Hal Ashby Interviews

Hal Ashby
INTERVIEWS
on Edited by Nick Dawson
Hi
ON PUBLIC LIBRARY
a MTA
37324 7A
Hal Ashby: Interviews
Conversations with Filmmakers Series
Peter Brunette, General Editor
Hal Ashby
INTERVIEWS
Edited by Nick Dawson
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University

Presses.
Copyright © 2010 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hal Ashby : interviews / edited by Nick Dawson.

p. cm. — (Conversations with filmmakers series)
Includes filmography and index.
ISBN 978-1-60473-564-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60473-565-9 (pbk. : alk.
paper) 1. Ashby, Hal—Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—United
States—Interviews. |. Dawson, Nick, 1980—
PN1998.3.A7635H35 2010
791.4302’33092—dc22 2009049312
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents
Introduction _ vii
Chronology xv
Filmography xix
Breaking Out of the Cutting Room 3

Hal Ashby
Director Hal Ashby’s Office Is a House with Psychedelic Walls iB

Steve Toy
Director Charges Studio Was Afraid of Maude 14

Marilyn Beck
Hal Ashby 16
Robert David Crane and Christopher Fryer
Shampoo: Film & Filmmaker 23

A. Leigh Charlton
Film Guru Ashby Enjoys View from the Mountain 28

Will Jones
Hal Ashby Interview 33

Larry Salvato and Dennis Schaefer
Gambling on a Film about the Great Depression 43

Aljean Harmetz
vi CONTENTS
That Special Okie Southwest Flavor, That Humor 49

David Sterritt
Hal Ashby 53
Tay Garnett
Positive Thinking 61
Ralph Appelbaum
Cinema Chat with Hal Ashby 78

Richard Fernandez
Dialogue on Film: Hal Ashby 83

James Powers
Hal Ashby: Satisfaction in Being There 99

Jordan R. Young and Mike Bruns
Whatever Happened to Hal Ashby? 106

Dale Pollock
“Directed by William Wyler” Interview 114

Scott Berg
How to Killa Movie 123

Michael Dare
Index 133
Introduction
In 2003, I went into one of the best film bookstores in London armed
with a list of movies I was researching. I showed it to the clerk behind
the counter and asked if he could suggest any books that would be
helpful. While he considered my question, he commented on those
movies on the list that he had seen, which was most of them.
Then he paused and said, “I’m intrigued—what’s the connection be-
tween all these films?”
“They’re all by Hal Ashby,” I said.
During the years I spent researching Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Holly-
wood Rebel, the first and so far only biography of Hal Ashby, I frequent-
ly thought back on this incident. Ashby, it seemed, was the forgotten
man of the New Hollywood generation. “I know that name...” people
would often say when I mentioned I was working on an Ashby biog-
raphy. And then, “Remind me, what films did he direct?” But when I
mentioned his movies, people’s eyes generally lit up: Harold and Maude
and Being There are probably the most recognizable and beloved, but
Shampoo and Coming Home are also popular favorites. The Last Detail
and Bound for Glory are well-loved too, and true cinephiles will talk
excitedly about The Landlord, Ashby’s criminally underseen debut. In
fact, Hal Ashby’s films of the 1970s are considered some of the best
and most important of their era, yet as a director he remains relatively
unknown and unacknowledged.
The question that naturally arises is “Why?” While there’s no one
explanation, a number of significant factors have led to Ashby being
consigned to relative obscurity after his death. In his 1970 book The
Film Director as Superstar, Joseph Gelmis wrote, “The director is in vogue
today,” and maintained that “the phenomenon will not soon peak and
pass.”! In the decade that followed, his prediction was borne out. Dur-
ing the New Hollywood era, the director was king and auteurs with out-
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
sized personalities and ballooning egos thrived: Francis Ford Coppola,

Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman,
Brian De Palma, and Bob Rafelson, not to mention the inventors of the
blockbuster, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. As the old Hollywood
collapsed and a fresh one replaced it, a film’s director became just as
important as its stars had once been.
In the midst of this group of self-promoting, hyperconfident direc-
tors was Hal Ashby, a man who, for all his self-assurance and talent,
left his ego at the door and put the work first. The universal story you
will hear from people who worked with Ashby is that he was the most
democratic of directors, who would just as readily listen to an idea from
a grip as a suggestion from his cinematographer, writer, or lead actor.
When Ashby worked on The Big Country (1958) as an assistant editor,
that film’s director, William Wyler, had told him, “Whenever you have
any ideas about anything, please get them out some way.” A hippie be-
fore the word was invented, Ashby believed in the collaborative nature
of filmmaking and took Wyler’s philosophy to heart, applying it later
in his own work as a director.
This was particularly true with actors, who thrived under Ashby’s
direction—or lack of. Ashby extended great freedom to his actors; he
never tried to alter or influence their performance, but instead made
it clear that he had complete faith in their abilities. The performances
in Ashby’s movies were, as a result, vital, genuine, and immediate, and
his films from the 1970s received eleven Academy Award nominations
for acting. Ironically, this had the effect of taking the focus away from
Ashby’s contribution to the film.
While beloved by his actors and crew, Ashby drew little attention
from the film press; his first few films weren’t very successful, and when
he had box office hits—with such films as Shampoo, Coming Home, and
Being There—the credit was often ascribed to the stars of those mov-
ies. What’s more, Ashby was not making movies that could be eas-
ily lumped together—what, for example, was the connective tissue
between the political focus and documentary-like realism of Coming
Home and the hippie philosophizing and quaint absurdism of Harold
and Maude?—and accordingly, unlike many of his peers, he wasn’t seen
as an auteur. Andrew Sarris, the American critic who was the major
proponent of the auteur theory in the U.S., declared in 1976, “Ashby
interests me, but I have not completely figured out his style.”?
But perhaps the most important factor in the decline of the public’s
INTRODUCTION ix
perception of Ashby was the string of critical and box office failures
that defined his post-1970s directing career.
In the fall of 1982, Dale Pollock, the then-editor of the Los Angeles
Times’ Calendar section, wrote a profile entitled “Whatever Happened
to Hal Ashby?” Ashby’s marketing guru, Mike Kaplan, was friendly with
Pollock and had assured Ashby—who had not conducted an interview
in over two years—that the article would be sympathetic to him. Ka-
plan said that Pollock was “a fan (saw Being There four times) and can
be trusted.”* The piece was, however, a hatchet job that focused on the
decline of Ashby’s career; to make it worse, it was coupled with a pic-
ture of Ashby—taken just as he had removed his glasses and was trying
to refocus his eyes—looking strung out.
The question in the title of Pollock’s article, though, was a good one.
Peter Biskind, in his seminal account of the New Hollywood genera-
tion, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, says that Ashby “had the most remark-
able run of any ’70s director,”* yet just two years after the end of the
1970s, Ashby was perceived as a spent force. So, whatever did happen
to Hal Ashby?
The story that went around Hollywood was that, as Biskind puts
it, Ashby “disappeared into the dark tunnel of post-’70s, Me Decade
drugs and paranoia.” It was a very neat explanation; the only problem
was that it wasn’t true. Ashby was Hollywood’s hippie poster child, a
man who had directed Harold and Maude with a beard that strayed well
below his shoulders, who had declared, “I was so loaded on that film,
I could hardly walk,”® and had been arrested at Toronto International
Airport for possession of marijuana shortly after Harold and Maude's
release. However, after this he had trimmed his beard and generally
smartened up his image. Though he remained a daily pot smoker and—
like so many others in Hollywood at the time—dabbled with cocaine,
it seemed that his run of successes would not stop. Until the end of the
decade, that is.
In 1978, Ashby signed a three-picture deal with Lorimar, the TV
production company behind The Waltons and Eight Is Enough, plan-
ning to make his first two Lorimar movies back-to-back, and then edit
them simultaneously. In the fall of 1982, the last of those three movies,
Lookin’ To Get Out, was finally released after almost two years in the
editing room: Ashby’s dealings with Lorimar had been very troubled,
post-production periods had been agonizingly protracted, and cutting
multiple movies simultaneously had ultimately not worked out as he
x INTRODUCTION
had planned. Ashby’s fractious relationship with Lorimar had lead to

word going around town that he was a washed-up junkie, unable to
finish a movie, a liability. In the very different environment of 1980s
Hollywood—where a film’s commercial prospects now took precedence
over creative concerns—this was exactly the opposite of what the stu-
dios were looking for in a director.
Ashby was, in fact, not a junkie, but a workaholic and a perfectionist
who had long used work as a buffer or distraction from the problems
of his personal life. Juggling multiple movies suited him but not Lori-
mar’s executives, who were anxious to see Ashby and his keen but inept
rookie editing crews create releasable versions of the problematic Sec-
ond Hand Hearts and Lookin’ To Get Out. As time wore on and tensions
grew, the anti-authoritarian Ashby responded to Lorimar’s increasingly
aggressive actions by locking himself away and trying to avoid or ig-
nore the conflict. Drugs were neither the root nor any real part of the
frictions between him and Lorimar, but ultimately his image as a hip-
pie, an unrepentant pot smoker and a loose cannon gave his employers
an easy out.
Ashby’s career started to go wrong when he signed on with Lorimar,
but his slide continued after they parted company. Lorimar blocked
him from making Tootsie, the film that would have been his follow-
up to Lookin’ To Get Out—on a contractual technicality—but then baf-
flingly let him direct the Rolling Stones concert movie Let’s Spend the
Night Together, which had only limited success. His final two features,
The Slugger’s Wife (1985) and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), were—like
Lookin’ To Get Out—taken away from him in the editing room, despite
the fact that he was an Academy Award-winning editor. Not surpris-
ingly, they were critical and commercial failures.
The commonly held perception of the end of Ashby’s life is that
8 Million Ways to Die was the final nail in his coffin, that Hollywood
wanted nothing further from him, and that he died shortly after. (Some
accounts I have read even state that he died of a drug overdose.) In fact,
Ashby separated himself from Hollywood rather than vice versa, taking
time out to develop his own projects on his own terms and schedule. In
1988, he was lining up a trio of literary adaptations—movie versions of
Truman Capote’s Handcarved Coffins, Thomas Berger’s Vital Parts, and
Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster—when he discovered he had
untreatable pancreatic cancer.
Ashby died on December 27, 1988; like many others who have passed
INTRODUCTION xi
away during the holiday period, his death got relatively little attention.
His memorial at the Directors Guild of America building was well at-
tended by Hollywood’s great and good, and those who were away in
Aspen or Vail skiing with their families sent on messages to be read out.
In the major newspapers, he received short and respectful obituaries
which typically underlined the contributions of his collaborators when
explaining the success of so many of his films. The picture they painted
was of a force long spent, an overrated talent whose favor had run out,
and who was now ready to be forgotten.
During the period of time when I was researching and writing my
biography of Ashby, there was a noticeable shift. His collaborators and
contemporaries had always spoken highly of him, but now the gen-
eration of filmmakers who had grown up watching his movies joined
them. Alexander Payne spoke of his love of Ashby and the influence
of The Landlord on Sideways, while Wes Anderson raved about Harold
and Maude (which he references in Rushmore) and said that Shampoo
was his favorite movie. Both Cameron Crowe and Judd Apatow, two
directors who shared with Ashby a passion for music as well as cinema,
talked repeatedly about their love of his movies. When Thumbsucker
and Rocket Science were released, their respective directors, Mike Mills
and Jeffrey Blitz, seemingly mentioned Ashby in every interview they
gave, and the screenwriters of Away We Go, Dave Eggers and Vendela
Vida, also spoke enthusiastically and often about the importance of
Ashby to their movie. Little Miss Sunshine’s writer-directors Valerie Faris
and Jonathan Dayton namechecked him as an influence, as did Half
Nelson’s creative team, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. George Clooney,
Zach Braff, Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Noah Baumbach,
Spike Jonze, and Miranda July have also all gone on record as Ashby
fans. In my own work interviewing directors for Filmmaker magazine
over the last few years, I have been amazed and heartened to find that
(without any prompting on my part) Ashby’s name crops up more of-
ten than any other as an inspiration to young auteurs.
In 2008, Good magazine published an article on the very subject of
Ashby’s popularity among the present generation of filmmakers en-
titled “The Director’s Director.” In it, a group of directors and writ-
ers each contributed short essays on one of Ashby’s movies: Alexander
Payne wrote on The Landlord, Jason Schwartzman on Harold and Maude,
Wes Anderson on The Last Detail, David O. Russell on Shampoo, and
Judd Apatow on Being There.
xii INTRODUCTION
Apatow’s piece begins as follows: “When I was asked to write about

the film Being There, I thought it would be fun. I am a big fan of Hal
Ashby’s work, and Being There has always been one of my favorite films.
I thought it would be a blast. I quickly realized that I had not seen the
film in a long time and that I probably should watch it again so I could
refresh my memory. That was my mistake. After watching it again I got
very depressed. It was even better than I remembered it to be. Fuck this
article. Sometimes seeing a great film takes the wind out of you. Watch-
ing this film reminded me how far I have to go.”°
And maybe that’s why Ashby is so important once again. In a time
when Hollywood is more focused on car chases and explosions than
character and exposition, Ashby’s movies provide a perfect counter-
point. They are stories about people, told with humanity and humor.
They tackle big subjects with a light touch. They are edgy and subver-
sive. They have great scripts, memorable performances, subtle direct-
ing. They were made within the system, but reflect an outsider’s view.
For contemporary filmmakers looking back, Ashby’s movies are an ex-
ample of what Hollywood cinema once was and, they hope, could be
again.
Ashby’s renaissance gained even more momentum in 2009: not only
was Being Hal Ashby: Life of Hollywood Rebel published, but Ashby’s pre-
viously undiscovered director’s cut of Lookin’ To Get Out was released
on DVD, Ashby retrospectives and tribute events were organized by
both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Sarasota
Film Festival, and a critical work, The Films of Hal Ashby by Christopher
Beach, also came out.
And now, in the wake of all that, this book, which I hope will help
in the greater cause of restoring Hal Ashby to his proper place in the
cinematic pantheon. Over the course of his twenty-year career as a film
director, Ashby was interviewed less frequently than one might have
expected given the success of his films. (There is, for example, only one
interview about Shampoo that I can locate.) However, as a subject he
was always forthcoming, interesting, and generous, and as a result the
Q&As and profiles in this book are of a particularly high standard. The
first piece is “Breaking Out of the Cutting Room,” an article about The
Landlord and Ashby’s years before he became a director which was most
likely ghost written for Ashby by a journalist from Action magazine, the
official publication of the Directors Guild of America. And closing out
the book is the fascinating and very revealing “How to Kill a Movie,”
INTRODUCTION xiii
an oral history piece written by Ashby’s friend Michael Dare which lays
bare the numerous difficulties—including Ashby’s firing—on his final
film, 8 Million Ways to Die.
I am very grateful to Leila Salisbury—who was briefly my editor on
Being Hal Ashby before moving on to the University Press of Missis-
sippi—for asking me to edit this volume. I also want to thank all the
writers, publishers, institutions, and individuals who granted me per-
mission to reprint these interviews, especially those who so generously
waived or lowered their fees. Lastly, and always, I must thank Heather,
my wife, constant companion, and personal copy editor, who kicks my
sloppy sentences into shape and gives greater meaning to my words,
just as she does to my life.
ND
Notes
1. Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (New York: Doubleday and Company,
1970), ix.
2. Andrew Sarris “Our Critic Eyes the Future and Blinks,” Village Voice, September 13,
1976, 107.
3. Nick Dawson, Being Hal Ashby: Life of aHollywood Rebel (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2009), 268.
4. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’N’ Drugs ’N’ Rock ’N’ Roll
Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) 170.
5. Dawson, Being Hal Ashby, 120.
6. Jennifer Wachtell, “The Director’s Director,” Good, Issue 11, June 1998 (http://www
.good.is/post/the_directors_director/).
Chronology
1929 Born William Hal Ashby on September 2, in Ogden, Utah,

to James Thomas Ashby and Eileen Hetzler Ashby. He is
the youngest of four children, coming after two brothers,
“Hetz” (b. 1910) and Jack (b. 1925), and a sister, Ardith (b.
1912):
1935 Parents divorce.
1936 Father marries Clarissa Little.
1942 Father dies, ostensibly having committed suicide.
1945 Is sent by mother to the Puget Sound Naval Academy
(PSNA) for high school.
1947 Marries Lavon Compton in March, and then returns to
PSNA to finish high school. In September, his daughter,
Leigh Ashby, is born.
1948 Leaves Ogden and begins divorce proceedings with Lavon.
After hitchhiking around the Pacific Northwest, he ends
up in Los Angeles.
1949 Marries Maxine Armstrong; they divorce soon afterwards.
1950-1955 Is part of bohemian group of young men living in Los An-
geles, including Bill Box, Bill Otto, lan Bernard, and John
Mandel. He develops an interest in directing and is told
that editing is the best route to achieving that goal.
1956 Is hired on the B-movie The Naked Hills as an assistant edi-
tor. Meets and marries Maloy “Mickey” Bartron.
1957 Gains membership in the Society of Motion Picture Film
Editors, and gets assistant editing job on The Big Country,
working under Robert Swink.
1958 Writes first screenplay, The Sound of Silence, with Ian Ber-
nard.
1958-1964 Works as Swink’s protégé on all his films, including George
xvi CHRONOLOGY
Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and William Wy-

ler’s The Childr en’s
Hour (1961).
1959-1960 Makes unsuccessful move to Europe with Mickey.
1960 Mickey leaves him for John Barreto, whom she later mar-
ries.
1961 Mickey begins divorce proceedings against Ashby. Ashby
falls in love with Shirley Citron, another editor, who is
already pregnant. Her daughter, Carrie, is born later that
year and given the last name Ashby.
1963 Marries Shirley after the final dissolution of his marriage to
Mickey.
1964 Is promoted to editor on The Greatest Story Ever Told, but
quits to cut The Loved One for Tony Richardson, a job which
is short-lived. Norman Jewison hires him to edit The Cin-
cinnati Kid; it is the beginning of a fruitful creative partner-
ship and a close friendship.
1966 Edits The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming for
Jewison, for which he and co-editor J. Terry Williams are
nominated for an Academy Award. Is also given role of as-
sistant to producer on the film by Jewison.
1967 Edits Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, on which he is also
associate producer. Separates from Shirley.
1968 Wins Academy Award for Best Editing for In the Heat of the
Night. Edits The Thomas Crown Affair, on which he is also
associate producer. Ashby and Shirley divorce, with the fi-
nal rift in their marriage occurring on the day their adop-
tion of Steven Ashby, a young mixed-race boy, is finalized.
1969 Makes his directorial debut on The Landlord, based on
Kristin Hunter’s novel and starring Beau Bridges and Lee
Grant. Marries actress Joan Marshall (the mother of teen-
agers Sheri and Stephen Marshall) on the set of the film.
Jewison’s Gaily, Gaily, on which Ashby is associate produc-
er but not editor, is released.
1970 The Landlord is released to good reviews and modest busi-
ness. Lee Grant is nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Ashby and Joan divorce, but continue to have an on-off
relationship.
1971 Shoots and releases Harold and Maude, which does very
poorly, both critically and commercially. (It would, how-
CHRONOLOGY xvii
ever, become one of the most popular and successful cult

films of all time.) Starts the production company Dumb
Fuck Films with producer Chuck Mulvehill.
1972 Stephen Marshall dies of an overdose.
1973 Releases his third film, The Last Detail, for which for actors
Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid and screenwriter Robert
Towne are Oscar nominated. Mother dies.
1975 Releases Shampoo, starring Warren Beatty (who is also the
producer and co-writer), Julie Christie, and Goldie Hawn.
The film becomes Columbia’s biggest ever box office hit.
Lee Grant wins a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award
for her role in the movie. The film also receives nomi-
nations for Best Original Screenplay (Beatty and Robert
Towne), Best Supporting Actor (lack Warden), and Best
Art Direction-Set Decoration (Richard Sylbert, W. Stewart
Campbell, and George Gaines).
1976 Releases Bound for Glory, a biopic of Woody Guthrie star-
ring David Carradine. The film wins Academy Awards for
Best Cinematography (Haskell Wexler) and Best Adapted
Score (Leonard Rosenman), and is nominated for Best Pic-
ture, Best Editing (Robert C. Jones and Pembroke J. Her-
ring), Best Original Screenplay (Robert Getchell), and Best
Costume Design (William Ware Theiss).
1978 Releases Coming Home, one of the first Hollywood films to
address the Vietnam war, starring Jane Fonda (the origina-
tor of the project), Jon Voight, and Bruce Dern. The film
wins Academy Awards for Best Actor (Voight), Best Actress
(Fonda), and Best Original Screenplay (Robert C. Jones,
Waldo Salt, Nancy Dowd), and is nominated for Best Pic-
ture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Dern), Best Sup-
porting Actress (Penelope Milford), and Best Editing (Don
Zimmerman). Ashby shoots Second Hand Hearts (original-
ly titled Hamster of Happiness), starring Robert Blake and
Barbara Harris, the first film in three-picture deal with TV
company Lorimar.
1979 Shoots and releases Being There, a political satire based on
the book by Jerzy Kosinski, starring Peter Sellers. The film
wins an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (Melvyn
Douglas) and is nominated for Best Actor (Sellers). Ashby
xviii CHRONOLOGY
creates production company Northstar International with

Andrew Braunsberg, the producer of Being There.
1980 Shoots Lookin’ To Get Out, a gambling comedy starring Jon
Voight, Burt Young, and Ann-Margret.
1981 Second Hand Hearts is released to terrible reviews. Dustin
Hoffman asks Ashby to direct Tootsie, but Lorimar threat-
ens legal action if he accepts the job. Ashby, however, is
permitted to shoot Let’s Spend the Night Together, a Rolling
Stones concert film.
1982 Lookin’ To Get Out is released after nearly two years in post-
production and receives mixed reviews. Ashby’s two-hour
version of the film has fifteen minutes cut from it, and it is
not until 2009 that his original version is finally released.
1983 Let’s Spend the Night Together is released to modest critical
and commercial success. Ashby shoots a concert movie for
Neil Young’s Solo Trans tour.
1984 Ashby shoots The Slugger’s Wife, a romantic comedy writ-
ten by Neil Simon. After a troubled production, he is fired
during the editing and then reinstated with no control
over the final cut.
1985 The Slugger’s Wife is released and is a critical and commer-
cial flop. Ashby shoots 8 Million Ways to Die, starring Jeff
Bridges and Roseanna Arquette, based on Lawrence Block’s
detective novel of the same name. Ashby is fired after pro-
duction ends.
1986 8 Million Ways to Die is released to poor reviews and bad
box office.
1987 Directs the pilot episode of TV show Beverly Hills Buntz, a
spin-off of Hill Street Blues.
1988 Directs the pilot episode of the Graham Chapman-created
TV show Jake’s Journey. Ashby is planning to make three
films (Handcarved Coffins, The Hawkline Monster, and Vital
Parts) when he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He dies
on December 27, 1988.
Filmography
1970
THE LANDLORD
Cartier Productions/The Mirisch Corporation/MGM
Producer: Norman Jewison; PatrickJ.Palmer (associate producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Bill Gunn, from the novel by Kristin Hunter
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Production Design: Robert F. Boyle
Editing: William A. Sawyer, Edward Warschilka
Music: Al Kooper
Cast: Beau Bridges (Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders), Lee Grant (Joyce
Enders), Diana Sands (Francine “Fanny” Marie Johnson), Pearl Bailey
(Marge), Walter Brooke (William Enders Sr.), Louis Gossett Jr. (Copee
Johnson), Marki Bey (Lanie), Douglas Grant (Walter Gee Copee), HAL
ASHBY (cameo)
35mm, color
112 minutes
1971
HAROLD AND MAUDE
Paramount Pictures
Producer: Charles B. Mulvehill, Colin Higgins; Mildred Lewis (execu-
tive producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Colin Higgins
Cinematography: John Alonzo
Production Design: Michael Haller
Editing: William A. Sawyer, Edward Warschilka
Music: Cat Stevens
Cast: Ruth Gordon (Maude), Bud Cort (Harold Parker Chasen), Vivian
xix
XX FILMOGRAPHY
Pickles (Mrs. Chasen), Cyril Cusack (Glaucus), Charles Tyner (Briga-

dier General Victor Ball), Eric Christmas (Priest), G. Wood (Psychia-
trist), HAL ASHBY (cameo)
35mm, color
91 minutes
19768
THE LAST DETAIL
Acrobat Productions/Bright-Persky Associates/Columbia Pictures
Producer: Lester Persky, Gerald Ayres; Charles B. Mulvehill (associate
producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Robert Towne, from the novel by Daryl Ponicsan
Cinematography: Michael Chapman
Editing: Robert C. Jones
Music: Johnny Mandel
Cast: Jack Nicholson (Seaman’s Mate First Class Billy “Bad Ass” Bud-
dusky), Otis Young (Gunner’s Mate First Class “Mule” Mulhall), Randy
Quaid (Seaman Larry Meadows), Clifton James (Master at Arms), Carol
Kane (Young Whore), Michael Moriarty (Marine Duty Officer), HAL
ASHBY (cameo)
35mm, color
103 minutes
L975
SHAMPOO
Rubeeker Films/Columbia Pictures
Producer: Warren Beatty, Lester Persky; Charles H. Maguire (associate
producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Robert Towne, Warren Beatty
Cinematography: Laszlo Kovacs
Production Design: Richard Sylbert
Music: Paul Simon
Cast: Warren Beatty (George Roundy), Julie Christie (Jackie Shawn),
Goldie Hawn (Jill), Lee Grant (Felicia Karpf), Jack Warden (Lester Kar-
pf), Tony Bill Johnny Pope), Carrie Fisher (Lorna Karpf), HAL ASHBY
FILMOGRAPHY xxi
(cameo, deleted)
35mm, color
109 minutes
1976
BOUND FOR GLORY
United Artists
Producer: Robert F. Blumofe, Harold Leventhal, Jeffrey M. Sneller;
Charles B. Mulvehill (associate producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Robert Getchell, from the book by Woody Guthrie
Cinematography: Haskell Wexler
Editing: Robert C. Jones, PembrokeJ. Herring
Music: Leonard Rosenman
Cast: David Carradine (Woody Guthrie), Ronny Cox (Ozark Bule),
Melinda Dillon (Mary/Memphis Sue), Gail Strickland (Pauline), John
Lehne (Locke), Ji-Tu Cumbuka (Slim Snedeger), Randy Quaid (Luther
Johnson)
35mm, color
147 minutes
1978
COMING HOME
Jerome Hellman Productions/Jayne Productions Inc./United Artists
Producer: Jerome Hellman; Bruce Gilbert (associate producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Waldo Salt, Robert C. Jones; Nancy Dowd (story); Rudy
Wurlitzer (uncredited)
Editing: Don Zimmerman
Cast: Jane Fonda (Sally Hyde), Jon Voight (Luke Martin), Bruce Dern
(Captain Bob Hyde), Penelope Milford (Vi Munson), Robert Carra-
dine (Bill Munson), Robert Ginty (Sergeant Dink Mobley), HAL ASHBY
(cameo)
35mm, color
127 minutes
xxii FILMOGRAPHY
O79
BEING THERE
Lorimar/Northstar International/United Artists
Producer: Andrew Braunsberg; Charles B. Mulvehill (associate produc-
er); Jack Schwartzman (executive producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Jerzy Kosinski, from his own novel; Robert C. Jones (un-
credited)
Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
Editing: Don Zimmerman
Music: Johnny Mandel
Cast: Peter Sellers (Chance), Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rand), Melvyn
Douglas (Benjamin Rand), Jack Warden (President “Bobby”), Richard
Dysart (Dr. Robert Allenby), Richard Basehart (Vladimir Skrapinov),
Ruth Attaway (Louise), HAL ASHBY (cameo)
35mm, color
130 minutes
1981
SECOND HAND HEARTS
Lorimar/Paramount Pictures
Producer: James William Guercio; Charles B. Mulvehill (associate
producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Charles Eastman
Editing: Amy Jones
Music: Willis Alan Ramsey
Cast: Robert Blake (Loyal Muke), Barbara Harris (Dinette Dusty), Son-
dra Blake (Ermy), Bert Remsen (Voyd Dusty), Shirley Stoler (Maxy),
Collin Boone (Human Dusty), Amber Rose Gold (Iota)
35mm, color
102 minutes
1982
LOOKIN’ TO GET OUT
Lorimar/Northstar International/Paramount Pictures
FILMOGRAPHY xxiii
Director: HAL ASHBY

Producer: Robert Schaffel, Andrew Braunsberg, Edward Teets
Screenplay: Al Schwartz, Jon Voight
Production Design: Robert F. Boyle
Music: Johnny Mandel, Miles Goodman
Cast: Jon Voight (Alex Kovac), Burt Young (Jerry Feldman), Ann-
Margret (Patti Warner), Bert Remsen (Smitty Carpenter), Jude Farese
(Harry), Allen Keller (Joey), Richard Bradford (Bernie Gold), Stacey
Pickren (Rusty), Samantha Harper (Lillian), HAL ASHBY (cameo)
35mm, color
105 minutes (Director’s Cut: 120 mins)
1983
LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER
Northstar International/Raindrop/Weintraub Entertainment Group/
Embassy Pictures Corporation
Producer: Ronald L. Schwary; Kenneth J. Ryan (associate producer)
Director: Hal Ashby; Pablo Ferro (credited as “creative associate”)
Cinematography: Gerald Feil, Caleb Deschanel
Editing: Lisa Day
Cast: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Ron
Wood, HAL ASHBY (cameo)
35mm, color
95 minutes
1985
THE SLUGGER’S WIFE
Rastar Films/Columbia Pictures
Producer: Ray Stark; Margaret Booth (executive producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Neil Simon
Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
Production Design: J. Michael Riva
Editing: Don Brochu, George C. Villasefior; Margaret Booth (supervis-
ing editor)
Music: Patrick Williams, Quincy Jones
Cast: Michael O’Keefe (Darryl Palmer), Rebecca De Mornay (Debby
XXiv FILMOGRAPHY
Huston Palmer), Martin Ritt (Burly DeVito), Randy Quaid (Moose

Granger), Cleavant Derricks (Manny Alvarado), Lisa Langlois (Aline
Cooper), Loudon Wainwright III (Gary), HAL ASHBY (cameo)
35mm, color
105 minutes
1986
8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE
PSO/TriStar Pictures
Producer: Steve Roth; Charles B. Mulvehill (coproducer); Mark Damon
(executive producer)
Director: HAL ASHBY
Screenplay: Oliver Stone, R. Lance Hill (as David Lee Henry), from the
novels A Stab in the Dark and 8 Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block;
Robert Towne, HAL ASHBY, Don Edmonds (uncredited)
Cinematography: Stephen H. Burum
Editing: Robert Lawrence, Stuart Pappé
Music: James Newton Howard
Cast: Jeff Bridges (Matt Scudder), Rosanna Arquette (Sarah), Alexandra
Paul (Sunny), Randy Brooks (Willie “Chance” Walker), Andy Garcia
(Angel Moldonado)
35mm, color
115 minutes
Hal Ashby: Interviews
i}
_ ae)
Oo
it Wt aeNe
estar
Oupay Ge
i: erke be le tgs ee eos
er en a ee
inane onlrr it Masey oo roe
a bay Sole tinmie™® OF Gallet bs ih 1 dor
— ism pve Rife) | pe. Baas i ‘
a Ae. jim bate rad Aga it Ti
WR 608 dieh hgem oh0 +9 DORs nes Ae

vou Perales, oe a oes: o7 ul
m Negi P-Gddes)\
| Pg | INe.
a
Breaking Out of the Cutting Room
Hal Ashby/1970
Action 5.5 (1970). Permission to reprint provided courtesy of Directors Guild of America,
Inc.
I was born in Ogden, Utah. Never a Mormon. Hated school. The last of
four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed
himself when I was twelve. I struggled toward growing up, like most
others, totally confused. Joined the drop outs in my senior high year.
. Didn’t get along with my family. Married and divorced twice before I
made it to twenty-one. Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was seven-
teen. Started smoking grass at eighteen. Had about fifty or sixty jobs
since I was ten, up to the time I was working as a multilith operator at
good old Republic Studios.
One day, while running off ninety or so copies of some now-forgot-
ten page fourteen, I flashed on the idea of becoming a film director.
That was about fifteen years ago.
With the hope of achieving my directorial dream, I plied my mul-
tilith trade, and asked advice from those I met.
“The best school for a director is in the cutting room,” was the reply
I heard most often. So I looked, looked some more, and finally found
a friend who would hire me as an apprentice editor. Then came the
union. I applied; luckily the timing was right and I was accepted, or at
least allowed to go to work.
It was good advice. When film comes into a cutting room, it holds
all the work and efforts of everyone involved, up to that point. The
staging, writing, acting, photography, sets, lighting, and sound. It is all
there to be studied again and again and again, until you really know
why it’s good, or why it isn’t. This doesn’t tell you what is going on
inside a director, or how he manages to get it from head to film, but it
4 HAL ASHBY: INTERVIEWS
sure is a good way to observe the results, and the knowledge gained is
invaluable.
But the life of a fledgling editor is far from ideal, and getting through
it was a trip and a half. The union has an eight-year rule, which de-
mands you work that length of time as an apprentice, or assistant, be-
fore you are eligible to edit film. It’s a bad rule, which tends to debili-
tate those who might have any creative juices going for them at all. It
can become a full-out struggle just to hang on during those eight long
years, and some good talent has gone down the tubes in the process.
Desire and sheer luck were responsible for my keeping it together.
First, desire made me a hard worker and kept me at it here and there
for a couple of years. Then came the luck. I went to work on The Big
Country. I was about the fourth assistant in a super large crew, headed
by the chief editor, Robert Swink, but the experience was something
that turned me on to film as the wildest, most exciting medium of all.
Mind-blower Number One came rushing at me the first day. One of
the editors had cut his way to the end of a reel, and we all—I mean the
whole crew—marched up to the projection room to look at it. Before
we ran the film, somebody remembered I was the newcomer, so Bob
Swink, or William Wyler, I’m not sure which, laid a little speech on
me.
“If you have any ideas any no matter how wild they might seem, get
them out. I, or we, might argue with you, and tell you it’s a dumb idea
and you are a dumb son of a bitch . . . but that doesn’t matter because
the heat of our anger comes only from the desire to make a good film.
You must understand how we all feel about this film, or any film, and
know in your heart that the words said in anger have nothing to do
with anything personal. It will sound that way because we are driven
by those strong feelings, and we don’t take the time to be polite, but
personal it isn’t. So get those ideas out into the open and remember,
the only thing any of us wants out of all this is to make a good film.”
Needless to say; there was a lot of yelling, hollering, and swearing
that went on down in those cutting rooms, but there were also about
eighteen tons of love floating around there, too.
It was, indeed, a beautiful year!
Some more good time was spent . . . Bob Swink took me with him
from film to film. The Diary of Anne Frank, The Young Doctors, The Chil-
dren’s Hour, The Best Man, and a couple of others.
HAL ASHBY / 1970 5
When I was lucky enough to be working with Bob, he hit me with

