In his room at the North Park Motor Inn in Dallas, Robert Towne spent most of his evenings writing. Every morning, he waited in the motel parking lot with the rest of Bonnie and Clyde’s cast and crew for the buses to come and drive them several miles to that day’s location. The farther they got from Dallas, the more arid, semiabandoned hamlets they’d find—each with its hollowed-out two-story buildings, a beauty parlor, and a luncheonette opening onto a mostly empty town square, all of which were largely unchanged since the depths of the Depression.1 “Pilot Point Is Proud to Have Been Selected to Participate in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’” cheered one local newspaper ad, in which local businessmen pooled their dollars to run a picture of the present-day town in order to reassure readers that it was now “peaceful.”2 “All the young people had left,” says Estelle Parsons. “These towns were really finished. Each one had one coffee shop, full of old men, just sitting around.”3
Sometimes Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty would find themselves shooting near the same streets where, thirty-three years earlier, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had become famous. Bystanders would shyly introduce themselves, and every one of them had a story: The middle-aged woman in white gloves was a little girl who saw Bonnie and Clyde run out of the bank and jump into their getaway car; the man standing off to one side waiting to meet Penn was Clyde Barrow’s nephew Duryl. What had seemed to Robert Benton and David Newman to be a story carved out of the French New Wave and American pop-cultural debris—gangster movies, detective magazines, comic strips—was, to the local Texans who kept showing up, just a part of their history, a brush with notoriety that had taken place not so long ago. “Life was shaping art,” Towne wrote later. “Warren and Faye were not working on Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde were working on them.”4 Towne wasn’t doing a lot of on-the-spot rewriting, although on many afternoons he’d leave shooting early to go back to the motel and fine-tune a scene that Penn and Beatty were planning to film the next day.5 “Robert, why don’t you come down to Dallas while we’re doing the movie?” Beatty had said to him. “We can work on Shampoo while we’re there.”6 It had sounded like a reasonable idea. But as the autumn days rolled by and Shampoo remained largely untouched, Towne started to realize why he was really in Texas: His job was to listen to Beatty and Penn fight.
“I can be obnoxious,” says Beatty. “And I knew that I would be hard to take in a one-on-one dialectic with Arthur, that finally he would say, ‘I just can’t take it anymore.’ Three heads are better than two, because if two people disagree, it’s more possible for it to become personal. You need someone to say, ‘Hey, schmuck!’ So Robert really was very helpful when we were kicking things around. He made the arguments, which I would prefer to call discussions, very productive.”7
“I would call it fighting,” says Estelle Parsons. “Every morning we would go to work, and Warren and Arthur would fight for half an hour or an hour. We would be all ready to go and they would start serious, professional, artistic fighting. I remember that when Gene [Wilder] and Evans [Evans] came to do their scene, Gene said, ‘My God, is this movie ever going to get made? What’s going on here? What are they doing?’ We laughed because we were so used to this happening that we’d forgotten they did it by then. And those fights—the creative energy of them—were so important to the movie.”8
“Was it tense? Are you kidding? It was excruciating!” says script supervisor John Dutton. “Beatty used to ask these questions of Penn that would sound silly, but there was always something behind it. He was fishing for something.”9
Beatty had tried to plan his entire career by studying the work of directors he admired, but as Bonnie and Clyde’s producer, suddenly he was feeling impatient with auteurism. “To attribute [movies] wholly to their directors—not to the actors, not to the producer, not [to] the leading lady… well, that’s bullshit!” he fumed. “Those pictures were made by directors, writers, and sound men and cameramen and actors and so forth, but suddenly, it’s ‘Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown.’… It’s not healthy.”10 Beatty and Penn’s discussions often concerned aspects of the script as small as which word in a line should be emphasized or as unquantifiable as the tone of a particular moment. A flourish, a camera angle, a reaction, a grace note—no issue was too trivial to stop both men in their tracks. “What else is making a movie,” Beatty said, “except attention to detail?”11
