Infamous Players

With Hollywood’s studio system crumbling in the 1950s and 1960s, movie stars were among the most visible casualties. Ironically, the top stars had always complained about the studio mandarins who’d dictated their roles, their salaries, and even, on occasion, their wives (or husbands). The Jack Warners and Louis B. Mayers had final say on whether an actor would become a lover or a gangster and whether their renown would be that of bravery or buffoonery. Stars were often suspended by studio bosses for turning down roles or otherwise defying decrees. The gossip columns of that era were steeped in angry rhetoric from actors directed against their career tsars.

But when the studios fell apart, these same irate actors suddenly realized that their dreaded employers had served as protectors as well as exploiters. Suddenly no one was around to develop projects or otherwise provide a protective cocoon within which an actor could build a career. Hence, just as the dream factories were falling apart, so were the careers of the pampered stars.

By the time I arrived at Paramount, in 1967, some stars were behaving like frightened creatures that had been unexpectedly removed from their native habitat. I was stunned at the absolutely terrible career choices being made by panicked performers when faced with the specter of unemployment. Paramount’s release schedule bulged with vivid examples: Lee Marvin singing in Paint Your Wagon, Rod Steiger blustering as Napoléon in Waterloo, Rock Hudson being seduced by Julie Andrews in Darling Lili.

Other career casualties littered the landscape: Peter Finch in The Red Tent, Tommy Steele in Where’s Jack?, Sean Connery in the The Molly Maguires, Liza Minnelli in Junie Moon, Elizabeth Taylor in Ash Wednesday, Kirk Douglas in Once Is Not Enough, Richard Burton in The Klansman, and Peter O’Toole in Murphy’s War. These were not so much roles as career enders.

Stars were accepting any role offered them because they realized that a new era had arrived in Hollywood. Studios were looking primarily to directors, not to stars, in assembling their pictures. Equally alarming: the hot young filmmakers didn’t want to work with established actors, preferring to create their own stars rather than cope with the huge egos (and salaries) of the old guard.

There was also another factor in play, as I soon discovered. Left to their own devices, many, if not most, stars simply didn’t know how to read scripts. They would study their own lines, obsess over a specific scene, but systematically ignore the overarching quality of the material.

Sometimes they turned out to be either smart or lucky. Mia Farrow was so captured by the lead role in Rosemary’s Baby that she put up with the taunting of her director, Roman Polanski, and the threats of her husband, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra felt that Polanski was brutalizing his wife; more importantly, he wanted her to finish on schedule so that she could next costar in his own movie, which was supposed to start right after Rosemary’s Baby.

Early on I realized that the most interesting projects tended to involve not the hottest actors, but those who had not as yet reached their zenith. Such was the case with Woody Allen, who had written a play titled Play It Again, Sam that Twentieth Century-Fox was interested in filming. Allen’s ambitions were not only to star in the adaptation but also to direct it. The studio, however, wasn’t interested in either option; they just wanted the property.

Given the impasse, I approached Fox about selling the project. They rejected my entreaties—studios have always been notoriously paranoid about putting a project into turnaround for fear a rival will turn it into a hit. My sources at Fox, however, disclosed that Fox was keenly interested in an action film I had developed titled Emperor of the North Pole.

I decided to approach Richard Zanuck, the boss of Fox, about an unorthodox trade: I would give him Emperor in return for Sam, with no money changing hands. To my surprise, he agreed. He really wanted to make Emperor but felt Woody was a lost cause.

My last challenge was to inform Woody’s very protective handlers that Paramount would now be making Sam with Woody starring, but not directing. The director would be Herb Ross, the esteemed director of Funny Girl. My hunch (and Bob concurred) was that Ross’s work was more accessible and that he would bring a wider audience to Woody’s film.

While Evans and I were trying to identify new stars, Charlie Bluhdorn decided that he, too, could be a star maker. His entry was a fierce-looking Yugoslavian named Bekim Fehmiu—an actor with a thick accent and a complicated name (which he didn’t want to change). To the chairman, he had star quality written all over him.

Fehmiu was to star in several high-profile Paramount films—the melodrama called The Adventurers, based on the Harold Robbins bestseller, and an action film titled The Deserter. Both bombed. Few filmgoers could understand his dialogue.

When it came to rancorous quarrels over casting, it was usually Evans who bore the brunt. As an ex-actor, Evans had passionate, and usually accurate, instincts on casting, but I found the process to be utterly exasperating.

The mechanism of the screen test itself struck me as desperately inadequate. An actor would sit in a cold room, looking utterly terrified, and be fed lines by a casting director. The tests revealed little to me beyond surface attractiveness or nervous tics. But sitting in a screening room, my studio colleagues would become passionate advocates or critics.

After enduring several such sessions, I asked the studio casting director to do some research for me. I wanted to see great screen tests from the past; what did Brando or Newman look like when they were starting out? Would even I—an admitted newcomer to this business—be able to discern their genius?

The studio casting guru, a bulky and forceful woman named Joyce Selznick, was delighted to take me up on my challenge, marshaling footage of old auditions. For two hours the two of us stared in awe as Brando and Newman, both raw and obviously intimidated, read their lines and tried to impress their peers. When the lights came on again, Selznick turned to me with a grin.

“Beats me,” she replied with a shrug. “I’m trying. That was a different era. Actors in those days had done Broadway, studied at the Actors Studio. But today we’re looking at mannequins.”

I soon discovered that I was not alone in my impatience with the conventions of casting. Given the collapse of the studio system, more and more young actors saw that their career aims would not be served by making the rounds of casting directors. The process of “discovery” was too happenstance. They’d do better buying a lottery ticket.

