The Big Screen (64 page)

Mander's book may be as rarely retrieved now as the name Jed Harris (the most famous American stage director of the 1920s and '30s, and a phenomenal bastard). But it's hard to read his warnings without an extra chill sinking in as we project his concerns forward to the age of the Internet. The only thing that seems dated or nostalgic—I hope I'm being ironic instead of tragic—is his note of distress. (We have had to learn Godard's cool: if there's a bloody corpse in the room next to where our lover is waiting for breakfast, try not to notice it.)

A couple of years after Mander's book, while teaching at Dartmouth, I sought to introduce a course called An Introduction to Television. If approved, it would be the first course at the school to consider that medium. This required describing the course to the Committee on Instruction. One member of that committee was Leonard Reiser, the provost at Dartmouth and a man who had been part of the Manhattan Project when younger. He heard my case and noted that I had said that television for some of our students was the central experience of their lives. In fact, I had suggested that while Dartmouth taught spelling, grammar, logic, and writing, it offered nothing that taught students to examine the experience of television or its ways of finessing “reality.” (I could have pointed out that Dartmouth's neglect had already educated Pat Weaver, inventor of the
Today
and
Tonight
shows, and Grant Tinker, the head of Mary Tyler Moore Productions.) I didn't say what I believed: that this instruction should have begun when the kids were five.

But surely, asked Reiser, aren't nuclear weapons the most profound shadow hanging over our students? I never want to minimize the Bomb, but I replied that while “it” was undoubtedly up there, out there, a threat and a shadow, the television was “on” six hours a day. It was a moment when I realized what could have been grasped earlier: While the movies might be great or satisfying, they were no longer what the world was really looking at. We were looking at screens.

So, in 1967, on television we were still turning on for
Bonanza
,
The Red Skelton Hour
,
The Andy Griffith Show
,
The Lucy Show
(minus Desi now),
The Jackie Gleason Show
,
Green Acres
,
Daktari
,
Bewitched
,
The Beverly Hillbillies
—were we living in a rest home? Or a place trying to ignore the actual tumult of the United States?

Or you could go see
Bonnie and Clyde
and feel the blaze, the ringing gunfire, and the thrill of the big screen. This was a picture from Warner Bros., who once had owned gangster movies—but with this one the studio was at a loss, and doubly perplexed when it turned into a hit. The violence, the talk, the cars and the motor courts, the music, the blood, and the lipstick—all looked spiffily American. For Texas, they went on location to Texas. But it was a picture with French blood in its veins, too. Seen from this vantage it looks like an inspired throwback as well as the start of a new age.

Robert Benton and David Newman were on the staff at
Esquire
under the editorship of Harold Hayes. In 1963 they saw Truffaut's
Jules and Jim
in New York and felt that it deepened their excitement over
Les Quatre Cents Coups
and
Tirez sur le Pianiste
. There really was a stylistic urgency and a respect for behavioral daring in French films that put American cinema to shame in the somnolent season of
Cleopatra
,
How the West Was Won
, and
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
. So it occurred to them to write an American script, one they might even offer to Truffaut. Benton recalled Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Texas outlaws of the early 1930s. His father had been to their funeral, and the son had grown up in Waxahachie, Texas, hearing stories of their exploits. The two men didn't know how to write (or type) a script, so it ended up more like a treatment or a novella: “We described a scene, including camera shots…but we didn't put dialogue in…The next day we would talk about the scene, and say, no, that's all wrong, and if David had written it, I would take it home and rewrite it, and if I had written it, David would redo it.” They loved the freedom and speed of it all, and they told themselves that most American pictures were being planned to death.

Elinor Jones and her brother Norton Wright, friends of Benton, took the project on as producers and sent the text to Truffaut. His English wasn't good enough to read it himself, but Helen Scott and a few others told him it was exciting. Truffaut was close to taking it on. He thought of Jane Fonda to play Bonnie. But at the same time he was considering making
Fahrenheit 451
(from the Ray Bradbury story) and he was visited by Leslie Caron, who was then in an affair with Warren Beatty, who was hopeful about the lead role in
Fahrenheit
. The three of them met, and when Truffaut praised the
Bonnie and Clyde
script, Beatty resolved to get a look at it. He flew to New York and met Benton. Meanwhile, Truffaut had also shown the script to Jean-Luc Godard, who said he would love to do it. This musical chairs happens on nearly every film, enough to persuade everyone that casting is a helpless gamble—so keep changing your mind until you can't any longer, and then you shoot a piece of film and it may last forever.

Jones and Wright wanted Truffaut to accept a movie star for Clyde. Paul Newman? No. Warren Beatty? “Actually,” Truffaut wrote to Jones, “I have no admiration for Warren Beatty and, moreover, he seems to me an extremely unpleasant person.” As if to demonstrate a point, Beatty waited for the Jones-Wright option to lapse, bought the script from Benton and Newman for $75,000, and announced he was going to produce it himself. The two writers were swept along like corks on a stream. Truffaut went to England to shoot
Fahrenheit 451
, with Oskar Werner in the part that had tempted Beatty.

