David Newman and Robert Benton wrote the original script, Robert Towne worked on it. Truffaut was offered to direct, but wanted to make Fahrenheit 451 more. Beatty came in, wanted to produce it himself. Warner Brothers eventually picked up the deal but hated the end product. It flopped on release, receiving near total critical rejection, but it opened well in the UK, where the fashions took off. The fashions and the music, according to Dede, made it come back to life, but it's also Pauline Kael's defence of the film in The New Yorker which caused it to be reassessed, then Beatty managed to get the studio to re-release it.
Dede says the film got her into trouble with her left-wing friends, 'How could you do such a dreadful film, so immoral, so violent?' She thinks they really didn't understand the characters but more importantly realised these women didn't like it because their kids loved it.
ACE nominated Dede but gave it to Michael Luciano for The Dirty Dozen. WTF? Who? She didn't even get an Oscar nomination - or a BAFTA nomination, which just goes to show you. What? I don't know. It seems incredibly well done. Dede was heavily influenced by Tony Gibbs, wasn't told to cut it in a European way, just that Penn and Beatty kept encouraging her to go faster. You can see how her peers may have thought of this as choppy, wrong, but it changed the acceptable face of film editing. She's brilliantly fast.
You can see right from the first scene - Dunaway in her bedroom - how 'European' it was. And before that, the credits that all turn red.. Beautifully shot by Burnett Guffey, even though he didn't like the direction he was pushed in (so I think I read somewhere).
It's great. Dunaway and Michael J Pollard stand out for me, though Estelle Parsons won the Oscar for Best Screaming. With Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, Denver Pyke (sheriff).
It certainly changed everything - that shocking and shockingly abrupt ending foreshadows Easy Rider and then just about every American film of the seventies. (Dede generously attributes the famous cutting of the massacre at the end to her assistant Gerry Greenberg - "I just tightened it up here and there". Can't remember where I read that now. Must start making notes. She gets the credit before 'written by, directed by', after the DP, very unusual, a sure sign of how valuable her contribution was deemed to be.)
I associate Michael J Pollard from the classic seventies but in fact he was working steadily throughout his life - he died in 2019.
I reckon this is Faye Dunaway's finest hour.
Gold Diggers of 1933 is the film they see (I'd guessed 42nd Street).
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