'Twas the best and most bittersweet moment of the Austin Film Festival when Richard LaGravenese, the winner of the festival's 2002 distinguished screenwriter, presented the first 10 minutes of a new documentary he co-produced and co-directed.
\n\nA Decade Under The Influence, an IFC production about the creative surge in Hollywood during the 1970s, showed immense promise as Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader's gravely voice played over a clip of his most well-known work, only to open up a deluge of quick cuts and innovative filmmaking.
\n\nLaGravenese's partner on the project, Ted Demme, had passed away in January, leaving LaGravenese to finish up the project himself. Since then, the project has become a labor of love for the prolific screenwriter, who has compiled over 30 hours of footage to tell the complete story of the 1970s, a story told once before in Peter Biskind's expose Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, yet this time the means are more romantic.
\n\nLaGravenese and Demme recruited friends and contemporary filmmakers Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne and Neil LaBute, among others, to interview some of the guiding forces of the decade such as Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Nicholson, and the results, from a mere 10 minutes, were simply stunning.
\n\nBut following the brief screening, LaGravenese dashed up to the front of the Dobie Theater, where the film was presented, and with appropriate urgency, awaited the audience's response. Some applauded the opening sequence's loving re-creation of 1970s stylistic cinematic touches, and others congratulated LaGravenese for sticking with the project after his partner's death. Still, while the compliments were coming in spades, one hand shot up in the air with an actual question: \"How are directors like Hal Ashby going to be recognized in the film?\"
\n\nIt was obvious this question was meant to catch LaGravenese off-guard, because within the clips of The Godfather and Easy Rider, only a passing glance was offered of Ashby's Harold and Maude. But in fact, LaGravenese relished the opportunity and told the man the editing of the documentary would be kind to Ashby. However, on the eve of the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love in Austin, Ashby himself might be surprised by how many films have already recognized him.
\n\n\"I feel one of our spiritual godfathers is Hal Ashby,\" said Jonathan Demme. \"I think he was a lot bigger influence on a lot of us than he's perhaps acknowledged as being. He kind of gets lost in the shuffle with more obvious icons like Scorsese and Coppola.\"
\n\nDemme is only one in a generation of filmmakers to feel Ashby's tremendous influence. Though Demme's 1980 film Melvin and Howard, about a chance encounter between billionaire Howard Hughes and a shlub named Melvin Dummar, is an idiosyncratic masterpiece in its own right, Ashby actually created the archetype for every other offbeat director who followed him.
\n\nDuring a span of eight years, beginning in 1971 with Harold and Maude, Ashby carved out a niche with films that seemed ahead of their time even though it was a time when Hollywood was at its creative peak. When the studio system crumbled during the late 1960s and a cultural revolution outside of the 405 Freeway in California sprung a leak that let auteurs such as Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski in, Ashby chose a prime time to worm his way into the Paramount lot.
\n\nAt 40, an age when most directors would be considered past their prime today, Ashby emerged from odd jobs at Universal and work as a film editor for director Norman Jewison on the classics In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair, to direct The Landlord, a comedy Jewison had been developing for himself. Due to a busy schedule, Jewison left the film to Ashby, who over the course of their four films together, became a protege to the director, although in post-production of The Landlord, the duo's relationship dissipated after a quarrel about the film's ending. Critics were kinder to the film, which remains the least celebrated film in Ashby's canon, and the positive notices led to a hot streak that has only been fully appreciated a generation later.
\n\nFirst, there was Harold and Maude, a film berated upon its initial release, but given a cultural reawakening in the years to follow, culminating with Cameron Diaz's celebration of the film in There's Something About Mary.
\n\nStarring the elderly Ruth Gordon as a free spirit and a young Bud Cort perfectly cast as a suicidal teenager who falls in love with her, Harold and Maude fit the bill as a bizarro version of The Graduate, punctuated with an elegant soundtrack by Cat Stevens and pitch black humor.
