| (University Press of Kentucky, 456 pages, $37.50)
By Nick Dawson 
(Thomas Dunne Books, 256 pages, $25.95)
By Tom Reilly 
(BearManor Media, 320 pages, $21.95)
By Phil Hall 
(University Press of Mississippi, 208 pages, $50)
Edited by Steven Organ 
| Finally a biography of Hal Ashby, who made a series of remarkable movies during the 1970s before falling into disfavor and dying at 59. Ashby is the lost man of the Hollywood Renaissance. His run of hits—Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home and Being There—was as good as any, yet he is known mainly from Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which details the familiar and unflattering Ashby legend: beatnik-hippie-pothead, who liked to create chaos on the set. By digging deeply into Ashby’s early life, his family, apprenticeship as one of Hollywood’s most innovative editors, and finally his career as an acclaimed director, Dawson doesn’t so much overturn this perception as grant it greater proportion and clarity. He also disputes rumors about Ashby’s supposed excesses. Ashby, with a director’s innate focus, characterized his early life thus: “Born in Ogden, Utah. Never a Mormon. Hated school. Mom and dad divorced when I was 5 or 6. Dad killed himself when I was 12.” It should be noted, Ashby was the only member of his family who believed it was a suicide, but as Dawson argues, his lifelong inability to process that trauma lay at the heart of his subsequent anxieties. Unlike his younger, film school-educated contemporaries, Ashby was a child of the system, working his way up to become editor on a number of Norman Jewison films before stepping behind the camera with The Landlord in 1970. As a director, he favored improvisation and used the script as a mere blueprint, preferring to find a movie’s soul in the editing room. Despite the marvelous results, it was a method that perplexed his financiers, and often, according to Dawson, they were not there to back him up come release day. His creative collaborators, by contrast, recall a freewheeling, approachable, hip father figure, who gently encouraged their best instincts while always integrating the spontaneous and accidental into his work. Dawson suggests it was the changing tastes in the ’80s and overwork, not cocaine, that ruined Ashby. In the blockbuster era, Ashby failed to find sympathetic backers. Lorimar, for example, took two films away from him in the editing stage (a curious move given that he had won an Oscar for cutting In the Heat of the Night), and reportedly spread rumors of drug abuse and alcoholism, which, based on numerous interviews with friends, Dawson refutes. He concludes that it was more likely Ashby’s driven, workaholic tendencies—twenty-hour days for up to nine months at a time—that did him in. Dawson’s impeccably researched and admirably clear-eyed biography reclaims Ashby from the fog of myth and sets his career in perspective, reminding us again what a loss his death was. Assistant director Tom Reilly started as a DGA trainee on Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories in 1979 and worked with Allen for the next 16 years up until Mighty Aphrodite. Since then, he’s worked with Taylor Hackford, James Toback and James Foley, among others, acquiring a depth of knowledge and experience that makes The Big Picture, his guide to working both on- and off-set, one of the most valuable books of its kind. Unlike many similar volumes, this one feels like a labor of love, a lifetime’s experience generously distilled into practical advice for assistant directors—tyros and old hands alike. Reilly starts with the vocabulary of the set, moving on to the perils and rewards of location versus studio shooting, the vicissitudes of chang-ing light, working in awkward locations, period shoots, and setting back-ground performers. Re-garding the banes of the ADs existence such as actors who prefer to block their own shots, he says “actors should act, directors should block.” He also thinks small, listing the kinds of things an AD should never have to go home and fetch mid-shoot. Reilly keeps everything in his trunk from actors’ sides to call sheets, sunscreen, maps, power bars, fisherman’s waders for river shots, even a wet suit—you never can tell, he says, so bring everything. A chapter on choosing a great cinematographer is especially illuminating in analyzing how the look of Allen’s movies changed with every new cinematographer from Gordon Willis’ visual austerity and tableau setups to Carlo Di Palma’s more questing, fluidly mobile camera, and Sven Nykvist’s Bergman-influenced respect for the close-up as facial landscape. Throughout the book, Reilly conveys a sense of being in the room with his directors, and his clear, unadorned prose should forewarn and forearm any newbie stepping on set for the first time.
The last decades have narrowed our thinking about the term “independent film.” Today it means the upsurge in independently financed moviemaking that followed (take your pick) She’s Gotta Have It, sex, lies, and video-tape or Reservoir Dogs. Often it evokes a directorial mindset, or a predilection for outré or shocking subject matter, and sometimes it’s deployed long after a formerly independent director has embraced the studio method. Phil Hall’s definition of independent cinema is more wide-ranging, starting not with the rise of Miramax but at the birth of cinema itself. Throughout his survey, one is repeatedly struck by how many movies were independently produced: Griffith’s Intolerance, entire specialist markets ranging from “race movies” to Yiddish-language productions, and even James Cameron’s first Terminator. And that’s to say nothing of phenomena like ’60s underground cinema; the actor-led
post-war independent outfits of Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster; and the UCLA uprising of 1970s African-American filmmakers. Directors also demonstrated inde-pendence, with Ida Lupino serving as a role model for women directors, and John Cassavetes inspiring wannabe film-makers even today. John Waters, George Romero, John Carpenter, Joan Micklin Silver and Joe Dante all preceded the Lees and Soderberghs by decades. Somehow Hall includes them all in
this dizzyingly detailed, authoritative account. One is repeatedly caught up short by hitherto unfamiliar fields of endeavor, lost movements, forgotten classics and weird specialty markets. He may have cast his net a tad too widely but in every unlit corner of this book, there
is another splendid lost factoid or misbegotten masterpiece.
Really, half this business is putting a rectangle around things,” David Lean told writer Hollis Alpert, with characteristic self-effacement, in 1965. “Put a square around something someone is looking at and he’ll say in surprise, ‘Oh, how beautiful.’ And I don’t think it’s the photographer who provides the square. I do.” There’s Lean in a nutshell: insisting on the essential simplicity of the immensely complex, expensive and (in his late career) logistically daunting business he had chosen, while reminding us that, in the end, all the decisions, responsibilities and blame are the director’s alone. Throughout this collection of interviews and profiles (some of which are now available for the first time since their original publication), Lean reiterates his essential credo: “Never tell them what you can show them.” More surprisingly, he cautions just as often against what he refers to as “the eyeful,” the image that assaults the senses with poorly integrated “beauty for its own sake.” Lean also talks at length of film as the collaboration between cameraman and editor. His late-1920s apprenticeship as an editor of newsreels and features was profoundly influential on his ever-widening cinematic eye. “You learn more in the cutting room,” he says, “than in any other department of the studio because you see everything that’s being done.” As a mature director, Lean felt all moviemaking ultimately depended on the right script, properly developed, and on one’s willingness to serve its needs, through the agency—and the unity—of lens and cutter’s blade. In these interviews, well chosen by editor Steven Organ, Lean also addresses the perceived divide between his early, intimate British work and his later, expansive inter-national epics. He considered the comparison of Brief Encounter versus Lawrence of Arabia, for instance, an artificial argument his critics insisted on all his life. Putting a rectangle around something, as his other remarks suggest, was just the beginning. |