Authoring Hal Ashby

The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur

Aaron Hunter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501308451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Casting fresh light on New Hollywood – one of American cinema's most fertile eras – Authoring Hal Ashby is the first sustained argument that, rather than a period dominated by genius auteurs, New Hollywood was an era of intense collaboration producing films of multiple-authorship. Centering its discussion on the films and filmmaking practice of director Hal Ashby ( Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Being There ), Hunter's work demonstrates how the auteur paradigm has served not only to diminish several key films and filmmakers of the era, but also to underestimate and undervalue the key contributions to the era's films of cinematographers, editors, writers and other creative crew members. Placing Ashby's films and career within the historical context of his era to show how he actively resisted the auteur label, the author demonstrates how this resistance led to Ashby's marginalization by film executives of his time and within subsequent film scholarship. Through rigorous analysis of several films, Hunter moves on to demonstrate Ashby's own signature authorial contributions to his films and provides thorough and convincing demonstrations of the authorial contributions made by several of Ashby's key collaborators. Building on emerging scholarship on multiple-authorship, Authoring Hal Ashby lays out a creative new approach to understanding one of Hollywood cinema's most exciting eras and one of its most vital filmmakers.

Part One

History, Historiography, and Hal Ashby’s Reputation

1

Hal Ashby and the New Hollywood Establishment

Seventies Hollywood represents an era of transformation, innovation, and experimentation in film culture that marks it as an anomaly in the history of American studio production. There is little disagreement about this. For example, Lester Friedman describes the era as “a wrinkle in time fashioned by a confluence of events that turned the world upside down and put the madmen—at least for a short time—in charge of the asylum.”¹ More prosaically but no less dramatically, David Cook claims, “The American film industry changed more between 1969 and 1980 than at any other period in its history except, perhaps, for the coming of sound.”² While this anomaly’s occurrence is not in doubt, how it came about has been the subject of much critical discussion. Certainly all of the following contributing factors played significant roles throughout this transformative period: changes in the economic structure and function of Hollywood studios; technological development in film production; the influence of massive cultural and political upheaval within the United States; changing patterns in film viewership; and the first appearance of film school graduates as filmmakers. What continues to fascinate scholars and the general public alike is the particular and collective role each of these events or trends played in shaping the Hollywood culture of the period. In fact, recent years alone have seen the publication of dozens of book-length studies of the era, as well as genre studies and works about particular directors and performers.

The difficulty of establishing Hal Ashby’s place on the fringe of a broader canon of 1970s Hollywood cinema has its roots in a widely held set of assumptions and markers about both Ashby and the era, many of which appear contradictory or even paradoxical. Ashby has often been described as a “maverick” or a “rebel,” terms that should denote him as central to some of the more commonly accepted descriptions of the New Hollywood era, yet he continues to hover on the margins of most mainstream conceptions of New Hollywood. This results not solely from his particular type of maverick having been an odd mixture of cantankerousness and idealism. Nor does it stem simply from his having made films that are difficult to classify because of their refusal to accept or replicate particular conventions of the era (although both of these must be read as factors in his marginalization). In short, the era itself has proved hard to define. Hollywood’s evolution has been a process of starts, stops, and new beginnings from the time of its infancy, yet few moments are as difficult to categorize simply as the transitional period between the mid-century breakdown of the vertically integrated studio system and the late 1970s re-entrenchment of a new system of horizontalized studio domination via conglomerate control that continues to typify Hollywood today. To determine Ashby’s place in such a chaotic production landscape, it is worth delineating just what New Hollywood was, how it got that way, and who benefited from its specific organizational architecture. For while Ashby was clearly an active participant in the era, he remains a peripheral figure in much recent work dedicated to exploring it.

Ashby’s career as an editor and director of Hollywood films, which began in 1956 and ended in 1986, neatly encompasses the New Hollywood era: his work as an editor began during the waning days of the Classical period; he directed his first seven films during the height of New Hollywood; and he spent the final years of his career witnessing the unraveling of that era. However, he never achieved the institutional prowess within the studio system of many of his contemporaries, directors such as Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, or Friedkin, who were able to make increasingly extravagant demands on Hollywood studios throughout the decade while maintaining reputations as “mavericks.” As a result, although Ashby was respected as a filmmaker by his contemporaries, he never developed a reputation as one of New Hollywood’s dominant personalities, its star directors. This was partly due to Ashby’s own demeanor—his sense of disdain towards producers and others whom he regarded as being simply “money men.” However, it was also partly due to Ashby’s conception of a film director’s role, which differed from the widespread auteur-driven concepts of what a director should be.

