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Lookin’ to Get Out 227 Directors who have the reputation of always coming in on schedule are in steady demand even if they’ve had a long line of box-office failures and their work is consistently mediocre, and . . . directors who are perfectionists are shunned as if they were lepers—unless, like Hal Ashby, they’ve had some recent hits. —Pauline Kael But you must understand if somebody says me, then they are automatically saying the film. For we are one and the same. —Hal Ashby Once again, it was time for Ashby to line up his next film. Given the range of projects on the table, Lookin’ to Get Out was a typically idiosyncratic choice. In the mid-1970s, the singer Chip Taylor had introduced his brother, Jon Voight, to his manager, Al Schwartz, who was writing a screenplay with dialogue that Taylor thought particularly impressive. Schwartz, who had quit high school after ninth grade and learned life’s lessons hustling on the New York City streets, had produced thirtyodd pages about the misadventures of two gamblers in New York City. Voight was so taken with the material that he started helping Schwartz with the script and trying to get the film made. Voight approached Burt Reynolds, Bruce Dern, and Peter Falk and actually convinced James Caan and Alan Arkin to play the leads, until Arkin pulled out. Voight resisted acting in the film himself, but he says, “I finally came to the point where I was looking at a lot of scripts and I admitted at last that the script I had in my hand was the best thing I had.”1 Once Voight decided to play Alex Kovac, the compulsive gambler heavily based on Schwartz, he quickly brought character actor Burt 19 228 Being Hal Ashby Young and Ann-Margret on board to play Alex’s best friend, Jerry, and old flame, Patti, respectively. The film was a shambolic comedy, virgin territory for Voight, and the actor felt that Ashby, whom he colorfully described as “an extremely gifted humorist, witty and bright, part W. C. Fields and part some kind of mystic,” was just the person to guide him through it.2 With a package in place, Voight approached Ashby with the script. “I said, ‘Read it this time,’” Voight remembers, “because I’d showed it to him about six months earlier, and I’m never sure if Hal actually reads anything. He got hurt, he got insulted, but he came back and said, ‘I think we can do it.’ . . . With his help, I knew I could solve any problems with the film, because he cares as much as I do.”3 Ashby asked Jerry Hellman whether he would produce the film, but Hellman turned him down and advised him against directing it. There was a feeling among a number of Ashby’s close friends that he was doing it for the wrong reasons—as a favor to Voight and because it was ready to go with a cast and a script, rather than because he was genuinely passionate about it. Nonetheless, when Voight’s friend Robert Schaffel, the man who had started Crawdaddy magazine in the 1960s, came on board as producer, things began to get rolling. Lorimar approved Lookin’ to Get Out as the third film in Ashby’s three-picture deal, and a start date of February 1980 was announced. However, complications repeatedly pushed production back. After three months spending almost every hour of every day rushing Being There to completion, Ashby was exhausted. “I’ve never worked as hard as I did editing Being There,” he wrote. “It damn near did me in.”4 Though the Northstar deal was announced in late January 1980, because the contract negotiations were still ongoing, the company had yet to see any money from Lorimar. Back in September, during the first Northstar talks, Merv Adelson had told Ashby and Braunsberg that they wouldn’t get any development money until the deal was done but had assured them, as Ashby recalled, that “everything we would want, or need, wasn’t any farther than a phone call away.”5 However, Ashby was having to put tens of thousands of dollars of his own money into the company to keep operations going while his phone calls to Adelson asking for funds were brushed away with the promise that money would be forthcoming—once the deal was signed. Ashby was still trying to save Second Hand Hearts. He had laid off...

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