Even Hawn, who was a loyal friend and placid of disposition, said later, “I was not happy with Warren.” She explained, “He’s a multi-talented individual but he’s very demanding. You learn a lot from Warren, but it can be very time-consuming. I didn’t have a lot of laughs making Shampoo.”
Carrie Fisher had her own problems, somewhat different. She remembered that as the producer, Beatty could do whatever he wanted with her, ask her to try on this bra, that bra, no bra. She felt he was just messing with her, treating her like a doll. Even though she felt objectified, she found it hard to be offended because Beatty’s manner was so playful. He was having fun, if she wasn’t. Beatty teased her for being a virgin in front of the crew and cast, embarrassing her, making her feel like a moron. She recalled, “He offered to relieve me of the huge burden of my virginity. Four times.”
Beatty marked his thirty-seventh birthday on March 30. The cast and crew threw him a party. As he was cutting the cake, a redheaded go-go dancer streaked across the room, threw her arms around him and gave him a birthday kiss. He was locked in an embrace with her before he realized she was naked. His face turned red.
Beatty made it clear that he was in charge. Anthea Sylbert recalled that he asked to see her sketches for the costumes. “I said, ‘You’re the producer, what am I going to show the sketches to you for? I’d rather show them to Hal.’ And he said, ‘I want to see the sketches.’ So from the beginning, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be like what I was used to, that Warren was a different kind of producer and Hal was a different kind of director, and that it was going to be a Warren Beatty film no matter how Ashby felt.” Adds Lee Grant, “Warren treated him like any other member of the crew. But Hal had to stay around; it was like his bargain with the devil because it was going to be a big hit.”
Beatty used Ashby as a surrogate director, but he preferred to work around and through him instead of running right over him. This was the era of the auteur, after all, and Ashby could make a fair claim to that distinction. Beatty was not insensitive to the complexities of the situation, and tried to exercise his influence with some delicacy. Anthea Sylbert recalls, “One day, Warren said to me, ‘I want you to watch that scene there.
“‘Well, how was it?’
“‘Okay.’
“‘Just Okay?’
“‘Just Okay.’
“‘Go tell Hal.’
“‘I’m not telling Hal anything. You go tell Hal.’”
She explained, “I found it very embarrassing at first. Because I didn’t think it was my job to be telling Hal Ashby, ‘It’s not funny enough.’” But after a while she fell into the habit of doing things Beatty’s way. Nevertheless, she was unable to quell her discomfort and felt sorry for Ashby. She said, “I hate even talking about it. In some ways, I’m [still] embarrassed that I did it.”
Ashby was sandwiched between Beatty, who stood next to him, and Towne, who crouched under the camera. Beatty would often show Ashby how he wanted scenes shot, like one in the shop, where he demonstrates seduction by hair styling. In costume, wearing tight jeans, a half-unbuttoned blue silk shirt, an iridescent green scarf looped and knotted around his neck, and lots of Indian jewelry, he told the director, “I’ll show you how I see this scene.” Facing a customer, and virtually sitting on her lap, he pushed her head forward, toward his crotch, and massaged her scalp. Turning to Ashby, he said dryly, “I want this to be a totally asexual scene.”
To Carrie Fisher, Ashby was invisible, not really directing. He didn’t direct the actors, didn’t direct her. He was smoking a lot of pot, and at the wrap party, he was presented with a large joint. To her, that said a lot. In practice, it was rough on the actors. Recalled Hawn, “We’d get three different directions, one from the director, one from Bob, and one from Warren. There were times when we’d say, ‘Guys, get together, can one person give me a note?’ So it became difficult.”
On the other hand, Ashby may have brought some of it on himself, through his passivity, his drug habit, and his training in the cutting room, which taught him that it wasn’t necessary to get things just right on the set, because he could shape the film later, in post. As a friend put it, “Hal would never judge a take. To him, they were all good. He was an editor.” Ashby created a vacuum into which Beatty, already inclined to grab the reins, was more than happy to rush.
