From Lili Anolik‘s “Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael, and an Epic Hollywood Mistake,” posted on 2.7.17 and really well written, my God:
“Didn’t that spate of Hollywood movies from 1967 to 1979, from Bonnie and Clyde to, say, Apocalypse Now, feel like a crime spree? As if the American New Wavers were pulling a fast one?
“The spree couldn’t last, of course. Sooner or later lawmen, i.e., studio men, would catch up. Or, worse, audiences wouldn’t. Times had changed.
“Kael understood this. In 1978’s ‘Fear of Movies,’ she wrote: ‘Now that the war has ended …[people have] lost the hope that things are going to be better…So they go to the movies to be lulled.’ But I’m not quite sure Beatty, who was considerably younger and had been knocked around far less, did. The chaos of the 60s and early-to-mid-70s — Vietnam, Watergate — made for an opening, though it was closing quick. Kael prophesied the end of Pauline and Warren when she wrote of the ‘new cultural Puritanism,’ as surely as Bonnie prophesied the end of Bonnie and Clyde when she wrote of the ‘sub-gun’s rat-a-tat-tat.’ (Did Kael foresee, too, the medium’s end? That the VHS revolution was just around the corner? That the 70s would be the last decade in which movies were truly a tribal experience?)
“Maybe Kael went to Hollywood, at least in part, to thwart this prophecy. Beatty had eyes for Kael, and Kael for Beatty, but they weren’t able to relate in a direct way. They’d need a go-between, a C. W. Moss.
“James Toback, who’d just made Fingers, a genuinely alarming movie about a concert pianist-cum-debt collector, would do nicely in that role since he excited them both. Writer George Malko recalls seeing Fingers with Kael: ‘She lifted up out of her seat, and even as she was settling back down, she was breathing fast.’ Toback, on screening Fingers for Beatty: ‘Warren stood after it was over and walked around in circles for a good two or three minutes.’ So Toback, quite literally, got Kael panting and Beatty erect.
“And Kael and Beatty used Toback to work each other up. Kael had socked it to Beatty for Heaven Can Wait, accused him of going commercial, selling out. It wasn’t only a review, it was a taunt. And a dare. Beatty double-dog-dared her back with an offer to produce. Kael and Beatty had been leading anti-Establishment figures for a decade-plus, which meant that they’d become the Establishment.
“By getting behind Toback, an artist, yes, but also a pickup artist, the protégé of composer Aaron Copland and orgy buddy of football player Jim Brown, they would prove that the spark hadn’t gone out of their rebel spirits, that they were still subversive, undaunted, young.
“Viewed from that angle, the crazy scheme starts to seem not so crazy after all, or possibly just crazy enough to work. Of course it was neither. It was the look Bonnie and Clyde exchanged — passionate, agonized, doomed — before the hail of bullets.”