REPUTATIONAL CAPITAL, CREATIVE CONFLICT AND HOLLYWOOD INDEPENDENCE

Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d 10 REPUTATIONAL CAPITAL, CREATIVE CONFLICT AND HOLLYWOOD INDEPENDENCE The case of Hal Ashby Philip Drake [R]eputation in the commercial culture industries is not a static currency that one may simply obtain and then possess. Instead, reputation is often experienced as a precarious, embattled state. It must be continuously achieved, performed, and re-performed in the ongoing process of creating the perception that one is a legitimate player in ‘the industry’. (Zafirau 2008: 100) It costs money to make movies, and if they say they don’t want to pay for it, then there isn’t any creative control any more, is there? It is real simple. (Hal Ashby, legal deposition, 1986) In this chapter I consider the autonomy and independence of creative talent in the American film industry of the 1970s and 1980s, through a case study of the film director Hal Ashby. As Yannis Tzioumakis has argued, definitions of independence and independent cinema are much contested and ‘independent cinema’ may be best conceived of as a discourse that changes over time and is continually redefined by a range of constituencies including audiences, critics and the industry itself (2006: 11). It is worth, then, briefly reflecting on some different connotations of the discourse of ‘independence’. First, in a purist sense it connotes the idea of free-choice, unconstrained by market forces. Here, creative decision-making aims for ‘true’ or ‘free’ artistic choices rather than ‘false’ or ‘constrained’ market ones. This discourse suggests that independence requires creative control over the production process. Second, independence can be thought of in terms of genre, form or style: a discursive formation that can be identified and decoded by audiences and critics. Third, to describe a film or film-maker as ‘independent’ is to make an ideological as well as aesthetic or industrial judgment, and such independence is usually seen as a positive quality (consequently, lacking independence tends to be viewed as negative). Such discourses, Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d Reputational capital: Hal Ashby 135 as Tzioumakis notes, capture just some of the attributes of cinema we understand as ‘independent’, and as Geoff King – via Bourdieu – has suggested, claiming independence is also bound up with processes of discrimination and judgment (King 2005; 2009). Yet commercial or artistic independence is rarely absolute in cinema, outside of amateur or avant-garde films, but instead is a matter of degree. Film-making is a collaborative enterprise, with film-makers able to exercise more creative control at some times than others, while some films are perceived to have more ‘indie’ qualities than others. These factors shift over time and depend on cultural and historical contexts. Chuck Kleinhans points out that ‘independence’ and ‘independent cinema’ are relational to what he calls the ‘dominant system’ (1998: 308). Therefore they are also contingent, subject to historical revision and contestation. Notwithstanding the difficulties of definition, over the last few years there have been a considerable number of academic studies of American independent and ‘Indiewood’ cinema (Levy 1999; Pribram 2002; King 2005; Tzioumakis 2006; King 2009). This work has usefully traced the shifts from ‘independent’ production, epitomised by films made outside of the Hollywood studios to ‘indie’ or ‘quasi-independent’ production: films often made by the speciality divisions of the major studios or picked up by them for distribution. It has also charted the rise and commercial and critical significance of so-called ‘Indiewood’ cinema, a term which, as King (2009) outlines, is used to describe ‘where Hollywood meets independent cinema’ and which primarily describes the boom in quasi-independent films since the 1990s. These books, and the multitude of journal articles and edited book chapters produced over the last decade, approach independent cinema in a range of ways and perspectives including industrial/ institutional, ideological/political, and in terms of aesthetics: narrative, genre, form and style, but with some attention to stardom, performance and music/sound. For instance the ‘quirky’ identifying aesthetics of independent cinema, with a focus on ‘wordy’ offbeat dialogue and characterisation, has been interestingly examined by James MacDowell (2010) while Michael Z. Newman (2011) has explored the mainstreaming of indie cinema within a broader notion of ‘indie’ aesthetics. The authors above often periodise American independent cinema in slightly different ways; however what they share in common is in focusing primarily on the 1990s and afterwards, with occasional glances back to the work of antecedent film-makers such as Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, John Waters and the films produced by Roger Corman, as well as a few other film-makers in the 1980s such as David Lynch, John Sayles or Jim Jarmusch. Most of the writers see the break-out success of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape (1989) as a pivotal moment in the mainstreaming of independent cinema; however the considerable commercial, if not critical, success of the independently produced A Nightmare on Elm Street horror franchise (1984–) might also be considered as significant, bankrolling an independent studio (New Line and its subsidiary, Fine Line) for more than a decade. Although many of the authors above acknowledge the historical debt that 1980s and 