Beatty was only thirty in 1967, the year his film opened. He had had a fine debut in Kazan's
Splendor in the Grass
(1961). He became notorious for his love affairs and his aloof intelligence act, and he took it as his duty to be difficult. Two of his films were uncommon ventures,
Lilith
(1964, with Jean Seberg) and
Mickey One
(1965), both failures and distressing to him because of that, but indicators of a taste for risky material. Moreover, on
Mickey One
he had been directed by Arthur Penn, raised in television and the theater, who had won praise and Oscars with the movie of
The Miracle Worker
(1962). The two men got on, which was a measure of sympathy and of Beatty's guess that he could handle Penn. In fact, Penn had had an early look at the Benton-Newman script and turned it down. Now he was hired to direct it for his one-time actor. And if Penn was to make something of
Bonnie and Clyde
that was personal (and he was that kind of director), he knew he had to let the young actor feel in charge. So musical chairs turns into poker, and then moviemaking becomes more tiring than answering a hundred questions every hour, staying on your feet while looking beautiful.

Beatty was patronized and disdained by Warner Bros., the studio he had gone to with the project. This was a very old guard. (Jack Warner was still active, but he was seventy-five by 1967.) The cameraman on the picture, Burnett Guffey, was sixty-two, though he had shot
All the King's Men
(1949) and
From Here to Eternity
(1953). He soon concluded that Penn and Beatty were modernist upstarts who didn't know how to shoot a picture the proper way. Benton and Newman were the scriptwriters of record, home in New York, but they heard that Beatty had taken a friend and script doctor, Robert Towne, to Texas on location with him, and Towne was rewriting every night at Beatty's instruction. So the sexual triangle they had intended, with Bonnie, Clyde, and C. W. Moss as a threesome, proved too problematic—C.W. was tossed out of the bed, and Warren had the girl to himself.

On the other hand, Beatty had approved Michael J. Pollard as C.W., just the kind of unpredictable actor who worried Warners. He had cast Faye Dunaway as Bonnie (after Tuesday Weld turned it down), and in addition he had Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, all the way to Gene Wilder and Evans Evans, both indelible as the bourgeois couple picked up by the gang. And then there was Penn's direction. The gentlest of men in person, Penn had an unexpected instinct for violence: few scenes in American film are more revealing of physical and emotional combat than the one in
The Miracle Worker
where Annie Sullivan gets Helen Keller to fold her napkin while the room is reduced to wreckage.
Bonnie and Clyde
would disturb people, not just for its killings, but because of the rapidity with which such assaults were bumped into humor on jaunty music. The first urge to get something fit for Truffaut was surviving in the shifts of tone.

It was a battle: the production designer, Dean Tavoularis (on his first big job), was arguing with Burnett Guffey. Penn and Beatty began most days with a half-hour dispute; it was called “artistic fighting” by observers. And Estelle Parsons would comment later on Faye Dunaway:

For good reason: Faye Dunaway looked like a movie star, while Bonnie Parker had a face like raw wood shaped with a hatchet (there are photographs). In an early scene in the film, Beatty's Clyde sits down with Dunaway's Bonnie and, like a producer, redoes her hair. It's such a cute lift for Bonnie, why wouldn't Faye fuss over her hair throughout the shoot?
Bonnie and Clyde
is a gangster film of the early 1930s and a movie about young liberation and sexual self-discovery to stir 1967. In addition, it dramatizes the quest for fulfillment that possessed Beatty and Dunaway on the project. This was their breakthrough, and that's how the emotional climax of the story comes, when Bonnie writes the poem about them and Clyde says, “You know what you done? You told my story!” Isn't that what we have always wanted?

But the sweetest thing of all—and it affects so many fine films over the years—is that this aura of discovery is available for the audience, too. It is us grabbing at some light for ourselves. So the film hangs on the marriage between Penn's eager eye for human animalism, Guffey's alertness to light, and editor Dede Allen's rescuing of brief flashes of life, looks, and reactions—especially in Dunaway and Beatty. This gang kills people, but how they yearn for life in scenes where they are wounded. It is a film of desperate glances, like the loving exchange when the two outlaws seize a last sight of each other before the comprehensive fusillade. That execution is the orgasm they (and we) have been longing for. No matter that the bodies are clothed and untouching, it may be the key erotic scene of the 1960s (brilliantly edited by Dede Allen and rendered in several different time speeds by Arthur Penn).

In 1967 this was one of the most devastating but complete endings to an American picture, and an unprecedented fusion of sex and violence. For the young audience, there was hardly a more desirable commodity; it surpassed the chic of Bonnie's clothes or the satisfaction felt by Warren Beatty at bringing the picture in. The outlaws were removed (as killers had to be), but their fame and being recognized were the point of the film—and the cause of grief to come as its battle carried on in the critical reaction. The film's selling line would be “They're young…They're in love…And they kill people.”

Beatty's job was far from over. The cutting of the movie had been kept in Manhattan, to avoid Warner's interference and to stop the studio from witnessing the prevailing artistic fights. But one executive had seen enough to send warning messages back to Burbank. The studio threatened to cut off funds as the editing extended: the costs climbed to $2.5 million. When Beatty and Penn at last reached Los Angeles they were required to show the film to Jack Warner himself, in his private screening room, that symbolic lair of old authority.

“If I have to get up and pee,” said Warner, “I'll know it's a lousy movie.” As Arthur Penn would say later, with the boss on his bathroom trot, it felt like “the most diuretic film in human memory.” The mood was so bad that Beatty offered to buy the picture back—this was a bluff, for he lacked the funds for repurchase. Then fate intervened: the Six-Day War broke out in June in the Middle East and Jack Warner was emotionally energized by the Israeli success. Gambling is a matter of mood and impulse: so the picture would open, on August 13, 1967.