Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Then there was Schrader’s intense affair with his leading lady. Coming off Roman Polanski’s Tess, Kinski was being touted as the next Ingrid Bergman. Flat-chested and boyish-looking, she had a sensual face with full lips, perfect for Schrader in his neo-gay phase. He proposed marriage, even though he had just proposed to his long-term (seven years) housemate, Michelle Rappaport, telling her he wanted children. In fact, “I had two marriage and honeymoon plans,” he recalls. “I had agreed to marry Nastassja, I had agreed to marry Michelle, and I said to my secretary, ‘Kook, I can’t handle this anymore. Whichever one says yes, that’s what ‘I’ll do,’ ”

  Not only had he agreed to marry two women, but he had two psychiatrists as well. Recalls Bud Smith, whom the director hired because he loved Sorcerer, “He would call one shrink, talk to him about whatever the problem was, then he would call the other one to find out if the first one was lying to him.”

  Toward the end of production, Kinski broke off the relationship. Schrader was devastated, furious. They ceased speaking to each other, and on one occasion, he directed her by proxy from his limousine. Says Milius, “When the movie was over, she disappeared. He pursued her to Paris and finally cornered her with some young stud. She said, ‘Paul, I always fuck my directors. And with you it was difficult.’ ”

  One day, during post-production, Kinski showed up at the Black Tower visibly agitated. Tanen’s assistant announced, “Nastassja Kinski is insisting on seeing you. She’s crying.” Kinski entered, indeed weeping copiously.

  “Please sit down,” said Tanen, gesturing to a chair. “What’s wrong?”

  “He shoot me here.”

  “What?”

  “He shoot me here!’

  “Somebody shot at you?”

  “No, no, no—he shoot me here!”

  “Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Who shot you?”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul took a shot at you?”

  “No, he shoot me here!” Kinski was jabbing her finger downward. Tanen cast his eyes down toward the Oriental rug. “No, not there, here!” He raised his eyes to her crotch. A light slowly dawned in his eyes.

  “He promise he never put it in movie.”

  “You’re saying that he took some shots of your... genitalia area... ?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why did you let him do that?”

  “Because he was my boyfriend and I believed him, but now he tells me he’s going to put this in the movie.” She began to hiccup hysterically.

  Tanen rolled his eyes, picked up the phone, called Schrader. “Listen, you fucking idiot, this girl is running around telling everybody you shot her crotch and you’re going to put beaver shots in the middle of this movie, what the fuck are you doing?”

  “Oh man, she fucked me over and I’m going to fuck her, nobody’s going to treat me this way...”

  “Jesus Christ, you asshole, don’t put any beaver shots in this movie! You’ll get an X rating.”

  Tanen recalls, “At one of the previews, we were sitting in the theater and he was popping pills and drinking vodka out of the bottle. He was so fucking gone you could have pickled him and he wouldn’t have known the difference. I said, ‘Listen, Paul, if I have to sit through this piece of shit, you have to sit through it too, you’re the one who made it!’ ”

  The picture fared poorly at the box office. Schrader’s image problem, if anything, was made worse by his behavior on the set, and he couldn’t get work. “Jerry Hellman asked me to write Mosquito Coast,” he says. “We sort of made a deal. My agent said he wanted to meet me. I said, ‘What’s this meeting about? We’ve met.’ And he said, ‘Jerry’s upset; the studio is telling him not to make this deal because of your drug problem.’ That was the first time I really realized that straight Hollywood was not the Hollywood that I was living in. And all of these eyes were trained on my sort of socio subgroup with reprobation. Then I wanted to do this film Born in the U.S.A. that Paramount had developed. Eisner wanted it to be more upbeat than it was. I refused. And I suspect that my reputation as a junkie wasn’t helping.” Like Nickelodeon for Bogdanovich, Popeye for Altman, Cat People was Schrader’s last studio picture for many years.

