Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  After Donnelly dumped him for a grip, Towne took up with Mariel Hemingway. Subsequently, Hemingway won the Dorothy Stratten role in Star 80, Bob Fosse’s biography of the slain Playboy centerfold, and had to have her breasts enlarged. In their kitchen, on the bulletin board, mounted on a piece of paper, were two corn kernels, one regular and one popped. The caption under them read, “Before and after.”

  By the time Personal Best was finished, after two years of struggle, the small, $7 million picture that was supposed to be an out-of-town tryout for Greystoke had ballooned to $16 million. Eventually, Geffen and Towne settled, Warners took Personal Best off Geffen’s hands, and Towne gave the studio Greystoke in exchange for finishing money for Personal Best. For his part, Towne felt Geffen tried to manipulate him into relinquishing the script. Asked about Geffen, he cites a scene from Giant, where Jett Rink (James Dean), who has just struck oil, confronts Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), twice his size. In Towne’s words, Jett says, “‘I’m a rich’n, Bick,’ and makes suggestive comments to Elizabeth Taylor, playing Bick’s wife. Bick hits him, and his men pull him off. While they’re restraining him, Jett Rink punches him in the stomach, hops in his truck, and drives off. As he does, one of Bick’s pals observes, ‘You shoulda shot that fella a long time ago, Bick. Now he’s too rich to kill.’”

  When Greystoke was eventually produced with Hugh Hudson directing, the co-screenplay credit read “P. H. Vazak,” Towne’s dog. Hira was nominated for an Oscar. Personal Best opened in 1982 and immediately disappeared.

  BLUHDORN, who had loved Days of Heaven, told Diller to make a deal with Bert Schneider. Bert turned around and hired Steve Blauner. It was ironic that Schneider, the same person who had kicked off the New Hollywood at the beginning of the decade, was now in business at the decade’s end with the TV regime at Paramount that helped to put the New Hollywood in its grave.

  Schneider had a book called Obsession, which Godard had earlier made into Pierrot le Fou. It was about the relationship between an older man and a teenage girl, a subject of more than routine interest to Bert. Monte Hellman was set to direct. Charlie Eastman, another ghost from the early ’70s, was doing a rewrite. Eisner had green-lighted the film. At the eleventh hour, just as they were about to start casting and location scouting, the green light turned red: “Diller said no to Eisner, but Eisner had already said yes to Schneider,” says a source. Eisner called Schneider, said, “You gotta do me a favor, you gotta meet with Barry.”

  “Barry is not my problem, he’s your problem,” Schneider replied. As Hell-man remembers it, Bert refused to go to Barry’s office, and Barry refused to come to his. “Bert was competitive with Barry, Barry with Bert, each not wanting to give up his pride,” he says. Instead, Schneider sent Blauner, who always did Bert’s dirty work. Blauner walked into Diller’s office, remonstrated, said, “How could you do this? Come in now, after a year’s work, say, ‘Who cares about an older man with a younger woman?’ So fine, we’ll make it an older man with a younger boy! Now do you understand it?” Needless to say, after an exchange like this, the picture was never made, and the improbable deal fell apart.

  After his unhappy experience with Paramount, Bert was again on his own. He decided to produce a script written by his former assistant, Michie Gleason, now living with Terry Malick, who had divorced his wife. The subject was close to his heart, gun-running to Third World revolutionaries. Gleason considered herself extremely lucky to have hooked up with Bert. Despite his reverses, he still had the reputation for being one of the few truly serious producers in town, one who would back a first-time director, a woman to boot—this at a time when there were virtually no woman directors save for Joan Micklin Silver and Claudia Weill—and beyond that, he shared her politics. The film was called Broken English, and Bert set it up at Lorimar. But then she ran up against the realities of Hollywood—and Schneider.

  First came the casting. She had her ideas, and he had his, namely his new wife, Greta Ronningen, whom he had unsuccessfully put up for Days of Heaven. “I wanted experienced actors, the best I could get, which I thought I could get because of who he was,” says Gleason. “But he wanted a movie where his wife would be a star, and he would be in charge. The compromise was she got the secondary role instead of the lead role. But I had to write that part for her, because she had never done anything before.” Then Bert, according to Gleason, surprised her again, insisting on a lesbian scene, despite the fact that neither of the two female characters was written as a lesbian. “Those guys, that was their social life, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, sex with two girls,” says Gleason. She said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” hoping he would forget about it.

