little crazier, you know, and that's always a great relief. The crazier you get, the better chance you have of surviving it all.”6
Someone who added to Ashby's fun in the editing room was Pablo Ferro. The young Cuban-born, New York–based graphic artist had made an impact with the title sequence for Dr. Strangelove and was now designing the opening credits for Russians. Ferro was immediately taken with Ashby and would become one of his most devoted and lifelong friends. “He was so easy and open,” he says, adding that the same could not be said of Jewison.7 Ferro and Ashby were peas in a pod, both approaching their work with a wide-eyed innocence and joy.
When the film was previewed, audience reactions were mixed, but the trades loved it and predicted excellent box-office returns. Variety called it an “outstanding cold-war comedy,” saying that Jewison had handled “the varying comedy techniques with uniform success, obtaining solid performances all the way down the line.”8 The Hollywood Reporter also acknowledged its comic strengths (“a brilliantly funny movie, the most hilarious picture of the year”) and noted: “Like all good comedy, it has for its core and springboard the hard facts of life. It strikes to the central being of the spectator, playing on his terror and unquenchable sense of the ludicrous.” All involved were lauded, but Jewison—“one of the most important not only of the new, young directors, but in any class”—was specially singled out for praise. Both reviews recognized the quality of the editing in light of the challenge Ashby had faced, and the Reporter called it “some of the best intercutting imaginable.”9
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming was released on May 25, 1966, and the same day the Washington Daily News declared that it should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, not everyone was so liberal minded. Following through on the film's message of tolerance, Jewison attended screenings in both Berlin and Moscow. Flying back from his triumphal visit to the Soviet Union, Jewison was greeted at the Los Angeles International Airport by a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officer, who told him: “You're unacceptable.” Had he not demanded to call the U.S. vice president, Hubert Humphrey—who had praised the film just weeks earlier—Jewison would have been put on a plane back to Russia or his “home,” Canada, even though his job, wife, and children were all in Los Angeles. Jewison's green card was confiscated, and he was told to report to the INS immediately. When Jewison went to try to resolve the situation, an incensed Ashby accompanied him, though he risked facing severe scrutiny himself. “If you had a problem—an emotional problem, a career problem, a drug problem—whatever your problem was, he was with you,” Jewison recalls. “He was completely non-judgmental.”10
Much to Jewison and Ashby's delight, The Russians Are Coming took nearly $8 million in the United States and became the fifth biggest grosser of the year. Encouraged by its success, Jewison made grand plans for the future, plans in which Ashby would play an increasingly large part. Having proved himself to be a director who could take an unconventional idea and turn it into a well-crafted, commercial film, Jewison purchased a blank-verse Western, The Judgment of Corey, which he planned to make with its poetic dialogue intact. Announcing that the film would start shooting in the spring of 1967, possibly with Steve Mc-Queen starring, Variety felt moved to proclaim: “Critics of Hollywood, please take note, there are those trying something different here.”11
As it turned out, that something different was not The Judgment of Corey but In the Heat of the Night.
Walter Mirisch had bought the rights to John Ball's novel about black detective Virgil Tibbs in the summer of 1965, planning to make the film quickly with one of the company's lower-profile directors. However, Stirling Silliphant's adaptation turned Tibbs's small-town murder investigation in the Deep South into a microcosmic examination of the American civil rights issue. Jewison saw it as “a plea for interracial understanding and respect” and insisted that he direct it.12
Robert Kennedy (whom he'd met while skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho) encouraged Jewison to make In the Heat of the Night, but the Mirisches saw it as incendiary material that would drive audiences away. For a start, the main character was black, so it was guaranteed to make little money in the racist South. Jewison wanted to shoot on location but was limited by the modest $2.6 million budget allotted him by Walter Mirisch. And because it was not safe for Sidney Poitier (who had recently been a target of racists while in the South), who was to play Tibbs, to film in the script's setting, Mississippi, a tiny town just above the Mason-Dixon Line—Sparta, Illinois—was chosen instead.
Ashby played a significant role in recruitment and casting on Heat as he was not only the picture's editor but also the “Assistant to the Producer,” a role created to allow him to be as involved in as many elements of the film as possible. Impressed by the Oscar-winning camerawork of former documentarian Haskell Wexler on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Ashby and Jewison hired him to be the director of photography on Heat—despite the fact that he had never shot in color before. Ashby had met Wexler on The Best Man, had worked with him again on The Loved One, and knew he had a great eye and also shared his and Jewison's antiestablishment views.
By mid-August, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, and Lee Grant had been cast, and filming began just over a month later in Sparta. Ashby, however, stayed in Los Angeles, casting minor roles and hiring the last remaining crew members. He'd been given the chance to edit on location but stuck by his belief that the chaos of location filming would prevent him from responding freely to the material. Nevertheless, he felt lonely and dislocated away from Jewison and the others.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of Ashby's noneditorial role was his working with Lee Grant. Grant, cast as the murdered businessman's widow, joined the Sparta company later in the shoot, and one of Ashby's tasks in Los Angeles was to help her find the right look for her character before she left for Illinois. Ashby drove Grant from store to store, offering his opinion on her hair, clothes, and shoes. He was relaxed and talkative, and in just a few days together they became friends. “He was a very straight guy, very easy to be with,” Grant recalls. “He was so uncoiled that one never had a sense of his power and drive.”13
During the two months of location filming, Ashby still had his usual phone conversations with Jewison, but he also rattled off regular memos to his colleagues. Even during the rehearsal week before shooting started, Ashby sent “The Family” a memo from “Lonesome Luke” telling them:
a. I MISS YOU!!!
b. The above (a.) is full out selfishness and you should also know my heart, along with every good thought from inside me, is there with you.14
In the same memo, Ashby included what he had found out from the coroner's office about dead bodies, providing exact details on how the corpse in the film should look as well as a sketch of a corpse with a smile on its face. His memos from this period show his playful nature and wild, infectious sense of humor. In each one, he used a different name for the recipients, from the straightforward, such as “Loves” or “The nicest people I know,” to the increasingly elaborate, “Pegs of my heart,” “Dayworkers of the Midwest,” or “The Daring Desperates.” Ashby, in turn, referred to himself as everything from “Crazyhead Hal Ashby” or “Captain / Ashby, Ret.,” to “P. T. Barnum & Sons” and “The Queen of Spades.”15
For his friends in distant Illinois, Ashby conjured up images of the (more civilized) life he was enjoying back in Los Angeles. “Dearest Motion Picture Pioneers of America,” he wrote one day. “Well, another day of golfing, riding, tea and having a good time in general.”16
His ability to home in on certain details and play on them for comic effect was particularly in evidence in a memo written the day after he visited the Pasadena Police Department to do more police-related research:
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