In my initial months at Paramount, I came into contact with three young actors who, despite their obvious differences in background and appearance, struck me as especially aggressive in this pursuit. All three had had promising breaks at the beginning of their careers. Their surface talent and their unique look had gotten them that far. But all realized how tough it was to take that next step. So many in their age group had stalled. They were determined to take that leap, even if it meant developing their own material and packaging their own projects.

The three in question were Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, and Robert Redford. At that moment in time, all were exhibiting both big talents and big appetites. And as budding students of the system, they knew that Paramount offered opportunity amid the chaos and that we would take chances that other studios were unwilling to take.

Of the three (all then entering their thirties) Beatty was the most astute, Redford the most cunning, and Eastwood the hardest to read. Beatty wanted to register the fact that, despite his mythic social life, he was also the smartest kid in town. He played the girls, but he also did his homework. Redford, by contrast, was a serious, very guarded young man who was almost pathologically suspicious of the studios—even in their present disarray. He had a vision of Redford, the Star, but it was still an unformed vision. He knew who he didn’t want to become but wasn’t sure what he was chasing.

Eastwood, oddly, was the most accessible, though inscrutable. Always attired in jeans and a T-shirt, he seemed comfortable as the handsome, but dim kid who’d made a name for himself in Rawhide. He enjoyed having a beer and talking about girls, but occasionally he would drop his guard: Beneath the pose was an intensely intelligent young man who had no intention of going through life as the hick who played in westerns. When Eastwood decided to “get serious,” his well-concealed intellect was easily as sharp as those of Redford or Beatty.

The three actors also had this in common: intuitively they knew that they had come along at the right time. The few remaining studio stars, like Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Spencer Tracy, were too old to compete for the leading-man roles. Montgomery Clift and James Dean had already selfdestructed. Young filmmakers didn’t want to be stymied with studio-bred leading men like Troy Donahue, Rock Hudson, or Tab Hunter. And Brando was being Brando—turning up in disasters like Burn amid reports of bad behavior. No one could compete with Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, but they were older and more expensive. There was definitely room within the ranks of the leading men for the likes of Beatty, Redford, and Eastwood.

Despite their surface macho and self-confidence, however, the three young actors were finding the road to stardom to be a bumpy ride, with abundant traps and dead ends along the way. Beatty had managed to shed his TV stigma (he had a recurring role on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) and achieve a brief glimpse of potential stardom opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass. He’d become an instant fixture in the gossip columns, and producers were showering him with scripts. Still the seemingly shrewd young actor had proceeded to involve himself in a succession of box-office flops, which cumulatively labeled him both “difficult” and “noncommercial.” By 1967, when I arrived at Paramount, the word among studio executives was that Warren Beatty was more trouble than he was worth.

Clint Eastwood, too, had fled his TV career after some angry salary battles on Rawhide, but his initial forays in film had left him unsatisfied. The Italian director, Sergio Leone, had made him a semi-star in Europe as the silent, steely-eyed hero in A Fistful of Dollars, but Clint knew a career could not be built around spaghetti westerns. By the late sixties, Clint Eastwood was regarded as an aging TV star whose ambitions were getting in his own way.

Like Beatty and Eastwood, Robert Redford, too, was having trouble making his way as a young actor. His native talent and Middle America good looks were landing him interesting roles, but his movies, The Chase and This Property Is Condemned, were tanking. He was the third or fourth choice for the lead in Barefoot in the Park, in ’66, but won the role, and the movie gave the young actor positive buzz. Redford was now getting offers to do light comedy, but those were not the roles that interested him. He wanted to be accepted as a serious actor and as a serious person, but that was not the way Hollywood saw him.

By the end of the sixties, an abundance of actors in Hollywood found themselves frustrated by the chaos of the system, but what set Beatty, Eastwood, and Redford apart was that each was about to seize their moment.

Even as a raw young actor, Warren Beatty seemed determined to be active in his own rescue. He understood that he was initially dismissed by some directors as yet another pretty boy. If he got lucky, he’d become another Troy Donahue, a career that had no interest for him.

Beatty observed that, both in Hollywood and on Broadway, there existed small enclaves of talent who fed off one another. It was as though the shrewd, truly gifted individuals in the creative community built walls to fend off the losers and the talentless. In his head, Beatty began to formulate his own list of the elite and to figure out scenarios on how he could join them.

On Broadway, he laid siege to the two hot playwrights of the moment, Tennessee Williams and William Inge. A gay Midwesterner, Inge had become an instant icon with hits like Come Back, Little Sheba and Picnic. And though Beatty was aggressively straight, he was also downright attractive to Inge. Indeed, the playwright saw to it that his young protégé played a lead role in his new play, A Loss of Roses. It flopped, but Inge’s theater friends labeled him Beatty’s “fairy godfather.”

Beatty’s quest continued in Hollywood, where he courted publicity as aggressively as he courted roles. Beatty’s ongoing affair with Joan Collins and his kinship with R. J. Wagner and Natalie Wood ensured his continued appeal to the gossip columnists. The agent turned producer Charlie Feldman decided Beatty would be a desirable addition to his salon, which meant introductions to filmmakers like Billy Wilder as well as stars like Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth.

Beatty had campaigned zealously for the lead opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, directed by Elia Kazan. At age twenty-three, Beatty was thrilled about working with Kazan, yet insecure about his acting talent. In an interview in the New York Times, he admitted, “I suppose I have a method—sloppy method.”

Yet the film earned some positive reviews for Beatty, with Time magazine pointing out his “startling resemblance to the late James Dean,” and the New York Times describing him as “a surprising newcomer.”

Most important to the young actor, however, was that the movie presented him as a symbol of male sexuality. It was Beatty’s fantasy: his career had been eroticized. The gossip columnists helped by pointing up his affair with his costar, Wood.