  The production was based in Paris. Gleason and Schneider conducted a movable battle over sexual politics in three-star restaurants all over Paris. Bert was a person who would go from a whisper to a scream in a nanosecond. He would yell, “Fine, you’re dealing with a man, fine, I have balls, I have a cock!” and clear the restaurant.

  When the picture was finished, they screened it for Merv Adelson at Lorimar. Gleason recalls, “He said, ‘What I wanted was an X-rated movie that we would show in European art theaters.’ I was stunned. All of a sudden, a light bulb went on in my head and I thought, Oh, maybe that’s why I had so much pressure.” In other words, she came to believe that Bert might have misrepresented her picture as a soft-core art film—hence the lesbian scenes—to Lorimar in order to make the deal, confident that he could nudge Gleason in that direction.

  In any event, Lorimar refused to accept the picture, and Schneider sued and won, but the picture never was released. It turned out to be the last picture Bert would ever make, a sorry conclusion to his career as a producer.

  •

  RAGING BULL was in post-production throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1980. The sound mix alone took six months. According to Winkler, while Scorsese was editing, UA was quietly trying to sell the picture, but none of the studios would touch it.

  If Scorsese was in fragile emotional and physical shape when he started Raging Bull, he was a mess when he finished it. He says, “I didn’t achieve any of the peace that Jake had with himself in the movie where he could sit down and look at himself in the mirror calmly and recite those lines. I just didn’t.”

  Scorsese showed the picture to Albeck, Bach, and a few other people in the middle of July at the MGM screening room on 55th Street and Sixth Avenue. As Bach described it, “The lights came up slowly in a room full of silence, as if the viewers had lost all power of speech. Nor was there the customary applause. Martin Scorsese leaned against the back wall of the screening room as if cowering from the silence. Then Andy Albeck rose from his seat, marched briskly to him, shook his hand just once, and said quietly, ‘Mr. Scorsese, you are an Artist,’ “ Scorsese asked a young woman after the screening what she had thought. She burst into tears and ran down the hall. The director knew he was not making a “likable” movie. He says, “The poster with the picture of Bob’s face all beaten and battered—I mean, if you’re a girl, nineteen years old, I don’t know if you’d say, ‘Let’s go see this one.’” But he didn’t realize just how unlikable it was, just as he never seemed to understand how disturbing the ending of Taxi Driver was.

  Raging Bull opened on November 14, 1980, at the Sutton Theater in New York. Jack Kroll called it “the best movie of the year” in Newsweek, and Vincent Canby gave it a rave in the New York Times. But it was Kathleen Carroll in the New York Daily News who struck the prevailing note when she called Jake “one of the most repugnant characters in the history of the movies,” and went on to criticize Scorsese because the movie “totally ignores [La Motta’s] reform school background, offering no explanation as to his anti-social behavior.” Worse, UA was too preoccupied with Heaven’s Gate to give it a proper promotional campaign. Scorsese’s movie bombed.

  Although Raging Bull was later selected in a Premiere magazine poll as the best movie of the ’80s, it was very much a movie of the ’70s, very much a beached whale o
n the shores of the new decade. It was an actor’s movie, a film that valued character over plot, that indeed contained no one to “root for.” With its unromantic, black and white, in-your-face tabloid look, its ferocious violence, and its pond scum characters layered with ghostly images of Italian Renaissance pietas and echoes of verismo operas such as Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, it was at the furthest remove from the smarmy, feel-good pap of the coming cultural counterrevolution. Scorsese had refused to get with the program, had made an anti-Rocky, thumbed his nose at Star Wars, and he would pay for it.

