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Hal
Ashby by Darren Hughes Darren Hughes is a doctoral candidate in American literature at the University of Tennessee and author of the website, Long Pauses. |
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The temptation, when writing about American filmmaker Hal Ashby, is to reduce his life and career to any of a number of ready-made, Hollywood formulae: the small-town boy done good who works his way up from the studio mailroom to the Academy Awards stage; the 1960s free spirit who champions individual rights in a world of oppressive authority and takes his fair share of lumps in the process; the cautionary tale of regrettable indulgences and falls from grace. Unfortunately, the relative dearth of critical and biographical writing currently available about Ashby makes such a trap unavoidable. This, despite the awards, the misty paeans from his collaborators and, most importantly, that amazing streak of films in the 1970s, a streak that rivals those of his more famous contemporaries, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman. With The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979), Ashby proved himself a prodigious talent. That he disappeared behind a string of disappointing pictures in the 1980s and died before redeeming his reputation has led many critics of the Hollywood Film Renaissance to dismiss Ashby as a filmmaker who lacked a coherent voice or who was simply the competent beneficiary of remarkable collaborations. This essay will, I hope, become part of a larger critical reappraisal of Ashby's films, for they document, with equal parts grace and polemic, a moment in America's history that was defined by precisely that dichotomy.I was born in Ogden, Utah, the last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was 12. I struggled toward growing up, like others, totally confused. Married and divorced twice before I made it to 21. Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios. No biographer has yet made a subject of Hal Ashby, which is surprising considering the quality and influence of his films and the dramatic circumstances of his life. Soon after discovering his father's body at the age of twelve, Ashby dropped out of school and began working odd jobs; by seventeen he had already been married and divorced (the first of his four failed marriages). According to Peter Biskind, whose Easy Riders, Raging Bulls offers the only readily-available discussion of Ashby's life, the young Mormon decided in 1950 to leave the cold winters of Utah and Wyoming behind and to head off for the golden skies of California (1). After arriving in Los Angeles, and after three hungry weeks of fruitless efforts there, Ashby visited the California Board of Unemployment and requested a job at a film studio. He was sent first to Universal, where he worked in the mailroom, but by 1951 he had become an apprentice editor at Republic. He later moved on to Disney and then to Metro, where he met Jack Nicholson, then an aspiring unknown. Ashby's film school was the editing room. “It's the perfect place to examine everything,” he told Michael Shedlin. “Everything is channelled down into that strip of film, from the writing to how it's staged, to the director and the actors. And you have the chance to run it back and forth a lot of times, and ask questions of it – Why do I like this? Why don't I like this?” (2) After working as assistant editor under Robert Swink on William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion (1956) and The Big Country (1958) and George Stevens' The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Ashby began to gain attention for his own cutting of films by Tony Richardson (The Loved One [1965]) and Norman Jewison. Ashby and Jewison would collaborate on four films: The Cincinnati Kid (1965), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), for which Ashby won a Best Editing Oscar, and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). It was Jewison, also, who recommended his friend to direct The Landlord, a project under development at United Artists. Thus Hal Ashby came to make his first film at the age of 40. “If I had it all to do over again, I would rather go at it a different way,” he later said. And, predicting the generation of young American filmmakers who would emerge in the 1970s, he then added: “I say, Good Lord, go out and somehow raise the money to make your own projects. It's not easy, by any means, but the potential is there for becoming just as good a filmmaker in a much shorter time. I feel very strongly about this” (3).
Capsule reviews of The Landlord typically describe it as a bildungsroman in which an emotionally stunted white man comes of age through his first-hand encounter with the realities of African-American life. Elgar “grows fond” of his tenants, such reviews claim and, by witnessing his blossoming romance with a woman of mixed race, viewers are to learn something about the possibilities of racial reconciliation in America. What we actually learn, though, is just the opposite. Ashby's film plays like the cinematic equivalent of Radical Chic, Thomas Wolfe's 1970 account of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers held in the well-heeled home of Felicia and Leonard Bernstein. Like the “limousine liberals” who gathered there on Park Avenue to sip wine, write cheques and discuss – in the measured tones of the New York Review of Books – the “race problem”, Elgar is unprepared for the messy radicalism that greets and, even more significantly, that excludes him. “See, children? Some people can't learn what we learn,” Professor Duboise tells a room full of students who are already well versed in the rhetoric of Black Power. Ashby captures this tension in a brilliant sequence near the end of the film, when Copee, who is threatening Elgar with an axe after learning that his wife is carrying Elgar's child, stops and slowly lowers his weapon. Rather than turning his attention to the film's protagonist, however, Ashby instead stays in a tight shot on Copee, and we're made suddenly aware that the film has been his story all along. The white, liberal audiences that watch The Landlord root for Elgar because, like him, they (we) believe that their idealism and distant sympathies can somehow make the world “colour blind”. By forcefully shifting the film's perspective from Elgar's to Copee's, Ashby reveals just how naive and politically charged such a position really is.