everything from the technical aspects to a philosophy of film.
“Once the film is in hand,” he would say, “forget about the script,
throw away all of the so-called rules, and don’t try to second-guess the
director. Just look at the film, and let it guide you. It will turn you on all
by itself, and you'll have more ideas on ways to cut it than you would
ever dream possible.
“And use your instincts! Don’t be afraid of them! Rely on them! Af-
ter all, with the exception of a little knowledge, instincts are all we’ve
got.
“Also, don’t be afraid of the film. You can cut it together twenty-six
different ways, and if none of those works, you can always put it back
into daily form, and start over.”
As I watched and absorbed, Bob proved editing to be a truly creative
force, and it really turned me around. I almost, but not quite, forgot
about wanting to be a director.
Finally, my eight years were up. Bob got me on The Greatest Story Ever
Told as a fourth editor. After a few months I left, and went over to The
Loved One as chief editor. The George Stevens people were mad at me—I
hope they still aren’t.
I did the first cut on The Loved One, but that was it. Tony Richardson
had a commitment in London, so he took the film with him to finish it
there, and left me here. It was a bad time. Depression and paranoia ran
rampant. In short, I was on the super bummer of the year.
Then some more good luck came my way, via John Calley, who pro-
duced The Loved One. John knew Norman Jewison was looking for an
editor, so he set up an introduction. It must have been a good meeting,
because Norman took a chance, and | ended up cutting The Cincinnati
Kid. I also got my head together at the same time. I was feelin’ good,
and from there on, things really happened.
I worked with Norman on The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are
Coming, In the Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair. It was
the most productive relationship imaginable. From in front, Norman
always gave me good film. Then, to top it off, he trusted me and my in-
stincts. 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 and, in the end, it
brought me two Academy nominations, and one Oscar.
As time marched on, Norman boosted me up to the position of as-
sociate producer, and I was able to gain some of the much needed ex-
perience in the areas of pre-production and production. Norman had
me involved in everything from scouting locations to being used as a
sounding board for ideas on script, casting, and new projects. It was
the total trip, and I really felt as if Iwere giving as much to the film as
possible, without actually being the director. What more could I ask?
What’s really wild is the fact that I didn’t even have to ask!
One day, while we were working on Thomas Crown, Norman looked
at me, smiled, then asked: “What do you want to do?” It really blew
my mind. In all the time I had known Norman, we never once touched
upon the subject, and here this beautiful, sensitive dude was standing
there asking me about my dream.
“Well, I want to make films,” I said. Christ, I couldn’t even get the
damn word out of my mouth.
Another long moment while Norman just stood there with his imp-
ish grin. Finally, it came out.
“I want to direct. That’s where it’s at, isn’t it?” I said.
“Right!” Norman replied. “So let’s find something for you.” And he
did!
Of course, it didn’t happen just like that, but happen it did. We were
still shooting Gaily, Gaily, when Bill Gunn sent the first eighty-two
pages of his first draft on The Landlord. Norman and I read it, and were
both very up on Bill’s screenplay and anxious to receive the forty, or so,
pages still due. Then, in the simplest manner possible, Norman said,
“Why don’t you direct Landlord?” I jumped up and did a fast dance
around the office.
Landlord was initially set as a project for Norman, but he had a cou-
ple of time schedule problems still unsolved, so he laid it on me.
I immediately took the pages we had to my dear and close friend,
Beau Bridges. Beau read the pages and said yes. I was home free. One
whole day as a director. One major decision made. And no rejections.
In the meantime, Norman had set things in motion to gain approval
from the brothers Mirisch, and United Artists. Not an easy task, I’m
sure, to ask for two million dollars so some unknown factor of a direc-
tor can make his first film. Nobody ever made mention of it to me—at
least I don’t recollect having ever talked about it to Norman—but it
certainly crossed my mind, as it must have crossed some others. They
probably even talked of it in some circles. Jt being what I call deductive
knowledge.
HAL ASHBY / 1970 7
Mainly: “If Ashby falls on his ass, Jewison can take over and we'll be
covered.”
I honestly don’t know if anyone ever had such a thought, but I do
know Norman was my producer, and for that I am truly thankful.
So I had the financing, a script, a star, a producer, me, and the ab-
solute need to fulfill about 1080 un-made decisions. All of them to be
resolved before the first day of shooting. And once you get there, as I
later discovered, the pace jumps up to about 1080 fast decisions per
day.
I was really learning the difference between being a sounding board
and using a sounding board. I couldn’t just sit around the office and rap
with Norman about the script, or the casting, anymore. Now I found
myself with the responsibility of making decisions. Final decisions. It
was nervous time.
We were into the casting, and I really do believe it was the toughest
time on the film. Maybe that was so because it was the first time I had
been forced to make such a definite commitment. Not words on paper.
Or film to be cut, then changed later.
This time, when the decision was made, that was it. Not to be
changed. Of course, as I look back, I’m sure the major fear I had about
my being a director was taking its toll. The fear of not being able to
communicate my thoughts to the actors.
I felt fairly secure in all other areas, such as the visual aspects, and I
never doubted for a moment the abilities of the actors I chose to play
the parts. No, the knowledge I had gained as an editor would serve
its purpose well, but it had nothing to do with telling an actor what I
wanted.
Beau was a friend, so the fear subsided somewhat when it came to
him, but how was it going to go with Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Lou Gos-
sett, or Pearl Bailey? I had no way of knowing. Time, as they say, would
tell—but that didn’t help at all. By that time, it could be too late.
The snowball was rolling, and some super good people were around
to help it grow. As production manager, Pat Palmer was the greatest. But
his talents went much, much beyond that, and he took on the chores
of associate producer, too. The gigantic talents of Bob Boyle were be-
ing used to do the best damn job ever as the production designer and
art director. I didn’t know Terry Nelson, who was going to be my first
assistant director, but my instincts said, “Yes!” the moment we met. As
time went on, they were proved right.
The time had indeed come! This was it! We had a week or so of
rehearsals in New York, and everybody got to know each other. I had
hopes this would ease some of the fears I held about the communica-
tion with actors thing, but it seems luck was definitely not with me.
The first day of directing my first film, and I couldn’t breathe. The
damn fear had actually managed to make me sick. The doctor came to
the location, checked me over, and said I had walking pneumonia. I
would have to go to bed. I said, “Hell, no!” and told him to pump ev-
erything he had into my arm, rear, or foot, if necessary. He did just that
and, three days later, I was a well man with three days of directing my
first film forever behind me.
Within a week, I had completely rid myself of that old communica-
tion fear, and we were on our way. Norman, as usual, was doing every-
thing right. To stress his point that it was my film, he stayed away from
New York. He didn’t want to run the risk of intimidating me by stand-
ing around in the background, getting nervous, and maybe suggesting
a shot now and then.
Pressures there were. The first thing the Mirisch Company came
down on was the photography. It was too dark. They couldn’t see the
actor’s eyes. I explained how I wanted the look of the ghetto footage
to have the etched feeling it did so we would have a contrast to the so-
called, blown out, billowy, white-on-white sequences which we would
be shooting in a few weeks.
“But this is a comedy,” Walter Mirisch said, “and you’ve just got to
see their eyes.”
Then I would get into how I could see their eyes, and how nice it
would be if they would just have a little faith in me, and trust me. It
went on and on, with neither side giving in, until we got to the so-
called white footage. Then I guess they saw what I meant, and the pres-
sure of that issue eased off.
But there were other things to get them up-tight, too. I had fall-
en behind schedule and, on top of that, I was shooting a tremendous
amount of film, much more than normal. As to the schedule, what the
hell could I say? I wasn’t any happier about it than they were.
We did run into fourteen days of rain while shooting out on Long Is-
land, but the main reason for being behind was me. I set the pace, and
that was that. Actually, it wasn’t a slow pace at all. We were running our
tails off, and the idea of being behind really ate away at me.
After we were six weeks into the shooting, Pat Palmer rescheduled the
HAL ASHBY / 1970 9
picture. He wanted to ease my anxiety, and enough time had elapsed

for him to study and gauge my tempo so he could come up with a more
realistic schedule to fit me.
As usual, Pat hit it right on the nose. Then we were right on, and I,
for one, felt much, much better. I’m not sure if the complaints were
fewer, or if I just ignored them, but I didn’t notice them as much.
And then it was over. It took sixty-six days and two million, four
hundred thousand dollars—about four hundred thousand over bud-
get—to do it, but we did it, and the shooting was finished.
A goodly portion of the overage was spent on post-production. I re-
ally did shoot a lot of film. A lot more than I realized. In one sense, it
was Okay; I believe the more film you have, the more latitude you have,
but I was floored when I saw what a load I had placed on Bill Sawyer,
the editor.
Bill had been in L.A. during the shooting, and I, the ex editor, didn’t
have any idea of just how much film we had. To help Bill out, I jumped
in and took a couple of sequences to cut, and we put another editor, Ed
Warschilka, to work as well.
Did I encounter any surprises?
Yes, one very pleasant and nice surprise. I believe one of the best
things a director can do for his film is to get as many others as possible
to become a part of the film. Get their creative juices turned on, and
most people will give and give and give. To gain this end, I submerged
my ego so it wouldn’t be out there getting in the way of someone else
who might be able to get it on, given half a chance, and really contrib-
ute something special.
As I honestly practiced such a policy, it really blew my mind when
I sat there looking at the dailies and saw so much of me coming out
on that screen. For some reason, I hadn’t expected any such thing, but
I must say my ego was most pleased to see it happen. It was indeed a
most wonderful surprise.
Will I do anything different next time?
Yes, I will try to apply even more concentration. I had a tendency
to try and get away from the film for a few hours each evening, hop-
ing for a fresher outlook the next day. I don’t think that is where it’s at
any more, so I will try, on the next one, to give it twenty-four hours of
concentration each day, during the entire shooting.
Students often ask me how they can become directors. The only
thing I can tell them is this: “Don’t follow my example. The cutting
room is an excellent place to learn much about directing, but that

eight-year rule is ridiculous.
“So forget that whole scene, and go out and make a film. Any kind of
film. Do a short ten- or twenty-minute film on a shoestring, or borrow
forty thousand dollars and make a feature. If it’s good, it will be seen.
“Above all else, put as much honesty as you can into everything.
That’s what comes across on the screen: Honesty.”
Director Hal Ashby’s Office Is a House
with Psychedelic Walls
Steve Toy/1971
From Variety, December 24, 1972. Used with permission of Variety. Copyright © 2009
Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Oscar stands in the middle of it all.

The walls are painted psychedelic; the rugs, of assorted shapes and
sizes, are strewn without format throughout.
An enormous couch with pillows occupies the center of the room
not far from a crackling fireplace.
“This is a real trip,” said Hal Ashby about his home that could have
been designed by Alice B. Toklas. “Paramount asked me where I wanted
my Offices. I told them I’ve always wanted a house.”
And he got it—one appropriate for the director whose granddaddy
beard stretches haphazardly down his chest and hair touches his shoul-
ders.
An Academy winner for editing of In the Heat of the Night, he directed
The Landlord and the current Harold and Maude.
Yet there are no traces of him ever occupying a chair with his name
on the back.
“This costs less than the space at Goldwyn,” Ashby said.
It Really Works
“We did all of the pre-production and editing for Harold and Maude
here. It really works well. When we got into casting, it set the people
more at ease.”
An enormous complex of editing equipment that occupies a wall of
the dining room clashes with the large crystal chandelier.
11
“I don’t know of any other directors operating like this. Most work
out of a studio. This is far-out.”
Underneath the hair is a forty-two-year-old man who started in the
industry as a multilith machine operator, worked for eight years from
apprentice editor up, before beginning to direct.
He’s part of a new breed that shuns Hollywood society—his idea of
a party is six or seven people rapping in his living room—and all that
goes with it.
“This definitely gets comment from everybody—Paramount likes it.
We had a meeting up here with Columbia officials. If some of them
didn’t like it, they didn’t vocalize it.”
A haze covers the city seen from his window high in the Hollywood
Hills.
It’s the most elaborate place he’s ever lived.
“Many years ago in Van Nuys I was out of work. I went to the state
employment office. I waited an hour to see the interviewer. I saw this
lady and told her I wanted to get into the motion picture business. She
looked at me like I was crazy. Then she said she had something for a
multilith operator.
“I started meeting people, and I got a direction of where I wanted to
go. I knew it was directing. I asked people what to do. They told me to
go into editorial.”
Totally Turned On
“I really did want to tell stories on film. And directing is the most ful-
filled way of getting my interpretation of my idea on the screen. Once
I got into it I was totally turned on by it.”
He lights a miniature cigaret.
His hair, he said, “is a symbol of where certain people’s heads are.”
His Basic Philosophy

“There are so many euphemisms. ‘Hippie’ encompasses more people.
The basic philosophy of wanting to further peace or love—I’m very
much in favor of that. How to attain it is another question.
“And I believe human values are more important than material val-
ues. I’ve never had a thing on material things. This is all rented. It’s
STEVE TOY / 1971 13
the best place I ever lived. I lived at the studio in a bungalow for two
years.”
Two black cats stroll by.
The social aspects of Hollywood, he said, will break down as the
financial system has.
He walks into the dining room to show off the equipment.
“T’m down here at 3 a.m. sometimes—you couldn’t do that if all this
were at a studio.”
He laughs and takes a sip of Sanka.
He walks back to his chair—colorful, with the usual pillows—and
rests.
He never once looked at Oscar.
Director Charges Studio Was Afraid
of Maude
Marilyn Beck/1972
From The Evening Bulletin. January 25, 1972. By permission of Marilyn Beck and Cre-
ators Syndicate, Inc.
HOLLYWOOD—Harold and Maude director Hal Ashby admits he’s

mighty disappointed at the weak audience response to his black com-
edy.
He’s convinced there would be many more coins jingling into the-
ater box offices if Paramount had done a better job of promoting the
Ruth Gordon-Bud Cort starrer.
“Paramount has gone out of its way,” says the soft-spoken filmmak-
er, “to see that there’s been no mention in ads of the fact this is a love
affair between an eighty-year-old woman and a young boy.”
They’ve run scared, Ashby feels, and “approached the subject so that
it leads people to suspect this is a simple, nice relationship between two
nice people.”
To prove his point, he points out that in Baltimore the film’s dis-
tributor used his own hard-hitting ad campaign, “promoting the film
like it is. And we ended up with our best box-office in that city.”
Ashby is not the sort to become riled by such sort of studio maneu-
vering, but, as he explains, “When you’ve devoted a year-and-a-half to
something, you watch and fret over it as you would a child.”
He recalls the joy of filming the picture in and around the San Fran-
cisco area, maintaining that, until this period of after-the-fact aggrava-
tion, everything about the project went swimmingly.
“There were some moments of uncertainty,” he admits, “when we
set about shooting in the exclusive area of Hillsboro. The last time a
film company was there was for an Otto Preminger project and I under-
14
MARILYN BECK / 1972 15
stand he went through that community like a storm trooper, leaving

residents with strong feelings that they’d just as soon prefer film com-
panies didn’t invade their borders again. But we weren’t given one bit
of trouble. Everything went fine.”
The Hillsboro home that the Harold and Maude company rented for
their mansion scenes is currently on the market for $500,000 unfur-
nished, $7 million furnished.
“You can imagine working in those kind of surroundings,” says Ash-
by. “Rare antiques, two hangings worth a million each. I didn’t even
dare smoke a cigaret for fear I’d burn something.”
Hal Ashby
Robert David Crane and Christopher Fryer/1972
From Jack Nicholson Face to Face. M. Evans & Co. 1975. 100-16. Reprinted with permis-
sion of Rowman & Littefield Publishing Group.
Looking at gray-bearded Hal Ashby sitting cross-legged on top of his

bed on the second floor of his home high atop Laurel Canyon suggests
a misplaced guru.
Ashby is, in fact, a film editor turned director. He had a long and suc-
cessful association with Norman Jewison as a film editor, culminating
in winning the Academy Award in 1967 for editing In the Heat of the
Night. In 1969 Jewison produced Ashby’s directorial debut, The Land-
lord, which was critically acclaimed but did only fair business at the
box office. In 1971 his second film, Harold and Maude, was released to a
totally lesser reaction than his debut film.
In the summer of 1972 he was to begin his third film, starring Jack
Nicholson for MGM, but after many unresolved differences over script
and casting the project was canceled. Nicholson and Ashby wanted to
work together, though, and in November of the same year they were to
leave for Toronto to begin shooting the Robert Towne screenplay, The
Last Detail.
Ashby followed the enormously successful The Last Detail with Sham-
poo, the story of a Beverly Hills hairdresser and his many adventures,
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, and Goldie Hawn, and written by
Robert Towne and Warren Beatty.
In the summer of 1974 there was a re-release of Harold and Maude
for a limited engagement because Paramount realized that there was
a growing cult for the film and the work of a major new director, Hal
Ashby.
As we began to get ready for the interview, attended by Chuck Mul-
vehill (Ashby’s assistant) and an unidentified woman, we quickly no-
16
ROBERT DAVID CRANE AND CHRISTOPHER FRYER / 1972 17
ticed that Ashby is an art lover. The house was sparsely furnished, but
in a rich manner specifically suggesting his love for rock music, for
example, a colorful painting montage of the Rolling Stones and Neil
Young.
As Mulvehill tried to wake Ashby up with some coffee, we settled
in our director-style chairs and were informed that Ashby, Nicholson,
cast, and crew would be leaving the following week for Toronto to start
production.
Question: How did you first come into contact with Jack?
Hal Ashby: My first contact with him came when I was doing Harold
and Maude, and | was at Bob Evans’s house discussing the film with Bob,
and Jack happened to be visiting there, and he took the time to come
over and introduce himself, and sit down, and tell me how he enjoyed
my first film, The Landlord, and a few things about it. So the first con-
tact I had with him was purely on a social level like that.
Then I was involved in a film over at MGM that I thought Jack would
be right for, so I made contact with him, and I took the script up to
him, and I sat with him, and sat with him a number of times from the
first time on, and about six weeks after that he said he would do the
project. But everything ended up in a mess over at MGM, and we didn’t
do it.
Question: What caused the cancellation of the film?
Ashby: What happened to it was, I was going to do this film, and I
finally got it down to where Jack agreed to do it—it was called Three-
Cornered Circle, and it was taken from The Postman Always Rings Twice—
and at that point I wanted to cast Michelle Phillips in the girl’s role, and
another actor in the other role, and it just came to a gigantic dispute
with MGM as to how to cast my film. I guess they’d say their film; I say
my film. I just couldn’t work that way; I’m sure there are some people
that can let the studios cast their films. It wasn’t the kind of film-mak-
ing that I was used to, or could actually get involved in. It became very
messy at that stage, and I had to say no, and then they said no, and
then Jack, in essence, said no, too. I would assume that his reasons for
saying no were basically the same as mine. What their ideas on the
casting were I really don’t one hundred percent know. It just wasn’t the
way that I saw it. I’d been involved with it for about three months, but
if it had been laid out in front exactly what they wanted I never would
have been involved in it in the first place. For myself, I was under the
impression that they (MGM) wanted to attract film-makers over there,

because they had quite a bad reputation. They got Danny Melnick in,
and maybe someday he’ll make that thing work, but what they want
to do now is to attract guys and still give them the old “yes” and “no.”
That results in a breakdown in communication. Whenever you have
somebody coming in and saying, “You have to do this,” or “You have
to do that,” then something, somewhere, is going to get up tight. In
this case it was me.
Question: So MGM owns the project, then?
Ashby: Oh, yes, they’ve always owned it, because they made the film
of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Gordon Carroll was going to pro-
duce it for them, and he had talked to me about the script, and I read it
and I saw some good possibilities in it. |made my deal, and from that
point on went after Jack. I was really happy when I got him. I thought
it was a big, big plus. I wanted to use Michelle. First of all, on one level
she’s a much bigger name than they think she is, because those people
don’t know anything about the music business. They really don’t. I
mean, besides Michelle, you could mention someone like Leon Russell,
and they’d say, “Isn’t he some country-folk singer or something?” Or
you say Neil Young, and they say, “I don’t know him.” That’s kind of
a weird experience in its own right, in that they wouldn’t keep up on
all the levels of the entertainment business especially on the level that
they basically function at, which is a financial level. You’d think they’d
look around and see who’s making a lot of money, if they just want to
go at it at that level.
Also, because of the relationship between Jack and Michelle, I
thought that they would be very exciting together on film. I really
thought Michelle had it. I was almost locked into Michelle before we
got Jack, as a matter of fact.
Question: Why did it take so long to get Jack?
Ashby: | think just because he’s very, very thoughtful about what he
does do. That was basically what it was. You know, he’s had a lot of
things come to him, obviously. And he has a lot of things to consider,
you know, like how does that role compare to the last one, and to the
next one that he thinks he might be doing.
As for myself, I can’t remember picking up a script and deciding on
it in less time than he did.
Question: What did you think of The King of Marvin Gardens?
ROBERT DAVID CRANE AND CHRISTOPHER FRYER ii 1972 19
Ashby: | liked it. I understand there’s been a lot of negativism about

it, and so forth, but I was pleased for Jack, and I was pleased for Rafel-
son because I thought they did a remarkable job. Jack’s character was
certainly different from anything he’s ever done before. He sold me; I
believed that character. I thought Bruce Dern was marvelous. And cer-
tainly, Ellen Burstyn was great. I haven’t read any reviews for it, except
for a little mention it got in an article about the New York Film Festival
in Newsweek, but I don’t really know what the reviewers are taking out
after. I’m not really sure where their heads are, but then I never am,
in that sense. I thought it was a very daring thing, because it was out
of the mainstream of films, or where they want you to go with films,
or what characters they want you to have on the screen. That’s why I
found it intriguing. I liked the look of the film, the locale where they
put it, those two interesting brothers, and making Jack the introverted
of the two brothers, which was not the usual casting. I thought he was
marvelous.
Question: Can you tell us how all the elements came together in The
Last Detail?
Ashby: | became involved in it out of the MGM deal; Jack was already
involved in it, and they were just at the stage when they were begin-
ning to look for a director. Jack was in it, Gerry Ayres was producing it.
We had talked a little bit about it before, but not very much, when we
were doing the MGM thing, but I figured it wouldn’t happen for me,
because since this had to be done in the winter, I’d probably still be in
post-production on the MGM thing. Well, when the MGM thing fell
apart Jack said, “Why don’t we try and move you over and get you to
do this?” And I said, “That would be great.” It got a little bit messy for
awhile, because I was involved in a thing over at Warner Brothers at the
same time, but I really wanted to do Last Detail.
Question: Can you tell us a little bit about the story?
Ashby: Yeah, I really like the story. It deals with three sailors, but two
of them are lifers, one of which is Jack. And Jack and the other sailor,
who’s black, are in transit, like at Norfolk, and Jack’s been in twelve
years, and the other guy, Mule, has been in fourteen years—they don’t
know each other. They’re in separate transient barracks, just awaiting
orders, and they pull this temporary detail as chasers, as SPs, to take
this eighteen year-old kid up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He’s
rather naive, naive because of a lack of life experiences, and he’s a klep-
tomaniac who just stole money from the wrong fund. It was the com-
manding officer’s favorite charity, and they really gave him a rather
hard sentence.
As for the two lifers, they’re just going to get him up there and come
back on kind of a paid liberty. They first go by bus to Richmond, and
then they take the train, and the relationship starts to build between
these three guys. It becomes episodic, with all the things they fall into
and get involved in. It also deals a lot with people doing their jobs and
how that fucks everybody up. Of course, when you get two guys like
this in situations there’s a lot of good humor in it. But on the other
level it’s a good character study. You’ve got a couple of lifers that are
very complicated characters. It’s interesting to see what motivates them
and helps them get through life. They’ve got their own things going;
they couldn’t give a shit about this dumb kid when it starts, they’re
kind of parental towards him; they still don’t know how to break out
of that other mold. What we’d like them to do is for all of them to go
to Canada and blow the whole thing off, but I don’t think that would
be honest either. We go through that all the time, showing what they
are, rather than what we’d like them to do. So by the time we get to the
point where the kid, who’s not really dumb, but he’s not really bright
either, decides that he really wants to get away, he can’t because he’s
concerned about what will happen to these two guys. He doesn’t want
to get away, because he knows it will be their ass. At the same time,
they’d like to see him get away, but they know they can’t let him. So
there’s a lot of complexities involved, which I think will be very, very
good. I’m very high on it. Bob Towne did the screenplay, who’s a long-
time writer, and a very particular writer who doesn’t put his name on a
lot of things. He’s a long-time friend of Jack’s.
Question: How is Jack preparing for this role?
Ashby: The way I see it, Jack prepares for a role as well as an actor can.
He tries to look at as many different thoughts or sides that the char-
acter might have at any given time, and constantly questioning that,
especially at this stage. I spent yesterday with him, and I’m going to
spend today with him again, just really going through the script and
questioning things. That doesn’t really mean that we’re solidifying the
answers right now, but what we’re doing is narrowing it down from
twenty possibilities to five possibilities in hopes of getting to the one
possibility for this complex character that we both want.
ROBERT DAVID CRANE AND CHRISTOPHER FRYER / 1972 21
Question: Do you believe in rehearsing with the cast as a group, or do

you like to work just on a one-to-one basis?
Ashby: On this one, since it’s basically a three-character story, I won’t
really rehearse with the people that they run into along the way. We’ll
basically do read-through rehearsals about a week before, so we can
all talk about each other’s characters and so forth. If we can get the
relationship of the characters established in the read-throughs, then I
think the spontaneity will happen on its own, which is important to a
film. We’re going to try and shoot as much in continuity, at least the
heavy scenes, as we can. Usually continuity doesn’t matter; it’s all part
of film-making, and sometimes it’s interesting, it’s part of the game,
but in this, since it is a character study, I wanted to do it in continuity,
especially in respect of the unfolding of the relationship with the boy.
Question: Do you have the actors set for the other two parts?
Ashby: The other sailor isn’t set yet. We were going to do it with Rupert
Crosse, but there have been some problems which we’re still trying to
work out, in fact, desperately trying to work out, because we're getting
so close. Rupert would have been marvelous. We’ve set the boy. A boy
by the name of Randy Quaid. He’s the kid from The Last Picture Show
who took Cybill Shepherd to the swimming party; kind of a strange
looking kid. He’s big, too. I like him; I like his quality. I had a feeling
we'd have a good start with him, because he has kind of a naive qual-
ity. He doesn’t look like he’s off the streets of New York. And visually,
I think his size is going to work for us. He’s not the classic small guy
who’s always getting picked on.
Question: What makes this film different for you from The Landlord
and Harold and Maude?
Ashby: I think it’s the subject matter more than anything else. In es-
sence, it deals with the military and military justice, and what a lot of
shit all that is, but it doesn’t profess to give any answers, but it lays a
lot of it out, and that’s something that’s always intrigued me. Intrigued
me in the sense that the story’s worth being told in all those areas, and
I liked this one because it doesn’t go after the obvious. We’re not say-
ing that he did something wrong in Vietnam that he’s being called on
the floor for, but he did something wrong here, and it’s still military
justice in the way that they respond. It deals with guys who are lifers
in the service, and how they respond. It’s about bondage—this is all on
an intellectual level, of course, we never get into dialogues about it, but
it’s stuff that we fight for to come out.
Question: What qualities do you think Jack has that attracts filmgoers
to his movies?
Ashby: Film is a very personal medium, at least for me it is. I think basi-
cally there’s an honesty to Jack that comes through. But then again, it’s
on an ethereal level. People aren’t watching the film and saying, “Gee,
I like his honesty, and that’s why I like to see his films.” That’s just not
the way it happens; people feel a kind of electricity, an attraction to
this person to watch him and see what he does, because you’re never
exactly sure what he is going to do, and I think that’s the kind of thing
that’s fascinating. Like in Marvin Gardens, even though Jack is playing a
subdued character, it’s interesting because it’s not what I expected him
to do. I’m not four reels ahead of him, saying “This is gonna happen,
this is gonna happen, this is gonna happen.” An actor in film has to
have a real sense of honesty, whereas some actors put up a fagade, and
you don’t feel that you ever get through to them. With Jack there is no
facade; it’s just right out there. There is just innately a great appeal to
a lot of people for that sort of thing. I may be intellectualizing it, but I
think that’s what a lot of the draw is. We all know that he did quite a
few pictures before Easy Rider, but when he came on the screen in Easy
Rider, you went, “Wow, here comes somebody, let’s watch this.” And it’s
a great thing because it isn’t forced, he isn’t pushing like hell to make
it happen. Whether he’s pushing like hell inside to make the character
happen doesn’t matter, because again if he is doing it, he’s doing it
very honestly and you're not put off by it. That’s one of the differences
between Jack and Steve McQueen. Steve is much more of a personality
actor, and he tends to be less honest. Jack’s honesty is his great attrac-
tion to the people because they feel like they really know him.
Jack is really a special guy; on all levels, too. I loved his picture, Drive,
that he directed, and he’s written some great things. I thought Ride in
the Whirlwind was a hell of a picture. He’s done a lot of different things
on really deep levels.
Question: Can you characterize Jack Nicholson in one sentence?
Ashby: To put it down in the simplest terms I think Jack is just great—
a great person and a great talent, and I love him.
Shampoo: Film & Filmmaker
A. Leigh Charlton/1975
From UCLA Daily Bruin, March 3, 1975.
Shampoo and its director Hal Ashby are very much alike—their unpre-
tentious exterior camouflages an inner profundity. For all its big name
star power (Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, screenplay by
Robert Towne, photography by Laszlo Kovacs), Shampoo is still a film
with depth and subtlety. And for all his recent success as a director (this
is his fourth film, preceded by The Last Detail, Harold and Maude, and
The Landlord), Ashby has retained the low profile image more in keep-
ing with his years spent in the editing room than his current position
behind the camera.
Ashby, Beatty, and Towne sat down together in November of ’73
to cull one screenplay out of two (Beatty and Towne each had writ-
ten their own script). By March of ’74 a powerhouse cast had been
assembled, including Jack Warden, Lee Grant, and Tony Bill as well
as the big three, and shooting began. By the end of May, Wycherly’s
seventeenth-century play, The Country Wife, the tale of a Don Juan in
eunuch’s clothing, had become two days in the life of a Beverly Hills
hairdresser.
It is no accident that the story is centered around Election Day, 1968.
In this comedy of musical beds, there is an undercurrent of political
irony that continually puts the antics of George, Jill, Jackie, Felicia,
and Lester in perspective. When Lester bemusedly notes the temporari-
ness of life in general and love in particular, he is standing in front of
a television ignorant of Nixon’s simultaneous pledge to bind up the
country’s wounds and “bring us back together again.”
This multi-leveled reality is a subtle dimension that adds immea-
surably to the overall impact of the film. It is one of the factors that
23
will enable it to endure, and probably improve with age, not only as
delightful entertainment, but as an astute time capsule.
In the words of its director, “There’s nothing wrong with entertain-
ment, if it’s good entertainment. Usually pure entertainment has other
things underneath it. I’ve never looked at Shampoo just as pure enter-
tainment; hopefully if it’s a good film, it will be entertaining.”
Indicating his own political awareness he added, “When Nixon was
elected in ’68 it meant more than many people realized at the time.
There was a gigantic change during that election. In the film we’ve got
a lot of people running around talking about it, some of them ignore
it; no one goes and votes. There’s a party with big contributors and
one where no one is paying attention to anything.” Important as that
point in time is to the film and the filmmakers, it remains the backdrop
against which the characters play out their comic drama, one layer of a
rich confection.
Warren Beatty is irresistible as the man who loves continually, but
not wisely. No other actor could possibly capture the magnetism and
vulnerability that Beatty personifies so naturally. Dressed seductively
in radical chic, packing his hair blower like a pistol, he is the epitome
of physical perfection; more an object to be worshiped than a human
being who can feel pain. The package is even more attractive because
George (Beatty) doesn’t wield his attractiveness as a weapon; in fact, he
seems almost unaware of his uncommon beauty.
As his current girlfriend Jill, Goldie Hawn is as gorgeous as she is
talented. This is the first role that has tapped the mature woman that
lies beneath the baby-doll blonde hair and innocent eyes. Her bubbly
energy is contained and the result is a performance that confirms the
adage that less is more.
Julie Christie is a sympathetic queen bitch and how she manages to
be both simultaneously is a secret that only she can reveal. With her
straight hair, bangs, and miniskirts, Christie is the quintessential late
sixties beauty. Not only are she and Beatty the screen’s most attractive
couple, but in her pouting, sensual way she is the only actress who can
mouth obscenities and still be beautiful.
Lee Grant accepts the challenge of Felicia, a callous, spoiled Beverly
Hills matron (who is as obnoxious in bed as she is around the dinner ta-
ble) with relish, and manages to create a fresh interpretation out of an
overworked stereotype. A skillful bit of writing makes the least likeable
character the biggest loser in the end and she brings Felicia through
A. LEIGH CHARLTON / 1975 25
all the changes gracefully. For those who have seen The Landlord, the
excellence of her work under Ashby comes as no surprise.
The surprise performance comes from Jack Warden, last seen as the
title character’s coarse, cab-driving father in Duddy Kravitz. As Lester,
the big-wig financial advisor who keeps his mistress (Jackie) in luxuri-
ous seclusion to protect his image, he represents conventional, accept-
able amorality. Revealing himself to be a skillful comedian, Warden
seems to know Lester so well that the term acting simply doesn’t ap-
ply. When he and George face off over Jackie (and Felicia and Lorna
and... ), Lester realizes that George is more the fool than the fox, and
accepts him for what he is—king of the king-sized, but unable to get it
together in the real world.
To Ashby’s credit, these broad characters never fall into caricatures
and although the action proceeds at breakneck speed, it never seems
forced or illogical.
These “pop” characters represent a change for the director from the
off-beat and the out-casts he has worked with previously. Neverthe-
less, Ashby maintains that Shampoo is as close to him as any of his
other films that might seem to be more personal. “It’s just different
characters in a different situation,” he says. “The overall philosophy of
every filmmaker, what he basically feels, will come through in his films,
no matter what characters he’s dealing with. Your basic values, what
you think a human being’s rights are, will be there. It just happens, I
don’t know how. When I first saw it in The Landlord, I was surprised.”
When asked to articulate his “personal philosophy,” however, Ashby
declined, saying “I’ve never sat down and thought to put this, this, and
this in my films.”
Ashby would elaborate on his feelings about the characters: “They’re
caught up in a particular situation at a particular time in their lives.
They’re not living their lives in the way I would consider ideal so con-
sequently our concern was not to be too harsh on them. At the same
time, I’m not going to be the one to sort it all out because that doesn’t
happen, either. Someone isn’t there to say, ‘Gee, if you’d do this or do
that things might be a little bit better or you might get a little bit more
of what you want, or think you want.’”
In Shampoo it’s the small moments, the subtle details in the char-
acters, the clothes, the dialogue, the atmosphere, that make it work.
Actually, the characters are more routine than extraordinary; but that
is a large part of their charm. Ashby is one director who is at home
exploring the subtleties of his characters: “Since Shampoo covers such a

