Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

20. Like a Rolling Stone

Like a Rolling Stone 244 I’m supposed to be a director, and a director is supposed to have a body of work. All I have is a body of frustration! —Hal Ashby The studios were basically frightened of him because he was their antithesis. As sweet as he was, he was a tough guy. You could not move him if he felt the enemy was in the room. And the enemy was anyone who was going to make him compromise what he felt was the truth of what he was doing. . . . When he was protecting the truth, he was a warrior. He was beautiful, sweet, lovely, but also ferocious—a ferocious angel. —Dustin Hoffman As soon as Ashby had handed Second Hand Hearts over to Paramount, he began supervising the editing of Lookin’ to Get Out. On hiring a new chief editor to oversee the cutting, he had noted that, unlike his predecessor , the replacement “did know how the basic mechanics worked, so things got done, and my life seemed more pleasant, for awhile, in that area.” Now, however, he began to notice a new problem: “In a few short weeks I was able to see how bad my new editor was, not the mess of before, just not much reason behind any of the juxtapositions used in placing one piece of film after another.”1 Finally, Ashby ran out of patience and took over the editing himself. He had all the footage transferred to videotape (at considerable cost) so he could use an innovative new editing technique and brought in the ever-reliable Bob Jones to share the workload with him. Having determined that the current cut was inherently flawed, Ashby insisted that he 20 Like a Rolling Stone 245 and Jones start over from scratch. With 130 hours of footage to wade through, the two friends faced a huge challenge. From spring through summer, they worked almost twenty-four hours a day, Jones doing day shifts and Ashby doing nights, trying to get it ready for the October release that Lorimar and Paramount were planning. Ashby had recently gotten into the Police and decided to make their music an integral part of Lookin’ to Get Out, selecting twenty-four tracks from their first three albums to put in the film. He cut scenes to the songs, using the beat to dictate the rhythm of the editing, but was still just thinking about the film a sequence at a time. He had not yet screened a rough cut for anybody and indeed seemed actively resistant to the idea of doing so, though he did show significant portions of what he had done to the increasingly vexed Lorimar suits. Ashby had never really seemed to need much sleep (which he apparently did for only an hour or so at a time, with his eyes half open), so he often edited at night. His editing staff, who’d all heard the rumors about his hedonistic tendencies that had been going around Hollywood, drew their own conclusions when he turned up at 4 a.m., sometimes barefoot and with a towel wrapped around him. “When he showed up, you never knew what Hal had had, whether he had eaten mushrooms, whether he was on acid or coke,” says Janice Hampton, one of his editors on Lookin’. “We would hear his Mercedes, and we would say, ‘Here comes Captain Wacky to the bridge.’”2 Ashby would then silently settle down with a joint, often encouraging the other editors to join him, and work with fiendish concentration for hours on end. Hampton recalls that a stoned Ashby would play sadistic mind games with her, trying to baffle her with his editing expertise, but still she maintains, “Everything I’ve learned of value I learned from Hal.”3 While there was certainly a degree of truth in the rumors of Ashby’s drug use, they were unreasonably inflated, in part because of people’s preconceptions about Ashby as a hippie, and possibly also because of Lorimar’s alleged attempt to blacken his name. Another editor who worked with him during this period, Eva Gardos, did not see him as being in any way an exceptional case. “He smoked a lot of marijuana freely, and sometimes came in with a bag of mushrooms and said ‘These 246 Being Hal Ashby are really good,’ but I never saw him take coke,” she recalls. “Drugs...