James Davidson: “Hal Ashby and the Making of ‘Harold & Maude’”

April 24, 2024

Click Here to listen to podcast version of this interview

Get us started, since I know nothing about you, except that you wrote this terrific book. Tell me your background: Where did you come from? What do you do?

James Davidson: Well, I grew up in St. Louis in the 60s and 70s. I went to Northwestern University for the radio TV film program, started in 1976, and graduated in 1980. So, I have a bachelor's degree from Northwestern and that's where I kind of got my interest in film study. I had two classes where we wrote papers and were encouraged to study films with a scholarly approach to them, so to speak. Then when I got out, I didn't pursue any graduate work or take that any farther. But I continued, of course, to be interested in seeing movies.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1981. It's really a great place to live in terms of film watching: the Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley, there's lots of great places in San Francisco to see movies. And it's also where Harold and Maude was mostly filmed, was filmed entirely, actually, I should say, although it's not really a movie that's associated so much with San Francisco, like Bullit or Vertigo.

I ended up starting a video production business and that's mostly what I did for 30 some years, but I just continued to be kind of an amateur film buff, sort of scholar on my own. I'm a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. I co-administered a Yahoo Hitchcock discussion group for some years and that was fun.

Hal Ashby was just a long-time interest of mine. From high school, I saw Harold and Maude, and The Last Detail and Shampoo, sort of in a short period of time and I noticed that this name kept coming up in the credits as the director being Hal Ashby, who I'd never heard of. And, you know as well as I do that, before the internet came about, you know, it was difficult to get a lot of information about people. So, Ashby is kind of out there as this unknown figure to me. I mean, I got whatever information I could about him. But I really loved his movies and in the 90s, I did write an article about him in an online publication called Images Film Journal, just summarized his career the best I could and the movies. I hadn't seen them all at the time. Since the 80s, of course, some of them were kind of hard to see, you know?

They were. Looking To Get Out was a particular one for me. It's like, where can I find Looking To Get Out?

James Davidson: Yeah, I remember when it came out, and I saw an ad in the newspaper, and I thought, oh, great, a new Hal Ashby movie, and then it disappeared. Just like Harold and Maude, which disappeared very quickly from movie theaters. Same thing happened with Looking To Get Out and then it was available on a VHS tape for a few years.

Anyway, in 2009, a young writer named Nick Dawson wrote a very good biography of Hal Ashby and that sort of stimulated me to get going a little bit and maybe do some research on one of the films. I wasn't going to attempt to write a whole another biography, because Nick's biography was great. But in 2014, I just had some free time, I was working from home and I just decided, hey, you know, this is the time to do something. And Harold and Maude occurred to me, because it was a film that I knew that so many people loved and felt so strongly about, you know? So many people just seem to have a deep personal connection to Harold and Maude, and I felt like very little had been written about it.

Let's jump back. Can you think back on when and where you first saw Harold and Maude and what you thought that first time?

James Davidson: Yeah, I saw it on the first time it was rereleased. My parents had actually gone to see it when it first came out and I was only 13. I remember my mom coming home and telling me a little bit about it and I thought, well, what a strange topic for a movie which probably a lot of other people thought. But when it was released in 1974, and in a movie theater, it was given a major rerelease by Paramount in 1974, when it had been kind of growing in popularity. And a lot of college aged kids and colleges were requesting and renting the movie. And Paramount wisely, you know, to their credit, while they didn't handle the first release of the movie very well, they did continue to own the movie and they decided to give it a major rerelease in 1974, which is good.

It got out into the public and a lot of people saw it, including myself. I was 16 ,but a lot of people saw it I think then for the first time. And they rereleased it again a couple more times in the 1970s and I go over a little bit in the book how the money making was done and when Paramount's started making money on the movie. Which probably was much earlier than they told Colin Higgins and Hal Ashby and Ruth Gordon, all who had a back end on the profits from the movie. I found a very interesting letter to Colin Higgins from his accountant, written in about 1981, talking about Paramount and what they were telling him about the profitability of the movie, when the movie was going to make money. He seemed to be a little cynical about the expenses they were writing off on the film.

When you saw it for that first time, in that big re-release, what did you think?

James Davidson: I adored it. I mean, I thought it was a great movie. I wasn't offended at all by any of the subject matter. I thought it was funny. I thought it was touching. I thought it was serious. It had this wonderful way of going along between the serious and the comedic. I thought it was a superb movie and I was seeing a lot of great movies at that time. That was the time, when we were in high school, was a really good time for movie making.

I probably saw it a month or two after I saw Chinatown, which is one of my favorite movies and came out that summer of 74. But yeah, I adored it and I like Cat Stevens’ music, had been a Cat Stevens fan for several years and his music really enhanced it. And I was just curious about the movie for many years because, like I said, there wasn't much written about the movie, you know, where did this movie come from?

It's famous, or infamous as a movie that people see again and again and again. You know, it ran here at the Westgate theater in Minneapolis for over two years. At least one young man who at the time had seen it 150 times, I think and that's during its two-year run. How many times have you seen it?

James Davidson: That's a good question. It's hard to answer. You know, like a lot of people when I saw it in 74, then it was rereleased again, I think a couple years later, I saw it again on its re-release. But I didn't go multiple times. I mean, what I would do would be to take people and go, have you seen this movie? So, I’d go to see it with various friends of mine. I saw it probably in college, must have seen it once or twice, you know, and then when it was on home video, I bet I've seen it a couple dozen times.

So, you said that you had some time on your hands, I think in 2014, and you picked Harold and Maude as something to dive into. What was your research process, because even at that point, a lot of the main players on and off screen were gone? So, how did you approach it?

James Davidson: I started out by going to the Margaret Herrick library, which is in Beverly Hills, and made a trip down there. My wife and I made a trip down there and I did an initial day of research there, going through the files on the movie. And then I did a second trip. We lived in the Bay area at the time. So, I did a second trip down to Los Angeles shortly thereafter, because I hadn't gotten everything I needed. You know, I attempted to reach out and contact as many people as I could. Hal Ashby has been dead for a long time. Ruth Gordon, Colin Higgins, they've all passed away. I attempted to solicit Bud Cort for some help on the book. He was not responsive.

He is famous for that.

James Davidson: Yeah, and that sometimes happens. You know, it's hard to get people to participate even for a simple interview a lot of the time. I did contact Nick Dawson, who had written his biography on Hal Ashby and Nick was very helpful. Nick gave me all of his research notes to use, which were very helpful.

And I did get a hold of Jeff Wexler. He had worked on the movie as a kind of a prop master and general assistant to Hal Ashby and he was very helpful because he'd been there all through the making of the movie. The actors and some of the other people were there for a few days and Jeff was pretty much there the whole time. So, he was very helpful.