short period of time you don’t go for a large scope, saying this person
is going to start over here and end up over there and change in this
particular way. There’s not a lot of changes that go in the characters, at
least not visible, surface changes. Hopefully there are emotional things
pulling at each and every one of them. That’s what I really wanted to
show—what happens to emotions in different ways.”
When asked about the possibility of such characterizations being
interpreted as superficial, Ashby answered, “We certainly never though
of it as superficial. We wanted to get down as much as possible, but in
that short period of time we knew there wouldn’t be great character
changes. We’re not trying to say it isn’t (superficial) either. We’re not
trying to get in great messages by articulating them in dialogue. We’ve
had a lot of fun with some of the characters, but we also want to show
there’s a bit of pain. To me that takes away from superficiality.”
Ashby laughingly described the function of a director as the one
who “sees that it all gets done.” This is no small understatement given
the dynamics of working on film, much less one that is produced and
co-written by its star (Beatty). In referring to his work on the film, Ash-
by uses the plural “we” rather than the singular “I” and it is apparent
that this is a genuine emotional, as well as professional, distinction. Re-
freshingly unegotistical, Ashby speaks of film as a totally collaborative
medium. “It takes all kinds of people, everybody working hard.” He
considers it stimulating rather than threatening to work with creative
people: “There’s a chance to get more periphery, more subtlety going
on because of the number of people you bring into it. One thing I’d
always want to stay away from, no matter if I were to write, produce,
and direct, would be to become too rigid and say, ‘Let’s do it exactly
this way.’ That doesn’t mean it can’t be that way. There are directors
that work that way and they do marvelous work, but it’s always scared
me a little bit.” Admitting that his next film, however, will be billed as
“A Hal Ashby Film,” he adds, “I’m not sure what that means exactly.”
In the spirit of a true collaborator, Ashby acknowledged Towne’s fine
script and discussed his handling of it: “We stayed very close to the
script because it was very full. There’s a lot of dialogue so there wasn’t
really much room for improvisation out and beyond that. We would
concentrate on tightening each scene during shooting as much as we
could.” As for photographer Kovacs, who captures L.A. and all its deca-
A. LEIGH CHARLTON / 1975 27
dent lushness so beautifully: “When I’m shooting, the person I’m clos-
est with on the set is the cameraman. He’s my eyes.”
Although older chronologically than many of the up and coming
filmmakers included in Esquire magazine’s Ninth Wave, Hal Ashby, by
virtue of his attitude, is more youthful than many of his colleagues
who cull their ideas from late night movies. In his quiet way he manag-
es to infuse everything he does with unequaled credibility (in Shampoo
he creates the definitive sixties psychedelic party, complete with Ser-
geant Pepper and Jimi Hendrix). When we spoke he was already deeply
immersed in his next project, Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound
for Glory. The screenplay, written by Robert Getchell (Alice Doesn't Live
Here Anymore), had been shown to him and the attraction was as im-
mediate as it was natural. As it’s planned now, the film will concentrate
on a formative four-year period in Woody’s young life (from ’36-’39)
when he was on the road looking for himself. With the combination
of fascinating characters, honest humor, politics (Woody was part of
the Oakie migration to California), music, and pain this project seems
tailor-made for Hal Ashby, a man who is content to walk softly.
Film Guru Ashby Enjoys View
from the Mountain
Will Jones/1976
From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 8, 1976. Reprinted with permission of Star
Tribune.
The closest I’ve come to climbing a mountain to visit a wise man was
a drive up into Laurel Canyon the other day to an area called Lookout
Mountain to pay a call on Hal Ashby.
There, in a house with a splendid view of Los Angeles and Hollywood
in one direction and the San Fernando Valley in another, is where the
man who directed Harold and Maude and The Last Detail, and Shampoo
puts together his movies.
Ashby, barefooted, bearded, and T-shirted and radiating serenity, is
as good a candidate for guruhood as any. And a mountaintop is cer-
tainly a fitting place for a visitor from Minneapolis to find the man
who made Harold and Maude, the film that seems destined to run more
or less forever in one Twin Cities theater or another. Ms. Jones, who
never has displayed any overt foot fetishism in the past, admitted later
that she repressed a strong urge to sit at Ashby’s feet, not necessarily
as homage in behalf of our area’s Harold and Maude cult, but simply
because the man has graceful, beautiful feet.
Ashby used to live in the house, and rented a house next door to use
as an office and editing studio for the chores that are known as post-
production work. Then he bought a beach house at Malibu and con-
verted his own Laurel Canyon house into a working headquarters. In
bygone days, when Ashby was getting started in the business as a film
editor, such work usually was done in dreary sheds that make the dark
streets of some of the biggest movie studios resemble urban egg farms.
28
WILL JONES / 1976 29
“I worked in those tiny rooms with those institutional green walls

till I thought I'd go crazy,” Ashby said. “And when you were working at
a studio, all the editors who were out of jobs would stop by, looking for
work. It was depressing to see ten friends who weren’t working, and it
was also hard to get any work done yourself.”
What used to be a living room is now Ashby’s office, with a king-
size bed, littered with books and scripts, serving as his desk. To ac-
commodate visitors, he located a couple of high-backed rolling office
stools. The only real desk in the room, tucked into a corner beyond a
projector-type TV set and giant TV screen, was occupied by a young
man taking his phone calls.
The guru-like, above-it-all image of the mountaintop moviemaker
was soon reinforced. All week long, in the Hollywood trade-paper col-
umns, l’affaire Shampoo at the Golden Globe awards dinner had been
subject of speculation. At the last minute, the cast of the film, includ-
ing Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, and Lee Grant, had
canceled their reservations. Their prominent ringside table had to be
filled with other celebrities so it wouldn’t be empty during the nation-
wide telecast, and others had to take their places on the program as
presenters. Could their director shed any light?
“T have to confess I didn’t even know the Golden Globes were taking
place Saturday night,” Ashby said with a serene smile. “I didn’t even
know Julie was in town, and was surprised to hear that she was sup-
posed to be there.”
“All awards are kind of strange; because if you go along with the idea of
winning, what you're basically doing is hoping somebody else will lose.
“When I won an Oscar for editing In the Heat of the Night, the biggest
thrill I got out of it was my friends’ reaction, because they seemed to
be so pleased on my behalf, and I enjoyed that. But when I got nomi-
nated that year, I was really embarrassed because Dede Allen didn’t get
a nomination for Bonnie and Clyde, which I thought was a gross over-
sight.
“But Dede works in New York, you see, and all the academy voters
are out here, and the New Yorkers don’t get much consideration. Take
Gordon Willis. He’s the best cameraman in this country, but he’s a New
Yorker, and I don’t know if he’s ever been nominated.”
Ashby recently finished filming Bound for Glory, based on Woody
Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography, with David Carradine playing the folk
poet, singer, and author. Now, in former bedrooms a floor below, Ashby
had film editors at work, assembling the movie. In a largish family-type
room adjoining a patio, the walls were lined floor to ceiling with cans
of Bound for Glory footage.
“For this picture, I shot about twice as much as I usually do,” Ashby
said. “There was a lot of action, and it just seemed the thing to do. I’ve
just had to move my music editor into the garage.
The movie covers four years in Guthrie’s life in the 1930s, when he
drifted from Dust Bowl towns in Oklahoma and Texas to the migrant
farmers’ camps in California and then started making a name for him-
self in Los Angeles. Ashby built a period farm-workers’ shantytown near
Bakersfield and had the little California town of Isleton, near Stockton,
dirtied up to resemble a run-down Texas town after a dust storm.
“Potentially, there’s a lot of resemblance to Grapes of Wrath, because
Woody was an Okie and that’s pretty much his story,” Ashby said. “I
took a look at Grapes of Wrath before I started the film, just to make
sure I wouldn’t appear to be making a copy. Not that anybody could
presume to make another Grapes of Wrath.”
The director talked glowingly of his luck at finding good faces and
lively, interesting extras in the farm areas where they shot the film.
Also, at the height of the harvest season, he was staggered by such
sights as truckloads of tomatoes, which he was normally accustomed
to seeing only in supermarket-bin quantities.
“We lived very well with all that produce around us,” he said.
Ashby said he uses the giant TV set as a casting tool:“When you’re
interviewing fifteen people a day, you can’t really be fair to them all
with one shot out, especially when you try to remember back to the
ones you talked with early in the day. So now I make a videotape of
every interview, or at least part of it. I have a video-cassette attachment
and I can go back and put those faces up on the big screen, and it really
helps.
“I ask my casting people to make tapes, too. I had this TV rig with
me in Bakersfield, and instead of all the bother and expense of flying
people up there for interviews, Lynn Stalmaster would talk with them
here in L.A. and then send me cassettes.
“No, you don’t tape Warren Beatty or Julie Christie, because you
know their work. But for this picture I did make a tape of David Car-
radine. When I first talked with him, I had no idea I would use him.
WILL JONES / 1976 31
I remember saying, ‘Well, maybe if you were five feet ten, you’d have
the part,’ because Woody was a small man, and that’s the way I was
thinking. But then I began to understand that not enough people really
know Woody that well, and the more I talked with David the more I
knew his height wasn’t important. So I made the tape mostly to show
to the people at United Artists, who were putting up the money, just so
they wouldn't think I was totally nuts. I had to get that Kung-Fu image
of him out of their heads.
“David’s musicianship was a part of it, too, although I didn’t get
more than about 60 percent of the musicianship I wanted out of him.
Like a lot of actors, David gives his best musical performances away
from the camera. But ultimately it doesn’t make that much difference,
because we’re not making a musical. There are a lot of songs in the film,
but I’m not certain that we’ll hear any one song from start to finish.
“One of the problems with staging a musical scene is what else you
put on the screen besides the song. You can show someone listening,
but that’s dangerous, because you have the person in the theater audi-
ence who says, ‘Yes, well, that’s what I’m doing.’”
Ashby said he hasn’t tried to follow Harold and Maude with more
wild comedy because he’s been too interested in finding out how many
other directions he can go.
“But I’ll certainly do another one in that vein, because it’s too much
fun not to do,” he said. Meanwhile, he’s concerned with the gentler,
slower-paced Okie humor that screenwriter Robert Getchell (Alice
Doesn't Live Here Anymore) has captured in Bound for Glory.
“It has a different beat, and it took me a while to get used to it,”
Ashby said.
He led a brief tour through several editing rooms, where barefooted
cutters were snipping away at some of the simulated Texas footage.
Bob Jones, who is editing Bound for Glory, is another film editor who
is being nudged upward on the moviemaking ladder by his boss, just
as Ashby was nudged upward by director Norman Jewison after Ashby
had edited a number of Jewison films, including The Cincinnati Kid, The
Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Corning, and The Thomas Crown
Affair.
Jones has written the screenplay for Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain
King, one of the films Ashby intends to do next. Another script on
Ashby’s bed was a treatment by Richard Brautigan of his own novel,
The Hawkline Monster.
“That one has been called a Gothic western,” Ashby said. “I’m still
not happy with the script. One way to go with it might be a wild Harold
and Maude approach.”
Hal Ashby Interview
Larry Salvato and Dennis Schaefer/1976
From Millimeter, October 1976. Reprinted with permission of Penton Media.
Hal Ashby sat with his legs crossed in a semi-yoga position. Behind him
a row of windows bathed the room in a wispy, tree-filtered light. As he
talked, Ashby calmly stroked his beard; he seemed very relaxed, very
laid back, or, to use a term from the last decade, “mellow.” There was
no pretense here, none of the paranoid suspicion one often encounters
in Hollywood. Success didn’t seem to phase him much; after all, he is
one of the top directors in the American motion picture industry, but
you would never know it to look at him. No Gucci or turquoise, just
bare feet and well-worn jeans with a sports jersey. His home-cum-office
was equally simple; outside of the bed the most dominant fixture in the
room was a video projection unit and screen.
Ashby’s journey from Ogden, Utah, where he was born, to Lookout
Mountain in the Hollywood Hills had been a long and difficult one.
A product of a broken home, Ashby’s early life was less than ideal. He
didn’t get along well with his family, hitchhiked to L.A. when he was
seventeen, and was married and divorced twice before he was twen-
ty-one. “I struggled towards growing up like most others, totally con-
fused,” Ashby reflected.
Finally at twenty-six, he got a job at Republic Studios running a mul-
tilith machine. Of all the odd jobs he had, this one was destined to
leave its mark on him. “One day while running off thirty or so copies of
some now-forgotten page 14, I flashed on the idea of becoming a film
director,” he said. After asking around about the best way to catapult
from the multilith machine to the director’s chair, most people told
him, with typical Hollywood logic, to become an editor. Ashby, with a
little luck in his corner, managed to get on as an apprentice editor only
to find that he would have to toil for eight long years before he could
33
become a full-fledged editor. Ashby commented that the union’s eight-

year rule “is a bad rule which tends to debilitate those who might have
any creative juices going for them. It can become a full-out struggle
just to hang on during those eight long years and some good talent has
gone down the tubes in the process.”
But in the long run, he believed that becoming an editor was good
training, at least for him. “When the film gets to the editing room,”
said Ashby, “it’s all there to be studied again and again.” His first film
as chief editor was The Loved One, but he only did the first cut on it;
after which director Tony Richardson took it back to England to finish.
Then another lucky thing happened. Ashby met Norman Jewison who
was looking for an editor for The Cincinnati Kid. He got the job, but
as it turned out, it was much more than that. Ashby edited Jewison’s
next three films and won an Academy Award for his work on In the
Heat of the Night. After a while, Jewison boosted Ashby to the position
of associate producer where he picked up more valuable experience.
Then came a project called The Landlord, which Jewison was supposed
to direct but couldn’t because of a scheduling problem. Knowing Ash-
by’s ambitions and goals, Jewison turned the film over to him and Hal
Ashby, the director, was off and running. It only took fifteen years after
operating that litho machine at Republic Studios, but Hal Ashby had
finally arrived.
MM: From your work as an editor, did you learn anything about the
relationship between the editor and director that helps you now that
you are directing?
HA: Yes. Coming from my training I would never be an editor with
any director who was going to stand over my shoulder, especially for
the first cut. And the philosophy behind it is that it’s another mind
working on the film. Especially since all the editor is responding to is
just the film. I never went out on locations, and I didn’t want to know
what the problems were. 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.
And then you show and the worst thing that can happen—this actually
happened to me when I was a director—is that it isn’t any good. Then
the best thing you can do is to put everything back into daily form. You
can always put it back the way it was; that’s the great thing.
LARRY SALVATO AND DENNIS SCHAEFER / 1976 35
I worked that way, and I would want any editor to work that way
with me. I had a little bit of trouble with one editor who was trying to
second-guess me, and there was a little bit of fear since I was known
as a hot-shot editor. But that should never enter into it. And from my
being an editor, I try to leave everything open. In other words, I don’t
camera cut; I leave everything as open as I can, because that provides
more alternatives. The more alternatives you have the better, at least
for my kind of filmmaking.
MM: So you tend to shoot a greater amount of film than one normally
might?
HA: Yes, especially with an actor like Jack Nicholson. I will go for four
or five takes on a thing, but what I really want him to do is four or five
variations, slight variations that will work within the character and the
context. Sometimes you intercut those takes, but what it does is leave
you with the opportunity at the end, of saying, “That attitude in this
take would be just a little bit better here than that attitude.” It gives
you choices.
MM: In your films the characters are usually very full and multifaceted.
Do you consciously do anything to prevent your characters from be-
coming one-dimensional?
HA: | think it’s mainly being aware of the fact that I don’t want one-
dimensional characters. I try to make my actors understand that. |
think the great thing about features is that it allows you the time for a
little more exploration. That doesn’t mean walking around and think-
ing while everybody is waiting on the set. It’s literally letting an actor
get up and start working in front of you and then taking a look at it
and saying, “What if we try it with this,” or “That’s too much.” So that
the actors will have a tendency to reach further and sometimes they
might overreach. But by the very fact that they’lI do that, it will usually
come out. If a talented person takes a chance, nine times out of ten it
will usually turn out pretty good. With people like Lee Grant and Jack
Nicholson, if they do something in front of you, it’s very rare that it’s
ever going to turn you off. With Jack I don’t think he could ever do
anything that would be too much. When I started The Last Detail, |
watched him the first two or three days and he did some things that
made me think, “Christ almighty, we’ll never get away with this on
film. It’s just too big.” But I didn’t get into anything with him, because
I wanted to see it on film first. It just felt too big, but when I looked at
it, it wasn’t. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was just a natural thing,
and it never happens too big for film. I just had never seen it before, be-
cause there are limits with everybody else I’ve known. People like that
help you explore these things and that way you get fuller characters.
MM: Your first two films weren’t huge commercial successes, at least
not initially. Did that have any effect on your career or the way you
looked of things?
HA: No, I was very fortunate. When I started, it was very easy for me
to do The Landlord. | had a great opportunity. Norman Jewison was so
wonderful about setting that whole thing up; I never had to go through
any of the battles on the financial level of it. I’ve been blessed with
being very naive about certain things at a very late age in my life. It
was very natural that I would go out and my first picture would be a
two-million-dollar picture as opposed to a half-a-million-dollar picture.
Because a half-a-million-dollar picture is hard to do in terms of making
something work and come together. You have a better chance to make
something work if you have two million dollars; you can be more full
in what you want to tell.
The response to the film was very good in this town. In other words,
people would look at it and wouldn’t go into a thing about how much
money it was making but rather how good a film it was. And that does
happen. Now obviously if the film had been a big moneymaker, my
whole life would have changed immediately. But I was still getting
enough scripts from the time The Landlord was finished and released.
So I settled right into looking for that which I really wanted to do. It
wasn’t a case of taking the first script that came along. So I wasn’t nega-
tively affected by it.
MM: You weren’t originally involved in Harold and Maude. How did
your participation come about? You were brought in late on it by Para-
mount?
HA: That’s right. That script was sent to me by Bob Evans. I read it and
liked it very much. I talked to Bob about it and said there were a lot of
things I really liked about it but that I would like to sit and talk to the
writer. Usually when you read a script and laugh out loud, that’s a dan-
gerous sign, because it’s hard to translate to the screen. Bob also told
me that Colin, the writer, was originally set to direct it. So I met with
Colin and I got the whole story from him—about how the script was
the thesis for his master’s and how it was sold and how he was origi-
nally set to direct it. They gave him seven thousand dollars to shoot
some tests, and the studio didn’t like the tests. So I asked him if he were
happy with the tests, and he said he still wanted to direct the film. So
I went to Bob and took Colin with me. I told Bob that I couldn’t do
it and that he should let the man make his film. And Bob said, “Hal,
if you don’t do it, Colin is still not going to do it; somebody else will
direct it.” So I just asked Colin right there if he wanted me to do the
film. I left it up to him. So Colin said he would like me to do it. Bob was
teally very good about it; he made it very clear that Colin would be a
co-producer and he thought it would be good for Colin to be around
me and watch and see what did. After I made the deal and looked at
Colin’s tests, I could see it was just a lack of experience and also he was
a little bit too close to the material.
MM: How do you explain the cult status of Harold and Maude?
HA: I think it’s because of what it has to say. It’s the idea of the young
and the old, the love thing, what she has to say, the statements and just
the way the thing is presented. I think Bud [Cort] and Ruth [Gordon]
are both wonderful in the film. Bud I’ve always been especially fond of
because that’s a tough role. There is nothing tougher than being the
recipient of information and being made to look like Mr. Blah.
MM: Did the studio have a push behind it after its initial release or did
the demand grow more by word of mouth?
HA: It grew. What happened is that the film has never been out of re-
lease. And that was the first way the studio could start to tell. The fact
was they were always getting call-backs for this particular picture. So I
think, on that level, what happened was there was a certain amount of
business done and it probably affected different exhibitors in its own
peculiar way. Because I know how everybody at Paramount reacted;
they were really high on the film. So consequently the film has never
been pulled to this day, over five years. Also, maybe it wasn’t the ex-
hibitors; maybe it was just enough people coming back and asking the
theaters to play it again. It’s probably been the most gratifying film I’ve
ever made.
MM: In Shampoo, how much of the script was Warren Beatty and how
much was Robert Towne? What was the level of collaboration?
HA: It was a pretty even thing as far as collaboration. Bob is the more
complete writer because he’s been writing more. The script had been
around for a long, long time and he’d been involved with it for a long
time. I had dinner with Warren one night and he said, “Did I ever tell
you that it was originally titled Hair.” It was Hair before Hair (on Broad-
way) was ever around, which was a great title for that too. So he told
me the story behind it. Warren was working on Bonnie and Clyde and
it took Bob a long time to write it, because Bob is a very thorough and
thoughtful writer. But by the time he handed it in Warren was furious,
because Bob had just been so long with it. So Warren saw everything
that he thought was wrong with it, and, as Warren tells it, he sat down
and started writing his own screenplay the day after.
So I said let me read both screenplays, and we’ll sit down and talk
about them. I read both of them, and I liked things in both of them. I
could see what Bob had done and where Warren had gone. So got back
to Warren and said that there was really something good here.
So Warren and I sat down for a couple of days and took pieces from
both of them and put together a long rough composite kind of script.
Then we asked Bob to come in and take a look at that and then we
could sit down and go to work on it. So that’s how it was; we all got
into a room for about ten days. I acted more as a mediator, because they
both had pride of authorship by then. So it was a close collaboration in
that sense.
MM: It’s surprising that it originally started out as a contemporary
script; it really wasn’t a period piece when it was first written?
HA: Right, the whole Nixon thing and all of that came in after the fact.
In fact there was a whole thing about dope dealing in there, which at
that time was contemporary. But by the time we got around to doing
the picture, it was really way back there somewhere. So we didn’t want
to get into that and instead we wanted to go more for the political
thing.
MM: Fifty years from now, when people see Shampoo, it will have more
power just for the historical reference.
HA: That’s right. That was all Warren’s idea, by the way, the fact of
the election eve/election day setting. We decided it would be just great
never to show anybody voting or anything.
MM: What happened after you screened the film and then shortly af-
terwards the praise for the film was almost universal? Did you expect
that?
HA: I never expect that on any film. I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned
by it. It got a couple of bad reviews like Nora Sayre in the N.Y. Times.
Her review was so negative that it didn’t make any sense, I mean, ev-
erything was wrong with the film, nothing was right with it. And I said,
“Wait a minute, I can be off a little, but this is so extreme that I can’t
take it seriously.” Then Canby came back and did a whole big thing on
how great it was.
As far as where they (the critics) were, I really didn’t have any idea,
because there were so many elements in the picture to take off after—
not in the quality of filmmaking and so forth but just in the characters
themselves. I saw what that picture did when I ran it at the Director’s
Guild for an invited audience, where they bring their wives and so
forth. All of them were getting up-tight; they thought we were present-
ing Hollywood. It wasn’t that at all. One person said to me afterwards
that his wife said, “I know what that asshole (Beatty) is out doing all
the time.” And we weren’t even presenting Hollywood people.
MM: People who live outside L.A. react to it differently than they do
here.
HA: On that level, some people criticized it for the way we presented
women in the film. We weren’t trying to do anything except say that
these were three women in this particular time and place; that’s not
the way a woman’s to live by any means. That’s not the way anybody
should live, for Christ’s sake; nobody should live the way those people
did!
But audiences once you get outside L.A. and into Middle America,
I can only think of them looking at it as a fantasy, saying, “Well, I’m
sure that’s the way they live out there.” It’s not anything they would
comprehend as happening in their town.
MM: But those characters are very real, because they are very human.
And that’s something that shows up in all your films: the importance
of human relationships and how people relate to each other. Is that
something that you personally contribute to your films?
HA: It’s just something I feel strongly about. When I first started mak-
ing The Landlord, | wondered a lot about how much of me would come
out on the screen. And after I was watching those dailies on the screen
for a week, I was absolutely flabbergasted how much of me was coming
out on the screen. It’s just one of those things that happen if you feel
strongly about something. And I am definitely responsible for it, and I
would hope that I would never let it go any other way, because that’s
what is important: the human relationships and how people deal with
each other.
But I think sometimes as far as commercial film making, it’s very
dangerous because it can get almost too subtle. In other words, you
may get down to some really fine points where a general audience is
not going to accept it because it doesn’t have the climaxes it should
have. How far can you go and still have an audience understand it?
Talking about honesty on a commercial level, on The Last Detail, if
we really wanted to go after the audience, the book had a much more
commercial ending to it. Because what happened in the book was that
both guys were so moved by what they had done that they went AWOL
themselves. And in the end, Buddusky was killed by the shore patrol in
Boston. That has more of a commerciality to it, because what you do is
take the characters and make them what most people would like them
to be.
What I settled on was that I can’t believe that a guy who’s in the
Navy twelve years and another guy who’s in for fourteen years will
not only be affected by what they’ve done but both go AWOL,; it’s just
beyond my belief. I don’t believe it; show me one fucking guy who’s
done it. Maybe if he’s in a war and killing people, you know, too much
of it, one on top of another and more and more. This is a different ex-
perience and these guys are lifers. That’s why to me, at the end, when
Jack’s walking along, talking and swearing about the grunts, he is as
emotional as he can be and I felt he was affected. It’s something that’s
going to be with him for the rest of his life. But to make so drastic a
change, I wouldn’t believe it. And I think the way we did it was more
honest.
MM: Was there any flak from the studio the nature of the language, as
far as selling the film to TV?
HA: After we’d finished shooting the picture, there was a period where
the studio started getting very weird about the language. So one day
we had a meeting at the studio and they said that they didn’t want to
emasculate the film but the language is very, very strong and we’ve got
to do something about it. We want you to help us with it, because we
feel we can reach a broader mass audience that way. So I said, “Wait a
minute, you're telling me that if the word ‘fuck’ is used eighty times
in the film and if we cut it down to forty times, we’re going to reach a
broader audience?” And they said, “Exactly.” And I said, “I don’t even
know what the hell you're talking about, because I guarantee you now
that the first time somebody opens his mouth and says ‘fuck,’ there’s
going to be ten people who get up and leave the theater. But if we do it
and that just becomes part of it, maybe some people can actually have
some fun with the picture, because that’s the way these guys talk. So
before we get into any of that, why don’t we take the picture up to San
Francisco and put it in a theater and look at it with an audience to see
what happens?” So we previewed it in San Francisco and I don’t think
even ten people got up and left.
MM: Your new film, Bound for Glory, is a biography, which seems vastly
different from your other films.
HA: It is and it isn’t. It’s biographical, but what I’ve ended up with is a
film I could very well have made if it were fictitious. It deals with not
too long a period of Woody Guthrie’s life; primarily that period of time
in which Woody absorbed a lot of information and started to become
what he became, when he first started getting involved with unions,
started writing songs, and made the migration from Texas to Califor-
nia. So it’s a growing character.
But the film has been different in many respects. In a biography you
run into a lot of things that you don’t usually run into. It’s very inter-
esting to be on the set shooting a story about Woody Guthrie and hav-
ing one of his wives and some of his children from different marriages
there. It’s interesting to see how they feel, especially Mary, his first wife,
who is portrayed in the film.
MM: Did you feel restricted because you were dealing with a real per-
son and real events?
HA: No. I took the license that I felt I had to take with the picture.
For instance, I never tried to make David Carradine look like Woody
or sound like Woody. I thought that would be dangerous, because he
isn’t Woody. He has the spirit of Woody closer than anybody else I ran
into and that’s all I ever went for. If those people (Woody’s family and
friends) didn’t like that, there was nothing I could do about it. At the
same time, they’re anxious to see Woody become more well-known.
The real hard-core Woody Guthrie freaks may not like the film that
much, but you’ve got to make the picture for other people that will
come to it and say, “Hey, I didn’t know about that; I didn’t know about
Woody Guthrie; that’s fantastic.” That’s what I want people to get out
of it, because Woody was great; he wrote great songs.
MM: How did you first get involved with the project?
HA: They mentioned it to me at United Artists. They said they had this
screenplay of Robert Getchell’s and it had to do with Woody Guthrie.
And I just immediately said that it sounded terrific. I didn’t even have
to read the screenplay, because I just felt so strongly about doing a story
about Woody Guthrie. I knew a lot about Woody already, but I didn’t
know that much about him, not nearly as much as when I got into the
project and started reading.
MM: What kind of people did you initially consider for the Guthrie
role?
HA: Oh my God, I was all over the place; I was everywhere. In fact, I
was working with Tim Buckley for a while before Tim died. We were
stunned, because we were going to get together with him the next day.
I have a tape of him here that he made four days before he died.
So, I’ve gone that way, thinking about singers and that kind of thing.
Also, Tim had a lot of that spirit too and he physically looked more
like Woody because of his size and stature. Naturally I thought about
Arlo Guthrie, but I didn’t think Arlo was quite the actor that would be
required. That plus the strain of doing his father. He’d say no, there
wouldn’t be any strain at all, but there’s got to be a certain thing there
of actually doing that which made me back away from it. It’s endless,
the ways I went to cast Woody.
I’d never met David Carradine before. We just met when he came
to call, saying he would like to sit down and talk with me about it. He
came and we sat down; | thought it would be about fifteen or twen-
ty minutes, but we spent an hour and a half just rapping and talking
about different things. Still, six weeks later, I hadn’t decided, but he just
kept popping back up. He had two things going for him. He had a good
rural look, whatever that is exactly; and the other thing was this spirit,
an attitude.
MM: Bound for Glory seems less commercial than any of your previous
films.
HA: It might and might not be. I’m not sure.
MM: In other words, you’re taking more of a risk this time with this
kind of subject?
HA: Yes, definitely we’re taking much more of a risk. God knows,
Woody had a lot to say to people. I’m now toying with the idea of
dropping some of the speech-making out of the film, because I don’t
like speech-making. But at the same time, it’s the only film I’ve ever
made where it’s legitimate for someone to get up and really say some-
thing. Because that’s what he did. So I’ve shot some of those things and
basically they work quite well. Woody took some definite stands, you
know what I mean; he was more or less talking about greed and saying
it straight out.
Gambling on a Film
about the Great Depression
Aljean Harmetz/1976
From the New York Times, December 5, 1976, © 1976 The New York Times. All rights re-
served. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States.
The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express
written permission is prohibited.
Barefoot and wearing frayed gray corduroy pants, director Hal Ashby
sits in the $350,000 beach house that Shampoo bought for him. He
wore the same pants yesterday, unaware of the hole in the back, and
will probably wear them tomorrow. Forty-five-year-old Hal Ashby has
little in common with the smooth, cruel, brittle, expensively dressed
characters in his most famous movie.
Two days later, Ashby will have to put on shoes—for the first time
in a week—and comb his yellow-gray goat’s beard and his wild hair
and accompany his new movie, Bound for Glory, to New York. Bound
for Glory, a $7,000,000 biography of folk singer Woody Guthrie, is not
nearly so secure a commercial venture as slick and exhibitionistically
sexy Shampoo. A memoir of the Depression, Bound for Glory is no road-
map through Woody Gutherie’s life with occasional pauses to watch
him rush to his guitar and compose a song. In fact, almost no song is
heard whole within the film because Ashby did not want to make a
standard “boring” musical biography. The movie focuses on the four
years between 1936 and 1940 when Guthrie (played by David Carra-
dine), increasingly radicalized, walks out on his family to pour his love
and his music onto factory workers and migrant laborers. It is a portrait
of an uncomfortably ambiguous man, a fact of which Ashby is well
aware. “If you want to make a Woody Guthrie film that is solidly com-
mercial you have to have someone kill him in the end.”
43
Ashby chews a piece of sugarless gum and stares at the ocean through
red-tinted glasses with thin steel rims. He is tall and thin with a long
face and crooked teeth. He has been a vegetarian for eight years. He
stopped eating meat after a series of nightmares in which animals were
killed to provide him with food.
“You wouldn’t typecast Hal as a film director,” says cinematographer
Haskell Wexler. “Most directors are dictatorial, active managerial, ex-
ecutive types. Hal’s gentle.”
“We were more concerned with who would direct Bound for Glory,
than with who would play Woody,” says the picture’s producer, Robert
Blumofe. “Hal was my first choice, the big piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
Because he cares about people. He cared about me. If most directors
give you a year, you're lucky. Hal was on a flat deal and no matter how
long he worked on the film, he didn’t get any more money. But he put
in close to two years on the picture, despite the fact that his agents were
pushing for him to ‘make more bread.”
Ashby’s willingness to spend two years on Bound for Glory may mere-
ly be because—having been a movie director for six years—he is still
surprised to be one at all. He was forty by the time he became a director,
nineteen years after he had gone to the California State Department of
Unemployment and naively asked for a job in a movie studio. There
had, incredibly, been a job available, for a multilith (a kind of mimeo-
graph machine) operator. It took him five years to become an appren-
tice film editor, fifteen years to become an Academy Award-winning
film editor for Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night.
By that time, he says, “I’d been working seventeen hours a day, sev-
en days a week for ten years. I’d wake up at 3 a.m. and go to work. I’d try
to leave the studio at 6 and still be there at 9. I’d gotten better and bet-
ter at my work, meanwhile wrecking three marriages. Suddenly, I was
tired. I’d become a film editor because everyone said it was the training
for a director. But suddenly I was almost forty, and I no longer had the
energy to pursue it. So I stopped.”
Then, in 1970, Jewison found himself unable to direct The Land-
lord and handed it over to Ashby. Ashby followed The Landlord with
Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, and Bound for Glory. Until
recently—until the box office success of Shampoo—he did not have the
kind of power that allows a director to pick material congenial to his
view of the world. Even so his films share a common kindness toward
their characters, a sense that being one’s brother’s keeper makes mor-
ALJEAN HARMETZ / 1976 45
tality a little more bearable. It is partly that gentleness in portraying

the love between an eighty-year-old woman and a neurotic twenty-
year-old that made Harold and Maude into a cult film. Ashby even finds
it necessary to be kind to characters who displease him. “I didn’t like
the people in Shampoo. And the career sailors in The Last Detail. | don’t
like the idea of people doing that with their lives. But I wouldn’t take
any cheap shots at them. I felt sorry for them.” If nobody quite uses
the word “saintly” when referring to Ashby, they discuss him, as his
friend Jack Nicholson says, “like we’re writing a recommendation for
a college scholarship.” He is, says Warren Beatty, “a good man.” “Most
movie companies drive the wagons right over the grave,” says Nich-
olson. “Hal delayed the start of The Last Detail for a week so an actor
could come to terms with the knowledge he had a terminal illness.”
It is doubtful whether Ashby’s five ex-wives would exactly agree, after
years of putting dinner on the table at 6 and having him arrive home
at 10. But then, “I understood Woody Guthrie very well,” says Ashby,
referring to Guthrie’s ability to love the whole world while running out
on his wife and two daughters.
Ashby sips a glass of water and eats a handful of raw nuts, look-
ing much too unassuming for a man who has five ex-wives. A number
of thin, blonde girls with heart-shaped faces walk through the house
on their way to or from the water’s edge. He is, at the moment, un-
attached. He finishes the water and pours himself some apple juice.
Except for an occasional glass of tequila or wine, he stopped drinking
alcohol ten years ago. “I was a great drinker and one morning I woke
up and decided I was poisoning myself.” Nor does he drink coffee or tea
anymore.
What is most surprising—given the compulsions that made him
work seventeen hours a day and that have prevented him from tak-
ing a vacation in the last four years—is the lack of tension he projects.
He had to move out of his last house because he had filled it so full of
editing equipment—so that he could roll out of bed at 3 a.m. and go to
work—that there was hardly any place left to sleep. But he is as loose,
as limp, as unthreatening as a rag doll. It is, perhaps, this lack of ego,
combined with his great technical skill, that has caused people in Hol-
lywood to extend themselves in unaccustomed ways: made Norman
Jewison hand him a picture to direct, made United Artists’ Arthur Krim
agree to go ahead with Bound for Glory even when no name actor was
available to play Guthrie.
That was April 1975, and both Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson
had turned down the role. Hoffman had been worried about a role
which required him to sing and play the guitar. Nicholson had chosen
to take the opportunity of working with Marlon Brando in The Mis-
souri Breaks. For a while after that, it seemed as though nobody suitable
would ever be found. Richard Dreyfuss was almost offered the part.
Tim Buckley died of a drug overdose a few days before he would have
been offered it. David Carradine was interviewed and dismissed. He
was, among other things, too tall. “But I kept thinking about him,” says
Ashby, “and, in July, I called him back. He had the right rural look and
musicianship. And he had a ‘to hell with you’ attitude, but it did cause
me some problems. Once, when we were doing a scene, some migrant
workers marched by. David started marching with them. By the time
we found him, he was two miles away; and he had held up shooting for
three hours.”
There is no anger in Ashby’s voice as he relates the incident. He is
willing to accept almost anything that makes an actor more comfort-
able. “His point of view hasn’t been engraved in stone.” says Nicholson
of Ashby. “He has such a light touch that some people who have worked
with him aren’t even sure he’s directed the picture.” Ashby admits that
he is “not as tyrannical as most directors. I don’t visualize myself as ‘the
boss.’ What I try to do is get as much creativity as possible from every
person I’m working with. Haskell Wexler drives some directors crazy
because he feels strongly about everything. I love to have him around.
He’s my conscience. But in the end I make the decision—to turn the
camera on; to turn the camera off.”
Some of Ashby’s lack of tyranny comes from what Wexler calls “his
genius as an editor. So much of filmmaking happens after the shooting
stops. The shooting of the film is like the top of the iceberg. There are
hidden secrets in film which Hal can uncover. He has enormous techni-
cal skill in mixing, editing, dubbing.”
Because of his skill in assembling film, Ashby can afford to experi-
ment. What frightens him most is the possibility “of becoming too
rigid with film, of seeing it all so clearly in my head in advance that
it’s no longer real, of concentrating on who’s going to walk here and
who's going to walk there.” One result of Ashby’s untidy openness is
an extraordinary sense of relationship between his characters. Except
for Shampoo, they do not shout at each other from across the screen but
seem to be bound by an elastic band that will continue to hold them
ALJEAN HARMETZ / 1976 47
after the cameras have been turned off. Ashby is “aware that the actors
are connecting.” He thinks it is “a question of honesty. If I catch an ac-
tor at all uncomfortable with the dialogue, it means it’s not honest to
him. So I’ll change it.”
Bound for Glory does not match “the unattainable perfect picture” in-
side Ashby’s head. He is disturbed by some of the speeches, particularly
by a scene where migrant worker Randy Quaid tells Guthrie to “keep
on singing.” (That scene was restored by United Artists executives after
Ashby had cut it. After seeing Ashby’s three-hour version, they missed
several scenes in his tighter final cut and asked him to reinsert them.
It is usual Hollywood procedure for a director to be asked to make his
picture shorter.) But what Ashby believes he has achieved is the authen-
tic re-creation of America. “It’s like we stepped out the door and into
1937,” he says.
Ashby remembers 1937, remembers his father loading his milk
wagon and taking the milk down to a hobo camp in Ogden, Utah.
That was after his parents had left the Mormon Church, after they were
divorced, and before the dairy was lost because his father refused to
accept pasteurization of milk. Six years later his father placed a rifle
underneath his chin and pulled the trigger. “I was twelve years old.
My father used to make me laugh a lot. He would give me a dollar for
taking the soda pop bottles to the basement of the store. But we didn’t
know each other. And only now, in retrospect, can I see how much pain
he must have been in.” Of all Ashby’s films, Bound for Glory—with its
raw Southwestern hero and its uneasy questions about love—is closest
to his own life. There is even a scene—in which David Carradine, hitch-
hiking to California, sleeps all night at the edge of the highway—which
comes not from Guthrie’s past but from Ashby’s.
He was seventeen years old, already once married and divorced. It
was September and he was repairing concrete railroad bridges in Wyo-
ming. “It was only September and it was already so cold there were
two inches of ice on the water barrel. I broke the ice, took a drink, and
said to my friend, ‘I’m going to California and live off the fruit of the
land.’ I packed my suitcase, but I left my work clothes behind. Outside
Provo, Utah, I slept all night by the side of the road. The next day a deer
hunter, the deer tied to the fender, gave me a ride all the way to L.A.”
Three weeks later, he took his last dime and called his mother collect
to ask for help. Ashby had been born when his mother was forty-four,
his oldest brother almost twenty. His mother herself was the result of a
polygamous marriage. Ashby’s grandfather had had five wives, keeping

one in town, one on his ranch, three on his farms. By nature or neces-
sity a rigid woman, she turned her youngest son down. Ashby took the
dime and bought a Powerhouse candy bar. The candy bar lasted for
three days—on the fourth day he found a job.
Originally, Ashby wanted a job in a movie studio because “it seemed
glamorous.” Now, he says diffidently, he hopes his films “will have
something to do with the human condition.” By that, he means “deal-
ing with what people have the most trouble with, the relationships
between them.” Pinned across one wall of an upstairs bedroom are the
photographs published in Life magazine of the 242 young men who
died during one week of the Vietnamese war. In January he will start
shooting Coming Home, a movie about the survivors of that war.
Ashby describes himself most often as “naive,” and he says now,
with naiveté and uncalculated charm, that “it is a wonderful thing to
look at your work and not be embarrassed by it.”
That Special Okie Southwest Flavor,
That Humor
David Sterritt/1977
Reproduced with permission from the February 4, 1977 issue of The Christian Science
Monitor (www.CSMonitor.com). © 1977 The Christian Science Monitor.
A room with Hal Ashby in it is a cheery one.