Although he was Penn’s boss, Beatty knew better than to tell him how to direct, at least most of the time. “He was always at Arthur Penn’s ear about everything,” says production designer Dean Tavoularis. “The wardrobe, a dolly shot, when to change a setup—he was hands-on, a very active producer. But I would never describe it as unfriendly.”12 Frequently, the conflicts would be put on hold only because shooting had to begin or the day would be lost completely; that night at dinner, Beatty and Penn would start again, often calling Towne over to step in and to take notes. “They were burning the midnight oil on that thing,” says Dutton. “They’d come out with new pages every day.”13
Penn and Beatty’s relationship during the shoot never fractured; although Penn says that “very difficult situations emerged almost daily,” Beatty usually knew when to quit pressing a point, perhaps because there was no producer around to stop him but himself. “The fact that Warren had nursed this material, that it was within his control, paradoxically allowed him to give up control more easily to a director,” says Towne. “He picked Arthur, and he trusted Arthur more easily than he would have if he had had to just show up for a director as an employee—he had done that before, and it hadn’t worked for him.”14
Penn and Beatty had far more to contend with than their own disputes: Bonnie and Clyde was not one of those shoots in which a remote location and a lack of local entertainment foster a spirit of camaraderie. Estelle Parsons was quarreling with her on-screen husband, Gene Hackman, who was nursing his own resentments and grudges. The maverick Tavoularis was at loggerheads with the crusty, aging cinematographer Burnett Guffey. And Faye Dunaway’s taut nerves and shaky emotional state were evident to everyone from the day she showed up on the set.
When Dunaway was cast, Penn and Beatty had worried about the weight she had put on during her unhappy stretch working for Preminger, and Penn told her she’d have to slim down. Just hours before Dunaway met Penn and Beatty, she had been at the beach with director Curtis Hanson, then a young film journalist and photographer, and the photographs he had taken of her that day convinced Beatty and Penn that they had made the right choice. “She was very overweight,” said Hanson, “but the way I shot her, backlit with her hair back, she looked softer and thinner.” But the actress, having been turned into a blond sex kitten for The Happening and then a drab farmwife for Hurry Sundown, was already insecure about her appearance, and the suggestion that she might not be physically attractive enough to play Bonnie was devastating to her. (“She doesn’t look like much,” an indifferent Beatty told Hanson when she was cast.)15 In the few weeks before production started, Dunaway worked relentlessly to lose twenty-five pounds. By the time she arrived in Texas, she was rail-thin and both physically and emotionally fragile. “She went on a starvation diet,” says Penn. “I mean, not eating anything.”16
In her autobiography, Dunaway insists that she “spent weeks walking around my apartment and working out wearing a twelve-pound weight belt, with smaller weights around my wrists,”17 but several people who worked with her on Bonnie and Clyde say she was also taking diet pills, a far more common way for an actress to lose weight in the preaerobics era. “What she went through …” says Theadora Van Runkle. “Once I took one of her diet pills and I stayed awake for days. You couldn’t have any fat on you at all—it was just awful. So for actresses back then, it meant diet pills, water-retention pills, all that stuff. And remember, she was next to Warren, who was terribly pretty himself. It wasn’t easy for her.”18 Beatty’s assistant Elaine Michea remembers that Dunaway lost so much additional weight during the shoot that Van Runkle’s costumes for her had to be re-sewn. “‘Fadin’ Away.’ That’s what we used to call Faye on the set, she was so thin,” says Dutton.19
Dunaway didn’t have a lot of friends on the set; she blew hot and cold with the crew depending on her mood, and they noticed. Her self-absorption worked both for and against her. On screen, she seems almost electrically charged as Bonnie, deeply in touch with the character’s restlessness, her desire to escape from her slow life and into a fast car, her hunger for thrills, her need to dramatize herself, and the speed with which her giddiness can turn to terror or anger; she channeled whatever anxiety or fear she was feeling off camera right into her performance. “I often say that the last role I played that really touched me and where I was able to access what I really am was Bonnie,” she said thirty-five years later, “which is kind of sad when you think about how