Bonnie et Jules and Clyde et Jim

Did you know that at two separate points during the early stages of its development, Francois Truffaut was set to direct Bonnie and Clyde?

Did you know that he helped novice screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton reshape, revise, and rewrite their script, even though he didn't speak English and they didn't speak French?

Did you know Newman and Benton, who were working at Esquire magazine when they came up with the idea of a movie based on the life and death of Bonnie and Clyde, wrote it to be first American French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague film, whatever that would have meant? (SFMike thinks it would have meant disaster.)

Did you that after the first time Truffaut begged off he managed to get Jean-Luc Goddard interested in taking over.  That deal fell apart over an argument over the weather in New Jersey in wintertime.

Did you know that the second time Truffaut was attached---or seriously thinking of becoming attached to the project---Warren Beatty set up an accidental meeting between himself and Truffaut at a Paris cafe in order to cajole Truffaut into letting him play Clyde Barrow?  Truffaut took a dislike to Beatty and vowed that if he wound up directing the movie there was no way en terre that he'd cast Beatty?

Did you know Truffaut would have liked to have cast Jane Fonda as Bonnie?  Maybe.

Did you know that Truffaut finally gave Bonnie and Clyde the skip because he wanted Fahrenheit 451 to be the first film he made in English?

Did you know that right up until the nearly the last minute the script included a menage a trois between Bonnie, Clyde, and the character that was eventually played by Michael J. Pollard?  The character was a bit different before the scene was dropped and Clyde was rewritten as impotent rather than as bisexually confused.

Did you know that for years afterwards Beatty liked to tell a story about how after he took over as producer he went down on his knees to beg Jack Warner to finance the film?  Warner didn't want Warner Brothers to have anything to do with Bonnie and Clyde.  Not because he thought it was too cutting edge, too French, or too New Wave.  Warner thought it was too old-fashioned.  No different from all the gangster films Warner Brothers produced back when Cagney and Bogart were the resident tough guys.

Did you know Beatty came very close to casting Natalie Wood as Bonnie?

I didn't know any of that until I started reading Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution the other day.  I now know a lot of things I didn't know about the making of Bonnie and Clyde and In The Heat of the Night, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle, the five Academy Award nominees for best picture for 1967.

Some more fun facts that aren't in the book.

Did you know I arrived at Boston University about 15 years too late to meet Faye Dunaway there and a year too late to meet Geena Davis but exactly at the right time to meet Marisa Tomei except that she dropped out her first semester to take a part in a soap opera?

Did you know that Faye Dunaway is the only movie actress that if I had a time machine I would travel back in time to meet and go down on me knees to in her prime---say in the years between Bonnie and Clyde and Three Days of the Condor?

I didn't know that either until I was thinking of her in The Three Musketeers while I was writing my post on Charlton Heston.  I think I saw that movie for the first time at a too impressionable age.

You know what?  I'm too old.  I think if I had a time machine I'd go back in time, find myself at 24, 25, give him the time machine, and let him travel back and find Dunaway and go down on his knees to her.

Then I would be sitting here able to enjoy at a distance the memory of his humiliation at her rejection of him.

Just thought I'd share.

Pictures at a Revolution is a good book.

Related reading:  Charles Taylor's essay in Salon, "Tout Truffaut."

Comments

[sfmike]

Dear Lance: Oddly enough, I AM the right age to know all those details without having read the book, and yes, Faye Dunaway in her prime was nothing less than a goddess on screen.

I saw the movie on its opening night at the local shitty movie theatre in a mini-mall in 1967 because I was astonished by the great poster/ad campaign out front. "They're Young. They're In Love. They Kill People." What? At age 13, I returned after seeing the film to my suburban California beachtown home, and was still awake at 2AM when my parents were returning from some kind of party, which shocked them because I was sitting in the living room quietly, still stunned, needing to tell somebody what I had just seen. There had never been anything like it in my experience, and I'd been seeing about five movies a week from the age of six.

It's still the best film of most of the actors' careers, including Beatty and Dunaway, and still the masterpiece of director Arthur Penn. And I'm SO effing glad that Truffaut didn't direct it because he would have been awful. The screenwriters were using "Don't Shoot The Piano Player" as a template for their screenplay, but I happen to have nothing but contempt for that movie (and most of Truffaut). Penn and Beatty proceeded to transform the French love of American gangster movies back into a radical, revolutionary American studio film that combined homespun stupidity/innocence with violence in a way that had never been seen before, even though it was the subtext of every gangster film that preceded it.

The crowning achievement of "Bonnie and Clyde" was how it incited Pauline Kael to write a 50-page essay, which the "New Yorker," when it was a good magazine, printed in full, about why the movie was so interesting and why it made people so uncomfortable. (It still does.)

By the way, Ms. Dunaway is essentially the Last Movie Star, and in person is supposedly an insane, neurotic diva in her work habits. However, when I moved to San Francisco in the mid-70s, I had a job working for Room Service at the St. Francis Hotel when they were filming "The Towering Inferno." I received a phone call at 6AM asking for a double martini for "Dunaway, Faye Dunaway, Room such-and-such." Because I felt like you obviously did about Ms. Faye, I paused, took a breath, and asked, "You mean, THE Faye Dunaway, The Goddess from Bonnie and Clyde," and after a pause on her end, she said, "Yes, the one and the same." By the way, they filmed all night so this was literally a nightcap.

[Exiled in New Jersey]

I recall seeing in when it came out and I was stationed at Ft Jaxson SC. Did it see it in Columbia SC or on base? Mixed memory but probably in a theater. What I remember was the critic at either Time or Newsweek ripping it a new one when it came out, on the same ground as Sfmike. Then Ms. Kael and others struck and he recanted in print a month later. Or is this a false memory?

[Dan Leo]

What would have been really cool would have been if Jean-Pierre Melville made the movie with Alain Delon and Anna Karina.

[LondonLee]

"It's still the best film of most of the actors' careers, including Beatty and Dunaway,"

Better than 'Chinatown'???

Surely you jest.