I talked to the woman who was Ruth Gordon’s stunt double, her stand in. I talked to her on the phone and talked to a fellow who was a just had a bit part in the movie. And I had some emails with Ellen Geer, who played Sunshine in the movie and Ellen gave me her recollections of the film. But it was a long time ago and, you know, for a lot of these people it was a week or two work, you know.

Nearly 50 years ago. What were you doing at work 50 years ago on a Tuesday?

James Davidson: Eventually my wife helped me locate Tom Skerritt who lives up in Washington State. Towards the end of my process, Tom gave me a call which was very nice of him. We talked for an hour or so about how and about the movie and that was great.

Your discussion with him that you touched on in the book, confirmed for me something I've thought for years. Because it took me a while to piece together who this M. Borman was in the film. And then I realized from the voice that it was obviously Tom Skerritt. And then in watching his scenes with Ruth Gordon, there's at least one point, maybe two, where he says something to her and her response has no connection with what he just said. And I realized finally, and you confirm that for me, that he was improvising with her. And Ruth Gordon doesn't do that. Ruth Gordon says the lines that were written.

And to have kept that in just added to their scenes together: he was on one plane, and she was on another. And I just think it's part of Ashby's genius that he allowed for that confusion for an audience member to go, he's saying one thing, and she's saying another, why is that? Did he talk about that at all?

James Davidson: Yeah, he talked about it to the extent that, you know, he was called into the movie kind of at the last minute. He wasn't supposed to be in it. I cover that in the book and I did find out some of the reasoning behind that. It’s in the book. It's one of the more interesting stories.

Just tell us quickly what happened to the poor actor who had the part before him?

James Davidson: Yeah, he cast an actor, his name escapes me at the moment, but he was going to play the motorcycle cop. The first time they got rained out. The second time they tried to shoot it, he took off on his motorcycle, and the motorcycle crashed because he hadn't put up the kickstand. And when he did turn it, it hit the ground. Very rough and he was hurt. He wasn't seriously injured or a long-term injury, but he couldn't be in the movie.

So, then they put the scene off again and then the last-minute Hal persuaded Tom Skerritt to come up from LA and do that part. So, Tom got the part at the last minute, he had to kind of come in quickly and learn his lines quickly. And he is just a more of an improvisational actor, and just came from a different generation and a different mindset for acting than Ruth Gordon did, who was a well-known Broadway actress, and you didn't diverge from the lines. A lot of the time she was doing, you know, Eugene O'Neill or somebody like that, and you're not going to start improvising on him. In this case, it was Colin Higgins.

And then there was also the issue of the fact that she couldn't really drive a car very well. So, her stunt double had to do a lot of her driving. So, a lot of the part where she's driving is her stunt double who is 20 years old. They created a rubber mask of Ruth Gordon's face for this young woman to wear while she's driving.

And it also explains why even when it's not raining, Maude will put up her hood before she starts to drive.

One of the other things you mentioned that it took me a long time to notice—and I am one of those people who'd seen the movie a lot—was during the motorcycle scene, the last one with Tom Skerritt, Bud Cort whacks himself pretty seriously in the side of the head with that shovel. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

James Davidson: Right. I had never noticed that in seeing the movie and it was brought up while listening to the commentary on the blu ray. He doesn't break. He carries on the scene and Hal used it in the movie. It adds a degree of realism.

It does. I mean, they had to get going and so he just kept going. Was there anything else you found out in your research that sort of surprised you that you hadn't noticed before?

James Davidson: I guess one thing that surprised me was I ended up going back to UCLA to the Special Collections Library at UCLA. And I went through Colin Higgins papers. They're all held at UCLA. Hal Ashby's and the production notes are at the Beverly Hills at the Margaret Herrick. But it was really useful to go to look through Colin Higgins notes.

I guess one of the more interesting things about it is the fact that Higgins was a graduate student in UCLA. And he wrote this script intending it to be just a 20-minute student film. It was the last of his three scripts that he'd written. And then with the encouragement of a lady named Mildred Lewis, he expanded it to from 20 minutes to a full-length feature. And her husband Ed helped sell the film to Paramount.

And the film really got produced almost as it was, in the way he had initially written it. It’s kind of crazy to think that and I think it probably only could have happened at that time, in the New Hollywood era in 1971, that a script could get written by such a novice to screenwriting from an original not from any source and be taken almost word for word and transferred to the screen. No changes were made, there weren't any rewrites of any significance that I could find. The film was more or less made by Paramount the way he'd written it.

I was surprised there'd been a short script. I didn't know it started that way and I was really surprised that the very first scene in the movie, the long continuous shot up to Harold hanging himself, is right there in the short, described exactly as it ended up being in the film.

James Davidson: As a matter of fact, Higgins said the reason he knew he could do it as a student film is that he found a place that would rent him a camera and crane that was all in one, so that he could do that shot where the feet get followed and then the camera lifts up to be behind Harold as he hangs himself. But yeah, that's the one constant as he expanded it. I mean, the finished one is quite a bit different from the original one. Although the central story of Harold and Maude meeting and falling in love is the same basically. He did expand quite a bit. He added a number of characters. He had the entire bit about the computer dating and the three girls. He added that a lot of Uncle Victor, I don't think Uncle Victor was a character, he wasn't a character in the original.

Was Glaucus in that, in the original short too?

James Davidson: Glaucus, yes, Glaucus was. I think his name was different. But yeah, he existed at the beginning, because they needed somebody to kind of help them with some of the things that they did. But yeah, Glaucus was in it.

That was another thing that always puzzled me before I could find out anything about Harold and Maude was Why is Cyril Cusack so highly billed? And he has one line, which is I think, “whatdya want?” and even I knew that he was a pretty well-known British stage actor, because the theater I was working at the time when they stopped running Harold and Maude were running some Pinter films, and he was in one of those. So, it always puzzled me as to why would an actor of that stature come all the way to America to do one line. And then of course, I find out that because Hal Ashby got started as an editor, he was pretty fearless in editing.

James Davidson: Yeah, the original cut of the movie was three hours long, which is kind of amazing. If you think about it, it ends up being 91 minutes. And yeah, there were a number of Glaucus scenes in the in the script that were cut completely. And he apparently really tried to keep some of them in, but they just didn't work as they were. So, he ended up having to eliminate almost all of them except for that one scene where Harold comes in and she's being sculpted in the buff. And even then, his part is very brief and then they talked about him a few other times.