early in my career that was.”20 At its strongest, Dunaway’s connection to the “yearning, edgy, ambitious southern girl who wanted to get out” was uncanny. “I knew everything about wanting to get out,” she wrote. “Arthur … said he always felt in working with me that my talent was crying out for expression, and I was crying out for fame.”21 But Dunaway tried everyone’s patience getting there. “Nobody was too keen on Faye,” recalls Parsons. “We were all kind of annoyed with her. We’d be ready to do a shot, and Faye would need the makeup woman. We’d be all set to roll, and oops, Faye would have to have her hair combed. There was a lot of that. We’d go in early to get made-up, five or six in the morning, and she’d be there with rock and roll blaring. Listen, that was the way she kept herself going. She’s got a temperament, but I love her, and I understand the way she is. Don’t get me started on being a woman in a situation like that.”22
Dunaway’s lowest moment came after the first time Arthur Penn showed dailies to the cast. The actress had never seen herself on screen before—when she began shooting Bonnie and Clyde in the fall of 1966, she hadn’t even had an opportunity to look at footage of herself in The Happening or Hurry Sundown. The rushes were “the first time I ever got a sense of how I must look to other people,” she wrote.23 The experience demolished what little confidence she had; she broke down, overwhelmed by the feeling that she was “ugly,” and spiraled into a three-day depression during which she sat “silent, sullen, morose” in a hay field, talking to no one. (By some accounts, she was briefly hospitalized.)24 “After that, I sort of closed the dailies,” says Penn. “Actors can’t look at themselves—all they can see is flaws. I have never done it again.”25
When Dunaway emerged from her despair, she was somewhat less mercurial and more focused on business—including her interactions with Beatty, which surprised almost everyone who assumed that, given the actor’s track record, a romance with his costar would be a foregone conclusion. “He was acting and he was producing,” says Tavoularis. “That was what he had his mind on.”26 Even when talking about their sex scenes, Beatty kept his flirting in check. At the end of a long day’s shoot, Dunaway and John Dutton were relaxing at the North Park Motor Inn when Beatty, his mind already on the next day’s schedule, said to her, as if checking off items on a list, “We need to talk about the before-fuck and the afterfuck.” 27 That was about as romantic as things got. “We had a tacit understanding that we’d simply remain friends,” said Dunaway later.28
“Listen, she was … I … I like anybody who’s working hard,” says Beatty. “She was never dismissive or bored. I think it was hard for her. Because she was not used to this, and I think she saw that something was maybe gonna happen here. You get all tense if you’re a thoroughbred and you know it’s a big race. But you put the result first.”29
To some extent, Beatty had only himself to blame for the less-than-cheerful atmosphere on Bonnie and Clyde, since he had assembled a creative team with nothing to lose, but also little reason for optimism. “Get ’em when they’re down!” says Towne. “Gene [Hackman] didn’t have anything going on, Arthur had just come off some damn mess [The Chase]. Warren’s attitude very often was, Get somebody who’s really talented at a point when they’re going to be more pliant or malleable than they might otherwise be. And very often that’s after a shaky or bad experience.”30 Beatty himself had just taken another pounding: Kaleidoscope, his attempt at a Bond-lite caper, had not fulfilled Jack Warner’s prophecy of success. Worse, it had only reinforced its leading man’s status as a pretty-boy actor in search of an identity. “Beatty tries so hard to act like Sean Connery that once or twice he almost develops a line in his face,” smirked Time’s reviewer.31 Any hope that a hit for Beatty might have loosened the studio’s purse strings when it came to Bonnie and Clyde was gone: The film was budgeted so tightly that there wasn’t even money for Van Runkle to come to the set, and other than the costumes worn by Beatty and Dunaway, the clothes came straight out of the studio’s warehouse of used goods. “I wore Barbara Stanwyck’s jodphurs,” says Parsons, “and Dorothy Malone’s skirts, whatever was left over from other movies.” When the weather got colder in Texas, Elaine Michea had to go to local bargain-basement stores just to find winter coats for the crew.32