An aura of faintly old-fashioned hipness hovers about his faded cor-
duroy pants, tie-dyed T-shirt, and brightly flowing hair, and his chuckly
voice erupts constantly in a laugh that’s really a gleeful hoot. You’d be
happy too if you’d directed such hits as Shampoo, The Last Detail, and
followed them with the critically acclaimed Bound for Glory.
I first met Ashby in Stockton, California, as he shot Bound for Glory
with David Carradine. I was scheduled to arrive at the location on a
Monday, but United Artists eagerly suggested I come several days ear-
lier to watch the shooting of an “amazing freight-train scene.” So I re-
vised a complicated cross-country itinerary—airline tickets, accommo-
dations, ground transportation—and showed up at the recommended
time. Ashby shook my hand, pointed out cinematographer Haskell
Wexler, and clambered to the top of a freight car, which promptly took
off into the distance, not to return for several hours. So much for the
“amazing freight-train scene.”
A Chat Develops
Now at last I’m chatting with Ashby in the civilized confines of a New
York hotel suite, and he hoots as I recall my Stockton visit (which in
the end I spent profitably watching Carradine learn to play the fiddle).
Ashby is delighted with the way Bound for Glory turned out, and hopes
49
it will reach “as broad an audience as possible.” How does one go about
recruiting such an audience? “I have no idea,” is the response.
Bound for Glory tells of Woody Guthrie’s early years as a folk singer,
social activist, and all-round ramblin’ man. The Robert Getchell script is
based on portions of Guthrie’s autobiography of the same title. Though
it reflects many of the social tensions and struggles of the depression
years, Ashby sees it as “more naive than political. It’s about learning
processes and character, so young people will probably identify with it
faster, because that’s where you are at a certain stage of your life. But
older people are drawn to the movie too, if they’ve been through any
part of that ’30s experience.”
Okie Rhythm Hailed
Ashby regards the Glory book as “a fantastic piece of work, and written
by a very young man. Its flavor was definitely an influence on the film;
at least I hope it’s there—that Okie Southwest rhythm, and that special
humor. We wanted to capture that texture.”
Does the movie succeed, in his view? “I talked to Woody’s family
and people who knew him. I wanted to know what sense they’d get out
of it. I tried for the spirit of Woody and people say we caught it—after
five minutes they forget it’s Davie on screen. .. . This was important for
me, because I didn’t want one of those things where the family’s run-
ning around angry.”
Paradoxically, the story of folksy Woody cost a whopping $7 mil-
lion to film. Shooting lasted nearly five months, going six weeks over
schedule. Most of the extra money went for period authenticity, as in
huge “Hooverville” migrant camps. “I always felt it was a very intimate
story,” explains the director, “but it had to be against a big canvas. And
it just kept getting bigger.”
Since Bound for Glory is Ashby’s fifth feature since leaving his post as
one of Hollywood's top film editors, I ask if he feels any connective tis-
sues running through his work. “There’s no story line or anything like
that running through my pictures,” he answers, “but I try to do films
that deal with human relations, with people relating to one another.
Which apparently a lot of people are not into doing these days.”
DAVID STERRITT / 1977 51
Different Love Story
This concern with people rather than sharks or giant apes will be evi-
dent in the next Ashby project, Coming Home—a “different kind of love
story, where a woman falls in love with a paraplegic.” It will star Jane
Fonda, Bruce Dern, and Jon Voight in a Vietnam-era setting. Next, prob-
ably, will come a movie version of Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline
Monster: A Gothic Western. This novel seems impossibly slight and rep-
etitious to me, but Ashby insists “it will work on film, even though
I’ve never seen anything like it before. It has two hysterical, unusual,
fascinating characters. .. .”
Looking back on his beginnings in Hollywood, Ashby remembers
them as unspectacular. “I was a kid looking for something,” he remi-
nisces, “but I didn’t know what. The movie business seemed like a ter-
rific thing to get into. I’d go into the unemployment office and say
I wanted to start at the bottom. People love to hear that, though of
course I didn’t want to start at the bottom anymore than anybody else.
Finally I got this weird job copying scripts at Universal Pictures.”
“T looked around, and directing looked like the best gig. So I tried to
become an assistant director, but I found out that editing was a better
‘school.’ It took three years to get a job as an apprentice editor, and it
was a great school, though time-consuming. My life changed when
I met [director] William Wyler and some of the others. Then all the
doors opened, like in a movie. And Norman [In the Heat of the Night]
Jewison was a good man, I could tell I was a good editor for him, be-
cause I could see the load I took off him.”
Hand Fairly Free
Today Ashby can pretty well write his own ticket, especially in the
wake of Shampoo, a depiction of dreary sensuality which remains the
biggest moneymaker in Columbia Pictures history. (“For them, not for
me,” muses Ashby with a rather muted hoot.) Interestingly, this young
celebrity among directors doesn’t think today’s movies hold up against
Hollywood works of the past.
“Back in the old studio days—which I didn’t go through, remem-
ber—the studios owned the theaters, so their main need was for lots of
‘product.’ They had to be factories, but they made better, more contro-
versial films. The less expensive ‘B’ pictures were great breeding grounds
for directors, including former editors. And you could do films that had
more to say, because there were just more films.
“Now if you have something to say you have to gamble $4-$5 mil-
lion, at a time when business isn’t that good. Everybody’s trying to play
it safer, to protect the investment and take care of the corporation.”
Treading the Middle
Ashby’s own films have managed to tread a careful line down the mid-
dle, making their statements and sometimes innovating while keeping
an eye on the mainstream audience. While his works may disappoint,
at times, they are painstakingly crafted by a self-admitted “slow cutter”
who used to sit fourteen to eighteen hours a day in the editing room
“until I realized there must be more to life than this.” Now he works
with another editor (often a fast one) and concentrates most of his at-
tention on overseeing the assemblage of scenes.
He is a serious filmmaker, and his movies show it. But listen closely
and you'll hear echoes of that hooting Ashby laugh refusing to take
itself too seriously. Which is a healthy thing in any business.
Hal Ashby
Tay Garnett/1977
From Directing: Learn from the Masters, by Tay Garnett, edited by Anthony Slide, Scare-
crow Press, 1996. Reprinted with permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
1. What was your personal background (your vocation) before en-

tering this field of endeavor?
I’ve had very many jobs. I traveled around just trying to find what I
wanted to do. This is prior to getting into the motion picture field, and
becoming a director. I finally got into film editing. I was a film editor
for about ten years and found it to be an excellent background.
2. What was your first position in the movie business? Were you
an assistant director, a Cameraman, an actor, a writer, a film editor,
an agent, or other? Please indicate the steps that led to your direct-
ing.
My first position was running a copy machine making copies of
scripts at Universal. I got that job from the State Employment Office
in Van Nuys. I went there because it was a free employment agency. I
remember sitting there, waiting for about an hour. I told the lady who
interviewed me that I wanted to get into the film industry. She looked
at me like I was crazy.
From there, I wanted to become a director. I thought, at that time,
the quickest way to directing was to become an assistant director, but
everyone I spoke to said, “Get into editing. With editing, everything is
up there on film for you to see over and over again. You can study it
and ask why you like it, and why you don’t.”
All this took a long time. The biggest break came for me when, after
two years, I worked with William Wyler on The Big Country [1958]. |
was, like, the fifth assistant on it. Those people opened all the doors
53
for me. They really encouraged everyone to get their ideas out. What a
blessing it was; the experience changed my life.
3. What is your philosophy regarding your film: your aim or pur-

pose in making it? Is there an underlying objective beyond provid-
ing entertainment?
My philosophy is what I like to call preoccupation with the “human
condition,” which can, of course, mean a lot of things. It’s basically
the relationship between people. | like to do that with entertainment. I
just can’t get into the idea of pure entertainment. If something is really
good, even if someone approaches it with pure entertainment in mind,
I think it will have an underlying theme. If I’m dealing with characters
that I don’t particularly like, I try to be kind with them. If I like the
characters, I’m very hard on them.
4. In seeking a story on which to base a film, in what particular

genre do you hope to find it?
I look everywhere for my source material. It doesn’t matter what
genre it might be. Whatever comes along that interests me, I’ll do.
5. Have you a preference as to the source of your story material:

story or script written directly for the screen, a play designed for
theatrical use, or a story (fact or fiction) intended for book or maga-
zine publication? Please explain reasons for your choice.
I believe an original story would be my preference, because it starts
right out with the idea of film in mind. I find that I have to read a script
two or three times to fully understand it and bring it to life.
Other things happen with novels; I find I get too emotionally in-
volved in reading a novel. Transposing that to a screenplay is difficult.
A short story might be interesting, and that’s one thing I haven’t
done.
I think there’s very little relationship between the stage play and
film. I think the best thing you can hope for out of a stage play is to get
some very highly emotional things like the delivery of dialogue.
6. In any of the above cases, do you prefer using another screen

dramatist to prepare the actual shooting script, or do you choose to
do that work yourself?
TAY GARNETT / 1977 55
I prefer to use another screenplay writer. I like that input, and objec-
tive viewpoint.
7. If you do use another scriptwriter, do you like to work closely

with him (or her) as a co-writer, or do you elect to allow the writer
to express his views fully, then ultimately do the final script polish
yourself?
I let them have as much freedom to create as they need, and I will sit
with them at the end, and use what I want. I’ve found with film that
the more creativity you can get out of other people, the better chance
you have of making a good film.
8. Does it please you to have all the action (business) worked out
fully on paper before you start shooting, or do you prefer to impro-
vise?
The structure of the script is very important to me, so I don’t start
messing around with that while I’m shooting. If a scene isn’t working,
I might get into improvisation as long as I know what the obligation of
the scene is. I like the spontaneity of films, so I don’t like to get it down
exactly as the script reads.
9. Is there one specific component involved in the creation of a

film, which you regard as transcendent in importance: story, script
(or scriptwriter), star or stars, cast (as a whole), film editor, art di-
rector, or Cameraman?
All of them. The guard is just as important as the quarterback. It’s a
communal operation to make a film.
10. Do you work with a producer? If “Yes”: what functions do you

expect from him? If “No”: would you care to explain?
The function I expect from the producer is to try to get me what I
need, and to take a lot of pressure off me. On a more important level, I
want that producer’s creative input, because he usually feels as close to
that story or film as I do, and should have a lot of things to say about
it. | look for those things to be said. I expect to have him take care of
all the business end of things. Also, I try very hard to work with my
producers.
If I were a producer and director on my own films, I would get a
sensational production manager and let him become, in effect, an as-

sociate producer, and let him produce the film himself.
11. Do you use a dialogue director, if only to save time by mak-

ing sure that all the actors know their lines? Or, if you use one, is
it because you feel that he brings other values to your operation?
Kindly elucidate.
I haven’t used a dialogue director yet.
12. Do you like to have your writer or producer on your set while
you are rehearsing or shooting?
That’s entirely up to them. If the writer or producer would like to be
on the set, they’re more than welcome. Certainly with Shampoo [1975],
Robert Towne was on the set most of the time, along with Warren Be-
atty.
13. Do you work closely with your cameraman prior to shooting:

planning effective dramatic and mood lighting, predetermining
every camera set-up for effectiveness dramaturgically as well as
composition-wise, and in blocking out all camera movements in
minute detail? Or, do you again prefer to extemporize?
I don’t block out my camera movements in advance. I work very
closely with the cameraman before shooting and we talk concept of the
overall look of the film; at that time we sometimes make a test to have
something concrete to look at. Sometimes he’ll make the set-up to see
if I like it, and if it feels comfortable.
When we start shooting I’m probably closer to my cameraman than
anyone else in the crew. I always make sure I ride to work with him, or
come home with him, so we can talk. I’ve found that the more freedom
a cameraman has, the better he works.
14. How closely do you supervise the casting of your films? Do you
pay particular attention to the proper casting of the more impor-
tant roles, then allow your casting director to set the other parts,
or do you maintain rigid control of setting the entire cast, down to
the one-line bit parts?
I maintain a tremendous control on casting. I work very closely with
my casting director. Casting is one of the toughest things in the film
for me. Casting the major roles can become really frustrating, because
it’s the first major decision. You have human beings out there waiting
to get work.
On Bound For Glory [1976], I used my Advent television screen and
my video recorder! I had my casting director, Lynn Stalmaster, tape
interviews with all the one-liners and one-day players. I was shooting
in Stockton and Bakersfield, so he would send the tapes up to me at
night. I could play them, run them back and forth until I got a good
look. It was a good technique, because those being tested were far more
comfortable with the casting director than they would have been with
me.
15. In considering actors, do you prefer working with the seasoned

“technician,” or with the more “instinctive” type? Would you care
to express your views toward the “method actor”?
I have no preference. When an actor is good all I know is that I get
excited. Whatever it takes for the actor to get where he or she wants to
go, it doesn’t matter to me how it’s done, as long as it works. But he has
to have some of the instinct. I do, too. One can have all the “method”
there is, but if the instinct isn’t there, it’s nothing.
16. Is it your practice, before rehearsals—even before the actor has

had a chance to form his own image of the character or to absorb
his lines—to discuss with him, in depth, your concept of the charac-
ter or the relationship of that part to the play-structure as a whole?
Or is it your position that, having chosen the actor, you would be
better advised to let him exercise, uninhibited, those qualities for
which you selected him, thus allowing for the possibility of his
bringing to the characterization, a plus which is entirely his own?
I believe that actors are intelligent people and are capable of giving a
character more study, more thought, and more levels than I ever could.
If they’re good actors, they’ll explore many different ways. Take Jack
Nicholson in The Last Detail [1973]; before shooting, we talked about
five or ten different approaches to his character. We talked concept. I
never want that exploration to stop. I always encourage my actors to
look at the dailies.
Again, with Jack, if he noticed some little mannerism he did, and it
worked, he would continue to do it. It was much easier with Jack sitting
there with me than if I approached him the next day and said, “You
know that little thing you did yesterday...”
17. Some very fine directors believe in long rehearsals, covering

the entire script with the complete cast, as one would in a theatri-
cal production. Others, perhaps equally talented, shun this method
on the theory that “Too much rehearsal flattens out spontaneity.”
Many hold their rehearsals to a minimum, on the theory that by
“shooting rehearsals” they avoid the possibility of leaving the play-
er’s best performance on the rehearsal hall floor. What is your view
on this subject?
I’m more for spontaneity. I think rehearsals are good if you have
something complicated that needs to be worked out. It’s best to work
things out on a Sunday, before you start shooting on Monday morning.
That’s better than, say, working out something eight weeks in advance,
then—ready to shoot—you’re standing on the set saying, “Gee—what
was it we did eight weeks ago?”
18. Do you insist that an actor adhere meticulously to the script—

lines and business—or do you accept the position of some very able
actors, that a slight change here or there, can damage nothing, but
will enable them to bring more realism, color or effectiveness to the
character being portrayed?
What ever more color and realism an actor can bring to a script with
slight alterations, I’m for. Considering the number of people involved
in making a film, it doesn’t make much sense to insist that every word
must be spoken exactly as it was written.
19. To what extent do you supervise the editing of your film? Note:
I recall one director—one of the all-time great American Directors—
who loathed viewing his own rushes. He preferred to allow his edi-
tor to make his own first rough cut. Then the director would move
in and live with the film until a final editing was achieved that
presented the picture to a viewer precisely as he had intended as
he shot it.
Will you kindly express your views as to the importance of this
phase of picture-making, and your individual approach to it?
I do like to look at my dailies. I let the editor have free reign to put
the stuff together in a way about which he feels strongly. I did that my-
self as an editor. It all has to do with getting maximum creativity out of
all the elements involved in making a film.
Nowadays, an innovation helps: we have those tabletop editors that

are just fantastic. I was raised on the old moviola. I started to use the
tabletop on Harold and Maude [1971].
20. How vital do you believe the musical score to be, as an adjunct
in emphasizing the emotional, dramatic, or comedic values of a
picture?
The musical score is vital, I think. You just have to be careful not to
overdo it.
21. Are you deeply involved in the preparation and recording of

the musical score for your films? Note: Obviously we are not deal-
ing with filmed opera or musical comedy at this point.
I’m very much involved, at least in discussion of what I feel the
music should be. I usually find records, and track a portion, a melody
or a theme—not to guide or hamper the composer’s freedom—but to
give him an inkling of what I’m trying for. Over a period of time, I’ve
had the opportunity to experiment with a number of different musical
approaches.
22. Do you exercise final control as to which scenes are to be scored,

and which are to be played a capella?
Do you have a fixed rule by which you determine this for your-
self? If so, would you care to elaborate?
I have no fixed rule. I usually sit with the composer and pick the
areas where I think we should have music. Most composers won’t get
too alarmed if you should drop something (that they’ve done) when
you get to the mix.
23. We who have directed silent pictures are inclined, perhaps, to

overestimate the importance of sound effects, particularly in ac-
tion sequences. What is your viewpoint on this? To what extent do
you participate in the recording and dubbing of the sound effects
in your films?
Because I’ve come out of the editing field, I’ve been very fortunate
in knowing some very good sound effect editors, and I’ve been lucky
enough to get them on my films. I know I’m going to have an excess of
what I need, but the fact stands that sound effects are very important
to the film.
After you have completed the questionnaire, if you feel that you have
left unsaid, anything that you believe could be vital to the growth and
development of the Student Director, please write whatever you have
in mind, as fully as you can spare time to do it.
It is quite possible that such thoughts from a man of your stand-
ing might well exercise tremendous influence on the lives and ca-
reers of a number of future filmmakers.
I’d like to impress the importance of a certain openmindedness to
be maintained by a newcomer toward the thoughts and ideas of others.
Don’t ever limit yourself to saying, “This is exactly what I want. You
move here, you move there, and speak these words.” The result tends
to be “locked in” and rigid. On Harold and Maude Colin Higgins, the
author, was supposed to direct the film.
I went to Robert Evans and said, “Let Colin direct.”
Evans said, “No.”
I left it up to Colin, who was sitting beside me, as to whether he
wanted me to direct the film.
He said I was to do it; Colin was made co-producer; in that capacity,
he was able to remain on the set and watch the film being made.
There were times when it was really hard for him to stand by and
watch the necessary changes being made. I would say to him, “Try to
keep an open mind about these things.” He tried, but it wasn’t easy.
Then, by the time we got into the editing, he began to understand
why certain things were done and why certain other things were not
done. I think he was pleased with the result.
So, in making films, it’s very important to keep an open mind.
Positive Thinking
Ralph Appelbaum/1978
From Films and Filming, July 1978. Reprinted with the permission of Ralph Appelbaum.
Hal Ashby, director of the first magnitude, is at the exclusive Carlyle

Hotel in New York, talking on the ’phone with his agent. He is fervent,
vigorous, and sparkles his speech with a jubilant glee, because even
though the agent hasn’t set a deal for the next film, there is a wealth of
material to sort out and choose from, and the prediction that Coming
Home, Ashby’s latest film, is going to outgross Shampoo, which thus far
has done twenty-two million dollars in rentals.
When I visited Ashby at the Carlyle, he was, as usual, barefoot and
wearing corduroy jeans and a plaid shirt—his work clothes. Certainly
not the image one conjures up of the Hollywood director. But then,
Ashby has never been 100 percent establishment, and his films reflect—
whether it be Harold and Maude, in which a twenty-year-old rich boy
falls in love with an eighty-year-old woman, or Bound for Glory, the
story of folk singer Woody Guthrie—his scepticism of human nature
and the unique ways people cope with success and failure.
Coming Home, which some reviewers have labelled his best film, was
a picture five years on the drawing board, one which almost every stu-
dio gave the thumbs-down to, and it is only due to Jane Fonda’s persis-
tence that the picture has seen the light of day. But one can understand
the studios’ reluctance to finance such a product. After all, the Vietnam
war, which this film chronicles, was a national embarrassment to the
American public; it cost thousands of lives, a fortune to fight, and it
broke up families and divided the nation. People may not want to re-
live such a trauma, and the studios did not want to take the gamble.
Until now, of course. Because there are a half-dozen or so Vietnam-
orientated films scheduled for release in the coming year, one being
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited Apocalypse Now.
61
But Ashby’s movie is, like The Best Years of Our Lives, more a love
story, or character study, than a war film, because there are no battle
scenes. It’s about the battle on the homefront and what happens when
a woman falls in love with a paraplegic, a so-called “War Hero,” while
her husband, a Marine captain, is overseas fighting a war “because it’s
expected of him.” It’s about changes, about growing up, about facing
responsibilities and learning to live with one another, and it’s told with
honesty and compassion, two ingredients one sees throughout Ashby’s
work. Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, and Bruce Dern play the woman, the
paraplegic, and the captain, respectively.
Today, Ashby is what’s known as a “hot” director, and his attach-
ment to a particular film property is all that’s needed to get the cameras
rolling. But it wasn’t always that way, and Ashby is not one to forget
the fifteen long and difficult years it took him to rise to the ranks of
director.
Born in Ogden, Utah, Ashby’s childhood was not an entirely happy
one. He didn’t get along with his family (his parents were divorced
when he was five or six), and dropped out of high school in his senior
year to hitchhike to Los Angeles. He was married and divorced twice
before he was twenty-one.
Eventually, he found work as a multilith operator at the Republic
Studios, and it was while running off ninety or so copies of some page
14, he says, that the idea of becoming a film director flashed upon him.
And when he queried those around him for advice, the most common
remark was: “The best school for a director is in the cutting room.”
Luckily, Ashby had a friend who hired him as an apprentice editor,
which led to a meeting with editor Bob Swink and work on The Big
Country, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Young Doctors, The Children’s Hour,
The Greatest Story Ever Told, and others. But his first solo effort came
eight years later, because of a union rule which demands you work that
length of time as an apprentice, when he cut The Loved One for director
Tony Richardson. But because Richardson had commitments in Lon-
don, Ashby was only able to do a first cut before the film was taken to
Europe. However, the producer of that film introduced him to Norman
Jewison, and thus started a long and fruitful association between the
filmmakers. Ashby edited The Cincinnati Kid, The Russians Are Coming,
the Russians Are Coming, In The Heat of the Night (for which he won an
Oscar), The Thomas Crown Affair, and Gaily, Gaily for Jewison.
Jewison also promoted Ashby to associate producer status, and when
RALPH APPELBAUM / 1978 63
he had problems scheduling The Landlord (1970), Ashby was given the
opportunity to direct, thus fulfilling that seemingly impossible dream
he had fifteen years ago. But now he had arrived and there would be
no stopping him. He followed his initial critical success with Harold and
Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), and Bound for
Glory (1976).
Ralph Appelbaum: Why has there been a reluctance on the part of

Hollywood to deal with the Vietnam issue?
Hal Ashby: That’s a question that has been asked by almost every-
body who has seen the film, and I wish I could answer it. I directed my
first film in 1969, and at that time—even the two or three years before
that—I cannot recall any serious conversation by individuals contem-
plating such a project, which is not something I’m particularly proud
of, because I never instigated it either. But, understand, the possibility
of a film about Vietnam was never thrown at me. Another interesting
question is why have they suddenly begun to explore that area, because
in addition to our film, there are a number of others coming out. May-
be Hollywood is bothered by their conscience, maybe they feel they
sidestepped it. It’s a very interesting question and I wish I could give a
definite answer as to why. I mean, I even asked myself the same ques-
tion when I decided to do the film.
Appelbaum: | believe that the only film to deal with Vietnam in the
1960s was John Wayne’s The Green Berets.
Ashby: That’s right. Listen, we had one critic refer to this picture as
the liberal Green Berets. Well, that’s just what I had in mind (laughs).
Can you imagine that, all of us sitting down and saying, “Now we’re
going to make a liberal Green Berets.” | may make mistakes, but I’m not
an idiot.
Appelbaum: Were you politically active during the war years?
Ashby: Yes. I was active in as many things as I was able to deal with,
none of them being enough—you know, there was just the pressure of
keeping the pressure on, and the frustration of knowing that nothing
was enough. I marched around and said what | had to say. It’s very
interesting because Los Angeles, if for no other reason than the geog-
raphy of it, is usually passive and not willing to get involved in causes.
But there was a great deal of activity there in the ’60s. For example, if
Nixon, or others like him, came into town and stayed, say, at the Cen-
tury Plaza, the people came down and they protested, they made their
views known. People became united, they walked hand in hand with
each other, and that was wonderful. In a sense, however, the only thing
that was not so wonderful was the reason for this unity—and that was
the war.
Appelbaum: When you agreed to direct the picture, what type of re-
search did you do?
Ashby: Once I commit myself to a project, my main objective is to
collect as much information as I can about the subject—even though
much of it will be wasted and go down the tubes. In this instance, it
meant spending time with the writer and reviewing whatever research
he had done. I also hired a couple of research people. I even got my
secretary and the girl I live with into the music of the ’60s and I had
them put every song that they could think of, and every song that |
remembered fondly, on cassettes. They filled six of them.
Then I assembled the photographs I had collected and pinned them
up on the wall of the room I do a lot of my work in. And to help me
remember the period, I borrowed many films from the Vietnam Vet-
erans Against the War, and I saw Frederick Wiseman’s Basic Training. |
just want to be like a sponge and absorb everything; that’s my form of
research. And at a certain point in doing this, I became very depressed
(this usually happens just before or after I start shooting) because I
realize that I’m only going to capture a small part of that period. You
know, unless you’re doing a documentary film, there are certain physi-
cal limitations that you must adhere to.
I think that doing a large amount of research gives you the edge,
because if you’ve got that detail covered and are constantly working
on it, those mistakes you make don’t hurt as much. And I’m going to
make mistakes I’ll be unhappy with, to the extent that I will work on
something else. But the research gives your film a base of reality and
honesty. So that when those mistakes are made, you can look at them
in a different way.
Appelbaum: Coming Home was five years in the development stages.
Could you talk about its history and why three writers are credited with
the screenplay?
Ashby: | think that Nancy Dowd was the first writer with Jane on the
project. I never met her, and quite frankly I don’t understand her hav-
ing a screen credit, because her story was not used. I’m a stickler about
credits. I don’t like it when people use a contractual agreement to put
their name on a film, especially when they’ve contributed nothing to
a film. But, at the same time, I understand a lot of people contribute to

the development of a project, and Dowd did work with Jane. However,
I didn’t know anything about her screenplay until six weeks into pre-
production, when someone sent me another script by Nancy Dowd
and mentioned that she did the original screenplay on this. I just an-
swered, “Oh, really.” And I asked Jerome Hellman, the producer, about
it and he said, “Oh, yes, there was something done.” And I said, “I’ve
got to read that screenplay.”
So I read her screenplay, which was called Buffalo Soldiers, to see if
I could use anything from it. And I can’t begin to tell you what it was
about. It took place somewhere in Wyoming, and the woman was mar-
ried to a sergeant who went to Vietnam and came back as a paraplegic.
There was nothing in it that bore any resemblance to the structure
Waldo had. And when I asked him about it, Waldo said he didn’t care
for that screenplay, but liked Jane’s concept so much that he asked to
do an outline. It was that sixty-five-page outline, which took him about
six or seven months to write, that convinced United Artists to finance
a screenplay; then when that was completed, they gave the go ahead to
find a director.
Before I became involved, John Schlesinger had backed out of the
project, and so I called him to ask why. Did they just decide they didn’t
want him? And he said something funny. He said, “It’s so American
that I don’t think I could do it.” I said, “Well, John, you do pretty good
films about Americans.” What he meant, he said, was that the Vietnam
subject was so American, he didn’t want the film opened to the kind
of criticism where somebody could say, “What right has he to do it?”
And in one sense, I understand his feelings about that. But if I was in
that situation and the question came up, I would say that I have the
right simply because it’s there. But John felt strongly about that and he
recommended they give it to me.
Waldo had done what I consider breaking the back of the story. Now,
I don’t know how close it was to Jane’s ideas, but it had the feeling of
what I wanted. He had this woman married to a Marine captain who
was going to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. And while he was away
she goes to work as a volunteer in a hospital, meets this paraplegic,
there is a love affair, and the husband comes home. But that concept
changed a tremendous amount because I felt Waldo’s script had too
much rhetoric in it. I felt quite strongly that these should not be articu-
late people; maybe they really couldn’t find the words to say what they
were feeling. And as we were working on the screenplay, Waldo had a

