I did not hear from Wallis for three weeks. Worried that I would lose the book, I sent him a memo inquiring if he was planning to do anything with it. I received an immediate response from Wallis’s assistant informing me that the producer had given True Grit to John Wayne, who urgently wanted to do it. Wallis was now looking for a director. There was no “thank you” or even a “let me know if you find something else.”
So much for building a relationship with Hal Wallis. Our total give-and-take, I realized, would consist of Wallis supervising a script and submitting his budget. We would then say “yes” or “no”—that would be the extent of our input.
Still, I was gratified that I’d found a picture for John Wayne—as it turned out, it was a damned good picture. Still my role had been defined as that of a studio functionary, servicing the filmmaking establishment, or at least that sector of the establishment that was based at Paramount.
As I drove to the studio with Evans one morning, I blurted out my frustration. “I don’t want to spend my life with the likes of Alan Jay Lerner, Hal Wallis, or Blake Edwards,” I complained. “They’re voices of the past, and if we don’t do something radical about it, they’ll become our voice.”
Evans flashed a pained smile, but remained silent. I knew he agreed with me, but I also knew that he relished the attention of Lerner, Wallis, Edwards, and others of Hollywood’s ruling class.
“What do you want to do about it?” Evans asked finally.
“I want to go out on a limb,” I told him. “I want to find the unexpected. I want to beat the odds.”
My friend looked at me quizzically. “What kind of unexpected ...?”
“Beats me.”
Evans was obviously bemused. “Go for it,” he mumbled.
The next weekend I read a script that perfectly fit my mood. It was utterly bizarre in terms of character and narrative. Its theme was one of rebellion if not downright nihilism. I had never heard of its author—a kid named Colin Higgins who had recently graduated from UCLA film school and was cleaning swimming pools to support himself. One of the pools belonged to a producer named Edward Lewis to whom Higgins had given his script, hoping for words of encouragement.
A tough, grizzled producer, Lewis knew the script—it was titled Harold and Maude—was off-the-wall. Apparently he’d decided that, of all the studio execs in town, I might be the least likely to reject it. “This may not be for you,” Lewis told me as he handed me a copy. “This may be an acquired taste.”
When I phoned Lewis that following Monday morning, my instinct was to express my unbridled enthusiasm, but I knew that was not the way business was done at studios. If you liked something too much in Hollywood, the price went up. The best attitude, I had learned, was one of mild disinterest.
“The script is different,” I told Lewis warily. “But it’s ... well, out there.”
Edward Lewis was known to be a stalwart liberal who had produced Spartacus and was one of the first to hire blacklisted writers. “But, do you personally like it?” he asked.
I was determined to be cagey. “The script has its own sensibility, I’ll give you that, but how the hell do you translate that sensibility to the screen?”
“I’ll give you the bad news,” Lewis said. “The kid who wrote it—the Higgins kid—insists on directing it. That’s the way it lays out.”
The “Higgins kid,” of course, had no credentials as a director except for his UCLA student film. “You know as well as I that you’ll never get the picture made on those terms,” I told Lewis. I was fencing. He knew it.
What I’d wanted to say was, “This is an amazing fucking script and I’ll bust my butt to get it made.” But first there were questions to be resolved. Was there interest in the script elsewhere? How cheaply could the movie be budgeted? Would Colin Higgins agree to a test of some sort—a director’s audition—to determine his capabilities?
There was another question as well. Would Bob Evans think I was losing it when he read the script?
The next morning I went to Evans’s office with Harold and Maude. “I told you I was looking for some break-the-rules material,” I said. “So I’ve got numero uno. It’s a love story between an eighteen-year-old boy and an eighty-year-old woman.”
Evans shot me a look. “And I suppose there’s a hot sex scene between them. It’s Deep Throat in a retirement home.”
I drew a breath. “They have sex, but, this movie could be ... well, game changing. Please read it and tell me I’m crazy.”
“You are serious?” Evans exclaimed.
I didn’t answer.