And then the other thing that was kind of surprising was there was an entire character that was completely excised from the movie, Madame Arouet. She had a pretty significant part in the original script. She's in a lot of the scenes with Maude and he just felt the character was unnecessary and it just got cut and cut and finally ended up completely excised from the movie.

Hal made some good decisions about he reordered some of the scenes, because there's a lot of discussion between him and Robert Evans, the production chief of Paramount that I found where he talks about the importance of getting Maude into the movie early enough, so the audience doesn't lose interest. Keeping her scenes, the right order so that you know, we don't lose track of Maude, because we do get off onto a lot of Harold stuff at various points with the computer dates and Uncle Victor.

But he does a great job of really keeping track of Maude and developing their relationship over the course of it's just a few days in the movie, of course, but really well done. I mean, he was such a brilliant director and I could go on and on about Ashby. There's a great documentary that Amy Scott did about how that, I'm sure you've seen. It's great that even you know, of course it's very posthumous. But you know, he finally gotten some attention with the biography and the documentary. Really nice that finally some attention has been paid. His films are so great, and unfortunately his demise was kind of quick and he's just never got the opportunity. I talked about that in the book a little bit. He didn't get the opportunity to get that career renaissance, you know, while he was alive to get that real appreciation, which he would have if he if he lived.

So, I'm guessing that if there was anyone you could have talked to who was gone by the time you started his research, it would have been Hal. Who else would you really like to have been able to at least ask one question of and what would that have been?

James Davidson: Well, I tried to contact as many people as I could. I would have liked to have had Charles Mulvehill, who was Hal’s associate producer contribute to the book. For whatever reason he didn't want to. And there were several questions at the time about things that happened during the making of the movie. There was one particular incident that I could only find sort of peripheral information about that had to do with some conflict with Paramount over a driver: somebody had called in the middle of the night and woken everybody. I touched on it in the book, but I couldn't get all the details that I wanted. That kind of thing is helpful to have, you know, people to get clarification on what exactly happened. There were a lot of the people though, that either I couldn't get or wouldn't participate in the book.

A lot of them though, are on the record quite a bit for various interviews, and what not. Robert Evans and Peter Bart, both of whom were the Paramount production people, they've been interviewed extensively about the movie and the process of how it came about. I would have liked to clarify one thing: Peter Bart has said that there was a meeting before the movie started production where Hal Ashby came in with Cat Stevens, and they talked about making Harold and Maude into a freaky musical and this and that. I just don't think that happened the way he remembers it. Stevens was not picked to be the musical part of Harold and Maude until they were really making the movie. They were in San Francisco shooting it and he only came to the set in San Francisco where they were filming. So, I think he's remembering that wrong.

I do have one question about that and maybe you can answer it because, you know, we know that Cat Stevens came into the project late. They were still shooting and he did come up with two songs and one of them he taught to Ruth Gordon. But what's always puzzled me was—it's just such a dumb film techy question—when it came to Don't Be Shy, which Cat Stevens has said along with, If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out, were both essentially demos that he gave them thinking he was going to redo them later with more instrumentation. Don't Be Shy is exactly the right length for what happens in that shot. And I've always wondered: Did they have it when they shot it? Did they say to Cat Stevens, this is your slot, you need exactly X number of minutes? Do you have any idea how that worked?

James Davidson: I can't say for certain that I got out of anybody's mouth. But my guess is that no, they didn't give Cat an exact time and say, hey, you know, Don't Be Shy needs to be three minutes and 12 seconds or whatever it was. My guess would be that Hal edited the sequence to the song.

But Jim, it's all one shot. From the time Harold puts the needle on the record until the time that he kicks his foot off the stool and you can hear the rope swinging as he swings. The song ends at that moment. Which is why it's always puzzled me as to, you know—and it's like I say, it's a stupid film geek question. Did they get lucky? Or did they already have the song? Or what? So, it may be one of things will never know.

My other question that I would ask if I had Hal Ashby sitting in front of me and again, it’s another stupid question, is the point in the movie which the people in the Harold and Maude world called The Look, which is when Harold breaks the fourth wall and looks right at the camera. To my eye, it appears to be in slow motion. If you look at Vivian Pickles, she blinks, I think Harold blinks. It's clearly been slowed down a little tiny bit, which would have been something he would have had to do in post yet. Again, stupid film geek thing, you know, this is 1970-71 when they shot it. He would have had to make an inter-negative of it to do that and like all special effects at that time, there would have been a slight shift and there is none. Do you know anything about that moment?

James Davidson: I really don't. I know, they said that it was not planned, that it was improvised.

Well, next time you see it, look at it. I believe it he actually switches into slow motion in order to draw it out just a little bit longer to make that part work. But again, because it's over 50 years later, we're just never going to, we're never going to know. Do you have a favorite moment in the movie?

James Davidson: The closing sequence, the intercutting, between her going into the hospital and him waiting all night and then driving to the point in Pacifica, where the car goes over. And that was not done in the script that way. That was not written in the script that way. That was all done by Hal in the editing room.

Because there was dialogue in the hospital and that's clearly been cut.

James Davidson: Yeah, I love that sequence and it's set to of course very great piece of music, Trouble by Cat Stevens. And it's just a really, it's a great way to conclude the movie. And then you get the car going over the cliff, which they apparently had a lot of trouble with and there is that awkward still, which I guess he had to do. Again, that would be that would have been a good question to ask Hal, you know, I guess that had to be done maybe to match sound or something.

I think he was just trying to draw the moment out so that it was more of a moment that you had to watch.

James Davidson: Apparently, they only had one camera that got the—they had a ton of cameras shooting it—but there was some problems with starting the shot and some cameras rolled and other cameras didn't and some cameras had malfunction.

Yeah, that's every filmmaker’s nightmare.

James Davidson: And especially on that one scene where the car gets wrecked. Now, I should mention about the car that, after the book came out, I didn't have a lot of information about the car but after the book came out, I was contacted by a gentleman named Don Kessler and he works for a man who actually recreated the Harold and Maude hearse/limo. This gentleman expended quite a bit of money, doing an exact reproduction of the limo hearse. And he brought it to, we had a book signing in 2016 at the Western Railway Museum, where the rail cars located that was Maude's home. They brought the car, and I did a book signing and people could go through and tour the rail car.

Is the rail car still set up as her home?

James Davidson: It's not set up as her home like it is in the movie. Everything was taken out that they put in and it was reverted to what it is, which is a 1930s Pullman or something railcar. But the core of it, the carpeting and the some of the glass, things like that they are still there. You know, obviously a lot of the objects are taken out.

Right! Is there something that people often just get wrong about the movie that you think the book might help correct?