1990s independent cinema had to earlier periods, such as the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ period of the 1960s and 1970s, Yannis Tzioumakis (2006) traces American independent cinema even further back in history, covering Poverty Row Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d 136 Philip Drake pictures, exploitation teenpics and other examples of earlier independent film. In many ways Tzioumakis’s work can be seen as part of recent revisionist film histories that have sought to address blind spots in our understanding of film production and contexts. In the introduction to their edited collection The New Film History (2007), James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper suggest there has been an epochal shift in film studies from an ‘old’ to a ‘new’ film history. Old film history, they argued, tended to focus on the history of film as an art form, often arranged in a canonical hierarchy, or film read historically as a reflection or mirror of society. ‘New Film History’, they suggest, can be dated to the mid-1980s in landmark volumes such as Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (1985) and Allen and Gomery (1985). This new film history, they claim, is revisionist in method, and engages with a broader array of materials, in particular archival materials and those surrounding the text including critical reception materials and audience data. Such work has helped to displace the film director as the centre of authorial control, offering attention to the creative input of other personnel such as writers, stars, art directors, designers and composers. Chapman, Glancy and Harper claim that ‘the new film historian is comparable to an archaeologist who unearths new sources and materials, especially those which have been previously disregarded or overlooked’ (2007: 7). In doing so they suggest that the film historian can ‘add a material dimension to the analysis by showing how struggles for creative control can be glimpsed in the visual texture of the film itself ’ (2007: 8). While there are pitfalls in reading texts in an overly deterministic way, when supported by detailed evidence such readings can be highly illuminating. The relative historical truth status accorded to texts, people, documents and other materials in presenting revisionist film histories is an area of important methodological enquiry, worthy of further research. My own approach in the rest of this chapter is to follow Tzioumakis’s lead in considering independence as a discourse that can also be found at the centre of Hollywood film-making, rather than existing primarily outside and in opposition to it: what we might therefore describe as ‘Hollywood independence’. I will differ from most of the work outlined above by examining the case of creative independence in the 1970s and early 1980s, well before the Miramax/Sundance boom in American independent cinema. Although I focus on questions of creative control, as outlined above, I do not claim that this is synonymous with or even a necessary condition for independent cinema. However, focusing on creative control does help avoid some of the difficulties associated with definitions referring only to those films produced and distributed independently of the Hollywood major studios (thereby excluding the films produced by speciality divisions such as Miramax after its takeover by Disney, for instance, or films picked up and distributed by majors). I also suggest that independence and power in Hollywood are often intertwined and that independence is sometimes more readily available within rather than outside of mainstream Hollywood cinema. When film-makers are able to exercise almost absolute creative autonomy it is usually because they either have considerable industry reputation and clout, or are positioned industrially in such a way as to be able to make the films they want. One might thus argue that George Lucas is an independent film-maker par excellence, as Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d Reputational capital: Hal Ashby 137 he has complete creative control over his films due to their commercial success, whereas Steven Soderbergh balances making high-budget commercial films with smaller, ‘personal’ films, allowing his ‘hits’ to cement his reputation as a bankable director and enable him to make more risky films. Alternatively, film-makers can make films that either do not require much studio involvement or have minimal risk: Woody Allen’s films, for instance, are able to make most of their revenues outside the United States, and having relatively small budgets are a low risk to their financiers. Creativity and contracts As the quote from Hal Ashby used to open this chapter indicates, creative control is rarely absolute, but dependent on collaborations with others and maintaining an effective working relationship with those who control a film’s finances. How then can we measure creative independence? Here I will use one approach to examine the evidence provided by contracts and primary production materials. Primary evidence from production materials has long offered scholars valuable information about the creative processes at work in Hollywood and, alongside interviews, has also informed more scholarly biographies of directors, producers and stars. Richard Caves, in an interesting analysis of creative production, demonstrates how it invariably involves ‘contracts between art and commerce’ (2000: iii). As Ashby’s comment above suggests, such contracts can also be a source of conflict and disagreement and this can result in lengthy and