  It was then that his gun thing finally played itself out. He was in his Jacuzzi with a friend. “I was trying to get him to play Russian roulette,” says Schrader, who aimed the weapon at his own head, squeezed the trigger once, handed it to his pal, who refused to play, and left. “I started getting into a suicidal funk,” he continues. “At which point I called another friend. He called my shrink, and my shrink came over. He told me that if I didn’t give him the gun, he was going to have me committed. So I gave it to him.”

  Schrader was shaken. He had been in the Black Tower going over the ad campaign for Cat People on March 5, 1982, when Universal executive Sean Daniel walked in, announced that John Belushi had been found dead in Bungalow 3 at the Château Marmont from a drug overdose. It was another one of those watershed moments. “The game was up,” says Schrader. “Some people quit right away, but the feeling was, the rules have changed. My life was completely fucked up by women and drugs and my career had gone dead. The Russian roulette was the event that made it clear to me it was time to leave L.A., go to New York, and start over. So I did.”

  AT LORIMAR, Peter Bart was putting into practice his old boss’s adage, Get ’em when they’re down, and not only financed Schneider and Bogdanovich, but Friedkin as well. But after Cruising tanked, his third flop in a row, Friedkin too had trouble getting work. On March 6, 1981, he was driving on the San Diego Freeway to his office in Bungalow 50 on the Warners lot when, he recalls, “Suddenly this pain cut across my ribs from arm to arm. It was like an elephant standing on my chest. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe. I thought, This must be a muscle spasm.” He pulled over, tried to get the car door open, but he couldn’t. Arranging his hands into the most comfortable position he could manage, on the bottom of the steering wheel, he pulled back onto the 405, crept slowly to the Burbank exit, and managed to reach the paramedics’ station at the main gate of the studio, where he passed out. They put a nitroglycerin capsule under his tongue, stuck an IV into his arm, pounded on his chest with their fists. Friedkin recalls, “I heard the paramedic say, ‘I’m not getting anything.’ Those were the last words I heard. And then I was gone. I remember passing through a dark space as though I was on an escalator, right out of All That Jazz, and I was moving toward a light and thinking to myself, I’m dying, I’m fucking dying, and I’ve accomplished nothing with my life. It’s fucking worthless and now it’s over!”

  Friedkin was pretty far gone, well on his way to the place to which his many enemies would have happily consigned him. The joke was, he couldn’t find anyone who would call 911. “The next thing I knew I woke up and I was in the St. Joseph Medical Center in the emergency ward and the pain was back strong. I was looking into these white lights right above me. There was an oxygen mask on my face and I couldn’t breathe and I thought, I’m in hell.” Later, he liked to tell friends he’d been clinically dead for twelve seconds. It turned out he had a genetic defect in the circumflex artery. He didn’t need surgery, and after several months of rehabilitation, he was all better. When he recovered, he didn’t dedicate himself to medical missionary work in Africa; he merely continued to make bad movies. However, according to Bud Smith, he said, “ ‘I know I’m a total asshole, a prick, but I’m on a five year plan to become a really nice guy.’ Five years later, he was still firing everyone right and left, hated them, hated the movie.” Later he said, “I would like to tell you that the heart attack made me a better person, but I don’t think so.”

  Professionally speaking, Friedkin might just as well have ended it all when he had his coronary. His career was essentially over. The new celebrity executives were slow to forgive directors who had treated them badly. The ’80s were payback time. Says Coppola, “The way it works is, the grandpas, the alter cockers, sit around and say, That’s a good kid, that’s
not a good kid.’ A good kid is someone who’s respectful of the establishment, who doesn’t bite the hand that feeds him. Steven Spielberg, who always thanks Sid Sheinberg, who always thanks Universal, who never used his money or power to compete with them, is a good kid.” Coppola was not a good kid. Neither were Altman, Rafelson, and Friedkin, especially not Friedkin. “They hated Billy,” says writer Walon Green. “Hated him. They were thrilled when he started bombing.” Muses Friedkin, “I burned a lot of bridges. I treated Diller and Sheinberg and Eisner with contempt. The more powerful they got, the easier it was for them to remember the way I had carried on with them. Those people I snubbed on the elevator going up, were the ones I met going down. There was a lot of resistance to my doing films at some of these studios.”