\n\nIf only Rushmore director Wes Anderson was old enough to see Harold and Maude upon its initial theatrical release, the film might've been a hit. People probably will be saying the same thing when another generation of writer/directors see Anderson's quirky 1998 comedy, but much of it was mined from Ashby's film, including Anderson's inclusion of three Cat Stevens' songs on Rushmore's soundtrack and the accompanying wicked sense of comic timing. Harold and Maude also displayed Ashby's most precious gift of telling winsome stories about people moving away from the environment where they feel most comfortable. Like Max Fischer of Rushmore, Cort's Harold is desperate to create an identity for himself, and in the process crafts one of the most indelible comedic performances of the 1970s on film.
\n\nAshby followed Harold and Maude with the legitimate hit, The Last Detail, remembered now more for having one of Jack Nicholson's best performances and Chinatown scribe Robert Towne's best scripts than it is as a complete film. Nicholson starred as Billy Buddusky, a marine who is assigned to take another marine to jail, and the film is similar in tone to Steven Soderbergh's 1997 film Out of Sight, in spite of the lack of any real romantic drive in the latter. A young Randy Quaid co-starred as the prisoner being transported.
\n\nThe Last Detail was both a telling precursor to Nicholson's Oscar winning role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for Nicholson once again played a person disilluioned with a standardized existence, and the most time-dependent film of Ashby's career. Ironically, while one of Ashby's greatest strengths as a director was his ability to tell timeless stories, the chaos of popular culture during the 1970s created the one thing that inhibits the director when watching his films today.
\n\nHis next film, Shampoo, in 1975, also suffers from a slight case of seeming dated by today's standards, although the fact that it's Wes Anderson's favorite screenplay should clue audience's in to how brilliant a film it still is. Working again with Robert Towne and one of the most popular actors of the decade, this time Warren Beatty, Shampoo caught Goldie Hawn in her prime as Beatty's neglected girlfriend and Beatty as a philandering hairdresser who slept with his clients, including Julie Christie. Though the hairstyles and fashion adorning Beatty's character are cringe-inducing now; the loudness of Shampoo wasn't limited to the superficial elements of the time and produced one of Ashby's most memorable comedies as a result. Loaded with funny ironies that are thought provoking and physical humor that cuts right to the humanity of the sad, but awkwardly engaging personalities that populate most of his films, Shampoo is Ashby at his most amusing.
\n\nShampoo also makes the two films that came after, Bound for Glory and Coming Home, an even more glaring contradiction in Ashby's relatively short career. The dramas about Woody Guthrie and a Vietnam veteran, respectively, won Ashby acclaim and allowed the director to build upon his nostalgic view of America from two completely different points of view, but was a notable departure for the director who would end the 1970s with his most searing film, Being There.
\n\nArguably one of the best understated comedies ever made with arguably one of the best comedians (Peter Sellers) who ever lived, Being There's influence, at least spatially, is evident in each of Alexander Payne's and Paul Thomas Anderson's films.
\n\nThe story of a simple gardener named Chance (played winningly by Sellers in what would be his final role), who mimics everything he sees on television in order to lead a productive life, is such an original that it's often listed as a favorite among screenwriters and directors. But its place in time shortly before the beginning of Reagan's presidency and the re-establishment of the studio system eroded most of the film's potential audience. Fortunately, directors like Payne have rediscovered the film, and sadly, it would be Ashby's last great film before his death in 1988.
\n\nAlthough he led a career that was marred by drug use, something that came with the territory during the 1970s, the renaissance of Ashby's relevant irreverence should come as no surprise. With the oversaturation of big-budget blockbusters allowing for the creatively indulgent producers in Hollywood to take risks on ambitious directors, Scorsese and Coppola may come up in a young auteur's reasoning for where to go to film school, but Ashby's name arises more when it comes down to making personal films.
\n\nAnd recently, from the Austin Film Festival to the release of Ashby disciples Demme's The Truth About Charlie and Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, Ashby's name has been cropping up more and more. A few weeks ago on the locally produced cable access show The Show With No Name, host Charlie Sotelo aired the trailer of Harold and Maude and chastised his sidekick Cinco for never having seen the film. Perhaps, like many others, he already saw glimpses of Ashby's work in the films of Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson, but also, like many others, has been missing out on the source.
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