A former client from Medavoy’s days as an agent, Toback was particularly harsh. “I don’t think he liked Bugsy as much as other people did,” he says. “He had one response when he saw the first cut of the movie: too long. He was involved in Spielberg’s career from the first, I don’t think he was prepared for the movie to be received as well as it was.”
Toback urged Beatty to go over Medavoy’s head to his boss, Peter Guber. But Beatty was reluctant. “Warren’s inclination would have been not to do it, except that Mike was literally missing in action,” says the writer. In the second week, when the numbers started to fall off, Beatty began calling the Sony Pictures CEO on holiday in Aspen several times a day, complaining that Medavoy wasn’t available to help. “Peter got upset,” Medavoy recalls, “over the fact that I was gone, because he had to take the calls. A lot of them. Frankly, he meddled anyway, but he liked doing it in the background. It was great to hide behind me, but the truth of the matter was, at that point I was sick and tired of taking the calls.”
When Beatty called, Guber was responsive. Toback continues, “It isn’t as if Guber would say to Warren, ‘You really should be dealing with Mike.’ He just stepped on Medavoy’s head and that was it. I don’t think he said no to Warren about anything.” Explains Jones, “Nobody wanted to be in the position of saying no to Mr. Mike Ovitz, who was Warren’s agent. Nobody was more powerful than he was at the time. So between him and Warren—that was quite a whirlpool to be in. I know Guber didn’t want to be involved, nobody really wants to be on those calls.”
Johnson feels that the studio did as much as it could do. “Too much was made of the fact that Mike was taking this trip. I’m not so sure what we needed him for at that time. The movie was out, and whatever changes we needed to make, we could make them. It’s not like anybody ever said, ‘Okay, that’s it, we’re not spending any more money.’”
But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the marketing staff wouldn’t have been so exhausted if they weren’t releasing Hook as well as Bugsy. And if they hadn’t allowed a substantial chunk of their staff to take vacations while they had two big holiday films in release. The Bugsy gang were having none of Medavoy’s excuses. Replies Toback, “Mike’s response was, What could he have done that he wasn’t already doing? I don’t know. Maybe the answer was nothing, because he wasn’t doing anything.”
IN JANUARY 1992, the L.A. critics awarded Bugsy Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, while the National Board of Review singled out Beatty for Best Actor. But after getting eight Golden Globe nominations, Bugsy won only one, Best Motion Picture Drama. The other drama awards were spread out over several pictures, so the Globes failed to send a clear signal. It was a significant setback, but, on the other hand, the winner of that category had won the Best Picture Oscar for the previous eight years.
With its strong reviews, TriStar recognized that Bugsy was a powerful Oscar candidate, and pushed it for nominations. But by January 20, the Martin Luther King holiday, the occasion for another marketing meeting, the feeling was, according to Jones, “All you wanted was for it to be over. What do I have to do to get out of this room? A couple more full-page Academy ads? Done!”
When the Academy Award nominations were announced on February 20, Bugsy received ten, including Best Picture and Best Director, a vote of confidence in the beleaguered movie, which immediately became the front-runner. Toback was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and both Harvey Keitel and Ben Kingsley for Best Supporting Actor. The other Best Picture nominees that year were JFK, The Silence of the Lambs, The Prince of Tides, and Disney’s animated feature Beauty and the Beast. In the Best Actor category, Beatty was up against Robert De Niro for Cape Fear, Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs, Nick Nolte for The Prince of Tides, and Robin Williams for The Fisher King.
Guber continued to pour money into the Oscar campaign for Bugsy. “Bugsy really was the movie that everybody had their eye on for awards,” says Jones. “We certainly chased it in every possible way. People teased us that we held the record that year for the number of full-page ads.”
When the envelopes were opened on March 30, Silence of the Lambs swept the major categories, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Keitel and Kingsley canceled each other out for Best Supporting Actor, which went to Jack Palance in City Slickers. Callie Khouri (Thelma & Louise) beat Toback for Best Original Screenplay. Bugsy won just two Oscars, Dennis Gassner for production design, and Albert Wolsky for costumes.