  But it wasn’t just a question of settling old scores. The new megaproducers didn’t want to use New Hollywood veterans like Friedkin because these directors were too powerful, independent, and costly. Simpson and Joel Silver preferred novices they could hire for a song and push around, like the young Adrian Lyne or Tony Scott. The producers were the auteurs—of crash-and-burn action pictures—but their medium was not so much film as money.

  The kind of reckless passion that Scorsese brought to Raging Bull is the privilege of the young, and as the New Hollywood directors got older, as they had more to protect and more to lose, as they grew familiar with failure, the passions of their youth were replaced by lassitude and cynicism. “When I first came out here, in the late ’60s, I met guys like Richard Brooks and Billy Wilder who were still active,” says Friedkin. “The two of them would invariably talk about what shit was being produced then. I thought, These guys who made films that I thought were astounding, are totally out of it today. How can this happen? The truth is, in America, film is a young man’s game. When I made French Connection and The Exorcist there was no doubt in my mind that those pictures would be popular. Because they were exactly what I wanted to see and what I wanted to see was what most people wanted to see. Now, to be very honest about it, I’m really not sure of what people want to see. I feel like Wilder and Brooks, like an old nag. And, like them in the early ’70s, I think that most of the films being made in this country today are garbage, just garbage.”

  Friedkin lost the ability to distinguish between a good film and a bad one. “I never set out to make a bad film,” he says. “I thought in each case they were going to be as good or better than anything I had done. I went through this long period of wondering why I wasn’t being received in the same way. Now I’ve reached the point where I know why. These films just weren’t any fucking good. They have no soul, no heart, they don’t even have any technical expertise. It’s as though someone reached up inside of an animal and pulled the guts out. The thing that drove me and still keeps me going is Citizen Kane. I hope to one day make a film to rank with that. I haven’t yet.”

  The ugly truth is that some directors never had much to say in the first place. Their own self-estimation to the contrary, most of them were not auteurs, not in the sense that Woody Allen is an auteur. Few directed movies from their own scripts; they were hostage to the material they were given. Says Coppola, “Even the great directors are not all great screenwriters. Scorsese is not the kind of guy who’s going to sit in a room alone and just write about something. He needs that perfect book.” Or, as Frank Yablans put it, “The directors still had to make movies whether the studios were developing good material or not. If out of desperation they finally said, ‘I gotta make it work,’ you’re gonna get lousy pictures.”

  Defeated by failure, exhausted, crazy, some of the great directors of the ’70s reached for the mainstream like a life preserver, only to drown in mediocrity. They became directors for hire. As Spielberg, of all people, puts it, “Francis has only floundered when he determined to succeed commercially. I’ve been unimpressed with films like Dracula and Jack, because those films don’t feel like Francis Coppola movies. They feel like any number of directors could have done the same job. I expect Francis to take risks.”

  Like the others, Friedkin was a victim of the too-much-too-soon disease. “Arrogance and pussy were the double-pronged temptress for guys in our position,” he says. “We all thought that where we were was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around our problems, our needs, our ambitions. I would never have stated it this baldly, but I really thought that directing films was the most important job in the world. We were endowed with some kind of magic.” Adds Bogdanovich, “We didn’t know how to deal with success, which is a much more difficult thing to deal with than failure. By the time the Old Hollywood veterans gained some power, they’d made a lot of pictures. John Ford’s first big success was Iron Horse in 1924, and he’d been directing since 1917, movie after movie after movie. We didn’t have the experience to do some of the things we thought we could do, in my case, a musical. It was lunatic.” Mardik Martin sums it up: “The auteur theory killed all these people. One or two films, the magazines told them they were geniuses, that they could do anything. They went completely bananas. They thought they were God.”