James Davidson: Well, one thing comes to mind, which is that some people have speculated that Cat Stevens does a cameo in the movie. And that's wrong, because the scene that they point out that he appears to be in was filmed before really Hal had even made a final decision on Cat Stevens being used. It's the scene at the at one of the funerals and she is standing there, and the camera looks across at her, at Maude, and there's a man standing near her who appears to resemble Cat Stevens: has a black beard and looks a little like him. And the timing of when that scene was shot, it can't be Cat Stevens. Aside from the fact that there's just no record of it. So that's, that's a minor point. I think that people get wrong.

Since the book has come out, since you wrote the book and it's been published, what else has come to light? Or who's approached you with new information? Or what has the book done to open up the world of Harold and Maude even more for you?

James Davidson: The most significant is Don contacted me about the car and all the work that was put in on the remake of the car. And they had some information about the original creation, the original Perce Jaguar car, you know, that they just couldn't be that forthcoming with it. It was apparently made by the same carmaker that made the Batmobile and some of the other crazy 1960s cars. I would have liked to have had more detail about that. I have talked with him some about it. I mean, I would probably if I was doing the book again, I would have more of an expansion on that.

Second edition? We need a second edition.

James Davidson: Yeah. Maybe it's not a huge part of the movie, but it is an interesting part of the movie.

And very well remembered by everyone.

James Davidson: Yeah, Colin Higgins originally wanted just a little British roadster, an MG. And Hal and the production designer for the film decided that a Jaguar would have more kind of punch, because they were very popular at the time.

You know, when the two-year anniversary of Harold and Maude at the Westgate happened here in Minneapolis, I was still in high school. But I had access to a lot of film gear, a lot of Super Eight film gear. And I also knew people who were working on the celebration. So, I was able to pretty much follow Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort around for the two days they were here and shot a documentary. I'll put a link to that in the show notes and I'll send you a link you can see. It's primarily looking at what they did when they got to the Westgate Theatre, but I did follow them around for two days. They would go from a press thing and I would run and get on a bus and try to follow them to the next press thing.

But because I knew the son of the film critic at the Star Tribune paper, I got to go to dinner with him and with Bud Cort. I don't remember a lot of it and I wasn't savvy enough to ask the right questions that I should have. Just because you know, I was 14 years old, 15 years old. What do you want? Give me a break. But I do remember Bud Cort saying the question that he is asked most frequently by anybody anywhere is, Did you really crash the car? And he would always say yes, the car is really crashed.

And so, all these years later, more than 50 years later, you've literally written the book on Harold and Maude. Why do you think it's survived and why it's so popular?

James Davidson: Well, people just are so personally responsive to the movie. They love it on a personal level. And I think that has something to do with the philosophy of Maude character. And a lot of people connect with that.

A lady came to the book signing who had a shirt that she'd made up that had some of the quotations that Maude makes in the movie. And you know, somebody brought Oat straw tea and ginger pie. They had a lot of these things. They really take it personally. They love those little touches. They feel a deep connection with both the Harold and the Maude characters.

And it maybe says something that, you know, this is a movie that's about death in a way and fake suicides and is a little morbid sometimes and has severe black humor to it, but people connect with it personally.

They love it and it's a great movie and it's a wonderful film and it's just got some quality that everybody connects to.

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Amy Scott on "Hal" (The Hal Ashby Documentary)

July 19, 2023

CLICK HERE FOR A PODCAST VERSION OF THIS INTERVIEW

First, I want to say thank you for making the movie and thank you for making such a great movie because he totally deserved it. I would always wonder why of all the directors of the 70s and 80s, he was never really heralded the way he should have been. I think part of it has to do with that he had no discernible style. So, you couldn't really pick him for something. But before we dive into that, tell me a little bit about your background before you made Hal?

Amy Scott: Well, I'm from Oklahoma. I moved to Chicago, out of college and in college, we studied a lot of, I had a great professor at ODU at the University of Oklahoma. I don't think he's there anymore. But he really hipped us to the coolest documentaries. I had no idea that you could be a documentary filmmaker, like from Chris Marker to the 7-Up series to Hands on a Hard Body. It was just a really great, great, well-rounded Film and Media Program.

Anyway, I moved to Chicago. I wanted to be a director and a DP, but I fell down, I had gotten a job at the University of Chicago. I think I faked my way into it. I was supposed to start on a Monday, and I fell on the ice and broke my arm on a Friday. So I was like, “I can't shoot. I can't film. I can't use my arm to film and hold the camera. I need to learn how to edit. So I learned how to edit with my right hand, and I loved it. And then I just did that for like 10 years. Well, I mean, I still do it. But it was like this accidental career path.

You're an accidental editor.

Amy Scott: An accidental editor. That became something that later, I just valued as such an important skill set. I use it now. I have wonderful editors that I work with. But we speak the same language. And I think with the story structure, that you have an eye for things in the edit bay and now it really, really helps my ability to break down a three-act structure or figure out where the narrative arc is, and things like that. I think would have taken me a lot longer, had I not fallen and broken my arm.

It was sort of a similar path for Hal Ashby, starting in editing.

Amy Scott: Totally. I loved his films and then when I read Nick Dawson's book, and I started to learn more about him, I really, really connected with him. Because of things that he would say about filmmaking and editing and being in the edit bay and being obsessed with every frame. I felt like, being seen and heard. Like, “Oh, this is how I feel about it, too. I don't feel like such a freak of nature, and lots of people feel this way.” I really connected with Hal and he didn't make The Landlord I believe until he was 40 years old.

He was up there.

Amy Scott: Yeah, up there.

For a first-time filmmaker, that's a late start.

Amy Scott: And that was about the same age that I made the Hal movie.

What was your first experience with a Hal Ashby movie?

Amy Scott: The first film that I saw that I can remember was with my friend Jason in college. I was watching Truffaut and Cassavetes and so I thought that I had a very well-rounded understanding of the new Hollywood. And my friend Jason said, “Have you ever seen Harold and Maude?” I had no idea what he was talking about. He was a couple years older, and he was like, “Oh, honey, you're gonna skip school today. We're gonna watch it.” And I swear to God, we watched it. I couldn't believe what it was. I couldn't believe I'd never seen it. It somehow gone past me.

As soon as it was over, I was like, “Stop. Start it again.” We have to rewatch it. We where there for like eight hours, watching it on a loop. David Russell compares it to The Catcher in the Rye as a sort of like rite of passage for people at that age. It hit me right straight through the heart. And then from there, I think I saw The Landlord, someone had screen of The Landlord in Oklahoma City. And I was like, oh my god, this is incredible.

