Bob and Marty took off for St. Martin, and completely reworked the script. Scorsese didn’t like islands, his asthma was killing him. He was taking Tedral to clear his lungs, but it sent him into bouts of trembling. De Niro nursed him, made him coffee in the mornings. They knew this was it; either they came back with a usable screenplay, or the project was history. But right away they found the zone. Once again, Scorsese dipped into himself. He recalls, “The key thing was the writing of the scene where Jake is fixing the television, and he accuses his brother of sleeping with his wife. What I took from myself was the tenacity of a man who is so paranoid and so self-destructive that even though he knows nothing, he will conduct an investigation of the person closest to him as if he knows exactly what happened, and he will not accept no for an answer, which means he sets up everything to destroy himself.”
Weeks later, UA approved it. Bach and Field had other things on their mind besides Raging Bull. They were preoccupied with gearing up for Heaven’s Gate.
PUFFED UP BY his Oscars, stubborn and so megalomaniacal he made Coppola look like Mary Poppins, Cimino had won all the preproduction skirmishes, including a cast of sub-marquee names that included Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken, and John Hurt, and most important, the contractual right to go over budget, if necessary, to make the Christmas 1979 release date UA wanted. After many delays, he began production on April 16, 1979, in Kalispell, Montana, on a budget of $10 million.
Cimino’s perfectionism knew no bounds, and it soon became clear that he was shooting at an exceedingly slow pace. While the budget visualized two script pages a day of a 133-page script, the actual rate was closer to five eighths of a page. After the first twelve days, he was ten days and fifteen pages behind. He started losing ground at the rate of one day for every day shot. He was building, tearing down, and rebuilding sets, as well as piling on extras by the cartload. Cimino was shooting ten, twenty, thirty takes of every shot and printing almost every one, ten thousand feet of film a day (two hours plus of film), which cost $200,000 per day or about $1 million a week. By June 1, a month and a half into the shoot, Cimino had reached the $10 million mark, equal to the original budget. But there were still 107 3/8 pages to go. Albeck projected that if Cimino continued at that pace, the film would cost the company, excluding prints and ads, in the neighborhood of $43.4 million. When Field visited the set, Cimino refused to speak with him. Bach and Field were virtually helpless. As Tanen put it, “It had become more risky to say, ‘We’re stopping the picture, you’re off the film.’ The Directors Guild came in with these rules that you could only fire for cause, and in the end, you just couldn’t put somebody off a movie. So the attitude became, just get to the end of the tunnel.”
Bach and Field visited the set on another occasion, with the intention of reading Cimino the riot act. But when he showed them his rough assemblage, they were stunned by its beauty—and won over. “It looks like David Lean decided to make a Western,” Bach later told Albeck, breathlessly. Instead of disciplining their intractable director, they congratulated him and went home. According to UA executive Chris Mankiewicz, who had resigned in anger just before the elevation of Bach and Field, “They were so attached to becoming somebody by making a ‘Michael Cimino movie,’ that they just let him roll over them in the most shameful manner.”
By the time he wrapped, on October 2, four and a half months after he started, Cimino had shot 1.5 million feet of film (about 220 hours’ worth), and printed 1.3 million feet. The press smelled blood, and was all over the story. UA was already saddled with Apocalypse Never. Now Time magazine called Heaven’s Gate Apocalypse Next.
SCORSESE WENT INTO Raging Bull twisted into a knot of bitterness, defiance, and self-doubt. He was overwhelmed by a sense of fatality, a certainty that this was his last movie. “I was dead serious about it,” he says. “I was throwing it back at them, like, This is what I think I can do, and I don’t know if I have any more in me.” He was lucky he never had the huge hits, The Godfather, Star Wars. He had nothing to protect. “After New York, New York, I thought, I’ll never have the audience of Spielberg, not even of Francis. My audience is the guys I grew up around, wiseguys, guys from Queens, truck drivers, guys loading furniture. If they think it’s good, I’m fine. Maybe I’m crazy. But rather than compromise the story and make ten other pictures afterward, I’d rather leave it alone and not make any more movies after this. So what the hell!” The conviction that he had cut himself loose from conventional Hollywood filmmaking, that he had nothing to lose and nowhere else to go, freed him to do the best work of his career.
