Pictures at a Revolution (23 page)

Silliphant's first version of
In the Heat of the Night
ended with a handshake between Gillespie and Tibbs, a moment Gillespie pointedly avoids at the end of the book. The screenwriter had been able to eradicate the novel's timeworn sentimentality about race—the idea that black people could be worthy of admiration only if they were better than everyone around them, a stereotype that tied in closely to the exceptionalism that had both shaped and constricted Poitier's career. But what replaced that idea was no less of a platitude—the concluding image (unintentionally echoing
The Defiant Ones
) of a white hand and a black hand clasped together. The final shot embodied a notion that all problems could be solved if two men just got to know each other as people—it may have been politically spurious, but at least it was more contemporary and less condescending than Ball's ending.

Jewison, however, knew that the script had a long way to go. Silliphant later joked about the finesse with which the director handled him. “He called me and said, ‘Stirling…I have never read a first draft which is so brilliant. I want you to know that I'm not going to change a word.'…I was so honored and flattered, I was in a euphoric state for about a week…. I called Norman and we had lunch, and I said, ‘I'm troubled by your easy acceptance of the script. What I'd like to do is go over it page by page.' Norman said, ‘It really isn't necessary, Stirling, but since you insist…' He takes his script out of the briefcase, and I see that it is bristling with paper clips, one on almost every page.'”
⁴⁰
Jewison, it turned out, had some notes. And Silliphant, the fastest writer in Hollywood, found himself working on the screenplay every day for the next six months. “Stirling always said I told him it was brilliant and then months later he was still working on it,” says Jewison. “But it wasn't that. We were living in a difficult time for race relations, and I wanted him to dig deeper. What were Virgil's feelings about race? What were Bill Gillespie's? That's where he still had to go.”
⁴¹

A
rthur Penn was in New York City directing Robert Duvall and Lee Remick in the Broadway play
Wait Until Dark
when, for the third time in three years, he turned down an invitation to direct
Bonnie and Clyde.
This time, the offer was coming from Warren Beatty, whose argumentative collaboration with Penn during production of the ill-fated
Mickey One
had only increased his affection for the director. Penn liked Beatty as well. “Nothing on
Mickey One
was personal,” he says. “We remained friends.”
¹
Beatty thought Penn's affinity for the French New Wave made him a natural choice for the film, but Penn had no interest in directing
Bonnie and Clyde
or any other movie.
The Chase
was about to open to poor reviews, and the experience of having Sam Spiegel take the movie away from him in the editing room, eight years after Warner Brothers had done the same thing on his first picture,
The Left Handed Gun
, had convinced Penn he wasn't meant to work in the movies at all. He had one Hollywood commitment remaining—a deal to direct a project about an ancient Native American and George Custer called
Little Big Man
—but otherwise, he intended to remain in New York and concentrate on directing Broadway plays and forming a repertory theater company in the Berkshires. “I was sick of movie shenanigans,” he said later, “and mostly sick of myself for abdicating responsibility.”
²
From now on, he told
The New York Times
, “I won't touch anything I can't control to the end.”
³

Soon after Beatty bought Benton and Newman's screenplay, he had to put his search for a director on hold; he had agreed to return to London in early 1966 to star in
Kaleidoscope
, a slapdash caper film about an elaborate card game scam that was intended to capitalize on the success of films like
Charade
and
Topkapi
as well as the public appetite for James Bond–like heroes scampering along ledges in scenic European locations. The blockbuster opening of the fourth Bond film,
Thunderball
, in December 1965 had only increased the urgency every studio felt to mount some competition; 20th Century-Fox had James Coburn in
Our Man Flint
, Columbia was beginning the Matt Helm series with Dean Martin, and even United Artists, the home of 007, was trying newcomer Michael Caine as a sort of unglamorous, bespectacled anti-Bond in
The Ipcress File. Kaleidoscope
was Warner's unmemorable attempt to get in the game. “The shoot was great fun, very jolly,” says Susannah York, who replaced Sandra Dee as Beatty's costar a few weeks before production. “It was a shame the movie didn't really live up to the script.”
⁴