sometimes revealing litigation. The processes by which contracts are formulated, negotiated and contested demonstrate how economic and artistic factors combine in movie production, and show how it is often highly collaborative rather than individual in nature. The roles played by agents, lawyers, managers and other intermediaries have key functions in the film industry, and how it developed historically, yet have too often been submerged in accounts of film production.1 Lawsuits turn contracts into matters of public record, presenting scholars with detailed texts that reveal the complex web of relationships between talent, agents, managers and lawyers. They also serve to perform claims over authorship and power both within and outside of the film industry, as we shall see below. Such critical production histories are therefore able to problematise questions of both authorship and independence. I will now draw out some of these points with a case study of Hal Ashby, whose turbulent working career involved almost continual creative and legal disputes with those organisations with which he worked, including Lorimar Productions, United Artists, Columbia, and PSO (Producers Sales Organization). Hal Ashby as a Hollywood independent Although Hal Ashby was one of the most critically and, at times, commercially successful film directors of the 1970s, working both inside and outside the major studios, he has been broadly ignored in most historical accounts both of the so-called ‘movie brat’ generation of the 1970s Hollywood Renaissance and in writing Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d 138 Philip Drake about American independent cinema. Over his career Ashby directed twelve feature films and before coming to directing was an editor on several more, notably winning an Academy Award for Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night in 1967. In spite of this, pioneering studies of New Hollywood such as Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (1988) and Robin Wood (1986) hardly give Ashby a mention. The critic David Thomson dismisses Ashby with a stinging auteurist put-down by calling him ‘a sad casualty who depended on strong collaborators’ (2002: 34). The most detailed website article on him is even titled ‘The Director that Time Forgot’ (Davidson 1998). Ashby’s films were regularly made with major studios, including Columbia, United Artists and Warner Bros. but he also made films with smaller production companies such as Lorimar Productions and PSO. However, working with an ‘independent’ production company was no guarantee of creative independence, and for Ashby most of his major creative tussles were with independent production companies rather than the major studios. Through the 1970s Ashby’s reputation shifted from that of a ‘maverick’ yet bankable director, able to command $1 million to $1.5 million paychecks plus gross-profit participation after the success of Shampoo (1975) and Coming Home (1978), to an ignominious position in the mid-1980s, following lengthy creative disputes with Lorimar and then PSO, being dropped from Tootsie (1982) and finally being unable to get his films made. In reappraisals, it is largely Ashby’s first seven films made in the 1970s – The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979) – that are the focus of attention. His films made in the 1980s – Second Hand Hearts (1981), Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982, a Rolling Stones concert film), The Slugger’s Wife (1985) and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986) – are rarely examined, and when they are, the approach tends to be in terms of artistic compromise and decline. Ashby’s early death in 1988 precluded a critical or commercial return alongside some of his New Hollywood contemporaries. Much of this lack of attention perhaps stems from Ashby’s films not fitting any of the usual definitions of what constitutes a canon of 1970s American cinema. His career, his films and his approach to filmmaking make it difficult to locate him within an auteurist cinema, a discourse that has powerfully driven discussion of the Hollywood Renaissance period of the late 1960s and 1970s. Ashby’s films are not linked by obvious theme, style, genre or setting, other than a quirky comedic sensibility and affinity with outsider protagonists. In a review of his Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory in 1976, film critic Andrew Sarris expressed this by writing, ‘Ashby interests me, but I have not yet completely figured out his style’ (1976: 107). Peter Biskind’s popular if rather lurid book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) positions Ashby as the backdrop and repository of the social values of the Hollywood Renaissance, which has the effect of mythologising him (albeit more as an individual than as a film-maker) and emphasises his drug use and hippy ideals rather than his work or position within or outside Hollywood film-making. Like a number of other directors of the period – William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Hiller, George Roy Hill – Ashby Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d Reputational capital: Hal Ashby 139 does not fit neatly into the ‘movie brat’ discourse that still dominates characterisations of this period. Reputational capital and authorship Such narratives of creative success and failure (and insider–outsider dynamics) are interesting. I will suggest here that we might consider reputation as a form of capital – what I shall call ‘reputational capital’ – that fluctuates over time and depends upon