Raging Bull commenced principal photography in April of 1979, the same month Heaven’s Gate went into production. Scorsese was edgy and irritable as ever, prone to sudden outbursts of anger. He got frustrated waiting for the DP, Michael Chapman, to set up shots. He would go into his trailer, put on the Clash at top volume, and sit there, revved up by the music, pacing back and forth, counting the seconds. After forty-five minutes, he’d come storming out, yelling, “It’s more than one side of the Clash, Michael. What are you doing?” Then he picked up a folding chair and heaved it against the side of the trailer, making big dents and chipping the paint. The beefy Teamster driver tried to stop him, shouting, “Hey, you can’t do that.” Scorsese’s tiny mother, Catharine, sprang to his defense. “Leave him alone,” she snapped. “He’s waiting, he’s upset.”
They took a break while De Niro ate his way through Tuscany and Rome for two months to gain the fifty pounds he needed to impersonate La Motta in his decline. “He stuffed himself with ice cream and spaghetti every night until he looked like a pig,” recalls Martin. Scorsese and Rossellini got married in Rome on September 30. Sandy Weintraub joked that he was sleeping his way through the daughters of his favorite directors. The couple went to Japan where she had two weeks of work. Scorsese had such a severe anxiety attack on the bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo that he couldn’t catch his breath and was convinced he was having a coronary. They took him from the train to the hospital in Tokyo in an ambulance. A doctor asked him to breathe into a paper bag. The next day, he was fine. But it was in a disturbed frame of mind that he returned to shoot the last two weeks of the picture. When it was finished, DP Chapman went to work for Robert Towne.
“A LOT of what made me hesitate to direct was my health,” says Towne. “Depending on how you put it, I was either neurasthenic or genuinely ill for a number of years, and I didn’t feel I had the ability to sustain the fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty days on the film.”
Beatty had asked Towne to polish the script for Heaven Can Wait, but Towne wouldn’t do more than one scene, busy as he was with his life’s great work, Greystoke. Greystoke was shaping up as a $30 million film, and Beatty warned Towne that Warners would never entrust a project of that magnitude to a first-time director, no matter how much Calley liked him, particularly because a major portion of it was to be shot in Africa. And then there were the usual Towne danger signs. He never finished the script, which ran 240 pages without the last act.
Greystoke was the story of a feral child raised by an ape, Kala. The child is physically inferior to his playmates, the young apes, and has to live by his wits. Like every Hollywood movie, on some level it was about the business. After all, he was a defenseless screenwriter, at a disadvantage against the ferocious carnivores around him, condemned to live on scraps from the tables of friends—Beatty, Nicholson, Evans, and Calley—who were way more powerful than he. Indeed, for him, Hollywood was the planet of the apes. As he grew older and more wily in the ways of the town, tainted himself, in fact, he increasingly sentimentalized innocence, became mesmerized by the theme of innocence and experience, purity and corruption, which was, after all, the preoccupation of The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo.
Preproduction on Greystoke was proceeding at full speed, including a trip to Africa to scout locations. Meanwhile, Towne and Julie Payne got married in November 1977. In the fall of the following year she gave birth
to a girl. Robert oddly named her Katherine—oddly, because it appeared she was named after Katherine Cross Mulwray, the incestuous issue of Evelyn Mulwray and her father, Noah, in Chinatown. They called her Skip.
Anthea Sylbert had just become a production executive at Warners. She was assigned Greystoke as her first project. She lived on the Old Malibu Road, near the Townes, who had finally left Benedict Canyon and moved to the Colony. Every Sunday Anthea drove down to Robert’s house. They walked on the beach together. She always asked the same question: “So whaddya think, Towne, how much longer before the third act will be finished?” Likewise, his answer was always the same: “Another two or three weeks.” Towne had spoken the story to her, talked her an outline so detailed she could almost write it herself. She loved it, was moved to tears every time she heard it. But he could never put it down on paper.
