupid to begin it. No one is ever going to see this picture, and I’m never going to work in this town again. Spielberg’s virtues, his energy and inventiveness, were getting him into trouble. “He would jump on an idea with great enthusiasm and take it a little step further until it became unreal,” said Zanuck. “If you said, ‘I think the family should have a dog,’ next day you’d see three dogs there.” For the final shot of the picture, after Bruce had been blown to smithereens, Spielberg had the darkly funny idea of showing a school of shark fins on the horizon. Zanuck and Brown talked him out of it.

  As Spielberg fell further and further behind, the budget kept creeping up. Worse, the studio was unhappy with the dailies. Fields told him, “Steven, where is the action? They’re waiting for the action.” He replied, “I know, we’re getting to it.” There was talk of pulling the plug or going to the Bahamas to shoot in quieter waters. One executive suggested they could recoup their investment in eighteen months by showing the shark on the Universal Tour and charging an extra nickel. Spielberg believed it was Tanen who wanted to get rid of him. “Everywhere we went, people treated us with sympathy, like we had some kind of illness,” said Brown. Spielberg was acutely aware that Zanuck had kicked Akira Kurosawa off Tora! Tora! Tora!

  One day, Sheinberg arrived at the location from L.A. He had dinner at Steven’s house, and afterward, the director excused himself and went off into a corner with Gottlieb, who was sharing the house with him, to work on the script for the next day’s shoot. Sheinberg thought to himself, My God! This is the way this is being done? We may have footage that we will never be able to assemble into a movie.

  The next day, Sheinberg went to the location, watched Spielberg shoot. During a break, they sat down on the wooden steps of the Kelly House, the cast and crew hotel where the executive was staying. Sheinberg said, “You know, this would be a lot faster and cheaper to shoot in a tank.”

  “Well, I want to shoot this in the ocean for reality,” replied Spielberg.

  “Your ‘reality’ is costing us a lot of money.”

  “I understand that, but I really believe in this movie.”

  “Well, I believe in you. I will back you in [either of] two decisions. If you want to quit now, we will find a way to make our money back. If you want to stay and finish the movie, you can do that.”

  “I want to stay and finish the movie.”

  “Fine.”

  But the real hero of this episode was Bill Gilmore, Zanuck and Brown’s line producer who was in charge of the numbers. According to Gottlieb, “The week before [Sheinberg’s visit], Gilmore had calculated the cost-to-date and cost-to-complete, and the picture was over, but not horrendously so. In the intervening week, apparently some stuff came to light, and it was obvious the picture was deeply in trouble. Probably with Steven’s connivance, Bill locked the new budget in his desk, wouldn’t give it to anybody, didn’t let on that it existed. He could have been fired for that. The following week when that budget came out, the brass had already been there and approved, so they couldn’t very well say no, so the picture went on.”

  The shooting on the Vineyard ended on September 17, 1974. The original fifty-five-day schedule having metastasized into 159 days, five and one half months. They were 104 days behind schedule. The final budge was about $10 million, an overage of almost 300 percent. Spielberg was humiliated: “It was a shonda, a scandal for the neighbors, meaning Mr. Sheinberg and Mr. Wasserman. Making a movie is like getting on a stagecoach, to paraphrase Truffaut. At first you’re hoping for a pleasant journey. After a while you’re just praying you get there. That’s what Jaws was all about.”

  Spielberg spent the night in Boston waiting for his morning flight back to L.A. He thought his career was over. He recalled, “That night I had a full-blown anxiety attack, something that I had staved off for eight or nine months. I thought I was going crazy.... I was lying in bed alone in this hotel room, sweating, heart palpitations. I couldn’t get out of the room. If I got out of bed, I’d pass out. I was too afraid to reach for the phone. I was a complete wreck.... In a way I could really relate when Francis made Apocalypse Now. When Hollywood was calling Francis self-indulgent, I was just looking at Francis and saying, Well he’s just a human being going through what we went through on Jaws.”

  BY THE SPRING OF 1974, Chinatown had reached the final stages of editing. Towne, who had been frozen out of the production, boasted that he was getting his way in the editing room with Evans in the absence of Polanski, who had left to direct an opera in Spoleto. “Towne hated it,” recalls Evans. “He criticized everything. ‘Don’t release it.’” He even contemplated taking his name off it. Says Beatty, “Towne has this whole technique whereby if it did well, he was part of it; if it didn’t, he separated himself from it.”

  Paramount screened the picture at the Directors Guild screening room in June. Barry Diller was in the audience, sitting next to Towne, whom he had known since they were both kids, neighbors in Brentwood growing up, both sons of developers. The devastating last scene was unfolding before their eyes: Dunaway’s creamy Packard halfway down the street in the middle distance, the gunshot, the car horn shrieking as Dunaway’s head hit the steering wheel, the inevitable close-up—the actress sliding off the seat as the door opened, eye staring, blond tresses spilling out onto the running board, her daughter screaming, Huston enveloping her in a vast paw, Nicholson helpless and numb, as his guy says, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The camera cranes up and back, the cr
edits roll. Diller turned to Towne and said, “This is a great fucking movie.” Robert thought, This guy’s full of shit, he’ll say anything. There was no applause. You could hear a pin drop. “The first person who walked up was Sue Mengers,” recalls Evans. “She said, ‘What kind of dreck is this shit?’ The next morning the reviews broke, and chicken shit became chicken salad.”