During Bonnie and Clyde’s long night shoots, the actors occasionally found time for a relaxing moment or two. Dunaway, at least for a while, discovered a kindred spirit in Michael J. Pollard. Dunaway’s onetime lover Lenny Bruce had died of a heroin overdose a few weeks before production began, and Pollard had been a fan; one night after Bruce performed, the two men had shared a taxi uptown and Bruce suggested they shoot up together (Pollard declined, saying he’d rather stick to Jack Daniel’s). Pollard and Dunaway bonded, playing Bob Dylan’s recently released Blonde on Blonde on the phonograph all night long and cracking each other up with old Bruce routines.33 But laughter was the exception to the rule. Parsons and Hackman kept to themselves. “I was a loner,” she says. “I was so close to Arthur Penn, and Gene didn’t have that—he was so competitive with Warren, so upset that I was so in love with working for Arthur. I would come out of my trailer crying and sobbing and run to Arthur saying, ‘I don’t know why Gene is so mean to me!’ It’s easy for me to be hysterical. Maybe that’s why I didn’t find Blanche hard to play.”34
The actress Morgan Fairchild, who at the time was a sixteen-year-old Texan named Patsy McClenny who had gotten herself a job as Bonnie’s driving double when Penn discovered that Dunaway couldn’t work a stick shift, hung out with the stunt crew and, whenever she could, watched Beatty work. “It was very interesting to watch a young, beautiful, elegant man be the one in power,” she says. Fairchild eavesdropped as much as she could, listening to Penn and Beatty argue about the “ring of fire, ring of fire, ring of fire. I didn’t know what it was until I found out they were trying to figure out how to do the scene in which they wake up and the house is surrounded by cops. They talked about how to edit it, frame it, put it together, and I hung on every word.”35
Penn’s desire to break away from the bloat and tedium of most period movies in the mid-1960s was reaffirmed when he took a road trip to a Dallas theater to see an early screening of Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles. After the success of The Sound of Music, Wise had carte blanche at 20th Century-Fox; he brought his first cut of the movie about U.S. Navy men in 1926 China down to Texas himself and sat directly behind Penn, who watched with a look of polite interest frozen onto his face for three and a half hours. “I couldn’t blink, I couldn’t yawn!”36 he said as he left the rented theater.* The movie was massive, ponderous, “important”—everything that Hollywood costume dramas had been for more than a decade—and it served as a reminder of the mission statement that Benton and Newman had laid out three years earlier: to make Bonnie and Clyde a film “about what’s going on now.”
Penn infused the movie with as much contemporary resonance as it could contain: He made the sexual psychodrama of Clyde’s struggle with impotence as vivid as possible, despite Beatty’s insistence that “the Freudian nature of [Bonnie and Clyde’s] relationship puts me to sleep,”37 using everything from suggestive cuts to crotch-level camera placement to imply that he was a man who wasn’t in control of his gun. He pushed Robert Towne to rewrite, again and again, a scene in which the Barrow gang traps Frank Hamer, the lawman who has been tracking them, and Bonnie humiliates him by kissing him on the mouth:38 They had to seem not like just a group of criminals tormenting a Texas Ranger, but like a band of antiauthority counterculture kids flipping off the Establishment. Penn liked the notion of Bonnie and Clyde as agrarian Robin Hoods who rob banks but not farmers, a notion made explicit in a couple of the film’s stickup scenes. He held tenaciously on to one sequence in which a group of starved-out Okies welcome the injured couple as comrades in poverty, and another in which Clyde hands a gun to a black farmhand and allows him to shoot out the window of a foreclosed house. The scene suggested an alliance against the Man that crossed racial lines, even though Clyde’s anachronistic lack of racism in the movie owes more to the progressivism of the 1960s than of the 1930s. After Bonnie and Clyde’s release, Penn proudly told Cahiers du Cinéma that black audiences looked at the characters and “said, ‘This is the way to go, baby. Those cats were all right.’ They really understood, because in a certain sense the American Negro has the same kind of attitude of ‘I have nothing more to lose.’”39
He had plenty of allies in his one-foot-in-each-decade approach. Towne knew just how much he could tweak Benton and Newman’s dialogue without breaking with period reality altogether. And Van Runkle, after Beatty vetoed her perfectly in-period sketches of Bonnie and Clyde (with marcelled hair for her and a close-cropped center part for him), came up with a look that nodded both to the 1930s and, in Dunaway’s straight hair, form-hugging skirts, and beret, to contemporary fashion and the French New Wave.
