Pictures at a Revolution (10 page)

Poitier didn't need to wait for the answer: He had given it himself years earlier. He was still, as he had put it, “the only one.” And with an Academy Award, Poitier was no longer just an actor, but himself a trophy, a successful progress report that the Academy had bestowed on the movie business and a name that Hollywood could invoke again and again as a way of telling itself that it had done enough, that a piece of unfinished business had finally been settled. Poitier had been in Hollywood long enough to know that the Oscar would be less useful to him than to the organization that handed it out. The prize was not a symptom of meaningful change, but a substitute for it; more substantial or widespread advances in the industry didn't appear to him to be on the horizon. In any case, Poitier certainly did not imagine that he had just been granted an opportunity for leverage. On the contrary, it seemed almost impossible for him to imagine any way that he would now be allowed to ask for more.

I
n May 1964, almost a year after they had started to talk about
Bonnie and Clyde
, Robert Benton and David Newman became, for the first time, paid screenwriters. Elinor Jones and Norton Wright gave them $1,700, formalizing their own role as producers and buying themselves an eighteen-month window—until November 27, 1965—during which they had the right to try to secure a production deal for the movie.
¹
Benton and Newman took some time off from their jobs at
Esquire
and used their payday for a trip to East Texas, where, guided by Benton, who knew some of the turf, they spent time visiting the sites of Parker and Barrow's crimes and getting a feel for the dusty, remarkably unaltered landscape. “Heighdy! See how I'm picking up the local jargon?” Newman wrote to Jones on a postcard. “Things going extremely well for us. Found the graves of Clyde and [Buck Barrow, his brother] in abandoned cemetery overgrown with weeds. One of the strangest sensations we ever had—standing six feet over Clyde. On Monday we'll see Bonnie's…. Bob is taking a lot of pictures.
Perfect
Bonnie and Clyde locations! Quite uncanny to see cities and towns that look like 1932 this year. So we are spending your money wisely and well.”
²

Benton and Newman often talked about the trip as a turning point—a journey during which they fell deeper into the world of Bonnie and Clyde and became fully committed to screenwriting. They kept their ears open for speech patterns and dust bowl slang.
³
Newman immersed himself in an idiom and an environment that he had never encountered. And it was in Texas that some of their ideas for the film's jolting changes in mood began to sharpen. “Bob and David had in their viscera some themes that they wanted to address,” says Wright. “Bob in particular was always drawn to the thought that what is rollicking good fun one minute can, in the blink of an eye, turn into something violent and scary—it was in his blood.”
⁴

Jones and Wright became more excited with every new dispatch from Texas. Still convinced that the movie could be made for between $350,000 and $500,000, a budget range that had been confirmed by their conversations with François Truffaut, they were now trying hard to turn themselves into real producers. Wright, who had gotten a job as a production assistant on TV's
Captain Kangaroo
(“I was pickling my brains, but at least I had some income”), was taking a Directors Guild of America–sponsored class in production management,
⁵
and Jones was doing what she could to move Truffaut, their strongest link to legitimacy, closer to making a deal.

Truffaut, however, could raise her hopes with one sentence and dash them with the next. Before leaving New York, he met with Jones in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel.
⁶
They talked about a due date for the script, settling on July 1, and Truffaut told her, “You have a very good thing here, you know—an excellent script for a director.” When Jones told him he was the only director they wanted, Truffaut remarked casually that any good director, foreign or American, could make
Bonnie and Clyde
and that he would return to the United States sometime in July, when he would make a final decision about whether to direct the movie.

Knowing of Benton and Newman's trip, Truffaut asked Jones to have them send him as many photographs and postcards as possible from Texas. (They did, and he replied by sending them the gangster comic strips from
France Soir
that had helped spark his initial curiosity about Bonnie and Clyde.) Are “the boys” still following the ideas they had discussed during their hotel room marathons? he asked Jones. When she assured him that they were, he cautioned, “But not too faithfully. [I] don't want to…restrict them at this point.”