Ashby’s approach to filmmaking and his ideas about the kinds of films he wanted to make were forged in the heart of this complex era of change. On the one hand, Ashby wanted to make Hollywood films—films that would have as wide an audience as possible—so it was vital that he remain ensconced within the Hollywood system. He benefited from working within that system in that he was able to develop a highly collaborative film practice in which he could put a great deal of trust in and delegate a considerable amount of responsibility to his casts and crews. On the other hand, he was highly suspicious—even contemptuous—of the money-driven nature of Hollywood filmmaking, which led him to distrust and antagonize producers, studios, and production companies—even as he relied on them to fund his career. This particular combination of collaborative practice and institutional distrust limited Ashby’s ability to attain a position of power within the New Hollywood studio structure, however “alternative” or even “maverick” that structure might have seen itself as being. This in turn has led to film scholarship taking Ashby and his films less seriously than it does his contemporaries. Having a full understanding of the roles Ashby saw himself playing is vital to any discussion of how he positioned himself within—and was accommodated by—Hollywood, while never being held in the same esteem as the select group of star directors.

This chapter, then, contends that because of his very individual approach to his career as a Hollywood film director, Ashby never became nor developed a reputation as an empowered, controlling 1970s-style auteur. The chapter begins by briefly examining the various definitions of New Hollywood and elucidating some of the major events and relevant arguments that mark the change from Old to New. Building on this foundation, the chapter explores the uneasy relationship Ashby had with New Hollywood as he attempted to remain part of the system while keeping it at a distance. The concept of what a successful Hollywood film director was and how he (and it was almost always “he”) should act changed rapidly during the era, and Ashby’s hesitance to embrace that concept fully was complicated by his unwillingness to embrace the system itself. With this in mind, the chapter goes on to explicate the factors, both industrial and personal, that kept Ashby from becoming central to the culture of New Hollywood filmmaking. In illustrating how the problematic nature of the debate about the meaning of “New Hollywood” is rooted in the era itself, I argue that Ashby’s peripheral positioning within the industry and the era has led directly to his continued marginalization within film studies.

The state of Ashby’s Hollywood

By the time Ashby directed his first film, The Landlord, in 1970, Hollywood, as a production system, was in the midst of a massive upheaval. In addition to major changes to the old, vertically integrated studio system of production, distribution, and exhibition, there were changes in technology, aesthetic appreciation, understanding of generic elements, and the composition of audiences for new films. This is not to mention the growing influence of competitors—both close to home in domestic US television, and farther away in the form of exciting and newly accessible films from Europe and Asia. Because the upheaval in the Hollywood of the 1960s and 1970s comprises so many threads, it is difficult to demarcate exactly when or why Hollywood became “New.” In fact, the term “New Hollywood” has been used since at least 1959 to describe several of the successive waves of change that have advanced within the American film industry since the breakdown of the Classical-era studio system.³

While the roots of these transformations and their analyses have been outlined and performed elsewhere,⁴ it is worth noting a few of them in order to make clear how difficult it is to pinpoint a particular moment when Old Hollywood became New Hollywood and the effect this transition had on Ashby as a filmmaker and Hollywood figure. One generally accepted starting point for the demise of the Classical Hollywood system is what has come to be called the Paramount Decree, the 1948 Supreme Court decision that ordered the divorce of the major Hollywood studios from their exhibition holdings; in other words, the legal decision that studios could no longer own cinemas.⁵ Like most historical markers, the Paramount Decree is best understood as one point on a continuum of change, albeit a highly significant point. For example, while David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson all posit that, “the Hollywood mode of production changed continually [between 1917 and 1960],”⁶ they acknowledge the profound impact the Paramount Decree had on how Hollywood films were subsequently made.⁷ Likewise, Murray Smith discusses the level of shock and instability that the breakup brought to Hollywood.⁸ Yet even this simple, mostly accepted starting point has been contested. David Welky argues that the anti-trust suits brought by the Federal Government might have broken up the vertical integration of the studio system much earlier (in the 1930s), if not for the Government’s reliance on Hollywood as its unofficial propaganda arm during the Second World War. While the danger of the potential dismantling of the studio system as a result of federal anti-trust legislation was temporarily allayed by studio rearguard action throughout the war years, the studios must have seen the breakup coming even as they tried to prevent it.⁹ Thus, while the studios did their best to protect and prolong vertical integration, changes to the system were taking place and studios were adapting to those changes before the reading of the Paramount Decree verdict.