Bugsy was far and away the best picture that year, and Beatty’s was the best performance. An injustice had been done, but what else was new? After all, the Academy was less the Roman Senate than the Parliament of Fowls.
According to Medavoy, TriStar lost just shy of $30 million on Bugsy. The film cost about $43 million, with an additional $15 million to open it, plus an additional $10 million for the Academy campaign. It grossed only $49.1 million, domestic, returning just $21 million to the studio in rentals.
Like Ishtar, Bugsy left a trail of devastation in its wake, although it took a few years for the other shoes to drop. Shutt and Jones left TriStar in 1994 and went to Universal, where they became co-presidents of marketing. The Levinson-Johnson partnership survived for another two productions, but subsequently the two split up. The seeds of their eventual parting of the ways were sown during Bugsy. “Up to then, Barry and I had had a lot of fun making films together,” says Johnson. “Bugsy soured a lot of things for us. It may have been me, in that I never connected to the movie as deeply as the three of them did. Who knows, perhaps that’s what Warren sensed. He is so smart.” Medavoy blames Beatty for poisoning his relationship with Guber, although the two men did not get along anyway. He wrote, “I had to go through a public crucifixion over [Bugsy], one that would shadow me for the rest of my time at TriStar.” That, along with Hook’s lackluster performance at the box office, paved the way for Medavoy’s departure in early 1994, and TriStar ceased to exist as a semiautonomous, independent entity.
Still, despite his difficulties on Bugsy, Johnson says he learned a lot from Beatty. “You go to dailies, and it’s very easy to say, ‘Gee, that’s great, that really works well, that’s great, terrific performance…’ You need to be that cheerleader, but your real job is to find out what’s not working so you can address it and fix it. I like to think that’s what I do, but Warren does it to a degree that even I didn’t. He just stays on everything, and never lets go. He watched every single number that came out. It was literally, Why don’t we add another eleven theaters in Omaha?’ or, ‘I spoke to somebody in Santa Fe who says we’re playing on the wrong screen.’ He will read the press release, reread it, and change this and question that. Some of it is absurd, but some of it, I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right.” Adds Jones, “Is he focused on the kind of details where you want to run out of the room screaming about? Yes. Would I want to do it again tomorrow? I don’t know. But when he’s making a movie, he’s really making the movie. This will sound weird, but I think he is kind of a genius. When it was all over, we both consider ourselves extremely lucky to be able to say we worked on those pictures.”
WHILE BUGSY struggled at the box office, Beatty and Bening’s first child was born on January 8, 1992, a daughter, named after his mother, Kathlyn, who died a little more than a year later, on February 26, 1993, at the age of ninety. “He was as close to his mother as mother and son can be,” recalls Toback. “But when she died, he called me up, and we talked for about twenty minutes. Then he said, ‘You know, I haven’t even mentioned to you my mother died yesterday.’ That’s that cultural, religious background where you don’t sob. It’s all restrained.”
Beatty and Bening married on March 12. Beatty was turning the page with a vengeance, which is not to say that he was never haunted by echoes from previous chapters. One of the weirdest was an outburst delivered from the stage of a Guns N’ Roses concert in Paris that year by Axl Rose. It appeared that while Stephanie Seymour was seeing Beatty, she appeare
d in Rose’s video November Rain. On their first date, she took him to the Bugsy set, built in an airplane hangar in the Valley, after which she ditched Beatty. According to a self-proclaimed “knowledgeable” blogger, Rose worried that she was cheating on him with Beatty. Dressed in red bathing trunks, a blue smoking jacket with red lapels, with a matching bandanna wrapped around his head, Rose cut loose with a profane diatribe directed at the movie star: “I’d like to dedicate this next song,” he exclaimed, to “a man who is so empty that all he can do is play fucking games. A man who is a parasite. A man who lives his life on sucking other people’s life forces, their energy. An old man who likes to live vicariously through young people, suck up all their life because he has none of his own. I’d like to dedicate this song to a cheap punk named Warren Beatty.”
