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Shampoo 152 Hal had a temperament that I guess was almost Buddha-like in some ways. He literally made you think better in his presence . It wasn’t always so much what he said, but he had such a calming influence, and particularly with two people like Warren and I were, who were prone to be volatile. —Robert Towne 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. —Lee Grant The Last Detail consolidated Ashby’s growing friendship with Jack Nicholson , and he became part of the actor’s inner circle, going with him to Lakers’ games, and hanging out at his house on Mulholland Drive. He got to know Nicholson’s new girlfriend, Anjelica Huston, and many of his friends, including record producer Lou Adler, writer Rudy Wurlitzer, and, most notably, Warren Beatty. One night in the fall of 1973, Beatty told Ashby about Shampoo, a project he and Robert Towne had been working on six or seven years earlier about the exploits of a womanizing hairdresser in Beverly Hills. Both Towne and Beatty had written versions, and they had fallen out over whose ideas were better, but Beatty was now keen to resurrect the project and make it his next film. At Beatty’s invitation, Ashby read both scripts and concluded that a combination of the two could produce a very good film. He was savvy enough to know that working with stars like Nicholson and Beatty could only raise his profile and help his career . “Warren was a giant star,” says Jerome Hellman, who would later make Coming Home with Ashby, “and Hal looked up to and cherished 14 Shampoo 153 his friendship with Warren. I think for him to do Shampoo was like a validation, because complicated as Hal was, and as quixotic as he was, he didn’t want to fail, he wanted to be on the A-list.”1 Despite resistance from Towne, who inexplicably felt that Ashby did not sufficiently respect his scripts, Beatty brought in Ashby to direct Shampoo. Beatty had found a home for the film at Columbia, which recognized Beatty as a star who could deliver the megahit it desperately needed. The next step was to put together a shooting script combining Beatty’s and Towne’s screenplays. The two men had huge respect for each other, but their relationship resembled a volatile marriage, fraught with jealousy and suspicion. When Ashby and Beatty first went to work on Shampoo’s script, Ashby wrote a note to his secretary, saying, “I’m going to be working with Warren for next few days. Taking no phone calls. . . . Don’t tell [Robert Towne] I’m working with Warren—(Don’t tell anyone I’m working with Warren).”2 After a few days alone with Beatty in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, during which they constructed what Ashby called “a long rough composite kind of script,” Ashby brought in Towne to hone and pare down what they had collated together.3 In the intensive ten-day period it took to write Shampoo, the demons of Beatty and Towne’s friendship emerged as they wrestled for control and Ashby played referee. Towne says the writing sessions were fueled by “adrenaline and rage,” with the pair most often referring to each other as “motherfucker” and Towne shouting at Beatty, “You cunt. . . . You’re just being a cunt. . . . That’s more cunt stuff.”4 “We had a very volatile time, I remember,” says Towne, “and Hal was in the middle, and thank God he was. We’d talk about it, and then I’d go into the next room and write ferociously and come out. We were all a little thrown by the surprising quality of the work, and the speed.”5 Beatty also ultimately felt extremely positive about the results of the claustrophobic writing session, calling it “the most creative 10 days of my life, probably.”6 In its first drafts, written in the late 1960s, Shampoo had a contemporary setting, but during the rewrites it became a period film set on the eve of the 1968 presidential election. Bridging several genres, it was a sex comedy that drew inspiration from Thomas Wycherly’s play The Country Wife (1675) and (apparently) Beatty’s own bed-hopping antics, but it was also a thoughtful backward look at America’s recent history...

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