I live in Minneapolis, where Harold and Maude ran at The Westgate theater for two and a half years. I saw the movie quite a bit there. And then, because I was in a film program, and knew someone who knew the film critic for the local paper, when Ruth and Bud came to town for the two-year anniversary, he sorts of dragged me along with him. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort and hung out a little bit with Ruth Gordon. I made a little documentary on Super 8mm of my perspective on their experiences. I was 15 years old or something and although I knew their itinerary, I couldn't drive. And so I would go to the TV station and shoot some stuff there with them and then they were on to something else. I had to hop on a bus to keep up with them.

Amy Scott: That's incredible.

Yes, my only regret was on that when I had dinner with Bud that I didn't ask better questions. I was sort of starstruck and there's a lot of question. I would ask him now—that I've tried to ask him—but you know, he's not too communicative.

Amy Scott: Yeah. That's incredible that you that you have that footage and I would love to see it.

It was really, really fun and interesting. Ruth Gordon was very much Ruth Gordon, very much Maude. She didn't suffer fools. So, you've seen Harold and Maude, seen The Landlord. At what point did you decide that a documentary had to be made?

Amy Scott: Well, okay, I was pregnant with my first child, and was finishing up Nick Dawson's book on Hal, you know, on Hal’s life. And I thought, I just couldn't believe there was a documentary. But this is before the market became oversaturated with a story about everyone's life. At the time, I just thought, oh my gosh, there's so much here. This guy, his films should be really celebrated. And he should be more known and revered in the canon of American 70s New Hollywood, because he's so influential.

And that's why it was important that we include David O Russell and Adam McKay, and Allison Anders, Judd Apatow. They could draw a direct connections, like the film family tree. When you see the wide shots in Harold and Maude, you think of Wes Anderson. Or, you know, the music, you think of David O Russell. I mean, his influence was everywhere. I started to connect the dots and I thought, oh, my gosh, we've got to, we've got to make a film here.

But I'd never done anything like that. I had directed smaller documentaries. I tried to make a film about this band called The Red Crayola and that was a hilarious attempt on my part. To try to chase them around the globe and on no money. That was my only experience outside of editing. So, fortunately, I had hooked up with my producing partners that I still work with now. I just met them at the time and they hired me to edit some cat food commercials. So it was editing Friskies or Purina, I don't know what it was. It was just looking at cats all day.

And I was about to give birth but I was working trying to lock down the rights And the rights came through one afternoon and I just pulled them (the producers) in and I was like, let's do this together. We didn't know what the hell we were doing, but it was so great and so fun. We approached it, like, all hands-on deck, and we were a little family making this thing. So, that spirit has continued, thank goodness, because of what we put into the Ashby movie.

What do you think were his unique qualities as a director?

Amy Scott: Gosh, so much. I just think he really had an eye. He could see stories. You said something earlier, that all of his films are not the same and therefore it's hard to go, oh, he's this style of filmmaker. But the thing that they all have in common is that he has a very real and raw approach at looking at humanity. Sort of holding the mirror up and showing us who we are, with all of our faults and complexities and layers of contradictions and failures. So he's able to see that and find the stories of humanity. And that's the connective tissue for me. He also had a sick musical taste; I mean, he sort of found Cat Stevens. The soundtrack to Shampoo—I think that's why it's not in wide release right now, as I can’t imagine having to license Hendrix and Janis and the Beach Boys, you know?

That's true. But I'll also say he had the wisdom to let Paul Simon do the small musical things he did in Shampoo, which are just as powerful or if not more powerful.

Amy Scott: So, powerful. So much restraint. Incredibly powerful. I feel like Hal, because he was not—from all of our research and talking to everyone and girlfriends and collaborators—he wasn't a dictatorial director. He didn't lay down mandates. He was really open to hearing from everybody and making it feel like it was a democratic scene and everyone has an equal voice. If you had an idea, speak up.

But at the end of the day, he was like, okay, here's the vision. And once he had that vision, I think that's where he really got into problems with the studio system. Because that was such a different time. The studio guys thought that they were also the director, that they were also the auteur. I cannot imagine a world where you throw your entire life into making a film and then a studio head comes along and tries to seize it from you. I mean, that would give me cancer, you know, from the stress. I can't imagine.

It certainly didn't match with his personality at all.

Amy Scott: No, not at all. What I thought was so fascinating was how open he was to ideas. I love that about him and it resonates in my microscopic ways of connecting to that now. Man, every time it pops up, I'm like, I feel this little Hal Ashby devil angel on my shoulders.

Yes, but it's odd. Because it's not like they didn't know what they were getting. It's not like he hid that part of his personality. You would know, immediately from meeting him that...

Amy Scott: Yeah.

With Harold and Maude, it was just a weird perfect storm of a crazy executive like Robert Evans saying yes to all these weird things. And then the marketing team at Gulf and Western/Paramount going, “we have no idea what to do.” You know, I had the Harold and Maude poster hanging for years. And it's the most obvious example of a studio that cannot figure out how to market a movie. The Harold and Maude different color name thing. It's just so obviously they didn't know what do.

Amy Scott: I know I love when Judd Apatow was talking about that. That's really funny.

So, what was the biggest thing that surprised you as you learned more about Hal?

Amy Scott: What surprised me was that side of his temperament. He did look like this peace love guy. He was an attractive man but, you know, this long hair and long beard and so cool and I had a really myopic like view of what I thought his personality was. I thought he was a super mellow guy. And then I got in and started reading the letters. My producer, Brian would read the letters in his voice as a temp track that we would use that to edit to cut the film. And we were rolling, dying, laughing, like falling down, like, oh, my God, I cannot believe that Hal would write some of this shit to the head of Paramount or whoever. It was like, wow, this guy is not at all who I thought. These were fiery missives that he was shooting off into space.

It wasn't like just getting mad and writing an email. I mean, he had to sit on a typewriter.

Amy Scott: Typewriter and they were very, very long. I mean, the sections that we used in the film, were obviously heavily cut. We couldn't show like six pages of vitriol. The best part about the vitriol though, he wasn’t just vomiting, anger. It was a very poetic. He had a very poetic way of weaving together his frustration and expletives in a way that I just loved.

And then we turned the papers over to Ben Foster. That's why we wanted him to narrate—be the voice of Hal—because he's always struck me as an artist that totally gets it. Not a studio guy and he was all over it. He was right. You can really identify with this sort of, you're either with us or against us artists versus, the David and Goliath. So, that was most fascinating to me.

