On page 84 of Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 1.12.10), author Peter Biskind summarizes Beatty’s thinking about the character who eventually became George Roundy, the scampy hairdresser in Shampoo.

Freudian analyses had a certain currency in the ’60s and ’70s, and, as Beatty puts it, “I wanted to challenge the fashionable assumption that the proverbial Don Juan figure is expressing self-hatred, self-love, hatred of women, homosexuality, sadism, masochism, a wish for eternal life and so on.”

“Beatty never thought about himself as someone who was inordinately interested in sex, obsessed or addicted to it in any way,” Biskind explains. “His attitude was, it’s perfectly normal, and society was too puritanical to accept it. And indeed, if you looked like him and were gifted with the talent for seduction that was his, why not? He did it because he could, thank you very much, Dr. Freud!”