Beatty had by now launched himself into two other projects—a drama titled All Fall Down, also written by Inge, and a turgid piece titled The Roman Spring of Mr. Stone, in which Beatty was cast as an Italian lover. According to Bosley Crowther, the New York Times’ esteemed critic, Beatty was “hopelessly out of his element playing a patent-leather ladies’ man in Rome.” Crowther was even tougher on All Fall Down, in April 1962, writing that Beatty’s character emerged as “sloppy, slow-witted and rude.”

To the celebrity press, Beatty was brimming with superstar self-confidence. After the opening of All Fall Down, he left for a two-month vacation with the newly divorced Natalie Wood, who adorned the cover of Life magazine. Yet Beatty’s interactions with studio executives were earning him a reputation for indecisiveness. He committed to Youngblood Hawke, then changed his mind. He turned down commercially promising projects like the film adaptation of Barefoot in the Park (which Robert Redford eagerly accepted) as well as Visconti’s The Leopard. Studio chiefs like Jack Warner openly expressed their dismay with Beatty’s behavior. Hollywood’s working filmmakers felt he was a poseur who would court an Inge, but turn up his nose at studio projects.

Beatty compounded his problems by committing to yet another film that had snob value but little else. Robert Rossen, who had won awards for All the King’s Men and The Hustler, asked Beatty to play the lead in a downbeat drama called Lilith, which was set in a mental hospital. Beatty admired Rossen and the script reminded him of The Snake Pit. The character of Lilith, a nymphomaniac, also appealed to him. Rossen invited Beatty to join him in working on the screenplay and choosing his costar. She turned out to be Jean Seberg, an actress who had made an impact in Saint Joan.

Throughout principal photography, dire rumors spilled from the set of Lilith. Beatty was quarreling with his costar, Peter Fonda, and with his director. Rossen was quoted as saying, “If I die, it’ll be Warren Beatty who killed me.” In September 1964, Lilith was greeted with negative reviews and skimpy box office results.

A worried Beatty now did not want to let any time elapse between jobs. He quickly agreed to shoot an existential New Wave crime drama directed by Arthur Penn titled Mickey One. Penn called the plot a metaphor for McCarthyism. Most studio executives who read it couldn’t figure out what it was about.

Beatty’s troubles were mounting. Mickey One was destined to be yet another pretentious disaster. Meanwhile, Beatty was battling his friend Charlie Feldman, who was trying to develop a comedy with Woody Allen titled What’s New Pussycat? The producer let it be known around Hollywood that Beatty had accepted a rich deal to star in Pussycat, but had reneged. At the same time, the ubiquitous gossip columnists were reporting that the actor was having a secret love affair with Leslie Caron, breaking up her marriage to Peter Hall, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (they’d had two children).

What’s New Pussycat? turned out to be a hit, with Beatty’s role assumed by Peter O’Toole, who had just finished Lawrence of Arabia. Peter Sellers came aboard as his costar. Once again, Beatty had misjudged an important property.

I would run into Beatty now and then during this period and was always confounded by him. When he walked into a party it seemed as though a neon banner proclaiming “superstar” lit up over his head. He always knew how to work the room, flirting with the women, paying homage to the heavyweights. The fact that I’d worked for the New York Times had been implanted in his memory bank, and when he saw me, he was uniformly polite and attentive. Within minutes, it was clear that he had read everything and was up on every rumor and intrigue both in Hollywood and in Washington. Beatty was smart and intended that I know it. There was no personal subtext to all this, but once, early on, he gave me a quick onceover and said, “You’re a married guy, right?” When I nodded my affirmation, I felt that I had shifted from one category to another in his mind. I would not have access to Beatty’s formidable inventory of spare girlfriends.

By 1965 Beatty had decided to recast himself as a cultural rebel. Though a product of middle-class mainstream America, he felt an urgent need to break out of that mold. The pressure was now on to find a project that would express sixties rebellion and present him in a new aura.

Beatty had negotiated a meeting in London with Francois Truffaut to determine whether the French director might cast him in Fahrenheit 451, a project Beatty admired. To the young American, Truffaut was the personification of the New Wave auteur who was rewriting the lexicon of cinema. To the Frenchman, however, Beatty seemed at once egotistical and unsophisticated; indeed, he had no interest whatsoever in casting him in his picture. During their conversation, however, Truffaut explained that he had been flirting with a screenplay titled Bonnie and Clyde. He related the story line, and then explained why he had decided that the movie was not right for him as a director.

Beatty was intrigued. If Truffaut liked the story, it had to have something going for it. Upon returning to New York, he learned that yet another French auteur, Jean-Luc Godard, also had read Bonnie and Clyde and found it compelling.

In New York, Beatty obtained the phone number of Robert Benton, the cowriter of Bonnie and Clyde, and made an impromptu phone call. Benton, who worked for Esquire magazine at the time, had never met Beatty. He was convinced the call was a practical joke on the part of his cowriter, David Newman. Hearing the skepticism, Beatty explained with his customary low-key nonchalance that he wanted to read the script—indeed, that he would personally drop over to Benton’s apartment to pick it up.

Now Benton was certain this was a joke, and he was glad he had not mentioned the call to his wife. When the doorbell rang, however, she answered it wearing her hair in rollers, no makeup on, and her usual hang-about-the-house clothing. When she recognized her visitor, she almost fainted, but Beatty got his script.

Benton and Newman were delighted but also dubious. They knew Beatty’s reputation for procrastination. They also knew that all the studios had already read Bonnie and Clyde and turned it down. To Hollywood executives, it was a downbeat period piece. Its sexual subtext was a turnoff, and the ménage à trois scene rang the alarm bell.

