Towne’s scripts were so lengthy and he was so reluctant to cut them himself that key creative decisions were left to the director, the producer, the star, or whoever was the strongman on the project. Says former wife Julie Payne, who admittedly dislikes him, “The great secret was, Roman could have easily asked for a credit on Chinatown and he would have gotten it. It wasn’t just the ending. Roman simply took it over, structured the whole piece. But he couldn’t be bothered. Directed it, got out of town.”
Beatty and Towne had been friends since the ’60s. They were as close as two men could be, but it is hard to maintain friendships in Hollywood where the stakes are so high, where there are vast disparities of money and power, where the lines between affection and business are blurred, and people never know whether their success is earned or accidental. Enough is never enough, and the poison of envy eats away at the fiber of friendships. Directors want to produce. Producers want to direct. Directors want to act. Writers, who are historically the lowest of the low, the monkeys with the typewriters, feel the sting most keenly. Says Payne, “Robert became very jealous of other people’s work or success. It wasn’t just Warren that Robert wanted to be. It was Francis, Jack.”
SCORSESE WAS ALWAYS in the Taxi Driver cutting room, according to Julia Phillips, popping ’ludes and drinking Dom Perignon. Bogdanovich would drop by to make sure Marty was doing right by Cybill. He admired the movie, so unlike his own. At one point, he suggested a few trims, told Marty, “You’re ten minutes away from a brilliant picture.”
Relations between Schrader and Scorsese, never great, became increasingly tense. Schrader was competitive with Scorsese, envious of his success as a director. He accused Marty of betraying his vision. “Marty is not an easy person to work with,” said Schrader. “When I first saw his cut, Marty and I had a talk about it; he ended up having an attack, screaming, accusing me of not knowing what the movie was about and of being against him. One of the reasons Marty’s good is that he’s headstrong and stubborn; he sees himself as an important entity, therefore he often takes criticism as a child takes a beating, wincing at every blow. If he gets enough of it, his health will go out. So arguing with him becomes a therapy session where you’re reduced to pleading, screaming.... [But] you have to work with the best people, no matter how hard it is.”
Talking about him in public angered Scorsese, but he would never confront Schrader directly. Rather, it was Cameron who told him, “Marty’s upset about some things you said in print.” Continues Schrader, “He was not very confrontational. Which I think is one of the reasons he gets so confrontational in the films, he’s just letting all that out. All the stuff that he can’t do in his day-to-day life.”
They cut and recut the picture until they came up with a version that worked. But the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) threatened to give the film an X rating. Scorsese and Julia Phillips met with Begelman and Stanley Jaffe, who was Executive V.P. of worldwide production of Columbia at the time, who simply told them that if they didn’t recut the film to an R, the studio would do it for them. Jaffe didn’t like the shot in which De Niro watched an Alka-Seltzer fizz in his glass. Jaffe wasn’t interested in homages to Godard, that film school shit, called it “an Alka-Seltzer commercial.” Scorsese was furious. He thought, What’s their problem? It was all in the script. He realized this was not going to be a meeting where people were going to be reasonable. It was a meeting where people were saying, in effect, “You do it or else.” He realized he had to fight, although he had precious few weapons. He thought, The fight is going to have to go down in a very showy sort of way: “I’m an artist!” And the response to that, of course, is going to be, “So what!” They don’t want to see you, they don’t want to know you, they don’t really want this movie, thank you very much. More than anything else, he was angry, reacted with the old Sicilian thing, “How dare you speak to me like that.” But his face became like stone, revealed nothing.
Scorsese was shaken. He went home, summoned his friends, Milius, De Palma, Spielberg, to his house on Mulholland. “Can you come up here right away?”
“Why?” Spielberg asked.