slight heart attack which limited his working time, and we had to start
at a certain date because Jane was committed to do Pakula’s film, Comes
a Horseman, which was already put off for about a month and a half so
we could slot this one in.
I remember that just before we started shooting, Jane said to me,
“Have you ever started a film knowing no more about what we're going
to do than this?” And I said, “No.” She looked at me and said, “I hope
it works.” I said, “So do I.” But I felt that because we were dealing with
personal relationships in the film, the very fact that we were in limbo
in certain areas would enhance it—we would be able to get deeper into
the characters by not having the scenes worked out in advance; we
might even discover things we wouldn’t normally look for. So I felt
pretty good about that, even though I knew it was going to be hard.
There’s enough problems in making a film without having to take that
load and put it on top of everything else.
During the first two weeks of shooting, I had Rudy Wurlitzer, who’s
a writer, working on the screenplay. I could come home at eleven at
night and we would work until about two in the morning. I don’t know
what material I used or didn’t use from what Rudy wrote, but just the
fact that he was from outside the production helped me a great deal. |
had a big problem with the actors because they would say, “When are
we going to get some pages?” And I would say, “I’m going to give you
a whole bunch in about ten days or two weeks.” But it really ended up,
“What are we going to do for tomorrow?” or, even, sometimes, “What
are we going to do today?” But like I said, I think overall it helped give
the film that sense of reality and honesty.
The one place where the picture stretches the melodrama is, obvi-
ously, towards the end, when the three characters confront each other
in the same room. I felt that even though we were pushing the melo-
drama, it was necessary to get those people together. People don’t con-
front their responsibilities when it comes to dealing with others, and
I wanted to put that on the screen, because that’s what people should
do, no matter how painful it is or how scared they are. Voight said, “I’d
never do that, and this character would never do it.” I said, “I know,
Jon, but we’re going to do it because that’s what he should do.”
Appelbaum: It’s very risky to put Bruce Dern in a room with a loaded
gun because it leads one to believe that...
Ashby: Somebody’s going to get killed. Absolutely. But I’ll tell you a
story: I’ve known Bruce for a long time, and while I knew he’s totally
opposite from his screen image—he’s a very gentle, kind, sweet man—
I never knew he abhorred guns. We were in Hong Kong shooting the
gunnery range scene, with Dern shooting the targets, etc., and you
couldn’t talk to him that day. All he said was, “I hate guns.” It’s funny
because I thought Bruce knew all there was to know about guns. But
I ended up showing him things. Mind you, I don’t own any guns and
never have. But my father collected them and so I learned how to use
them. It wasn’t until I watched some guys kill a deer that I decided it
wasn’t for me.
If there’s one thing I do regret—and I don’t really regret it—but it
would have been interesting if we could have structured the Marine
captain’s part more evenly or given him more screen time, so that we
would have learned more about him. I liked what Bruce was doing with
the role—obviously, it was the more difficult one, and I felt he brought
humanity to this character.
Appelbaum: | understand that Voight was originally set to play the
Marine captain’s role?
Ashby: Here’s what happened with that: I have a very close relation-
ship with Jack Nicholson, both as an actor and friend, and it would
be very hard for me to imagine any male role that he couldn’t do. So
I thought he would be right for the paraplegic, and I spoke with him
about it. I don’t really try to sell him, I just say, “Jack, here’s what I’ve
got, would you be interested?” Then, I thought about Bruce or Jon for
the other role—and I chose in my mind to give it to Jon first; just how I
arrived at that I don’t remember. The very next day Jon came to me and
said, “Believe me, I will do anything in this picture. I would be glad to
play the captain, but I would prefer Luke.” And I spoke with Jon about
it (we didn’t know each other very well and he was nervous about be-
ing with me) and said, “That’s interesting. Let me think about it for a
bit. But you can be sure that I'll have a role for you.”
Now, I went back to thinking about Bruce more strongly. This is one
of the things I hate about casting, because you’re dealing with people
and not two blocks of wood. But when Jack couldn’t do it because of
prior commitments, all my problems were solved, and I gave the part
of Luke to Jon and that of the captain to Bruce.
During the debating period in my mind of whether he was going
to play the captain or not, Jon met a Marine captain in a coffee shop
and he asked him (this was on tape) what he would do if he came
home from Vietnam and found out his wife was having an affair with a
paraplegic. He said, “I’d kill both of them. I’d kill her first because he’s
in a chair and wouldn’t be as dangerous.” And all this, mind you, was
before Jon even got the role. But as soon as Jon knew he was going to
play the part of the paraplegic, we got him a wheelchair and he practi-
cally lived in it. He went out and met different paraplegics. He played
basketball with them, and they took to him right away.
Appelbaum: Did you use actual paraplegics in the film?
Ashby: Yeah. The only actors playing paraplegics were Jon and the guy
with the ventriloquist’s dummy. All the rest were para and quads. Every
one of them; not an actor in the bunch.
Appelbaum: What comes through in the film is the attitude that
these people are no different than any of us.
Ashby: Absolutely. In fact, they’re actually more up than we are. No
matter what their accident was, when they found out they were para-
lyzed for the rest of their lives, they got into some very heavy thoughts
about ending it. But once they’ve made the decision to go on living,
they become very positive thinking people.
Normally, during the course of making a film, people start moaning
and groaning, because of the time it takes to set up a shot. But these
people were very patient; not once did they complain. It’s one of the
only times that I can think of where I’ve been around fifty or sixty
people for six weeks at a time and liked every one of them.
I felt very obligated to treat them full out as people—and that’s why
I don’t show them complaining about their handicap. I think the only
time Jon talks about being in a chair is in front of Jane’s house that one
night where he says, “When I dream I still see myself walking.” I felt we
had to touch upon the dreams that these people have.
Appelbaum: Going back to the screenplay: Could you give an exam-
ple of a scene which worked better because it was loosely structured?
Ashby: There were so many. I would say that one was probably the
confrontation scene, where the three of them meet in the room. That
was never even written. What we did during rehearsal, a couple of
weeks before we were going to shoot, was set up a tape recorder and
have them improvise the scene from beginning to end for about four
hours. Then I had that transcribed, and Bobby Jones, the writer, and
myself constructed the scene from that material. They were just full of
ideas.
Appelbaum: | understand Salt’s script had an altogether different

ending.
Ashby: At the end of his script, the Dern character, the captain, flashed-
back to Vietnam and ended up holding hostages; then, when the police
and helicopters came, he flashed-back even further and ended up get-
ting killed on the freeway. He almost got talked out of it by Luke. And
that was it. The end actually came a little later when Luke and Sally got
back together after the funeral. It just didn’t make it for me.
Appelbaum: Your ending has been criticized because it has the cap-
tain commit suicide by drowning himself.
Ashby: | know. But none of them has said very clearly what they didn’t
like. I thought it was pretty interesting—and it moved me a lot.
I didn’t think it was too pat. I didn’t say that Luke and Sally would
definitely get back together. All I was trying to say was that this Marine
wasn’t strong enough to handle it. And that’s pretty honest, I think.
I’m not saying that every Marine captain couldn’t handle it, but that
this particular one couldn't.
Appelbaum: It seems to be that maybe they were looking for a happy
ending where everything would be resolved. But that doesn’t happen
in every day life.
Ashby: Right. The last line in Waldo’s script was a line I loved. I think
Luke said, “You know, fuck this being alone shit,” and they walked into
the house together. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that because I felt,
Jesus Christ, first they have an affair while her husband is in Vietnam,
and now, fortunately, he gets himself killed and they can be together. I
didn’t want the story to go that way.
Appelbaum: Did you have any problems with Fonda because she
launched the project?
Ashby: No. We had no more problems on this than any other film
where somebody says, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” Never
once did she say that this was her idea. We never got into anything
like that at all. We did get into many disagreements, but they had to do
only with what we would be doing at a given time.
Appelbaum: Such as?
Ashby: There were different things that would crop up where some-
body would say, “I just don’t think this woman would do that.” But
most of that dealt with real small problems. For example, there was
a scene when the captain brings his Marine buddies home, they tell
7oO HAL ASHBY: INTERVIEWS
jokes, get drunk, and as we pan around the room later that evening, we
see her tearing a “Welcome Home” sign down. Well, the place looked
too messy for her. She said, “I think that if this place was so messy, Sally
would just be furious about it.” So we cleaned it up a bit. That was the
type of disagreements we had. I never saw her balk at doing anything.
Appelbaum: Was there a reluctance on her part to do the nude scene
with Voight?
Ashby: She was concerned about it; about her image and what people
might say. In other words, she felt that people would say, “I always
knew that’s what she did running along with the Black Panthers like
she must have...” But she didn’t do that, and I understood her feel-
ings. I explained to her that those people were going to say it regardless
of what’s on the screen. As a matter of fact, my attitude was: if they
come to a Jane Fonda movie at all it would be fortunate. She’s outspo-
ken but still basically a shy person. So we had that to worry about.
Appelbaum: Barbarella was just re-released to theatres because of the
renewed interest in science-fiction films, and it’s remarkable how she’s
grown as a person and performer since that picture.
Ashby: Yes, it really is. She’s a remarkable person. She has so much
energy that she can be thinking about twenty things at the same time,
whereas maybe I’m down to my last one. And she can give equal time
to each.
She has also maintained her career throughout the years. Usually,
when someone becomes politically active and controversial, their pop-
ularity drops—even if they’ve won an Academy Award. But that never
happened to Jane. I don’t think I ever heard anyone say she would
be too controversial for a role. And in Hollywood they are outspoken
about matters such as that.
Appelbaum: There is almost a continuous flow of ’60s music in the
picture. Was this something you intended to do from the beginning?
Ashby: Well, I always knew I wanted to use music from that period,
but I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do it. And when I got into the
editing of the picture, I got a lot of questions about that from people
who are into doing films in a conventional manner. I will say that if
we had the money it would have been wall to wall music. I would have
started it right over the UA logo and maybe even put a good disc-jockey
in there now and then, like it was one big radio station playing. But I
did the next best thing, which was to put in as many songs as I could.
I concentrated on where they started rather than where they stopped.
And that had to do with a number of thoughts I had, the first one be-
ing that music was very important during the ’60s, and if there was
anything that could set that period better than almost any image that I
could put on the screen, it would be the music. The other reason is that
I believe people drift when they watch films. They may watch a certain
scene and be so taken in by it that they are halfway into the next scene
before they realize it. And I think that’s a very natural thing to do. I cer-
tainly do it, and I’m certain a lot of others do too. So I felt that if they’re
going to drift, let them drift off into something that they did in their
own life. Let them hear something and say, “Wow, that really takes me
back to a certain place.” Then they can come back into the flow of the
picture. They’re not really going to miss that much.
The ultimate hope, of course, is that if they enjoyed it so much,
they’ll come back for the parts they missed. Unfortunately, the cost of
seeing a movie makes that prospect unlikely. I love the format of film,
but it would be great if they could buy the film on a record or disc and
play it on a console at home five, six, twenty, or a hundred times. And
maybe you become so addicted to one sequence that you play it over
and over again. Nothing would be more exciting than that, and it gives
people a chance to see all the things you tried to do in the film.
Appelbaum: Your last film Bound for Glory, was a critical success but
financial disaster. Do you think that one of the reasons for this could
have been the casting of David Carradine as Woody Guthrie?
Ashby: I would hope it wasn’t, because I think he did a fine job in it.
And if that were the case, it would mean that audiences prejudged it,
which I guess happens all the time. But I think it’s more of a question of
timing, where if a film came out a year or two earlier or even later than
it did, it would have a better shot at making it—provided it’s a good
film to begin with. I don’t know how to answer it except to say that it
has to do with the mood people are in and what their interests are, etc.
What I try to do with my films is not be too heavy-handed with them.
And sometimes I think that has a lot to do with it, because if you are
heavy-handed you sometimes stand a little better chance of grabbing
an audience. But I don’t want that to ever be my guide.
Appelbaum: Why did you choose Carradine for the part?
Ashby: When I started the film, I said, “I just want to think of Woody
as an interesting character. I don’t want to get into his physical look,
and so forth.” But after two weeks of research, I felt the actor had to
look like Woody: he’s got to be short and have that hair, etc. So I went
through a whole period with that. In the meantime, I was meeting

actors and recording artists. My casting director said that David’s man-
ager, a man I had known for many years, called and said David really
wanted to talk with me about doing the Woody Guthrie role. I knew
he was a good actor because of what I had seen, but I heard he was bad
to work with, that he was irresponsible, and that he was morose. But |
thought it was someone who might be putting a lot of thought to how
Woody should be played, so I set up a meeting. David didn’t, however,
come in that way. He brought his guitar in, he sang his own songs, he
never sang a Woody Guthrie song. But we spoke, and in the end what
he was saying wasn’t so much that he studied Woody Guthrie and felt
he could play him, as it was people he knew had told him for years that
he should play Woody Guthrie. And the more I got involved with what
the spirit of Woody Guthrie was, which was his family and beliefs, the
more David came closer to that than anybody else I met with. I got
resistance along the way from people because of David, because of the
Kung-Fu television show and all the adverse publicity surrounding him.
When I met him, he was a man who had been living with Barbara Her-
shey for seven years, they had a baby, and they had broken up. So of
course he was morose.
About six weeks later I brought him back in and put him on tape. I
used an Advent, one of those four-feet-by-six-feet video screens, which
are terrific for filmmakers as far as casting, because you can put people
on them without pressure on yourself or the actor, and you can see
them in close-up or whatever other angles you choose. So I put David
on it so that other people could take a look and get as turned on as
I was about the idea of him doing it. You see, I think he has a lot of
charm. He has a neat smile. You talk to them about his smile and they
look at you like you were crazy, like the man never smiled.
Appelbaum: Didn’t you also speak to Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son,
about doing the part?
Ashby: Yes. He was the first person I talked to, and he was interested
in doing the part. But in the end I really felt that it would be too much
of a load to ask somebody to play their father in a film. As far as I knew,
he loved his dad very much and might have been able to play the role.
But I felt that was a little risky, not just for the picture’s sake, but for
Arlo’s as well.
Appelbaum: And UA didn’t interfere with the casting?
Ashby: No. UA is exceptionally good for a film-maker in my estima-
tion because they really do make it clear that it’s up to you. I asked their
opinion because I do want to keep them enthused about the picture,
and in the end they’re the ones who have to sell it. But it was made
very clear to me that I didn’t have to ask them anything. It was the
same on Coming Home. Of course, they would have liked a bigger name
than Voight for the role, but when I told them I was adamant about
having him, they agreed and let me make the picture.
Appelbaum: Why did you decide to focus only on Guthrie’s early life
in the picture?
Ashby: | just felt that to cover his entire life would make the film less
good. It took us two hours and twenty-seven minutes to cover what we
did; any more than that would be another picture.
Appelbaum: How extensive was your research?
Ashby: Again, I put a lot of photographs from that period on my
wall—photographs by Walker Evans and others. And, of course, there
was a tremendous amount of other material on migrants available. We
used the original research books from 20th-Century Fox’s The Grapes
of Wrath, which told of that particular period when migrants came to
California. That incident we show in the film when the Los Angeles Po-
lice set up barricades two or three hundred miles away from the border
to keep people out of the state of California was not, to the best of my
knowledge, in any of Woody’s writing, except maybe a song. It came
out of the research we did.
Appelbaum: Was it difficult to re-create that period because of mod-
ern-day conveniences, such as TV antennas and telephone poles, etc.?
Ashby: Enormous. We kept on looking and looking for locations. And
my production designer, Michael Haller, who’s normally a very calm
human being, became agitated. I don’t know how many thousands
of miles he drove—and he had other things to do. I told Michael very
early on that I didn’t want to make any high shots looking down at the
ground. That’s what everyone does on a period picture because you can
cut out a lot. I wanted everything to be at eye-level. And it’s difficult to
say, “Let’s go outside and start shooting 1937.”
Appelbaum: Did you have to build any sets?
Ashby: We built the interior of the radio station. Originally, we had
found a great old radio station in LA (I think it was KLA) that had
been around since the ’30s, and now the owners were moving it; they
had bought a new building. And so we had the interior, the exterior,
everything was terrific. But while we were up in Stockton, California,
shooting, the Korean Press bought the building, and by the time we
got back to LA to shoot there they had the presses all set up. So it was
a location we lost. But I didn’t regret that because we were able to rent
a lot of their old equipment, and any time you build a set you're able
to shoot freer. You can move walls and the crew around. You’re much
more relaxed.
Applebaum: How does your background as an editor affect the way
you shoot?
Ashby: It doesn’t affect it other than just knowing basically what piec-
es of film will cut together and what the composition should be. It’s
very important that the singles, or the over-the-shoulder masters, be
basically the same size, because if something throws you off, you’re
limited by the amount of coverage you got. So, as a general rule, you
have to be very careful about that. Most cameramen will pick that up—
that’s why they’re always to the actor. But as far as pre-cutting the film
in my head, I never have. I always shoot more film than I’ll ever need.
I prefer to edit that way.
Applebaum: But when you shoot more footage, isn’t the film hurt as
far as expositions and character development go?
Ashby: In my mind it doesn’t hurt the film. I would rather be frus-
trated by having too much material than not enough. There’s obvi-
ously many, many times when I say, “My God, why did I shoot that?”
I mean, everything was working very good and I didn’t need any more
material. But I’m just going to let it ride along. I don’t even question
that. You just go with what you think is best.
Applebaum: | understand that for Bound for Glory you originally cut
a shorter version and when UA saw it they asked that certain footage
be put back in.
Ashby: When I first showed the picture to UA it was three hours long,
and they genuinely liked the film and were moved by it. Now, when
it came down to my end process, my assumption was that they would
want a shorter running time so that the theatres would be able to get
more screenings in. And it also said in my contract that I would deliver
a two-hour picture. I don’t pay much attention to those things, but I
let them have it because it doesn’t really have to do with anything real.
However, I did think that they would want a shorter running time on
the film. So I ended up with a version that worked very well and ran
two hours and fifteen minutes. But when Arthur Krim and Pleskow
saw the film again they talked about scenes they missed, scenes that
emotionally affected them. They were scenes that I liked, but I never
expected them to want the film made longer. So I re-investigated it and
changed around the beginning of the picture. But UA made it very clear
that if I was satisfied with the shorter version, it was fine with them.
In the shorter version, the opening scene was the square dance and
dust storm. I put back into the picture the scene where Woody Guth-
rie comes into the gas station and they sit around and one guy comes
up with the cards—the fortune-telling scene. That scene was originally
out. He just came up to the gas station and sat around with the guys
and said, “You folks sure are depressing.” Another scene I put back in
was when he got the lady to drink the water. A scene that was ques-
tionable, but I put it back in anyway, was when Randy Quaid comes to
the radio station and talks about standing up for his rights. I’ve never
been quite sure about that. Randy’s a good actor and he does the scene
wonderfully but it just upsets me.
Appelbaum: How hard do you work to visualize on film what’s writ-
ten in the script?
Ashby: Once, when I was working as an assistant editor on a film,
George Stevens came up to me and said, “In film, 25 percent of it is
in the writing, 25 percent of it is in the shooting, 25 percent of it is in
the editing, and the last 25 percent is what you end up with.” Making
a movie is an horrendous undertaking. You can’t lock yourself into
anything. It’s an ongoing process from the time I say I will do a film
until the time I hand the distributor the cut film. The danger to me is
if you fight so hard to put it down exactly the way you visualize it, and
I’ve seen this happen, you bend it and bend it into something it isn’t
anymore, just because you’ve got something about it in your mind. If
a scene vaguely represents what I had in mind, I’m happy as hell. The
more latitude you give yourself, the better your chances for a good film.
It’s very personal, and I don’t know how anyone feels about this other
than myself.
Appelbaum: Is it true that on The Landlord you had problems with
the Mirisch Corporation, the financiers of the film, because they felt
the rushes were a bit on the dark side?
Ashby: Well, I think it must have been Walter Mirisch who actually
flew in from the Coast, and we looked at the film, and he said, “It’s too
dark.” And other people said, “You can’t see their eyes.” What I was try-
ing to do was stylize a certain design, and I told them they must have
faith in me. I said, “I’m not going along with the school of thought
that because people laugh, you have to see their eyes real clear.” People
could stand in a dark hallway and say a funny line and laugh just as
hard as you can if you’ve got a light turned on and you see them very
clearly. I felt very strongly about that, and I wanted the whole ghetto
part to have that ash look and Long Island to have that white look. I
said, “I understand your plea, but that’s what we’re going for.” I told
my editor that on the next picture what we should do is just put up
black leader and clear leader for dailies and tell them to have faith in
me, that I have a design here (laughs).
Appelbaum: Shampoo is thus far your most successful film at the box-
office. Could you talk about its genesis?
Ashby: Warren and I were just becoming friends and during dinner
one night we talked about different ideas and he asked me if he had
ever mentioned Hair, which was Shampoo’s original title. He didn’t call
it Hair; he just described the story. He said he and Bob Towne had
worked on it when they were doing Bonnie and Clyde and that when
Towne had finally written the script and given it to him to read, he
was So angry with it that he sat down the next day and wrote his own
version. I read both versions, and I told him I thought it would make
an interesting film because of the interactions between the characters.
And he and I sat down and we took pages from each one just to get
an overall idea. Then we got Towne to come in, and we sat for about,
I guess, seventeen or eighteen days, almost twenty-four hours a day, in
this hotel suite, trying to get a first draft of those two scripts together.
Appelbaum: When it came to the actual making of the film, was there
any friction between you and Beatty?
Ashby: | was the director of the film and I had as much control as I
have on any film. Beatty would exert a tremendous amount of influ-
ence on everybody because of what he felt about the film, and so forth.
But everybody does that. And we had Towne around all the time. All
I care about is what I’m seeing every day at the dailies. I don’t care
how we get it. I really liked working with Warren. There was never any
power struggle on the film, because I would walk away from it in two
seconds.
Appelbaum: The Last Detail, I’m told, was a problem film because of
the explicit dialogue.
Ashby: Columbia Pictures, the distributor, said to me that they didn’t
want to totally emasculate the film, but they wanted my help in toning
down the language. They felt the language was going to be offensive
and would keep them from reaching a broader audience. I just said,
“No. The word ‘fuck’ is used in this picture eighty times. Are you saying
that if we cut it down to where it’s used only forty times the film will
reach a broader audience?” I said to the president of Columbia Pictures,
“I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about_ You do know
that the first time ‘fuck’ is said there’s going to be fifteen people who
get up and leave the theatre.” Well, I convinced them to preview the
film in San Francisco, and when the audience liked the picture, they
dropped the whole matter.
Appelbaum: Why do you think Harold and Maude has become such
a cult classic?
Ashby: | think it’s probably due to a number of things, the first being
the kind of black humour that’s in the film. I also think that a lot of it has
to do with what Ruth Gordon says about life and love in the film. That’s
the impression I get with the feedback. It’s not that she said such pro-
found things in the film, as it is maybe the way she said them. And the
spirit of the film makes people laugh. They have a good time with it.
Cinema Chat with Hal Ashby —
Richard Fernandez/1978
From Audience 10.2, Summer 1978, pp. 25-27.
Biographies of Hal Ashby usually read like this: “He hitchhiked to Hol-
lywood from Ogden, Utah, in the early 1950s. He first worked as a
multilith operator in Universal’s story department, and soon became
fascinated by the filmmaking process.”
I showed him that particular bio which United Artists had given
me, and Ashby had a hearty laugh: “It always fascinates me how they
compress years of pain and frustration into two sentences.”
Before directing his first feature film, The Landlord, Ashby worked
as editor on The Big Country, The Loved One, In the Heat of the Night, to
name just a few. His films as a director, following The Landlord in 1970,
are: Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, and
his most recent, Coming Home, which stars Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, and
Bruce Dern.
Ashby’s next film will be Hawkline Monster, based on the Richard
Brautigan book, which Ashby will be writing the script for; it will star
Jack Nicholson.
The following interview took place while Ashby was in New York
doing publicity for Coming Home.
Richard Fernandez: You were an editor for a good ten years before
you directed your first feature. In all that time, did you ever try to get a
film off the ground through independent financing?
Hal Ashby: That wasn’t done as much when I was editing. The first
job I worked on as an editor was for an independent movie. The film-
maker had raised $250,000 himself and then finally found someone to
distribute the picture. But there were only a few people around Holly-
78
RICHARD FERNANDEZ / 1978 79
wood doing that. I don’t think I was knowledgeable enough to go out

on my own. I did try, but with no success.
RF: Norman Jewison is responsible for your start as director, isn’t he?
HA: Right. I was pretty comfortable as an editor. I believed I was good
at it, which gave me a secure feeling. So I sat back and really got into it,
not thinking too far ahead about my future. It was Norman who asked
me where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with the rest of my
life. |expressed interest in directing, and he said, “Let’s find something
for you to do.”
RF: He found The Landlord.
HA: Yes. That was originally developed for Norman, but he was too
busy doing other pictures. There was no way in the world I would turn
down this chance to direct.
RF: And eight years later you’re considered a “hot commodity.” What
does it mean to mean to be “hot”?
HA: | get to see a lot of material. But more importantly, it means that I
can get made almost anything I choose.
RF: What about the saying that you’re only as hot as your last film?
HA: I never believed that success had to do with whether or not your
pictures made money, as much as it had to do with showing these
business types that you know how to handle a camera, and that you
can make a feature film—with some talent. Now, if all my films were
dismal failures, then I’m sure I would have problems getting another
one made.
RF: Was Bound for Glory the most time-consuming film you’ve done to
date?
HA: It sure was, close to a year. I think my budget was a little over seven
million dollars, too. Shooting the big crowd scenes and working in the
trains was so fucking hard on me physically.
REF: Was the choice of David Carradine to play Woody Guthrie made
early on, or were there a lot of actors considered?
HA: There were hundreds. Tim Buckley was one. Dustin Hoffman an-
other. But Dustin wanted to take time off to learn to play the guitar.
The hell with that. It was Warren Beatty who pointed out to me, while
I was casting the film, that Carradine had the right “I don’t give a fuck”
attitude I was looking for. David captures Woody’s spirit better than
anyone could, I think.
RE: How did your involvement with Coming Home start?
HA: Through Jane Fonda, screenwriter Waldo Salt, and producer Je-
rome Hellman. There was a lot of work being done on the script, but
that was all hearsay to me. Nancy Dowd, who wrote Slap Shot, was also
involved in working up the script, which I didn’t even know until eight
weeks after joining on. John Schlesinger was Hellman’s first choice as
director, since they had worked together on two previous pictures. But
then you had the problem of an Englishman doing a story about the
Vietnam war. Schlesinger turned the project down.
RF: The approach to the story and your style of shooting were really
quite simple and realistic. You didn’t clobber us over the head with a
heavy message.
HA: Absolutely not. Waldo’s first draft had none of that. Our draft did
add more protests—as when Jon Voight chains himself to the recruit-
ing office fence. That particular scene was first written as a bunch of
paraplegics taking over one of the administration buildings of the Vet-
erans Hospital.
RF: That was a part of the period.
HA: It was, but it wouldn’t have been right for our film. It would have
been standard material. I thought, what personal thing can this guy do
out of frustration? I knew I didn’t have to verbalize too much about the
paraplegics, they’re as graphic as anything you want to see.
When I started shooting, I found the script to be a bit talky; but I felt
if we really got into the characters’ heads we’d pull off a good story.
RF: When the three people confronted each other, at the end of the
film, I found I wasn’t hating the Bruce Dern character, but feeling sorry
for him.
HA: That’s what I wanted. It’s very easy to hate, isn’t it? Here’s a guy
who’s a stereotype Marine captain, someone we don’t feel terribly
friendly towards. I certainly don’t spend my time with those types.
There’s no growth to them. There is, however, growth to Dern’s char-
acter. I wanted to take a look at him and realize just how sad this man
really is.
RF: This confrontation is the most melodramatic section of the film.
HA: No question about it. The original script called for Dern to hold
hostages; later, Voight meets with him, talks him down, and Dern is
subsequently killed on the freeway. But we’ve seen all that before, and
Vietnam veterans already have such a heavy load to carry. I wanted
those people to confront each other in a room, and talk about what has
gone down.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ / 1978 81
RF: That scene raises the question—as does the entire film—of our re-
sponsibilities.
HA: That’s such a big part of the film’s meaning. These people had an
affair while her husband was in Vietnam, which has a lot to do with
his breakdown. But it wasn’t just Vietnam—it was everything that built
up inside him. Rarely do people kill themselves for just one reason. The
film especially raises the question of responsibility to the veterans .. .
and the responsibility to each other.
RF: Isn’t there a bit of manipulation on your part, when they confront
each other, by letting Dern have a gun?
HA: It was something I thought about heavily, and yes, I did manipu-
late the audience there—maybe a bit too much. Here was a man who
not only lived with guns but, in that one scene, slept with them when
he returned home. But all I was trying to show was that the Voight and
Fonda characters did care about that other person. The ending has a
feeling of being an epilogue, because of the melodramatic height. I had
the option of ending the picture with just Voight coming down the
walkway and stopping. I decided to go one step further—to show that
Dern couldn’t cope and that life goes on.
RF: | felt that Dern had a chance—?
HA: Did you? No, he’s gone. He’s completely out. I eliminated a couple
of shots that had him way out in the water, when he went for the swim.
There’s little or no chance for him.
RF: Let me ask you about the radio music in the picture. It’s almost
nonstop.
HA: Exactly. I thought, while editing this film, that the music actu-
ally has more controversy than anything else. I was planning to hire a
good FM dee-jay to come on at the beginning of the film and introduce
a radio program which would last for the next two hours. I got some
pretty strange looks from the people at United Artists. We didn’t have
the bread to go quite that far.
RF: In an effective way, the music definitely goes against the grain.
HA: But it fits, right? I wanted it on all the time—have these characters
speaking dialogue while the radio or television is on. Isn’t that what
we do in life? Plus, I knew the music would make people reflect back to
what they were doing in 1968.
RF: Letting them drift away for a while?
HA: That’s what I wanted. They’re not going to lose the flow of the
film. Let the music take them somewhere.
RF: You’ve managed to make extremely personal—even offbeat—films

that are starting to hit with a large audience. You’re now working in
the mainstream of the film industry. How do you view your standing
in that industry?
HA: That’s hard to analyze. I hope more films move towards personal
cinema, because that is where I’m at. These big-budgeted, splashy mov-
ies will always be around, they have great appeal for many. The fact
that a Star Wars or a Close Encounters can gross millions of dollars is
very attractive to those who finance films. But I intend to keep making
personal pictures.
RF: How can you maintain such a perspective and keep your values
intact with all the bullshit around you in the industry?
HA: | don’t know if I do it with any real conscious design. I’ve always
led a very simple life. There are so many things that have molded my
present set of values. The music I listen to, which is a big part of my
life, for example . . . and any of the arts that put you in motion and
make you think. Materially, I’m living very comfortably; I can afford
the things I need. But it’s not as if I’ve been striving for all this. It’s just
starting to happen now and it’s all very weird for me. I just won’t let it
take me over . . . |won’t lose that basic value.
RF: You seem to keep your career moving.
HA: Now that has been a conscious effort on my part. You know, I
never believed I was not wanted in the industry. I feel as though people
are starting to listen, and that as much as I can ask for. If it can happen
for me, it can happen for Jerry Schatzberg, for Henry Jaglom, and cer-
tainly for John Cassavetes. I don’t think I’ll ever be totally happy, but I
feel satisfied right now with what I’m able to do.
Dialogue on Film: Hal Ashby
James Powers/1980
From American Film, May 1980, pp. 53-60. © 1976 American Film Institute. Reprinted
with permission of the American Film Institute.
Hal Ashby appears briefly—all of a few seconds—in his latest film, Being
There. The setting is the editorial office of the Washington Post. Casu-
ally dressed, hair unkempt, Ashby is standing in the background, a Post
employee languidly lost in work at a filing cabinet.
The cameo fits the style of the director. “He has such a light touch,”
Jack Nicholson once told an interviewer, “that some people who have
worked with him aren’t even sure he’s directed the picture.” That light
touch—an open, nonrigid approach to filmmaking—has been applied
during ten years as a director on such movies as The Last Detail, with
Jack Nicholson; Shampoo, with Warren Beatty; Coming Home, with Jon
Voight; and on the film that has become a cult favorite here and abroad,
Harold and Maude, with Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon.
These films have established Ashby as one of Hollywood’s leading—
and more maverick—directors, free to pick and choose his scripts, free
to select the actors he wants, free to go his own way. He is already
booked for years to come, and a look at the Ashby films in the works
shows the unpredictable range of his interests: “Lookin’ To Get Out,” a
story about gamblers, with Jon Voight and Burt Young; “The Hawkline
Monster,” described as a “gothic Western” and based on the Richard
Brautigan novel; and “Henderson the Rain King,” based on the Saul
Bellow novel set in Africa. Opening this year is his newest film, Second
Hand Hearts (once The Hamster of Happiness), with Robert Blake and
Barbara Harris. It’s a romantic comedy set in Texas.
Ashby’s own roots are in the West. He was born, during the Depres-
sion, in Utah, where his father ran a dairy. Ashby’s rural upbringing
found its way into Bound for Glory, his 1976 film about Woody Guth-
83
rie’s wanderings in the Southwest. At seventeen, Ashby abandoned a

job repairing railroad bridges and hitchhiked to California. He man-
aged to get work at a film studio.
By the early fifties, Ashby was learning film editing. He worked on
films like The Loved One and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are
Coming, and in 1968 won an Oscar for his editing of In the Heat of the
Night, directed by Norman Jewison. It was Jewison who opened the way
to a new career. Busy with other projects, Jewison offered Ashby The
Landlord, and in 1970, nearing forty, Ashby made his debut as a direc-
tor.
In the Dialogue, speaking with engaging informality, Ashby recalls
his first days as a director. He also talks about Being There and Coming
Home, his work with Peter Sellers and screenwriter Robert Towne, his
open working style on the set and in the editing room, and he speaks
his mind, as he typically does, about Hollywood bureaucracy.
Question: The ending of Being There has provoked a good deal of com-
ment. Do you have a definitive answer when you’re asked what the
ending means?
Hal Ashby: It means whatever you want it to mean. That’s basically
it. 1had another ending, which I shot. It worked very well. Shirley Ma-
cLaine goes after Peter Sellers when he leaves the funeral and goes into
the woods. She finds him and says she was frightened and was looking
for him. He says, “I was looking for you, too, Eve.” And they just walk
of together.
But I was working one Sunday with a writer by the name of Rudy
Wurlitzer, who was really interested in the film, and we progressed in
the afternoon to talking about it. I said that because of the way Pe-
ter was playing this film, I knew what we were going for was a child-
like kind of thing. And when Rudy asked me how it was going, I said,
“Rudy, the way it’s going with these characters and what’s happening
with them, I could have this guy walking on water at the end of the
film.” Then I said, “Well, I think I will have him walking on water at the
end of the film.”
So that’s what I did. One guy in the crew said, “You can’t have him
walking on water.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, you know the only
person that walks on water.” I said, “Jesus, or maybe some other godlike
figure?” He said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, what is wrong with childlike
JAMES POWERS / 1980 85
innocence being godlike?” You could break it down that way if you
wanted to. Whatever—you could break it down for a good laugh.
Question: How did Peter Sellers prepare for the role of Chance?
Ashby: Peter likes to go for the voice first. If he can find what the voice
is, then it’s very easy for him to locate the person. He didn’t know what
to do with this one—“Wherte is this guy from?” So we talked about the
different possibilities. It was very difficult, but it was something he had
to struggle with himself. It’s very difficult to do that childlike delivery
of lines and not have them sound like bad readings.
Question: What sort of possibilities did you talk about?
Ashby: As I said, we talked a lot about the voice. I believe I told him
to start with a little bit of what he had in Lolita, mixed with his own
sound, because his own sound to the American ear is cultured—even
though it isn’t, it’s just an English sound. The best way to describe Pe-
ter: When he finished this picture, he went to work on a picture called
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. He was rewriting the script himself,
and he called me from Europe one day and read me the first ten pages
he had written. He did all the parts on the phone for me—even did
FDR—and they were all incredible.
He’s the fastest mimic I’ve ever seen in my life. If he meets you, I
guarantee you in thirty seconds he can do you—he picks up character-
istics and moves. It’s unbelievable how fast he works.
Question: Was the character of the president, played by Jack Warden,
direct from the script, or did you make additions?
Ashby: The lines are basically what we came out with in the script. It’s
just that Jack is such a unique actor. Jack’s timing is totally spectacular
and special, and the character takes on something that nobody else
could possibly do. i had the idea one day of casting Jack for the presi-
dent, and I just couldn’t from that moment on think of anybody else
as the president.
Question: One of the targets of Being There is television. Did you con-
sider making more of a comment about it than you did?
Ashby: Well, for me it makes plenty of comment. I mean, you’ve got
a guy sitting there watching television, and he mimics everything—
that’s his life, watching it. As far as making a statement of what televi-
sion really does, the thing that comes out of it for me, very clearly, is
the children’s shows. They’re very strong in the film, if you listen; all
they do is talk about friends, about love and special people. And so it
all makes its own comment on just what it is. It’s what it is. It’s what
every individual does with it that counts. It can be the greatest tool in
the world, and it can be the greatest detriment in the world.
Question: Did you have a good working relationship with Caleb De-
schanel, the cinematographer of Being There?
Ashby: I’ve known him for years. I met him on The Landlord. He was a
student at USC, and he came back to meet Gordy Willis. I always kept
track of Caleb. The designer Mike Haller went to help him with a film
he was doing in Valley Forge, and Mike told me he was in the union.
Then he was up shooting More American Graffiti when I had just fin-
ished Second Hand Hearts. | called and said, “You’ve got to come and do
the film.” He’s really incredible. I can’t find the words to tell you what
I think of him.
Question: Was he involved during preproduction in working on the
look you wanted in Being There?
Ashby: Absolutely.
Question: How much time did he have before shooting started?
Ashby: I don’t know how much I gave him. I finished shooting Sec-
ond Hand Hearts in October 1978, and I started shooting Being There
in January 1979, so he must have come on in November sometime.
I remember we went around and spent a lot of time going over stuff
together, so I think of it as quite a while. Caleb puts a lot of time in. He
was still looking at prints after the opening.
Question: How did you get involved with your previous movie, Com-
ing Home?
Ashby: I came into it when Waldo Salt’s script was sent to me. John
Schlesinger was supposed to do it. I called John to see why he wasn’t in
it any more. He said because it was too American. I said, “What are you
talking about? You do good American films.” He said, “No, the subject
matter.” In other words, what the hell right does an Englishman have
to come and make a da-di-da-di-da. Whatever it was, I knew he obvi-
ously didn’t want to do it. So I committed to do it.
When I told United Artists I wanted to cast Jon Voight, I remember
Mike Medavoy sat there and said, “No way. Absolutely. The man has no
sex appeal.” He gave me a whole big line of reasons not to cast Jon Voi-
ght in the role. Unfortunately, I’d already made up my mind. That’s the
kind of resistance you run into—“You got this wrong,” and so forth.
Nonetheless, it moved ahead pretty well.
I had Waldo’s script and Bob Jones’s script. But as soon as I was two
days into the shooting, I saw where Jon was coming from with his
character, so I just threw the first script out. We wrote the script as we
shot. That’s the only time I’ve ever done that. That’s hard. I got Rudy
Wurlitzer to come in. Iwould come home at about eleven at night, and
we'd work till about four in the morning, and I’d get to work at six. We
just wrote all night. I knew we had to go ahead on it because I can stand
to do that for only about ten days or two weeks. You just physically
can’t take it.
I told Rudy I wanted to find out where Jon was going with this char-
acter, what we were structuring, and what we were going toward. It had
a lot to do with some of the conversations I’d had with Waldo Salt. I
think we accomplished most of the ideas he described and wanted to
go toward. From what we discussed, he would have liked to see the
Bruce Dern character sign up again and go back to Nam. That would
have been his suicide wish. I was very much in tune with that, but I
didn’t know how in the hell to do it after that much film. That’s a lot
of stuff to explain all of a sudden.
Question: How do you see the Dern character?
Ashby: He was a casualty, a walking casualty, just like Jon was a casu-
alty. But Jon is the central character in that film because Jon is the one
who comes up the strongest. Jon at the end is saying, “There is a choice
to be made here.” That’s what the film is about—that’s the strongest
central character you can get for me.
Question: At the end of the film, the Dern character runs into the Pa-
cific. There was another ending originally, wasn’t there?
Ashby: The end of it was holding hostages, for Christ’s sake, and then
getting killed on a freeway. That was the end of the picture at one time.
I just kept looking at that, and I said, “I know I saw that on television
one night when I was flicking by all the channels. That’s been done.”
So that evolved into a whole thing. I didn’t know what ending I was
going to shoot on the picture until four weeks before I was finished
shooting the picture—I mean, | didn’t know.
Question: Did that make the executives a little nervous?
Ashby: I don’t even know if they knew. When I was doing that writing
with Rudy, by the way, their input was: Oh, my God, you ought to do
this with it, and you ought to do that. I came home one night, and I
remember that Medavoy and others were all going to visit the set the
next day. I noticed that there was some pink paper there. I read it, and
it was some notes from some story editor in New York about the script.
But the first two goddamn paragraphs were about how I had miscast
the film, how I’d made this horrible mistake—and it didn’t matter what
the hell I did with the screenplay, because it wouldn’t work anyway. I
thought about that one all night while we worked. In the morning I
called up Jerry Hellman, the producer, and I said, “Just call Mike Meda-
voy’s office and tell them if they come on the set, I go off the set.”
Question: Did working on the script while you were shooting create
something of an unstructured atmosphere on the set?
Ashby: Even though I’m that unstructured, I am structured. I mean,
I would talk with the actors the night before and say, “Here’s what I
think we ought to do tomorrow,” and give the reasons why I thought
we should do it. And they’d all come in with their lines, and they were
great. They were terrific. And that all was guided by Jon’s character—I
threw out a screenplay because of where he was. That man received
incredible amounts of resistance—down to everybody, including Jane
Fonda, wanting him to play it more macho. I remember Haskell Wexler
at one point said to Jon, “Why don’t you just reach out and grab her?”
I said, “Because he’s not going to reach out and grab her. Jon is too
scared to reach out.”
One thing we were all relating to were the guys in wheelchairs dur-
ing the first six weeks we shot at a veterans hospital. There were about
fifty people in chairs around all the time.
Question: They had volunteered to be in the film?
Ashby: Yes. They had decided they wanted to live. I never talked to one
of them that I didn’t hear that the most serious thing he went through
was the time he didn’t know if he wanted to live or not. They didn’t
talk about hope—they didn’t ever talk about getting up and walking.
Question: You shot rap sessions with them, didn’t you?
Ashby: Yes, just two cameras sitting around. I have a lot of good film.
I have a whole lot of footage of these rap sessions—I must have sixty
thousand feet. They talked about everything. They talked about when
they first came home, they talked about their first date, they talked
about their children. | want to make that available to someone. I have
some other rap sessions which are really heavy. One that took place in
Jon’s apartment was really an incredible session—anyway, I go off on
that. Let’s talk about something else for a minute.
Question: Well, how about Bud Cort?
Ashby: Bud Cort?
Question: Yes. Was he your choice for Harold and Maude?
Ashby: Absolutely. Everybody that’s in my pictures is my choice.