And Ashby's is, most certainly, an adult world. When, two-thirds of the way through the film, we learn that Maude is a Holocaust survivor – and we learn this only from a wordless, one-second shot of the identification tattoo on her forearm – the context within which the film is operating suddenly blossoms to include not only Nixon's America but all of the impossibly tragic 20th century. Like Walter Benjamin who, in his famous description of Paul Klee's “Angelus Novus” imagines the angel of history propelled irresistibly forward by the storm of progress “while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”, Harold and Maude demands that viewers experience a glimpse of hope despite the tragedies of the past (5). Ashby accomplishes this to best effect in the final sequence, in which he dismantles and intercuts three events: Harold and Maude's arrival at the hospital, Harold's agonising wait for news of her death, and his high-speed drive up the California coastline. Accompanied only by Cat Stevens' song “Trouble” and by the roaring engine of Harold's Jaguar-cum-hearse, the sequence is marked by a tragic inevitability. There's no question of Maude's survival, no possibility that this dark fable will be appended with a Disney ending and yet, despite the sadness, Harold walks away in the end strumming his banjo, and the film is rescued from the nihilism of its day.
The standard critical line on The Last Detail is that its many and obvious merits are attributable, first and foremost, to the quality of Ashby's collaborators, Nicholson and screenwriter Robert Towne chief among them. Towne certainly deserves much credit, both here and in his next teaming with Ashby on Shampoo, but the film soars on the strength of Ashby's direction, and particularly on his restraint of Nicholson. By casting 6'4” Quaid and 6'2” Young in the supporting roles, Ashby turns Badass into an embodiment of aggressive overcompensation; Nicholson has never looked so small or his shtick so impotent. And when the actor does launch into full-on “Jack” mode – as when he trashes their motel room in a vain effort to rouse Meadows' anger – Ashby refuses to allow Nicholson's persona to subsume the character. Instead, he cuts abruptly to a quiet moment of Badass and the young seaman together on the edge of the bed, now bored and contained. Such a jumpcut works here only because Ashby's verite approach with actors and with the staging of key sequences, an approach employed to even greater effect in Coming Home, allows room for freedom and improvisation. That so many actors – Quaid and Young, but also Cort, Gordon, Lee Grant, David Carradine, Peter Sellers, Jack Warden and Bruce Dern, among others – delivered arguably the best performances of their careers in Ashby films is perhaps the finest testament to his gifts as an actor's director.
Of the films he made in the '70s, Shampoo feels the least like a Hal Ashby picture. It's too restrained, too closely bound to the tight structuring of Towne and Beatty's remarkable screenplay. At times, there is also an uncharacteristic staginess to the blocking of actors, as in the first scene between Christie and Warden, where they move unnaturally around Lester's office, self-consciously hitting their marks in synch with the choreographed movements of the camera. Ashby's films come alive, instead, when his actors are allowed room to move, as when George flies into a rage outside of a bank that has just denied him a loan. Here, Ashby shoots Beatty in an extreme long shot, watching silently from across the parking lot as the actor rips off his jacket and tie and throws them both into a trashcan. Such long shots are a trademark of Ashby's films: Elgar standing in the street with his child in his arms, Maude's introduction at the first funeral, Badass and Mule wrestling Meadows to the ground, Bob undressing at the beach in Coming Home, Chance walking off across the water in Being There. The extreme long shot serves, for Ashby, the same function that the close-up does for many filmmakers – heightening emotion at critical moments in the narrative – but it does so without forcing a shift to a particular character's subjective perspective (Ashby, in fact, very seldom cuts on an eyeline match). We remain always detached observers, judging and, occasionally, sympathising with characters, but never coming to see the world exclusively through their eyes. Shampoo also makes effective use of popular music, another Ashby trademark. Except for the Paul Simon song, which returns like a Greek chorus five times in the film, the only other non-diegetic music is The Beach Boys' “Wouldn't It Be Nice?” which plays over the opening scene and returns again for the closing credits. Released in 1975, within months of Nixon's resignation, and set seven years earlier on the day he was first elected, Shampoo is an elegy to the wasted potential of America's cultural revolution. “Wouldn't It Be Nice?” is wistful nostalgia, as ironic as the final words we hear uttered by the President-Elect on George's television: “A teenager held up a sign that said 'Bring Us Together,' and that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset. To bring the American people together.”
