When Hollywood Was Really a Man’s World

People who love movies and know a bit about them agree that the ‘70s were a golden decade for American film. The studio system had lost its strangle hold on U.S. movie production, the social revolution of the ‘60s had broken the culture wide open, and in rushed a generation of young actors and directors on fire to make films.

This was when Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, De Palma, Ashby, Altman, Rafelson, Beatty and Nicholson did the great work that launched their careers. The creative renaissance didn’t last long, however, and by the end of the decade it had gone down in flames.

This spectacular rise and fall is the subject of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood,” a recently published book by journalist Peter Biskind. Essentially a story of men and power, Biskind’s book chronicles a time when feminism had yet to make inroads in the movie business. Nonetheless, the role women played in this chapter of cultural history makes for a fascinating subtext.

If Biskind’s book is accurate--and one assumes it is since he hasn’t been sued--sexual inequality reached an appalling extreme 25 years ago in Hollywood. Women, then, were mere accessories in the lives of men whose important relationships were with other men, and the contempt and open hostility male filmmakers expressed toward women was staggering.

A brief sampling from the book:

* Robert Altman ridiculing actress Louise Fletcher as she signs to her deaf parents, then using what he’d observed in his film “Nashville”--and giving the part he’d promised Fletcher to Lily Tomlin.

* Peter Bogdanovich taking girlfriend Cybill Shepherd to the New York premiere of “The Last Picture Show”--a film based on a property suggested by Polly Platt, who also art directed the film and was Bogdanovich’s wife at the time.

* Bob Rafelson groping other women in front of his wife, and demanding that Carole Eastman share screenwriting credit with him for his film “Five Easy Pieces,” even though she wrote the script with little help from him.

* Candice Bergen’s boyfriend, producer Bert Schneider, railing against her personality flaws and announcing “I’m sorry it’s so threatening to you, Bergen, but you have to understand that I’m a love object for every woman who walks into my office. Start dealing with that.” (When Bergen finally left him, he started seeing a teenager from his daughter’s school.)

* Dennis Hopper attempting to seduce his daughter Marin’s best friend at her high school graduation, breaking the nose of his first wife, and jumping on the hood of a car she was driving, then smashing the windshield. Hopper hitting Michelle Phillips and handcuffing her to prevent her from running away, and tossing a flaming mattress out the window of a hotel room in the Philippines that he was sharing with girlfriend Caterine Milinaire. She emerged the following morning with a black eye.

* Francis Ford Coppola instructing an actress with a small part in “Apocalypse Now” to inform his wife of the affair he was having with another actress on the picture.

* Robert Towne making his girlfriend sit in the back seat of his car so his dog could ride up front with him.

Nobody says Biskind’s book isn’t true, but everyone who appears in it seems to wish it would just go away. “I cringed as I read the book, but the information in it struck me as largely accurate,” says Polly Platt, one of the few people in the book who’s willing to go on record about it. Marcia Lucas, Sue Mengers, Toby Rafelson and Candice Bergen all declined to speak to The Times about “Easy Riders.” Brooke Hayward and Margot Kidder didn’t return calls. Pauline Kael and Anjelica Huston were willing to discuss the book, but were unable to due to scheduling conflicts.

Asked why they’re so reticent to comment, Biskind says “several of these women got something off their chest in the book, then they got a lot of flak about it from within the film community.”

A more complex question is: Why were gender politics in the film community so abysmal in the ‘70s?

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In retrospect, one can chart several forces that may’ve converged to produce them. First, the social codes that prohibited men from overtly expressing hostility toward women unraveled in the ‘60s, a period that also idealized promiscuity. With feminism, women were stepping out of the submissive position they’d always occupied, thus they were more threatening to men. Finally, directors wielded an unprecedented power in the ‘70s; for the first time producers and executives danced to their tune.

“Directors of every generation screwed around, but they use to do it with discretion,” says Platt, who married Bogdanovich in 1962. “During the ‘70s the humiliations men inflicted on women were very public. I recently met a handsome actor who told me he’d been happily married for 35 years, and I can’t imagine hearing a man boast about that in the ‘70s. Nobody was giving out awards then for being a good husband or father.”

Adds Biskind: “These men lived with a sense of entitlement that was almost Nietzschean, and felt they were above the law. And, because it’s unbelievably difficult to get a movie made, the demands of the job encourage a user mentality; women were in a disadvantaged position in the ‘70s--as they had been for decades--so they were exploited then cast aside.”