Beatty's colleagues on
Kaleidoscope
recall him as a funny and rambunctious presence during the shoot. “Warren is a great flirt, and if you're up for it, that's great,” recalls York. “But I was pretty newly married at the time, and he was still with Leslie Caron, and while I enjoyed his company on the set, sometimes I sort of had to put him down a wee bit.”
⁵
In fact, Beatty's relationship with Caron was coming to an end during production—a split he later said left him “with enormous, overwhelming sadness”
⁶
—and his mind seemed more on moviemaking than on romance. Before he could even try to get a studio to finance
Bonnie and Clyde
, he had a couple of key decisions to make, and while acting in
Kaleidoscope
, he made the first of them. Despite his initial interest in Bob Dylan and his later insistence that he did not intend to star in the film when he bought the script, Beatty does not appear to have given serious consideration to casting any other actor as Clyde Barrow; by the time he finished
Kaleidoscope
in March, he was committed to playing the role. That, at least, clarified two things for him: As a first-time producer who was also the film's star, he could not consider directing
Bonnie and Clyde
as well, and Shirley MacLaine was now, obviously, out of the running to play Bonnie Parker.

While Beatty was in Europe, he met briefly with Jean-Luc Godard, mostly as a courtesy to Benton and Newman,
⁷
who were not quite ready to give up their dream of making the first American French New Wave movie. But Beatty didn't start thinking seriously about a director until he returned to the United States. In the decades since
Bonnie and Clyde
was released, a myth of rejection has been attached to the film, often burnished in the retelling by the moviemakers themselves; the project was said to have been turned down by every director, by every actress, by every studio. But, as Beatty says, “sometimes turndowns are not so clear…. You talk to somebody, and something doesn't spark, so you don't really follow it up and then you talk to someone else. So I guess it's somewhat of a misspeak to say they all turned me down.”
⁸
However, it's easy to imagine that polite indifference would have felt like rejection to Beatty, and once he settled in Los Angeles and started meeting with directors, he found himself in a position that was as unfamiliar professionally as it was personally: lots of first dates that ended with handshakes and pleasant good-nights.

In his talks with directors, Beatty knew he was at a disadvantage: He was a twenty-nine-year-old actor with a spotty track record who was declaring his intention to become a producer at a time when only a handful of actors, all much older and more experienced, took those reins. Even his friends warned him he was making a mistake: “They would say to me, ‘Why are you producing this? You're a movie star. What's it going to say: “Produced by
Warren Beatty
”?' Kirk Douglas could do that. But not conventional, pretty movie stars.”
⁹

In the five years since his debut in
Splendor in the Grass
had won him access to anyone in old or new Hollywood, Beatty had done his homework and learned his movie history. The first director he pursued was George Stevens, whose career, which began when he worked as a cameraman on Laurel and Hardy silent shorts, had spanned two-thirds of the history of the American movie business. Stevens had made comedies (
Alice Adams, The Talk of the Town
), melodramas (
Penny Serenade
), action-adventures (
Gunga Din
) and, in the 1950s, three films,
A Place in the Sun, Shane
, and
Giant
, that some critics viewed as a thematic trilogy that explored American ambition, expansion, and longing. That was as much of a through line as anyone then looking to trace a pattern in Stevens's work was able to discern. His reputation as a consummate, versatile craftsman was unimpeachable, but he was as far from Truffaut or Godard as it was possible to get: At sixty-one, he was part of Hollywood's unapologetic old guard. As a director who tried to tailor himself to each movie rather than use his films to express an overriding personal vision, he was of little interest to auteurist critics or to New Wave directors. Nonetheless, “Warren had a real fascination with Stevens,” says Robert Benton. “He was one of the first names he mentioned.”
¹⁰

Beatty may have looked at Stevens's films of the 1950s and seen his gift for bringing out greatness in actors like Montgomery Clift and for pulling better work out of performers like Alan Ladd and Rock Hudson than anyone knew they had in them. “Warren spent a long time talking to George Stevens about doing the picture,” says
Bonnie and Clyde
's script supervisor, John C. Dutton, who had worked with the director on
The Greatest Story Ever Told.
“I'd see the two of them walking up and down Sunset Boulevard—they'd have dinner someplace on the Strip and then walk, and Warren would talk about the picture.”
¹¹
But in early 1966, Stevens was not in a state of mind to attempt a fresh approach to moviemaking. He had worked for six years on
The Greatest Story Ever Told
, planning a version of the life of Christ that would be stripped of pageant and spectacle, a counterpoint to the extravagant epics of Cecil B. DeMille. But Stevens, a deliberate worker who liked to shoot and reshoot scenes from all possible angles, took so long to make the movie that religious films passed out of fashion; by the time the 225-minute picture lumbered onto screens in early 1965, Pier Paolo Pasolini's spare and stark
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
had dazzled European critics, and Stevens's film was derided for being as stiff and old-fashioned as anything by DeMille.

