Читать книгу Being Hal Ashby - Nick Dawson - Страница 15

Motion Picture Pioneers of America

All of us, including Hal Ashby, although we didn't share some ideology or some political party, we did have strong feelings about what America was and what we could be, and we felt our responsibilities as artists and citizens.

—Haskell Wexler

Back in 1963, Jewison had bought the rights to Nathaniel Benchley's The Off-Islanders, a novel about a Russian submarine that gets beached off the New England coast. He had engaged William Rose, the writer of Genevieve (1953) and The Ladykillers (1955), to adapt the book, but it was Christmas 1964 before Rose delivered his first draft. Jewison could not interest any of the studios in a film that they felt was, as he put it, “about a bunch of communists,” but he set it up as part of his three-picture deal at the Mirisch Corporation.¹ Run by brothers Walter, Marvin, and Harold Mirisch, the company had already attracted top-line directors like Billy Wilder and William Wyler by offering them complete creative control.

Jewison and Ashby saw an opportunity to make an antiwar film that stressed the similarities between the opposing sides in the Cold War and would humanize the Russian sailors whom the Cape Cod residents mistakenly believe are invading their little island. As soon as The Cincinnati Kid was ready for release, Jewison went upstate to Mendocino County, California—which was doubling as Cape Cod—to begin shooting the film, now called The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.

When filming began on September 9, 1965, Ashby was back in Los Angeles, and every day new footage was flown down to him. Despite what one might expect from a future director, he was happier being away from filming, as it allowed him to focus entirely on the material. “I didn't want to know what the problems were,” he said. “If it took you eight hours to get this particular shot because of this and that, I didn't care; what was important was what was happening on the piece of film. You put the film together and tell the story in the certain way you feel it from the film you have.”² They spoke on the phone every night to discuss the dailies, and even though Jewison had J. Terry Williams, his editor on the Doris Day picture Send Me No Flowers (1964), working alongside Ashby, it was Ashby he most depended on. “He was my rock,” recalls Jewison. “He was totally supportive. Everything I shot, he loved. Whatever I did, he would fix it.”³

The understanding Ashby and Jewison achieved in their working relationship was remarkable. “It was the most productive partnership imaginable,” Ashby wrote. “From in front, Norman always gave me good film. Then, to top it off, he trusted me and my instincts. He never stood behind me in the cutting room. He let me select, and cut his film as I felt it. It was an editor's dream.”⁴

On December 6, location filming on Russians ended, and Jewison and the company returned to Hollywood to shoot a week of interiors. Around that time, it was announced that Johnny Mandel—who a few months later won an Academy Award for Best Song for The Sandpiper (1965)—would write the score for Russians. By chance, Ashby and Mandel, both excelling in their fields, ended up working together.

As Ashby settled into his work, he found that the material posed some unique challenges. A particular problem was the inconsistency from shot to shot caused by the fickle Mendocino weather. As the production designer, Robert Boyle, remembered, there would be “six kinds of weather every day,” including “absolutely dense fog, heavy rain, bright sunshine,” and this made cutting scenes together difficult and allowed very little editorial leeway. Boyle recalled that in dealing with this problem, Ashby displayed “an editorial genius. He was just marvelous. He would take pieces of film from the end—sometimes the wardrobe didn't even match—but if it worked he could put it together.”⁵

Ashby's main challenge, however, was how to structure the film; with five or six separate plotlines, it could have been cut together in an infinite number of ways. Ashby created version after version, turning the film inside out and then back again as he worked to find the most watchable and logical sequence of scenes. The difficulties, however, seemed only to fuel his creativity. “That was a lot of fun to edit, a lot of craziness going on,” he recalled. “Whenever there's craziness going on it's always fun because you can get a little crazier, you know, and that's always a great relief. The crazier you get, the better chance you have of surviving it all.”⁶

Someone who added to Ashby's fun in the editing room was Pablo Ferro. The young Cuban-born, New York–based graphic artist had made an impact with the title sequence for Dr. Strangelove and was now designing the opening credits for Russians. Ferro was immediately taken with Ashby and would become one of his most devoted and lifelong friends. “He was so easy and open,” he says, adding that the same could not be said of Jewison.⁷ Ferro and Ashby were peas in a pod, both approaching their work with a wide-eyed innocence and joy.