an individual’s performance in the business, critical and commercial reception as well as their embeddedness within key industrial, institutional and social networks (in Hollywood vernacular, ‘getting one’s call returned’ and ‘being invited to the right parties’, as so adeptly satirised by Robert Altman’s The Player [1992]). Robert Faulkner and A. B. Anderson, in a sociological study of careers in Hollywood, suggest that the precarious nature of reputation in the film business requires individuals to build up a career of performance results. They state: ‘as a result of being observed exercising these talents when given assignments, an artist or technician accumulates a history of performance results. [ … ] Attributes translate into professional reputation and into a distinctive industry identity: the person slowly becomes a personage, a valuable commodity to buyers’ (1987: 889). This ‘personage’ is the currency of creative labour, circulating in the movie industry and dependent on the perception of others. Even at the height of his success Hal Ashby was dependent on studio producers, executives and star talent in order to be able to make his films because of the financial risks involved. Stephen Zafirau, in an intriguing study of life inside a talent agency, argues that reputation thereby operates as ‘a stabilising feature of an otherwise uncertain business’ (2008: 102). The relationship between the concept of reputation and that of authorship is interesting and complex. Analysis of reputation and how it circulates avoids the potential pitfalls associated with the intentional fallacy that accompanies much auteurist criticism. However in a recent article titled ‘Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory’, John Caughie warns that there is a paradox in abandoning the concept of the auteur at this time. On the one hand, he states ‘there is now a more scholarly and empirical understanding of the actual conditions of production which permitted and constrained the creativity and self-expression of the auteur; an understanding which, in fact, no longer needs the concept of an ‘auteur’ and is content to write about directors within ‘director-centred criticism’ (2008: 408–9). On the other, he notes: meanwhile, slowly vanishing from academic debate, the auteur is everywhere else – in publicity, in journalistic reviews, in television programmes, in film retrospectives, in the marketing of cinema. Sometime around the point at which Film Studies began to be embarrassed by its affiliation to the author, the film industry and its subsidiaries began to discover with renewed enthusiasm the value of authorial branding for both marketing and reputation. (2008: 409) Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d 140 Philip Drake This is an important point, and those that have pronounced the death of the author may well have been premature. My view, however, is that the term ‘reputation’ is, in the current context, of greater usefulness than that of auteur/author. Whilst marketing and branding around reputation (including that of the director) is widespread, this is different from authorship as it was previously understood in film studies, which relates to the structuring of intentionality within the text. Instead, reputational capital may well be built by drawing on the work of others, for instance film stars and writers. Ashby’s collaborations with cinematographer Haskell Wexler, stars Jon Voight, Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty, writer Robert Towne, titles and credits guru Pablo Ferro, assistant and photographer Dianne Schroeder, sound mixer Jeff Wexler and many others were identified not just by critics, but by the director himself, as integral to the creation of his artistic output. As mentioned, Ashby engaged in creative and legal disputes in nearly every film on which he worked. I shall now examine the contractual disputes with Lorimar over Lookin’ to Get Out and the protracted legal battle that followed his removal from Tootsie. The archival correspondence and legal material around these disputes offer vivid examples of the creative struggles that take place in Hollywood’s package-unit mode of production. It also raises some interesting questions about the extent to which the concept of independence can be applied to Hollywood cinema and what it means for a filmmaker of Ashby’s stature (not) being able to exercise creative control. Analysis of these archival materials enables nuanced accounts of creative decisionmaking to be built, alongside detailed production histories, offering a useful corrective to auteur studies that emphasise individual rather than collaborative or negotiated film authorship. These allow us to consider how processes as well as people author films; that is, creative decisions are often the result of institutional processes (such as rehearsals with actors, script conferences and suchlike) as well as the internalised requirements for producing work for a particular studio or market, rather than the unfettered creative vision of a single artist. Lookin’ to Get Out, Tootsie and Creative Conflict at Lorimar In 1978, after the critical and commercial success of Coming Home, Ashby decided to enter into a multi-picture deal with Lorimar Productions, an independent film and television production company. Lorimar had a highly successful track record in television with the long-running US television series The Waltons (1972–81) and Dallas (1978–91) but little experience in making feature films, so wanted to attract a director of Ashby’s stature. The offer was attractive to Ashby (or more precisely, his loan-out companies, Hal Ashby Productions and Northstar Pictures, the latter a joint venture with producer Andrew Braunsberg) as it offered him full creative control plus profit participation in addition to a directing fee (Northstar International Pictures 1980; Lorimar Productions 1980). Ashby decided to shoot the first two of his next pictures, Second Hand Hearts and Being There, back to back and to edit both at the same time. On making these films, Ashby increasingly came into conflict with Lorimar, especially over what he felt was inadequate marketing of Being There and the time he spent re-editing Second Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d Reputational capital: Hal Ashby 141 Hand Hearts. Being There maintained Ashby’s reputation, however, as it was both a critical and commercial success, grossing over $30 million and winning an Academy award for Melvyn Douglas as Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for Peter Sellers as Best Actor. Ashby’s next feature film, his final for Lorimar, was less auspicious. Lookin’ to Get Out was brought to him by Jon Voight, with whom he had successfully collaborated on Coming Home. Remembered now mostly for the first screen appearance of Voight’s daughter, the five-year-old Angelina Jolie, the film was a critical and commercial failure, damaging Ashby’s reputation in the industry. When he accepted the picture, Ashby was funding much of the operations of Northstar himself and wished to use it as a development house supporting independent films. Northstar planned to produce five films in 1980 but Lorimar backed out of their promised $50 million development deal and soon Ashby desperately needed money to pay his overheads and those of the staff.2 Since the 1950s it had been usual for major talent not to be employed directly by studios but instead via companies set up to ‘loan out’ their services, and often several companies were set up for a film’s production. In a loan-out agreement dated May 12, 1980, Ashby was offered $1 million to direct Lookin’ to Get Out, subsequently amended to $1.25 million (though with some complex deductions) plus contingent compensation of 50 per cent of net profits (Lorimar Productions 1980). In his contract he was also assigned full creative control, including final cut and advertising approval, although Lorimar retained approval of the script, budget and casting. The film was beset with production difficulties, with an unfinished script at the start of principal photography in 1980 and a budget that ballooned out of control. Other problems ensued on set, including an accident at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas during filming, when a tiger escaped from a stage act injuring several extras, followed by the firing of Ashby’s inexperienced editors of the daily rushes, and the involvement of Ashby himself in a car accident. Perhaps most costly was the 13-week delay in production caused by the 1980 Screen Actors Guild strike. During postproduction, as well as completing Lookin’ to Get Out, Ashby had to re-edit Second Hand Hearts, spending months reinstating footage that had been removed by an inexperienced editor. Lorimar eventually lost patience with Ashby. From 1981 until 1987 the film generated a series of legal battles between attorneys representing Ashby and those representing Lorimar, culminating in a lengthy and vitriolic lawsuit. On January 26, 1981 Lorimar wrote to Ashby’s lawyers regarding what it described as ‘serious, on-going problems Lorimar is experiencing with Hal Ashby [which have now reached] “critical proportions”’ (Lorimar Productions 1981). The company stated that the picture had by that point cost Lorimar in excess of $7 million, which was more than $4 million over budget, and that it wanted ‘a concrete and reasonable method of monitoring Ashby’s post-production activities and progress from now to delivery’ (ibid). Ashby’s lawyer, Bruce Lilliston, responded on February 27, asserting that Ashby had full creative control and final cut and that Lorimar had no take-over rights nor power to impose a post-production schedule (Lilliston 1981a). Another dispute soon followed, regarding Ashby’s attempts to soundtrack the film using British band, The Police, in Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d 142 Philip Drake contravention to an agreement with the American Federation of Musicians which allowed only music recorded in the United States to be used for American produced motion pictures (Lilliston 1981b). By late 1981 the relationship between Ashby and Lorimar had further deteriorated. In a letter to Lilliston dated September 25, 1981, Norman Flicker, Senior V.P. of Business Affairs at Lorimar, complained that principal photography had finished almost one year earlier and Lorimar had not yet seen a rough cut, stating scathingly: ‘We are more than $5m over budget. My guess is that is more than you will earn in your entire lifetime. Everyday of delay costs us $10,000 [ … ] I do not want to go through the whole history of the three sets of editors and everything else [ … ] I sincerely hope that you will curb what I think is youthful, innocent and inexperienced enthusiasm’ (Flicker 1981). Ashby, as one might expect, did not take this provocation lightly and, on his behalf, Lilliston issued a robust reply: I do not understand and totally reject your self-serving statement that Lorimar has never agreed that Hal Ashby has creative control. [ … ] Hal Ashby has creative and artistic control … [and that] cannot be made to vanish [ … ] Your manner is somewhat reminiscent