I knew—because of the book, because Nick did such a great job—I knew Hal’s story. Leaving his child, leaving Leigh. It's one thing to read about it in a book and it's a completely different thing to go meet that person, to sit with her. She's since become a dear friend to me. I feel like she'd never really spoken about that, about her dad and that time of her of her life. I think revisiting trauma on that level, and working through a lot of those emotions with her, was really heavy and not what I intended. When I set out to make the film, I was thinking about the films of Hal Ashby. I didn't think it would get as heavy as it did. I'm glad that we went there and that she took us with her. I feel really, really thankful. I think she got a lot out of it. We certainly did.

It really did show you just how complicated he was, the reality of his life, when you see the child. And she was so eloquent on screen.

Amy Scott: So great. He had some generational trauma too and then you put it all together, and you're like, okay, well, this is somebody that's really adept at looking deep into the human condition. He’d been through a lot. He'd made a lot of mistakes and he's been through a lot. So, of course, this checks out. And he's just so talented and creative, that he can make these films that are this really accurate, fun and funny and sad and tragic and beautiful portrayals of humanity.

Well, let's just if we can't dive into a couple of my favorites just to see if anything you walked away with.

Obviously, Harold and Maude hold a special place in my heart. I've just loved reading Nick’s book and reading and hearing in your film and in listening to commentaries about what Hal did to wrestle Harold and Maude into the movie that it is. I forget who it was on one of the commentaries who said there were so many long speeches by Maude that you just ended up hating her. And Hal’s editor's ability to go and just trim it and trim it and trim it. I compare what he did there to what Colin Higgins went on to do when he directed and he simply didn't have it. He had the writing skill, obviously, and the directing skills. He didn't have that editor’s eye. I don't think there's a Colin Higgins movie made that couldn't be 20 minutes shorter. If Hal had gone into Foul Play and edited it down, it would have been a much stronger comedy. 9 to 5 would have been 20 minutes shorter. Probably a little stronger. Anyway, you don't recognize that. It's all hidden. It's the edit. You don't know what he threw away and that's the beauty of Harold and Maude: within this larger piece he found that movie and found the right way to express it. So, what did you learn about that movie that might have surprised you?

Amy Scott: Everything surprise me about it. You know, we were never able to get Bud Cort. You know Bud Curt, he's so special and so elusive and we thought we thought we were gonna get him a couple times and then it was just a real difficult thing.

But you have him from the memorial service, and that's a great thing.

Amy Scott: Oh, yeah. Anytime he's on camera, he's bewitching. He's incredible. So we went again with the letters. I just didn't realize that Bud and Hal we're so close. I mean, obviously, they were close. But they were very tight. They had a real father son, sort of bond.

Charles Mulvehill, the producer, also talked about how difficult it was to make the film. I didn't know that Charles ended up marrying one of the women that is on the dating service that Harold's mom tries to set up. That was interesting, too. It's hard for me, to tell you the truth. We did so much research on all the films, so there's little bits and pieces of all.

Jumping away from Harold and Maude—just because my brain is disorganized—Diane Schroeder was with Hal for a number of years and she's in the film. She was sort of a researcher archivists, she wore many hats. I did not realize that on Being There, she really needed to nail down what was on the television Chauncey Gardiner learned everything from TV, so it was really important what was on it. When he's flipping, it's not random. She and Hal would take VHS tapes in or I guess it would have been Beta at the time, whatever the fidelity was, but they would record hundreds of hours of TV and watch it. She got all these TV Guides from that year, 1981. But what was a three year’s span, she had all the TV Guides.

She had everything figured out. It was like creating the character of Chauncey Gardiner, with Hal and then Peter Sellars got involved, and he had certain thoughts about it, too. I was just so blown away by the fact that that much care and effort and painstaking detail would go into it. When you see it on screen, it's definitely a masterpiece because of those things. Just the defness of editing, of leaving things out, is what makes it good. That is such a such a really hyper detailed behind the scenes thing to know that. When we were going through his storage space. I remember asking Diane, why are there boxes and boxes and boxes of TV. She said, “oh, yeah, that's Chancy Gardener's.” I said, I cannot believe you guys saved this. Really funny.

It's interesting because they would have done all that in post now. And they had to get that all figured out, before they were shooting it. That’s a lot of pre-production.

Amy Scott: Oh, an immense amount of pre-production. Hal set up an edit bay in his bedroom. It’s the definition of insanity. I had that going on at one point in my life and it's not good. It's not good thing to roll over and it's like right there like right next to pillows staring at you. You need some distance.

When I saw Being There for the first time for some reason I was in Los Angeles/ I saw it and of course loved it. And then came back to Minneapolis and someone had seen it and said, “don't you love the outtakes?” And I said, “What outtakes?” They said, “over the end credits, all those outtakes with Peter Sellars.” And I said, “there were no outtakes.” In the version in LA, they didn't do that.

Amy Scott: I wanted to add this, but we just ran out of time. We found all these Western Union telegrams that Peter Sellars wrote to Hal, just pissed, just livid, furious about that. He said, “You broke the spell. You broke the spell. God dammit, you broke the spell.” He was so pissed that they included those outtakes and I agree with them.

It’s not a real normal Hal move, is it?

Amy Scott: No, it's honestly the first time that I'd ever seen blooper outtakes in a film like that. That’s such an interesting 80s style, shenanigans and whatnot. But, yeah, no, you want them to walk out on the water after watching him dip umbrella in the water and think about that for the rest of your life.

Exactly. I think they left it out of the LA version for Academy purposes, thinking that would help with the awards. But then years later to look at the DVD and see the alternate ending and go, well, that’s terrible. I'm glad you guys figured that out. And then apparently, was it on the third take that somebody said, he should put his umbrella down into the water?

Amy Scott: That's so smart.

It's so smart. Alright. Shampoo is another favorite. I'm curious what you learned about that one, because you had three very strong personalities making that movie with Robert Towne on one side and Warren Beatty on the other and Hal in the middle. It's amazing that it came out as well as it did. Somehow Hal wrangled it and did what he did. What did you learn there that sort of surprised you?

Amy Scott: Well, that aspect is what we wanted to really investigate. Because Hal had a pretty singular vision. Hal as a director—at that stage—was becoming a very important filmmaker. So, then how do you balance the styles of Robert Towne and Warren Beatty? These guys are colossal figures in Hollywood, Alpha dogs. I wish that we could have sat with Warren. It was not for lack of trying. I think a lot of these guys that we couldn't get, it's like, yeah, that's what makes him so cool.

Bruce Dern. I was trying to chase down Bruce Dern at the Chase Bank, and he got up one day and I was just like, I knew, let it go.

