Celebrity Birthday of the Day

Happy Birthday, Hal Ashby!

Hal Ashby's story is one of the great (ie tragic) rise and fall stories of Hollywood.

Born in 1929 in Ogden, Utah and raised as a Mormon, Ashby put his fucked up childhood this way:

"I was... the last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was 12. I struggled growing up, like others, totally confused. Married and divorced twice before I made it to 21. Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios."

Ashby parlayed his various jobs at Hollywood studios (he started as a printing press operator at Universal) into being a freelance assistant film editor. While doing this, he made friends with an MGM messenger by the name of Jack Nicholson (who he would later direct in The Last Detail).

Talented, driven and weird, Ashby was soon a full-fledged editor, and it only took until his fourth movie to get his big break: editing Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night.

It's much more exciting edited together.

He won an Academy Award for editing the movie, and three years later he directed his first film, a Beau Bridges vehicle called The Landlord. The next year he released the tender/creepy story of a romance between an incredibly old woman and a teenager -- one of the great love stories of our time: Harold and Maude.

They bang. They bang hard.

Ashby made a number of noted (code for: I haven't seen them) films after Harold and Maude, including Shampoo, a movie about a hairdresser that stars Warren Beatty (the reason I haven't seen it should be fairly evident).

But before the decade was out, he managed to direct one of my very favorite movies, Being There, starring Peter Sellers in his last major role.

The story of a functionally retarded gardener whose generalized ramblings about plants and the seasons are mistaken for profundity, Being There cracked open the world of politics and celebrity in a hilariously bitter way, prodding us to pay attention to content rather than superficial assumptions about who someone is and how they look. The controversial ending (which I dare not give away), remains one of my favorite moments in the movies, since (in my reading of it) it plays the same trick on the audience that so far been played on everyone else in the movie. It's conceit dares you to look through it, and the implication is that if you don't, then you're no better than the dopes you've been snickering at the rest of the movie.

Sadly, Being There marked the effective end for Ashby. Though he had for most of his life been charitably described as an eccentric, he now began the slow slide into madness. Drugs and obsessive behavior began to take their hold. He refused to eat in front of other people. He began to take so long in the editing room several projects were taken away from him so they could be finished.

By the time he had straightened himself out, he was diagnosed with cancer that quickly spread throughout his body. He died on December 27, 1988.

But he left behind a series of totally unique movies (many of which, especially from his 1971-79 phase, I will surely get around to watching), filled with idiosyncratic characters, intelligent concepts and sly humor.

As a parting video, I present this funny scene from Harold and Maude.

Note: If you haven't seen this movie, this is one of Harold's fake suicides, which he stages to try to get a reaction out of his mother.