What is most striking today about Bound for Glory is Haskell Wexler's photography, which turns Depression-era California into one more of Ashby's many worlds of the haves and have-nots (7). Los Angeles, with its green lawns and sparkling sheen, couldn't be more different from the small Texas town where Guthrie begins his voyage and where everything – even the people, it seems – is covered by an inch of dust. Wexler shoots it all in soft, muted tones; the sky is as brown as the desert landscapes through which Woody travels, slowly, for the first third of the film. Like Ashby's and Wexler's next collaboration, Coming Home, much of Bound for Glory was filmed with long lenses that pull characters into focus against an impossibly expansive backdrop. When Woody sits down to play his harmonica, for instance, he and his chair appear to float above a desert highway that stretches, in a dead-straight line, from Arizona to the Atlantic. The long lenses also allow Ashby and his crew to stay far-removed from the action, capturing the spontaneous “performances” of his lead actors and his large cast of extras. A two minute montage of such images lends the campground sequences, in particular, a documentary-like feel; Wexler and Ashby would later return to this technique for Coming Home's Fourth of July picnic sequence.
If Coming Home is guilty, at times, of over-earnestness or of slipping into polemic, it is rescued from such potentially fatal missteps by its many fine performances and by the filmmaker's palpable respect for his characters. Even Dern's disgraced Bob, a Marine who could so easily have been reduced to a caricature, becomes instead a tragic figure capable of eliciting our deepest sympathies. Dern's desperate delivery of the line, “What I'm saying is I do not belong in this house!” is one of the most affecting moments in any of Ashby's films and it encapsulates, in a single breath, the crisis of the dislocated veteran. Ashby and Wexler once again blend dramatic set pieces with documentary style footage, most notably in the opening sequence, when Voigt's character, Luke, listens quietly as a group of actual, paralysed vets discuss their very real feelings about the war. That same sense of verisimilitude also informs many of the scenes between the lead actors, as when Fonda and Voigt stroll down the boardwalk, discussing Bob's impending return. On the DVD release of Coming Home, Wexler remarks that the scene was shot with an 800 millimetre lens from a distance of more than 400 yards, freeing us, once again, to remain distant and relatively objective observers, and allowing the actors room for spontaneous improvisation. The film's showpiece, however, comes in its final sequence, when Ashby crosscuts between Luke's speech to a group of draft-eligible teens, Sally and Vi's trip to a grocery store, and Bob's walk into the ocean, all of it accompanied by Tim Buckley's “Once I Was”. Like the finale of Harold and Maude, this sequence balances tragedy – is Bob swimming off to his death? – with painful progress. Despite the still-lingering wounds of war, Sally's new-found independence and Luke's charity suggest that Ashby retains some measure of hope for healing. The last of Ashby's signature films is Being There, his adaptation of the Jerzy Kosinski novel. After publishing Being There in 1971, Kosinski swore that he would never allow it or any of his other work to be filmed, but after learning that a movie project was in the early stages of development, and after experiencing first-hand Peter Sellers' aggressive campaign for the lead role, the author set to work on a screenplay of his own. Ashby's final product is, by most accounts, a smashing success, both as an adaptation of a much-respected novel and as a film, judged on its own merits. The story of Chance, a simpleton gardener who stumbles into America's most powerful spheres of influence, Being There is a satiric jab at the co-opting of the nation's public discourse by television's empty images and content-free rhetoric. Such ideas were nothing new to Ashby, who had been toying with similar themes in his own work for years. In The Last Detail, Shampoo and Coming Home, in particular, characters are unable to free themselves from the constant barrage of political speeches, commercial advertisements, and reportage that emanate from the televisions, billboards, and radios that seem to have them surrounded. When Sally asks Bob what combat was like, his response echoes the main argument of Being There: “I don't know what it's like; I only know what it is. TV shows what it's like; it sure as hell don't show what it is.”
