Читать книгу Being Hal Ashby - Nick Dawson - Страница 16

1968

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

“Have you ever gone to a preview and seen a film so outstanding that you wanted to rush into the street, grab the first person you see, and shout ‘Don't miss this when it comes to your favorite theatre!' Well, this is exactly how I felt when I saw In the Heat of the Night,” enthused Radie Harris in her Hollywood Reporter column. “If it isn't the big ‘sleeper' of the year, I'll toss my personal crystal ball overboard into the East River.”¹

In early June, a new glow of optimism appeared in Ashby's life. In the Heat of the Night now seemed to be hitting just the right note with preview audiences; he and Norman Jewison were about to embark on a new film, The Thomas Crown Affair, in Boston; and an unusual proposition had given Ashby and Shirley a chance at reconciliation.

During the slow disintegration of their relationship, Ashby and Shirley had been in the process of trying to adopt a “hard-to-place” child, which Shirley hoped would help bring them back together. (Ashby allegedly had had a vasectomy sometime after leaving Ogden, so adoption might have been their only option.) When Ashby left, Shirley's shot at adopting went with him. However, before anybody had found out about the separation, Shirley appealed to him to help her.

“If there is one thing I'm good at,” she said, “it's being a mother, and I want to follow through with the adoption! Will you play the game? Will you help me?”

For Ashby, this meant not only paying for the adoption, but also spending time getting to know the child. There was also a tacit implication that by playing “the game,” Shirley and Ashby were taking a step toward mending their marriage and becoming a proper family again.

Shirley didn't press him for an immediate decision, saying simply, “Think about these things, and let me know your decision later.”

Ashby's desire to be a rescuer once again took over; though he no longer found Shirley irresistible, he could not resist the opportunity to save her. Against his better judgment, he agreed to go along with her plan a few days later. “God Bless You!” Shirley cried, overjoyed.²

Shirley ultimately decided to adopt a mixed-race toddler originally called Baby Boy Lawrence, whom they called Steven. Steven, who became known as Teeg, was three years old when Ashby and Shirley began the adoption process in the spring of 1967. A few years earlier, Sammy Davis had adopted a mixed-race child, and now, in the wake of the Watts riots, Ashby may have seen his adoption of Steven as a politically symbolic action. Ashby and Jewison had endless conversations about the adoption, and Jewison agreed to be his guarantor and tell the authorities that Ashby and Shirley were good parents. Nonetheless, at one point Jewison sat with the two of them and asked, “Are you sure you want to do this? It's eighteen to twenty years of your life!”³

Throughout the making of In the Heat of the Night, Jewison had worked with Alan Trustman, a practicing lawyer, on his script for The Thomas Crown Affair, then called The Crown Caper. The story of Thomas Crown, a Boston banker who masterminds audacious bank robberies for kicks and is pursued, both professionally and romantically, by alluring insurance investigator Vicki Anderson, was fundamentally shallow in nature, putting style before profundity, and required leads who were classy and sexy. The role of Crown was given to Steve McQueen after the actor convinced Jewison that, despite appearances, he had the necessary sophistication, but the casting of Vicki confounded Jewison and Ashby until, just weeks before shooting began, they chose a young actress named Faye Dunaway, who had just completed filming her first feature, Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

With the leads in place, there was just enough time before shooting started in Boston for Jewison to take Ashby and Haskell Wexler up to Montreal to Expo '67. He wanted them to see Canadian filmmaker Chris Chapman's A Place to Stand (1967), in which multiple screen techniques condensed more than an hour of footage into less than twenty minutes, with a view to using multiscreen as a stylistic device in The Thomas Crown Affair. Jewison and Wexler had so enjoyed experimenting with the cinematography on In the Heat of the Night, and Ashby had so enjoyed cutting their footage, that they agreed that in The Thomas Crown Affair visuals would be king.

The screening of A Place to Stand didn't disappoint, and Ashby, Jewison, and Wexler headed to Boston plotting the use of multiscreen in The Thomas Crown Affair; Ashby was probably the most excited of the three and looked back on Expo '67 as “the greatest film show I had ever seen in my life.”⁴ While in Montreal, Ashby had bought some Cuban cigars, but on his reentry into the United States, customs officials wouldn't allow him to bring them into the country. To get rid of them, Ashby went down the customs queue, offering each person a cigar. He took devilish glee in watching Americans and Canadians alike puffing on their cigars, blowing smoke into the faces of the U.S. officials.