“Well, it’s an emergency.” Spielberg jumped in his Mercedes and drove over from Laurel Canyon. “I had never seen Marty so upset,” he recalls. “Verging on tears, but leaning toward rage. He shattered a glass Sparkletts bottle all over the kitchen floor. We were holding his arms, trying to calm him down, find out why he was so upset. He finally came out with the fact that Columbia had seen his movie, had hated the ending, and wanted him to take out all the violence, the entire shoot-out, to cut away from the splintering fingers and the blood spouting and puddling. They felt the film was bound for an X rating, and he was being forced to Disney-ize it. Eventually he began to tell us the story of an actor, Timothy Carey, when he was auditioning for Harry Cohn in the early ’50s. In the middle of his audition, he broke down and said, ‘This is so humiliating standing up here and acting for you people who know nothing about actors, nothing about my art,’ and he pulled out a gun and fired at the executives, full-load blanks, and then had trouble getting a job for years after that. That was his fantasy. He pointed a finger at Stanley Jaffe, and said, ‘He’s the head of the studio, he’s the guy I’m angry at, so I’m gonna get a gun and shoot him.’ He wasn’t serious about it, but he was relishing the rage, and he wanted us to share his anger.”
In an attempt to gather ammunition for the imminent blow-up with the MPAA and the studio, Julia took the work print to New York to show to Kael and a few other critics. Kael offered to write an open letter in her column to Begelman if they needed it. Back on the lot, Julia let it slip that Kael loved the movie. Begelman and Jaffe flipped out. Afraid they would seize the print, Scorsese locked it in the trunk of his car and sneaked it off the lot.
Powerless as Marty thought he was, he did have a few cards he could use if he had to. UA was wooing him. He and Michael Phillips had lunch with Eric Pleskow one day at MGM. Pleskow offered to take Taxi Driver, sight unseen, with an X. UA, which had released Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango, had done very well with X-rated films. When Scorsese heard that, he thought, These are the people I want to be with. But it wasn’t up to him.
Scorsese agreed to cut a few frames that depicted blood spraying from the severed digits. He also suggested desaturating the color in the sanguinary finale, something he had wanted to try since he saw Huston do it in Moby Dick. Appeased, the MPAA slapped an R rating on all the disputed footage. Marty had the last laugh. He thought with the colors muted, the scene was even more shocking.
Begelman hated Taxi Driver even more than he hated Shampoo. He couldn’t get past the grunge, the garbage, the people like pond scum, and of course the blood-soaked denouement. He wanted to dump it in drive-ins in the South.
DESPITE BACK-TO-BACK HITS, Friedkin hadn’t changed much. After The Exorcist, “we went around the world and he was given accolade after accolade,” says Nairn-Smith. “Everyone he met told him he was a genius, but he already thought he was a genius.” Success had done little to dull the edge. He had a photograph of Idi Amin on the wall of his office. Rolling in money, he decided to buy a home. Nairn-Smith occupied herself with house hunting. She found one in Bel Air on Udine Way, next door to Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland. He bought it, she decorated it, shopped for furniture, selected wallpaper. “I’d have floral patterns,” she says. “He would get George Grosz paintings, Francis Bacon stuff. He was very dark.” Friedkin was embracing a way of life he would come to regret. “When I started out, I lived in an apartment in New York, I rode the subways every day, I ate in lower-middle-class restaurants,” he says. “When someone achieves a degree of success you tend to alter your lifestyle in a way that is not conducive to staying in touch with the Zeitgeist. You ask a guy, ‘Do you know how to play tennis?’ He says, ‘Yes,’ you know it’s the beginning of the end for him, that he’s out of touch with the public, the vast majority of whom don’t give a flying fuck about tennis.”
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bsp; Twice he decided they should get married, and twice he backed out, after her proper banking family in Tasmania had arranged the weddings. (One of the engagements was even announced in the gossip columns.) Her father died after the cancellation of the second ceremony. Nairn-Smith was in Tasmania for the funeral, when Friedkin invited her mother to accompany her back to L.A. to stay with them. But one night, toward the end of her visit, Jennifer’s mother took him to task for canceling the weddings. According to Nairn-Smith, she said, “‘Why haven’t you married my daughter, William? Is it because she isn’t a Jewish girl?’ William went insane. He had this terrible trait, he threw tantrums like a two-year-old. He foamed at the mouth, spittle flew out of it, he screamed at her, ‘You’re a racist!’ My mother sat very upright, a houndstooth-suit, silver-caned kind of a lady, didn’t flinch at all. I was quivering with terror. My mother calmly said, ‘Well, William, I suggest we retire now and you think about what you’ve said.’ William called to me, ‘Come to bed with me. Come to bed with me.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going with my mother. Blood’s thicker than water.’ The next morning, he was on his best behavior. He sat there and blew bubbles in the milk, like a seven-year-old kid, like, ‘Aren’t I a good boy now.’ My mother left the following day.”
