Pictures at a Revolution (37 page)

During
Bonnie and Clyde
's long night shoots, the actors occasionally found time for a relaxing moment or two. Dunaway, at least for a while, discovered a kindred spirit in Michael J. Pollard. Dunaway's onetime lover Lenny Bruce had died of a heroin overdose a few weeks before production began, and Pollard had been a fan; one night after Bruce performed, the two men had shared a taxi uptown and Bruce suggested they shoot up together (Pollard declined, saying he'd rather stick to Jack Daniel's). Pollard and Dunaway bonded, playing Bob Dylan's recently released
Blonde on Blonde
on the phonograph all night long and cracking each other up with old Bruce routines.
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But laughter was the exception to the rule. Parsons and Hackman kept to themselves. “I was a loner,” she says. “I was so close to Arthur Penn, and Gene didn't have that—he was so competitive with Warren, so upset that I was so in love with working for Arthur. I would come out of my trailer crying and sobbing and run to Arthur saying, ‘I don't know why Gene is so mean to me!' It's easy for me to be hysterical. Maybe that's why I didn't find Blanche hard to play.”
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The actress Morgan Fairchild, who at the time was a sixteen-year-old Texan named Patsy McClenny who had gotten herself a job as Bonnie's driving double when Penn discovered that Dunaway couldn't work a stick shift, hung out with the stunt crew and, whenever she could, watched Beatty work. “It was very interesting to watch a young, beautiful, elegant man be the one in power,” she says. Fairchild eavesdropped as much as she could, listening to Penn and Beatty argue about the “ring of fire, ring of fire, ring of fire. I didn't know what it was until I found out they were trying to figure out how to do the scene in which they wake up and the house is surrounded by cops. They talked about how to edit it, frame it, put it together, and I hung on every word.”
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Penn's desire to break away from the bloat and tedium of most period movies in the mid-1960s was reaffirmed when he took a road trip to a Dallas theater to see an early screening of Robert Wise's
The Sand Pebbles
. After the success of
The Sound of Music
, Wise had carte blanche at 20th Century-Fox; he brought his first cut of the movie about U.S. Navy men in 1926 China down to Texas himself and sat directly behind Penn, who watched with a look of polite interest frozen onto his face for three and a half hours. “I couldn't blink, I couldn't yawn!”
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he said as he left the rented theater.
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The movie was massive, ponderous, “important”—everything that Hollywood costume dramas had been for more than a decade—and it served as a reminder of the mission statement that Benton and Newman had laid out three years earlier: to make
Bonnie and Clyde
a film “about what's going on now.”

Penn infused the movie with as much contemporary resonance as it could contain: He made the sexual psychodrama of Clyde's struggle with impotence as vivid as possible, despite Beatty's insistence that “the Freudian nature of [Bonnie and Clyde's] relationship puts me to sleep,”
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using everything from suggestive cuts to crotch-level camera placement to imply that he was a man who wasn't in control of his gun. He pushed Robert Towne to rewrite, again and again, a scene in which the Barrow gang traps Frank Hamer, the lawman who has been tracking them, and Bonnie humiliates him by kissing him on the mouth:
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They had to seem not like just a group of criminals tormenting a Texas Ranger, but like a band of antiauthority counterculture kids flipping off the Establishment. Penn liked the notion of Bonnie and Clyde as agrarian Robin Hoods who rob banks but not farmers, a notion made explicit in a couple of the film's stickup scenes. He held tenaciously on to one sequence in which a group of starved-out Okies welcome the injured couple as comrades in poverty, and another in which Clyde hands a gun to a black farmhand and allows him to shoot out the window of a foreclosed house. The scene suggested an alliance against the Man that crossed racial lines, even though Clyde's anachronistic lack of racism in the movie owes more to the progressivism of the 1960s than of the 1930s. After
Bonnie and Clyde
's release, Penn proudly told
Cahiers du Cinéma
that black audiences looked at the characters and “said, ‘This is the way to go, baby. Those cats were all right.' They really understood, because in a certain sense the American Negro has the same kind of attitude of ‘I have nothing more to lose.'”
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He had plenty of allies in his one-foot-in-each-decade approach. Towne knew just how much he could tweak Benton and Newman's dialogue without breaking with period reality altogether. And Van Runkle, after Beatty vetoed her perfectly in-period sketches of Bonnie and Clyde (with marcelled hair for her and a close-cropped center part for him), came up with a look that nodded both to the 1930s and, in Dunaway's straight hair, form-hugging skirts, and beret, to contemporary fashion and the French New Wave.