During their meeting, Truffaut also suggested
Mickey One
's Harrison Starr (whom neither Wright nor Jones knew) as a possible associate producer who might be able to help them secure financing. For his part, Starr wasn't happy to learn that the
Bonnie and Clyde
treatment already had producers attached; he had clearly had separate conversations with Godard and Truffaut about producing
Bonnie and Clyde
himself and, eager to prove his suitability for the job, had taken the initiative to meet with Mike Frankovich at Columbia to see if he would be willing to fund the film as part of a new program of low-cost European-style ventures the studio was setting up.
⁷

After Benton and Newman returned to New York, they began work in earnest on turning their treatment of
Bonnie and Clyde
into a screenplay that incorporated everything they had learned from Truffaut and from Texas, reshaping their descriptive passages into scenes with dialogue. They also went back to
Esquire
(where Benton was no longer art director but had become the magazine's special projects editor) to oversee the completion of their grand statement of pop principle, “The New Sentimentality,” the magazine's cover story in July 1964. Lofty and exuberant, hilariously arrogant, and irresistibly presented as an infallible index of taste, the article was a cultural call to arms—out with the old (except for those elements of the old approved by the young), in with the new. The “Old Sentimentality,” exemplified by the Eisenhower era and values like “Patriotism, Love, Religion, Mom, The Girl,” had given way, Benton and Newman argued, to a “New Sentimentality” about “you, really just you, not what you were told or taught, but what goes on in your head,
really
, and in your heart,
really.”
⁸

“The New Sentimentality” was really about what was going on in Benton's and Newman's heads and hearts, which wasn't hard to decode.
Breathless
's Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo were a “Key Couple of the New Sentimentality,” and their description of them (“He was destroyed because he let love carry him away…she was fragile, but hard”) could have come straight from their
Bonnie and Clyde
treatment. Other favored representations of the New Sentimentality included
L'Avventura
, Malcolm X, Alfred Hitchcock, and, of course, Truffaut, who was shamelessly referenced four times. “He is Style over Content,” they wrote, meaning it as high praise. Consigned to the ash heap as relics of the Old Sentimentality were
The Sound of Music
, Gene Kelly, and John Wayne. “What we were talking about,” Newman wrote later, “was what is now known as ‘the Sixties.' But as we were in the midst of living through them at the time, we didn't have a chronological name for what was happening.”
⁹

“The New Sentimentality” slowed Benton and Newman's work on
Bonnie and Clyde
, but not significantly: By August 1964, they had completed their first draft of the screenplay. Wright and Jones read what they had done and “flipped over it,” says Wright. “It was just marvelous.” The young producers were ready to spring into action, even though they weren't entirely sure what they were supposed to do next. “We really didn't have any idea other than that, if we got a budget together and then told [attorney] Bob Montgomery about it, we'd go to the major studios and tell them about François Truffaut and they'd come rushing to us,” says Wright.
¹⁰

Their first shock came when Wright, using the skills he had acquired in his production management class, went through Benton and Newman's script page by page, only to realize that the $350,000 they had tossed around as a budget was a fantasy. “I broke it down, added it up, and to my horror, it came to the catastrophically high figure of a million three,” he says. “I kept checking my addition, thinking, ‘This is terrible!'”
¹¹
Wright's math was correct: He and Jones hadn't taken into account the fact that
Bonnie and Clyde
would require period automobiles, doubled and tripled costumes to account for all the blood and bullets the script now contained, and multiple locations. The film was no longer viable as the on-the-fly independent production they had envisioned.