Meanwhile, Friedkin was beginning preproduction on Sorcerer, his quixotic attempt to remake The Wages of Fear. Sorcerer was supposed to be a little, $2.5 million in-between movie while he was waiting to launch his next big production, The Devil’s Triangle, about the Bermuda triangle, except that instead of ships and planes sinking to the bottom, he had this notion that they would go up into space. But Spielberg beat him to it with Close Encounters.
Sorcerer revolves around the attempt of a small group of desperate men to drive a couple of trucks loaded with nitroglycerine across treacherous mountain terrain. “The feeling was,” says Sorcerer screenwriter Walon Green, “we’re really auteur filmmakers, we can do anything we want, we can go anywhere we want.” Friedkin had always been competitive with Coppola. Coppola was going to the Philippines to shoot Apocalypse Now, Friedkin would go to South America to shoot Sorcerer, an ambitious, pricey foray into the heart of darkness. Friedkin was having a hard time lining up a cast. He gave the script to Steve McQueen. McQueen asked Friedkin, “This is the best script I’ve ever read. Can you make this movie in the U.S.?”
“Oh no, the location’s real important, it’s gotta be believable.”
“I’m worried about my marriage to Ali. If I go outta the country for three months, I won’t have a marriage when I come back. Can you write in something for her?”
“No, I can’t write in a part for her. You told me it was the best script you ever read and there’s no part for a woman in there.”
“Would you consider making her associate producer so she can be with me?” “No, I wouldn’t consider that.” After McQueen turned him down, Friedkin actually began shooting without a lead. Eventually, Roy Scheider, a veteran of The French Connection and hot from Jaws, took the role.
Friedkin had made his three-picture deal with Julie Stein, who had given him a $1 million signing bonus without consulting Wasserman. Now, as the budget started to climb, Wasserman wasn’t happy. He pounded his desk and refused to back a $12 million picture in the jungle without stars. He closed Friedkin down. When the word got out, Bluhdorn called Friedkin, invited him to do the picture for Paramount in his backyard, the Dominican Republic. Eventually, the two studios co-produced.
Friedkin told Green he wanted “a sense of people in the Third World manipulated by these international companies that aren’t even there.” Bizarrely enough, a millionaire director like Friedkin was able to identify with the wretched of the earth by way of the studio boot he felt on his own neck, and in Bluhdorn he found a symbol too good to be true, at once his own personal oppressor and a capitalist buccaneer whose exploitation of the Third World through Gulf + Western he could actually document by using the conglomerate’s client state as a location.
Sorcerer was shot in France, Israel, the Dominican Republic, and New Jersey. The budget skyrocketed to $22.5 million, making the Jaws overruns look like small change. Friedkin hated Israel. Recalls Nairn-Smith, “He said, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here, all these people are just so obnoxious. They’re like my family.’” The trip was the end for the unhappy couple. “I said to William, ‘You know, I think I’m pregnant again,’” she continues. He screamed, she recalls, “I don’t have time for a baby, I don’t want a baby. If you don’t get rid of the baby, I’m getting rid of you.” Continues Nairn-Smith, I said, ‘That’s not going to work this time.’ He simply turned on his heels, saying, ‘I’m going to a casting session.’ The last time I saw him, he was blowing up a building. He had his Cartier wedding ring on his little finger and he waved to me and shouted across the town square, ‘We’ll work it out in New York.’”
Friedkin never had any intention of getting married. No one got married in the ’70s, and commitments were day to day, “till the milk goes bad,” as the saying went. Sex without strings was free and abundant. According to Friedkin, “All I ever thought about Jennifer was that she was a great-looking woman, but I never had any real attachment to her, nothing emotional, she was just a piece of ass. She sort of attached herself to me. I always thought she was Fatal Attraction personified. For about the last twenty years, Jennifer has been totally obsessed with me. Her home is like a shrine to me. She came to me one day in Israel, and said she was pregnant, and wanted me to marry her. I said, I’m not going to marry you.”
