Hal Ashby

Hal Ashby (born September 2, 1929, Ogden, Utah, U.S.—died December 27, 1988, Malibu, California) was an American filmmaker who was one of the preeminent directors of the 1970s. He was especially noted for such films as Harold and Maude (1971), Shampoo (1975), and Being There (1979).

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early years

Ashby was the youngest of four children. His dairy-farmer father divorced his mother when Ashby was six and killed himself six years later. After holding a series of odd jobs, Ashby hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where he eventually became a multilith printing press operator at Universal Studios. He worked in Republic studios’ poster-printing operation in the early 1950s, then became an assistant editor to such directors as William Wyler (on Friendly Persuasion [1956] and The Big Country [1958]) and George Stevens (on The Diary of Anne Frank [1959] and The Greatest Story Ever Told [1965]). As head editor, Ashby worked with Tony Richardson on The Loved One (1965) and with Norman Jewison on The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and In the Heat of the Night (1967); Ashby won an Academy Award for his work on the latter film.

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The 1970s

Jewison helped Ashby land his first directing assignment, the socially conscious comedy The Landlord (1970), with Beau Bridges as a quirky, wealthy young man who bonds with the tenants living in the Brooklyn tenement he has purchased on a whim. The film’s potent cast included Louis Gossett, Jr., Pearl Bailey, Lee Grant, and Susan Anspach. Ashby’s second film was Harold and Maude (1971), a black comedy about a 20-year-old boy (played by Bud Cort) who has a passionate affair with a lusty octogenarian (Ruth Gordon). Although coolly received upon its release, the film slowly found an audience and became a cult classic. It was The Last Detail (1973), however, that advanced Ashby to the front rank of mainstream directors. The film offers a hilarious (and often profane) turn by Jack Nicholson as a U.S. Navy chief petty officer who (along with Otis Young as his partner) draws the unpleasant task of escorting a fugitive sailor (Randy Quaid) from West Virginia to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, naval prison where he will spend the next eight years. Robert Towne’s Oscar-nominated screenplay helped make The Last Detail one of the year’s best films.

One of 1975’s biggest—and most controversial—hits was Shampoo, a satire of Los Angeles society in 1968 with charismatic starring performances by Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, and Goldie Hawn, great supporting work by Lee Grant (who won an Oscar) and Jack Warden, and a clever, bold screenplay by Towne and Beatty. Ashby’s next film was Bound for Glory (1976), a biopic about the activist folk singer Woody Guthrie (David Carradine). Although it did not do well at the box office, the film was well received by critics; among its many Academy Award nominations was one for best picture.

Ashby’s most-lauded film was one that many critics panned, an appropriately polarized reaction to a film about the effects of the Vietnam War on the home front. But if some regarded Coming Home (1978) as sanctimonious, others believed the film had the courage of its convictions. Most critics, however, agreed that Coming Home featured powerful performances. In fact, all the principal actors were nominated for Oscars—Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, Penelope Milford, and Bruce Dern, with both Voight and Fonda winning—and Ashby received his only Oscar nomination for best director. Although Coming Home was a difficult act to follow, Ashby did nearly as well with Being There (1979), a sometimes brilliant adaptation by Jerzy Kosinski of his novel, with an inspired performance by Peter Sellers as the idiot gardener who becomes a savant to all who behold him.

The 1980s

After an impressive string of acclaimed films, Ashby’s next efforts—Second-Hand Hearts (1981) and Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), which actually was filmed before Hearts but was left on the shelf for two years—were poorly received. Searching for a change of pace, Ashby directed Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982), a Rolling Stones concert film that he assembled in a workmanlike fashion from their 1981 tour. In 1985 he returned to feature films with The Slugger’s Wife, a Neil Simon-scripted story about a baseball player (Michael O’Keefe) infatuated with a singer (Rebecca De Mornay), much to the dismay of his manager (Martin Ritt). However, it was also a box-office disappointment. Ashby’s final film, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), was only marginally better. A freewheeling adaptation of a Lawrence Block novel, it starred Jeff Bridges as alcoholic private eye Matt Scudder, with supporting performances by Rosanna Arquette as a call girl in trouble and Andy Garcia as her smug pimp. With film studios reluctant to hire him, Ashby turned to television, and he worked on several projects before being diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1988.

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The cause of Ashby’s decline may never be known, though some attributed it to drugs and alcohol. When one compares his initial seven films with his final five, it seems as if two different beings took turns inhabiting his body—the first with talent to burn, the second merely burned-out.