But Shampoo, everything we learned, we put in the film. Robert Towne talked to us. And then there was the audio commentary that Hal had from his AFI seminars. Caleb Deschanel spoke pretty eloquently about it being like watching a ping pong match going back and forth between Robert and Warren about what the direction should be. And then the director sitting in a chair probably smoking a joint, waiting for them to finish. It seems like they might have needed a sort of mediator type presence to guide the ship, like have a soft hand with it, you know?

You can't have three alphas in the room at the same time. Nothing would get done. You need a neutralizing force and it seems like that's what Hal was it. He just had a really great taste, you know? My favorite element of that movie—besides Julie Christie's backless dress—would be Jack Warden. Anytime Jack Warden comes on screen, I'm like, just want to hang with him for another half hour. I can just watch that man piddle around and be funny.

I remember reading an interview with Richard Dreyfus after Duddy Kravitz came out, in which he was blasting the director, saying that they ruined Jack Warden’s performance in post-production. And Jack Warden is amazing in Duddy Kravitz. I don't know what they he thinks they did to it, because he's just fantastic.

Amy Scott: He must have just been astronomically amazing and funny, which is what I imagined he's was like.

I took away two things from Shampoo. One was—having seen Harold and Maude as often as I did—recognizing that the sound effects of the policeman's motorcycle as being the same one as George's motorcycle as he's going up the Hollywood Hills. Exact same ones.

But the last shot as he's looking down on Julie Christie's house and the use of high-angle shot, it is one of the saddest things I've ever seen. It's just a guy standing on an empty lot looking down onto the houses below, but it's … I don't know. Given the guys he was dealing with, I don't know how he made that into a Hal Ashby movie, but he did.

Amy Scott: He did. Well, it seems like it's moments like that yeah, there's so much melancholy loaded into that moment. Because George is such an interesting character. Now, I'm realizing that you and I have just blown, we've just spoiled the ending shots of both Being There and Shampoo.

Anybody listening to this who hasn't seen those movies deserves to be spoiled.

Amy Scott: Get on the boat. But yeah, that always got me. I think it's all of those really like, foggy misty Mulholland Drive shot of George on his motorcycle, anytime he's alone. Because he crams his life so full of women to try to fill the hole or the void or whatever he's got going on that's missing in his life. And he's just trying to shove it full of women. So, when he's alone, and he has nothing and no one you're like, oh, my God, this is the saddest thing I've ever seen.

It really is. I don't know. Maybe you can fill me in on this. I remember reading somewhere that the scene—his last scene with Goldie Hawn—they went back and they reshot it because somebody said he's standing. He should be sitting. And I'm always interested in directors who hear that and are willing to go back and do it.

The other example is Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People in his last scene. Telling Redford, “I did it wrong. I should be done crying. I was crying when I should have been done crying.” and they went back and reshot. His portion of it is no longer crying because the director went, you're right. And that simple notion of Warren Beatty should be sitting down, and she should be standing over him.

Amy Scott: She's got the power.

Yes. But I'm not sure a lot of directors would have said yes to that. Like, “We don't need to go back and do that. We're overscheduled we got other stuff to do …”

Amy Scott: Oh, I don't think Hal cared about the schedule at all. Everything that I read or, you know, even Jeff Bridges talked about, like them being over budget and he's like, “you know, all right, let's figure out a creative solution to this. It's going to take as long as it's going to take.” He never seemed to really get riled onset or let those sorts of parameters hold all the power and guide the filmmaking. He was in complete control of that.

Having that sort of attitude about things, that just spreads to the whole set. That spreads everywhere and makes it easier for everybody to work.

Amy Scott: It does.

Let's do one last one. Coming Home is interesting for me because I had friends who ran a movie theater here in town. It was just a couple of running it and I would come by from time to time if they were busy. I’d go up and run the projector for them. They had one of those flat plate systems, so you only had to turn the projector on. It wasn't that big a deal. But you know, I was young and it's like okay, now I'm going to turn the house lights down … I got to see the first five minutes of Coming Home a lot. Probably more than I saw the rest of the movie. Was there anything you learned about the making of that film that surprised you?

Amy Scott: Yeah, I didn't realize how hard it was to get that film made. Jane Fonda is the one that's really responsible for Coming Home even existing. Nancy Dowd had a book and Jane really fought hard to get it made. By the time it got to Hal, it was different, there was a number of rewrites. And it obviously had to be cut down significantly.

I never think—it's never my go-to—to think that one of the actors is the one responsible. Usually it comes to you in a different way, and especially if he's working with Robert Towne and the like. But I thought that was really cool and really interesting that Jane spoke about showing what our veterans were going through. This wasn't new, because you had like The Deer Hunter would have been the comparable. And that's a wildly different take on what coming home from the Vietnam War was like. But also, the woman's journey in that film, and the sexuality of all of that was just like, wow. Only Jane Fonda can speak about it eloquently as Jane Fonda does.

I also didn't realize— when we were sitting with John Voigt—that he was really method in the way that he didn't get out of his chair, I mean, for days on end. Going into crafty in the chair, learning how to do go up ramps and play basketball and all the things that you see was because he wouldn't get out of the chair, which was wonderful.

I really enjoyed talking with Jeff Wexler, and Haskell. That interview that we did with Haskell, I'm so thankful for because, you know, Haskell passed away, not that long after we film. That was one of his last interviews. So, it was really special. He came to the set and Haskell is like, a film God to me and my team. For me, I lived in Chicago so Medium Cool, was one of the coolest things ever. Meeting him and talking with him was so interesting.

I loved hearing about the opening. You can just tell it’s Haskell Wexler. You know it's a Hal Ashby film, but the way it starts and having seen Medium Cool, and going into that opening scene, where the all the vets are non-professional actors. They were actual vets that had come home and those were their true real stories. Now we would say it's sort of hybrid documentary and scripted, but it was like a really early use of that kind of style. And that's what made it feel so real and then you start in with the Rolling Stones, it's just such a masterly, powerful film.

I'm always curious about that sort of thing where he has a lot of footage and he's creating the movie out of it and what would Hal Ashby be like today? How different would his life be if he had everything at his fingertips and it’s not hanging out a pin over in a bin and he had to remember where everything was? I don't know if that would have been any made any difference at all?

Amy Scott: He was an early pioneer of digital editing. He was building his giant rigs and was convincing everyone that digital is the way to go. Which is so cool and so mind blowing. But I think it was born out of a place of independent film, of democratizing the access and taking the power away from the studios. And knowing that you could do this cheaply in your home. It was so actually tragic to learn that. What could he have done? Because his output was just, he put out so much so many great movies. So, what could he have done if the infrastructure was even more accessible and sped up technologically?

Imagine an 8-part streaming series directed by Hal Ashby, what would that be?