Being There is a strangely fitting conclusion to Ashby's enviable run during the 1970s. Commenting on Kosinski's prescient novel, Barbara Tepa Lupack writes, “while Kosinski did not live to witness the Chance-like candidacy of H. Ross Perot, conducted largely via television time purchased with his own millions, he surely must have appreciated the irony of actor Ronald Reagan's two telegenic terms in office as well as understudy George Bush's subsequent lacklustre performance in the White House” (9). Ashby's career, like those of so many of his contemporaries, was derailed by sweeping changes in Washington, D.C., in Hollywood and in America at large. The studios, now on the lookout for blockbuster box office returns and wary of signing over creative control to “cost no object” directors, turned their attention away from smaller, more personal films like Ashby's. Reagan's America likewise awoke to a “new morning”, conveniently ignoring the traumatic events that had defined the previous decades. For Ashby, who had embodied the country's counter-cultural spirit in thought and deed, the “Me Decade” must have been catastrophically disheartening. In an era of conservative piety and institutionalised greed, Ashby's politically motivated irreverence and his simple faith in humanity's potential for radical change were suddenly an anachronism. Ashby finished his career with a string of largely forgotten films. He reunited with Haskell Wexler for the first two: Second-Hand Hearts (1981), starring Robert Blake and Barbara Harris, and Lookin' to Get Out (1982), a character study of two gamblers written by and starring Jon Voigt. Like the rest of Ashby's final work (and The Landlord), neither is currently available on any home video format. He also directed Let's Spend the Night Together (1982), a by-the-books document of the Rolling Stones' 1981 tour, and followed it with The Slugger's Wife (1985), an irredeemably bad translation of Neil Simon's abysmal screenplay (10). The poor quality of the film is frequently attributed to Ashby's growing dependence on drugs and alcohol, which had precipitated a physical collapse during the Stones' tour. Because of his increasingly unreliable behaviour, films were taken from him during post-production and given to others for final editing. Ashby's final feature, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), however, marked something of a return to form for the director. An adaptation of Lawrence Block's popular detective novel, the film is an entertaining piece of film noir, with Jeff Bridges as the hardened ex-cop and Rosanna Arquette as his femme fatale. Though burdened by the stylistic influence of TV's Miami Vice and by James Newton Howard's cloying, synthesized score, 8 Million Ways to Die comes to life at surprising moments, particularly in the final act. When Bridges confronts the young drug kingpin, played by Andy Garcia, we are reminded of Ashby's gifts as a director of actors; they appear to have set aside Oliver Stone's screenplay and discovered a more palpable energy in their improvisations. Ashby's final production was Jake's Journey (1988), a television project developed by ex-Python Graham Chapman. After filming the pilot, both men were prevented by poor health from continuing their collaboration. Hal Ashby was diagnosed in early-1988 with a cancer that spread rapidly to his liver and colon and to which he succumbed, finally, on December 27. Ashby's death at 59 prevented him from witnessing the re-birth of independent cinema that energised America's filmmakers, young and old, during the early-1990s. Imagine how different our appraisals of Robert Altman's career might be had it ended with Popeye (1980), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Secret Honor (1984) – had it ended before he made The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). Or, imagine how different our opinion of Francis Ford Coppola might be had he not retreated to his vineyards and re-emerged as an acclaimed producer of others' films – had his career ended with One from the Heart (1982), The Outsiders (1983), and Rumble Fish (1983). Hal Ashby personifies, better than any other director, Hollywood's Film Renaissance of the 1970s: its moral ambivalence and political rage, its stylistic audacity and deeply human voice, its supernova of energy that could not possibly burn so brightly for very long. © Darren Hughes, January 2004 Endnotes:
Filmography As director: The Landlord
(1970) As editor: Friendly Persuasion
(William Wyler, 1956) assistant 
Bibliography Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York, Simon, 1998.
Articles in Senses of Cinema The
Last Detail
by Richard Armstrong
Web Resources Compiled by author The
Director That Time Forgot: The Films and Career of Hal Ashby
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