After that, Stevens seemed to dig in his heels and rail against an industry that was changing more quickly than he could. In 1965, he filed a $2 million lawsuit against Paramount and NBC, charging the network with the “dismemberment” and “emasculation” of
A Place in the Sun
by planning to air it with commercial interruptions and claiming that Paramount had violated his right to control the film's editing by selling it to a network.
¹²
Stevens's suit came at a moment when Hollywood's older directors felt particular enmity toward television, possibly because a new generation of TV-trained directors was asserting itself in the movie business. Otto Preminger had recently filed a similar suit over
Anatomy of a Murder
, and William Wyler sided publicly with Stevens in his claim against NBC, urging his colleagues at a Directors Guild dinner to join the “fight to keep our films from being mutilated on television.”
¹³
But Stevens's lawsuit was shot down,
¹⁴
and he turned away from the industry. Beatty's attempt to woo him for
Bonnie and Clyde
came to nothing, and he reluctantly moved on.

In the weeks that followed, Beatty talked to at least a half dozen other directors. The conversations all led nowhere. He tested the waters with Wyler (like Stevens, a giant of the Hollywood establishment and a director for whom auteurists had little use at the time). He approached the sharp, modern filmmakers he had gotten to know while shooting
Promise Her Anything
and
Kaleidoscope
in London, discussing
Bonnie and Clyde
with both Karel Reisz, whose comedy
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment
opened in the United States in April 1966, and John Schlesinger, whose 1965 film,
Darling
, had been among the best-reviewed films of the year. Beatty also discussed the movie with Brian Hutton,
¹⁵
a young American director who had just completed
The Pad and How to Use It
(a comedy based on Peter Shaffer's
The Private Ear
, the companion piece to the one-act play Mike Nichols had almost filmed,
The Public Eye
).

Robert Towne, though he had no official role in
Bonnie and Clyde
yet, had become a close friend of Beatty's and an articulate champion of Benton and Newman's screenplay, and he accompanied Beatty to many of the meetings. But Towne's impassioned take on the script didn't move any directors. “I remember at one point in the meeting—and this was typical of a lot of the interviews—Brian Hutton turned to me and said, ‘What do
you
think is so special about the movie?'” says Towne. “And I remember saying that this was something new in movies, that it may have been putatively a gangster movie, but that it was nothing like
They Made Me a Criminal
or
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
or
You Only Live Once
, all of those movies in which sociological issues were at the forefront and sympathy was enlisted because of the characters' circumstances. This script eschewed that, and it was also a very bold use of what the French had been doing that at the same time transcended mere admiration for them and did something different. I certainly went on at some length. And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, that's what you
say
is in it, that's what you may
think
is in it, but it's just in your mind. It's not in the script.' And that little scene was replayed many, many times. After a while, I just kept quiet.”
¹⁶

Some directors may have shied away from
Bonnie and Clyde
because Beatty made no secret of his intention to serve as a hands-on producer. “My producing point of view came, really, when I was a kid,” he says. “The great advantage I had in getting famous when I was twenty-one was that I knew, very well, Sam Goldwyn, David Selznick, Sam Spiegel, Arthur Freed, Jerry Wald, Pandro Berman—so as a producer, I felt, I'm responsible for the movie. I started it, and I'm going to finish it, and if you're going to be a director on a movie that I do, you better know you're gonna have to put up with that.”
¹⁷
But Beatty himself may have held back from making any director a firm offer because he still hadn't taken Penn's rejection as a final answer. In the late spring of 1966, Beatty met with Sydney Pollack about the movie. “I was quite serious about wanting to do it,” says Pollack, “but Warren was very honest with me. He said, ‘Look, I don't know yet whether this is going to work out, but if it does work out and Arthur wants to do it, I'm going to do it with Arthur.'”
¹⁸