With each film, his partnership with Jewison led to greater responsibilities for Ashby, and on The Thomas Crown Affair he had an associate producer role in addition to his usual editing duties. According to Jewison, he was to act as “casting consultant, script idea man, and all-round good companion,” and the job title basically allowed Ashby to work more closely with Jewison on the film from beginning to end.⁵ Jewison was producing as well as directing again, and as Ashby acknowledged: “When you're really directing there's not a lot of producing you can do.”⁶ Ashby therefore handled whatever producing duties Jewison was too busy to fulfill. By now, the pair knew each other so well that they had a synergistic artistic and personal rapport. “I saw what a force Hal was, making Norman's creativity blossom,” says Haskell Wexler. “They were a good combo, and I don't think Norman's made as good pictures since he and Hal were partners.”⁷

Ashby spent little time on set and instead tinkered with the script, sorted out any problems with the day-to-day running of the production, and prepared the ground for postproduction. However, when he did venture on set, he watched closely how Jewison worked. Jewison treated his actors with kid gloves, always putting them at ease and praising them whenever possible; if he was particularly pleased with a take, he would grab McQueen and Dunaway and give them a huge bear hug. Yet despite this gentle touch, he was, according to Ashby, “more shrewd than some actors think.” Jewison had a hard-edged alter ego, “Irving Christianson,” who Jewison claimed produced his films. “Up in Boston we got a call from the Mirisches,” Ashby recounted. “They say, ‘You're a couple of days over schedule. Why don't you come back to Hollywood?' So Norman says, ‘Wait a minute, I'll ask Irving.' Then he comes back and says, ‘Irving wants to stay a few more days,' and hangs up.”⁸

While the company was in Boston, a special preview screening of In the Heat of the Night was organized in the city. The film's first reviews, from Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, must have somewhat disappointed Jewison, but they were extremely pleasing to the Mirisches. Both critics saw that, aside from its racial theme, the film was essentially a flimsy potboiler. In the Variety critic's eyes, the standout performances by the leads helped “overcome some noteworthy flaws,” Jewison's direction was “sometimes…pretentious,” the script was “uneven,” and the film as a whole was “a triumph over some of its basic parts.”⁹ The Hollywood Reporter also found Jewison's direction overly arty and thought that Heat “effects a feeling of greater importance by its veneer of social significance and the illusion of depth in its use of racial color.” Both reviews praised Ashby's editing (though Variety criticized the audacious use of long shots in the chase sequence), and, significantly, both also predicted big box office for the film, with the Reporter saying it would “emerge one of the top boxoffice winners of the year.”¹⁰

For Ashby and Jewison, it was difficult to decide whether critical or commercial success was more important. “We wanted to make a film that would make money, that people would see,” says Haskell Wexler, “and would also express our awareness that progress was being made and that human values can supersede bigotry.”¹¹ While the three saw themselves as artists and sought validation from their intellectual peers, good box office was arguably more crucial as it meant that large numbers of people were being exposed to and, they hoped, embracing, their message of racial tolerance. In the end, they got both. When the film was released in August, the reviews were predominantly positive and the business extraordinary: by the end of 1967, it had earned an enormous $14 million. By packaging the ideas of the civil rights movement in a detective story, they had gotten their message across to mainstream America.

As was his way, Jewison shot as much of The Thomas Crown Affair on location as possible, but after twelve weeks of filming in Boston, the company returned to Los Angeles to shoot interiors on the Goldwyn lot. For Ashby, this meant he would now have to face up to his situation at home. The adoption process was moving along, and Steven had been living with Shirley and Carrie since the middle of May. Shirley had sent Ashby a Father's Day card she had made with Steven and Carrie, enclosing drawings by both children, including one of “Papa Cat.”

In Ashby's absence, Shirley was trying to keep the possibility of them being a family again in his mind, but as always Ashby's workaholic personality meant that he put editing and films first, to the detriment of his wife and children. His biggest frustration in life was that there weren't enough hours in the day to get his work done. “Great God but the time do fly,” he wrote during the filming of Heat. “Each day I tell myself I'll get further ahead and we all know what really happens don't we.”¹² Shirley's main frustration was that her husband was a barely present figure in the family home.

As the marriage progressed, Shirley's relative abandonment in the home led her to spend large amounts of money on herself and the house, much to Ashby's anger and frustration. Since the 1950s, Ashby had been very careful with whatever small amount he was earning, and as he moved up the ladder and his weekly paycheck got bigger, this attitude hadn't changed.

