Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

17. Double Feature

Double Feature 200 The strain is beginning to show on the cast and crew. This is not what you’d call a carefree, happy set. There have been firings, and Hal Ashby has been doing a lot of yelling lately. —Journalist Bruce Cook on visiting the Hamster of Happiness shoot I was thoroughly at home inside of Being There, in significant measure because of Ashby’s inarticulate empathy. The director loves his actors and his work, and that seemed just exactly right at this time with this part. —Melvyn Douglas “I’ve always led a very simple life,” Ashby reflected in early 1978. “Materially , I’m living very comfortably; I can afford the things I need. But it’s not as if I’ve been striving for all this. It’s just starting to happen now and it’s all very weird to me. I just won’t let it take me over. . . . I won’t lose that basic value.” Ashby’s commitment to basic values was apparent in his filmmaking as well. In the face of the success of an emerging breed of blockbusters such as Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), he expressed the hope that “more films move toward personal cinema because that is where I’m at. These big-budgeted, splashy movies will always be around, they have great appeal for many. . . . But I intend to keep making personal pictures.”1 At the time of Coming Home’s release, Ashby was closing in on his next project. He desperately wanted to do The Hawkline Monster, but he felt Richard Brautigan’s screenplay was not up to scratch, so he was rewriting it himself. American Me, a project about low-rider gangs in East Los Angeles that Ashby’s friend Lou Adler had planned to produce a few years earlier, was ready to go at Paramount. It had a strong ro17 Double Feature 201 mantic element, and though Ashby was attracted to the subject, again he felt the writing was not strong enough. By May 1978, he had passed on American Me (which finally appeared in 1992, directed by Edward James Olmos) and was considering Popeye, a live-action musical of the cartoon that was to star Dustin Hoffman and be produced by Robert Evans . Working with Hoffman was a big draw, and though a deal seemed to be in the offing—Hoffman, Evans, and Ashby went out to celebrate with vodka and caviar—Ashby withdrew after Hoffman fell out with Jules Feiffer, the satirical cartoonist hired to write the screenplay. (Robert Altman took Ashby’s place and Robin Williams Hoffman’s, and the resulting film was released in 1980.) Ashby had not had an agent since Mike Medavoy moved to United Artists (UA) and instead employed his business manager, Larry Reynolds , and entertainment lawyer Jack Schwartzman to handle his affairs. Schwartzman, who was Ashby’s friend as well as attorney, became a powerful Hollywood player after he joined the Coppola clan by marrying Talia Shire, Francis Ford Coppola’s sister. Ever since Ashby had bought the rights to Hawkline in 1975, Schwartzman had insisted it was “the special one,” identifying it as a potential goldmine if Jack Nicholson and another major male star (Dustin Hoffman and then Clint Eastwood were both considered) were to sign on.2 MGM was very keen on the project and regularly called Ashby about it, but he was always too busy with either Bound for Glory or Coming Home and, in any case, knew the script still needed work. In 1978, Schwartzman began negotiating a multipicture deal with UA and told Ashby that an “unprecedented” deal for Hawkline would be at the heart of it. However, when the talks with UA foundered, Schwartzman turned his attention to Lorimar, the television company that made The Waltons and Eight Is Enough, which had recently expanded into films. Peter Bart, previously Robert Evans’s lieutenant at Paramount, had been appointed head of the film division, but Ashby didn’t want to work with him after negative experiences on Harold and Maude. Lorimar, however, was extremely keen to attract someone of Ashby’s considerable cachet, so Schwartzman opportunistically brokered an agreement where his newly formed JS Productions would act as the middleman between Ashby and Lorimar. The reason Ashby was drawn to Lorimar, a company with no track 202 Being Hal Ashby record in Hollywood, was...