The Films of Hal Ashby

Notes

notes Chapter 1 1. Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. 2. Jacobs, Hollywood Renaissance, 216. 3. Sarris, The American Cinema, 31. 4. Lehman, “The American Cinema and the Critic Who Guided Me through It,” in Citizen Sarris, ed. Emanuel Levy, 75. 5. Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 27. 6. There have been at least eight critical monographs on Altman’s work, as well as a full-length biography and a collection of interviews. 7. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 331. 8. University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming. 9. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 331. 10. For a delineation of auteur theory and its origins in Romantic theories of the individual creative artist, see Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship ,” 75–85. 11. See Robert Carringer’s discussion of such theories in “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship,” 370–79. Probably the best account of collaborative filmmaking in action is Carringer’s own The Making of Citizen Kane. See also Bruce Kawin’s discussion of collaborative filmmaking in How Movies Work. Kawin provides a number of illustrative examples of “collaborative decision -making” in the making of both European and American movies. 12. Caughie, Theories of Authorship, 9. 13. Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 237. 14. Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius, 179. 15. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 72–73. 16. Schatz, “Anatomy of a House Director: Capra, Cohn, and Columbia in the 1930s,” in Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System, ed. Robert Sklar and Vito Zagarrio, 13. 17. See my discussion in chapter 2 of the arguably difficult collaboration between Ashby and Beatty on Shampoo. 18. Kawin, How Movies Work, 300. 19. Deschanel, interview with author. 20. Hamburger, interview with author. 21. Cynthia Baron, Frank Tomasulo, and Diane Carson, More Than a Method, 7. Nearly all of the performances in Ashby’s films can be described as what Baron, Tomasulo, and Carson call a “neonaturalist” style of performance , one in which the character belongs “to a clearly delineated social environment ,” and in which the character’s actions can be read as “a consequence of personal history and environmental determinants.” 22. Cox, interview with author. 23. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 81. While it could be argued that a director who makes movies on very different subjects develops the kind of broad range one would expect of an auteur, such an argument has not been borne out in the way auteurism has been defined. Directors acknowledged as auteurs are generally identified with a given genre—Alfred Hitchcock , Chaplin, Scorsese—or with two or three defining genres, as in the case of Ford or Hawks. Peter Wollen, for example, argues that even though Hawks made films in ostensibly disparate genres, he exhibits “the same thematic preoccupations , the same recurring motifs and incidents, the same visual style and tempo” in nearly all his films. Hawks was able to achieve such consistency, according to Wollen, “by reducing the genres to two basic types: the adventure drama and the crazy comedy.” Ashby’s films, on the other hand, are radically different from one another not only in terms of genres and themes, but also in their visual style, pacing, and mood. 24. It is clear, however, that Ashby worked closely on the scripts of all of his films, and he was instrumental in rewriting the endings of at least two films—Coming Home and Being There. 25. Hellman, interview with author. 26. For the purposes of this discussion, I include Second-Hand Hearts among Ashby films of the 1980s rather than his films of the 1970s. Although he completed principal photography on the film in the fall of 1978, the postproduction was not completed until May 1981, when the film received its first public screening. Chapter 2 1. Ashby, Interview by Paul Frizler in Close-Up: The Contemporary Director , Jon Tuska, ed. Frizler gets other facts wrong as well, such as the date of Ashby’s arrival in Los Angeles, which he places in 1953. Diane Jacobs, in Holnotes ฀to฀chapter฀2 160 lywood Renaissance, also writes that “Ashby was a non-Mormon born among Mormons in Ogden, Utah.” 2. The promotional bio released by Paramount Pictures (1971) states that “after being graduated from Utah State University, [Ashby] joined one little theatre group after another.” 3. Hellman, interview with author. 4. Hamburger, interview with author. 5. Jack Ashby, interview with author. 6. Ashby, Interview by Paul Frizler, 225...