Soon Beatty began second-guessing himself. Mickey One had opened to damning reviews and dismal box office results. Variety’s review called it “strange and confused.” Columbia Pictures was not promoting the film, merely booking it into a few theaters as though embarrassed by the project. Beatty was a few months short of thirty years old, worried now that stardom seemed to be escaping his grasp.

In November 1965, Beatty made two moves on his project of the moment that displayed both decision and indecision. He wrote a check for $10,000 to option the screenplay of Bonnie and Clyde, telling friends that he intended to create an American New Wave film. At the same time, he started submitting the script to exactly the sort of Hollywood directors who had no desire to make that sort of movie—establishment filmmakers like George Stevens and William Wyler. Neither “got” the material, nor did they understand why Beatty had decided he was qualified to be a producer.

Shaken, Beatty decided to return to the one filmmaker he knew sympathized with his take on the material. Like Beatty, Arthur Penn had felt whiplashed by the failure of Mickey One. He had already read Bonnie and Clyde and hadn’t responded favorably. Stirred by Beatty’s conviction, however, he now reversed course and decided to take a shot with his charming and determined young star.

Funding was now the key issue. David Picker, a young executive at United Artists, liked the script, but his zeal faded when Beatty submitted a $1.8 million budget. Beatty knew his likeliest target was Jack Warner, the seventy-five-year-old patriarch of Warner Bros. Warner was displaying occasional moments of senility, but still held tenuous control over the studio. His attitude toward Beatty had shifted as quickly as his moods: He had seemed satisfied with Kaleidoscope, a modest thriller Beatty had starred in for the studio. However, he’d also been irritated by Beatty’s refusal to say yes to studio projects like Youngblood Hawke or PT 109, which had been offered him.

Warner Bros. needed product, however, and Walter McEwen, a longtime Warner aide, felt he could engineer a green light at the studio provided Beatty handled the boss shrewdly. A meeting was set up and Beatty was suitably obsequious. Indeed, he even got on his knees and offered to lick Warner’s boots if he was awarded a deal. The young producer made his score.

When Beatty finally delivered his film, however, Warner made no effort to disguise his distaste for the movie. Beatty told the old studio chief that he should think of Bonnie and Clyde as an homage to the studio’s classic gangster pictures. Warner replied, “What the fuck’s an ‘homage’?” The film’s only internal supporter was a young marketing executive named Richard Lederer, but he clearly was a voice in the wilderness.

Beatty knew his movie would be dumped and he was right. The critics weren’t offering encouragement. Bosley Crowther, never a Beatty fan, termed the movie “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick.” The only affirmative voice was that of Pauline Kael, then a reviewer who was auditioning for a job at the New Yorker and hence eager to cause a stir by taking on the New York Times. Her review started with the rhetorical question, “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” She then launched a stalwart defense, arguing that Bonnie and Clyde needs its violence; “violence is its meaning.”

Kael’s ringing endorsement got Bonnie and Clyde a few release dates. It even earned it an opening in Paris, but the movie still was not performing well at the U.S. box office in its limited releases. To Warner Bros., it was still a “critics’ picture.” Not until the movie gleaned ten Oscar nominations did Warner Bros. finally give the film a wide opening—which yielded banner box office results. Bonnie and Clyde, together with The Graduate, suddenly were heralded as precursors of a new movement in American cinema—the long-awaited Hollywood New Wave.

By the time I met Beatty, in 1967, he was not only a reborn movie star but also something of a folk hero. He had taken on the Hollywood establishment and won. The bad calls of his earlier career were now forgotten. He was being flooded with offers as both actor and producer and, true to form, was turning them all down—even Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was now above the Hollywood fray and let it be known that his primary concern was Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He was also immersing himself in books about John Reed and the Russian Revolution—tracts that would, some years later, lead to his involvement in his grandiose movie Reds.

Life as a legend provided a delicious complement to political celebrity. George McGovern and his campaign chief, Gary Hart, devoured Beatty’s endorsement and support. Beatty cajoled Carole King, James Taylor, and even Streisand to bring glitter to fund-raisers and rock concerts. Beatty and his then companion, Julie Christie, were stars at the ’72 Democratic convention in Miami Beach. The Democratic cause was clearly headed for defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon, but the McGovern primary campaign was an exciting distraction for the star. Despite Beatty’s entreaties, Christie had flown off to Venice to star in Don’t Look Now, opposite Donald Sutherland. Dollars, Beatty’s third follow-up to Bonnie and Clyde, had opened to patchy reviews and mediocre business. Previous films, The Only Game in Town and McCabe & Mrs. Miller had failed to generate the sort of box office heat Beatty had hoped for.

Beatty again yearned for a hit, but found it impossible to leave politics behind him. “I understand politics and I’m damned good at it,” he told me earnestly. At the same time, the thought of running for office was anathema to him, defying all his self-protective instincts.

Given Beatty’s mood, a screenplay titled The Parallax View provided the ideal lure. The property, based on a novel by Loren Singer, was a deftly dramatized study in political paranoia. A presidential candidate is mysteriously murdered. Several witnesses meet suspicious deaths. A conspiracy looms.

The script had been brought to my attention by Alan J. Pakula, a smart filmmaker whose first directing effort, The Sterile Cuckoo, had been distributed by Paramount in ’69. Pakula had followed up with a vastly more commercial film, Klute, in’71, and he had been looking for a thriller that had social relevance. A thoughtful but fastidious man, Pakula knew of Beatty’s interest but was worried about getting into business with him. Was Beatty serious about Parallax, or would this become another notch on his development list?

Bob Evans, too, was wary of Beatty. There was always a tacit competitiveness between them—one that involved business, women, and matters of style. “In Warren’s mind, he’s the biggest star in the world,” Evans told me. “But look at the numbers; his movies don’t make any money.”