“I’ll show you what I’m going to do,” Evans said. He disappeared into his bathroom. I heard the lock click. I retreated to my office. Forty minutes later, he buzzed me on the intercom. “I love it. But you’re going to get me fired, you prick.”
This was a project that had to be semisurreptitious: that much we both understood. We could not expose the script to Bluhdorn or Davis or even to the head of marketing. It would never survive the encounter. Harold and Maude would have to be protected from the pack. It would not even be given to the story department for the usual coverage by its “readers.”
Problem one, of course, was to zero in on a director. Since the deal specified Higgins would get his shot, he was given a check for $7,000 and told to shoot a test. My own feeling, spending time with Higgins, was that he was not up to the challenge. A bright and friendly guy from Australia, he explained that he had written his script visualizing Elsa Lanchester as Maude and a young actor named John Rubinstein as Harold. Neither seemed especially attractive to me in those roles.
Two weeks later, Higgins presented his filmed audition: it was not especially impressive—a fact that he acknowledged. I knew I had to spring quickly into action to find another director. A friend had told me about a newly completed movie called The Landlord, which was produced by Norman Jewison and directed by his former editor, Hal Ashby. When I saw the film and asked Jewison about its director, he was unstinting in his recommendation. “Ashby is brilliant,” said Jewison, whose own work included The Russians Are Coming. “He’s got the touch. He’s a quirky guy—he may not be your cup of tea.”
I dispatched a copy of Harold and Maude to Ashby with a note expressing my enthusiasm for the material.
When Ashby turned up in my office a few days later, I understood Jewison’s message. Rail-thin and wearing tinted “granny” glasses, his straw hair splayed across his shoulders, mustache and beard fighting each other for space on his rumpled face, Ashby looked like a homeless person. Checking his background, I learned that he was from Ogden, Utah, the rebellious product of the Mormon culture, but was not himself a Mormon. When Hal was twelve years old, his father had shot himself, and Hal had left home shortly afterward.
Ashby had been married and divorced in his early twenties and floated around the West until he lucked into a job running a mimeograph machine at Universal studio. He befriended a young assistant editor and found himself developing an affinity for the Moviola editing machine. By this time, he had also acquired the nickname “Hashby” because of his fondness for marijuana and related substances.
Chatting in my office now, Ashby seemed diffident about our prospective project. “The writer, Higgins, he wants to direct his script,” he said. “Why not let him do it?”
“We let him do a test,” I said. “He’s not ready.”
“Let me talk with him,” Ashby said. I remembered Jewison’s warning. Ashby was indeed “quirky,” if not funky.
Over the next few weeks, Ashby went through a sort of dance—one I’d ultimately become familiar with. He talked with Higgins, and apparently they liked each other. Higgins reiterated his interest in directing, but said that if Ashby wanted to take it over, that was OK with him.
Ashby’s appetite for Harold and Maude seemed expansive one week, only to fade the next. In rereading the script, he’d decided that music had become an essential ingredient to telling the story—but what music?
He sent the script to Elton John, who reacted enthusiastically to it, and even talked about trying out for the role of Harold. His handlers reminded him that his career as a performer was just starting to take off. This was no time for an acting hiatus.
And then there was Cat Stevens. Ashby loved the funky ballads in Cat’s album Tea for the Tillerman. The songs told a story that could be integrated into the Harold and Maude story.
Ashby would never get around to specifically saying, “I want to direct this movie.” Direct communication of that sort wasn’t in his repertoire, I concluded. So one day I told Evans that we shouldn’t have any more meetings, we should simply start putting together our crew and cast.
Hence, in typically cool seventies style, Harold and Maude drifted into reality. There was no ceremonial green light, and no one at the corporate level asked about it when the title appeared on the production charts. It would simply become a “happening.”
As he started reworking the script, Ashby’s conceit was that Harold was a rebellious rich kid who was ambivalent about virtually everything except for two issues: He hated his mother and he wanted to stay out of the draft. Maude was a hippie empress whose background was either one of privilege or poverty, depending on which story she wished to spin (Harold even spied concentration camp numbers on her arm, but that was never discussed). Harold and Maude shared a fondness for funerals. He was enamored of her panache but appalled by her tendency to steal cars and defy the law. And somewhere along the way, Maude decided that, though she was nearing her eightieth birthday, she would make a man of him—and shortly thereafter, commit suicide.