Predictably, Beatty’s dual announcements—baby, marriage—were greeted by the media with a blizzard of “end of an era” items, as the avatar of 1960s hedonism, the symbol of the sexual revolution and the death of the family, finally bowed, it seemed, to the realities of advancing age and the pressure of convention. With Nicholson growing a paunch and losing his hair, Evans (however briefly) in a mental institution, and now Beatty tangled up in apron strings, it seemed as if it were only a matter of time before Hugh Hefner traded in Playboy for Redbook. No one quite knew what to make of it. Johnny Carson quipped, “Warren wanted a baby so he could meet baby-sitters.”
Many of those who knew Beatty best were stunned, convinced that it wouldn’t last. Several people who know him were of the opinion that it all had to do with the D-word. Shirley MacLaine’s daughter, Sachi, was quoted as saying, “He’s very frightened of the age thing so he’ll marry and have kids.” One anonymous friend agreed, saying, “Everything he’s done all his life has been an attempt to fight off mortality. The movie Shampoo declared you could fuck your way to life eternal.… Now he’s discovered there’s an obvious way he’s ignored all these years—just have a kid.”
But many of his friends took it in stride. “In a weird way, the guy that he became, and is today, is who I believe Warren always was,” says former Disney publicist Terry Press. Added a friend, “The only thing anyone talked about was not Warren’s movies or his acting but his sexual exploits. It took him a while to understand that.” Continuing the thought, Dick Sylbert observed, “Warren has always been obsessed with not being taken seriously. He couldn’t get past the playboy stuff. That’s what drove him to take his life in his own hands. Even the marriage is part of that.”
Says Pikser, “I don’t think there was a great sea change in Warren, other than it was time. He never gave up the idea of having a family, and being a movie star he was able to delay that much longer than a normal person could. If somebody said to me, ‘You can fuck as many beautiful women you want until the age of fifty, and then you can get a beautiful thirty-year-old woman to marry you, and have children with you’—who’s gonna turn that down? Annette was the perfect person, with a strong family background of her own, who was relatively stable, not a nut job, and a good actress. In terms of presenting her to the world, this is not a bimbo—it’s a no-brainer.”
12
MR. BEATTY GOES TO WASHINGTON
How Beatty spilled tears over Love Affair, tore the wings off the director, virtually kidnapped Katharine Hepburn, but redeemed himself with Bulworth.
Bulworth is “the only truly political film to come out of mainstream Hollywood.”
—Jules Feiffer
BEATTY HAD LONG nursed a sentimental affection for Leo McCarey’s Love Affair, released in 1939, with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, as well as the same director’s treacly remake, An Affair to Remember (1957), with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. He recalled them both fondly, especially the latter, apparently oblivious to the candied dialogue and overripe smell of the 1950s that make it virtually unwatchable today. With Love Affair he could kill two birds with one stone. First, it allowed him to play opposite Annette Bening, which he was determined to do, as he did with Caron, Christie, and Keaton. Said one friend, “He’s never going to let her out of his sight. He’s got a beautiful albatross around his neck.” Second, he admired Charles Boyer when he was growing up, and now he could play debonair Cary Grant in Love Affair 3. As the years wore on, Grant became a role model for Beatty, a better fit than Brando and Dean, especially when Beatty demonstrated a flair for comedy. Years earlier, in the sixties, Grant found himself a Hollywood party and couldn’t help noticing that all the stunning young actresses were drawn to Beatty. “See that guy?” Grant reportedly said to a companion, “that used to be me.” Now, Beatty was returning the compliment, if compliment it was. Warners head Steve Ross, also a fan of the McCarey pictures, urged Beatty to do another one, a quickie that would mint money for everyone. So of all the films he could have made, Beatty settled on Love Affair, a soapy remake of a soapy remake.
Beatty had asked Robert Towne to write and direct the movie, which was set up at Warners. Beatty took home $9 million up front. He announced the film in January 1993. Towne agreed, despite their frayed friendship. Observed Dick Sylbert, “This was a vaguely sick relationship that had been going on for a very long time. Bob was always broke.” Towne, who had not repaid the loans Beatty had made him over the years, asked for an advance of $500,000 against his share of the film. Beatty wondered how he had been able to afford his lavish house in the Pacific Palisades, given his poor-mouthing. But he acquiesced, on the condition that Towne retire the loans, approximately $800,000, with his next paychecks, from Love Affair or elsewhere. (A few years earlier, the writer had taken his second wife-to-be on a first date to a screening at Beatty’s, which Dick Sylbert, Marshall Bell, and others also attended. The star stood up and humiliated Towne by asking, “Are you still doing drugs? You’ve stopped that, haven’t you?”)