Personally, I was eager to get Parallax moving. A Beatty-Pakula thriller was a solid commercial bet, but also one that could capture the attention of smart young filmgoers. The Nixon landslide had stirred a paranoia that Washington was out of control, and Vietnam seemed like a struggle without end. Further, the Watergate hearings were coming to a boil, with charges of conspiracy and cover-up. This could be a perfect moment for Parallax, provided I could move it forward quickly.

But that in itself posed problems. The original screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. needed work, and David Giler, a solid rewrite practitioner—“body and fender” man was his informal job description—had been hired to sharpen it. In script meetings, Beatty’s mind tended to wander. He would come up with an idea, then back away from it. Pakula, by contrast, was precise, but pedantic in his presentation.

I had long since learned that every star had a favored writer and that the only way to pacify their story concerns, real or imagined, was to hire that writer at the eleventh hour. For Beatty, that writer was Bob Towne, with whom he had worked on Bonnie and Clyde. The problem was that Towne, too, was famously slow in delivering script changes.

I knew I had one card to play and I decided to play it. The Writers Guild was threatening an imminent walkout. Unless we jammed on the script, I pointed out, no writer—even Towne—could do a rewrite without facing banishment from the guild. The time had come to push forward.

Beatty himself turned up at my office one afternoon, looking troubled. “Alan has told me of your conversation,” he said. “I just want you to know that I’m ready to start the picture. If there’s a strike and changes need to be made in the script, I’ll make them myself.”

I didn’t think it prudent to argue with him about his literary talents. Knowing the cadence of his speech, meandering and absent of structure, my every instinct was that Beatty’s talents did not lie in writing.

Alan Pakula agreed. “We’ll figure a way through it,” he said. “Besides, the writers may very well call off the strike at the last moment. Writers don’t strike. They’re not Teamsters.”

Even as the movie started, however, the writers’ strike commenced. By the end of the first week, the pace of shooting had already slowed. The company would arrive on set ready to start, and Pakula and Beatty would retire to discuss script changes. By midday, the cameras would start to roll.

But pages of the rewritten script would then start arriving. The official word was that no one knew where they came from. The young assistant director, Howard Koch Jr., son of the former studio chief, would distribute the mystery pages with a genial wink. I would read them, along with Pakula and Beatty. And none of us would discuss their source.

If last-minute rewrites were slowing the shoot, so was Beatty’s desire for multiple takes. In one scene, Beatty demanded repeated shots of him sitting at a table, stirring soup. I happened to be on the stage that day and, despite my impatience, had to admire the way Pakula indulged him. If his star was worried about the lack of steam rising from the cup, Pakula would let him play.

When I visited Beatty in his dressing room, however, he seemed unconcerned about the sluggish pace. Thumbing through newly arrived pages, Beatty was wearing nothing but red-and-white-striped underpants, which struck me as oddly patriotic. “I think the story is unfolding well,” he said, “but Gordie Willis is costing us time. There was one scene yesterday—Alan said it was so dark it was unusable.”

The man he referred to, Gordon Willis, the gifted cinematographer, previously had worked on The Godfather where, again, his tendency to underlight scenes had caused some reshooting, but the finished film was superb. On Parallax, Willis was seeking a darkly moody atmosphere to reinforce the sense of paranoia.

Ultimately, Parallax wrapped with no writer admitting authorship, but when Evans and I viewed the first cut, we were both disappointed. The movie was intelligent and well acted but oddly unsatisfying. Beatty’s character had pinpointed the dreaded Parallax Corporation as being responsible for the murders, but the point of the exercise still seemed unclear.

The Parallax View was released on June 14, 1974, but instead of causing a stir, it seemed to stir disappointment. “You’re likely to feel cheated, as I did,” wrote Vincent Canby in his review in the New York Times.

Beatty and Pakula, too, felt cheated, but for a different reason. In their view, the campaign for their film had been vastly overshadowed by the publicity blast greeting Chinatown, which opened only a few days later. Chinatown, of course, was the first production from Bob Evans’s new production label at Paramount, and, as such, commanded the major share of attention from the marketing teams at the studio—at least to the mind of Beatty and Pakula.

Instead, the openings marked the beginning of a new frenzy of anger and bitterness. To Pakula, the release of Chinatown had “doomed” his movie—a view he expressed to Bluhdorn with great passion. Beatty, too, felt that his longtime friend, Evans, had betrayed him. Evans, he knew, had a percentage of the profits in Chinatown. He thus had every incentive to make that film the winner, not Parallax.

When I first learned of the release dates of the two films—they were set very late in the game—I warned Yablans of my apprehensions, but he was sternly dismissive. “They both have great dates,” he countered. “They are our summer pictures. Anyone who complains about it can go fuck themselves. That goes for Evans, too.”

What I did not realize was that Yablans and Evans were themselves battling at that moment over shares of Chinatown profits. If Pakula and Beatty were alarmed about conflicts of interest on Evans’s part, they should have been even angrier about Yablans’s cut.

From the outset, Clint Eastwood didn’t seem comfortable on a movie set and certainly didn’t display the natural gifts of an actor. Tall and chiseled, his gaze nonetheless seemed distanced and disinterested. His teeth were yellow and he moved awkwardly. He looked like what he was—an awkward kid who pumped gas during the day and took acting classes at night. In 1953, shortly after getting married, he lucked into a modest contract at Universal where he started earning bit parts in movies. Always the realist, however, Eastwood sensed that his career as a film star wasn’t going to happen. He considered going to college and looked for other jobs.

But then he got lucky again. TV westerns like Gunsmoke and Wagon Train were registering solid ratings, and he caught the eye of CBS executives who were casting a rip-off titled The Outrider, later retitled Rawhide. To his surprise, Eastwood got the nod for the young lead, Rowdy Yates. The show was a hit from the start and rolled on to seven seasons, with Eastwood playing the fast-drawing young stud opposite Eric Fleming.

