Pictures at a Revolution (14 page)

 

In New York,
Bonnie and Clyde
was no closer to finding a director or a studio than it had been the day Godard had walked out of Tom and Elinor Jones's apartment. After the publication of “The New Sentimentality,” Benton and Newman had left
Esquire
and moved into an office together. Benton was now married, Newman had a growing family to support, and both men felt it was time to see if they could make a living as a writing team. Inspired by a comic book that Newman's young son had left on his living room floor,
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they had begun work together with composer Charles Strouse on a Broadway musical,
It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman
, which would, a year later, become their first produced work.

After Godard's departure, says Norton Wright, “Ellie and I wanted to shift into high gear and see if we couldn't make amends [to Benton and Newman] by using our connections to Bob Montgomery.”
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Montgomery, for the second time, sent the script to Arthur Penn, who, for the second time, rejected it. Penn was about to start shooting
The Chase
, a massive, murky southern crime-and-passion melodrama for producer Sam Spiegel at Columbia. The production was gargantuan, the cast—led by Marlon Brando—challenging, and the tone of Lillian Hellman's adaptation utterly at odds with the original material by Horton Foote. Penn, facing all he could handle, passed on
Bonnie and Clyde
in a note sent by his assistant, saying that he liked the material but that its young-outlaws-on-the-lam theme was too close to
The Chase
, which begins with Robert Redford running for his life and just barely escaping the reach of the law.
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In the spring, Montgomery managed to get Jones and Wright a meeting with Arthur Krim, Robert Benjamin, and David Picker at United Artists, with the idea that Picker, who was enthusiastic about the project, might be able to sell his bosses on it. “It was really just to get their reaction and their ideas about what directors they would favor,” says Wright. “Picker was a young guy—he seemed to be happy and open—but Krim and Benjamin looked gloomy and troubled.”
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They had read the screenplay—at least, they had gotten as far as the scene, early on, in which Clyde and his accomplice both fall into a sexual relationship with Bonnie (in this version of the script, Clyde's partner in crime was still named W. D. Jones, who was one of the last surviving members of the Barrow gang).
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“Mr. Krim said to me, ‘Mr. Wright, I don't know how to say this, but am I to assume that Clyde Barrow and this character W.D. are, well, being sexually intimate with Bonnie Parker?' And I said, ‘Oh yeah, they're both balling her. And maybe each other! It's a ménage à trois!'…It was as if I'd spit on the flag. He looked at me, and there was a sort of a shudder. That was the first time that we realized that the sexuality of the script could be something that would make people somewhat reserved.”
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“Their reaction was, ‘What the hell do you want to make this movie for? I mean, you've got naked women and homosexuals and violence—are you out of your mind?'” says Jones.
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“Without exception, it was turned down,” wrote Benton and Newman, “with comments…along the lines of, ‘Who could care less about characters like these? They are repulsive people.'”
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After United Artists said no to
Bonnie and Clyde
, the movie began to feel like used goods. Those who weren't disgusted simply didn't see anything fresh about it. “This is what he said,” wrote Jones after a meeting with a potential production manager for the film. “‘Oh my. Oh boy. Oh God. All that violence—it's been done before a million times. I've read it carefully through a couple of times and I just can't see anything special about it. It's like a thousand TV gangster films—Public Enemy Number One and his tough moll and speeding cars and all that. I doubt a distributor's reaction will be good.'”
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With no takers at the studios, Wright went to London, where he wooed Desmond Davis, a young British director who had been the camera operator on
A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
, and
Tom Jones
before directing his first feature, 1964's
Girl with Green Eyes
, an art-house hit in the United States. Davis liked
Bonnie and Clyde
, but Benton and Newman's deal with Jones and Wright gave the writers approval over the choice of a director, and they vetoed him.
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“As we moved on,” says Wright, “you could kind of see the names move toward the bottom of the barrel.” Their low point came when Benton, Newman, Wright, and Jones, in an attempt to secure private financing, paid a visit to the Manhattan apartment of jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw, the last big name that Bob Montgomery was able to offer up. “We sat down, and Artie Shaw told us how terrible the script was—he said it was like looking in a sewer,” says Benton. “Literally nobody wanted to do it. David and I would laugh and tell each other that we'd be eighty years old, out on the street, and still peddling
Bonnie and Clyde.”
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As
Promise Her Anything
wrapped in London, Beatty still wasn't sure what his next job was going to be. Nothing in particular had excited him until he heard that François Truffaut had been thinking about making his first English-language movie. As soon as Beatty heard about
Fahrenheit 451
, he wanted to play Montag, the book-burning “fireman” who begins to question authority. Caron knew Truffaut, and during a postproduction vacation in Paris, Beatty asked her to set up a lunch for two—after which he would, with choreographed offhandedness, arrive for coffee.
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It's a safe bet that the outcome of that lunch was a surprise to all three of the participants in it. Beatty showed up, as planned, at the end of the meal, and according to Caron, who acted as a translator and interpreter when needed, he expressed his enthusiasm for
Fahrenheit 451.
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Truffaut politely rebuffed his inquiry, telling him that he had already earmarked the role of Montag for Oskar Werner, the Austrian actor who had played Jules in
Jules and Jim
and had since moved on to star as a world-weary physician, a part that would bring him an Oscar nomination, in Stanley Kramer's soon-to-open
Ship of Fools.
(Truffaut, in his desire to put Beatty off, may have been less than fully honest about Werner's hold on the role; at the time of the lunch, he had not yet signed the actor for
Fahrenheit 451
and was considering Terence Stamp as well.)
²⁹

Truffaut recommended
Bonnie and Clyde
to Beatty, praising Benton and Newman's script and telling him he should take a look at it. If Beatty had read the treatment a year earlier, when Harrison Starr and Godard had talked about making the movie while on the set of
Mickey One
, he either didn't remember or didn't reveal it. But Beatty came away from the lunch eager to get his hands on the screenplay, and he decided to contact Benton. Caron was also intrigued, imagining that
Bonnie and Clyde
might be a good opportunity for her to reteam with Beatty on screen. And, somewhat perversely, Truffaut, who had long since passed on the film, left the lunch with his own interest in
Bonnie and Clyde
rekindled, even though his brief encounter with Beatty had left him determined to avoid working with the actor.