  Evans could indeed be justly proud of himself for getting Chinatown to the screen, but he was not to reap the rewards. Something was rotten in Bluhdorn’s kingdom. Bluhdorn and Yablans had not been getting along for over a year. There was no more socializing between the thirtieth and forty-second floors. But after the premiere, Charlie, Bob, and Frank went to dinner at Pietro’s Steak House in New York to celebrate. Charlie toasted the picture, toasted themselves, the great team, the partnership. This was too much for Yablans. While Evans watched in horror, he lashed out, bellowing, “Charlie, we’re not a partnership! I’m an employee, and Evans is an employee, even though Evans won’t open his mouth ‘cause he ain’t got the balls to open his mouth. There are haves and have-nots in this world. You’re a have, and I’m a have-not. So don’t give me this partnership shit.” Says Yablans, “That dinner was the beginning of the end.”

  Recalls Bart, “It is indescribable how bad the relations were at that company. Everybody was breaking down emotionally, it was an absolute disaster.” Yablans, living with his wife in Westchester, was jealous of Evans’s celebrity, and Evans believed Yablans was trying to undermine his position. Typical was a fight between Evans and Yablans over Time magazine’s plan to put Evans on the cover. According to Evans, Yablans browbeat him, yelling, “If you’re on the cover of Time magazine without me, I will make each hour of each day of each week that you’re here so miserable, you’ll be sorry you’re alive.” Evans was so intimidated, he said, “Fuck it, it ain’t worth it.” Moreover, Evans’s production deal was making waves with many of the directors, like Beatty and Sidney Lumet, who had pictures at Paramount. Says Yablans, “They totally resented that Evans was using his position to pick off the best projects. And put his name on them.” Beatty felt his Parallax View was not getting the full attention of distribution and marketing. Worse, it was released only two weeks before Chinatown. The two pictures played side by side at New York’s prime site, the East ’60s. Alan Pakula, who directed Parallax View, was furious. “How could they?” he asked, almost in tears, taking his umbrella and smashing it against the wall of his suite at the Sherry Netherland so hard the shaft broke. “We’re doomed, absolutely doomed.”

  Beatty complained to Bluhdorn. Evans, and possibly Yablans, had a direct, vested interest in a competing picture. Bluhdorn wasn’t aware that Evans had given Yablans half his points, if in fact he did. When he found out, he hit the ceiling, called Evans in, told him it wasn’t working out, that either he had to revert to his previous arrangement, or exit the executive suite with a production deal. Evans protested. Bluhdorn said, “Legally you’re right.... But do you want to be put in the closet for the next five years?” Evans felt Beatty had stabbed him in the back. He says, “My closest friend, he tried to kill me on it.”

  In October, Bluhdorn installed Diller over Yablans and Evans. Diller had been a film buyer at ABC and had done a lot of business with Paramount. He was credited with inventing the Movie of the Week, but the appointment raised eyebrows, even though it was evident that Yablans was on the way out.

  Yablans made no secret of his hatred for Diller. Says producer Al Ruddy, “He tried to embarrass him and humiliate him.” Shortly after his appointment, Diller came out to the West Coast, called a meeting of the department heads for nine o’clock in the morning. Yablans was conspicuously late, finally strolling in around 10:00. He sat down, listened to Diller drone on, thought, This guy has exactly six days of experience, and he’s coming on very pompously. “I gotta tell what happened last night, Barry,” he broke in, and proceeded with a lengthy, spectacularly vulgar, graphic, and—he claims—fictional account of his exploits the previous night, as only Yablans could do, complete with slapped rumps and pendulous breasts. “Even I was getting disgusted,” Yablans recalls. Diller tried to laugh it off, but as Yablans ran on, undeterred, he started to get red in the face, said, “That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard in my life.”

  “If you think that’s disgusting, wait till I tell you—”

  “I’m asexual, this doesn’t interest me at all,” interrupted Diller, standing up. “I think it’s time to end this meeting.” It was a cruel joke, calculated to embarrass Diller, who was widely suspected of being gay. Recalls Yablans, “I knew it would torture Diller, who was trying to palm himself off as some very proper person. I didn’t care. I wanted outta there so badly it was ridiculous. I didn’t want to be part of Charlie, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be part of Diller.”

  Shortly thereafter, Yablans got his wish. He left with the customary producing deal at Paramount, but some people suspected it was really a form of hush money. The studio was under investigation by the SEC, and Yablans was in a position to drop the boom on Bluhdorn.