When the film was previewed, audience reactions were mixed, but the trades loved it and predicted excellent box-office returns. Variety called it an “outstanding cold-war comedy,” saying that Jewison had handled “the varying comedy techniques with uniform success, obtaining solid performances all the way down the line.”⁸ The Hollywood Reporter also acknowledged its comic strengths (“a brilliantly funny movie, the most hilarious picture of the year”) and noted: “Like all good comedy, it has for its core and springboard the hard facts of life. It strikes to the central being of the spectator, playing on his terror and unquenchable sense of the ludicrous.” All involved were lauded, but Jewison—“one of the most important not only of the new, young directors, but in any class”—was specially singled out for praise. Both reviews recognized the quality of the editing in light of the challenge Ashby had faced, and the Reporter called it “some of the best intercutting imaginable.”⁹

The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming was released on May 25, 1966, and the same day the Washington Daily News declared that it should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, not everyone was so liberal minded. Following through on the film's message of tolerance, Jewison attended screenings in both Berlin and Moscow. Flying back from his triumphal visit to the Soviet Union, Jewison was greeted at the Los Angeles International Airport by a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officer, who told him: “You're unacceptable.” Had he not demanded to call the U.S. vice president, Hubert Humphrey—who had praised the film just weeks earlier—Jewison would have been put on a plane back to Russia or his “home,” Canada, even though his job, wife, and children were all in Los Angeles. Jewison's green card was confiscated, and he was told to report to the INS immediately. When Jewison went to try to resolve the situation, an incensed Ashby accompanied him, though he risked facing severe scrutiny himself. “If you had a problem—an emotional problem, a career problem, a drug problem—whatever your problem was, he was with you,” Jewison recalls. “He was completely non-judgmental.”¹⁰

Much to Jewison and Ashby's delight, The Russians Are Coming took nearly $8 million in the United States and became the fifth biggest grosser of the year. Encouraged by its success, Jewison made grand plans for the future, plans in which Ashby would play an increasingly large part. Having proved himself to be a director who could take an unconventional idea and turn it into a well-crafted, commercial film, Jewison purchased a blank-verse Western, The Judgment of Corey, which he planned to make with its poetic dialogue intact. Announcing that the film would start shooting in the spring of 1967, possibly with Steve Mc-Queen starring, Variety felt moved to proclaim: “Critics of Hollywood, please take note, there are those trying something different here.”¹¹

As it turned out, that something different was not The Judgment of Corey but In the Heat of the Night.

Walter Mirisch had bought the rights to John Ball's novel about black detective Virgil Tibbs in the summer of 1965, planning to make the film quickly with one of the company's lower-profile directors. However, Stirling Silliphant's adaptation turned Tibbs's small-town murder investigation in the Deep South into a microcosmic examination of the American civil rights issue. Jewison saw it as “a plea for interracial understanding and respect” and insisted that he direct it.¹²

Robert Kennedy (whom he'd met while skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho) encouraged Jewison to make In the Heat of the Night, but the Mirisches saw it as incendiary material that would drive audiences away. For a start, the main character was black, so it was guaranteed to make little money in the racist South. Jewison wanted to shoot on location but was limited by the modest $2.6 million budget allotted him by Walter Mirisch. And because it was not safe for Sidney Poitier (who had recently been a target of racists while in the South), who was to play Tibbs, to film in the script's setting, Mississippi, a tiny town just above the Mason-Dixon Line—Sparta, Illinois—was chosen instead.