Penn’s only real nemesis was Burnett Guffey, who after forty years in the business of lighting, framing, and shooting scenes didn’t want to end his career with a movie he was sure would look ugly and amateurish. Guffey was a popular and respected leader within the Cinematographers Guild—he was known as “Six-Day” Guffey for his effort to prevent guild members from having to work seven-day weeks40—and he wasn’t accustomed to being told how to do his job. Before shooting started, he summoned Dean Tavoularis to his room at the North Park. Tavoularis had violated a cardinal rule of old-guard art direction: He’d chosen rooms with low ceilings to serve as the locations where the Barrow gang hid out. But he wasn’t about to give in and change them. “They hired me because they wanted a new approach,” he says. “I found that totally to my liking, to rebel against the Pillow Talk, Hollywood movie look. I hated those narrowly framed back-lot street shots. I was more interested in what directors like Sidney Lumet were doing.” For Bonnie and Clyde’s interiors, “I had looked at rooms in places like Waxahachie, and I knew what a modest house looked like—I wanted those old ceilings with old wallpaper on them to be visible,” he says. “When I got to Bernie Guffey’s room, he came to the door wearing a silk robe and holding a Scotch and soda, and he offered me a drink. He didn’t say anything about the ceilings, the challenges of hanging lights in a small room, but I knew that’s what he was thinking. He was sizing me up, waiting to hear if I knew what I was doing. It was very clear—I was just a little chick, and he was a veteran.”41
Penn pushed Guffey, and Guffey pushed back. The director didn’t want overlit scenes; he wanted soft-focus, filtered, almost foggy light in the sequence in which Bonnie reunites with her family in the Texas sand-hills; he wanted the same level of sophistication in a color movie that European cinematographers were bringing to black and white;* and he wanted some of the outdoor scenes to have the on-the-fly feeling of the Nouvelle Vague. “The famous scene where they were running in the fields and the light changed—Bernie hated that,” says Tavoularis. “He hated flash, or lens flare, or bumps. Having the light change in a shot was, to him, a taboo—but why? Maybe it’s great! Maybe it’s dramatic! He hated anything like that.”42
“It was really the lack of light that upset Bernie,” says Beatty. “He was an older man—he wanted to use a lot of light, and Arthur did not. Arthur’s influences were—well, one very strong influence was his brother [photographer Irving Penn]. Arthur would say, ‘Here’s the light,’ and Bernie would say, ‘Well, this is not gonna play well in the drive-ins!’” Finally, after one too many confrontations with Penn, Guffey quit. The cast and crew were told he had suffered a heart attack. “It was not a heart attack,” says Beatty. “It was an I-can’t-do-it attack.”43 Another veteran, sixty-two-year-old Ellsworth Fredericks, took his place. Fredericks had shot for Joshua Logan and William Wyler, but “it was impossible,” recalls Parsons. “The shots were so conventional that it became like a typical Hollywood movie. The guy would set up a shot, and Arthur would just throw up his hands.”44 After a few days, Penn had new respect for how hard Guffey had been struggling to take the look of the film in the direction he wanted, and Guffey returned to work.
As the shoot progressed, the violence and morbidity of Bonnie and Clyde became, more than ever, the focus of Penn’s attention. The bloodshed in the movie, the intensity of which had never been seen in a studio film, was built right into the language of Benton and Newman’s script. The two writers had, by design, placed the story’s most jolting moments of violence in the middle of episodes of comic incompetence: When Clyde holds up a grocery store to impress Bonnie, he’s suddenly overwhelmed by a giant butcher who literally lifts him off the ground and tries to attack him with a cleaver; “in blind fury, he pistol-whips the BUTCHER’S head with two terrific swipes,” they wrote. When Bonnie and Clyde rob their first bank, their getaway is slowed because their simpleton accomplice C. W. (Pollard) has decided to parallel-park their escape car in a tight spot. That leaves time for a white-haired bank official to leap onto the back of the car. As the passengers, the bystanders, and the tires are all screaming, a panicked Clyde shoots him, and “the face of the man explodes in blood.”45 Penn loved the moments in which rural ineptitude fractures into horror and was determined to find a visual language that would shock moviegoers out of their laughter. When Clyde shoots the teller, he turns directly to the camera for an instant before firing; Penn then cuts on the sound of the gunshot to his victim’s blood-soaked face, and we have the sickening, split-second impression that the bullet has spiderwebbed two pieces of glass—the back windshield and the lens of the man’s spectacles.