Penn's only real nemesis was Burnett Guffey, who after forty years in the business of lighting, framing, and shooting scenes didn't want to end his career with a movie he was sure would look ugly and amateurish. Guffey was a popular and respected leader within the Cinematographers Guild—he was known as “Six-Day” Guffey for his effort to prevent guild members from having to work seven-day weeks
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—and he wasn't accustomed to being told how to do his job. Before shooting started, he summoned Dean Tavoularis to his room at the North Park. Tavoularis had violated a cardinal rule of old-guard art direction: He'd chosen rooms with low ceilings to serve as the locations where the Barrow gang hid out. But he wasn't about to give in and change them. “They hired me because they wanted a new approach,” he says. “I found that totally to my liking, to rebel against the
Pillow Talk
, Hollywood movie look. I hated those narrowly framed back-lot street shots. I was more interested in what directors like Sidney Lumet were doing.” For
Bonnie and Clyde
's interiors, “I had looked at rooms in places like Waxahachie, and I knew what a modest house looked like—I wanted those old ceilings with old wallpaper on them to be visible,” he says. “When I got to Bernie Guffey's room, he came to the door wearing a silk robe and holding a Scotch and soda, and he offered me a drink. He didn't say anything about the ceilings, the challenges of hanging lights in a small room, but I knew that's what he was thinking. He was sizing me up, waiting to hear if I knew what I was doing. It was very clear—I was just a little chick, and he was a veteran.”
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Penn pushed Guffey, and Guffey pushed back. The director didn't want overlit scenes; he wanted soft-focus, filtered, almost foggy light in the sequence in which Bonnie reunites with her family in the Texas sand-hills; he wanted the same level of sophistication in a color movie that European cinematographers were bringing to black and white;
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and he wanted some of the outdoor scenes to have the on-the-fly feeling of the Nouvelle Vague. “The famous scene where they were running in the fields and the light changed—Bernie hated that,” says Tavoularis. “He hated flash, or lens flare, or bumps. Having the light change in a shot was, to him, a taboo—but why? Maybe it's great! Maybe it's dramatic! He hated anything like that.”
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“It was really the lack of light that upset Bernie,” says Beatty. “He was an older man—he wanted to use a lot of light, and Arthur did not. Arthur's influences were—well, one very strong influence was his brother [photographer Irving Penn]. Arthur would say, ‘Here's the light,' and Bernie would say, ‘Well, this is not gonna play well in the drive-ins!'” Finally, after one too many confrontations with Penn, Guffey quit. The cast and crew were told he had suffered a heart attack. “It was not a heart attack,” says Beatty. “It was an I-can't-do-it attack.”
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Another veteran, sixty-two-year-old Ellsworth Fredericks, took his place. Fredericks had shot for Joshua Logan and William Wyler, but “it was impossible,” recalls Parsons. “The shots were so conventional that it became like a typical Hollywood movie. The guy would set up a shot, and Arthur would just throw up his hands.”
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After a few days, Penn had new respect for how hard Guffey had been struggling to take the look of the film in the direction he wanted, and Guffey returned to work.

As the shoot progressed, the violence and morbidity of
Bonnie and Clyde
became, more than ever, the focus of Penn's attention. The bloodshed in the movie, the intensity of which had never been seen in a studio film, was built right into the language of Benton and Newman's script. The two writers had, by design, placed the story's most jolting moments of violence in the middle of episodes of comic incompetence: When Clyde holds up a grocery store to impress Bonnie, he's suddenly overwhelmed by a giant butcher who literally lifts him off the ground and tries to attack him with a cleaver; “in blind fury, he pistol-whips the BUTCHER'S head with two terrific swipes,” they wrote. When Bonnie and Clyde rob their first bank, their getaway is slowed because their simpleton accomplice C. W. (Pollard) has decided to parallel-park their escape car in a tight spot. That leaves time for a white-haired bank official to leap onto the back of the car. As the passengers, the bystanders, and the tires are all screaming, a panicked Clyde shoots him, and “the face of the man explodes in blood.”
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Penn loved the moments in which rural ineptitude fractures into horror and was determined to find a visual language that would shock moviegoers out of their laughter. When Clyde shoots the teller, he turns directly to the camera for an instant before firing; Penn then cuts on the sound of the gunshot to his victim's blood-soaked face, and we have the sickening, split-second impression that the bullet has spiderwebbed two pieces of glass—the back windshield and the lens of the man's spectacles.