Ashby played a significant role in recruitment and casting on Heat as he was not only the picture's editor but also the “Assistant to the Producer,” a role created to allow him to be as involved in as many elements of the film as possible. Impressed by the Oscar-winning camerawork of former documentarian Haskell Wexler on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Ashby and Jewison hired him to be the director of photography on Heat—despite the fact that he had never shot in color before. Ashby had met Wexler on The Best Man, had worked with him again on The Loved One, and knew he had a great eye and also shared his and Jewison's antiestablishment views.

By mid-August, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, and Lee Grant had been cast, and filming began just over a month later in Sparta. Ashby, however, stayed in Los Angeles, casting minor roles and hiring the last remaining crew members. He'd been given the chance to edit on location but stuck by his belief that the chaos of location filming would prevent him from responding freely to the material. Nevertheless, he felt lonely and dislocated away from Jewison and the others.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of Ashby's noneditorial role was his working with Lee Grant. Grant, cast as the murdered businessman's widow, joined the Sparta company later in the shoot, and one of Ashby's tasks in Los Angeles was to help her find the right look for her character before she left for Illinois. Ashby drove Grant from store to store, offering his opinion on her hair, clothes, and shoes. He was relaxed and talkative, and in just a few days together they became friends. “He was a very straight guy, very easy to be with,” Grant recalls. “He was so uncoiled that one never had a sense of his power and drive.”¹³

During the two months of location filming, Ashby still had his usual phone conversations with Jewison, but he also rattled off regular memos to his colleagues. Even during the rehearsal week before shooting started, Ashby sent “The Family” a memo from “Lonesome Luke” telling them:

a. I MISS YOU!!!

b. The above (a.) is full out selfishness and you should also know my heart, along with every good thought from inside me, is there with you.¹⁴

In the same memo, Ashby included what he had found out from the coroner's office about dead bodies, providing exact details on how the corpse in the film should look as well as a sketch of a corpse with a smile on its face. His memos from this period show his playful nature and wild, infectious sense of humor. In each one, he used a different name for the recipients, from the straightforward, such as “Loves” or “The nicest people I know,” to the increasingly elaborate, “Pegs of my heart,” “Dayworkers of the Midwest,” or “The Daring Desperates.” Ashby, in turn, referred to himself as everything from “Crazyhead Hal Ashby” or “Captain / Ashby, Ret.,” to “P. T. Barnum & Sons” and “The Queen of Spades.”¹⁵

For his friends in distant Illinois, Ashby conjured up images of the (more civilized) life he was enjoying back in Los Angeles. “Dearest Motion Picture Pioneers of America,” he wrote one day. “Well, another day of golfing, riding, tea and having a good time in general.”¹⁶

His ability to home in on certain details and play on them for comic effect was particularly in evidence in a memo written the day after he visited the Pasadena Police Department to do more police-related research:

Today dearhearts is Columbus Day. Please observe it accordingly.

My knowledge of the above came about because of a still (thank God) insatiable curious nature. My across the street neighbor who I suspect as being a bit on the conservative side; Reagan for Gov. stickers on the bumpers of both cars since last Xmas yet, etc.…Well it seems he has a little flagpole, which I hadn't noticed, on his front lawn, and today it had the American Flag on it. Hence, I made it a point to find out what's the special occasion.

Columbus, by the way, was a very, very nice man.

Met with Detective Ray Bartlett yesterday and it was most entertaining. He's a registered Republican; is anti-welfare; thinks civil rights demonstrations have made the point by now and should be fini [sic]. Also, I had the distinct feeling he wanted to arrest me.¹⁷

When Jewison asked for Ashby's opinion on changing the film's title to Between Two Trains, Ashby initially replied seriously, but then launched into long lists of very silly alternative titles for Jewison's approval: The Spartan Boogie Man, Uppity Jig Get Gillespie's Goat, Black and White in Color, etc.¹⁸