Beatty and Penn argued for much of the production about Penn’s desire to include a scene that wasn’t in the script, in which Bonnie and Clyde, shortly before their death, act out their own demises in a ghoulish private pageant. “I had a place for a scene just before the end in which I thought—to my chagrin as I say it now—that Bonnie might have wanted to perform her own death, something that grew out of the romantic idea she had about herself, a kind of overembellished funeral with a movie star look, and that was what I kept pressing for,” says Penn. “It was a colorful idea, but too elaborate. Warren didn’t like it at all, and neither did Towne.”46
After Penn gave up on the notion, he started concentrating on the movie’s most technically difficult scene, Bonnie and Clyde’s death in a hail of bullets that seem to come from every direction at once. Benton and Newman’s screenplay called for just five seconds of “rapid, deafening” gunfire and noted that “at no point during the gunfight do we see BONNIE and CLYDE in motion …. We never see BONNIE and CLYDE dead.” Penn had something else in mind even before production started; the way he visualized the sequence was what finally convinced him to make the movie earlier in the year, when he had been working with Benton and Newman in Stockbridge and wavering about his decision to direct.
“I just woke up one day in the country and thought, gee, I can see the ending,” he says. “Not the benign, lyrical thing that I had thought, but something spastic and balletic. It has to do something extraordinary, something that makes them into a legend.”47 During the shoot, Penn mapped out the final scene, drawing for inspiration on Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, the Zapruder film, Breathless, and his own finale for his first movie, The Left Handed Gun, in which he had used different film speeds to intensify the image of Paul Newman’s Billy the Kid shooting a man out of his boots. The summer’s riots were on his mind; so was the war in Vietnam, which in the two months that Bonnie and Clyde had been shooting had become the subject of increasing pessimism in the nation’s press and of major public protests, including the rally at the Pentagon that Norman Mailer later memorialized in The Armies of the Night. Penn wanted as much political resonance in the scene as it could comfortably contain, an ambush that would, as Richard Gilman later put it in The New Republic, “mount up to an image of absolute blind violence on the part of organized society, a violence far surpassing that which it is supposed to be putting down.”48
The final sequence in Bonnie and Clyde, which includes sixty shots in less than a minute, took longer to film than anything else in the movie. Penn used four cameras for every setup, each one filming from the same angle but running at a different speed. He extended the gunfire from five seconds to twenty-five; he rigged Beatty and Dunaway with dozens of squibs and blood packets that would be set off when Beatty squeezed a pear that Clyde was eating;49 he attached a piece of prosthetic scalp to Beatty’s head that an off-screen makeup man would pull off using an invisible nylon thread (a subliminally fast moment designed expressly to evoke memories of the Kennedy assassination); he tied one of Dunaway’s legs to the gearshift of the car so that she would eventually be able to fall dead according to “the laws of gravity” without hurting herself; and he devised separate pieces of choreography for Beatty, who is quickly knocked onto the dusty road by bullets, and Dunaway, who dances like a marionette behind the steering wheel, unable even to fall over as the bullets jolt her in every direction. “There’s a moment in death when the body no longer functions, when it becomes an object and has a certain kind of detached ugly beauty,” he said. “It was that aspect I was trying to get.”50 Penn mapped out every shot in advance, including the fast, flashing sequence of close-ups in which Beatty and Dunaway realize what’s happening and lock eyes. The elaborate setup of the squibs meant he had time to film the scene from only two angles each day. On the fourth afternoon, he was done.51