The Paramount Decree, however, was not in fact the first of the major court rulings to begin the dismantling of the studio system. In 1944, actor Olivia de Havilland successfully sued Warner Bros. in a California Court of Appeals over the extension of her seven-year contract by means of “suspension”—the process whereby studios would suspend an actor from her contract for refusing to take a particular role, and then add the accumulated time of suspension onto the end of an existing contract, thereby extending the contract indefinitely. The de Havilland case significantly shifted “negotiation power from studios to talent … allowing agents like MCA’s Lew Wasserman to usher in the era of top-dollar star salaries,” which gradually shifted the balance in power away from the studios to their stars.¹⁰ This shift would come to play a major role in the way films are produced and financed in Hollywood, including several of the films Ashby directed, most notably Shampoo (1975), with its producer-star Warren Beatty, and Coming Home (1978) with producer-star Jane Fonda.

In addition to these legal blows to studio dominance, the ensuing years of 1948 to 1970 witnessed the rise in prominence of color and widescreen formats, the influence of television and foreign films,¹¹ the introduction of a new ratings system, Lew Wasserman’s ingenious decision to incorporate individual actors, and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) strike of 1960, which led to widespread studio acceptance of sharing percentages of films’ profits with actors.¹² Furthermore, actors were not the only ones grasping for power in the wake of the Paramount Decree; the late 1950s and 1960s also saw the rise of a large number of independent production companies. These played an increasingly dominant role in the development and production of films. David Bordwell describes this as a shift from the “producer-unit system” of the studio era to a “package-unit system” that still dominates today.¹³ This shift was so dramatic, so rapid, that by the early 1960s there were over 160 different companies producing feature films in the United States, the majority of them “independent.”¹⁴ The effect of all these influences was, at least temporarily, to weaken the hold major studios had on filmmaking in the United States and to expand avenues to power for directors, stars, and independent producers.

It took decades for this flux of new trends, business and industrial practices, and ownership battles to be resolved. Perhaps the most significant early development in this decades-long process of resolution came in 1966 when Paramount Studios was purchased by Gulf + Western, a multi-national conglomerate that had its roots in the Texas auto industry. By the mid-1970s, the conglomerate, run by Austrian-born Charles Bluhdorn, controlled an auto-parts company, New Jersey Zinc, Madison Square Garden in New York (and its professional basketball and hockey franchises, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers), Stax Records, Esquire magazine, and Simon & Schuster book publishers, all in addition to one of Hollywood’s premier film studios.¹⁵ Such a vast array of seemingly unrelated industries represented the first real step in Hollywood’s transformation from being a vertically integrated, film-only industry to co-existing as one component in a horizontally integrated network of conglomerations. This reconstructed system would come to define American filmmaking by the end of the New Hollywood era. Actually, Gulf + Western’s takeover of Paramount was not the first instance of a major Hollywood studio being bought out wholesale. Lew Wasserman’s talent agency MCA had set a precedent for studio takeover with the purchase of Universal in 1959. However, that deal’s overall impact on the repositioning of studios within a new Hollywood system of production was far less significant than Gulf + Western’s action. As a talent agency, MCA was seen as being part of the “business.” Furthermore, after the takeover, Wasserman was pressured by government antitrust regulators to divest of the talent agency component of MCA’s holdings in 1962. Thus MCA continued as the owner of Universal, and running Universal became its main business. In contrast, Paramount would become just one entity in its parent company’s vast network of holdings, film and nonfilm alike.

The Gulf + Western takeover of Paramount was only the first instance of an entity outside the “business” wresting control of a major studio. This was quickly followed by Transamerica’s purchase of United Artists (1967), the merger of Warner Bros. with the Canadian company Seven Arts (1967) and that entity’s subsequent acquisiti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 History, Historiography, and Hal Ashby’s Reputation
• Part 2 Tracing Ashby’s Authorship
• Part 3 Multiple-Authorship
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Copyright