Back in Sparta, Jewison and Wexler were having fun experimenting with the photography, the limited budget forcing them to be ultracreative and think around corners. Wexler shot handheld, played with focus, shot reflections in glass, captured a chase through the woods from the perspective of the pack of dogs, and put in the first-ever zoom shot. So much innovation made watching the dailies a treat for Ashby, who let Jewison know how he felt about their work, describing himself in one memo as “old happy (I do like the film) Hal.”¹⁹

Though things were going well in Sparta, Walter Mirisch was pressuring Jewison to bring the film in on budget. Jewison had long told Ashby that they were the artists and that producers were “the enemy,” moneymen who couldn't be allowed to interfere with their creativity, and Ashby now felt very strongly about this. On hearing about Mirisch's actions, he was consumed by an anger so intense it put him on the edge of desperation. In a memo to Jewison entitled “Stupidity,” he vented his frustration:

This will most certainly not be a memo of any sort. It will be closer to the ramblings of a very very angry young punk.

Norman, since I talked to you this afternoon, I've become so god-damned, furiously, frustrated from anger I don't know what to do except sit here at this typewriter and rant and rave and hope I can cope with everything without blowing my cool completely.

To think Walter would put this kind of pressure on you is beyond the realm of my comprehension. It is so dumb; so stupid; so far out ridiculous I could cry. I guess RUSSIANS wasn't enough to prove you are an honorable and responsible man. I swear to Christ what do you have to do[?] When I look at our dailies, and see the extra quality—I'm talking about those values which cannot be evaluated—and then I hear what you told me today I feel like going kill crazy. You really need that kind of pressure; it's so constructive. I'm sure you haven't another thing in the world on your mind. Obviously, you don't care about the picture; or what's the best way to tell the story. Christ, I've actually seen times when I saw something in the dailies that bothered me, and if I happened to say I was going to tell you about it somebody would inevitabley [sic] say: “Oh don't do that! It might upset him!” Do [you] believe how these people think?

At any rate, I got some of this out of my system; for all the good it will do. I'm sure yelling like this will solve the scene. Besides, by the time you get this I'll have said the whole thing to you over the phone.

If there is anyone you want me to kick in the shins or bite; please, please let me know.

LOVE

me

oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

The devotion to Jewison and the noble cause of filmmaking is very evident here, and during his months alone in Los Angeles Ashby had decided, despite his usual financial restraint, to put $100 per week of his salary back into Jewison's company, Simkoe. Ashby thought it could be used toward such things as paying for a screenwriter on an upcoming project, The Landlord, a novel by the black writer Kristin Hunter about a young, rich owner of a black ghetto tenement. “If you got it to spend; spend it where it will give you the most of whatever the hell you want,” he wrote to Jewison. “And right now I want to spend it on something I believe in. Me! You!…And anybody else around who wants to groove the way we do.…Think of it? We got a too much Director (who, bye the bye is flipping me with such nice things. I must say, Norman, you really are a joy—you are many, many things and they all add up to one groovy human being. It's a good feeling to dig someone that much.”²⁰

In November, the company returned to Los Angeles. Once again surrounded by his friends, Ashby happily started assembling a first cut of Heat. “So much of this film, and the success of this film,…came through in the editing process with Hal Ashby,” says Jewison. “What is great about the editing, and what Hal preserved in this film constantly, is those moments without any dialogue, which essentially are the best moments in a movie, regardless of what the scriptwriters tell you, because it's the human moments, the emotional moments that we hang on to.”²¹

One of the most powerful of these moments comes near the beginning of the film, when Warren Oates finds Sidney Poitier alone in the station waiting room and frisks him, assuming he is the murderer simply because he is black. As the deliberately humiliating body search is conducted, a simple side-on shot shows the silent Poitier: his body is arched as he places his hands against the wall, his face barely registers any emotion, but his eyes burn with righteous anger.