After Thomas Crown wrapped in late September, he took some time off to try to make sense of what was going on in his life. “It took me about six weeks to go into the cutting room,” he recalled later. “I had a lot of things on my mind.”¹³ After carefully considering his position, he wrote an anguished letter to Shirley in which he voiced his frustrations about their current situation as well as profound doubts about his involvement in the adoption process. Clearly overwhelmed, he wrote that since Steven had arrived in their home “the emotional and financial pressures have been piled one on top of the other with an unrelenting consistency, and in such a manner, that I've finally reached the breaking point.”

“Unfortunately,” he continued, “it's difficult to describe the actual causes of emotional stress, let alone the results, for they seem to thrive on a cumulative basis. One thing hits you, then another, and another, and another, again and again, until it becomes a nebulous mass of churning anxiety. As a result, these feelings have reached the all consuming stage where I am unable to cope with them any longer. In fact, this thrashing about inside myself to find some sort of inner stamina to help carry me through these emotional assaults has brought me to a level of exhaustion and despair I didn't believe could exist without the advent of total insanity.

“The burden has increased by the mere fact that it's been over four years since I took more than three days off in a row, and I'm extremely aware of how tired I am because of this. However, the compulsions which drive me in this area are not new, and I'm used to working long stretches without time off. Now, the big difference comes when the little something inside me says you're pushing too hard; relax; go away; rest your mind and body; recharge them. Of course, I can't do this because the loss of income from a two or three week rest period, combined with the expense of going somewhere would be disastrous. Hell, it was a scramble to get three or four hundred dollars so I could go to Expo '67 for a few days.”

Ashby had calculated that during the twelve weeks he was away in Boston, Shirley had spent almost $10,000—this at a time when she was off work getting to know Steven—and he didn't believe she would become thriftier. “If I'll just tell you what to do—you'll do it!” he wrote. “However, when I ask you to look for another, less expensive place to live, the request is ignored. When I complain about $2,000.00 per year spent on schools for two children, who aren't yet (either of them) in the first grade, then it's ‘up-tight time.' It's so tight you can't even talk about it. If I ask when you plan on looking for work—again it's ‘up-tight time'—and besides everything you made would have to go towards paying somebody to care for the children. Whatever happened to that independent lady who wouldn't think of asking anything from anybody?”

Ashby wanted Shirley to become financially independent, which meant ceasing to use his charge accounts and putting the house entirely in her name and having her make the payments on it herself, as he now lived in the office on the Goldwyn lot rather than at home. He also suggested that Steven should be adopted by Shirley rather than both of them. “I honestly believe this is the fair thing to do for Carrie's sake,” he maintained. “As you know, Carrie isn't legally my child, and my legal adoption of Steven would really have her out on a limb if something were to happen to me—as the attorney once said—if someone were to question it.…”

Ashby's closing statement reveals just how extreme his feelings were about the situation: “If by the time I finish work on this film, you haven't sold the house or obtained a job of your own, or found some means of income, then let this be fair and adequate warning—I will blow everything. I will not work my life away just to have somebody drain what's left down the tubes. I'm more prepared to let all of my work during the past few years go straight down those tubes, but I'll do it of my own volition—no matter how painful it might be—and I'll find that beach somewhere in this world.”¹⁴

Having made his feelings known, Ashby retreated into the sanctuary of the editing room and threw himself into the cutting of The Thomas Crown Affair. He started off with the first three reels but could not put them together satisfactorily. The plan had been to create multiscreen sequences within the film, but as this idea had been conceived only a few weeks before filming began, there had been no storyboarding, and creating a sequence from scratch proved almost impossible. Fortunately, Ashby remembered that Pablo Ferro had worked with multiscreen on a commercial and invited him to take over that part of the editing. Ferro was not only a highly creative and unconventional artist but also a welcome ally in difficult times. He faced a huge challenge as he had only two Moviola editing desks and a sketch artist to mock up the multiples he was planning, but the now iconic robbery and polo sequences he created are arguably the most stylish parts of a film in which dash and panache are everything.

Another important element in the style offensive was the music: Ashby brought in Michel Legrand (whose score for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg [1964] he and Jewison both greatly admired) and had him write music in response to the film. Legrand composed eighty minutes of lush orchestral music that Ashby listened to as he cut, matching the music to the image where it fit best. Legrand's collaboration with Alan and Marilyn Bergman on the film's iconic theme song, “The Windmills of Your Mind,” added a further touch of style to the proceedings.