One unexpected fan of the show was the Italian film director Sergio Leone, who yearned to make a western. Leone needed a believable young American cowboy and was keenly aware that the top Hollywood actors weren’t interested; even Eric Fleming had turned him down.

Eastwood was wary when he got the offer. For one thing, he didn’t think of himself as a cowboy, yet feared being typecast as one. On the other hand, he had never been to Italy, and the $15,000 offer, with Rawhide on hiatus, was tempting.

It was not long into the shoot of A Fistful of Dollars that Eastwood realized that while Leone was shooting a traditional revenge movie—the stranger who helps folks, is left for dead, then comes back against the odds—his rhythms and stylized camera angles were vastly different from those of TV directors. The Man with No Name, in sheepskins and poncho, was a mythic figure in the making. And since the character had little dialogue—Leone was shooting in three languages simultaneously—Eastwood began to come to terms with the power of his physical presence, his eyes and his gestures.

Meanwhile, the young actor was also aware of the fact that he was beginning to occupy a precarious never-never land in the pop culture. Serious critics were fascinated by his Leone films. Andrew Sarris wrote, “What Kurosawa and Leone share is a sentimental nihilism that ranks survival above honor and revenge above morality.” Sarris concluded, “The spaghetti western is ultimately a lower class entertainment.”

Eastwood noticed that while his Leone sequel, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was outgrossing most Hollywood movies, its reviews were still dismissive. Charles Champlin, the critic of the Los Angeles Times, dubbed the movie The Bad, the Dull and the Interminable and Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker, called the film both “stupid” and “gruesome.”

In a 1974 interview in Playboy magazine, Eastwood observed petulantly that while his spaghetti westerns were increasingly popular in the U.S. and overseas, “I’m having a rough time cracking the Hollywood scene.” He added, “Not only is there a movie prejudice against television actors but there is a feeling that an American actor making an Italian movie is taking a step backward.”

I occasionally ran into Eastwood in and around the Paramount lot during this time, and he was candid about his frustration. Though reserved and spare in his conversation, Eastwood was always good company. He liked drinking beer and his gaze would dwell on any attractive woman who happened by.

Though a married man, his reputation as a player was well known and well deserved. Yet he also saw lots of movies and studied scripts and, if pressed, commented on them concisely and lucidly. His tastes were populist, but he particularly admired filmmakers whose work was lean and disciplined. While Warren Beatty sought out the top playwrights and auteurs, Eastwood was drawn to the working artisans of the business. His friend and mentor was Don Siegel, a Hollywood veteran of B-pictures. “He shoots lean and he shoots what he wants,” Eastwood observed. “He knows when he has it and he doesn’t need to cover his ass with a dozen different angles.” Siegel’s films ranged from Baby Face Nelson to Hell Is for Heroes and the studios considered him dependable but pedestrian.

To Eastwood, the time had now come to mobilize his own company and turn out films to his liking. Since he owned land in Big Sur that encompassed the Malpasso Creek, he named his company Malpasso and decreed that its initial production would be a contained little western titled Hang ’Em High.

The project was classic Eastwood: it represented a step forward, yet a very guarded one. The $1.5 million movie followed a Sergio Leone–type plot—Clint pursuing the men who tried to kill him, all of it ending in a shootout. He selected as its director a veteran from TV, Ted Post, a safe choice, who had shot several Rawhide segments.

Funded by United Artists, which had distributed the spaghetti westerns, Hang ’Em High turned out to be a solid business venture and a help to Eastwood as a filmmaker. Upon seeing it, Universal offered him $1 million to star in Coogan’s Bluff, in which he would play a deputy from Arizona assigned to bring back a murderer hiding out in New York. In his new venture, Eastwood was invited to function as a producer, working with the writers and appointing his friend, Don Siegel, to direct.

While his first Hollywood films gave him credibility as a producer, they also raised his price as a movie star, and Eastwood was eager to exploit that franchise as well. He accepted the lead in an action film titled Where Eagles Dare, opposite Richard Burton. Clearly the notion of hanging out with the brilliant, hard-drinking Welshman and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, in Salzburg, Austria, was appealing to an actor who had been locked into low budget westerns. The film was a potboiler but represented a good payday.

Upon its completion offers were streaming in for other action films and westerns, but Paramount put another scheme before him—one that would provide a bizarre diversion in his career path.

When Bob Evans first informed me that Alan Jay Lerner had offered Eastwood a role in Paint Your Wagon, I laughed it off. “I know Clint a little bit,” I responded. “His mind is set on becoming a filmmaker. There’s no way he’s going to do a singing western.”

I was dead wrong. Having made his “secret” album of western songs, Eastwood was, in fact, thrilled that the Broadway legends Lerner and Loewe were now pursuing him. Years later, when I discussed the film with him, he seemed embarrassed by the entire episode. “These great men of the theater ... they actually were courting me. And they wanted me to sing!” he said.

In the end, of course, Paint Your Wagon proved to be a career embarrassment. Eastwood now found himself caught up in a series of almosts: He was almost a TV star, almost a movie star, almost a producer. His frustration was exacerbated by bad luck in the release schedules. Three Eastwood movies, Paint Your Wagon, Kelly’s Heroes, and Two Mules for Sister Sara, were all opening in close proximity—a daunting triple-header that dramatized the lack of direction in his career.

In an unusually candid interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter at the time, Eastwood declared, “After seventeen years of bouncing my head against the wall and watching actors go through all kinds of hell without any help, I’m at the point where I’m ready to make my own pictures. I stored away all the mistakes I made and saved up the good things I learned and now I know enough to control my own projects and get what I want out of other actors.”

