Oscilloscope Laboratories. 2018. Documentary. 94 minutes.
Film fans place upon their pedestal the now-mythic (and, considering where we are now, deservedly so) 1970s, the last hurrah for rich, honest, probing, engaged, character driven dramas greenlit by the major studios. To the average moviegoer (under 50, that is), Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola are the marquee names that spring to mind first, although there are two others who deserve their place in the firmament but don’t receive equivalent amounts of mainstream, non-academic attention: one is the master of clean, masculine, urban storytelling, Sidney Lumet, who received his own docu-treatment in 2015’s By Sidney Lumet. The other is Hal Ashby. Director Amy Scott attempts to correct the record with her new documentary, Hal, a diverting, surface-level primer on Ashby’s ‘70s-synonymous career that works by virtue of such an appreciation being long overdue.
Unlike the darker, more violent films of Coppola, Scorsese and Lumet, Ashby earned his seat at the table by being a pure creature of the ‘70s, a prodigiously-bearded, “peace and love”-spouting, pot-smoking, authority-hating, New Hollywood hippie whose films were satirical, odd, countercultural and, (watch Being There again, please) prescient. His run of seven classics during the 1970s, including Harold and Maude, Shampoo and Coming Home, is noted in dutiful fashion by those who were there (actor Jon Voight, cinematographer Haskell Wexler) and those who came only to lavish praise (directors Judd Apatow, Alexander Payne and David O. Russell).
Scott’s key contributor is director Norman Jewison, who launched Ashby’s film editing career, which peaked with his 1968 Best Editing Oscar for the racially-charged In the Heat of the Night. It’s Jewison who told Ashby “the studio is not your friend. The studio is the enemy of the artist”, a key piece of early advice that would lead him to engage the studios in many epistolary battles, including one with Paramount Productions head, Robert Evans. One of the many minor pleasures in Hal is hearing actor Ben Foster read from Ashby’s letters in which the director spares no F-bomb in his haranguing of movie executives (he also wrote with effusive and rather adorable affection, including ending a letter to Jewison with the words, “Eighteen Loads of Super Double Dynamite Love”)
Scott’s traditional, if not staid, film-by-film assessment of Ashby’s style emphasizes his choice of material and the confidence he gave his performers. Unlike the dry, take your medicine, lesson-learning of a fine, post-war director like Stanley Kramer, Ashby tackled social issues with an often satirical touch. Possibly only Mike Nichols could have pulled off something as offbeat as 1971’s Harold and Maude yet I’m not sure Nichols could have made something as humanist. Unsurprisingly, the studio had no idea what to make of the film, about an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor’s (Ruth Gordon) love affair with a death-obsessed 20-year-old (Bud Cort). When Ashby cut a trailer that included a passionate kiss between the film’s two lovers, Paramount execs became “very angry” and the eventual one-sheet included no image from the film, just the words Harold and Maude and the credit bed.
Technically, Ashby had a very open style that was largely devoid of affectation, save for allowing Wexler to pull off the very first Steadicam shot in a feature length release in the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic, Bound for Glory. Although Scott notably fails to get Warren Beatty and Golden Hawn to sit down for an interview, Voight, Jane Fonda and Jeff Bridges all attest to Ashby’s ability with actors, a light touch that gave them plenty of room to feel and to improvise. We’re told here that Ashby allowed the Vietnam vets in the pool hall scene in Coming Home to speak extemporaneously of their experiences while Wexler’s camera hangs back to capture their thoughts. He also let Voight improvise his heartbreaking speech in the high school at the end of the film.
Scott’s biggest achievement is giving us the backstory on how Robert Jones went uncredited for writing Being There. Jones had read three increasingly bad drafts of the script by the author of the original novel, Jerzy Kosinski. So Jones decided to scrap them and start over by returning to the book for inspiration. Ashby, in a vintage recording, freely admits to shooting Jones’ script, but the Writers Guild saw it differently and gave Kosinski sole writing credit, “a knife to the gut”, as Jones understandably puts it.
As delightful as these stories are, there are moments in Hal when you wish Scott would have a more thoughtful conversation about Ashby, put him into a deeper historical context and connect the dots regarding his personal behavior. By the end, we’re satisfied but still unsure what really made this odd-bird tick. Born in Ogden, Utah (“…not a Mormon”) Ashby hitchhiked to L.A. when he was 17 and “started smoking grass when I was 18.” The suicide of Ashby’s father when Hal was 12 is duly noted but I wondered how forcefully such an unspeakable tragedy sent him down a path of career rebelliousness, womanizing (although here, the 5-times married and many-lovered Ashby is portrayed as a charming, passionate rogue) and spending month after month entombed in edit bays. Comments from Ashby’s daughter point to a less-than-optimal father but, as the documentary tips towards hagiography, even she provides the appropriately worshipful soundbite.
Like Cinderella at midnight, when the ’80s began, everything changed for Hal Ashby. His talents were put to poor use in lesser films once Hollywood became a Simpson/Bruckheimer Production more than a Hal Ashby Film. Scott notes that the studio heads began to label Ashby “a junkie”, which she argues was a cruel, disinformation campaign, but she fails to tell us how prodigious and debilitating his cocaine use really was. Ashby continued to work, though, and in the 1986 crime thriller, 8 Million Ways to Die, Ashby, according to star Jeff Bridges, was more interested in the drug abuse aspect of the story than the cop drama. Eventually, his improv-heavy shooting style prompted the producers to, according to Bridges, “kidnap the film (and) fire Hal.” It would be his last feature film directing credit. He would die of pancreatic cancer in 1988.
As tragic as Ashby’s precipitous fall is, there is something symmetrical and perfect about his masterpiece years beginning in 1970 (The Landlord) and ending in 1979 (Being There). Any director who said the following words, which Scott wisely highlights, was not meant to survive into the blockbuster era, “who the hell wants to aim a film down the middle. Is that what the fuck we make a film for?”