  A scant four days later, on a cold, raw Tuesday, November 18, Cimino’s three-hour-and-thirty-four-minute cut of Heaven’s Gate opened at the Cinema I and Cinema II on Third Avenue. Arthur Krim was in the audience to witness the debacle, the immolation of the company he had built. The party afterward was at the Four Seasons. Almost no one showed up, a premonition of the reviews—which were devastating. In the Times, Canby wrote, “Heaven’s Gate fails so completely, you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.” He went on to call it an “unqualified disaster.” In an unprecedented move, UA withdrew the picture to cut it down to a reasonable length—this time at Cimino’s request—and canceled the L.A. premiere, which was to have been held two days later. A version was released on April 24, 1981, at the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to barely better reviews than the first version received. When the costs were all in, including prints and ads, Heaven’s Gate wound up at $44 million. Re-released in a two-and-a-half-hour version, it grossed only $1.3 million in 830 theaters, or an average of $500 a night for each theater, a pathetic sum.

  The chorus of outrage was quickly transformed into an attack on the studio that made the film, and then the system that made it possible. Although Albeck bore the brunt of the blame (he took early retirement), Heaven’s Gate was an accident waiting to happen. The film that caused the crisis could have been Sorcerer or Apocalypse Now or 1941 or even Reds. So far as the ambition and budget were concerned, Cimino didn’t do anything Friedkin, Coppola, Spielberg, and Beatty hadn’t done. Heaven’s Gate was as much a product of the ’70s as Raging Bull, the result of the empowerment, nay, deification of the director, on the one hand, and the consequent, or congruent, demonization of the producer, on the other. When Calley swept the producers out of Warners a decade earlier, little could he have anticipated the result. As producer Jerry Hellman puts it, “Yes, the director is in creative respects the most important part of the team. But directors are not producers, by and large, and if you look at the cost overruns and films out of control, and huge, terrible movies being made by guys with two credits like Cimino, you begin to see how they built a disaster in there. It was a case of the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater.”

  The system of social Darwinism that is Hollywood took care of the problem in short order. UA, stripped of credibility, was devoured. Transamerica sold it to MGM’s Kirk Kerkorian for $350 million. MGM itself was no more than a plaything for the buccaneering Kerkorian, and despite a momentary respite in the hands of Yablans in the early ’80s, it was all over for both companies for the foreseeable future. UA became the symbol of a discredited, directorcentric system, and in its ruins, Paramount, the studio that boldly changed the rules of the game, flourished.

  •

  TO MANY, it seemed that Heaven’s Gate had rung down the curtain on the New Hollywood. Indeed, Altman had a project in preproduction at UA that was knocked out by Heaven’s Gate. It was called Lone Star, and was to feature Sigourney Weaver and Powers Boothe. The locations had already been selected. For him, it was the last straw. He sold Lion’s Gate, and announced that he would no longer make feature films. At the beginning of the ’70s he said, “Suddenly there was a moment when it seemed as if the pictures you wanted to make, they wanted to make.” Now he complained, “The pictures that they have to make to keep their machine running are not the kind of pictures I want to make. And the pictures I want to make they don’t want to make because they don’t know how to distribute them.” It had come full circle.

  The perception was that one director run amok had done in a studio and transformed the climate in which films were made. Says Scorsese, “Heaven’s Gate undercut all of us. I knew at the time it was the end of something, that something had died.” And Coppola, “There was a kind of coupe d’etat that happened after Heaven’s Gate, started by Paramount. It was a time when the studios were outraged that the cost of movies was going up so rapidly, that directors were making such incredible amounts of money, and had all the control. So they took the control back.”

  Scorsese and Coppola were right. There was a counterrevolution at the beginning of the ’80s, but Heaven’s Gate was merely an excuse, a shorthand way of designating changes that had been in the works since The Godfather had transformed the way the studios did business eight years earlier.

  The new Paramount regime of Diller, Eisner, and Simpson—with assistant Jeffrey Katzenberg studying their every move—embarked on a course that would eventually transform Hollywood filmmaking. Diller and Eisner, former network executives, had a TV mind-set that burned through feature production like a laser, focusing everything on one idea, one image so that the films could be shoehorned into promotional spots. “I went to see Brandon Tartikoff, when he was head of Paramount,” recalls John Boorman. “I was pitching a film, and he said, ‘Tell me what the thirty-second TV commercial is.’ I said, ‘I don’t think I could express it in—.’ He said, ‘Then I can’t make the picture. How am I going to sell it?’” As Milius puts it, “The stuff that brought it all to an end came from within. Diller, Eisner, and Katzenberg—they ruined the movies.”

