I’ve always been a “Hal Ashby devotee”, but what does that phrase really mean? That I’ve long had to balance my worship of Ashby’s legendary ’70s films with the awkward, less than fulfilled, in some cases cocaine-flaked failures of his ’80s features.
All hail Harold and Maude, The Last Detail — generally regarded as Ashby’s masterpiece — Shampoo (which Ashby didn’t really direct as much as submit and relinguish to the will of Warren Beatty), Bound for Glory, Coming Home (Ashby’s second-best film) and Being There (which has lost much of its potency since ’79, at least in my own head). And offer a sad shrug to Second-Hand Hearts, Lookin’ to Get Out, Let’s Spend the Night Together (a better-than-decent Rolling Stones concert doc), The Slugger’s Wife and the half-resurgence of 8 Million Ways to Die.
So I’ve long been uncertain about his legacy — who hasn’t been? But six and a half years ago Nick Dawson‘s “Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel” convinced me that with any kind of half-fair perspective, Ashby’s decade of ’70s glory definitely out-classes and outweighs the tragedy of the ’80s and how the derangement of nose candy enveloped and swallowed the poor guy.
Hence my strong interest in Amy Scott‘s Hal, a 90-minute doc about Ashby’s high and low times that will debut at Park City MARC on Monday afternoon, and then screen three more times — Tuesday evening at the Prospector, Thursday morning at the MARC and Friday morning at the Holiday 2.
From Sundance program notes: “As befits a subject whose stretch of work especially in the 1970s included Harold & Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo and Coming Home (he was Oscar-nominated for that one), interviewees include collaborators Jeff Bridges, Jane Fonda and Louis Gossett Jr. as well as Alexander Payne, Judd Apatow, Lisa Cholodenko, Beau Bridges, Haskell Wexler and Norman Jewison.
