In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Glory Bound 165 Find out who is causing the Trouble here in this old World— remove the Power from their hands—place it in the hands of those who aint Greedy—and you can roll over and go to sleep. —passage underlined by Ashby in his copy of Woody Guthrie ’s Woody Sez (1975) When Oscar time came around, Columbia put Ashby forward as a candidate for Best Director, but he wasn’t nominated. Shampoo received four Academy Award nominations in all, for Beatty and Towne’s script, Richard Sylbert’s art direction, and Jack Warden’s and Lee Grant’s performances , but Grant was the only one to return home with a smile on Oscar night. Though Ashby was delighted for Grant, he felt a degree of detachment when it came to the film and said, “That’s not my picture, that’s Warren’s picture.”1 However, he was still relatively happy with Shampoo, saying, “There are always things that will gnaw at me, but I’m not walking around holding my head in my hands.”2 Ironically, the film Ashby was least invested in as a director was his biggest hit by far: Shampoo performed astronomically at the box office, where its saucy sensationalism rapidly earned it $22 million and made it Columbia’s most successful film of all time. As a result, Ashby was no longer associated with worthy small-scale pictures that underachieved financially but came to be seen instead as a director who could deliver big films with mass appeal. Both his “creative collaborators” on Shampoo were keen to work with him again: Robert Towne wanted Ashby to direct Personal Best, a script about female athletes that Ashby ultimately convinced Towne to direct himself (the film was released in 1982), while Beatty says, “We always talked about the things he was doing [and] I was always hoping 15 166 Being Hal Ashby we’d do another film together.”3 A decade later, Beatty asked Ashby to direct Dick Tracy, an offer Ashby turned down because he felt the comic book characters were too one-dimensional (Beatty himself wound up directing the film in 1990), and right after Shampoo he was trying to interest Ashby in another sexually explosive project, an adaptation of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. According to You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, a book by the film’s prospective producer, Julia Phillips, Beatty wanted to turn Jong’s novel into a porn film “with see-through dildos and vibrators.”4 (Beatty, however, says Phillips’s contentions were pure fabrication.) Ashby feared that the movie would be too glib, and even though Dyan Cannon wanted to be in it, he passed. His reasons for doing so were disputed by those involved: according to Jong, Ashby was “driven away by Julia’s craziness,” while Phillips claimed Ashby got tired of Columbia execs “dicking around” and not making up their mind whether they wanted him.5 It was easy enough to say no to Fear of Flying as offers were now flooding in. Producer Richard Roth wanted Ashby to do either Sheltering Sky (1990) or Havana (1990), Barbra Streisand offered him A Star Is Born (1976), he was being considered as a potential director for Network (1976), and he was linked to The Great Brink’s Robbery (1976) with Dustin Hoffman, whom Ashby was very keen to work with after the two had become friends. Though all these films eventually got made, Ashby was not the director of any of them. Ultimately, Ashby narrowed the list down to two possible projects: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a novel about a suicidal teenage girl in a psychiatric hospital, and Bound for Glory, the memoir by the Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie. Ashby was drawn to Rose Garden but feared that with Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest due to come out later that year, it would be seen as an attempt to jump on the “funny farm film” bandwagon. The Woody Guthrie project, however, had excited him even before he saw the script. Ashby had first heard about Bound for Glory during discussions at United Artists (UA) about his next project. Published in 1943, the book had since spawned numerous unsatisfactory screenplays, mostly written by friends of Guthrie’s who were too close to the subject matter to have the proper perspective. The film’s producers, former UA production chief Robert Blumofe and the late...

Share