Several factors, including the volatility of Truffaut's own enthusiasms, were probably responsible for his sudden reemergence as a possible director for the movie. The start of production on
Fahrenheit 451
was now facing yet another delay; Truffaut's own hard sell of
Bonnie and Clyde
to Beatty may have reminded him of what he had liked about the script in the first place; and perhaps most significant, Elinor Jones had stayed in touch with him for the last several months, determined to hold on to even the slenderest chance that he might reverse himself and make the picture after all. Jones had also kept in touch with David Picker, who saw great potential in the screenplay;
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on June 5, 1965, unaware that Truffaut had just been talking about the screenplay to Beatty, she and Wright sent the director a letter, telling him that Picker was “very enthusiastic about the property and has indicated a willingness to put up full financing for the film in the neighborhood of $800,000.” Jones and Wright asked Truffaut if he would permit them to tell Picker he was still considering the movie; they quickly followed up with a telegram inviting him back to New York to reopen the discussion.
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Picker's desire to make the movie was serious, and if Truffaut's was just a whim, it wasn't apparent from his behavior. On June 18, the director wrote back to Jones, telling her, “Your proposition concerning
Bonnie and Clyde
has come at just the right moment, provided…that we will be able to start shooting this summer.” Truffaut was ready to talk specifics and went on to enumerate several conditions that had to be met as a prerequisite to continue negotiations: He wanted $80,000 plus 10 percent of the net profits to direct the film, he wanted Helen Scott hired as his personal assistant, and he wanted Alexandra Stewart, who had costarred with Beatty in
Mickey One
, to play Bonnie: “She would represent for me…[a] reassuring presence, since it is very important, in this, my first English-language film, that I have around me people with whom I can get along.” If Jones and Wright were able to meet those requirements, he said, he would plan a trip to New York to discuss other issues—the choice of cinematographer, his hope that Benton and Newman would be available for rewrites before and during the shoot, and the casting of Clyde, for whom Truffaut now wanted Terence Stamp (“But I will not speak to him before hearing what you have to say,” he wrote Jones).
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Jones blanched a little at the idea of Stamp, whose film
The Collector
was just opening in New York (“Terence Stamp?! He's an Englishman!” she wrote in her notes), but she was determined not to let Truffaut slip away again.
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At the same time, Beatty had decided to pursue
Bonnie and Clyde
his own way. He flew to New York, telephoned Benton, whom he had met at a party years earlier, and reintroduced himself.

“I think he doubted me when I said who I was,” says Beatty of Benton, who was indeed incredulous.
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“Warren said he'd had lunch with Truffaut and had heard about the script, and could he see it? I said, yes, I'll bring it to you, and he said, that's all right, I'll come by your apartment. Twenty minutes later there he was. My wife was so angry—she hadn't even had a chance to put on makeup.”

Beatty took the script and left. A little while later, he called Benton and said, “I'm on Chapter Two and I want to do it.” Benton, knowing that he had yet to reach the scene in which Clyde's bisexuality was introduced, said, “Wait until you get to Chapter Three.” Beatty hung up. It didn't take long for the phone to ring again. “I'm on Chapter Three,” he said, “and I know what you're talking about, and I still want to do it. Who do you want to direct?”
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Beatty has often said that when he first read Benton and Newman's screenplay, he wanted to produce the film, not star in it: “I didn't want to play Clyde. I didn't think I was right for it. You know who I thought was right for it? Bob Dylan. And the person I could see the most as Bonnie was my sister. But I couldn't see her with Bob Dylan. And certainly not with me! So I was confused.”
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But Beatty soon learned that he was getting ahead of himself, since Elinor Jones and Norton Wright still had five months left on their eighteen-month option. Had Beatty truly wanted to star in the film at that point, he could have called Jones and Wright and told them he was interested, as Benton urged him to do. But as the project's would-be producer, he was their rival and decided that he would keep his endgame private while their time ticked away.

Benton and Newman were not so circumspect; given the way Beatty was talking about the script, they had every reason to believe he wanted to act in
Bonnie and Clyde
, not just produce it. “We kissed our wives and broke open a fresh six-pack and started playing Flatt and Scruggs again,”
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they wrote. “I just remember the excitement starting again,” says Leslie Newman. “All the more because it had sagged. This terrible low followed by this incredible high that you hadn't expected to have!”
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Benton and Newman called Elinor Jones to let her know that Beatty had read the screenplay and liked it. Jones, thinking this might be a further selling point for Truffaut and an effective way to get him away from the improbable idea of casting Terence Stamp, immediately wrote to the director in Paris, asking him, “What do you think of Warren Beatty in the role of Clyde?” and “If [his] participation makes it easier to raise money, would that be an influence on your opinion?”
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