One day Ashby called to say, “There are six guys I’d like to test for the part of Harold but I don’t really know what to expect. In fact, I don’t have a clue.”
The actors were a study in contrast: John Rubinstein had a boyish charm, Bob Balaban was intelligent but nerdy, and Bud Cort was delicate and sexually ambiguous.
Of all the actors, only Cort had heat. He had recently starred in Robert Altman’s picture Brewster McCloud, and he was now pursuing the role of Harold with a self-confidence the other young actors couldn’t mobilize. He even promised Ashby that he would personally recruit Greta Garbo to play Maude. (Garbo at the time had long since retired.) Cort said he loved the script but warned he would do a lot of improvising—a suggestion that offended Colin Higgins but seemed to excite Ashby.
Cort got the gig. Ashby dismissed his Garbo idea, proposing Ruth Gordon for Maude—a notion that jarred Higgins. He felt Gordon would play Maude as too aggressive and surly a character. Ashby had earlier considered the gentler Dame Edith Evans, who had starred in The Whisperers, but after spending time with Gordon, he told his producer, Charles (Chuck) Mulvehill, “Let’s go for the comedy—and that’s Gordon.”
Bob Evans concurred with this choice. He’d just seen Ruth Gordon in a very broad comedy called Where’s Poppa?, and also admired her work in Rosemary’s Baby two years earlier.
“I want laughs,” Ashby responded. “Harold and Maude won’t work without big laughs and Ruth Gordon is funny. She also has a gentler side.”
Though I’d resolutely avoided arguments about casting, I decided to join the Ruth Gordon cause this time. “You’ve seen her crass side in Where’s Poppa? but, trust me, Ruth Gordon in person is a thoughtful, soft-spoken individual,” I told Evans. “She’s even a friend of my mother on Martha’s Vineyard. She presides over a literary salon.”
Ashby was similarly unpredictable in favoring a British TV actress with the unlikely name of Vivian Pickles to play Mrs. Chasen, Harold’s mother. Again, he’d interviewed more serious and famous actresses like Gladys Cooper and Dame Edith Evans, but opted for a performer who would deliver laughs.
Ashby had taken a lot of time in choosing his cast, and Mulvehill, his young producer, learned that his director would be similarly deliberate in picking his locations. “I love Hal, but he’s indecisive,” Mulvehill complained. “Whenever he faces a tough decision, his instinct is to light up a joint and walk off by himself.
“Hal’s life is all about dope,” Mulvehill observed. “If he lights a joint, he feels he’ll get a better idea.” Be prepared, Mulvehill seemed to be warning; shooting Harold and Maude will be a hallucinogenic experience. “Hal doesn’t even want to rehearse his actors,” Mulvehill said. “He feels it takes away the spontaneity.”
Mulvehill’s foreboding was justified. By the third week of principal photography, it became evident that Ashby’s indecisiveness was costing him, and also the studio. With every passing day, he was managing to accomplish only half a day’s work. And when Evans phoned him to register his concern, Ashby refused to take his phone calls.
When I spoke with Mulvehill about these issues, the young producer was, as usual, candid. “Hal seems to be struggling to find the voice of the picture. It’s that music issue we talked about at the start.”
Ashby, it seemed, had been playing Cat Stevens songs over and over on the set. He even decided to ask Cat Stevens and his manager to fly to San Francisco to watch the dailies and perhaps compose some songs that could integrate the scenes. Uncertain about the flow of the narrative, Ashby hoped the young Brit could not only devise a score but also become a partner in creating the story.
Stevens was thrilled by the opportunity. He had never visited San Francisco; indeed, he had never flown first-class. And he liked both the script and its director. “Hal isn’t like the predictable Hollywood director,” Stevens told me. “He always seems to be high.” And he wasn’t talking about mood.