Question: Is it a look you go after—like your choice of Peter Sellers for
Being There?
Ashby: Well, with Bud, I met a lot of young people for the role in
Harold and Maude. But Bob Downey probably said it best after he’d seen
the picture. He said, “He’s a bar of Camay with two eyes.” That’s not
exactly what I thought when I saw the picture—I mean, I didn’t know
that’s what I had in mind. In that case it is a look, but it was also what
Bud gave to it. It was a whole thing he brought to the picture.
With Peter, he gave me the novel Being There in 1973, and I read it,
but we just couldn’t get the money to make the film then. After I’d just
finished Coming Home and was trying to make some kind of a new deal,
Andy Braunsberg walked in with it and asked if I’d be interested. That’s
when Ryan O’Neal was suggested for the film. But I said there was no
way—just on the level that Peter gave me the book was enough, plus
that’s who I saw in the role. To start with, you just don’t do that to
people. If he had given me the book and I wasn’t interested, that would
be something else again.
Question: How did you work with Ruth Gordon in Harold and
Maude?
Ashby: Ruth was great. She’s just all that energy that you would imag-
ine she is. She was seventy-five then, so she ought to be eighty-three or
eighty-four years old now. Every time I see her, she’s still going strong.
One of the funniest things that ever happened on that film was when
I got Tom Skerritt as the motorcycle cop. Tom is a very loose actor, but
whatever he would say, Ruth would still say her lines. She was a stage
actor and those were her lines, and if those were the lines, that’s where
she was going. She was everything about that role that should have
been there.
Question: You were once a film editor. What led to your directing your
first film, The Landlord?
Ashby: | was very fortunate in all that. I knew I was a good editor.
I almost settled in there, because I got a lot of gratification. I’d been
trained real good by Bob Swink, who just taught me everything. I al-
ways was very rebellious and I fought real hard. I remember the first
picture I ever cut for Norman Jewison. He asked me one day if I felt he
should come down to the cutting room, and I asked him why. He said,
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe to help you pick some takes and things.” I
said, “If you don’t trust me, why don’t you get somebody else? I’m go-
ing to cut this picture. Then we’ll take a look at it and see how it looks.”
That sort of stuff. I had that relationship with Norman.
Norman set the thing up for me in the end. He asked me one day,
“What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to direct. That’s all I’ve ever
wanted to do.” But I hadn’t even talked to him about it. I’d been with
him for three pictures by that time. He said, “Well, let’s find something
for you.” About the time we were just finishing up the shooting on
Gaily, Gaily, he said, “How would you like to do The Landlord?” J said,
“You kidding?” The last few years, from In the Heat of the Night on, I was
like his assistant. I had a real close relationship with him. It was real
good of him in all ways. I mean, I got $2 million to make my first film,
I had a lot of help, I got to shoot sixty-five days.
Question: How did you handle the change from editing a film in a
little dark room to dealing with—
Ashby: With people? Well, there were two things I was really scared
about. One was how to communicate with the actors. On my first film,
I cast Beau Bridges, and I’d worked previously on a film with him. We
had become friends, so I felt comfortable. I had worked as associate
producer, not as an editor, on Gaily, Gaily, so |wasn’t around the set a
lot, but I got to know Beau. I felt comfortable there, but I didn’t really
know how to communicate with the other actors. I was terrified about
that aspect of it.
The other was just how much of me would come out on the film,
because I really feel strongly about film being a communal art. I really
encourage that from everybody—to try and get as much creativity as I
can from everybody that’s working on the film. It took me about thirty
seconds of watching the film not to worry about how much of me was
going to be on the film, because it would be all me as much as it would
be everybody else. You don’t do any film unless you want to make it, so
once you have a real reason to do it, it will always be you.
As far as with the actors, it took me about three days. The first day
I couldn’t talk. I’d worked myself into a state of walking pneumonia
and was just gasping all day and pointing a lot. I wasn’t working with
anybody but Beau, so it was easy. But it took me about three days to
find out that I could communicate with them, so I enjoyed it from that
point on.
Question: Do you find yourself now approaching a film with the edit-
ing process in mind?
Ashby: The only editing process I have in mind is how I think the
shots are going to look, the juxtaposition of shots. As far as the editing
itself, I don’t have any preconceived thoughts about it at all. That’s
why I wanted to do two pictures back to back, so I could get even
further away from any preconceived ideas. I don’t think for me that’s
healthy. I like the spontaneity that goes on in film and work for it that
way. I don’t edit as I go along. I wouldn’t do that to an editor, first of
all. |mean, that’s the thing I was talking about with Norman: After I’ve
cut the picture, if you don’t like it, then let’s do something about it,
but not before.
Question: Some directors like to be in the editing room when the film
is first being cut. You don’t?
Ashby: | would never go in the editing room. What I try to do is en-
courage any editor that I have working for me to take his first cut and
really get into doing that first cut, because that’s his shot—I mean, not
that he’s not going to contribute from that point on. When I edited The
Thomas Crown Affair for Norman, I didn’t go in the editing room until
six weeks after he’d finished shooting. Now when I went in, I didn’t
leave it for seven months. I mean, I literally didn’t leave it. I stayed in
it, I slept in it, I lived in it for seven months. I worked that hard on it. I
don’t even know how many months it was after he’d finished shooting
that he saw the thing.
I would give any editor who felt that strongly the same leeway. Un-
fortunately, not very many of them do. Most of them try to second-
guess you. Most of them are interested in something else. I don’t know
what the hell it is. But Bobby Jones is the best editor I ever found.
Question: He’s also writing?
Ashby: Yes. That’s all he’s doing now. | hired him as an editor on The
Last Detail. I'd hired a young fellow to cut The Last Detail, but | looked
at an hour and forty-five minutes of it, and I really almost got ill. I
mean, I didn’t know what the hell his point of view was at all, other
than trying to use every piece of film I shot.
I don’t have to see the film in the first cut. I couldn’t tell you what
film was in Donny Zimmerman’s first cut of Being There and what we
ended up with. I ended up at four in the morning the day we opened
making the last change that I can remember. I was sitting in the cutting
room all night because we were behind on the thing.
Working on two pictures was very good for me because one of the
things you want to do is always to try and get your mind Clear, first
of all. When you do an editing process, it has a tendency to go by se-
quence. In other words, when you go in, you sit down and you have
such and such a problem. You discuss it—a certain portion, a certain
reel, a certain scene. Scene by scene usually—otherwise, I’d get up and
walk away. I would do that so I wouldn’t become too restless. I have
a tendency when I get restless, because I physically know how, to say,
“Let me do it’
By the way, I’m going to start editing everything on tape now. I’m
going to get one of those great big goddamn Mach 1 tape editing things.
I tell you, it’s going to be great. I don’t know if I’ll save any time, but I’
sure explore a lot of ideas, and I can find out real quick if they work or
not.
I think Kubrick started the whole system. The last I heard, Stanley
claims he can find any line in any take in twenty seconds. He’s got four-
teen playback machines going. I’m just getting into the whole thing
about computers and everything. I think it’s incredible.
Question: But you’re still going to let the editor edit first?
Ashby: Oh, absolutely. Mark Harris, who’s been working as an assistant
with me these past five years, has been taking a course. We’re building
all that goddamn stuff. He’ll have to teach me how to work it. I may
never be in the editing room again because I won’t physically know
how to do it.
The other thing, by the way, which I’m really excited about—all my
dailies for Being There and the other film I’m working on, Second Hand
Hearts, are on tape. Now I can turn that over to the AFI. Anybody that
wants to sit down and edit my film on tape can edit it. And I’m going
to do that on all my films now and make the tapes available to places
like the AFI, UCLA, USC. That’s a great experience. You can just go in
there and do anything you want to do with it.
Question: You say you let the editor do the first cut. Don’t you even
involve yourself in going through the takes and picking this one or
that one?
Ashby: No.
Question: You give the editor the whole reel and say, “Cut it”?
Ashby: Hell, yes. He’s got to be a big boy. He’s the one who looks at it.
It’s the fourth and fifth time you see it that you start seeing stuff you
never saw before—the stuff happening with actors, things like that.
That’s his job. That’s what he sits down and looks for. The film will tell
you how to edit it. The film will tell you what to do in the end.
The editor's the one who sits there the first time and investigates
the film. I investigate it later—I can tell you. The last week before we
opened Being There, | bet you I put fifty new pieces of film in that pic-
ture that had never been in the picture before. Now that’s part of the
process, too. I’m searching stuff out, just pursuing different ideas.
Question: But when you're looking at the film all cut together, how
do you manage to remember that you have another take with a slightly
different reading?
Ashby: By how it moves you.
Question: Let’s back up a little. When you're still shooting a film, how
far in advance do you plan a shot—or do you just go in and wing it?
Ashby: | just go in there and wing it—I’m lucky to get there in the
morning. It’s because of the structure of what goes on with the film.
Let’s say we’re going to shoot a scene in this room. I’ve looked at the
room before. I’ve got an idea of the area of the room that looks the
best—that’s what you basically want to go for when you're finding lo-
cations: what on the overall is going to look the best on film. But once
you start walking around and looking, you see something else and you
say, “Well, gee, that’s interesting.”
Then you bring the actors in—maybe the night before—and you say,
“Why don’t you sit down over there, and then we’ll see what happens.”
Then you start working it down to where you got it pretty much in line
with what you’re thinking about.
Question: Is it just you and the actors at these early rehearsals, or is
the cameraman there, too?
Ashby: I usually have myself and the cameraman and the sound man
on those first rehearsals—plus anybody else who wants to stand around
and watch. They’te all going to go to work on it. As many people that
can watch what’s going on, the more information they have—you
know, instead of just all of a sudden being out there in the dark.
It all depends on what the scene is, how intimate the scene is, but I
basically want the actors to work it out in some free form. I don’t want
to come in and make them fit the camera. | would rather make the
camera fit the actors. Let that be our job. We’re skilled.
Question: What happens next?
Ashby: Now we’ve got the thing worked through. It’s going to take
three or four hours to light it, so during that time the actors can be
working on lines. Then we bring them back in, and we rehearse it again
to do it with the finer lighting, which is another half hour. But none of
the pattern is going to change. Out of the whole thing, maybe an hour
is different than what it would be if you had walked around and said,
“Well, this is it.”
Now if you really want to work fast, then you go in the night before,
and you say, “OK. We’re going to put the camera here, Caleb, and light
this way, and so forth. The actor will be here and then will be there.”
And when the actors come in in the morning, you say, “OK. That’s
where you go and that’s where you go.” They say, “Well, gee, I kind of
felt like maybe I ought to come through the door.” You say, “No, no.
No door.” So you spoil even the possibility because you’re locked into
it, and you stop exploration of film. Always do as much exploration as
you can. You'll never regret it.
Question: So during the first blocking of a scene, you’re working just
with the actors, instead of with the crew, too.
Ashby: | just have the crew around to watch, so they are all familiar
with what’s going on. There are fifty people in that crew, and in the
end almost all of them are directly related to what is going on with
the actors and what we’re photographing. Whether it’s the grips or
the gaffers or whoever the hell it is, they all have to know what you’re
shooting for. Once you get that kind of cohesion working for you, all
that crew stuff works great.
Big crews are great, by the way, when they’re good. It’s incredible,
watching those guys work. In Ben’s bedroom in Being There, we had the
lighting from out the window. So we had a scaffold built that was four
stories high, and that’s the windy side of that house. Once in a while
I’d peek out there. I watched these guys stand out there with those
goddamn arcs, four stories up in the air with the wind blowing against
them, holding those lights in the freezing cold. They’re there all the
time—those guys are there.
Question: You make use of a lot of rock music in Corning Home—and
in Shampoo, too. How did that come about?
Ashby: Well, I’m just very locked in to music. When I got down to
Coming Home, I knew I wanted the music. It takes you somewhere—I
mean, it’s good for the film because it puts you in a different time pe-
riod than what you're actually sitting in. All I wanted to do was take
people to wherever they would go. There are going to be a couple of
songs that are going to do something to them. They can drift out of the
film for a while, if they want to. All I listened to from the time I started
shooting the picture until I finished that picture were cassettes.
Question: Did you have a lot of the songs already in mind for Coming
Home?
Ashby: Oh, no, no. Right on down through the editing process I was
changing songs all the time. The Rolling Stones play a big part because
I'd been hanging out with Mick Jagger a little bit and listening to more
music that way. Almost any goddamn thing in the picture, if we put a
Stones song down to it, would just click—the way the rhythm of the
film was going in relation to what was going with that music.
The music plays a big part in any of my films. I had it happen as an
editor on In the Heat of the Night. I'd just gotten a Ray Charles album
and was listening to it. He had a song called “Chitlins and Candied
Yams.” Haskell Wexler had been out with his assistant shooting the
main title footage of the trains, and Haskell did a lot of stuff where he
moves way out of focus. Now any time I’ve ever had silent footage, I’ve
always put music with it. It’s just crazy to sit there and watch an hour
of silent film.
So 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. I really
started to realize the whole thing. I’ve always gotten into music in rela-
tion 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.
Question: You did two with Robert Towne, the screenwriter—The Last
Detail and Shampoo. What sort of relationship did you have with him?
Ashby: I don’t know a writer that’s as good as Bob in town. | don’t
know anybody that even comes close to him. He’s in a whole other
league. He’s got a script he’s going to start directing now which is in-
credible. It’s about women athletes, called Personal Best. Boy, is it good.
I told him, “I don’t even know how in the hell you got inside those
people.” He said, “I don’t either.” It’s the best thing I’ve read about
women athletes and what goes on there. He’s also going to do Grey-
stoke, the Tarzan film, but he got so complicated into the damn ape
systems. He’s right—the ape outfits have to be one thousand percent
believable.
By the way, in 1972, when Robert and I went to Catalina Island for
ten days to work on The Last Detail, he first talked to me about do-
ing Greystoke. Now it’s eight years later, and he still hasn’t done it—he
hasn't finished the screenplay totally yet, as a matter of fact.
In between we did Shampoo, and he did help on a couple of other
things. He was going to write Personal Best for me. I had told him, MOU
should do something in between because the Tarzan picture is going to
eat you up.” He said, “I have this thing I want to do about women ath-
letes.” Soon he had thirty pages. Once he got into it, I said, “Why don’t
you go ahead and do it? It will be a good first film for you to direct. I’m
not going to do it.” It’s going to be great—the stuff reads right, feels
right, comes to life.
Question: When you came in on Shampoo, had Towne already fin-
ished his script?
Ashby: Originally it was titled Hair. That’s how long ago it was writ-
ten. When I came into it, Warren Beatty sat down with me and told me
the whole story of Bob taking a year and a half to write the screenplay
and Warren being so angry by the time he got it that he sat down the
next day and started to write his own version. So I sat there and read
both versions. Then I said, “I think it’s a really terrific film for us to do,
but let’s just you and me spend four or five days going through the two
scripts and compiling the feelings of the scripts, the sense of the char-
acters. Then once we’ve done that, let’s give that to Bob and then ask
him to come back.” We actually all worked together on that.
Question: |’ve read what I guess is Towne’s original script of Shampoo,
but I found no descriptions of the characters or of places.
Ashby: It comes to life better than the reading of it. I prefer to be
much looser with a script and pick up things as I go along. That has to
do with my own thing about spontaneity in film. Not describing what
the characters look like is always better. I never get any lock-in on what
people look like when I’m reading a script. Scripts are hard to read.
Most people don’t know how to read them. They just don’t know what
they’re trying to get out of them.
Question: How do you read them?
Ashby: | read them in general just to see what the idea is, to start
with—what the hell kind of story we’re trying to tell and why. I look
to see what the rhythms are, and I try to hear certain things which
give me an idea of how it starts to come to life. From that point on, it
depends upon how good the writer is. That’s why Bob Towne reaches
the point where the stuff becomes magic. It comes to life very easy off
the page with Bob.
Question: Do you worry about staying on schedule when you’re shoot-
ing, or do you assume the money will come through if you run over?
Ashby: | fight real hard on the budget aspect—to where I’ve said I
won't shoot the picture. I’m down to the point where I can really gauge
it quite well just by habit. I know I’ll shoot somewhere around seventy
days—that’s about what it takes me to shoot a film. The only one that
was really different was Bound for Glory. We just got into train stuff on
that. We got into stuff that physically was more than I’d ever dealt
with before. The train comes down heading the wrong way, and you
say, “Well, let’s turn it around.” They say, “Well, OK. It will take about
twelve hours to turn the goddamn train around.” They’re not kidding
either.
But I always assume they’ll come up with the money. I never think
they won’t. You really have to be doing something wrong for them
not to come up with it, because we all work real hard. The only time
anybody sits around is when I don’t have an idea. And sometimes I
don’t. Sometimes I don’t know what the hell I want to do with a scene.
Once in a while that happens, and we all sit around—or play a little
football.
The big thing is to see that what you shoot can at least be put on
film. That’s what you fight hard for, and nobody fights harder for that
than me. Those guys back in the production offices don’t have a clue of
what goes on in my heart, in my head, and what I’m thinking about.
They don’t know. They sit back there and they say, “Well, if he shoots
tonight, that’s going to cost $20,000.” So what! Lorimar sent out mem-
os on that kind of thing. Now none to me, believe me, because I get
crazy when I hear that kind of stuff, and when you’re shooting and you
get crazy, they really get nervous.
Question: Do you draw the line on how expensive a project you'll get
involved in?
Ashby: | think I would, just because of the way I function and the way
I think. The whole inflation thing is so crazy. Now somebody says a pic-
ture is going to cost $10 million. A few years ago I would have had to sit
back and say, “Well, I don’t know if I want to get involved in something
that big.” That’s not big any more.
But I have very strong feelings that any good film today that costs
between $5 million and $10 million—that there’s no reason in the
world you cannot let it at least pay for itself. But these guys want to
take it down the middle. They don’t realize that there’s a market for
everything today in this country. Being There looks like it’s going to be
a successful film. And it isn’t down the middle—not that that doesn’t
come into it. But you should never gauge it. You should never say,
“That’s where I’m going to aim my film.” Who in the hell wants to
aim a film down the middle? Is that what you make a film for? For the
middle of the road?
You don’t make your films for that. You make your films for a reason.
What guides me are my instincts—what I feel about something. It’s the
only thing I know, and so I have to rely upon that—that what I know
as these instincts are going to affect a number of people. That’s all any
of us have. So go for what you’re going for and find that.
Hal Ashby: Satisfaction in Being There
Jordan R. Young and Mike Bruns/1980
From Millimeter, May 1980. Reprinted with permission of Penton Media.
The films of Hal Ashby, from the wild and free-spirited Harold and Maude
to the emotionally devastating Coming Home, are fresh and original.
They reflect a unique sense of humor, a profound outlook on life and,
above all, a deep-rooted humanity. Deciding that the development and
production of his films took far too long, the director embarked on an
experiment in 1978 to speed up the process. He shot two films back
to back and then edited them simultaneously. The result: Being There,
and the upcoming Second Hand Hearts (originally titled The Hamster of
Happiness). Ashby took time out to discuss his latest work, his future
plans, and his views on filmmaking in a recent interview at his house
in Malibu, California, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
MM: You first read Being There several years ago, didn’t you?
HA: Yes. Peter Sellers brought me the book in 1973. I’d just finished
shooting The Last Detail. We couldn’t get it together then, and Jerzy
Kosinski wasn’t willing to let it go. I think he might’ve, I don’t know—
he never really got tested. He said he would let go of it, that we could
do it, we just never got far enough to offer him the money. Peter and |
were never at a place where anybody would give us the money to make
a real offer to the man.
MM: How did it suddenly materialize as a film?
HA: About two years ago I was sitting here and Andy Braunsberg walked
in. He didn’t know the history of the project. He said, “Would you be
interested in doing this thing called Being There?” | said, “Absolutely.
But I wouldn’t do it with anybody but Peter Sellers.” I’d never visual-
ized it any way, ever, except with him. I don’t think Jerzy was so hot for
99
him, strangely enough. I remember Ryan O’Neal was mentioned to me

at one point. The book describes more physically that kind of person,
but I don’t know how he ever could’ve made it work.
MM: Didn’t Robert Jones work on the adaptation with Kosinski?
HA: No. What happened was, Jerzy’s script, for my taste, was too
heavy-handed. There’s a certain thing that can happen with people
when they don’t make films, and it’s understandable. I was in El Paso
shooting Hearts and I had Robert come down; Jerzy had made a second
pass at it and I had Andy Braunsberg sitting with him. I didn’t have the
time, first of all, and I didn’t feel as comfortable sitting with the author
and going through that kind of thing, having a lot of dialog about why
it was this and why it was that, which is all good—it’s always good to
have information—but I felt he was fighting it in his scripts. It could
have been that he was away from the book for so long—if you go back
and you look at your film six years later, you say, “Well, I think I could
do thisenn7
Also, it looked to me like Jerzy was a little afraid of the character he
had drawn in Chance, in the book. He was afraid of him being a total
retard. So I gave Robert Jones the book, and I gave him Jerzy’s screen-
play, and I asked him to write the script. A few weeks later he gave mea
screenplay, and I knew I was into the film then. I’d always felt strongly
about it being a film, but now I had my blueprint, my structure there.
Then I sat down with Robert for three or four weeks and we worked re-
ally hard on it, eight or nine hours a day. We never worked with Jerzy
on the script; when we sent it to him, he loved it.
MM: As it is, the film is very close to the book.
HA: Absolutely. There’s another ending Robert wrote, which is great.
Chance leaves the funeral, and Eve goes after him; he’s doing a lit-
tle thing with this tree, using his umbrella as a windscreen to protect
it, and she says, “Where were you? I was looking for you.” And he
says, “I was looking for you, too, Eve.” That was the way it ended. We
were down in Asheville, North Carolina, and I was sitting and think-
ing about what was going on with the film. I was talking with Rudy
Wurlitzer about how it had come to life, how Peter was playing it, how
the innocence of the childlike character was coming through so strong
and how the other actors were responding to it. I said, “I could just
have him walking on water at the end.” And I thought, “I’m going to
have him walking on water.”
JORDAN R. YOUNG AND MIKE BRUNS / 1980 101
MM: Are you saying that we make our own reality?

HA: It was interesting to see the different reactions when I said I was
going to do that. Somebody said, “I don’t know about him walking on
water.” I said, “Why?” He said, “You know what that means.” “What?”
“There’s only one person who can walk on water.” I said, “Well, I don’t
know .. .” I did it basically for that reason, that there would be a lot
of answers to it. If I could have had him walking just above the water,
though, that would’ve made me happy.
MM: Once you have the script down and you go into pre-production,
who do you work with and how do you work with them?
HA: When I start pre-production, the person I work closest with is
my production designer, Michael Haller. He will have more ideas than
anyone—especially on this one because when I shot the two pictures
back to back I didn’t use him on Hearts, I just let him go on Being There.
We wanted sort of a special look and I didn’t want anything to interfere
with that. So I said, “Mike, all that’s going to be on you.” By the time
I finished Hearts, he was so full of ideas—that’s how the ghetto scene
came about. He said, “When I was in Washington, D.C., I was looking
around in the ghetto. It was real interesting.” I just flashed on that.
I said, “Oh, God, Chance has just got to come out there.” I work real
closely with Mike. When I start pre-production, he is the man that has
the most information.
MM: How did you work with Caleb Deschanel to determine the visual
style of the film?
HA: You sit down and you start talking about what that film is, and
looking at the locations .. . it’s really difficult to do, to talk about what
it is that you want in that visual style. Also, it has to do with knowing
someone’s work, and I was very familiar with Caleb’s work. I’ve known
him since he was a student at USC. The way I usually approach it is,
I ask the cinematographer what he’s thinking about. Instead of going
in and saying, “Let’s do this, I want this... ,” I say, “What do you
think?”
MM: So instead of telling your DP what you want, you ask him how
he sees it?
HA: Yeah, I start to feel it out and find out, because otherwise you cut
off ideas too fast. The great thing about film is, it really is communal. It
is the communal art. And you don’t lose anything—all you do is gain.
Your film just gains and gains. The more input you can get, the better
it is.
MM: Did Peter Sellers have trouble staying within the rigid confines of
that character?
HA: No. It was hard work, but he never had any trouble. The hardest
part of it was actually the delivery of the lines; to make him sound
childlike, and not make them sound like bad readings. It was a real fine
line.
MM: It’s so tremendously underplayed. Did you exercise much restraint
on him?
HA: I never once had to hold Peter back. The only times we went too
far were from Melvyn Douglas’s ideas. He would be further out with the
ideas—not that they were bad ideas, he had a great sense of humor. We
would try and shoot them and they would be a bit too far out.
MM: What’s your shooting ratio, on the average?
HA: About 30 to 1, I would think. I don’t think it ever gets less than
that. It may be 40 to 1 at times.
MM: As a director, how much freedom do you give your editors on the
first cut?
HA: I give them complete freedom. I don’t even hang around; I just let
‘em go. Amy Jones went through four of five cuts of Second Hand Hearts.
I looked at different cuts and made a couple of comments, really minor
things. I sat down with both Amy and Don Zimmerman (Being There)
the end of May, and I didn’t look at either of the films until the end of
September. In that period, I wasn’t physically cutting myself; I would
sit with the editors and talk with them about it. On Being There, when
it got down to the last stages, the last six or seven weeks I physically sat
and cut the film myself because I didn’t have the time to transfer the
thoughts to Donny. At that point, I knew I better physically do it, and
have him sitting there with me. I don’t think my physically doing it
made any difference; it was out of necessity. The last few weeks it really
got crazy; I would not be gone from that editing room any more than
four hours any given time, seven days a week.
I'm going to edit on tape from now on. I’m building a very sophis-
ticated computerized tape editing machine. The possibilities you can
explore! The first time you look at your dailies you can punch a button
and it’s on another thing over here, and you haven’t cut into anything.
At the end of three or four hours, you’ve got thirty minutes of selected
takes which you haven’t had to physically take out and move over
there. But I don’t think editing on tape will save me any time, because
I'll use the time going after different thoughts and ideas.
JORDAN R. YOUNG AND MIKE BRUNS / 1980 103
MM: Are you completely satisfied with Being There, or could you con-
tinue to work on it?
HA: Oh, I’m sure I could. I could work on any of them. It’s an ongoing
process, but I’m not going to go back and re-cut them. After a film is
out in the theater for a while, I don’t go back and look at it anymore. I
did see Harold and Maude again recently, and it was more damn fun...
I had a lot of little surprises: “I didn’t know I left that in.”
MM: Did you make many changes in Second Hand Hearts, or did you
film Charles Eastman’s original script pretty much as it was?
HA: Pretty much as it was. The script had been around a long time.
Charles had a thing about it—he wanted to direct it—and I knew that;
we'd talked about it for years. Robert Blake finally bought it. He had
somebody go up to his door and offer him cash. I couldn’t get Eastman
involved in the film. It was a pretty hard battle. I felt pretty much ob-
ligated at that point to go as much with that script as I possibly could.
I changed very little: I didn’t sit down with it myself and work on it. I
just went with it; it was a script I liked a lot. But I wouldn’t normally do
that, and I’m not sure I would do it again. The biggest limitation I had
was with Barbara Harris. | knew right away I would be limited in my
editing with Barbara, but what she does is fantastic.
MM: With Blake, was there a conscious attempt to get away from the
image he established in Baretta?
HA: I would think it was conscious on his part. I never talked with him
much about it. Blake was very much into the character when we started
shooting. Some people can’t get rid of the macho thing in Blake; I think
he completely lost it. He took chances in that film—lI’ve never seen ac-
tors take chances like that. I let it go and get as crazy and as big as it
could get.
MM: Second Hand Hearts doesn’t seem very commercial. Does it to
you?
HA: Yeah, it does. I don’t know, though, because it’s really about two
people that are at the end of their ropes, and I’m not sure how much
that appeals to people.
MM: Isn’t it a rather offbeat choice, after the powerful drama of Com-
ing Home?
HA: I don’t think about things that way—what this does in relation to
that.
MM: How are you going to promote Second Hand Hearts? Do you make
those decisions?
HA: I’m making more of those decisions all the time. I don’t want to
leave it up to other people anymore. I don’t think they know how to do
it. One of the things I want to do in my advertising—anzd it’s a very fine
line—but I think film is one of the things you can advertise in this life
and be honest about. If thoughts enter your mind that are not honest
to that film, get rid of them. I want people to know there’s humor in
Second Hand Hearts; it isn’t just a downbeat thing. The characters that
Robert and Barbara play are crazy damn people, too.
MM: That was a nice campaign for Being There, that white-on-black
silhouette that appeared in the papers.
HA: If you knew the fight I’ve had! Not only is it complicated with
Lorimar, but it’s doubly complicated because they have a contract with
United Artists to release the picture—more people involved with it,
that you have no contract with. The first ad ever run for Being There
was a full page ad in Variety, for a pre-screening for Academy members,
when I was working so crazy and hard on it. I didn’t even know there
was an ad—nobody had told me—and it was the worst thing I’ve ever
seen in my life. I’ve never found out to this day who made up the ad.
So I said, “That’s it.” I’m at a point where I’m not going to deal with
these people anymore.
I’m at the point right now, fortunately, if I just wanted to make my
own films, I could distribute them myself. I’m starting this company
with Andy Braunsberg, Northstar International. I’ve always wanted to
have a company, because I want to help young filmmakers. It’s stupid
not to do it. And morally, you’ve got to do it. The studios don’t have a
clue, when it comes to new filmmakers. When they have little flurries,
and they try new filmmakers, nine times out of ten what they do is
listen to the guy that talks the fastest. And that isn’t necessarily the guy
that makes the best films. I want to set it up where the people will run
it themselves; they do not have to come to me and say, “What do you
think?” I want to see the money being used that way. I think it’s of real
value to do that; it’s a chance to use what you’ve got.
MM: There’s a real sensitivity and compassion in all of your films.
HA: It comes out of your life. It’s just something I have. I was blessed,
very early on—I don’t know what it was, but I always had the capacity
to see through things real fast, to sit and think about things—that’s
all it requires for any amount of empathy or compassion, if you sit
and think for two minutes about the position of anybody in the world
other than yourself, and what they might feel like.
“JORDAN R. YOUNG AND MIKE BRUNS / 1980 105
MM: How is it that you exercise so little authority on a set—you seem

