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Old Man 268 I’ve been first and last Look at how the time goes past But I’m all alone at last —Neil Young, “Old Man” In Let’s Spend the Night Together, as Mick Jagger sings the lines “When you’re old, when you’re old / Nobody will know” from “She’s So Cold,” there is a cut to Ashby sitting on a sofa backstage, bare chested and wearing shades, waving at the camera. And he does look old, the effects of the stress, trauma, and hard work of the past few years all too visible on his face. This cameo appearance was a dig at himself but also an acknowledgment that he was no longer a young man of boundless energy, that he didn’t get up so quickly anymore when he was knocked down. “You know, some people think you’re dying,” Jack Nicholson had told him sometime in 1982. “Dying?” Ashby responded with an incredulous laugh. “Yes!” said Nicholson. Ashby related this story to Dale Pollock, arts editor of the Los Angeles Times, quipping, “I never got swamped by so much damn work in my life, but I didn’t know it killed me.”1 Ashby had spoken to Pollock just after the release of Lookin’ in an attempt to give the film a push, breaking his silence after a number of years of not giving interviews. Mike Kaplan, who set up the interview, wrote to Ashby saying that Pollock, a friend of Kaplan’s, was “a fan (saw Being There four times) and can be trusted. I discussed the Lookin’ to Get Out situation with him—off the record, and he feels it can be finessed without hurting the movie.”2 Over the course of two interview sessions, Ashby and Pollock had 22 Old Man 269 in-depth discussions about Ashby’s life and, in particular, the events of recent years. When asked about the rumors of his heavy drug use, Ashby ascribed them to the fact that he had admitted to smoking marijuana, saying , “I hear all this stuff, but I personally don’t get alarmed. As I go on with my life, I can’t recall the last thing I heard about myself that was true.”3 He called his time at Lorimar “as heavy a period in my life as I ever want to have.” “I’ve run into more frustration than I could ever imagine,” he continued, enigmatically adding, “It’s made me think about things I don’t usually think about.” Having his house and editing rooms in Malibu , an hour from Los Angeles, had inevitably earned him a reputation as an “inaccessible” recluse, but Ashby had no regrets about his isolation from Hollywood. “I see people there start to fall into the wrong things,” he said. “They start living their lives on simple levels where they didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.”4 While Pollock’s article gave such intriguing insights into Ashby’s views, it was ultimately sensationalist. Titled “Whatever Happened to Hal Ashby?” it focused on the failure of Second Hand Hearts and Lookin’ to Get Out and even included a sidebar of numerous quotes from (mostly negative) reviews of the latter. Ashby was, however, given a forum to detail how Lorimar had systematically mishandled his films. (Lee Rich responded to these accusations by saying, “They’re all ridiculous . Why even dignify them by answering them? They deserve no answer.”) Nevertheless, the portrait Pollock painted of Ashby was one of a director in decline. The article opened by saying, “For the last three years, Hal Ashby seems to have disappeared. . . . There have been ugly rumors that Ashby was in ill health, burned out by drugs, incapable of completing a movie.”5 This negative image was compounded by a huge, unflattering photo of Ashby, looking spaced out. An incensed Mike Kaplan wrote to the Times, criticizing Pollock’s article, and giving the backstory behind the druggy-looking photo of Ashby: “During the first interview session, which lasted over two hours, nearly 50 photographs must have been taken by The Times photographer . Ashby wears glasses all the time, alternating the tints depending on the light. After the first hour or so of the session, he removed his glasses to readjust his eyes and pause for a moment. It was then that what appears as the cover shot was taken, providing the reader with a [18.224.39.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 04:54...

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