Clint Eastwood was determined now to transform himself into a director, but typically, he would do so on his own terms. Play Misty for Me, his first turn as a director, would be modest in design and conventional in plot, as Hang ’Em High had been. Misty was a thriller about a disc jockey who had a one-night stand with a caller, but then turned violent when she subsequently refused his advances. The plot seemed somewhat dated, but the performances were solid.

Eastwood completed his film in under five weeks in the fall of 1970. It received respectful notices. Studio reps who saw it complimented him. They treated him as though he were a diligent student who had now received his diploma.

But Misty was to be overwhelmed in the marketplace. The screens seemed ablaze with films that were redefining the lexicon of cinema—A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, The Last Picture Show. In comparison, Eastwood’s foray seemed bland and dated. It was a start—but Clint Eastwood knew he had to do better.

The inability of Misty to attract the attention it deserved played a part in Eastwood’s decision to take on the role of Dirty Harry Callahan. Here was a character who demanded attention. Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman had both turned down the movie, fearing that the public would reject the movie’s violence and its lowlife protagonist. Callahan had set himself up as both judge and jury, tracking down a bad guy named Scorpio who had earlier been set free because his rights allegedly had been violated by other cops. Eastwood felt he could capture Callahan’s antiauthority rage. But, following the disappointment of Misty, he wanted the assurance of having his alter ego, Don Siegel, serve as director.

Dirty Harry was released in December 1971, two months after Misty. The audiences loved it and the critics were appalled. Writing in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael described it as an exercise in “Fascist medievalism.” The New York Times critic Roger Greenspun said Eastwood’s performance amounted to “iron-jawed self-parody.”

To Eastwood himself, the chorus of criticism reflected the ideology of what he liked to call “the pussy generation.” He felt great about the movie. Perversely, the intensity of the response to Dirty Harry guaranteed Eastwood’s ascent to stardom.

Among the young actors coming into their own in the late sixties, Robert Redford seemed the best bet for conquering the studios. Born in Santa Monica, he instinctively understood Hollywood’s schemes and idiosyncrasies. He was intelligent and handsome in a stolidly conventional way. Hollywood always needed a young star with an all-American look, and Redford not only had the look but also knew how to market it.

But he wasn’t who he seemed to be. Though an LA brat, he was reserved and rather conservative in his personal habits and liberal in his political beliefs. Seemingly open in discussions, he would walk away from confrontation. If a negotiation became an argument, Redford would simply disappear. “Redford is someone you can easily get to know, but you never really know him,” Judd Bernard, the producer, warned me early on.

One clue to his behavior was that Redford distrusted the studios and their executives perhaps more than any other actor. His dream was to construct an institution that embodied the mirror opposite of Hollywood processes and values—a vision that ultimately came to life as the Sundance Festival. But to achieve his aims, Redford understood he would first have to exploit the resources of mainstream Hollywood without becoming a servant of the system.

Inevitably, Redford would turn out to be the most difficult to deal with of his generation. With Redford, all commitments were tentative, all relationships arm’s-length. In my dealings with him, I sensed his distrust, but felt it was an institutional antipathy, not a personal one. I represented studio power and Redford hated studio power in all its iterations.

Since he generated so many mixed signals, Redford’s ride to stardom was a bumpy one. He was the clean-cut young leading man in Barefoot in the Park, displaying solid instincts for comic understatement. Cast in somber melodramas like The Chase and This Property Is Condemned, Redford received tepid reviews and his films generated meager box office results. Inside Daisy Clover, too, demonstrated his competence as an actor, but the movie simply didn’t work.

Keenly self-aware, Redford realized that his Waspy appearance often worked against him. Mike Nichols auditioned him for the lead in The Graduate, but opted instead for the more ethnic and idiosyncratic Dustin Hoffman. The movies that were stirring excitement were not about blond, blue-eyed Protestants but rather about freaks.

Redford liked his character—a tough cowboy raised by Mexican bandits—and also related to the milieu (the Mexican border), but had reservations about both the script and the director, Silvio Narizzano. Fearful of potential failure, he simply walked away. Lawsuits were threatened but Redford would not reconsider.

When Blue imploded, several issues became clear to me. There was no sense developing a script with Redford, because he was simply too difficult to communicate with. He would show up an hour or two late for a meeting, never offering an explanation or apology. His comments on material were opaque and he didn’t show much interest in the points of view of others.

Though Redford’s sudden exit from Blue had caused a chill in his relations with the studio, I still felt that the right Redford project at the right time would be a win. With this in mind, I kept in touch with a shrewd young British agent named Richard Gregson, who I knew had a solid relationship with the actor and who also yearned to become a producer. One day I told Gregson that I’d read a gripping screenplay titled Downhill Racer, which dealt with Olympic skiers. Given Redford’s passion for skiing, I said, this was a subject that might stir some interest.

A week or so later Gregson phoned to say that we’d hit pay dirt. Redford was not only a passionate skier but had also wanted to buy property in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah—an undeveloped area some 6,000 feet up. Within a decade, not only would the actor purchase thousands of acres in that area, but they would become home to his Sundance Institute and to its resident festival—the mecca of independent film.

Richard Gregson was witty and worldly and I felt I could be candid with him. If Downhill Racer became reality, I would help him through the Paramount intricacies if he would deal with Redford. I was intent on keeping my distance from his star and from his resentments. The project, I warned them, already had become politically complicated because it had been dangled before Roman Polanski as part of a possible two-picture deal involving Rosemary’s Baby. The Polish filmmaker, too, was a devoted skier. On top of that, Polanski was at that point considering Redford as the possible lead in Rosemary’s Baby (a role which ultimately went to John Cassavetes).

