‘Hal’ turns camera on legendary director Ashby
If you want to know why the name Hal Ashby shines so brightly among the legendary filmmakers of the 1970s (the only more famous Hal is HAL the computer of “2001: A Space Odyssey”), you must see “Hal,” an enlightening and entertaining film history class from Oklahoma-born editor-turned-director Amy Scott. Beside such names as Francis Coppola, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby stands tall because, as Judd Apatow puts it more or less, “To make seven great films in nine years is astonishing.”
Ashby, Scott tells us, came from a Mormon family in Utah. As a young man, he made his way to Los Angeles, got a job at a studio as a multilift operator and eventually learned to edit such films as Tony Richardson’s “The Loved One” (1965). Ashby made a friend for life working on Norman Jewison’s “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965) and later Jewison’s landmark Southern police drama “In the Heat of the Night” (1967).
Jewison, along with Jeff and Beau Bridges, Cat Stevens, Rosanna Arquette, Lisa Cholodenko, Lee Grant, Louis Gossett Jr. and Robert Towne, also appear in the film talking about their experiences working with or being influenced by workaholic Ashby, whose marijuana use grew along with his beard and his list of credits.
Tellingly, Ashby’s debut film as a director was another race-centered effort, in this case an outlandish comedy-dramaromance “The Landlord” (1970), with Beau Bridges as a goofball, rich white kid who buys a building in the then-rundown and primarily AfricanAmerican Park Slope section of Brooklyn and enriches his life.
The cult favorite “Harold & Maude” (1971), with the unforgettable Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort and a score by Stevens (aka Yusuf Islam) followed. Then the gritty military drama “The Last Detail,” with an Oscar-nominated Jack Nicholson, followed by the Warren Beattystarring Hollywood satire “Shampoo.”
Ashby’s crowning achievement was his prophetic adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There” (1979), with Peter Sellers in a definitive role. The things that connect Ashby’s seemingly disparate films are his shining humanism, love for actors and wry, undeniably kooky sense of humor. These virtues were matched only by his fierce sense of independence, evident in his profanity-laced typed memos to studio executives. A rebellious director like him would not have a chance in the corporatedominated world of today’s sausage-factory films. That’s another reason Hal Ashby was great.