Penn and Beatty had kept costs down at the beginning of the shoot; Benton and Newman’s lawyer had even had to write a letter after filming started reminding the production that they still hadn’t been paid most of what they were owed for the screenplay and that “the boys need it very badly.”52 But as the weeks continued, Beatty and Penn’s long discussions, their attention to detail and shared taste for multiple takes, Dunaway’s skittishness, and the logistical complexities of filming a period movie on location had wreaked havoc with the schedule. The ever changing combination of night shoots and early-morning calls had exhausted the cast; Pollard had to have a tattoo painted on his chest for many scenes and would often lie there sound asleep while makeup designer Bob Jiras did his work.53 As long as they were in Texas, and as long as the footage from Bonnie and Clyde was being sent to editor Dede Allen in New York, Beatty and Penn were free from studio interference; Warner Brothers would be forced either to keep sending money or to shut down the production and lose everything it had spent. Nevertheless, “there was always a sense of something between a request and a threat about our need to come back to the studio,” says Tavoularis.54 “Jack Warner was having apoplexy when we were three days over,” says John Dutton. By the end of the Texas shoot in December, “we were [weeks] over schedule and well over budget. And then he clamped down.”55
Walter MacEwen had worried since production began about being beaten to screens by another Depression-era gangster movie, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, that Roger Corman was directing for 20th Century-Fox; he wanted Bonnie and Clyde in theaters by the summer of 1967 without fail. “Stay as sweet as you are,” he wrote to Beatty at the beginning of the shoot, “[and] complete the goddamn show on schedule.”56 And Jack Warner could barely muster enough enthusiasm to send the traditional first-day-of-filming cable to Arthur Penn. “Every good wish on the start of your picture,” he wrote. “Know you will bring production in on schedule. And for the budget,” he added, before crossing the last four words out.57 “Warner was so pissed off that they were in Texas,” says Walter MacEwen’s assistant Robert Solo. “He’d say, ‘Why aren’t they on the lot? Why do they have to be in Texas? Mike Curtiz could shoot on the lot! Mervyn LeRoy could shoot on the lot! What’s wrong with these guys?’ He would rant and rave and carry on every day. Finally, he forced them to come back.”58
Bonnie and Clyde moved to Burbank for its final weeks; the technical requirements of filming the driving sequences would eventually have forced the production onto a rear-projection stage in any case. Since so much of the movie is set in the very crowded getaway car, all five principal actors were there as well as Gene Wilder and Evans Evans. “If the movie had been shot just a couple of years later,” says Penn, “there would have been no need for rear projection. But the terrain of the road was just too rough for those cameras and the sound equipment, so we had to go to the lot.”59 Jack Warner had gotten his wish; the film was now nominally under his control, although he hadn’t seen the unprecedentedly bloody and brutal footage that Dede Allen and her assistant, Jerry Greenberg, were beginning to cut together. Obsessed with Camelot, he hardly paid attention to Bonnie and Clyde. When he did, he expressed little enthusiasm. “We had shot one scene in Dallas—the scene where Buck, the brother, is first seen with Clyde … about fifteen times,” said Beatty. “When we got back to Hollywood, we did some over-the-shoulder shots—all of this same scene. We had about 125,000 takes … and this was the one day, of all the goddamn days, that Jack Warner picked to come and see the rushes. He came up to me afterward and said, ‘Hey, kid, Bogart wouldn’t do that. You think Errol Flynn would put up with that many takes? For Christ’s sake, kid!’”60
On the film’s last day of production, the seventy-four-year-old studio chief found an opportunity for one last assertion of authority. “There had been a long tradition at Warner Brothers, with their B movies, that Jack Warner would give them a time frame and then come down to the set, no matter how far along they were, and say, ‘Your picture wraps tonight.’ That became sort of legendary,” says Penn. “Well, we finished Bonnie and Clyde on a Friday and we were having a wrap party, but the photographs that open the movie—the stills—we were gonna do without the crew, in a studio off the lot. And we kept the costumes for them. So here’s this wrap party going on, and Jack comes down and says, ‘You finish tonight.’ And lo and behold, we were forced right then to do the stills, while the crew was sitting there eating and drinking. It was, I guess, an exercise in power for him. But it was also a last hurrah.”61
1. This chapter’s account of the production of Bonnie and Clyde comes from interviews with Warren Beatty, John C. Dutton, Morgan Fairchild, Elaine Michea, Estelle Parsons, Arthur Penn, Michael J. Pollard, Robert Solo, Dean Tavoularis, Robert Towne, and Theadora Van Runkle, among others.