Gregson and Redford decided to hire a novelist named James Salter to rewrite their skiing script, which was based on a 1965 novel written by Oakley Hall. They went to Grenoble, to hang out with the U.S. ski team, traveling with them on buses and taking notes. When they returned, Gregson and Salter filled me in on the specifics of their central character, to be named David Chappelet. He would be something of a golden boy, remote and self-centered, a humorless young athlete who, while a member of the Olympic team, was never a team player. As they described Chappelet, I realized that, consciously or not, they were also describing Redford. The central character of this movie would be as emotionally inaccessible and fiercely focused as the movie star who would play him.

With the new script in development, the search for a director became crucial. I had become friendly with a bright young filmmaker named Michael Ritchie, who’d been working mainly in long-form television. Ritchie was an articulate Harvard graduate and an avid skier. I felt Ritchie would be an interesting match for Downhill Racer, but, as I’d learned on Blue, Redford would never be comfortable if he felt he’d been assigned a director. It would have to be Redford’s idea.

That would become Gregson’s problem, and he negotiated it well. He showed some of Ritchie’s work to his star before setting up a meeting. Ritchie’s intellect impressed Redford. Since Ritchie was six feet eight inches tall and Redford, like many stars, was somewhat undersized, the height differential also made the director’s arguments more persuasive. Ritchie was signed to direct the film.

Even as Downhill Racer was being prepped, yet another important screenplay possibly involving Redford was stirring interest at Paramount. Titled Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and written by William Goldman), the script was put up for auction by the writer’s agent and the bidding quickly passed $300,000—a formidable figure at that time for an original screenplay with no “elements” attached. I offered a bid for Paramount, telling my colleagues that the two leading roles would surely attract top stars and that our studio could benefit from another star vehicle. Redford was clearly a possibility, but he had not as yet read the script, nor had Paul Newman, who would finally get the other lead role.

Meanwhile, Downhill Racer rolled into production on colorful Alpine locations in Wengen, Switzerland, and Kitzbühel, Austria. The racing scenes were made vividly realistic through the use of handheld cameras. Redford’s skiing double managed to ski downhill at upwards of fifty miles per hour toting a 35 mm Arriflex camera weighing forty pounds. The audience would feel the swerves and bounces, all the while hearing the crunch of snow and sensing the bone-chilling blast of air.

In test screenings, filmgoers reacted with admiration to Downhill Racer, but their praise seemed tentative. Some commented that the characters seemed as chilly as the setting. They wanted a story that was both warmer and more entertaining.

They got it in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which opened on September 25, 1969, six weeks ahead of Downhill Racer to ecstatic reviews and audience reaction. Indeed, Downhill Racer seemed to be pale and spartan compared with Butch Cassidy. It was a well-crafted art picture, and Butch Cassidy was a classic Hollywood blockbuster.

Evans and I were both disappointed in Downhill Racer, but we were already developing yet another Redford picture—one that was also a racing story. In Little Fauss and Big Halsy, however, the setting was far from the clean white slopes of Olympic skiing. This was a down-and-dirty script by Charles Eastman, a cult favorite among writers and young directors, and it was set in the dusty Southwest biking circuit. It was a buddy picture that focused on a homely but earnest loser and his womanizing, thieving partner on the circuit. The project was brought to me by Albert S. Ruddy, a tall, fast-talking young producer with a gravelly voice and an off-center sense of humor.

Ruddy’s notion was to match Redford with a hilariously eccentric young actor named Michael J. Pollard. And the director would be Sidney J. Furie, a young Canadian, who had made an impact with his thriller The Ipcress File.

To my surprise, Redford liked the lowlife role and the colorful setting, and felt Furie had an original take on the material. He also was intrigued by the sexual tension generated by a sex object named Rita Nebraska, who was to be played by Lauren Hutton. The bike racing, too, interested him, even though Big Halsy was anything but a champion.

Redford’s behavior on the movie was typically cool and professional. Consistent with the subject matter, Ruddy put together a boozing and hard-living cast and crew. Redford showed up every day on the Arizona location looking like the down-and-dirty Halsy, but he and his wife opted to live at an upscale resort far from the gritty location. He did not “hang” with the cast, and while other actors tended to ham it up during the shoot, Redford’s performance was carefully understated. It was as though he was buying into the funky setting but also Redfordizing it.

Little Fauss did not especially embellish Redford’s career. If anything, it was irrelevant to it. By the time of its release, a different destiny in the film world had taken shape in Redford’s mind. He had yearned to be a movie star, but that was now a means to an end. The vision of Sundance had captured his imagination, the notion of establishing an environment for independent filmmakers that would become at once an alternative to Hollywood, and also a preparation for it. Redford would himself mature as a skilled director of films that occupied a shadow world between the two domains. Ordinary People reflected the sensibility of independent filmmaking but achieved widespread mainstream recognition. Lions for Lambs, by contrast, aspired to challenge mainstream sensibilities, but turned out instead to be a failed polemic.

Redford’s contemporaries Beatty and Eastwood each went on to momentous achievements as filmmakers. Beatty’s supreme moment, Reds, surpassed expectations in every way. It was challenging as a work of pop culture; it was wildly excessive in terms of cost, and, finally, it achieved recognition on a scale that exceeded even Beatty’s formidable ego. The depth of Clint Eastwood’s work similarly mirrored the star’s own personal growth. In a sense, Gran Torino was a response to Dirty Harry; Letters from Iwo Jima was a counterpoint to Kelly’s Heroes. The Man with No Name had molted into a sort of Everyman, who was determined to teach as he was himself learning.

When I first encountered them, Redford, Beatty, and Eastwood, each was desperate to find a good role in movies and in life. Surely none would have imagined the mythic roles they were destined to play out.