Pictures at a Revolution (32 page)

By insisting on the ménage à trois and introducing it early in the film, Benton and Newman knew that they might damage something that was just as important to them—an arc of audience identification in which moviegoers would take Bonnie and Clyde's side at the outset and have bonded to them by the time their adventures turned disorientingly dark and violent. The writers liked the idea of weaving a sexual component into Clyde's frustration and appetite for violence, and Penn's suggested solution—that they make Clyde impotent—“fit right in with all that phallic gun stuff,” wrote Newman.
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Beatty thought impotence worked better than bisexuality, but he pushed Penn for a scene, late in the movie, in which Clyde finally manages to complete sex with Bonnie; Penn resisted but ultimately gave in.
²²

Its politics aside, the decision to eliminate the ménage à trois benefited the script in other ways; it allowed Benton and Newman to rewrite the character of C. W. Moss, the wheelman. A thick, dull stud-for-hire in the first version of the screenplay, he now became a puckish, slightly dopey kid brother—this “lovable little guy,” says Penn—an important comic element in the movie's lighthearted early scenes and an ideal part for Michael J. Pollard, a friend of Beatty's from their days working together in the play
A Loss of Roses
and on the sitcom
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
. “The only other person I ever thought about was Dennis Hopper,” says Beatty. “I thought he would be funny, and a very good actor. But Michael J.—you just look at him and he's fun.”
²³

Beatty and Penn turned to New York for the rest of
Bonnie and Clyde
's cast, populating the film almost entirely with inexpensive stage actors. For the role of Buck's nervous, chattery wife, Blanche, Beatty had been interested in Elia Kazan's wife, Barbara Loden,
²⁴
but Penn wanted Estelle Parsons, an actress who had worked in television (including as a cub reporter for the
Today
show) but had had only one tiny movie role. “I was not having a good career at that moment,” says Parsons, who had packed up her New York apartment and two children in order to join a San Francisco repertory company, only to have the job fall through before she got there. “I was doing a Murray Schisgal play with Gene Hackman and Dusty Hoffman up at Stockbridge, for Arthur [at the Berkshire Theatre Festival]…. I was thinking, what am I doing in this ridiculous business? I really do tragicomedy, and nobody hiring for a rep company wanted that. But Arthur's rehearsal technique was so exciting, it really turned me around. It was impossible to work for him and not be 100 percent fully engaged. I would have gone anywhere with him.” Parsons signed on to play Blanche for $5,000. For the role of Clyde's brother, Buck, she suggested her stage costar Hackman—“People always thought we must be lovers because we had the same rhythm, the same way of acting,” she says. “And of course, Gene wanted to be a movie star, always.”
²⁵
Penn was enthusiastic about him, and so was Beatty, who had shared a scene with Hackman in Robert Rossen's
Lilith
and came away thinking, “This guy's such a good actor, he's making me look good.”
²⁶
And Penn brought in Evans Evans and Gene Wilder, with whom he had worked at the Actors Studio, to play a young couple briefly swept up in the Barrow gang's joyride.
²⁷

The ensemble Beatty and Penn pulled together was made up of newcomers and outsiders, and the crew was light on experience as well: Neither Theadora Van Runkle, the costume designer, nor Dean Tavoularis, the production designer, had made a film before. “I waited three hours to meet Warren Beatty, and he breezed in and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Sorry, kid, you can't do the movie—I talked to the Costume Designers Guild and you're not in the union,”' says Van Runkle. “So I did something uncharacteristic—I leapt across the room and grabbed him by his shirt and said, ‘I've got to do the movie!' He said, ‘Okay, okay,' and got the head of the guild on the phone, and they swore at each other for about half an hour, and I was in.”
²⁸
Editor Dede Allen had overseen the cutting of only a few films, but they included Kazan's
America America
and Rossen's
The Hustler
, which was enough of a recommendation for Beatty. The sole veteran behind the scenes was Burnett Guffey, a sixty-one-year-old cinematographer who had begun his career as an assistant cameraman in 1923 and had shot more than eighty films, among them
All the King's Men, From Here to Eternity
, and
Birdman of Alcatraz
. Guffey had been nominated for four Academy Awards and won once, but these days, he went where the work was, whether it was episodes of
Gidget
or Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies. “My impression was that people were down on their luck,” says Parsons. “It was more or less like doing an independent movie. I mean, Gene hadn't done much, I had not really done a movie before, Warren and Arthur had done that
Mickey One
, so they were both kind of down…and Faye had not really done anything, or anything that people had seen.”
²⁹