so laid back, so casual—yet when you shoot, everything is so precise?
HA: I really am a stickler for detail. I’ll just hang in; I have a great
tenacity. I think that has to do with the other philosophy, of trying
to get as much creativity out of people as you can, their own creative
energies and efforts. I think that’s part of what it is. I’m not laid back;
there’s a tremendous energy going on all the time. What are you going
to accomplish by raising your voice? Even if you’re striving for some
tense thing in the film, getting the crew tense isn’t going to help. I
went through a period in my life where I argued about everything, and
I found I wasn’t getting much accomplished.
MM: Your next film is with Jon Voight, from a script he co-wrote?
HA: Yes, it’s called Lookin’ to Get Out. He’s been working on it since
Coming Home. It’s a comedy about two gamblers. Jon’s a great writer—if
they’re good actors, they’re good writers—they hear so good. I’m not
quite sure where we’re going with it. In the end, I think it’s a film about
learning how to let go. After that I’m going to do The Hawkline Monster
with Jack Nicholson. I bought the rights to Richard Brautigan’s novel
several years ago.
MM: You were also thinking about doing Henderson the Rain King by
Saul Bellow, weren’t you?
HA: Yeah. I’m also going to do that with Jack. We may even do Hender-
son first; I’m not sure. We’ll have to wait and see.
Whatever Happened to Hal Ashby?
Dale Pollock/1982
From the Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1982. Los Angeles Times, Copyright © 1982.
Reprinted with permission of the Los Angeles Times.
Hal Ashby is known in Hollywood as a classy film director. His best

work, as demonstrated in Shampoo, Warren Beatty’s sexual salon odys-
sey, and Being There, a telling fable about the influence of television
that marked Peter Sellers’s last great performance, is provocative and
stylish.
Since he began making movies in 1970 with The Landlord, Ashby has
been one of the most consistent directors working in Hollywood. Al-
though all his films have been made for major studios, he has remained
fiercely independent, working within the system without really being
part of it.
But for the last three years, Hal Ashby seems to have disappeared.
Since the successful premiere of Being There in late 1979, two of the
films he has made—Second Hand Hearts and Lookin’ to Get Out—have
failed to gain a national release. There have been ugly rumors that Ash-
by was in ill health, burned out by drugs, incapable of completing a
movie.
And a director whose movies always enjoyed critical if not box-office
success has been the victim of particularly damning reviews for Lookin’
and its predecessor, Second Hand Hearts, which was released in 1981 for
less than two weeks in only six cities.
There is an image in Lookin’ to Get Out, Ashby’s ninth film, that poi-
gnantly summarizes his plight. Jon Voight and Burt Young play two
New York hustlers, and during an argument, Young turns on the TV
set. Ashby appears on the screen, as if he might be on a talk show—but
there is no sound. Voight turns off the set and Ashby disappears. Young
106
DALE POLLOCK / 1982 107
turns it back on, but Ashby remains silent, spouting words that no one
can hear.
Even Ashby agrees that these have not been the best of times for
him. No one has heard what he has to say because hardly anyone has
seen his films.
“This has been as heavy a period in my life as I ever want to have,”
the bearded wispy-haired film maker said in a recent series of inter-
views at his Malibu home and a Hollywood sound studio where he
was mixing his latest film, Time Is on Our Side, a documentary (due for
release next February) of the 1981 Rolling Stones concert tour.
Ashby recalled a recent conversation that he had with his old friend
Jack Nicholson, who also starred in his 1973 film, The Last Detail. Nich-
olson told him, “You know, some people think you're dying.” Ashby
responded with his peculiar, high-pitched, maniacal laugh. “Dying?”
Ashby asked, incredulous. “Yes!” shouted Nicholson. Ashby reflected
for a moment. “I never got swamped by so much damn work in my
life,” he explained, “but I didn’t know it killed me.”
Hal Ashby is alive and well in Malibu. His gaunt face and sunken
cheeks show the ravages of more than his fifty years. But he is vigorous,
alert, and energetic, dressed in loose-fitting clothes and a rumpled blue
corduroy jacket with elegantly embroidered dragons on the sleeves.
Ashby claims that he hasn’t disappeared, he isn’t dying, and, rather
than being unable to complete a film, he has finished four in four years,
an output that few other contemporary Hollywood directors have
equaled. As for the drug rumors, Ashby says the accusations stem from
his admitted marijuana smoking. “I hear all this stuff, but I personally
don’t get alarmed.” Ashby explained, “As I go on with my life, I can’t
recall the last thing I heard about myself that was true.”
Ashby almost invites gossip, however, by secluding himself in his
Malibu Colony cottage that would look more comfortable on Cape Cod
or his nearby offices, where he has set up a complex and expensive
video editing system. And his decision to shoot two films back to back,
then edit them simultaneously, backfired. He was forced to rush Being
There into release just four months after he finished filming it, while
Second Hand Hearts (originally titled Hamster of Happiness) took him
almost two years to complete.
Ashby won't even go to see the version of Lookin’ to Get Out now
playing in theaters. Jon Voight, who co-wrote the story about a scam
artist who flees to Las Vegas to avoid the Mob, also stars in the film and
originated the project. He edited fifteen minutes out of Ashby’s two-

hour film, with the director’s permission, if not his approval.
In any form, Lookin’ has failed to attract an audience—Paramount
Pictures reports that the movie sold only $500,000 worth of tickets in
its first four days in three hundred theaters. And the critical reaction
seems to be savage.
All this, Ashby claims, does not perturb him. He’s happy to be iso-
lated from Hollywood: “I see people there start to fall into the wrong
things. They start living their lives on simple levels where they don’t
know the difference between right and wrong.”
He is bitter about his experiences with Lorimar Films, the TV compa-
ny (Dallas) that tried to make a big splash in movie production on the
strength of a three-picture deal with Ashby. Being There was the compa-
ny’s biggest hit both here and abroad, but the relationship soured over
fights between Ashby and Lorimar executives over the film’s advertis-
ing campaign. It hit rock bottom when Lorimar, without informing
Ashby beforehand, sold Second Hand Hearts and Lookin’ to Paramount
Pictures, which has not released them with great enthusiasm.
Ashby also accuses Lorimar of preventing him from directing Tootsie,
the Dustin Hoffman-in-drag film, by notifying Columbia Pictures that
he had not finished Lookin’ or Hearts on time. (Sydney Pollack was
eventually chosen to direct Tootsie.) Ashby, usually genial and friendly,
can barely suppress his rage as he talks about the dispute.
“Nobody was more unhappy than | about the delays,” he explained.
“I’m not crazy—I would have liked nothing better than to look at Sec-
ond Hand Hearts and think it was great. But I didn’t, so I ended up put-
ting a load on myself. And instead of getting help in the form of sup-
port from Lorimar, I got BS encouragement that you don’t even waste
your time listening to because you know it’s not sincere.”
Lorimar President Lee Rich said of Ashhy’s complaints, “They’re all
ridiculous. Why even dignify them by answering them? They deserve
no answer.” Filming Lookin’ to Get Out in Vegas while he was trying to
edit Hearts and plan his Rolling Stones documentary was too much
even for a workaholic like Ashby. “These last couple of years have been
an especially hard time for me,” Ashby says with a sigh. “I’ve run into
more frustration than I could ever imagine. It’s made me think about
things I usually don’t think about.”
“I have actually been on the verge of amok my whole entire lifer

—Loyal Muke, Second Hand Hearts
What Hal Ashby doesn’t like to dwell on is his life before he became a
Hollywood editor in 1963, and then a director seven years later with
The Landlord, starring Beau Bridges and Pearl Bailey.
Raised in Ogden, Utah, during the depths of the Depression, Ashby
felt an early sense of alienation as a non-Mormon in a predominantly
Mormon state. His parents’ twenty-five-year marriage broke up when
he was five; when he was twelve, his father committed suicide. Ashby
became a drifter, hitchhiking around the West, doing odd jobs, always
reading books. In the fall of 1950, he was building railroad trestles in
northern Wyoming when he went to get a drink of water. There was
an inch of ice in the water barrel, prompting Ashby to announce to his
co-workers, “I’m going to live off the fruits of the land.”
He hitchhiked to the corner of Vermont and Santa Monica and took
a seven-dollar-a-week room on Bunker Hill, working as a salesman for
everything from magazines to encyclopedias. He didn’t last long at any
of the jobs. “You were always doing a con, telling a lie.” Ashby ex-
plained. “I don’t like to tell lies.”
A job at Republic Studios running a multilith press led him to the
studio’s editing rooms. He was lucky enough to become apprenticed to
Robert Swink, editor for director William Wyler, with whom he worked
on The Children’s Hour. Eventually Ashby became director Norman Jew-
ison’s editor, winning an Oscar for his cutting of In the Heat of the Night.
Finally, Jewison gave him a chance to direct The Landlord and Ashby
was on his way.
Since then, there has been a Hal Ashby film out every two or three
years: Harold and Maude in 1971, with Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon as
unlikely lovers; The Last Detail in 1973, with Jack Nicholson as a career
sailor; Shampoo in 1975, starring Beatty as the philandering haircutter;
Bound for Glory in 1976, the Dust Bowl-era film about folksinger Woody
Guthrie with David Carradine in the title role; and the peak of Ashby’s
career, the pivotal antiwar movie Coming Home in 1978, for which he
was nominated for an Academy Award.
Unlike other directors in the 1970s, Ashby never collected a cult
reputation around himself. Shampoo is thought of as a Warren Beatty
film; Coming Home was credited more often to producer and star Jane
Fonda than director Ashby.
“That’s all right, it doesn’t bother me at all,” Ashby said in his low,
muttering voice. “If it did, I could do something about it very easily. I
could be very blatant and play the role. But I honestly believe that film
is a very communal art. People get out of it what they give to it.”
At the beginning of his career, Ashby worried that his self-effacing
attitude would reduce his own influence on his films. “But I didn’t have
to worry,” he said. “The first time I saw a piece of film I directed, I real-
ized all of me was in it.”
Ashby put a lot of himself into films like Bound for Glory and Sec-
ond Hand Hearts, a bittersweet love story about two of society’s rejects
played by Robert Blake and Barbara Harris. As Loyal Muke and Dinette
Dusty, Blake and Harris offer an alternately infuriating and touching
portrayal of human flotsam. (One of Harris’s children in the film is
named Human, a silent, withdrawn boy who seems a painful evocation
of Ashby’s own childhood.)
When Lorimar executives saw the film, according to Ashby, they
didn’t know what to do with it. Neither did Paramount Pictures, which
opened the film in New York and Texas for a week in May 1981, and an-
other week in Los Angeles and four other cities. There was no television
or radio advertising, and no advertising at all in newspapers for the
film’s Boston run. Paramount wouldn’t even screen the film in advance
for critics.
The experience was particularly painful for Ashby, who had re-edit-
ed Hearts several times while working on his other films. Lorimar had
hired a new editor to implement Ashby’s changes, but the editor ended
up changing the entire picture.
“It was a mess,” Ashby conceded. “I basically have a very positive
philosophy on life, because I don’t feel I have anything to lose. Most
things are going to turn out OK. But when I saw (the re-edited version)
of Second, for the first time in my life I thought someone was ruining
my picture.”
It was only the latest in a series of disappointments Ashby had with
Lorimar. He joined the company in 1978, after receiving assurances of
creative freedom in making his movies, and control over who would
distribute them. “That was one of the key appeals to me as a film mak-
er,” Ashby said. “It always hurts me to do battle over the marketing of
my films. I have a pretty good idea of what I’m trying to say, and one
of the goals of marketing is to convey some idea of that so people will
go to see the film.”
After working twenty-four-hour days to complete Being There in time

for Christmas 1979 and Academy Award consideration, Ashby found
that his preferred advertising campaign was abandoned. Lorimar’s new
campaign emphasized the love story between Peter Sellers as Chauncey
Gardiner, the dim-witted political savant, and Shirley MacLaine, the
wife of aging politician Melvyn Douglas (who won a best supporting
Oscar for his role).
“They created a lie,” Ashby says of Lorimar’s ads. The former en-
cyclopedia salesman has no more use for lies now than he did then.
“They were trying do make it seem as if there was this tremendous love
story because people like to go to see movies about men and women.
But that’s not what this picture was about.”
Ashby said his final falling out with Lorimar came when he inquired
about the radio ads for Being There in New York City. Lorimar Chairman
Merv Adelson asked Ashby why he wanted to know. “Nobody listens to
the radio in New York,” Ashby recalls Adelson telling him. Ashby was
dumbstruck.
“The first thing I wondered was if he was kidding me. Then I found
out he was serious. He’s a busy man and thinks, ‘I don’t listen to the ra-
dio in New York.’ But he doesn’t listen to the radio anywhere. He’s not
a radio listener. That’s OK. There are lots of people who don’t. That’s
part of life. But don’t tell me no one listens to the radio.” Although it
hardly seemed as if the relationship between Ashby and Lorimar could
deteriorate any further, Second Hand Hearts proved otherwise. Although
Lorimar was well aware of his unusual plan to shoot two movies back
to back and then edit them simultaneously, the company soon lost pa-
tience with the director. Rumors began to circulate through Hollywood
that Ashby was incapable of finishing Hearts.
Not so, Ashby claims. “Editing two films at once was an interesting
process that I shun now only because of the horrifying Lorimar experi-
ence,” he said. “I was in one room editing Being There and concentrat-
ing heavily on that, but sometimes I just couldn’t get it. Then all I had
to do was get up, walk down the hall and into a room where they were
working on Hearts and I'd get as involved in that as I was on the other
film. That was the whole idea, and it worked very well.”
Unfortunately, Second Hand Hearts didn’t work quite so well. Ashby
spent weeks tinkering with the movie, changing entire sections and
replacing them with new footage. Finally, in May of 1980, he arrived at
a version he liked, left detailed notes on how it should be constructed,
and drove all night to Las Vegas where he began filming the next day
on Lookin’ to Get Out.
Again without his knowledge, Ashby claimed, Lorimar sneak-pre-
viewed Hearts to disastrous resuits. The director claims that the research
companies hired by the studios attract what amounts to a cult sneak
preview audience, older film patrons who attend only studio previews
in selected cities. Based on the research, more changes were made by
the time Paramount released the film the following year (supposedly as
a contractual requirement to get a TV sale). Ashby had, in his words,
“emotionally cut loose from the film.”
Abandoning a film is a painful process for any film maker, but Ashby
had to suffer through it not once but twice. He has declined to see the
version of Lookin’ to Get Out now playing across the country because it’s
not his version. “I directed it, it’s a Hal Ashby film,” the director said. “I
made the decision to allow what Jon Voight) did to the cut. I choose
not to see it, not because I disagree with the cut, but because I don’t
want to second-guess him.”
Ashby and Voight’s relationship was a close one, going back to the
intensity of filming Coming Home, in which Voight played a paraplegic
veteran. But Ashby said he will never turn over one of his films again
for someone else to edit.
“It’s my responsibility. I can’t negate that by saying, ‘Hey, if they
don’t like it, it’s your fault, not mine.’ That’s bull. I’m the one who said,
‘OK, do what you want,’ instead of ‘No. I’m sorry. The version I have
here is my cut, it’s my film and I don’t care what any of you think.’
From now on, that’s what I’m going to say.”
To soothe his wounds, Ashby threw himself into the filming of Time
Is on Our Side, a documentary of three Rolling Stones concerts that is
as direct as the famous rock group’s music. Ashby and Mick Jagger had
long been friends and mutual admirers of each other’s talents, and Ash-
by accepted immediately when the Stones offered him the opportunity
to make the first major concert film since Martin Scorsese’s The Last
Waltz in 1978.
“I wanted a classical look, not a hand-held,” Ashby explained. “I
wanted to stay on a shot as long as could. This film has energy just from
watching the Stones.”
Embassy Pictures, the studio recently bought by Norman Lear and
Jerry Perenchio, will release Time Is on Our Side in February, although
not in the manner Ashby originally planned. He wanted patrons to be
able to “jump up and down and holler” while watching Time in concert
halls, not movie theaters. Embassy will employ a more traditional ap-
proach, however.
Never one to remain idle, Ashby is negotiating to direct a new Diane
Keaton film, Modern Bride, which the actress will co-produce with Rich-
ard Roth (Julia) for Orion Pictures. Two of his more expensive projects,
a film version of Gore Vidal’s apocalyptic novel, Kalki, which will star
Mick Jagger, and a cinematic adaptation of Richard Brauntigan’s Gothic
mystery, The Hawkline Monster, are in limbo while Ashby tries to figure
out how to make them cost less.
For now Ashby is just trying to recuperate from the tensions and tri-
als of the last four years. Or as Loyal Muke put it, “You just got to learn
to take the bitter with the better. That’s my philosophy.”
“Directed by William Wyler” Interview
Scott Berg/1985
Unpublished interview conducted on February 12, 1985. Reprinted with permission of

Catherine Wyler.
Scott Berg: How did you first meet William Wyler?

Hal Ashby: Well, I first met Willy Wyler when I was like the fifth as-
sistant editor—the apprentice editor, in short—on a picture he directed
called The Big Country. | had worked in different jobs. It was the first
big picture that I really went on to, and I think I went on to it because
I was a good hard worker. Bob Swink was the chief editor on it, and
whenever they finished working on a reel everybody would go down
to the cutting room, and it was a little speech that Mr. Wyler made
[laughs] to me as being the last person on the picture. And he asked me,
“Whenever you have any ideas about anything in the reel at all, any
cuts in the reel, please get them out some way. Find some way to bring
what it is that you have to say.” I had never been asked my opinion be-
fore [laughs]|—that’s part of what goes on in the cutting room. I think
of him so tenderly that way because he opened up all those doors for
me. He made me think more creatively than I had in my whole life. I
mean, it was just an attitude towards how they would look at film, so I
met him on that picture in that particular way. He also said, “It’s fine if
I tell you that’s a lousy idea, [laughs loudly] and it’s crazy, and I’m real
hard on you. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to hear the ideas; it just
means that arguments tend to sound personal.” [laughs loudly] That’s
how he put it, and he said, “So, please, get them out.”
Now I can also remember a little later date one time when he was
asking my opinion about something in the projection room. While he
was asking me, and I was rambling on a little like I am right now, he
had some little thing in his hand that he kind of wore like with a watch
114
SCOTT BERG / 1985 115
fob thing, and he kept spinning it. [laughs loudly] He looked down at
it, he was spinning it, what it did was to spin real fast and you could
read what it had on it and it said, “Piss On You.” [laughs loudly] Need-
less to say, I don’t know how he took my thing. That was how I met
him, that was my first introduction.
Scott Berg: Now were there specific things you came up with?
Hal Ashby: Gosh, I don’t even remember. I mean, most of my ideas of
the time I don’t think they sounded so hot [laughs loudly] because I re-
ally didn’t know very much. But I must say, the main thing was that he
was always willing to listen to the idea, he really did mean it, he meant
that’s how good films are made. And he said, “That’s why you’ve got to
get it out.” And he meant, “And when I do yell at you and holler at you,
I really don’t mean that. I don’t mean it. I don’t mean that you’re stu-
pid or you’re dumb,” he said, “because you must struggle to get things
out because that’s how good films are made.” Ideas I may have had I
wouldn’t remember right now, and there are so many that go around.
Scott Berg: What other films did you do under his baton?
Hal Ashby: Well, I worked on that one. One nice thing, when you
worked with Wyler, you worked for a long time. [long laugh] I worked
a lot with the editor that he worked with for such a long time, which
was Bob Swink. The other film that I worked the longest was The Chil-
dren’s Hour.
I remember so many things because in the editorial you come into
such contact all the time. I meant that I as an assistant, you know,
would spend so much time personally with him and so forth. I could
go on for hours [laughs] about the things that would happen with him.
I still to this day, my notepaper at home has to do with .. . If Iramble
on and digress, if you want me to stop, please do... |have my notepa-
per at home which I told somebody about. I think it was on Big Country,
and we went on a preview down in Long Beach. And we got back about
one o’clock in the morning, we got back to the Goldwyn Studios, and
we were up in his office. We were all talking about things, and all dur-
ing the discussions, he was sitting at his desk and he just kept doing
something on a pad of paper. When we left, after we’d been up there
talking for about an hour, maybe two o'clock in the morning, I looked
[laughs] at his desk to see what it was. And on this pad of paper, he'd
just written the word “Decisions.” [laughs] He just kept writing it over
and over, [laughs] and had nothing else on the page at all. | remem-
ber telling a friend of mine about that about five years ago. [laughs]
They had scratch paper, note paper, made up for me with this particular
thing. That was, uh, oh God. [laughs]
I remember another thing also, another preview. When I went, there
was such a big crew on Big Country that they couldn’t take everybody. I
was so into the film, they [were previewing in] San Francisco, and so I
paid my own way up there, you know, and just went to the theater. Of
course, when Willy saw me there, he said to make sure that I was paid
and everything. One of the things I remember the strongest about that
preview was that, I think on reel seven, it came up out of sync. [laughs]
I found out something that night—I’m sure he already knew it. I found
out how interested an audience was by how upset they got when they
had to stop. But it was down for probably ten minutes because there
were somebody’s nervous fingers in there trying to thread up the nega-
tive and get it all back in sync and everything. And when I went back
down in the projection room, a lot of people had come out to get candy
and popcorn and so forth, and when they started the picture back up,
there was Willy running around in the lobby grabbing people and say-
ing, “The picture has started again, the picture has started again,” forc-
ing [laughs] them back into the theater! There was no question about it,
he wasn’t polite or anything, he was just grabbing them and throwing
them back in! It was hysterical.
Scott Berg: In the cutting room, how involved was Wyler in the edi-
torial process would you say?
Hal Ashby: Well, because of having Bobby Swink, he really left a lot
up to Bobby. I mean, like when we actually did the finish of The Big
Country, he was over shooting Ben-Hur and I remember Bobby taking
one of the last prints—it may have even been the answer print—over
to Willy in Rome to show him. But he would spent a lot of time in the
projection room.
On Children’s Hour, there was a point where he spent quite a bit of
time in the cutting room. But because of that good relationship with
Bobby—which is the relationship everybody should have with an ed-
itor—he didn’t spend that much time directly over his shoulder. He
utilized his time.
I’ve always wished I could find someone like Bobby as I’m directing
now, because I think it helped Willy in his output of what he could do.
He could get more pictures out. I looked, it was a long period of time
when he had two a year coming out! It dawned on me how he did that
[laughs]—it had to be with a good editorial staff.
Scott Berg: How much understanding do you think he had of the
editorial process?
Hal Ashby: Oh, | think he had a good understanding of it. I think that
Willy had a very good understanding of the editorial process. I never
found him wanting for, you know, to try to figure anything out as far
as the mechanics of it were, or how the machinations of it worked.
The only thing that would be funny because of him not spending all
that great amount of time in the room was some of the arguments he
and Robert would get into, and they got into some horrendous [laughs]
arguments.
On Big Country, for example, when we ran what we cali the first cut,
or the rough cut, which was three months after the picture was finished
shooting, [laughs] it was like twenty-eight reels, first cut. At the end of
reel fourteen, Bobby had put a piece of leader that said, “Place Com-
mercial Here,” figuring that they would take a break and [laughs] go
have dinner. As I said, it was this huge crew, and I being the fifth assis-
tant, the apprentice, I didn’t go up to dinner with everybody. We were
down at Goldwyn Room A, and I was waiting there for them, waiting
there for them. About 11:30, one of the other editors came back, a man
by the name of Bob Belcher. He came back and said, “What are you do-
ing here?” I said, “Well, I’m waiting for them to come back. We finish
running the picture. They’ve only run the first fourteen reels!” Willy
had never seen the picture all the way through. And he said, “Oh, God,
they aren’t coming back!” I said, “Why?” He said, “Bob quit!” [laughs
loudly] So they were discussing the first fourteen reels and apparently
had this huge argument, and Bob walked out. But he was back the next
day and continued on. Those are the kind of things that go on.
Scott Berg: We’ve noticed there is a certain fatness to Wyler’s films
in the ’50s, when he became his own producer. Do think part of it
was not having a Sam Goldwyn or a strong producer to rub against?
Do you think there is some disadvantage to being your own producer-
director?
Hal Ashby: | don’t know, I guess. I assume from some of the things
that Willy had told me—not told me, but that I heard . . . A good ex-
ample of that is that [Samuel] Goldwyn was an exceptionally strong
producer. I remember leaving the projection room one time—I think it
was while working on Children’s Hour—and we were going by the open

booth. There was a couple of goldbergs that I noticed had Wuthering
Heights on it. I just poked Willy and said, “Hey look, how about that?”
I’m sure his mind was well into the other picture we had just come
out of, and he said, “Oh, yes. You know I shot a much better ending
than is on the picture.” [Ashby cracks up laughing.] I was absolutely
astounded. I said, “What do you mean?” and he proceeded to tell me. I
don’t remember exactly what it was that happened, but he did say that
Goldwyn didn’t like the ending that Willy had had on the picture and
that he had had another ending shot for the picture. My God, that’s
absolutely amazing, because I’m sure at the time it must have cost a
tremendous amount of [money]. I just remember it as, first of all, it
startled me, and then it made me also see how strong a person that
Goldwyn was, and then it also showed me that there was an incredible
thing about how you get over something, in other words, how at a later
time you can not have the . . . Because it didn’t bother Willy, he just
said it, as a matter of fact, like, “Oh sure, that went on,” and so forth.
As to whether it made his pictures better, I’m not sure.
But I think he was very, very tough. I think if those films felt fat,
they might have been the films themselves, what they were and how
this filmmaking itself expanded in their stories. Like Big Country was a
big, big picture. God, it was shot in Technorama, big like Vistavision,
a big wide frame, and we had so much [footage]. According to Bobby,
he always shot a lot of versions of things. He shot a lot of film, but he
actually shot versions and versions, which was wonderful as an editor.
It was just terrific, it gives you so many different ways to go. [laughs]
But he left himself with a lot of latitude. I have a feeling he was always
pretty strong with that.
Scott Berg: How would you describe the particular quality of his
films?
Hal Ashby: | always thought of Willy as very based in reality, his films
are based in reality. He had a great sense of humor that went along
with things, and he’d get pretty much out there and so forth, but his
base in reality always made him go after that which would never feel
false. I felt I learned along the way from Willy that he didn’t want to be
untruthful. He had very strong feelings that way, and he would make
films for reasons. I remember one time talking about The Big Country,
a big, huge film that took all these people this long, long time to make
it. One of the things he felt very strongly about it—I remember him
talking to Bobby in the projection room one day. They had this fight
sequence in it and it was wonderful. It was shot with these long shots
that they did. In this fight between Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck,
at the end of the fight, and where either man had exhausted them-
selves and beaten the hell out of each other, Peck had a line that said,
“Now, tell me, Leach, what did we prove?” And that was one of the rea-
sons for Willy making the film. He had these very honest things, very,
very simple things sometimes, that would be basic drives, they would
be reasons for him making these films, and so forth. And that reality
came out of that, along with his incredible sense of humor that he had.
As tough as he could get—[laughs] I saw him put a couple of people in
tears before!—there was always that base of reality that was so good.
Scott Berg: Let me ask you one more question about The Big Country.
You said he was off to do Ben-Hur. Had he hung around, do you think
the picture would have been cut differently?
Hal Ashby: Well, I don’t know, because he really had long, long ses-
sions in the projection with Swink and the editors before he went off to
do Ben-Hur. He wasn’t happy with the ending, and Bobby went up and
shot just an ending with Jean Simmons and Peck riding off down from
this higher place coming from the mountains away trom the camera
together, and that was the only thing I could really think of that was
done without Willy knowing it. I don’t think he had any great sur-
prises when Bobby took the picture back, when he took it over to him
in Rome. I don’t remember it as that way, at least. We had such long
sessions and by the time he did leave, I remember we did a lot of long
hours and a lot of pressure, wanting to get as much done before Willy
took off.
Scott Berg: When Wyler was out of the room, what was the scuttle-
butt among the editors about Wyler? What were the eccentricities, pe-
culiarities, the inside dirt?
Hal Ashby: Well, I’m trying to remember because I went on with
Swink from that picture; strangely enough, I ended up his assistant.
Bobby might complain with other directors about what they shot or
didn’t shoot and so forth, but I don’t remember him complaining that
way with Willy. There was such a close relationship, they had such a
good feeling. Bobby would tell me a lot of stories about Willy, and I can
remember Bobby telling me a story about Willy from Roman Holiday,
which to me is one of the most hysterical stories I’ve ever heard. But
there apparently was a scene—they finished editing the film in Italy
also—that Bobby didn’t like, Willy did like. When they first came back
to California to run the picture for the Paramount executives, Bobby
told me that at the end of the screening everybody said, “Oh, my God,
it’s just wonderful. Awful pleased with the film,” and so forth. And
Willy proceeds to stand up and tell everybody, “Well, if you think it
was wonderful .. .” and he describes this great scene which Bobby
always said was never that good. Everybody asked, “Why isn’t that
in the picture?” and he said, “Because this man here”—and he points
to Bobby—“doesn’t want it in the picture. He didn’t think it was any
good.” Now they all turned to Bobby and said, “How can you not have
that scene in the picture, this wonderful scene?” I forget what the scene
was—it doesn’t matter—but Bobby, he said he’d had a feeling, so he
had brought the scene with him when he came and had it in a can. He
said, “I just happen to have it,” and he ran it for everybody, and they all
looked like they didn’t like it. So they would have those kind of games,
that’s like Bobby telling stories out of school on Willy. That’s the main
thing, Bobby telling me more like anecdotes about things that hap-
pened with Willy prior to the time that I knew him and wasn’t around
for things like that and so forth. I think that, you know, I just always
felt a deep affection for him, even though I saw him get into arguments
that I couldn’t believe, I’ve never been anywhere near before in my life
or after in my lifetime.
Scott Berg: Is there such a thing as a Wyler style? Can you see a trade-
mark? An imprint on a Wyler film that would distinguish them?
Hal Ashby: I’m sure there is a style of Willy’s. I always thought it was
because he had such great restraint. I mean, he always held back, he
never hit it on the head all the time. A great example for me of show-
ing how somebody would do something would be in The Best Years of
Our Lives, which I had nothing to do with, it’s just a film I’ve seen a
number of times. When Fredric March first comes home and he and
Myrna Loy get together, it’s that long shot down the hall and there is
so much emotion to it. He would do that continually, always holding
back, holding back. I just felt I learned so much from that particular
thing. I kept looking for that kind of thing, so I kind of thought about
that as his style, but he made so many different kinds of films. I don’t
know if it’s the style of being able to do that with great restraint, but
it’s a great way of injecting humor without forcing it. One of the things
I remember, as far as Willy’s humor, was in Big Country we had scene
where Burl Ives came out to the edge of his porch and they brought
his horse around and told him to get on the horse. I don’t know if it
was Chuck Connors or which one it was who brought it around, but it
was too far away from him to get on the horse. He just stood there and
looked at him, and it never got that big a laugh, it never worked that
big in Big Country. And when I was watching Ben-Hur later, he does the
same thing and it got a big laugh in that picture. I always thought that
was a great thing: if it doesn’t work in one way, I’ll try it in another. I
think if it had worked in the one he wouldn’t have used in the other.
Scott Berg: You mentioned Wyler’s influence on you just in terms of
getting you to think creatively and in terms of film. What influence did
he have on your career? Did he affect your becoming a director at all?
Do you carry him around when you direct in any way?
Hal Ashby: Oh, I think I carry him around all the time when I direct,
although I never had discussions with him about that. It all had to do
with just the absorption of his work and being close enough at times to
really see how it happens. It was that very strong attitude about being
able to listen to what other people had to say, like the first thing I was
hit with when Willy said, “Let us hear what you have to say.” It’s some-
thing that I’ve carried and I think it’s the only way for me—it came
directly out of that. I don’t think, “Gee, what would Willy have done
with this?” or “How would Willy have done that?” That doesn’t ever
even enter into my mind, but I’m sure it’s there in the subconscious, at
least it’s such a strong influence. It was through Willy and Bobby that I
learned what it meant to direct a film; I didn’t have a clue before that.
And what was good about it was bringing it up, making one talk about
what their ideas and thoughts were. That’s the creative process. Prior
to that, I can remember an editor looking at me across the room and
saying, “Now whatever they say, don’t open your mouth. Don’t you say
a word.” I said, “I wouldn’t know what to talk about anyway.” [laughs]
Which I wouldn’t have. But this, I learned what to talk about. I’m sure
the first ideas I had were horrendous ideas, but the fact that I was en-
couraged to keep doing it, and then you start learning and you really
do learn, it’s amazing. That, plus just Willy’s gift of what he did with
his films. You know, it becomes an instinctive thing, like the restraint,
holding back and so forth. I remember and think about those things
very strongly, I think they are very important things in the films, and
in that way I try to be the same way and think the same way.
Scott Berg: Now, I’m questioned out, unless you have anything else.
Are there any other things you’d like to say?
Hal Ashby: Well, the things I remember about Willy and fighting,
arguments. When I worked with Bobby Swink, I’ve never seen anybody
have arguments—I mean never before I came into contact with him or
after I left him and was out on my own—I’ve never seen anybody have
arguments the way they had arguments. I mean, they were incredible.
A good came out of them and I’m not sure if they were sometimes...
I can relate one short story that had to do with Big Country, with the
close-up of Charles Bickford at the end of it. Bobby had a long shot and
in the projection room Willy would not let go of it. He said, “Didn’t
I shoot a close-up of that?” And Bobby said, “Yes.” “Why?” He said,
“I thought this was better.” Fifteen minutes later, Willy would still be
on it, we’d be off on another sequence and he would still be saying,
“Well, how could anybody not put the close-up of the man in the last
sequence of the picture?” And he’d go on and that was needling and
so forth, but I saw them get in arguments and I saw Bobby throw a reel
on the floor one time he was so angry and so furious with him and so
forth. They would literally really yell at each other. And they main-
tained this wonderful relationship, they were close enough they could
do that, I guess is what it is. They could do it.
How to Kill a Movie
Michael Dare/1986
From LA Weekly, May 16, 1986. Reprinted with permission of Michael Dare.
In Susan Seidelman’s original ending for Desperately Seeking Susan, the

two heroines brush off all the guys and run off together to Egypt; in
Orion’s version, they go back to their fellas. In Terry Gilliam’s version
of Brazil, there’s a happy ending that turns out to be a cruel delusion; in
Universal’s version, the last shot was cut to keep the happy ending hap-
py. Though Brazil is one of the few cases in which the filmmaker pre-
vailed (Universal released Gilliam’s cut), we’ll never know what Adrian
Lyne really had in mind when he made 9% Weeks or what Ridley Scott
was imagining when he made Legend. Studios hacked those pictures to
shreds in last-ditch efforts to make them more commercial.
Does anybody really think that Desperately Seeking Susan would have
been Jess commercial with a more outrageous ending? Orion did—and
obviously they’re not alone. For as these (and many other) examples
show, we’re being inundated with pictures with no single guiding intel-
ligence to guarantee that they make sense. They’re nobody’s version of
anything, just bastardized “product” out to make a buck.
People often wonder how so much time and money can be spent on
projects that seem to have been made by nobody. This is the story of
what happened to one such bastardized movie, 8 Million Ways to Die,
a film disowned by its producer Steve Roth, its director Hal Ashby, and
its stars, Jeff Bridges and Rosanna Arquette. With its cross-purposes,
assembly-line methods, and battles between backers and artists, this
production story provides a textbook example of how to kill a movie.
It is one such story among many.
8 Million Ways to Die should have been a contender. The story was a
thriller, but it was more than a thriller—it tackled the subject of addic-
tion.
123
It started out as a hot property, a prizewinning crime novel by Law-

rence Block about an alcoholic ex-cop and a coke-happy hooker in New
York who fall in love despite the murderous interference of a drug-deal-
er named Angel. Like most hot properties it went through the standard
Hollywood permutations. Screenwriter Oliver Stone (Midnight Express,
Salvador) adapted the novel; and his script was originally slated to be
directed by Walter Hill, with Nick Nolte in the starring role. As often
happens, the project fell through.
The film took its present shape when producer Steve Roth set up
a deal between PSO (Producers Sales Organization) and director Hal
Ashby to shoot Stone’s script with Bridges and Jamie Lee Curtis as leads;
ultimately, Arquette replaced Curtis. Then Stone’s script was thrown
out when, for budgetary reasons, the setting was changed from New
York to L.A. and Stone was too busy directing Salvador to rework the
story.
Script-doctor supreme Robert Towne took over the job (he’s uncred-
ited) and worked to preserve the blend of addiction-study and thriller
that made the story special. He even wanted to change the title to Easy
Does It, an Alcoholics Anonymous slogan seen frequently on bumper
stickers. In turn, AA was impressed by the filmmakers’ sincere belief
that they were creating a serious film about the spiritual aspects of
battling alcoholism and drug addiction. For the first time, Alcoholics
Anonymous actually allowed its name to be used in a film.
This seemed to be an optimistic and rather fitting sign, for rumors of
chaos on the set and rampant drug-abuse had been attached to Ashby’s
last few pictures. And since Second-Hand Hearts, Lookin’ to Get Out, and
The Slugger’s Wife had all been resounding commercial and critical fail-
ures—thereby fueling the speculation about drugs—some people had
begun to ask whether Ashby was still capable of making a good film.
Towne completed about half the script before shooting began, leav-
ing the actors a lot of room to improvise, a “hardship” they cheerfully
embraced. Ashby, Arquette, and Bridges spent long afternoons in their
trailers writing scenes. Soon word got out that the picture was in trou-
ble. (There was even vague speculation as to what they all were really
doing behind closed doors.)
All along, there, was pressure from PSO to get on with the produc-
tion. Though the start-date kept getting pushed back, PSO decided not
to adjust the release date. Tension on the set mounted. The fact that
the script was being rewritten as they went along, and that Bridges and
MICHAEL DARE / 1986 125
Arquette felt free to participate actively in creating their characters, led

to problems: PSO’s completion-bond company wanted to see the actual
pages of script before they were shot each day; but given Towne’s con-
stant rewriting and all the improvisation, the money-men couldn’t see
the script until after each day’s shooting.
Once they had finished shooting, the real trouble began. Perhaps
the PSO people thought they were losing control of the project, or that
Ashby would take so long editing that they wouldn’t have time to make
their own final cut before release. In any case, two weeks after the last
day of shooting, Ashby was fired from the picture and the actual nega-
tive was moved to another editing facility.
At first Ashby didn’t take the firing seriously, deeming it just another
ploy in the constant political shuffle of Hollywood filmmaking. Besides,
he always lets his editor do a first cut with no interference, making his
own cut only when the editor says it’s ready. In this case, he handed the
film over to his chosen editor, Robert Lawrence, and lounged on the
beach for a couple of weeks, assuming that eventually PSO would let
him do his own cut. (Ashby, after all, had made his name as a film edi-
tor, even winning a 1967 Oscar for In the Heat of the Night.) Instead, PSO
hired editor Stuart Pappé (An Unmarried Woman) to do the editing and
Lawrence quit (though he’d been invited to stay). Pappé never spoke to
Ashby while editing the footage; indeed, Ashby still hadn’t seen any of
the film other than the dailies he saw while shooting.
Fights between producers and directors are not uncommon in Holly-
wood, but they’re usually over artistic differences. “Why is it three and
a half hours long and not in chronological order?”—that’s the kind of
thing one hears when studios catch their first glimpse of someone’s lat-
est “masterpiece.” But that didn’t happen here, and PSO said nothing
of the kind, because Ashby was never given a chance to finish. There
wasn’t anything wrong or right about the Ashby version of 8 Million
Ways to Die—it only existed in his mind.
Nevertheless, this film with Ashby’s name on it has been lambasted
by most critics for its Miami vices: too much dirty language (fuck this,
fuck that), too much sleaze, and an incoherently developed theme
about alcoholism and drugs. Ashby says this isn’t his film, that only he
could possibly know how the pieces were supposed to fit together and
he was never consulted during post-production.
Bridges and Arquette share the same sense of betrayal. Throughout
his career, Ashby has been known as an actor’s director and, in fact,
has directed his actors to numerous Academy Award nominations (€.g.,