of an ostrich attempting to deny the existence of daylight. [ … ] The degree of vitriolic personal disparagement directed at me in your letter is rather pathetic. I wish you well, and hope you come to feel better about yourself. (Lilliston 1981c) This grappling over creative control demonstrates how commercial feature films are authored through negotiation and (sometimes) conflict and, I suggest, shows how production histories drawing on primary archival materials can offer valuable evidence through which to understand creative decision-making. After going to arbitration lawyers, Ashby/Northstar managed to retain creative control though ongoing disputes about marketing the film, net profit definitions and eventually the television and video release continued to keep lawyers busy on both sides. On April 29, 1982 Ashby wrote an extremely candid 18-page handwritten letter to his attorney, Ken Kleinberg. In it he states: ‘What I’m going to be writing is the truth and if they don’t know how to deal with the truth without becoming inflamed, or with egos attacked then that’s their problem’ (Ashby 1982: 1). He complains bitterly about the treatment of long-time friend, titles and graphics director Pablo Ferro (who, he pointed out, had won 42 international awards for films including Dr Strangelove [1964] and The Thomas Crown Affair [1968]). In the letter Ashby emphasises the importance of collaborative authorship, remarking ‘it’s never acknowledged that he contributed to the film. No, he’s treated as if he’s another off the street’ (1982: 9). Ashby also writes at length about the balancing of his creative self against the demands of working on a commercial production: It has to do with my creative, ha ha, person. You see, it seems I’m only so good at working night and day, for almost 4 years, while trying to create, ha Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d Reputational capital: Hal Ashby 143 ha, 3 films for Lorimar, and all the while receiving no more support than a few broken promises, served up with a good dose of out and out lying. Most certainly, Lorimar has never even come close to saying thanks for a job well done. Well, as a result of this kind of treatment, my creative, ha ha, self sometimes starts to feel real sick inside, and even goes so far as to get very depressed at times [ … ] but what the hell, why should 4 unappreciated years, matter [?]. (Ashby 1982: 15–16) Ashby’s anger with Lorimar was exacerbated by their involvement with the film he planned to make with star Dustin Hoffman after Lookin’ to Get Out, Tootsie. Ashby had been asked to direct this film for Columbia Pictures, which in June 1981 issued him a contract for $1.5 million, of which $250,000 was a deferment against the film’s future earnings. Ashby was also to get 7.5 per cent of the adjusted gross receipts after breakeven until they reached $20 million, then 10 per cent afterwards, a gross participation deal that reflected his continuing high status as a director (Columbia Pictures 1981). However Lorimar attempted to claim that Ashby was contractually obligated to them and in October 1981 Columbia, not wishing a lawsuit from Lorimar, replaced Ashby with Sydney Pollack, despite the fact that Ashby’s contract with Lorimar was non-exclusive. The issue of creative control is fascinating here. Despite Ashby’s status and substantial pay-check, having just directed an Oscar-winning picture (Being There), he still did not have overriding creative control, which, in this case, lay with Dustin Hoffman. Ashby’s contract stipulated that he had star approval should Hoffman leave the picture, but otherwise he and Hoffman had to agree allocation of creative control. In the event, Hoffman’s contract – revealed in the subsequent legal battle – stipulated that the star, paid a reported $4.5 million, had both complete artistic and creative control on the film. Even a director as successful as Ashby, having directed several major Academy award winning pictures, could not assert creative control in a production with a major star such as Hoffman. The Lookin’ to Get Out battles continued and in mid-1982 Ashby was informed that his film had been confiscated during a screening for Lorimar, who claimed that because Ashby did not deliver the picture as agreed it had complete control of the picture. Ultimately, although Ashby threatened to sue, he was already involved in another project (a Rolling Stones concert film) and, exhausted by the argument, allowed the studio cut of the film to be released in October 1982 to mostly poor reviews and box office. According to a Lorimar profit participation statement dated 31 July 1983, the film had a negative cost of just over $20.5 million, plus distribution fees of nearly $0.5 million, and yet had earned only gross receipts of $1.66 million, mostly from cable and video sales (Lorimar Productions 1983). After deductions and foreign earnings the film had made a substantial net loss of $20,053,537 (ibid). Even with the colossal success of Dallas, this kind of loss was damaging to Lorimar, and blame was sought and placed on Ashby’s head. As a result of the film’s failure, Lorimar decided to sue Ashby, leading to a lengthy lawsuit. In March 1985 Ashby himself filed a lengthy lawsuit against Lorimar for lost Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d 144 Philip Drake earnings and the damage to his critical reputation suffered over his fate on its films. Ashby’s lawyers claimed $1.5 million compensation from Lorimar, citing his contract and coverage from The Hollywood Reporter that reported how both Columbia and