2. Advertisement, Denton Record-Chronicle, 1966 undated, Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
3. Author interview with Parsons.
4. Towne, Robert. “A Trip with Bonnie and Clyde.” Cinema, III, no. 5.
5. AI with Towne.
6. AI with Beatty.
7. Ibid.
8. AI with Parsons.
9. AI with Dutton.
10. Beatty, to Curtis Hanson in Wake and Hayden, The Bonnie and Clyde Book, op. cit., p. 180.
11. Ibid., p. 179.
12. AI with Tavoularis.
13. AI with Beatty, Dutton, Penn, and Tavoularis.
14. AI with Penn and Towne.
15. Hebron, Sandra. “Curtis Hanson (part 2).” Guardian, November 16, 2002.
16. AI with Penn.
17. Dunaway, Looking for Gatsby, op. cit., p. 58.
18. AI with Van Runkle.
19. AI with Dutton and Michea.
20. “Faye Dunaway: Frank Words from a Cult Goddess,” Interview, November 2002.
21. Dunaway, Looking for Gatsby, op. cit., pp. 131–133.
22. AI with Parsons.
23. Dunaway, Looking for Gatsby, op. cit., pp. 118–119.
24. Finstad, Warren Beatty: A Private Man, op. cit., p. 372.
25. AI with Penn.
26. AI with Tavoularis.
27. AI with Dutton.
28. Goldstein, “Blasts From the Past,” Los Angeles Times, op. cit.
29. AI with Beatty.
30. AI with Towne.
31. “In the Cards.” Time, September 30, 1966.
32. AI with Michea, Parsons, and Van Runkle.
33. AI with Pollard.
34. AI with Parsons.
35. AI with Fairchild.
36. AI with Dutton.
37. Beatty to Curtis Hanson, The Bonnie and Clyde Book, op. cit., p. 178.
38. AI with Towne.
39. Labarthe, Andre and Jean-Louis Comolli. “The Arthur Penn Interview.” Cahiers du Cinéma, December 1967.
40. AI with Beatty.
41. AI with Tavoularis.
42. Ibid.
43. AI with Beatty.
44. AI with Parsons.
45. Benton and Newman’s screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde is reprinted in its entirety in both The Bonnie and Clyde Book (op. cit.) and Best American Screenplays: First Series, edited by Sam Thomas (New York: Crown, 1986).
46. AI with Penn.
47. Ibid.
48. Gilman, Richard. “Gangsters on the Road to Nowhere.” The New Republic, November 4, 1967.
49. Goldstein, “Blasts from the Past,” Los Angeles Times, op. cit.
50. “The Arthur Penn Interview,” Cahiers du Cinéma, op. cit.
51. Crowdus, “The Importance of a Singular, Guiding Vision,” Cineaste, op. cit.
52. Letter from Floria Lasky to “HWF,” October 12, 1966, Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
53. AI with Pollard.
54. AI with Tavoularis.
55. AI with Dutton. Daily production and progress reports from Bonnie and Clyde show that the production had fallen fourteen days behind schedule by December 10, the last day of the shoot in Texas; Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
56. Letter from Walter MacEwen to Warren Beatty, November 2, 1966, Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
57. Telegram from Jack Warner to Arthur Penn, October 12, 1966, Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
58. AI with Solo.
59. AI with Penn.
60. Thompson, “Under the Gaze of the Charmer,” Life, op. cit.
61. AI with Penn.
*Hal Ashby had a similar experience during production of In the Heat of the Night, when he went to see another Fox epic, John Huston’s The Bible. “Great God in Heaven,” he wrote to Norman Jewison, “I hope we never kid ourselves into trying something like that.”
* Ingmar Bergman was an admirer of Penn’s work on Bonnie and Clyde, but he disapproved of Penn’s decision to shoot in color. “There’s a sensual erotic charm in color, when properly used,” he said. “… But I think color spoils a film like Bonnie and Clyde. That was a film, if any, which ought to have been shot … in coarse-grained black-and-white tones.” At the time of his remark, Bergman had not yet shot a color movie. (Bergman, quoted in Bergman on Bergman, by Stig Björkman, Torstenn Manns, and Jonas Sima, translated by Paul Britten Austin [New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1973], p. 227.)