“The great thing about film is, it really is communal. It really is the communal art, and you don’t lose anything—all you do is gain. Your film just gains and gains. The more input you get, the better it is.” – Hal Ashby

Utah-born William Hal Ashby was working on railway construction in the bitterly cold winter of 1948-49. Southern California seemed to be a better place to be so the 18-year-old hitched to Los Angeles where he found a job with Universal Pictures in their print room copying scripts. He progressed to poster printing at Republic before becoming 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 (1966), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (for which he was nominated for a Best Editing Oscar), and In the Heat of the Night (1967) for which Hal Ashby won the Best Editing Academy Award.

“When film comes into a cutting room, it holds all the work and efforts of everyone involved up to that point. The staging, writing, acting, photography, sets, lighting, and sound. It is all there to be studied again and again and again until you really know why it’s good, or why it isn’t. This doesn’t tell you what’s going on inside a director, or how he manages to get it from head to film, but it sure is a good way to observe the results, and the knowledge gained is invaluable.” – Hal Ashby

Norman Jewison encouraged his talented editor to direct and the result was The LandLord (1970), based on the 1966 novel by Kristin Hunter. The film stars Beau Bridges in the lead role of a privileged and ignorant white man who selfishly becomes the landlord of an inner-city tenement, unaware that the people he is responsible for are low-income, streetwise residents.

The film was a commercial disappointment. Arthur Krim of United Artists later assessed the film as part of an evaluation of the company’s inventory:

“What was expected to be provocative material to the new modern film audience of 1968-1969 in depicting black and white relationships in an urban setting, emerged as a film which we felt would be of limited interest to the audience of 1970 – an audience more and more sated with films of this genre. This is still a type of film we intend to continue to make but at one-quarter the cost. Unfortunately, at the time this film was programmed, unrealistic optimism about the potential audience for this type of film prevailed.” – Arthur Krim of UA on The Landlord’s commercial failure

The Landlord, did poor business at the box office, partly due to a misleading and ill-conceived promotional campaign. Hal Ashby’s next film, Harold and Maude, initially met a similar fate before gradually gaining a cult following through word-of-mouth. The film is a dark comedy in which eighteen-year-old Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) drifts away from the life that his detached mother (Vivian Pickles) prescribes for him, and slowly develops a strong friendship, and eventually a romantic relationship, with a 79-year-old woman named Maude (Ruth Gordon) who teaches Harold about living life to its fullest. The film received mixed reviews with many finding the romance distasteful. It took over a decade for the film to make a profit though it is now seen and enjoyed as a cult classic

The Last Detail (1973) was an adaptation of the novel by Darryl Ponicsan. Two Navy lifers (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) are assigned a shore patrol detail escorting 18-year old Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to start an eight-year sentence in the naval prison for stealing forty bucks form a charity fund. They have a week to complete the journey and decide to provide the naive young man with some memorable experiences before he begins his jail sentence.

The was a problem with the profanity in the film with a then-record 65 instances of the word fuck occurring The studio demanded cuts, Ashby, already untrusted by Columbia due to his drug usage, refused. Eventually the studio agreed to a test screening in San Francisco. It was a huge success. A further battle ensued with Ashby persuading the studio to submit the film to the Cannes Film Festival. After Nicholson won Best Actor there, it shamed the studio into releasing the film, some six months after its proposed release date.

Shampoo starred Warren Beatty who co-wrote the script with The Last Detail’s screenwriter, Robert Towne. The satire of Los Angeles society in 1968 also starred Julie Christie with whom Beatty had an on-off relationship and Goldie Hawn with whom he was involved during filming. Shampoo ends with main character George (Warren Beatty) watching from a hilltop as the woman he loves leaves to run away with another man. Hal Ashby had to fight both Beatty and Robert Towne to do the ending his way, as they both wanted to include an epilogue that would solidify the fates of the various characters.

“I like to leave a little bit of an enigma there about exactly what it is because I think that’s what makes it not a totally down kind of an ending.” – Hal Ashby

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.