The second, far worse piece of news came in a letter from Truffaut to Elinor Jones on September 7, 1964. “I have had the new script…read to me in French,” he wrote of
Bonnie and Clyde.
“I thought all the modifications are excellent. I am, unfortunately, obliged to reply to you in the negative.” Three weeks earlier, Truffaut had warned Helen Scott in a letter “that I want to curb the enthusiasm of Elinor Jones.” Now, he was offering Jones a variety of reasons for turning down the film: He had decided that
La Marié Était en Noir
(
The Bride Wore Black
), a French-language adaptation of an American suspense novel, would be his next film; moreover, he wrote, Lewis Allen was insisting to him that his first American film would have to be
Fahrenheit 451
, which was now scheduled for production in the summer of 1965.
¹²

“I would like you to know that, of all the scripts I have turned down in the last five years,
Bonnie and Clyde
is the best, but I hope that you will fully understand my reasons and that David Newman and Robert Benton will also understand them,” Truffaut wrote. In fact his explanation was slightly slippery; it's not clear why he would suddenly have accepted a dictum from Lewis Allen, with whom he had now had a long and testy relationship, about the start date of
Fahrenheit 451.
Truffaut was, at the time of his letter, going through some problems he didn't share with Jones: He was in the middle of a divorce, and his latest film,
La Peau Douce
(
The Soft Skin
), had opened to poor reviews and mediocre business in France.
¹³
In the letter, he sounded self-conscious, formal, and somewhat overinsistent about his lack of remorse. “I do not think that I have caused you to waste too much time, nor have I broken my word,” he wrote, “since I had always made it clear I would make my final decision when the second version of the script was finished.”

But Truffaut seemed to know how crushing his abrupt about-face would be, because he had taken the time to arrange an extraordinary second chance for the movie. He had given Benton and Newman's script, he said, to Jean-Luc Godard, who “greatly liked” it, was “a very fast worker,” “speaks English fluently,” and “might well give you an American
Breathless.”
Truffaut didn't say whether he had ever talked with Godard about the possibility of taking over
Bonnie and Clyde
when both men were in New York. But he was telling the truth about Godard's reaction: Before he broke the news to Jones, he had sent the script to Italy, where Godard was showing his newest movie at the Venice Film Festival, and Godard had promptly cabled him back: “Am in love with Bonnie and also with Clyde. Stop. Would be happy to speak with authors in New York.”
¹⁴

Benton and Newman didn't have the time or the inclination to be devastated. They were now exchanging one leader of the French New Wave for the other, and hesitation was a luxury they couldn't afford: Two of Godard's newest movies were showing at the New York Film Festival the following week, and the director wanted to meet them during his visit to New York and make a decision about
Bonnie and Clyde
on the spot.

The festival, sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, was only a year old in 1964, but under the guidance of its respected and influential program director, Richard Roud, it was already starting to assert itself as an annual summit meeting for the world's leading filmmakers. Besides Godard, who was showing
A Woman Is a Woman
and
Band of Outsiders
, that fall's invited directors included Bernardo Bertolucci, Abel Gance, Luis Buñuel, and Satyajit Ray. An invitation extended to an American director signified approval by the auteurist critical community—thus the inclusion of Sidney Lumet's
Fail-Safe
and Robert Rossen's
Lilith
(the latter making its long-delayed and poorly received debut).
¹⁵

As Truffaut had said, Godard worked fast: In the four years since
Breathless
, he had directed seven features as well as shorts in three different multidirector omnibus films, a format that enjoyed brief popularity in Europe in the early 1960s. “That was very much a Nouvelle Vague thing—get in there and do it quickly,” says Elinor Jones. “Even Truffaut thought that way. But with Godard, it went to extremes.”
¹⁶

When he arrived in New York, Godard began his flirtation with
Bonnie and Clyde
by meeting with the two producers for lunch at the Algonquin. “Godard was somewhat cool, somewhat distant, but he said he was interested in the script,” says Wright.
¹⁷
There was a bit of polite, detached discussion in which Godard advanced some of his ideas for the film and Jones and Wright discussed their own. Harrison Starr, whom Godard brought along to the meeting, says it didn't go well. “I literally saw the gate close in Jean-Luc's eyes, and that was it. I knew that he wasn't going to work with them.”
¹⁸