Friday, November 19, 2010

HA

Just finished Nick Dawson's bio of Hal Ashby.  The 70s was a time when Hollywood directors got to express themselves, and few have a resume from that decade as intriguing as Ashby's.

Ashby spent a long apprenticeship as an editor, working with William Wyler, George Stevens and, above all, Norman Jewison, a good friend who helped get him his directing gig.  Jewison's great decade was the 60s, and he fell off in the 70s--it's almost as if he passed on the torch.

Ashby was a contradiction.  A millionaire who didn't care about money.  A monumentally hard worker who spent a lot of time getting high. A sweet, loving man who had numerous wives and affairs.  But he got into directing just as Hollywood was allowing more experimental work, perfect
for his laid-back style and interest in the personal.  Ashby would play things loose--perhaps coming up as an editor he figured he could always fix things in post. And for a while, anyway, it worked.

His film of the 70s make an impressive list: The Landlord (1970), Harold And Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound For Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979).  I don't love them all (don't get the Harold And Maude cult and find Bound For Glory boring) but each one is notable.

Then, as quickly as he had it, he lost it.  All his films in the 80s were commercial and (most would say) artistic failures: Second-Hand Hearts (1981, though shot before Being There), Lookin' To Get Out (1982), The Slugger's Wife (1985) and 8 Million Ways To Die (1986).  He may have been at the top of the heap, but he got involved in projects that were ill-considered, with producers who took the final cut away from him.  Perhaps he would have recovered from this tailspin, but after a couple TV pilots (Beverly Hills Buntz and Jake's Journey) he died, not yet 60.

His artistic story isn't that uncommon.  There were a fair number of Hollywood directors who flourished in the free-flowing 70s but never reached those heights again: Bogdanovich, Lucas, Friedkin, Mazursky, Rafelson, Coppola, Altman. (Dawson notes this but then goes on to say they "hit a slump during the 'me' decade of the 1980s from which most would never recover." I'm used to easy swipes at the 80s, but the "me" decade was the 1970s.)

I think Ashby's masterpiece is Being There.  It gives Peter Sellers a chance to show what he can do, but it's an odd piece that requires perfect tone and pacing.  Without a director or editor like Ashby to keep it under control, it could easily get too silly on one side or boring on the other.  Instead, he ended up with a classic comedy, unlike any other. (Though I'm not sure of the ending, which was Ashby's idea.)

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Spolier Alert I guess

Has Ashby ever addressed the ending of Being There? I will admit I missed the whole "walking on water" thing- I just Chance was off staring at something in a puddle and that the message was his utter lack of awareness or care of the statesman's funeral and President's speech going on around him.

If it was just meant to suggest the image of Chance walking on water through trick of the light or what have you- its sort of a cute ending. If Ashby meant to be actually portraying the exercise of superpowers, I think I'll just ignore and remember the rest of the movie. neg

6:03 AM, November 19, 2010  
Anonymous Denver Guy said...

Continued spoiler alert.

I don't think the ending can be interpreted without a reference to Christ's miracle of walking on water. I think the reference is to indicate Chance's utter innocence - using that term in the sense of lacking any malice or sin, but also in its other sense of naivety.

I read a book once that postulated Christ being reborn again and again, in different ages and different conditions, such that God (in Christ) experienced directly the trials and temptations of mankind. So Christ was reborn as a slave in the old South, for example, but in all his new reincarnations, he simply witnesses the activities of the people around him (and suffers). Can't remember the Title, but I remember thinking Chance could have been one of those reincarnations.

8:15 AM, November 19, 2010  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The christian interpretation doesn't appear in Jerzy Kosinski's book does it?

I'll buy it if Ashby was meaning to suggest Christian imagery by having Chance appear to walk on water but if in the end he is descending into superstition and actually thinks he portraying Chance as an actual Christ (as opposed to a Christ-like figure), it kind of up-ends and destroys the rest of the work( Which seems to be more about simplicity than innocence)

I'm interested in what Ashby thought he was doing- did he mean to create ambiguity? I guess that's OK but if he didn't, he just created unintentional confusion through a bad shot.

Though maybe I guess it was genius since we are still talking about 30+ years later.

code word= "bengence"

10:09 AM, November 19, 2010  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I see the ending two ways. First, though Chance is an idiot, we've seen he can work miracles, even if he doesn't understand what he's doing. He can walk on water, politically speaking, and this ending shows us the miracles will continue, even if he doesn't get it.

Second, he has no education and learned everything from TV. TV has no third dimension, just as Chance can only see the surface of things. So as long as he only sees the surface, he can walk on the surface. Walking on water represents that. If he had a deeper understanding of things, he'd sink.

10:54 AM, November 19, 2010  

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