The experiment seemed to work. Cat recorded two of his songs, and then the editors cut them into scenes, and Ashby was excited by the result. Now Harold and Maude was emerging as a comedy with music.
But it was still emerging too slowly. As its principal advocate, I was the obvious candidate to visit the set and forcefully inform the filmmaker and producer of the studio’s growing alarm. Harold and Maude was a delicious adventure at $1.4 million. At $2 million or beyond, it could become an embarrassment to the new production regime.
Mindful that Ashby was habitually noncommunicative, I flew to San Francisco and walked onto the set one morning. Mulvehill was the first to spot me, and his look was one of panic. Ashby pretended to ignore me at first, but when I started in his direction he advanced to meet me.
“Didn’t expect you,” he said, not offering his hand.
“Look, Hal, you and I know how this conversation between us will play out, so let’s make it simple. You have to go faster. Much faster.” My voice was calm but firm.
“Faster is not better,” he replied.
“Faster is better for me and that makes it better for you,” I replied. I then handed him an airline ticket.
“Why are you giving me a ticket?”
“It will be your ticket home to LA if you don’t maintain your shooting schedule,” I said.
Ashby’s pallid face turned pink. He nervously adjusted his granny glasses. “I’ll try,” Ashby said, and turned away. “No promises.”
“The ticket is a promise,” I told him.
It was not a warm-and-fuzzy meeting, but studio executives rarely have warm-and-fuzzy meetings with directors. This one apparently served its purpose. Ashby stepped up his shooting pace. He smoked a little less and shot a little more and the Cat Stevens songs were playing constantly and seemed to give him heart.
As I watched the dailies, Harold’s ceremonial suicides were hilarious. His dialogues with Maude were poignant. Though he required myriad takes, Bud Cort’s reaction shots were inspired—his wistful contentment upon his sexual initiation with Maude was classic. And the bits from the character actors were consistently on target.
My colleagues in the screening room broke up when Eric Christmas, cast as Harold’s priest, delivered his reaction to the news of Harold and Maude’s imminent marriage. “The commingling of withered flesh, sagging breasts ...” represented his imagining of the Harold and Maude wedding night, and it somehow epitomized
the opaque love story.
Once the final scene had been shot and Ashby had a chance to return to his natural habitat—the editing room—the expectation at the studio was that a tidy first cut would soon be delivered. By this time, however, I had already learned that expectations of any kind were dangerous at a studio. In fact, Ashby soon found himself stymied. The first act of the film, embracing Harold’s faux suicides, his “auditions” of the girls recruited by his mother, and the initial encounters with Maude all fell deftly into place. Ashby cut together forty minutes, replete with Cat Stevens music, to show us, and our reactions were exuberant.
At the same time he was struggling with several key scenes toward the end of the movie, which had been desperately overwritten. From the time Maude announced her intention to end her life through the hospital sequences, the movie simply died. Scenes were talky; emotions were announced, not dramatized.
In desperation, Ashby played repeatedly with montage and with music, but the first full cut came in at three hours, and Mulvehill told him, “This movie is fucking awful.” Reacting to one Ruth Gordon scene, Mulvehill blurted to his director, “If this fucking broad says one more wiseass word I’m gonna smack her.”
That scene was cut. In the end, after much anguish and many joints, Ashby turned in a streamlined cut of ninety minutes. Evans and I loved it and arranged for a test screening before what we thought would be a sympathetic audience in Palo Alto, adjacent to the Stanford University campus. The young audience seemed stunned by the movie at first then started laughing and even applauding. At the end the audience was on its feet.
Evans and I were delighted. The time had finally come, we agreed, to show this film to the Paramount marketing and distribution executives.
Alas, the Stanford reaction would not be replicated. A few professed to like the film, but I could sense the furtive dismissal. Frank Yablans, the newly anointed president, did not “get” Harold and Maude. He labeled it “an art house picture” and proposed a limited Christmas release, designed as counterprogramming to the rival studios’ would-be blockbusters. The marketing team meanwhile struck out again and again in their effort to design a campaign. Their final effort was a sort of tombstone ad that simply showed a background of type.
Peter Bart Page 12