Friedkin was focused on Sorcerer, not on Nairn-Smith. As a result of the unusual financing arrangements, he had not one, but two studios by the nether parts. Says Mark Johnson, who started the picture as a second AD trainee, “Billy had won an Oscar for The French Connection, and had directed what was then the third top grossing movie of all time, The Exorcist, so when he got down there, he was the Christ, and couldn’t be touched.” When he found out that Universal executives were seeing the dailies before he was, he had an extra who had been taught phonetic English peer into the camera and say, “More per diem Meester Waherman, more per diem, Meester Waherman,” over and over for the length of a camera reel. Bluhdorn didn’t fare any better. Friedkin couldn’t help but notice that the Dominican Republic was a very poor country, dominated by Bluhdorn’s holdings. “He virtually had President Balaguer and the whole government working for him,” he recalls. So when Friedkin needed a photo for the office wall of the board of directors of the rapacious oil company that has a death grip on the fictional Latin American country where the action is set, he tore a photo out of Gulf + Western’s annual report and used it. “To me, they looked like a bunch of thugs,” says Friedkin. According to Green, “When Bluhdorn saw his picture, he had a shit hemorrhage.”
Friedkin’s behavior made a difficult situation nearly impossible. He invariably arrived at the remote jungle locations, discovered two or three things not to his liking, threw a fit, and only then, when everyone was thoroughly terrified, did he begin the day’s shooting. He was a perfectionist, and when something wasn’t right, there was hell to pay. He was said to have fired scores of people during the course of the production, including Dave Salven, his longtime line producer, and five production managers. Friedkin fired so many people that Johnson moved up to second AD. “If we had shot for another week or two, I could have become the producer,” he jokes. “I was the only guy he couldn’t fire, because I was the leading man,” says Scheider. “I said to Billy, ‘You gotta stop firing these people, ‘cause I’m getting tired of going to the airport and saying goodbye to them.’” Explains Bud Smith, Friedkin’s editor, “At first it was like the old baseball thing, three strikes and you’re out, three fuckups and you’re gone. Then it got down to two, and then it got down to one. And sometimes it didn’t matter if they made any fuckups at all, he fired them because he didn’t want to look at them again. ‘Get ’em out of my sight.’ He fired the director of photography, Dick Bush, because Dick wanted to
light the fucking jungle, and the whole camera crew left. He fired the head of the Teamsters, and all the Teamsters left. With all that rolling stock there must have been thirty, forty Teamsters there, so we had to bring in a whole new crew. And a new stunt crew.” Friedkin assumed Salven’s job himself, joining the flock of New Hollywood directors who tried to be their own producers. The results were disastrous.
On one occasion, Billy hired a local for a few pesos to drive the car carrying Scheider back into town, a scene that occurs at the end of the picture. He instructed the driver to stop for nothing and no one. The unhappy man ran over a pig, and continued on. Friedkin cut, screamed and ranted at the campesino, and fired him on the spot. “The pig was dying on the side of the road, screaming in pain,” recalled Johnson. “Billy went over to it and started to cry. Every single person on the cast and crew had very snide comments about the fact that he shed a tear for this pig, and yet the location manager, who was a very sweet woman, had been fired and sent running from the set in tears. Yet this is how Billy chose to show his sympathy.” He adds, “At that point, people were beginning to question whether or not he had a heart.”
Friedkin and Nairn-Smith’s baby was born in November 1976. Jennifer named him Cedric, after her father. What was left of the relationship quickly deteriorated into “he said, she said.” Although she and Friedkin had lived together as man and wife for three years, she says he just abandoned her, refused to acknowledge the baby was his. According to Ellen Burstyn, who had an affair with him after The Exorcist (which he denies), he told her that he and Nairn-Smith “had broken up, gotten back together for one night, had sex, and she didn’t use what she usually used. She got pregnant, and he felt it was on purpose, that she was doing it to keep him. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it.” Says Green, “She told him she was four months’ pregnant, and he went crazy. He was hysterical, she was trying to put him to the wall. Within a few days she was the enemy. He didn’t acknowledge the paternity until quite a ways in. I saw the baby, and it looked exactly like him. He said, ‘I’m fighting this all the way to the end,’ and I said, ‘Billy, let me tell you something. If she walks into court with that kid you’re gone.’” Friedkin says, “I had a blood test, initially, to make sure that it was mine, and the blood test came out that it was, and I never contested it. I never denied paternity, and I supported the child from the beginning.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 46