Still, Ashby’s friends were irate. Haskell Wexler visited the set on a number of occasions. “Warren just chewed Hal up and spit him out,” he recalls. “Hal was like an office boy on that, and he’s not used to being treated that way, Warren telling everybody what to do, just taking over.” According to Bob Jones, Ashby’s editor, who says Beatty threw him off the set one day when he was hanging around, “It was tough for Hal. I’d go on the set, and Warren and Towne would be off whispering in the corner. Hal would be sitting in the other corner. I purposely stayed away. It was uncomfortable seeing what was going on.”
One day, Ashby walked up to Sylbert, who was dressed, as always, in his “uniform”—a safari jacket from Abercrombie & Fitch, khakis, a beige (his twin, Paul, wore blue) work shirt, and a red bandanna twisted around his neck—and said, as Sylbert recalls, “ ‘I can’t take it anymore. These guys won’t let me alone.’ He hated it, because we’d have meetings, and we’d go, ‘All right Hal, this is what we’re gonna do… ’ We beat the shit out of him, had him boxed in—Warren, Towne, myself, and Anthea. Actor, script, set, and costumes. We’d make him reshoot, do takes he didn’t want to do, coverage he felt he didn’t need. But he was wacked most of the time. And generally he was smart enough to just go with the flow. He was the best person Warren could have hired, because Ashby’s feelings about people were very good. To do that movie, you couldn’t be mean, you couldn’t do an Altman: ‘Schmucks, schmucks, schmucks.’”
Indeed, Ashby did manage to capture George’s sweetness, his innocence, the flip side of his narcissism. He tried, in his words, “not to be too harsh on [the characters]… because their bullshit is so inherent that it’ll come out anyway. In other words you can humanize a little bit more with the character because all that stuff’s going to come out whatever it is. You know, make him a little bit more believable hopefully and not make him a caricature.”
About a year and a half later, Ashby admitted, “It was very difficult because I was working with an actor who was the producer of the film and we spent a little bit of time trying to differentiate between that, never with much success.”
Beatty, however, made no apologies. After all, he had incubated the project. It was his, without a doubt. “I’m not a hired actor in Shampoo,” he explained, by implication alluding to Ashby, who was in his view a director-for-hire.
Shampoo became an early laboratory for Beatty’s notion of “hostile intelligences,” ultimately refined to three. Essentially, it was an insurance policy that works this way, to paraphrase him: If one person runs the show, he is hostage to his own mistakes, originating in ego, stupidity, or plain bad judgment. If two people share the responsibility, one is going to dominate the other, so in effect you still have only one person making decisions, or worse, neither will prevail and there will be a standoff. With three, he says, “usually the right thing prevails.” In practice, this meant that Beatty, Sylbert, and Towne, who was rewriting as they went along, with Ashby playing catch-up, argued a lot while the cast and crew stood around and waited. Often, the outcome was productive, the way it was supposed to be.
Dick Sylbert claims credit for the celebrated scene between George and Jill (Hawn), wherein she asks, “Were there other women?” and he replies, “Well, there were a few times at the shop—let’s face it, I fucked all of them.” He says he told Beatty, “You’re fucking whining all the time. You need a scene where you say, ‘I love fucking pussy.’ Warren went to Towne and said, ‘We need a scene where I finally say how I feel about pussy.’”
Towne recalled, “Warren was towering over Goldie, so it seemed like he fucked everybody, and then was lecturing her
about it. Hal thought it was okay, but I called for a reshoot. Warren, being the prudent producer, was reluctant. I insisted, and then he got mad at me for not having realized that it was fucked up before we shot it. I went for a walk with my dog Hira, and realized that Warren had to be sitting down and Goldie towering over him, and that this speech had to be personal. It had to be torn out of him, so I did a rewrite.” And indeed, as Towne wrote it, it was personal, maybe too personal, and has always struck Beatty watchers as words from the heart: “I don’t know what I’m apologizing for, I go into that shop and they’re so great looking, you know. And I, I’m doing their hair, and they feel great, and they smell great.… It makes my day. Makes me feel like I’m gonna live forever…”
Both Beatty and Ashby liked to shoot a lot of film. But, according to Jones, the resemblance stopped there. “The difference between a Beatty set and an Ashby set is incredible,” says Jones, who worked for both of them. “They shot film for different reasons. Hal would create a feeling of freedom, where people would contribute. He loved to liberate other people’s creativity, and he wouldn’t judge it, he’d just be open to it. And he would go for lots of different coverage. Warren shoots little coverage, hundreds of takes on everything, and kind of wears the actors down.”