Among the extraordinary things revealed in the book is that women lined up for this privilege. Though it wasn’t intended, “Easy Riders” poses a question for the ages: Why do women abandon themselves in the service of creative men?

“It’s very powerful--sexually and on every other level--when a man has a dream,” says Platt. “It would be a blessing to fall in love with an ordinary man, but I don’t know if that’s possible for a woman once she’s been involved with someone extraordinarily talented.”

Leslie Taplin, who was married for 13 years to Jonathan Taplin (who produced “Mean Streets”), speculates that women choose to be handmaidens to greatness because “you meet incredible people, you participate in high risk games without risking much yourself, and experience the excitement of power without having to pay the bill. The downside is that if you live through someone else you’re not developing yourself, so you have less and less to bring to the table. And eventually you become completely disempowered.”

Dr. Diane Broderick, a feminist scholar and clinical psychologist, comments that “if a woman hasn’t developed her own resources, she projects her ego needs onto the man she’s with, believing that there’s no other access to the arena of power than to be ushered in on the arm of a man. And, people who have been oppressed--as women have been--are often drawn to those who behave outrageously. The saintly woman and the bad boy is an obvious fit.”

Sandy Weintraub, a producer who was in a relationship with Martin Scorsese that began in 1973, recalls the ‘70s as slightly more benign.

“Men just seemed to have more direction than women did then,” she says. “I was pretty aimless when I met Marty, and the extent of my ambition then was to own a book store. I learned a lot from him; however, making a film is completely consuming and they often force relationships into second place.”

This was something women seemed to accept then.

“Theoretically women could go off and screw around too, but they paid for it if they did, because the men couldn’t handle it,” says Biskind. “In talking with these women, I never got the impression that they saw themselves as muses to these men, so it’s hard to understand how they rationalized the way they were being treated.

“Some of them were in love and didn’t want to see the darker aspects of what was going on, so they were in denial about it,” he adds. “I assume others stayed in abusive relationships in order to be part of a world that was exciting. People in the ‘70s film community saw themselves as cultural revolutionaries, and they were making lots of money.”

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Several of the women in Biskind’s book began the ‘70s in creative partnerships with their husbands. Coppola, Rafelson and Bogdanovich, for instance, all relied on their wives for crucial aspects of their work, which went into a downward spiral when the relationships ended.

“Toby [Rafelson] took care of the aesthetics on Bob’s movies, as Polly [Platt] did on Peter’s,” actress Ellen Burstyn says in the book. “They both had an incredible eye for detail--they were the eyes. In both Bob and Peter’s cases, their best movies were made in partnership with their wives. And when the marriages ended, their work was not ever up to that same level.”

Says Biskind: “One of the reasons these guys got rid of their wives or screwed around is because their wives were the only people who said ‘no’ to them. These men also didn’t understand the chemistry of collaboration, and didn’t realize what their wives contributed to their work. They thought it was all them and were very arrogant--and that arrogance was fed by the media.

“Reporters didn’t talk to Polly Platt about ‘The Last Picture Show,’ or to Toby Rafelson about ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ even though they made major contributions to those films. That’s partly a gender issue, but it’s also a reflection of Hollywood’s belief that nobody matters but the director. That hasn’t changed either. Directors still tend to get all the credit when a film is a collaborative effort.

Says Broderick: “It’s not unusual for the creative element that comes from the feminine to be usurped by the masculine side of a partnership. Women as a group tend to be more humble, and they’re covertly taught that it’s necessary to feed the male ego--that’s a central component of the Cinderella complex,” [which revolves around the fantasy of being rescued from a life of drudgery by prince charming].”

When Biskind says women were exploited then cast aside, he wasn’t kidding: Many of these women who’d worked alongside their husbands were blackballed from the film community when their relationships ended. Platt’s career is now thriving, but she had a hard time getting work after she broke with Bogdanovich. When George and Marcia Lucas broke up, Marcia stopped being invited to the Coppolas’ annual Easter party. “It’s like I never existed,” she recalls in “Easy Riders.” When Weintraub and Scorsese broke up, she lost access to friends they’d shared for years as a couple.

“Marty obviously had the power--it was his career, his passion, and his friends and they went with him,” recalls Weintraub, who now produces for television. “I wasn’t surprised, but of course it hurt me. The only person who didn’t cut me off was John Cassavetes, who gave me a job on ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.’ ”

That was then, this is now. Have things improved? Sort of, says Platt.

“Sexual politics in Hollywood have changed, and women are now in positions at the highest levels of the business. And, if a woman is involved with a profitable film, her reward is that she gets to be treated like a man.”