Hal Ashby: A Legacy Renewed

Over 20 years after his death from cancer at age 59, the legacy and influence of editor-turned-director Hal Ashby has never been stronger. This summer saw both a star-studded, multi-generational Academy tribute in Los Angeles and the DVD release of a newly discovered “extended cut” of Ashby’s Lookin’ to Get Out, a film that came soon after what Peter Biskind referred to in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as “the most remarkable run of any 70s director”: Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There.

It has been argued by Biskind and others that Ashby was never accorded the same due as his contemporaries because of a perception of Hal as a director who was only as strong as his source material and the talent of his collaborators. Two new books, Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson and The Films of Hal Ashby by Christopher Beach (available 9/22), do their best to fight this perception and also happen to be the only books yet devoted to Ashby. Rebel is a biography that finally tells the full story of Ashby’s unlikely journey from Ogden, Utah to Hollywood, while The Films of is a critical study focusing on his 70s output as it makes the case for Ashby as auteur.

In advance of Facets’ class on Harold and Maude this Saturday at midnight as part of our Night School series, I talked with not only Dawson and Beach about Ashby’s life and career but also with Lookin’ to Get Out’s lead actor and co-screenwriter Jon Voight, whose best-remembered collaboration with Ashby remains his Oscar-winning performance as wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet Luke Martin in Coming Home.

VOIGHT: [Hal] was this kind of resident editorial genius. He had received the Academy Award for doing In The Heat of the Night. He was kind of an eccentric genius—that's the way everybody thought about Hal.

DAWSON: I think he was a complete workaholic. If you look at his life, work was the thing that structured his life, that gave it order, that he could escape to. He would sleep on the floor of the editing room. He was between marriages and it was like he had nowhere else to go. The work was sort of his haven. When he became a director, he really excelled at it.

VOIGHT: When he made his decision to go into [directing] film, we were watching very carefully for him. Some people make the transition but many don't. Obviously he was a filmmaker from the start.

DAWSON: He was someone who worked incredibly hard but also knew how to fully involve people in his films, he really gave them room to express themselves. He was very sort of hands-off as a director, he always trusted his actors to sort of find the right way to approach things themselves. If they needed guidance, they would approach him and ask for help and he would give it.

VOIGHT: He presented himself in a very shy, soft-spoken way. He had a very strong personality and he was extremely knowledgeable about filmmaking. He never told you what to do - ever, he never told anybody what to do - but he would provide so much environment and information. And he did so much homework, so that whatever little subtle thoughts he expressed, they came from a certain depth and they would really hit their mark.

DAWSON: In the 80s [Ashby] ended up working on projects that were either not really his first choice or were compromised by the fact that other people basically wrecked them in post-production. I had heard that there was another version of Lookin’ that was Ashby’s cut. A friend of mine had seen it and told me that it existed. I was kind of keeping my eyes peeled for Lookin’, so when looking through the catalog for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, I noticed that they had two prints. One had six reels and one had seven reels. I was like, “Maybe one of these is longer.” And it turned out that right from the opening shot, this was a completely different movie.

VOIGHT: Discovering this version that [Hal] had subsequently cut, it was a bit of a treasure discovery for all of us. We got together and saw it recently and it was a very happy experience. Until I read Nick's book, I didn't know how much Hal was carrying, how much pressure was on him when he made the film and obviously that did affect us. But I must say it was always enjoyable to see Hal on the set in the morning and we had a good time shooting it, there was a lot of laughter. I was very pleased with the performances of Burt Young and Ann-Margret. I thought we were making a very strong piece, and then the piece came out and it was not successful because it wasn't finished by Hal.

BEACH: It's interesting that there were controversies with so many of Hal's films. I guess this makes sense, particularly since the last four films were not completed and/or edited by Ashby. It would be great to have a DVD release of 8 Million Ways to Die, for example, and include some of the footage that was shot but not used in the cut released by the studio.

DAWSON: I saw it as part of my brief as the person writing [my] book to recontextualize Ashby, to change the way that he was perceived. His legend has become very sort of simplistic, "the hippie director who was a drug addict who's career tanked in the 80s because he was wacked out on coke," and that's really not what happened at all.

BEACH: One thing that surprised me is the number of people I talk to who have seen his films but who don't know the name "Hal Ashby" or who don't know that he directed them. Perhaps the publication of Nick Dawson's bio and my book will help to change this.

DAWSON: I feel like in a way [Hal] was somebody who very much didn’t push himself forward, he didn’t promote the idea of himself as an auteur or as sort of the only architect of his films. He would rather talk about the films than his involvement with them. I feel like among his contemporaries he kind of didn’t sell himself the way a lot of them did. So what you’re left with after all of that is the work. This whole generation of filmmakers and film viewers who grew up seeing his films on TV, being shown Harold and Maude by their parents, they feel like they kind of discovered him in a sense and are managing now to piece together, “Oh, he’s the guy who did The Last Detail and he did Being There. Oh yeah, he did Shampoo. Oh, and he did Coming Home.” I think now is the time that he’s starting to have his comeback, in a weird way. His reputation is being restored to what it should have been.

VOIGHT: I think that he deserves it, it's nice to see that come forth. I'm very glad for the revival of interest. I think his work will be precious to us forevermore within the film legacy that we've been given. Certainly his great masterworks will be cherished forever and people will receive inspiration from looking at his pieces.


-Dan Mucha

(Study materials to be handed out at the class include the full texts of my interviews with Voight, Dawson, and Beach. One lucky audience member will receive a copy of Being Hal Ashby, courtesy of University Press of Kentucky).