  PETER BOGDANOVICH TURNED FORTY in 1979. Just as They All Laughed was to be released, Time, Inc., shut down its movie division. Fox, which was set to distribute, lost its enthusiasm after three test screenings had gone badly. Bogdanovich decided to do it himself, invested $5 million of his own money. They All Laughed was released in 1981, and grossed under $1 million. “I fell apart then, a delayed reaction to Dorothy’s death,” he says. “I went insane. I blew five million bucks distributing the movie, which was everything I had, including the house, cash, and everything—gone.”

  Bogdanovich had always behaved as if his life were a movie in which inconvenient scenes could be reshot or recut. He used his life as material for his movies, employed actors like Ryan O’Neal and John Ritter as ill-disguised surrogates for himself. This was by no means a vanity unique to Bogdanovich. Coppola, Spielberg, Schneider, Schrader—many tried to live their movies, or make their lives into movies, but none managed to fuse reality and fantasy to such a painful degree as Bogdanovich, and none was so rudely reminded of the discrepancy. “About a year or so after Dorothy’s death,” he recalls, “I was in Beverly Hills, and Billy Wilder walked up to me, and he started to talk about what had happened to me. I didn’t know what he meant at first, but then I understood he was talking about my life as a script!” It came home to Peter, as he put it, “When Dorothy got murdered, it changed everything. It wasn’t a movie. It was life. We all make movies about murder—but we don’t really know what it means. We just think we do. But when something happens, and it’s real, and there’s no way to change it, no way to rewrite it, no way to recut it or reshoot it, you suddenly say, ‘What is the point of making pictures? What is the point of doing anything? Because this is real.’” Bogdanovich could no longer work. “The day Dorothy was killed, I just didn’t care about my career anymore; it was like a bomb went off, and I was left standing, but I wasn’t the same person. That took away a decade.”

  Still, he courted and married Dorothy’s (much) younger sister, L.B. “My excuse is my mother was twenty when she had me,” he says. “And so the first woman I loved was twenty, so I guess it’s this idée fixe of some sort.” He was angered when People magazine claimed he was remaking her in Dorothy’s image, paying for dental work that made her look more like her older sister. He threatened to sue. Bogdanovich was again living a movie, this time a picture by one of his mentors, Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo. During the rest of the ’80s, he was largely persona non grata at the studios, his career in ruins. He declared bankruptcy.

  Peter had always aspired to be Orson Welles, and early in his career the critics flattered him by speaking of the two men in the same breath. Peter supported Welles in his time of troubles. When Welles was broke, he stayed with Bogdanovich. When Bogdanovich declared bankruptcy for a second time in 1997, and lost his home, he stayed in his friend Henry Jaglom’s apartment in New York. He had become Welles, but not i
n the way he imagined. Irwin Winkler once ran into him at a party, where he said, “Remember me? I used to be Peter Bogdanovich.”

  COPPOLA HAD a clearer idea of the opportunity the ’70s presented for revolutionary change than anyone else. He always claimed he was a visionary, and he was right. Coming off Apocalypse Now, and The Black Stallion, which he produced and which had been an unexpected hit in the fall of 1979, and frustrated in his attempts to acquire UA, Coppola, as was his wont, marched full speed ahead over the precipice. He bought Hollywood General Studios, a ten-and-one-half-acre lot on the corner of Santa Monica and Las Palmas, on March 25, 1980, for a song, $6.7 million. He asked Spielberg for help, a $1 million loan. Spielberg refused, saying, “I don’t do that kind of thing.” Lucas refused as well. He was still struggling with the financial burden of The Empire Strikes Back, and told Francis he didn’t have the money to lend him. Coppola was incensed and vowed he would never ask Lucas for money again. “It’s like your brother wouldn’t help you out,” said Mona Skager, then Coppola’s producer. Added Francis, “Some people have that kind of generosity in their nature, it’s easy for them. For other people, it’s just not. I don’t think George is wired that way.” Responded Lucas, tartly, “Francis helped me and gave me a chance, but at the same time he made a lot of money off me. Francis has a tendency to see the parade marching down the street and to run in front of it with a flag and become the leader.” He attacked his mentor for moving south, commenting, “I thought Francis was betraying all of us in San Francisco who had been struggling to make this community a viable film alternative.”