“Doing a film about a real person drove me crazy at first, trying to be faithful, until I decided I should just do a story about the character.” – Hal Ashby on Bound for Glory

Bound for Glory was the first feature film to use Garrett Brown’s Steadicam.

Coming Home (1978) follows a perplexed woman, her Marine husband, and a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran she meets while her husband is deployed in Vietnam. The film was the first feature made by Jane Fond’s production company IPC Films (Indochina Peace Campaign), Ashby was a replacement for John Schlesinger who left the project after feeling uncomfortable with the subject matter. The film polarised the critics, some regarding Coming Home as sanctimonious, others believing the film had the courage of its convictions. The film won three Academy Awards – for Best Actor (Jon Voight), Best Actress (Jane Fonda), and Best Original Screenplay (Waldo Salt, Robert C. Jones, and Nancy Dowd). It was also nominated for including for Best Supporting Actor (Bruce Dern), Best Supporting Actress (Penelope Milford), Best Director (Hal Ashby), Best Film Editing (Don Zimmerman), and Best Picture (Jerome Hellman). Coming Home is one of only 12 films in history to be on two lists of rare Oscar accomplishments; nominations for the “Big Five” Oscars and nominations in all acting categories.

“I identify with all my characters in one way or another. I never sat in a wheelchair like a Vietnam veteran, that’s true. But in a sense, I transcend that reality somewhere inside me when I go to make a film like Coming Home. It then becomes what I would do, how I would feel if I were this particular human being in this particular situation.” – Hal Ashby

Based on the 1970 novel by Jerzy Kosi?ski Being There (1979) was a comedy-drama adapted for the screen by Kosi?ski and the uncredited Robert C. Jones. The film stars Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine and features Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas, Richard Dysart, and Richard Basehart. Sellers’s performance was universally lauded by critics and is considered by critic Danny Smith to be the “crowning triumph of Peter Sellers’s remarkable career”. Critic Frank Rich wrote that the acting skill required for this sort of role, with a “schismatic personality that Peter had to convey with strenuous vocal and gestural technique … A lesser actor would have made the character’s mental dysfunction flamboyant and drastic … [His] intelligence was always deeper, his onscreen confidence greater, his technique much more finely honed”: in achieving this, Sellers “makes the film’s fantastic premise credible”

Hal Ashby had formed his own production company, Northstar, under the auspices of Lorimar. Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home and Being There had all been successes and Ashby was keen to work with peter Sellers again on a Terry Southern scripted black comedy, Grossing Out, based on an experience Sellers had had when meeting an international arms dealer by chance on an aeroplane. Sellers’ sudden death sent the project into development hell. Ashby’s occasional drug use became more frequent and his relationship with Lorimar deteriorated as did the reaction to his films. Second-Hand Hearts (1981) and Lookin’ to Get Out (1981) were poorly-promoted commercial failures with Lorimar becoming intolerant of Ashby’s increasingly perfectionist ideas – he shot over 800,000 feet of film for Lookin’ to get out and spent six months editing a sequence that was unusable because American musicians were not employed.

Let’s Spend the Night Together is Hal Ashby’s live concert film, documenting The Rolling Stones’ 1981 North American Tour. More than 200,000 feet of film was shot to make the movie. collapsed before the final filmed concert at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona on December 13, 1981. Although Jeff Wexler claimed that Ashby was “partying way beyond his capabilities with the Stones,” Caleb Deschanel has said that Ashby (who directed the concert shoot on a gurney) simply had the flu. Lorimar gave the film a limited release

In 1985 Hal Ashbyreturned 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.

A 2018 documentary, Hal by Amy Scott chronicles the rise and decline of Hal Ashby.

“I’m not laid back. There’s a tremendous energy going on all the time. What are you going to accomplish by raising your voice? Even if you’re striving for some tense thing in your film, getting the crew tense isn’t going to help. I went through a period in my life where I argued about everything, and I found I wasn’t getting much accomplished.” – Hal Ashby

Fresh Dailies

Newest Oldest Title A-Z Title Z-A