Beatty liked Ashby, and always spoke well of him. And, to hear him tell it, the director-in-waiting learned a lot by watching him. “Hal understood something that I had trouble with, which was the value of passivity. A lot of times people will look at a person who seems passive as a guy who doesn’t know what he wants and doesn’t know what he’s doing. Rather, it’s the value of not pushing it, the receptive potential of directing, allowing of things to happen, which is a big gift for a movie director. Of course, Hal’s great teachers were Stevens and Wyler.”
To Dick Sylbert, Shampoo was the opposite of Chinatown, which he had just finished. If Chinatown was about concealment, Shampoo was about display, vanity, narcissism, which were “what the seventies turned out to be,” he said. “What you hide in Chinatown, you show in Beverly Hills. It’s about showing everything. ‘You know what I got? This is what I got. You want to see my house? This is what’s in it.’” Sylbert had a method, which consisted of distilling the movie’s theme, choosing visual metaphors reflective of that theme, and then making each and every design element a slave to those metaphors. In this case the visual equivalents were mirrors. There were mirrors everywhere, two hundred or so, according to the designer. The mirrors made Beatty nervous, not because he didn’t like admiring himself (he always had “one eye in the mirror,” to quote “You’re So Vain”), but because they smacked of “I’m-here-too-ism,” a cardinal sin in his book. “When you have a shot in the mirror, you usually think about who’s shooting it,” Beatty reflected. “Sometimes shots in mirrors will overly complicate a shot, and when you overly complicate a shot, some people will say, ‘Gee, what an interesting way of shooting something.’… We were not a group of people that liked to draw attention to the way something was shot.” As Sylbert put it, “You get a mirror shot if you have a real scene, and there happens to be a mirror there. It’s not because the mirror’s there that you make the shot.” Perhaps the only exception to Beatty’s proscription of “I’m-here-too-isms,” was himself, to whom it did not apply. For him, it wasn’t “I’m here, too,” it was just, “I’m here,” and truly, without him, there would have been no Shampoo.
The production continued into May, when they shot for three days in the Bistro restaurant on Rodeo Drive and also did the party in a Holmby Hills mansion. The notorious fellatio scene, where Christie, at the election night dinner, dives under a table to perform the nasty on Beatty, was shot during the last week on a closed set.
Shampoo wrapped on June 12, 1974, only a couple of days shy of two weeks behind schedule. Beatty planned to go to the wrap party with Christie, but he asked her if she minded if he brought along Michelle Phillips, formerly of the Mamas and the Papas. Outside of her music career, she was perhaps best known for her action-packed eight-day marriage to Dennis Hopper, and subsequent romance with Nicholson, which lasted about two years, from 1972 to 1974. They split up before Shampoo began. Phillips and Nicholson were not getting along. She told him, “One day I’m going to leave you and you’ll never know why.” Nicholson had a safety razor in which the blade consisted of a ribbon of metal advanced by turning a knob. One day he walked into the bathroom, grabbed the razor, and discovered that the ribbon had been used up. He accused her of being the culprit. She said, “I can’t stand living with someone who complains all the time,” and walked out. He never knew why.