Towne tried to update the material and spike the syrupy goo with pins and needles: “I opened it up with Warren as a former football player getting a prostate examination. Then I put him on a fat farm,” he explained. “He thought it was too funny and unglamorous.” It took Towne a year to do the first draft, and Beatty sent him back to the typewriter. After several more drafts, Beatty finally approved one.
With Towne angry and out of the picture, the star recruited Glenn Gordon Caron the way he had Barry Levinson. He first called him in 1988, six or so weeks after the release of his first feature, Clean and Sober, with Michael Keaton. Then in his early thirties, Caron was a large man, a shade under six feet, heavy, around two hundred pounds, maybe more, with thinning, light brown hair and preppie taste in clothes—golf shirts, sweaters, khakis. He was of an age to have grown up with Shampoo and the others. In other words, he was starstruck.
Caron was best known for his work in television. He had written and produced Moonlighting, which became a surprise hit in the late 1980s. The show featured relative newbie Bruce Willis opposite Cybill Shepherd playing a hip detective team whose clashing personalities created enough sparks to conjure up memories of the screwball comedies of the 1930s, like Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby. Caron was hot, and like every other TV producer, he dreamed of making features. After Clean and Sober, he began developing Evita for Madonna under the watchful eye of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave him a deal at Disney. It was through Madonna that he first met Beatty, who was then working on Dick Tracy. As no one could do better than he, Beatty wooed him with shameless flattery. “Gosh,” he exclaimed, “we should do something together. If I had known you before, I wouldn’t be directing Dick Tracy, you would.” Recalls Caron, “I was thrilled.”
Caron, who had turned Willis and Shepherd into the Tracy and Hepburn of the small screen, must have seemed like the perfect choice to set fire to the lachrymose dialogue of McCarey’s weepie. Beatty asked Willis whether he thought Caron would be up to directing Love Affair, and got an equivocal response. He shrugged it off, and called Caron, asking, “Would you ever consider making a movie quickly, just for fun? Is there anything wrong with just singing ‘Danny Boy’?” C
aron should have seen the red flags. There has never been a quickie Warren Beatty movie, and he had no idea who or what “Danny Boy” was. Nevertheless he understood what Beatty was saying: “How ’bout doing something right down the middle?” Still, when the star said, “What I’d really like to do is a remake of Love Affair,” he was puzzled. He thought, I never saw either of the Love Affairs, I’m not interested in remakes. It didn’t make any sense to him.
Caron was right to hesitate. As time wore on, Beatty was becoming disenchanted with his theory of hostile intelligences, regardless of how well it worked on Bugsy. He had once spoken, years earlier, words that would prove prophetic: “Basically, success breeds intolerance to the simple fatigue that comes out of a difference of opinion. Someone comes in and says, ‘I hate to tell you, but this room we’re sitting in is supposed to look like 1933 and it looks like 1945.’ You say, ‘All right, move these couches out and get rid of that desk. Change the curtains.’ At a certain stage in life, at a certain point on the ladder of success, it’s goddamn tiring to have a difference of opinion. It is easier to say, ‘Look, I think it looks fine. Get the hell out of here. We are going to shoot it the way it is.’ That’s why certain directors and actors eventually become old-fashioned. They cease to be willing to undertake the fatigue that’s involved when there is a difference of opinion.” Would that he had listened to his own advice.
Meanwhile, Caron’s new movie, Wilder Napalm, produced in 1993 by Barry Levinson and Mark Johnson’s company, Baltimore Pictures, flopped badly. Caron recalled, “Frankly I became scared and I wondered, Am I ever going to work again?” He remembers, “Warren really wanted me to write a screenplay. So we talked and talked and talked, and then I began to write.” That was the honeymoon period, the fall of 1993. Caron recalls, “We spent a lot of time together, we genuinely enjoyed each other.” According to him, Debra Winger, among others, warned him off.
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 59