Jon Voight and Jane Fonda for Coming Home). Actors will take chances
with him that they wouldn’t necessarily take with anyone else. While
shooting, he frequently gives them extra takes, allowing them to ex-
periment, fool around, deviate from the script, hang loose, and take the
chance of looking stupid—trusting that during editing, Ashby will use
only the takes that make everyone look best. To fire Ashby was not just
a surprising power maneuver but a considerable betrayal of the actors’
confidence. Arquette, in particular, has received horrible notices but it’s
quite possible there’s no single shot of her in the film that Ashby would
have used.
Bridges’s performance isn’t exactly what Ashby had in mind either.
Though it’s considered the norm in Hollywood, Ashby doesn’t believe
in postdubbing (or “looping”) the actors’ voices. (Even in Bound for
Glory, when David Carradine plays the guitar on the top of a moving
train, you’re hearing live sound.) After Ashby was fired, Bridges was
given two hundred lines of dialogue to loop. In effect, more half of the
audio version of his performance was directed by editor Stuart Pappé.
Ashby took PSO into arbitration at the Directors Guild under a DGA
rule that if a director completes shooting, he or she has the inalienable
right to a director’s cut; the director is also given ten weeks for edit-
ing and a set number of previews. But TriStar, the film’s distributor,
planned to testify that it needed the film released in April because of
a threatened movie glut in May. Normally, in that type of “expedited
arbitration,” the DGA cuts the editing time in half. For Ashby, the idea
of five weeks of editing was laughable. He wanted to continue working
toward the original April date. “It would have been silly to go for expe-
dited arbitration and end up having to hand the film over unfinished.
It would have been too frustrating. And there would have been nothing
to stop them from releasing their version in the meantime.”
As it turned out, PSO did release its version—to a shellacking from
the critics and a lack of interest from the audience. Were it not for the
film’s box-office failure, the ruin of a once-promising project and the
waste of time for all the talent involved, this story would have a hap-
py ending. All potential litigation has been resolved. Ashby has been
compensated for his removal from the picture. No one’s reputation has
been ruined. Arquette, Bridges, and Ashby are all working on new films.
And PSO is now getting out of producing and sticking to distribution.
But not before having made some very strange choices and a lot of en-
emies.
ROSANNA ARQUETTE—ACTRESS (The Executioner’s Song, Desper-

ately Seeking Susan, After Hours)
“The only reason Jeff Bridges and I did the movie was because Hal
Ashby was involved; and it was one of my greatest experiences working
with him. He’s a great actor’s director; he’s always there with you. The
guy’s an artist, a true, true artist. Hal lets you do your thing with a very
strong guiding hand. He’s in fine shape, better than he’s ever been, but
obviously they only hired him to get us. I guess they hired me because
they wanted me to show my tits, I don’t know. PSO was flipped out
because I didn’t do any nudity. Hal and I decided, ‘Why do we have to
show a hooker fuck?’ ...
“We'd purposely do takes where we’d overact, then calm down and
do a take right after that was perfect. One example is when Jeff and I
were riding down on the tram the first time. The way it is now, I say,
‘Prick’ and he says, ‘Fucking cunt’ and I say, ‘Fuck you.’ That was, just
us on the first take warming up to get into it. Hal would never have put
that in the movie...
“T go from a tough chick to suddenly I’m nice. It wasn’t like that at
all, and I’m getting attacked because they left all these scenes out. I was
really proud of what I did in this movie. It was a completely different
character from my others. But they made me look like a jerk, like I de-
cided to play it that way, and I didn’t. It’s the most painful experience
in the world to know that Hal didn’t get to decide which takes to use.
“It’s really scary considering how many people in Hollywood think
you're only as good as your last film. I do this for a living. Besides our
love of the work, it’s the way we support ourselves. These people are
fucking with my life. | had heard that the film was in terrible shape,
but the only bad thing was them coming to the set and hovering with
their bad vibes. Hal is clean, protective, energetic, and supportive.
They come on with doom and blackness and time and money and
pressure...
“They even have the score in mono. They wouldn't put up the extra
$5,000 to have it in stereo. It’s unbelievable! They took pieces of mu-
sic written for one segment and put them in another. They even told
James Newton Howard to rewrite the music more like Miami Vice. I
said, ‘You guys wanted to make Miami Vice, and instead you made Mi-
ami Twice.’ Hal shouldn’t see the film; it would kill him. It’s a horrible,
horrible thing...
“I mean, PSO thought they could edit the film better than Hal Ash-
by. What kind of mind thinks that way? Who do they think they are?
Confiscating that film was the lowest thing anyone could do.”
JEFF BRIDGES—ACTOR (The Last Picture Show, Bad Company, Winter

Kills, Cutter’s Way, Starman, Jagged Edge)
“I had one of the most creative times working on this picture I’ve
ever had. Hal gave us space to create, and it wasn’t just jerking off—we
came up with good stuff. Unfortunately, they cut against the way Hal
shot and conceived the film. He’s one of the best directors I’ve ever
worked with. He’s an artist, though his process may look strange to
people who aren’t artists. They shouldn’t have hired Hal in the first
place if they wanted some other kind of film. We were going out of our
way not to make a shoot-’em-up drug movie. There have been enough
movies about drug dealers and cops...
“T was interested in exploring the obsessive side of his character. I
went to AA meetings and found it to be an incredible organization,
with an interesting perspective on how to live your life whether you’re
an alcoholic or not. I wanted to put some of that out. I wanted to
explore the spiritual aspects of what an alcoholic goes through. It’s a
tricky subject to address in a movie, because when you talk about any-
thing spiritual in a movie, there’s a danger of getting too sappy or too
preachy. We were very aware of that, and the scenes we shot dealing
with it really walked that tightrope. They got the point across without
being preachy. It’s all been cut out of the film.
“I feel ripped around. In the first place, I did the picture to work with
Hal. To have it pulled away at the stage where all his expertise lies—
which is in the editing—made no sense to me whatsoever.
“Hal’s magic lies in letting certain energies in. Some directors have it
all planned out, but Hal is very open, and you'd be surprised the kind
of things that just come in at the last moment. Hal’s process is an ex-
citing one, but I can see how it might be a little disconcerting for the
money people. But they’re big boys. They should know what movie-
making is all about. It wasn’t as though they were unhappy with the
parts of the film we were showing them. We were busting our butts,
writing and shooting at the same time. I’ve never worked so hard on
a picture in my life! We were locked in our dressing rooms writing our

asses off. It’s not like we were in there doing coke or anything. This was
the cleanest, hardest-working set I’ve ever been on. I never saw anyone
do anything...
“In the final film, they goosed up all the stuff we were trying to
avoid. It was a case of fixing something that wasn’t broken.”
HAL ASHBY—DIRECTOR (The Landlord, Harold and Maude, The Last

Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, Being There)
“My experience as a director has always been that the moment you
start directing that creative flow in somebody, you’re doing them a
disservice 99 percent of the time because you’re throwing them off. It
doesn’t mean the creative flow stops, but all of a sudden they have to
downshift and turn left instead of going straight ahead—just because
you think you know the bridge is out. All you have to know is that if
that person is creative, when they get to the bridge and it’s out, they’1l
know it themselves. They won’t need me to tell them. Just because
they’re brave doesn’t make them stupid...
Everything concerned with 8 Million Ways to Die was just my normal
process. I know PSO had good reason to be anxious, but I’d never had
people watching that close before. I don’t know why. I’ve had them
come up and say, ‘Hey, you’re five days behind,’ and it’s the normal
thing, but this film had more of that than anything I’ve ever done. We
finished the picture less than 10 percent over budget, which was well
within the contingency estimated for completion. All of their com-
ments during the making of the film were positive. They liked the dai-
lies, and nobody complained...
“It’s just a case of them not wanting me. Maybe they thought I
wouldn’t get it finished on time. I’m not quite clear. I’ve had these sort
of situations before. With Being There, which only opened in two the-
aters on Christmas Day, I actually brought the film myself from the lab
to the noon opening in L.A. That’s how I look at editing. In this case,
I don’t even know what the arguments were. The wire that I got said
that I was totally irresponsible and nonprofessional. I think they have
to say that to fire you, but it’s a little harsh when you've been working
so Mardi.
“Once a director is removed, the danger is that there’s this commit-
tee of editors who can’t possibly think the same way. They offered me
the opportunity to see the film to see if I wanted ‘A HAL ASHBY FILM’
on it—it was in my contract—but I couldn’t look at it. I said obviously

it’s not “A HAL ASHBY FILM” unless J make it. I ended up with a pay-
ment, but what does that do? It doesn’t give you your film. Talk about
how experiences...”
MARK DAMON—EXECUTIVE PRODUCER (Founder, chairman,

and former chief executive officer of PSO, which marketed Das Boot,
The Neverending Story, The Clan of the Cave Bear, 92 Weeks, and Short
Circuit)
“I’m not a whimsical person. I don’t operate on whims. What was
done was done for a reason. | think I’m a total professional, and what
was done was done with the best interests of everybody. Our firing Hal
wasn’t because we disagreed with or distrusted Hal’s creative vision of
the film. It was a business decision .. .
“T don’t think there are many interpretations of this film. Ashby
doesn’t shoot a lot of footage, and he very much edits in camera. There-
fore, any other editor coming on cannot, in my estimation, go very
far afield from Ashby’s intentions. It’s not as though someone shot
500,000 feet of film and you had a year to assemble the pieces. If Ashby
didn’t want so much swearing in the movie, why did he print it in all
those takes?...
“The man who was the final editor on the picture had long discus-
sions with all the actors involved. I personally invited Rosanna and
Jeff to make sure that their characterizations were reflected as much
as possible in the film. They made comments to the editor, who made
changes at their request. One scene about Arquette’s background as a
dancer was put back in because she wanted it. The scene made sense; it
helped the character. I never wanted Arquette to do nudity. I left that
decision up to the director...
“I knew that Hal was a very talented director, and when we hired Hal
we hired a man whose talents we knew would eventually come out on
the screen. I think the picture we eventually put into the marketplace
was a picture that all parties can be proud of. In the end, I was satisfied
with the product . .”
STEVE ROTH—PRODUCER (Vice-chairman of ICM; packaged Foul

Play, Silver Streak, The Omen, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff.)
“Hal is just great, and I loved the work he did. After he was fired,
I didn’t want to have anything to do with the film. The wrong takes
were used, the wrong music was used . . . just a lot of dumb errors, and
I blame myself for it. |put the whole thing together, and I never should
have gotten involved with those guys at PSO. Hal Ashby and myself
were trying to make a movie about an alcoholic, not so much about
‘Hey, fuck you, Angel!’”
ee — ar
en. hae a i Pape
5 a ae 7 eererr,
= ay oe i sees ee
= ee >“S=aaw fre
+2 itevs a Be” eres ae ae) OGam-<
erm By Wa 2
- oe =
aed —S
; ’ _
4 ing i a a
j ; he « wae
- ee | oe , i
FS i)
4
, iiept whe)
285 a
> obs wep fos
Hakim! go
Index
Academy Awards, viii, x, 5, 11, 13, 16, 78-79, 109, 114-22; music, 17, 18,
29, 34, 44, 70, 84, 109, 111, 125, 126 70-71, 81, 94-95, 112; politics, 24,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci- -38, 63-64
ences (AMPAS), xii, 104 Away We Go (Mendes), xi
Adelson, Merv, 111 Ayres, Gerald, 19
After Hours (Scorsese), 127
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 124, 128 Bad Company (Benton), 128
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Scor- Bailey, Pearl, 7, 109
SESe) a2 po Baltimore, Maryland, 14
Allen, Dede, 29 Barberella (Vadim), 70
Altman, Robert, viii Baretta (TV series), 70
American Film Institute (AFI), 92 Basic Training (Wiseman), 64
Anderson, Wes, xi Baumbach, Noah, xi
Apatow, Judd, xi, xii Beach, Christopher, xii
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 61 Beatty, Warren, 16, 23-24, 26, 29, 30,
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The 37-39, 45, 56, 76, 79, 83, 96, 106,
(Kotcheff), 25 109
Aronofsky, Darren, xi Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel
Arquette, Rosanna, 123, 124, 125, 126, (Dawson), vii, xii, xiii
127-28, 130 Being There, vii, viii, ix, xi—xii, 83, 84-86,
Ashby, Hal: actors and acting, 8, 20-21, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99-103, 104,
22, 35, 57-58, 68, 85, 89, 90, 102, 106, 107, 108, 111, 129
125-26, 127, 128; casting, 7, 30-31, Belcher, Robert, 117
56-57, 67, 71-72; clashes with stu- Bellow, Saul, 31, 83, 105
dios, 8, 14, 17-18, 40-41, 59, 75-76, Ben-Hur (Wyler), 116, 119, 121
86, 87-88, 96-97, 104, 108, 111-12, Berger, Thomas, x
125, 129; collaborative approach, Best Man, The (Schaffner), 4
viii, 9, 26, 55, 94, 101, 110, 114, 115, Best Years of Our Lives, The (Wyler), 62,
124, 128-29; death, x—xi; directing, 120
7, 12, 26, 35, 74, 93-94, 105; drugs, Bickford, Charles, 122
ix, x, 106, 107, 124; early life, 3, 33, Big Country, The (Wyler), viii, 4, 53,
47-48, 51, 53, 62, 78, 83-84, 109; 62, 78, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118-19,
editing, 5, 34-35, 52, 58-S9, 75, 120-21, 122
89-90, 91, 92-93, 102, 111, 114, Bill, Tony, 23
116-17, 121; editing apprenticeship, Biskind, Peter, ix
3-5, 29, 33-34, 44, 51, 53-54, 62, 75, Black Panthers, 70
133
134 INDEX
Blake, Robert, 83, 103, 104, 110 89, 94, 95, 99, 103, 105, 109, 112,
Blitz, Jeffrey, xi 126, 129
Block, Lawrence, 124 Connors, Chuck, 121
Blumofe, Robert F., 44 Coppola, Francis Ford, viii, 61
Boden, Anna, xi Cort, Bud, 14, 37, 83, 88-89, 109
Bogdanovich, Peter, viii Country Wife, The (Wycherly), 23
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 29, 38, 76 Crosse, Rupert, 21
Bound for Glory, vii, 27, 29-31, 41-42, Crowe, Cameron, xi
43-47, 49-50, 57, 61, 63, 71-72, 73- Curtis, Jamie Lee, 124
TS SIS ROS 9p LOO LOZ G29) Cutter’s Way (Passer), 128
Bound for Glory (Guthrie), 27, 29, 50
Boyle, Robert F, 7 Dallas (TV series), 108
Braff, Zach, xi Damon, Mark, 130
Brando, Marlon, 46 Dare, Michael, xiii
Braunsberg, Andrew, 89, 99, 100, 104 Das Boot (Petersen), 130
Brautigan, Richard, x, 31, 51, 78, 83, Dayton, Jonathan, xi
OSA 113 De Palma, Brian, viii
Brazil (Gilliam), 123 Dern, Bruce, 19, 51, 62, 66-67, 69, 78,
Bridges, Beau, 6, 90, 109 80-81, 87
Bridges, Jeff, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, Deschanel, Caleb, 86, 94, 101
128-29, 130 Desperately Seeking Susan (Seidelman),
Buckley, Tim, 42, 46, 79 1PY /
Burstyn, Ellen, 19 Diary of Ann Frank, The (Stevens), 4, 62
Directors Guild of America, xi, xii, 39,
Calley, John, 5 126
Canby, Vincent, 39 Douglas, Melvyn, 102
Capote, Truman, x Dowd, Nancy, 64-65, 80
Carradine, David, 29, 30-31, 41-42, 43, Downey, Robert, 89
46, 47, 49, 50, 71-72, 79, 109, 126 Dreyfuss, Richard, 46
Carroll, Gordon, 18 Drive, He Said (Nicholson), 22
Cassavetes, John, 82
Charles, Ray, 95 Eastman, Charles, 103
Children’s Hour, The (Wyler), 4, 62, 109, Easy Rider (Hopper), 22
Whiley, Way, als} Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Biskind), ix
Christie, Julie, 16, 23, 24, 29, 30 Eggers, Dave, xi
Cincinnati Kid, The (Jewison), 5, 31, 34, Eight Is Enough (TV series), ix
62 & Million Ways to Die, x, xiii, 123-31
Clan of the Cave Bear, The (Chapman), Embassy Pictures, 112-13
130 Esquire magazine, 27
Clooney, George, xi Evans, Robert, 17, 36-37, 60
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spiel- Evans, Walker, 73
berg), 82 Executioner’s Song, The (Schiller), 127
Columbia Pictures, 12, 51, 76-77
Comes a Horseman (Pakula), 66 Faris, Valerie, xi
Coming Home, vii, viii, 48, 51, 61, 64-71, Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, The (Hag-
73, 78, 79-81, 83, 84, 86-88, gard), 85
INDEX 135
Film Director as Superstar, The (Gelmis), Hawkline Monster, The (Brautigan), x ,

vii 31-32, 51, 78, 83, 105, 113
Filmmaker magazine, xi Hawn, Goldie, 16, 23, 24, 29
Films of Hal Ashby, The (Beach), xii Hellman, Jerome, 65, 80, 88
Fleck, Ryan, xi Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), 31, 83,
Fonda, Jane, 51, 61, 62, 64-66, 68, 105
69-70, 78, 80, 88, 109, 126 Hendrix, Jimi, 27
Foul Play (Higgins), 130 Hershey, Barbara, 72
Friedkin, William, viii Heston, Charlton, 119
Higgins, Colin, 36-37, 60
Gaily, Gaily (Jewison), 6, 62, 90 Hill, Walter, 124
Getchell, Robert, 27, 31, 41, 50 Hoffman, Dustin, 46, 78, 108
Gilliam, Terry, 123 Howard, James Newton, 127
Golden Globe Awards, 29
Goldwyn, Samuel, 117, 118 In the Heat of the Night (Jewison), 5, 11,
Goldwyn Studios, 11, 115, 117 16, 29, 34, 44, 51, 62, 78, 84, 90, 95,
Good magazine, xi 109, 125
Gordon, Ruth, 14, 37, 77, 83, 89, 109 International Creative Management
Gosset, Louis, Jr., 7 (ICM), 130
Grant, Lee, 7,23, 24,29) 35 Ives, Burl, 120
Grapes of Wrath, The (Ford), 30, 73
Greatest Story Ever Told, The (Stevens), Jagged Edge (Marquand), 128
5, 62 Jagger, Mick, 95, 112, 113
Green Berets, The (Kellogg and Wayne), Jaglom, Henry, 82
63 Jewison, Norman, 5-6, 7, 8, 16, 31, 34,
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of 36, 44, 45, 51, 62, 79, 84, 89-90, 91,
the Apes (Hudson), 95 109
Gunn, Bill, 6 Jones, Amy, 102
Guthrie, Arlo, 42, 72 Jones, Robert C., 31, 68, 86, 91, 100
Guthrie, Mary, 41 Jonze, Spike, xi
Guthrie, Woody, 27, 29-30, 31, 41-42, Julia (Zinnemann), 113
43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 61, 71-72, 73, 79, July, Miranda, xi
83, 109
Kalki (Vidal), 113
Hair (Broadway show), 37 Kaplan, Mike, ix
Half Nelson (Fleck), xi Keaton, Diane, 113
Haller, Michael, 73, 86, 101 King of Marvin Gardens, The (Rafelson),
Hamster of Happiness. See Second Hand 18-19, 22
Hearts Kosinski, Jerzy, 99-100
Handcarved Coffins (Capote), x Kovacs, Laszlo, 23, 26
Harold and Maude, vii, viii, ix, xi, 11-12, Krim, Arthur, 45, 74
ASO mle ln 3 929), 32) 30-02, Kubrick, Stanley, 92
44, 45, 59, 60, 61, 63, 77, 78, 83, Kung-Fu (TV series), 31, 72
88-89, 99, 103, 109, 129
Harris, Barbara, 83, 103, 104, 110 Landlord, The, vii, xi, xii, 6-9, 11, 16, 17,
Harris, Mark, 92 21, 23, 25, 34, 36, 39, 44, 63, 75-76,
78, 79, 84, 86, 89, 90, 106, 109, 129
136 INDEX
Last Detail, The, vii, xi, 16, 19-21, 23, Nicholson, Jack, 16-20, 22, 35, 40-41,
28, 35, 40, 44, 45, 49, 57, 63, 76-77, 46, 57, 67, 78, 83, 105, 107, 109
Tey, (885, Gil, DS, OO, OW, MOL), 122) 91% Weeks (Lyne), 123, 130
Last Picture Show, The (Bogdanovich), Nixon, Richard, 23, 24, 38, 63
DAN, We} Nolte, Nick, 124
Last Waltz, The (Scorsese), 21 Northstar International, 104
Lawrence, Robert, 125
Lear, Norman, 112 Omen, The (Donner), 130
Legend (Scott), 123 O'Neal, Ryan, 89, 100
Let’s Spend the Night Together, x, 107, Orion Pictures, 113, 123
112-13 Oscars. See Academy Awards
Life magazine, 48
Little Miss Sunshine (Dayton and Faris), Pakula, Alan J., 66
xi Palmer, Pat, 7, 8-9
Lolita (Kubrick), 85 Pappé, Stuart, 125, 126
Lookin’ to Get Out, ix—x, xii, 83, 105, 106, Paramount Pictures, 12, 14, 16, 37, 108,
107-8, 112, 124 IG), Wakes, AAD)
Lorimar, ix—x, 97, 108, 110-12 Payne, Alexander, xi
Los Angeles Times, ix Peck, Gregory, 119
Loved One, The (Richardson), 5, 34, 62, Perenchio, Jerry, 112
78, 84 Personal Best (Towne), 95-96
Loy, Myrna, 120 Phillips, Michelle, 17, 18
Lyne, Adrian, 123 Pleskow, Eric, 74
Pollack, Sydney, 108
MacLaine, Shirley, 84 Pollock, Dale, ix
March, Fredric, 120 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Gat-
McQueen, Steve, 22 nett), 17-18
Medavoy, Mike, 86, 87 Preminger, Otto, 14
Melnick, Danny, 18 Producers Sales Organization (PSO), 124,
MGM, 16, 17-19 ZS L267 127 2S ORAS Osa
Miami Vice (TV series), 127-28
Midnight Express (Parker), 124 Quaid, Randy, 21, 47, 75
Mills, Mike, xi
Mirisch, Walter, 8, 75 Rafelson, Bob, viii, 19
Mirisch brothers, 6 Republic Studios, 3, 33, 34, 62, 109
Mirisch Company, 8, 75 Rich, Lee, 108
Missouri Breaks, The (Penn), 46 Richardson, Tony, 5, 34, 62
Modern Bride, 113 Ride in the Whirlwind (Hellman), 22
More American Graffiti (Norton), 86 Right Stuff, The (Kaufman), 130
Mulvehill, Charles, 16, 17 Rocket Science (Blitz), xi
Rolling Stones, The, x, 17, 95, 107, 108,
Nelson, Terry, 7 a}
Neverending Story, The (Petersen), 130 Roman Holiday (Wyler), 119-20
New York Film Festival, 19 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 85
New York Times, The, 38 Roth, Richard, 113
Newsweek, 19 Roth, Steve, 123, 124, 130-31
INDEX 137
Rushmore (Anderson), xi Swink, Robert, 4-5, 62, 89, 109, 114,

Russell, David O., xi TESS, UIKey, GLA, NR, Wake ay eal Te
Russell, Leon, 18
Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Technorama, 118
Coming, The (Jewison), 5, 31, 62, 84 Thomas Crown Affair, The (Jewison), 5, 6,
31, 62, 91
Salt, Waldo, 65-66, 69, 80, 86, 87 Three Cornered Circle, The, 17
Salvador (Stone), 124 Thumbsucker (Mills), xi
San Francisco, California, 14, 41 Time Is on Our Side. See Let’s Spend the
Sands, Diana, 7 Night Together
Sarasota Film Festival, xii Toklas, Alice B., 11
Sarris, Andrew, viii Tootsie (Pollack), x, 108
Sawyer, William A., 9 Toronto, 17
Sayre, Nora, 38 Towne, Robert, 16, 20, 23, 26, 37-38, 56,
Schatzberg, Jerry, 82 76, 84, 95-96, 124, 125
Schlesinger, John, 65, 80, 86 TriStar Pictures, 126
Schwartzman, Jason, xi 20th Century-Fox, 73
Scorsese, Martin, viii, 112
Scott, Ridley, 123 United Artists, 6, 31, 41, 45, 47, 49, 65,
Second Hand Hearts, x, 83, 86, 92, 99, 70, 72-73, 74-75, 78, 81, 86, 104,
100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 123
109, 110, 111-12, 124 Universal Pictures, 51, 53, 78
Seidelman, Susan, 123 University of California, Los Angeles
Sellers, Peter, 84-85, 88, 99-100, 102, (UCLA), 92
LOGS ha University of Southern California (USC),
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The 86, 92, 101
Beatles), 27 Unmarried Woman, An (Mazursky), 125
Shampoo, Vii, Viii, xi, xii, 16, 23-26, 28, Urban Cowboy (Bridges), 130
29, 37-39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51, 56,
61, 63, 76, 78, 83, 94, 95, 96, 106, Variety magazine, 104
109, 129 Vida, Vendela, xi
Shepherd, Cybill, 21 Vidal, Gore, 113
Short Circuit (Badham), 130 Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 64
Sideways (Payne), Xi Vietnam War, 61, 63, 65, 68, 69, 80, 81,
Silver Streak (Hiller), 130 87
Simmons, Jean, 119 Vistavision, 118
Skerritt, Tom, 89 Vital Parts (Berger), x
Slap Shot (Hill), 80 Voight, Jon, 51, 62, 66, 67-68, 73, 78,
Slugger’s Wife, The, x, 124 80-81, 83, 86-87, 88, 105, 106, 107,
Soderbergh, Steven, xi 112, 126
Stalmaster, Lynn, 30, 57
Star Wars (Lucas), 82 Waltons, The (TV series), ix
Starman (Carpenter), 128 Warden, Jack, 23, 25, 85
Stevens, George, 5, 75 Warner Brothers, 19
Stone, Oliver, 124 Warschilka, Edward, 9
Washington Post, The, 83
138 INDEX
Wayne, John, 63
Wexler, Haskell, 44, 46, 49, 88, 95
Willis, Gordon, 29, 86
Winter Kills (Richert), 128
Wiseman, Frederick, 64
Wurlitzer, Rudy, 66, 84, 87
Wuthering Heights (Wyler), 118
Wycherly, Thomas, 23
Wyler, William, viii, 4, 51, 53, 109,
114-22
Young, Burt, 83, 106

Young, Neil, 17
Young Doctors, The (Karlson), 4, 62
Zimmerman, Don, 91, 102

791.430233 A823. INFCW
Ashby, Hal.
Hal Ashby :interviews /
CENTRAL LIBRARY
01/11
“41 believe one of the best things a director .
can do for his film is to get as many others
as possible to become part of the film.”
Hal Ashby (1929-1988) is considered to be the lost genius of the New Hollywood
generation. While his name does not bear the familiarity of, say, Robert Altman or
Martin Scorsese, his diverse films are among the best known and most beloved of
the era. From the cult classic Harold and Maude (1971) to the iconic political satire
Being There (1979), from the subversive sex comedy Shampoo (1975) to the anti-
Vietnam War romance Coming Home (1979), Ashby rejected mainstream conven-
tions while his films attracted both popular and critical praise.
A true actors’ director, Ashby drew A-list stars and elicited powerful performances
from Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail (1973), Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in
Shampoo, Jon Voight and Jane Fonda in Coming Home, and Peter Sellers in Being
There.
Hal Ashby: Interviews for the first time brings together the best interviews con-
ducted over the course of Ashby’s career. Ashby discusses his filmmaking philoso-
phy, memories of working his way up the Hollywood ladder in the 1950s, and his
troubled productions in the 1980s.
Nick Dawson is a contributing editor for Filmmaker magazine. He is also the as-
sociate editor for the FilminFocus website, a freelance film journalist, and author of
Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel, the first biography of the director.
Conversations with Filmmakers Series

University Press of Mississippi
www.upress.state.ms.us
Cover photograph from author’s collection

Hal Ashby Interviews

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hal Ashby Interviews

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hal Ashby Interviews

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hal Ashby

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University

Copyright © 2010 by University Press of Mississippi

First printing 2010

Hal Ashby : interviews / edited by Nick Dawson.

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Breaking Out of the Cutting Room 3

Director Hal Ashby’s Office Is a House with Psychedelic Walls iB

Director Charges Studio Was Afraid of Maude 14

Shampoo: Film & Filmmaker 23

Film Guru Ashby Enjoys View from the Mountain 28

Hal Ashby Interview 33

Gambling on a Film about the Great Depression 43

That Special Okie Southwest Flavor, That Humor 49

Cinema Chat with Hal Ashby 78

Dialogue on Film: Hal Ashby 83

Hal Ashby: Satisfaction in Being There 99

Whatever Happened to Hal Ashby? 106

“Directed by William Wyler” Interview 114

How to Killa Movie 123

sized personalities and ballooning egos thrived: Francis Ford Coppola,

had planned. Ashby’s fractious relationship with Lorimar had lead to

Apatow’s piece begins as follows: “When I was asked to write about

1929 Born William Hal Ashby on September 2, in Ogden, Utah,

Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and William Wy-

ever, become one of the most popular and successful cult

creates production company Northstar International with

Pickles (Mrs. Chasen), Cyril Cusack (Glaucus), Charles Tyner (Briga-

Director: HAL ASHBY

Huston Palmer), Martin Ritt (Burly DeVito), Randy Quaid (Moose

WR 608 dieh hgem oh0 +9 DORs nes Ae

When I was lucky enough to be working with Bob, he hit me with

picture. He wanted to ease my anxiety, and enough time had elapsed

room is an excellent place to learn much about directing, but that

The Oscar stands in the middle of it all.

His Basic Philosophy

HOLLYWOOD—Harold and Maude director Hal Ashby admits he’s

stand he went through that community like a storm trooper, leaving

Looking at gray-bearded Hal Ashby sitting cross-legged on top of his

impression that they (MGM) wanted to attract film-makers over there,

Ashby: | liked it. I understand there’s been a lot of negativism about

Question: Do you believe in rehearsing with the cast as a group, or do

From UCLA Daily Bruin, March 3, 1975.

exploring the subtleties of his characters: “Since Shampoo covers such a

“I worked in those tiny rooms with those institutional green walls

From Millimeter, October 1976. Reprinted with permission of Penton Media.

become a full-fledged editor. Ashby commented that the union’s eight-

tality a little more bearable. It is partly that gentleness in portraying

polygamous marriage. Ashby’s grandfather had had five wives, keeping

A room with Hal Ashby in it is a cheery one.

Okie Rhythm Hailed

Different Love Story

Hand Fairly Free

Treading the Middle

1. What was your personal background (your vocation) before en-

3. What is your philosophy regarding your film: your aim or pur-

4. In seeking a story on which to base a film, in what particular

5. Have you a preference as to the source of your story material:

6. In any of the above cases, do you prefer using another screen