Robert Sellers by Hollywood Hellraisers

Author:Hollywood Hellraisers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-25T06:00:00+00:00

Face it, they know we’re always trying to nail ’em and they don’t like it.

Shampoo (1975) started life back in 1968, the height of the sexual revolution, as a cautionary tale for people like Warren Beatty who slept around too much. ‘I wanted to explore contemporary sexuality through the medium of a Don Juan,’ he said. According to Warren, a Don Juan doesn’t get that way because he’s a misogynist, impotent, or has a desire to degrade women; neither is he a latent homosexual who seduces so many women to conceal the fact that he really wants to seduce men. No, said Warren, ‘He just wants to fuck because he likes to fuck.’

Screenwriter Robert Towne was hired to work on a story about a randy hairdresser who discovers porking everyone under the hairdryer is actually rather an unsatisfying way to approach middle age — a sort of Alfie with curlers, then. Warren revealed that Shampoo was his attempt to ‘close out the promiscuous phase’ in his life. It didn’t work. He was shamelessly on his way to becoming the world’s oldest adolescent, the only man alive Hugh Hefner envied.

Beatty liked Towne’s finished script but suggested the female characters needed bolstering. Towne didn’t agree and it got nasty. ‘Although I don’t know anybody who’s a bigger prick,’ said Towne about Warren, ‘there’s no one I love and admire more.’ The relationship between Warren and Towne was one of the closest and most interesting in Hollywood. When producer Gerald Ayres decided to live an openly gay lifestyle it was Towne who warned him that his reputation might suffer. Ayres was furious, knowing how intimate he and Warren were, ‘twisted together like a knot’. He told Towne, ‘Listen, you and Warren squabble on the phone every day like a couple of lovers, go all over the world fucking the same women in the same room. If you two guys aren’t lovers, you’re the next thing to it.’ Towne refused to speak to Ayres for years.

They ran hot and cold, Warren’s feelings for Towne, and vice versa. After the impasse over the Shampoo script the atmosphere was definitely chilly and resulted in the project’s cancellation and both men not speaking for a few years. But a thaw eventually set in and Towne returned to have another bash at it. Shampoo gradually came back to life. Warren, who’d installed himself as producer, pumped a million dollars of his own money into pre-production, assembling a top-notch cast including a couple of ex-girlfriends in Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn. The autobiographical nature of the project was now unavoidable. Warren said he ‘didn’t mind the suggestion of parallels too much’. He also hired the then unknown seventeen-year-old Carrie Fisher to play a wild Beverly Hills brat, not a huge stretch at the time, providing her with some of the film’s choicest lines, such as ‘Wanna fuck?’ Years later Carrie admitted to Rolling Stone that Beatty unsuccessfully propositioned her.

Because of the personal nature of the story, Warren thought Shampoo

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