During the editing of Heat, Ashby also managed to put his love of music to good use. He was looking at the silent footage for the opening sequence, for which Wexler had shot the train coming into Sparta with the image moving in and out of focus. As Ashby couldn't ever bear to cut silent footage endlessly, he played a song over it, “Chitlins and Candied Yams” from Ray Charles's Ray's Moods (1966) album: “I just laid the song in, and I'm telling you, the changes in music that went on were the changes that went on with the focus,” Ashby said. “I really started to realize the whole thing. I've always gotten into the music in relation to film and what it does—just the rhythms that you have in the film at any given time and how they feed off the music.”²² This led to the idea of having Charles sing the film's theme song (both that song and the film's score were written by jazz musician Quincy Jones, a longtime friend of Charles's).

Though Ashby's career was at an all-time high, that very success was causing serious problems in his marriage. He was so engrossed in editing that he often put off going home, knowing full well that Shirley was waiting for him and his dinner had been on the table for hours. “Hey man,” Jewison would tell him, “it's OK to be obsessed, but I think we should go home now.” Yet Ashby found it more and more difficult and sometimes even slept in his editing room. According to Jewison, Ashby and Shirley were both flower children, “like two bohemian students. But I didn't think she was very solid. She wasn't very stable emotionally.”²³

Stable or not, Shirley was understandably unhappy about Ashby spending so much time away from her and Carrie. He often returned home to arguments or accusations, and this, in turn, made him even more inclined to stay at work, creating a vicious circle. It was far from the perfect home life that Shirley had hoped for and that Ashby had believed he could give her.

They were now living in a house on Roscomare Road, in the affluent Bel Air area, just off Mulholland Drive. It was beyond their means, but Shirley had set her heart on having a dream house to complete her idealized image of family life. The upshot, however, was that they had to take out a second mortgage, which added financial stress on top of the emotional stress that had built up in the relationship.

A further problem was that as Ashby isolated himself in the editing room, he became increasingly dependent on alcohol. He had been drinking since he was a teenager, had run with a group that smoked and drank heavily during the 1950s, and later recalled that by the mid-1960s he “was a great drinker.” However, he said: “One morning I woke up and decided I was poisoning myself.”²⁴ Ashby all but ceased drinking from this point on, only occasionally allowing himself a glass of wine or a shot of tequila with friends. However, the tendencies that made him an alcoholic—a fascination with mood-altering substances and an addictive personality—remained, manifesting themselves now in his drug use and continued workaholism.

Around the beginning of April, Ashby and Shirley separated, and he left the family home, decamping to Jewison's office, a bungalow on the Goldwyn lot. Formerly inhabited by Frank Sinatra, it had a bed and a kitchen in addition to a production office and cutting rooms. “Having that bungalow,” recalls Jewison, “was the smartest thing we ever did because we were all alone, away from the suits,” but now it provided a refuge for Ashby from the wreckage of his marriage.²⁵

April got no better for Ashby when the Oscars rolled around on the tenth. Russians was nominated in four categories, with the film up for Best Actor (Alan Arkin), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture, and Ashby and J. Terry Williams shortlisted in the Best Editing category. To everybody's disappointment, the film came away without a single award, leaving Jewison and Ashby to hope that In the Heat of the Night might fare better in a year's time.

In mid-May, Heat previewed in San Francisco. Ashby and Jewison, sitting nervously at the back of the cinema, heard the audience laughing at scenes that weren't supposed to be funny. Walking out after the screening, Jewison was distraught.

“I've ruined the movie,” he said.

“You're wrong, man,” Ashby protested.

They ended up walking for hours through the night streets, discussing the audience's reaction. Jewison was adamant that he had botched his chance to make even a small difference in the civil rights struggle, that the film was a failure.

“You don't get it man,” Ashby persisted. “The audience was really into the film. Maybe they weren't exactly sure how to react because the movie was such a new experience for them. The movie's so different.”

“They laughed,” Jewison said. “I can't believe they laughed so much.”

“Not at the movie, man. With the movie. They were so knocked out by it, they had to react the only way they knew how in a dark theater. You have to expect some participation from an audience.”

“I don't think so,” said Jewison. “I've blown it.”²⁶