  Increasingly films resembled comic books, were even based on comic books, like the Superman and Batman films to follow. This phenomenon was later dubbed “high concept,” and has been variously defined, but the most scandalous explication of the term has always been attributed to Spielberg: “If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie. I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand.” As the studios became stronger, the power shifted from the director back to the executives, who were beginning to emerge from the shadow of auteurs to become celebrities in their own right. Whereas a key piece by Kit Carson in Esquire in the early ’70s focused on directors, a similarly influential piece by Tony Schwartz that appeared in New York in the early ’80s focused on the front office at Paramount.

  Simpson led the way. “Don redesigned the way studios related to the material they produced,” says Craig Baumgarten, who was also an executive at Paramount at the time. “The ’80s would become a period in which studios took charge of their movies. It wasn’t like, Gee, we like it, or we don’t like it, or why don’t you try this or why don’t you try that? We began to issue blueprints. We came up with our own ideas.” Recalls producer Rob Cohen, “Don would dictate easily, twenty- to thirty-page memos, single-spaced, that would go through the script from the beginning to the end, every scene.”

  As a delayed result of the conglomeratization of the late ’60s, and the block-buster money that flooded Hollywood, the new crop of executives were businessmen first, movie people second. As bright as Diller, Eisner, and Katzenberg were, they could easily have made themselves at home in any large corporation. “Diller would always make remarks like, ‘Oh, I hate the movie business, it’s disgusting,’” says Yablans, who admittedly detested him. But Simpson adds, Diller “never really cared much about movies, which is probably the reason he’s now working for HSN selling dresses.” And as for Katzenberg, he continues, “Jeffrey’s not creative at all. He is a businessman. He’s about commerce, and product, and shelf life, and crap like that.”

  The net effect was that the studios began to resemble other large corporations. They became bloated bureaucracies, with a proliferation of so-called creative executives. The days when production at Par
amount was run by two men, Evans and Bart, were long gone. The comeback of the studios would be accompanied by the reemergence of the producers through whose hearts Calley had driven a stake in the early ’70s. They would crack the coffin lids, shrug off their shrouds, and rise again—not creative producers like Tony Bill, Julia and Michael Phillips, or Jerry Hellman, but a new breed of hustler who just smelled money, megaproducers like Jon Peters, Mario Kassar, and Andy Vajna. As Bogdanovich puts it, “The cinema of the director went into eclipse at the end of the ’70s. There was a general movement away from the auteurism toward producer-oriented movies.”

  By the end of the decade, costs were skyrocketing, not only production costs, but the cost of expensive TV promotion and wide breaks into thousands of theaters. The average cost of making and selling a movie at the beginning of the ’70s was $8 million. Up to 1975, no picture cost more than $15 million. By 1980, an ominously large number of pictures—not only Heaven’s Gate, but Meteor, The Black Hole, Popeye ($20 million each); The Empire Strikes Back ($23 million); King Kong ($20 million); A Bridge Too Far ($20 million); The Wiz ($24 million);Moonraker ($30 million); Superman ($55 million); 1941, The Blues Brothers ($30 million); Flash Gordon ($40 million); Star Trek—The Movie ($45 million);Raise the Titanic! ($36 million), Reds ($33.5 million)—had shot up into the $20 to $30 million and above range.

  With above the line and marketing costs skyrocketing, interest rates—spiking near 20 percent, and tax shelters eliminated, many of the smaller companies that contributed to the vitality of the ’70s were forced out of the business. The majors consolidated their control of the market. Studios were increasingly reluctant to take risks on projects that did not seem to guarantee an enormous return on their investment. Distribution steamrolled production. The failure of the talent-run companies was used to prove the point. “We all remember the Directors Company,” says Tanen. “We all do remember First Artists. Do you really want to discuss American Zoetrope?... If you put four directors in charge of choosing what films are to be made in the course of a year, they’ll end up shooting each other....”