Every Monday morning Anthea had a staff meeting at the studio. The discussion would turn to Greystoke, and she would say, “Towne says, another two or three weeks.” Wells’s face turned dark red, because he knew in his future lay another renegotiation with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, which controlled the rights to Tarzan. Then, one day, during their walk, Anthea saw several muscular women doing push-ups on the beach in front of Robert’s house. She asked, “Who are those women, Towne?”
“Aren’t they great?”
“I don’t know if they’re great or not, but who are they?”
“They’re all going to be trying out for the Olympics.”
“Oh—but what are they doing around here? Do they have anything to do with the fact that you’re not—that you’ve got this block?”
“Actually, I have this story roaming around in my head.”
“Oh, really.”
“It’s got everything, heterosexuality, homosexuality, great bodies. I’ll write it for Jack. I want to call it Personal Best.”
Sylbert felt her jaw clench, but the next day, she gamely went to her staff meeting, said, “Listen, Towne has this other story that’s got heterosexuality, homosexuality, great bodies...” Wells rose from his seat. She thought he was going to leap across the room and kill her. She said, “I know, I know, don’t get excited, because—Let’s look at it this way. From the practical side, isn’t it better to have Towne do a movie that’s controlled, right here, with adults, rather than off in Africa with babies, and live chimps, and mechanical chimps. It seems to me that not only does this make creative sense, but it probably makes business sense.” She talked everyone into being happy about the fact that instead of getting Greystoke, they were getting Personal Best
The story for Personal Best was loosely based on a scandal about a coach who had sex with one of his female athletes. It may seem a leap from a movie about apes to one about athletes, but it was still another story about innocence despoiled, primitive grace, pre- or subverbal natural man, or in this case, woman.
As Payne nursed Skip, the Malibu house was invaded by Amazons. On a typical day, there were three or four topless women, none of whom was under five foot eleven, slicked down and lying on towels on the beach. “I’ve never seen such emotionally retarded crippled people as these women,” says Payne. “They were all javelin throwers, shot-putters, the crème de la crème. There was sand all over the place, piles of dirty socks. Robert was always so fastidious, I couldn’t believe it. The socks alone were enough to kill off everyone. “I’ve rather had apes around the house.” She adds, “He abandoned everything for Personal Best, and went off on this wild journey that never ended.”
Towne drove to his bungalow on the Warners lot in a red Mercedes, wearing the same outfit every day: a $175 Hawaiian shirt, jeans, and Birkenstocks, his graying, Old Testament locks flying in all directions, walking around the office with only a pink towel wrapped around his waist. He finished the script, in record time for him, racing a threatened actors strike. He couldn’t postpone the film because his Olympic hopefuls had to leave for the Moscow games. Nicholson had turned it down, and Towne cast Scott Glenn instead. He cast Mariel Hemingway as one of the lead actresses, Patrice Donnelly, an athlete, as the other.
Even in preproduction, Towne struck several people as someone out of his depth. “He was overwhelmed by directing and producing and the writing, dealing with a lot of people, needing to make decisions minute after minute,” says Patty James, his assistant. Adds Michael Chapman, the DP for the bulk of the shooting, “He couldn’t make a decision, and that drives you crazy.” Towne complained that people needing answers followed him into the men’s room, talking through the door of the stall where he took refuge on the John. And, continues James, “If he really couldn’t handle it, then he would be on the phone to Warren.”
Personal Best started production in early summer of 1979. A few weeks later, when the actors strike hit, the film was already behind schedule. Towne had begun an affair with Patrice Donnelly. Now he realized that with the production suspended, and the cast and crew returning to L.A., Julie would probably find out. She was recovering from a hysterectomy. Just as she was beginning to feel like her old self, Towne confessed his affair with Donnelly. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he said, “I’ve made a mess, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it.” He swore it was just a location fling, but Payne was determined to get a divorce. Trying to change her mind he said, according to her, “You’re middle-aged, no one will want you. You’ll be in the street, and Skip will hate you forever, I’ll make sure of that.”
Towne ran into David Geffen at Michael Eisner and Neil Diamond’s annual Labor Day party on the beach. Geffen was setting himself up as an independent after leaving Warners and selling his music company to MCA. The director asked Geffen to help him. Geffen went to the same psychiatrist as Towne and Beatty. Dr. Martin Grotjahn advised him not to get involved because Towne was “crazy.” But Grotjahn said a lot of people were crazy, including Geffen, and Towne was an old friend. So Geffen agreed to bridge the cost of starting it up again—with his own money—until his pal Diller at Paramount took it off his hands.