  Evans quickly followed Yablans out the door. Says Yablans, “When I left, Bob lost his bulletproof vest, and there was no way he could survive under Diller.” But Evans made the best of it, took a production deal, and replaced himself with Dick Sylbert, the first time, so far as anyone could remember, a production designer had become head of production. Sylbert hired an impoverished Don Simpson as his assistant. Simpson, who had been hustling tennis games at a city court to make ends meet, had to borrow a sports jacket and a car for the meeting with Sylbert.

  One of the first things Sylbert did was pick up Altman’s Nashville for distribution. Kael created something of a scandal by accepting the director’s invitation to a screening of the rough cut, reviewing the picture off that screening, thereby jumping the release date—and all the other reviewers—by months. It was a typical Kael move, calculated to prevent Paramount from recutting the movie and to goad the studio into putting some marketing muscle behind it. Her piece was full of the excitement of discovering a great work. She called it “an orgy for movie-lovers,” and wrote, “I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness.” Nashville was Altman’s best film, and the studio had high hopes for it. With its large, ensemble cast of character actors, wandering narrative, and refusal of genre, it was an echt New Hollywood creation. Its failure to perform at the box office, despite the blitz of good press, was not only another indication that the passions that animated the first half of the decade were on the wane, it also underlined the limits of Kael’s power. When Altman was asked why it hadn’t done better, he said, “Because we didn’t have King Kong or a shark.”

  •

  DREYFUSS, who avoided the war by working as an orderly in the LA County Hospital as a conscientious objector in 1972, was good friends with Abbie Hoffman. (He later played a detective in the Abbie-based movie The Big Fix, directed by Jeremy Kagan.) In April 1974, Abbie had gone underground to avoid doing time for selling three grams of coke to a narc. Bert Schneider gave him aid and comfort, as he continued to do with Huey Newton. On July 30 of the same year, Huey and his bodyguard, Big Man (six foot eight) Bob Heard, were allegedly assaulted by two cops in a bar in Oakland. Huey was arrested and released on $5,000 bond. Six days later, he apparently shot and killed a seventeen-year-old prostitute. He jumped bail, headed south, and ended up hiding out with Steve Blauner. Blauner lived in a big, gated home in Bel Air. The two men were an unlikely pair, but they hit it off. Huey was the godfather of Blauner’s second child. But baby-sitting Huey was like tending a time bomb. “When he walked in the house he had a gun,” says Blauner. “I said, ‘Gimme the gun. My house, my ground rules.’ He handed me the gun. I took the bullets out, I gave it back to him, empty. After a week in the house, twenty-four hours a day, he wanted to go to a movie, I figured I could disguise him, pull a hat down low, and I said, ‘Whaddya wanna see?’ He said, ‘The most violent picture playing.’ There was one of thos
e make-my-day pictures—Magnum Force—that’s what we ended up seeing.”

  When it looked like the charge against him might be taken care of, Newton returned to Oakland. But he was immediately slapped with more charges. On August 23, he failed to show up for a court appearance. The stakes were going up; like Abbie, Huey went underground. He made his way to Big Sur, stayed with Bert’s friend Artie Ross and some others. They buried the car that brought him from Oakland with a bulldozer. Then he went south.

  Huey’s L.A. friends tried to come up with a way to get Huey out of the country to Cuba—by plane, by boat, by automobile. Life was imitating art in a serious way. The whole enterprise was referred to as “the movie.” The principals adopted code names, like the Jew (Benny Shapiro, the music promoter pal of Bert’s who had first turned Hopper onto coke), the Star (Huey), the Baby-Sitter (Artie). The goal? The Star (aka the Package) had to make it to the Big Cigar (Cuba), or go directly to jail. Darkly anticipating some such outcome, the conspirators referred to themselves as the Beverly Hills 7. On some level, it was all a game, but a deadly game. One night, Huey, his signature Afro in corn rows in a stab at a disguise, was at the Rafelsons’ for a fried chicken dinner. Bob was very nervous, didn’t want to have anything to do with him, kept making promises to Bert he’d do this and that to help out, but never came through.

  At the same time, this being Hollywood, albeit counterculture Hollywood, Artie and director Paul Williams would begin a script based on the adventure. It was art imitating life imitating art.

  Artie was part owner of a trimaran, which was then in Miami, in need of refitting. Bert reportedly paid for the latest radar and sonar equipment. The plan was to sail through the Panama Canal, pick Huey up in Mexico, and take him to Cuba by boat. Artie and a pal stayed with Artie’s uncle Charlie Goldstein, who lived on a houseboat in Miami. After the work was finished, they took the trimaran on a shakedown cruise. The story—too good to be true—goes that the bottom snagged on an underwater Jesus in one of those snorkeling attractions off Key West, and the boat was badly damaged. Artie had to swim ashore. Soaking wet, he called Bert from a pay phone by the road. “Uh, Bert, we have a problem... !”