Dunaway was among the last of
Bonnie and Clyde
's principals to be cast. Beatty had thought a great deal about his former lover Natalie Wood and discussed the part of Bonnie Parker with her more than once. “Here's how out of touch I was with the movie world,” says Van Runkle. “When Warren said he wanted to cast Natalie Wood, I said, ‘No, she can't be Bonnie—she doesn't have enough class!'”
³⁰

A reunion of the two stars of
Splendor in the Grass
would have gone a long way toward selling the film to audiences, and Wood, though her romantic relationship with Beatty was long over, was interested. “All during the time I was directing her in
This Property Is Condemned
,” says Sydney Pollack, “she was trying to decide whether to do it or not. That's how I met Warren. He kept after her.”
³¹

But Wood's emotional state was fragile, and Robert Towne was quietly urging Beatty to look elsewhere. “I remember feeling that he should not go back to Natalie, and I'm sure I expressed that, because I felt that this script really needed someone different,” he says. And Beatty himself stopped short of directly asking Wood to take the part. “There is that point,” says Towne, “when he would have just thrown himself at a prospective Bonnie's feet and said, ‘Please do it, you're the only one.' I don't know that he ever did that—I don't know that he ever felt it.”
³²

Beatty looked at Sharon Tate, the young starlet who was about to be cast in
Valley of the Dolls
. He wondered if Ann-Margret might be good for the part, or perhaps Carol Lynley, who had just played Jean Harlow in a biopic and might have had the right period look. And he gave serious consideration to Jane Fonda, who years earlier had been François Truffaut's first idea for the role. “I thought that Jane would be very, very good in it,” says Beatty. “But Jane had worked on
The Chase
, and because that was not a good experience either for her or for Arthur, that sort of negated that.”
³³

“We talked about Jane Fonda, but she seemed too sophisticated,” says Penn. And for the director, Fonda's fame, which was on the rise after the success of
Cat Ballou
, also worked against her: “I didn't want a movie star.”
³⁴

“Warren has an incredible way of making you
think
he's offering you a part…and then not using you—and you never feel you've been rejected,” Fonda told Beatty biographer Suzanne Finstad. “That's a gift.”
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Beatty and Penn both say the only actress to receive a firm offer from them before Dunaway was Tuesday Weld—and she turned them down. Beatty had worked with Weld years earlier on
Dobie Gillis
when she was still a teenager; she was now a twenty-three-year-old new mother whose almost doll-like beauty and unconcealable streaks of wildness and neurosis might have made her a fascinating Bonnie. But she was nursing, overwhelmed by parenthood, and didn't want to travel to Texas for the shoot. And, says Penn, “she didn't like the script.”
³⁶
(“I refused to do
Bonnie and Clyde
,” she fretted later, “because down deep I knew it was going to be a huge success.”)

By the time Dunaway's name came up, Beatty and Penn were out of options, and the excited ingenue who had been signed to two multipicture contracts just six months earlier had already had a bruising introduction to the realities of Hollywood moviemaking. Dunaway's debut in
The Happening
had been reasonably smooth, if somewhat rushed, but when she went from that into Otto Preminger's southern melodrama,
Hurry Sundown
, in which she had a supporting role as the wife of a dirt farmer, the shoot turned into an ordeal that left the actress badly shaken.