Both Towne and Geffen would regret it. According to one version of the story, the trouble began when Geffen tried to get options on two future Towne scripts in exchange for using his money to restart the picture, the theory being that he was at personal risk for the money. But Diller called, ostensibly told Towne, “Let me be very clear about this, David Geffen is not risking a dime, I have your picture.” It was said that Towne never knew about Diller’s involvement, and came to believe Geffen was trying to trick him. Says Geffen, “It’s an absolute lie. Made up stuff. As part of the agreement for my putting up the money on an interim basis—just through the strike—I got an option on his next picture, Tequila Sunrise. The deal was very clear. Everything was known to him.”
In any event, Personal Best resumed shooting. It was a cokey set. A costume designer referred to him as “ol’ write a line, snort a line Robert Towne.” Says Bud Smith, who cut the picture, “If you were close to Robert, there was just an abundance of incredible cocaine. Patrice and Robert would be in the hallways at four in the morning, arguing, crying. The next day she’d look like dogshit. He wasn’t paying as much attention to what he was shooting because he was chasing the girls. He was basically a playboy, he loved women, he loved drink, and he loved drugs. That to him would be a full life.”
When Towne moved from one suite of rooms to another in the Westwood Marquis, Patty James was in charge of the move. “In one of the dresser drawers was a plastic bag of what obviously was cocaine,” she says. “It was stuffed under his cashmere sweaters. I put it in the same place in the new suite. Then I left for the day. When he realized I must have found the cocaine, he sent half the staff running after me in the parking lot, saying, ‘Miss James, you cannot leave. Mr. Towne must see you.’ I thought, What the hell is going on? I went upstairs, and I said, ‘You know what? Your goddamn fucking cocaine is exactly where you left it in the other suite,’ and I turned around and walked out. That was the first time I had actually seen any cocaine.”
Meanwhile, Geffen was not impressed with the film he was seeing. “A lot of terrible stuff was going on,” he says. “For instance, Robert had this scene where Donnelly and Hemingway were arm wrestling, and he made them shoot it from the waist down naked. There was not a reason in the world for that.” Says Smith, “Bob would go from the set to his office where he had a steam room, and he and the girls would sit in the steam room snorting coke all day long, while the crew was sitting on the set waiting for him. He probably spent less time in the cutting room than he did with his dog.” (Towne denies he used coke.)
“I remember Geffen storming around the stage,” recalls Chapman. “We only heard Robert’s side of it. Geffen was this devil incarnate, this awful man who was going to stand between us and art. But as things went from loonier to loonier, we began to think perhaps he had a point.”
“It went wildly over budget,” Geffen continues. “Towne behaved despicably during every aspect of this. I called up the security department at Warners, and I arranged to have everything surrounded by guards the next morning so he couldn’t make off with the negative. I had the trailer where he was editing padlocked, the sound and the negative taken care of, and threw him off the lot.” But unbeknownst to Geffen, the print was out for duping. When it came back, Towne asked Bud Smith to hide it in Friedkin’s office, and then get out of town so nobody could question him as to the whereabouts of the print. Smith left for Colorado. Towne filed a $110 million suit against Geffen and Warners.
Now living at the Westwood Marquis, Towne was chronically short of cash. Beatty lent him $100,000 in 1980, the first of a series of five- and six-figure loans. He borrowed six-figure amounts from his agents. He borrowed $250,000 from Warners. He and Payne became embroiled in a brutal custody battle over Skip. They traded charges of child and substance abuse. “Robert had become extremely violent,” recalls Payne. “He came walking in the door one day and said, I want to see you alone. He shut the door. I was sitting in a chair, and he knocked me across the room, five feet, with his fist in my eye. The damage from the blow was so horrifying—I heard the orbital bone break—that it smashed the septum and ripped the muscles off my cheekbone, so that one half of my face was being held up by the skin only.” (Towne denies this.)
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 59