Phillips had called Towne, asked him to let her be an extra in the party scene. She went into Beatty’s trailer to say hello. “I started seeing Warren towards the end of Shampoo,” she says. “It was just a kind of weird, surprising attraction. Because I was not attracted to him when I first met him. It was just something that happened. It was funny, because he was still kind of going with Julie. When he asked her, ‘Is it okay if Michelle comes along with us?’ she said, ‘Sure.’ She didn’t care. I think her indifference about how he behaved made him love her more.” Christie’s equanimity could have stemmed from the fact that they had more or less broken up, or she was unaware that Beatty and Phillips were involved, but Phillips doesn’t think so: “I think she did know. We didn’t make any secret about it. She just wasn’t jealous, she just wasn’t possessive.”
Phillips was familiar with the gossip that swirled around him. She had to be; everyone in Hollywood was; everyone in America was. “I was concerned about his reputation, but I was drawn to him,” she goes on. “I don’t think women walk into the trap without thinking, I can change him. Warren is the great seducer. He makes every woman he is with feel that she is the One—Maybe I really am the one.” But “you could never get that close to Warren.” Phillips felt “He was very cautious with his emotions. Because I’m sure he didn’t want to feel used either. Let’s face it, he was a star, and a big star.”
The Parallax View was released on June 14, 1974, two days after Shampoo wrapped, to tepid reviews. Wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times, “You’re likely to feel as cheated as I did.” Beatty felt cheated because Paramount opened it right next to Chinatown at Manhattan’s prime exhibition site, the twin Coronet and Baronet theaters on Third Avenue and 58th Street.
Beatty felt Parallax View was not getting the full attention of distribution and marketing. He objected to the fact that it was released only a week before Chinatown, in effect having to compete with it. Yablans admits, “It was a major film for us, a big summer movie. I didn’t believe in Parallax View. It was heavily flawed. We didn’t have time to finish the picture in a proper fashion, because the writer’s strike came right when we were shooting the film, and the script needed an enormous amount of work.”
According to Evans, who produced Chinatown, Beatty complained to Bluhdorn. He felt Beatty had stabbed him in the back. He says, “My closest friend, he tried to kill me.”
BEATTY BARELY had time to catch his breath. He wrapped Shampoo on a Friday, and started rehearsals on The Fortune the following Monday. Production started in early July. He was leery. He realized yet again, that every time he wasn’t in control, there was trouble. “Had I produced The Fortune, we wouldn’t have started shooting for another couple of months,” he says. “In truth I should’a had [at least] a month off, but I wanted to work with Mike and I wanted to work with Jack.” But Mike Nichols, who was co-producing, and directing, assured him it would be all right. It wasn’t.
The Fortune was based on the script by Carole Eastman. Eastman, who died in 2004, had written Nicholson’s first hit, Five Easy Pieces (1970). An exotic flower, even by the standards of the day and place, she managed to stand out among the parade of freaks cruising Sunset Boulevard in their flamboyant plumage—wild hair, colorful bandannas, vintage clothing, hammered silver bracelets. A former dancer and actress, she was tall, blond, rail-thin, with a swan’s long neck. In fact, she was
very like a bird, high-strung, startled into flight by the rustle of a leaf.
Born in 1934, she came from a working-class background, and made something of a specialty of characters who did the same. She had a great ear for the rhythms of blue-collar speech. Her reputation rested on her script for Five Easy Pieces, directed by Bob Rafelson and released in 1970. “Jack was always wild about Carole,” says Harry Gittes, an old and close friend of his. “She was the first person to understand how brilliant he was, and wrote a character for him—a blue-collar intellectual, which is what he is—and he never, ever forgot that.”
Eastman was a recluse, an agoraphobe, wouldn’t leave Los Angeles, rarely went to places with which she was not already familiar, wouldn’t let anyone else drive her car, and insisted on taking the wheel when she was in someone else’s. “Carole was born to be an eccentric old lady,” recalls writer Buck Henry. “She was severely strange. She wouldn’t set foot in a plane if you put a gun to her head.” She refused to ride in elevators, was phobic about having her picture taken, obsessed over food and wouldn’t eat meat at the same time that she, as The Fortune producer Don Devlin, who died in 2000, put it, “was coughing herself to death on cigarettes,” which she chain-smoked.
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