Beatty and Penn argued for much of the production about Penn's desire to include a scene that wasn't in the script, in which Bonnie and Clyde, shortly before their death, act out their own demises in a ghoulish private pageant. “I had a place for a scene just before the end in which I thought—to my chagrin as I say it now—that Bonnie might have wanted to perform her own death, something that grew out of the romantic idea she had about herself, a kind of overembellished funeral with a movie star look, and that was what I kept pressing for,” says Penn. “It was a colorful idea, but too elaborate. Warren didn't like it at all, and neither did Towne.”
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After Penn gave up on the notion, he started concentrating on the movie's most technically difficult scene, Bonnie and Clyde's death in a hail of bullets that seem to come from every direction at once. Benton and Newman's screenplay called for just five seconds of “rapid, deafening” gunfire and noted that “at no point during the gunfight do we see BONNIE and CLYDE in motion…. We never see BONNIE and CLYDE dead.” Penn had something else in mind even before production started; the way he visualized the sequence was what finally convinced him to make the movie earlier in the year, when he had been working with Benton and Newman in Stockbridge and wavering about his decision to direct.

“I just woke up one day in the country and thought, gee, I can see the ending,” he says. “Not the benign, lyrical thing that I had thought, but something spastic and balletic. It has to do something extraordinary, something that makes them into a legend.”
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During the shoot, Penn mapped out the final scene, drawing for inspiration on Akira Kurosawa's
The Seven Samurai
, the Zapruder film,
Breathless
, and his own finale for his first movie,
The Left Handed Gun
, in which he had used different film speeds to intensify the image of Paul Newman's Billy the Kid shooting a man out of his boots. The summer's riots were on his mind; so was the war in Vietnam, which in the two months that
Bonnie and Clyde
had been shooting had become the subject of increasing pessimism in the nation's press and of major public protests, including the rally at the Pentagon that Norman Mailer later memorialized in
The Armies of the Night
. Penn wanted as much political resonance in the scene as it could comfortably contain, an ambush that would, as Richard Gilman later put it in
The New Republic
, “mount up to an image of absolute blind violence on the part of organized society, a violence far surpassing that which it is supposed to be putting down.”
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The final sequence in
Bonnie and Clyde
, which includes sixty shots in less than a minute, took longer to film than anything else in the movie. Penn used four cameras for every setup, each one filming from the same angle but running at a different speed. He extended the gunfire from five seconds to twenty-five; he rigged Beatty and Dunaway with dozens of squibs and blood packets that would be set off when Beatty squeezed a pear that Clyde was eating;
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he attached a piece of prosthetic scalp to Beatty's head that an off-screen makeup man would pull off using an invisible nylon thread (a subliminally fast moment designed expressly to evoke memories of the Kennedy assassination); he tied one of Dunaway's legs to the gearshift of the car so that she would eventually be able to fall dead according to “the laws of gravity” without hurting herself; and he devised separate pieces of choreography for Beatty, who is quickly knocked onto the dusty road by bullets, and Dunaway, who dances like a marionette behind the steering wheel, unable even to fall over as the bullets jolt her in every direction. “There's a moment in death when the body no longer functions, when it becomes an object and has a certain kind of detached ugly beauty,” he said. “It was that aspect I was trying to get.”
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Penn mapped out every shot in advance, including the fast, flashing sequence of close-ups in which Beatty and Dunaway realize what's happening and lock eyes. The elaborate setup of the squibs meant he had time to film the scene from only two angles each day. On the fourth afternoon, he was done.
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