Preminger had assembled an impressive young cast, including Michael Caine, Jane Fonda, Robert Hooks, and Diahann Carroll, for the Louisiana shoot, “right in the heart of Ku Klux Klan territory,” Dunaway wrote. For Fonda, the besieged production represented a step in her political awakening: “I was still using the term
Negro
while the African-Americans in the cast were calling themselves black,” she wrote. “I listened to conversations between Robert Hooks, Beah Richards and others…about a burgeoning ‘black nationalism'…a growing sense that blacks had only themselves to depend on.”
³⁷
But for Dunaway, the shoot tapped into her innate competiveness: “Jane was the May Queen in this film. She was the bigger star, and Otto wanted her to be the main star of this movie,” she wrote.
³⁸
And Dunaway learned the hard way that Preminger's reputation as a monster with actors was well earned. He was “autocratic and dictatorial,” she wrote. “It is difficult to understand the depth of the rage until the full force of it is turned directly on you.” When Preminger exploded at her one day “like a mad dog,” Dunaway kept her cool, finished her work on the movie, went back to New York, and told her lawyer to do whatever he had to do to get her out of the remainder of her multifilm contract. “It cost me a lot of money,” she wrote, “not to work for Otto again.”
³⁹

It's not clear how Dunaway came to the attention of Beatty and Penn. Some people have said that publicist John Springer, a confidant of Beatty's, first suggested her. Theadora Van Runkle remembers sitting in a meeting where Beatty “scooted this catalog of actresses across the table and I opened it to Faye's picture and saw her and said, ‘There's the girl you should cast!' She was perfect for the spirit of the thirties and the spirit of the sixties.”
⁴⁰
In her autobiography, Dunaway writes that it was Penn who got in touch with Creative Management Associates' David Begelman and asked to meet her, although earlier, when she had wanted to audition for Fonda's role in
The Chase
, she couldn't get past Penn's casting director, who said she “didn't have the face for movies.”
⁴¹

Neither of Dunaway's first two films was scheduled to open for several months, so Beatty and Penn asked Columbia if they could look at footage of Dunaway in
The Happening
, and they liked what they saw enough to fly her to Los Angeles. But the woman who walked into Beatty's suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel bore little resemblance to the blond, gaunt Bonnie Parker of
Bonnie and Clyde
. Dunaway had gained weight during the making of
Hurry Sundown;
her appearance in the film, in which she gave a vivid, impassioned performance, was womanly, full-hipped, appropriately unglamorous. That evening, Dunaway shuttled between Beatty's penthouse and Penn's room several floors below; each man claims to have convinced the other to hire her. “I had a long meeting with her, and I was impressed by her energy and intelligence,” says Beatty. “And I also felt her toughness, which I thought was dramatic and funny.” Knowing how many times Penn had watched him blow hot and cold about an actress, Beatty called him and said, “‘I've gotta introduce you to an actress who I
don't
think I want in the movie, but you should meet her because you'll really like her.' An hour later, he calls me and says, ‘I met Faye Dunaway. I think I want her in the movie.'”
⁴²

Penn's account is slightly different. “It got a little testy between Warren and me, because I had seen Dunaway in
After the Fall
in New York. Warren had a sense about her, that she was difficult, I think that was part of it. I don't know what it was, but it made him keep her at a distance. But she was clearly beautiful and a damn good actress. And Benton and Newman were there, we were all up in Warren's suite, and it got to the push-comes-to-shove point, and the three of us wanted Dunaway. And at that point Warren said all right.”
⁴³

As Dunaway was coming on to
Bonnie and Clyde
, Benton and Newman were stepping away from the film. The project they had begun three years earlier had launched their careers; they now had a musical,
It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman
, on Broadway and a suspense drama in the works for Universal. For weeks, they had been traveling to Stockbridge, rewriting the script for Penn, and they had reached a dead end. “Benton and Newman, by then, were just exhausted,” says Penn.
⁴⁴