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The Last Detail 140 He had a sense of truth, and what was a real moment. He didn’t like to watch moments that were not real, and he was willing to let—to a fault sometimes—things go wherever he felt they should as long as they stayed real. —Robert Towne (on Hal Ashby) Because Ashby and his cast and crew were shooting in Toronto at the time, they voted by absentee ballot in the U.S. presidential election on November 7, 1972. Richard Nixon’s image had appeared on a television screen in The Landlord and in a deified picture on the office wall of Harold’s Uncle Victor, in both cases embodying for Ashby all that was wrong with the country. Though he was rarely vocal about it, Ashby was highly politicized and in the past two years had written numerous letters to Washington to lobby for several environmental acts, help Hopi Indians, stop the clear-cutting of forests, and push for the abolition of the death penalty and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. He cast his vote for Nixon’s opponent, Democratic senator George McGovern , who was campaigning as the “peace” candidate. (He also voted for the proposed environmental measures and the relaxation of laws on obscenity and marijuana.) For the rest of the year, Ashby and the company stayed in Canada, where the rain, snow, and freezing temperatures of a Toronto winter made California seem a world away. Despite the cold, they felt fortunate to be far from the depression many felt back home when Nixon won a landslide victory, taking 60 percent of the popular vote. Ashby had decided to shoot the film chronologically, as this would help the inexperienced Quaid and Otis Young, the actor who had replaced Rupert Crosse, ease their way into the characters. Toronto 13 The Last Detail 141 doubled as Norfolk, but with this exception, Ashby’s company made the same journey Buddusky and Mulhall took as they gave Meadows a taste of the good life before his internment, traveling from Virginia up the East Coast to New Hampshire, and taking in Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston on the way. Quaid, in his first major film role, found himself thrust into a surreal new world. “The first night I arrived for The Last Detail,” he recalls, “I went to Hal’s hotel room, and someone came in with a huge garbage bag filled with grass, saying, ‘I got the supply for the movie!’”1 Quaid was concerned about making a good impression in his first scene: “I remember I was very nervous, and I had my eyes twitching, my eyeballs rolling, and my lips quivering, and my head shaking, and my hands trembling, and had my inner monologue working, and I was really acting. We did a take, and Hal came over to me, and put a hand on my shoulder, and leaned down and said, ‘Randy, we don’t have to do the whole movie in the first scene.’ It had a very calming effect on me, and I was able to do the part with the confidence he always instilled in me.”2 Ashby kept a close eye on Quaid but allowed him to develop into the role, just as Meadows grows in confidence and comes out of his shell over the course of the film. “Randy, I loved him because he was very outgoing,” Ashby said, “and as an actor the man is a genius. I’ve never worked with anybody in my life like him.”3 Michael Chapman, the first-time director of photography who was shooting The Last Detail, was another up-and-comer whom Ashby had taken a chance on. It was no secret that Chapman was not Ashby’s first choice—he had tried to get Haskell Wexler, Nestor Almendros, and Gordon Willis—but Chapman had been Willis’s camera operator on The Landlord and had served an apprenticeship with him much as Ashby had with Bob Swink. Chapman and Ashby formulated a specific look for the film, using natural lighting to bring a stark realism and immediacy to the action. Chapman’s documentary-style photography was perfectly in tune with the tight, deliberate script by Robert Towne, whose emotionally spare writing featured characters who were not immediately likable. Ashby was making a politically charged film (it was overtly antimilitary, with clear anti–Vietnam War undercurrents), but unlike his previous [3.144.243.184] Project MUSE (2024...

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