star Dustin Hoffman wanted Ashby to direct Tootsie. The filing of the lawsuits produced a series of large legal documents. Ashby was accused of professional misconduct and counterclaims were presented by Ashby’s lawyer, followed by a legal deposition that took place in January 1986. In the event, settlement of the case in 1987 offered no conclusive ruling: Lorimar paid Ashby $40,000, much less than his legal costs, and donated a further sum of money to charity. Conclusion In this chapter I have presented a case study of Hal Ashby’s experience working with the independent production company, Lorimar Pictures, in order to demonstrate how creative control and authorship are constructed, and can be analysed, through legal and contractual documents. In nearly every one of Ashby’s films a similar pattern emerged over disputes over creative control, authorship and rights over approval and final cut. I have also suggested that the concept of independence might be assessed through an examination of creative control, and that working for an ‘independent’ production company was no guarantee of creative independence. Although Ashby had numerous battles with the major studios over his films, none of them were as restrictive to his creative autonomy as his experiences with Lorimar and PSO. The documents on these films reveal how each involved constant negotiation, continuing even beyond the theatrical release of the film: over contracts, possessory credits, edits, marketing, release scheduling as well as over the afterlife of the film on video, broadcast and even versions for airline use. Any straightforward understanding of independence and independent authorship seems difficult to apply; it seems more appropriate to refer to this as negotiated independence, conducted through networks of contractual relations. Reputation, it seems, is important to maintaining creative independence. In my first visit to Ashby’s archives in 2007 there was almost no scholarly work on the filmmaker. However during 2009, Nick Dawson’s Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel, a weighty biography, and Christopher Beach’s The Films of Hal Ashby were published. The same year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held a retrospective of Ashby’s films featuring a discussion panel that included Jon Voight, Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen and Haskell Wexler. More recent directors such as Apatow, Curtis Hanson and Cameron Crowe declared their appreciation of Ashby’s films and his quirky comedic sensibility, publicly validating claims for the reassessment of his critical reputation. Additionally, a version of Lookin’ to Get Out re-edited by Ashby was discovered by Dawson, whilst at the UCLA archives, and he alerted Jon Voight, who arranged its release with Warner Video. All of these activities represent a concerted attempt to re-construct Ashby’s reputation as a ‘lost auteur’ and offer an interesting example of how academic and journalistic research can also feed into ‘reputation work’ (Zafirau 2008: 103) in the reconstruction of Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 15/06/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/AMIC/ApplicationFiles/9780415684286.3d Reputational capital: Hal Ashby 145 reputational capital. The marketing around the new DVD of Lookin’ to Get Out centres on its authorial branding and the recovery of Ashby’s ‘lost film’ and its place in his oeuvre. The resurrection of a director’s cut re-energises the aftermarket, replacing a compromised text with an ‘authorised’ version, and returns auteur branding to a previously authorless text. Furthermore, in this case it raises interesting questions about the status of archives in establishing and validating authorship, and their importance in carrying out revisionist film histories. Archival production histories can offer valuable information about creative processes and the complex, often hidden relationships between talent, agents, managers, lawyers and executives, providing useful evidence of the creative struggles that routinely take place both in and outside of the studios. Even successful directors such as Ashby were subject to such disciplining regimes when their films began to perform poorly at the box office or they were simply deemed unfashionable, eventually leading to reputational decline. By exploring how reputational capital is accumulated, circulated and authenticated both in the Hollywood industry and outside, we can offer a useful balance to auteur studies that have emphasised individual authorship over collaborative processes in film production. Through such critical production histories, alongside reception studies and textual work, we are able to place discourses of independence under greater scrutiny, considering how claims of independence within and outside of Hollywood might then be established or refuted. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of staff at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, especially Barbara Hall, as well the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, for supporting the archival research. Notes 1 Recent work has begun to address some of these issues. See, for instance, Kemper (2009), which offers a rich analysis of the rise of agents in the Hollywood studio system. 2 In the event only one Northstar picture was made that was not a Hal Ashby film: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), although four others were subsequently produced elsewhere. Bibliography Allen, R. C. and Gomery, D. 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