it accordingly.
My knowledge of the above came about because of a still (thank God) insatiable curious nature. My across the street neighbor who I suspect as being a bit on the conservative side; Reagan for Gov. stickers on the bumpers of both cars since last Xmas yet, etc.…Well it seems he has a little flagpole, which I hadn't noticed, on his front lawn, and today it had the American Flag on it. Hence, I made it a point to find out what's the special occasion.
Columbus, by the way, was a very, very nice man.
Met with Detective Ray Bartlett yesterday and it was most entertaining. He's a registered Republican; is anti-welfare; thinks civil rights demonstrations have made the point by now and should be fini [sic]. Also, I had the distinct feeling he wanted to arrest me.17
When Jewison asked for Ashby's opinion on changing the film's title to Between Two Trains, Ashby initially replied seriously, but then launched into long lists of very silly alternative titles for Jewison's approval: The Spartan Boogie Man, Uppity Jig Get Gillespie's Goat, Black and White in Color, etc.18
Back in Sparta, Jewison and Wexler were having fun experimenting with the photography, the limited budget forcing them to be ultracreative and think around corners. Wexler shot handheld, played with focus, shot reflections in glass, captured a chase through the woods from the perspective of the pack of dogs, and put in the first-ever zoom shot. So much innovation made watching the dailies a treat for Ashby, who let Jewison know how he felt about their work, describing himself in one memo as “old happy (I do like the film) Hal.”19
Though things were going well in Sparta, Walter Mirisch was pressuring Jewison to bring the film in on budget. Jewison had long told Ashby that they were the artists and that producers were “the enemy,” moneymen who couldn't be allowed to interfere with their creativity, and Ashby now felt very strongly about this. On hearing about Mirisch's actions, he was consumed by an anger so intense it put him on the edge of desperation. In a memo to Jewison entitled “Stupidity,” he vented his frustration:
This will most certainly not be a memo of any sort. It will be closer to the ramblings of a very very angry young punk.
Norman, since I talked to you this afternoon, I've become so god-damned, furiously, frustrated from anger I don't know what to do except sit here at this typewriter and rant and rave and hope I can cope with everything without blowing my cool completely.
To think Walter would put this kind of pressure on you is beyond the realm of my comprehension. It is so dumb; so stupid; so far out ridiculous I could cry. I guess RUSSIANS wasn't enough to prove you are an honorable and responsible man. I swear to Christ what do you have to do[?] When I look at our dailies, and see the extra quality—I'm talking about those values which cannot be evaluated—and then I hear what you told me today I feel like going kill crazy. You really need that kind of pressure; it's so constructive. I'm sure you haven't another thing in the world on your mind. Obviously, you don't care about the picture; or what's the best way to tell the story. Christ, I've actually seen times when I saw something in the dailies that bothered me, and if I happened to say I was going to tell you about it somebody would inevitabley [sic] say: “Oh don't do that! It might upset him!” Do [you] believe how these people think?
At any rate, I got some of this out of my system; for all the good it will do. I'm sure yelling like this will solve the scene. Besides, by the time you get this I'll have said the whole thing to you over the phone.
If there is anyone you want me to kick in the shins or bite; please, please let me know.
LOVE
me
oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
The devotion to Jewison and the noble cause of filmmaking is very evident here, and during his months alone in Los Angeles Ashby had decided, despite his usual financial restraint, to put $100 per week of his salary back into Jewison's company, Simkoe. Ashby thought it could be used toward such things as paying for a screenwriter on an upcoming project, The Landlord, a novel by the black writer Kristin Hunter about a young, rich owner of a black ghetto tenement. “If you got it to spend; spend it where it will give you the most of whatever the hell you want,” he wrote to Jewison. “And right now I want to spend it on something I believe in. Me! You!…And anybody else around who wants to groove the way we do.…Think of it? We got a too much Director (who, bye the bye is flipping me with such nice things. I must say, Norman, you really are a joy—you are many, many things and they all add up to one groovy human being. It's a good feeling to dig someone that much.”20
In November, the company returned to Los Angeles. Once again surrounded by his friends, Ashby happily started assembling a first cut of Heat. “So much of this film, and the success of this film,…came through in the editing process with Hal Ashby,” says Jewison. “What is great about the editing, and what Hal preserved in this film constantly, is those moments without any dialogue, which essentially are the best moments in a movie, regardless of what the scriptwriters tell you, because it's the human moments, the emotional moments that we hang on to.”21
One of the most powerful of these moments comes near the beginning of the film, when Warren Oates finds Sidney Poitier alone in the station waiting room and frisks him, assuming he is the murderer simply because he is black. As the deliberately humiliating body search is conducted, a simple side-on shot shows the silent Poitier: his body is arched as he places his hands against the wall, his face barely registers any emotion, but his eyes burn with righteous anger.
During the editing of Heat, Ashby also managed to put his love of music to good use. He was looking at the silent footage for the opening sequence, for which Wexler had shot the train coming into Sparta with the image moving in and out of focus. As Ashby couldn't ever bear to cut silent footage endlessly, he played a song over it, “Chitlins and Candied Yams” from Ray Charles's Ray's Moods (1966) album: “I just laid the song in, and I'm telling you, the changes in music that went on were the changes that went on with the focus,” Ashby said. “I really started to realize the whole thing. I've always gotten into the music in relation to film and what it does—just the rhythms that you have in the film at any given time and how they feed off the music.”22 This led to the idea of having Charles sing the film's theme song (both that song and the film's score were written by jazz musician Quincy Jones, a longtime friend of Charles's).
Though Ashby's career was at an all-time high, that very success was causing serious problems in his marriage. He was so engrossed in editing that he often put off going home, knowing full well that Shirley was waiting for him and his dinner had been on the table for hours. “Hey man,” Jewison would tell him, “it's OK to be obsessed, but I think we should go home now.” Yet Ashby found it more and more difficult and sometimes even slept in his editing room. According to Jewison, Ashby and Shirley were both flower children, “like two bohemian students. But I didn't think she was very solid. She wasn't very stable emotionally.”23
Stable or not, Shirley was understandably unhappy about Ashby spending so much time away from her and Carrie. He often returned home to arguments or accusations, and this, in turn, made him even more inclined to stay at work, creating a vicious circle. It was far from the perfect home life that Shirley had hoped for and that Ashby had believed he could give her.
They were now living in a house on Roscomare Road, in the affluent Bel Air area, just off Mulholland Drive. It was beyond their means, but Shirley had set her heart on having a dream house to complete her idealized image of family life. The upshot, however, was that they had to take out a second mortgage, which added financial stress on top of the emotional stress that had built up in the relationship.
A further problem was