Amy Scott: Just be incredible. Well, I know that he was wanting to work. He had so many films that we found. And we found script after script. One of them, I was so, “damn, that would have been cool,” was The Hawkline Monster. A Richard Brautigan science fiction Western novel. It's so trippy and so cool. I feel like every couple of years, I hear about some directors says, “we got the rights, we're gonna make it.” And I'm like, when are they gonna make it? It's so long.

And imagine what his version of Tootsie would have been.

Amy Scott: Oh, I know. Yeah. No joke.

Just seeing those test shots. Wow.

Amy Scott: I know, it would have been a different film.

I read a quote somewhere that one of the producers or maybe it was Sydney Pollack, who said, they took the script to Elaine May. And she said, “yeah, it just needs…” And then she listed like five things: He needs a roommate that he can talk to … the girl on the TV show, she needs a father, so he can become involved with him … there also has to be a co-worker who is interested in him as a woman … the director needs to be an ass, he should probably be dating the woman. It was like five different things. She said the script is fine, but you need these five things. So, what did they have? She just listed the whole movie.

Amy Scott: Right. Well, we're talking about Elaine May. She’s someone that needs a film.

She does. And why aren’t you doing that?

Amy Scott: Listen, I'm telling you. I've tried. This is another one that I've tried for years. You know, here’s a real shocker: It's hard to get a film about a female filmmaker funded. It's a hard sell.

She probably wouldn't want to do it anyway

Amy Scott: She's so cool. My approach has always been that she has so much to teach us still. So, I would love to get her hot takes on all those films. A New Leaf. I mean, the stories behind that thing getting made.

Like the uncut version of A New Leaf.

Amy Scott: Exactly. I want to hear it from her. So, yeah, that's high up on my list. I really, really want to make one with Elaine.

Was there anyone else you really wanted to get to? You mentioned Warren didn't want to talk to you. Anybody else?

Amy Scott: I would have loved Julie Christie or, you know, more women would have been great. Bruce Dern was so great and so funny and I’d seen him a number of times. I saw he was at a screening of one of his movies. He talked for like, an hour and a half before they even screened the film. He was whip smart in his memories. I was so upset that we couldn't work it out because I knew that he would be incredible.

Just his knowledge of movie industry, having been in it so long.

Amy Scott: My gosh, yeah.

He even worked with Bette Davis.

Amy Scott: Yeah, he's national treasure. Exactly. I was just staring at a poster. I have framed poster of Family Plot in my kitchen.

That's the movie that was going to make him a star, according to Hitchcock. It still has one of the greatest closing shots of all time. I think I read that Barbara Harris improvised the wink, and that's another person who you should make a documentary about.

Amy Scott: Oh my gosh. Barbara Harris is something. Do you remember what was the film that she was in with? Dustin Hoffman and Dr. Hook scored it. It's a really long title.

Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?

Amy Scott: That is such a phenomenal Barbara Harris performance. I mean, Dustin Hoffman is incredible. He's always great. But Barbara Harris really shines and I guess I'm like, that's who she was. Yeah, I think she was difficult. Well, I don't know, difficult.

She had stuff she was dealing with.

Amy Scott: She had issues and Hal had to deal with those on Second Hand Hearts too.

From a production standpoint, people are interested in hearing what your Indiegogo process was Any tips you'd have for someone who wants to fund their film via Indiegogo?

Amy Scott: Oh, boy. Well, that was a different time, because I really don't know how films are funded at the moment. This came out five years ago, but it took us like six years to make. So, during in that time, you could at least raise enough capital to get through production.

The Indiegogo campaign enabled it so that we could even make the movie, because everything past that point, nobody ever got paid at all. But at least that way, we could buy film stock and pay the camera operators and our DPs and stuff. So, that was hugely important.

At the time, I remember thinking like, oh, no, how are we ever going to get anybody to because you had to make these—I don't know if this is still the case—but you had to make these commercials for your project or like a trailer to get people's attention. And you had to be all over Facebook and crap like that. So, I was like, oh, no, how am I going to make a thing that shows that Hal Ashby's important to people that want to give money?

A friend somehow knew John C. Reilly and mentioned it to him. It was like, we just need a celebrity to come in for like, you know, half a day or one hour. And he said, I'll come on down and do that. And he came. I couldn't believe it. The generosity of this man. He didn't know us at all. But he knew and loved the films of Hal Ashby and wanted to give back and pay it forward.

So, he came down and because of him, we have a really funny, awesome little commercial trailer. I have no idea where that thing even is. I'd love to see it because I had to do it with him, which was terrifying, because I am not a front of camera person. I didn’t know what to say. And he said, All you have to do is ask for money. I'll all do the rest of the talking.

I remember seeing it.

Amy Scott: It’s been stripped from Indiegogo which probably means that we used a song that we weren't able to. That was back in the early days of crowdfunding, where you could just take images or songs and I'm sure I used the music of Cat Stevens, and then, loaded up with a bunch of photos that we never paid for.

Well, that brings up a question of how did you get all the rights to the stuff you got for the finished movie? Was that a huge part of your budget?

Amy Scott: No. The most expensive thing always to this day is music. Music is going to get you. Outside of that, thank goodness, there's this little thing called fair use now, which wasn't the case in documentary filmmaking for a very long time. But now you can fair use certain elements, photographs, or news clips, video clips, anything that sort of supports your thesis that you're making about your subject and supports your storyline falls under the category of fair use.

So, I think what our money did pay for is the fair use attorneys that that really go over your product. They went over out fine cut, because we couldn't afford to pay for multiple lawyers to look at it. So you give them a fine cut, you hold your breath and hope that they say, oh, you know, you only have to take out a couple things. And you're like, oh, thank God. Okay, and then you change it.

I believe, because we never had any money, that we submitted to Sundance and got in on a wing and a prayer. And then had, you know, two weeks to turn the film around and get it, finished. I remember we were like, you know, pulling all these all nighters, trying to change the notes that the legal said XY and Z was not fair use and trying to swap out music with our composer. It was a wild, wild run.

Isn’t that always the way? You work on it for six years and then suddenly you have two weeks to finish it.

Amy Scott: That's how it shook out for us. It was like really, really pretty funny, because you're going on a leisurely pace until you're not. And then it's like, alright, it's real now. I thought for years, I think my friends and casual acquaintances thought that I've lost my mind. Because every year, I'd see people that I would see occasionally and they're like, hey, how's it going? What are you working on? I'm like, I'm just working on this Ashby's movie. And they were like, year after year, like damn. She's like, we need to reel her in and we need to throw her a lifeline. No, really, I really, really am. So, it was pretty funny. We were. We did it.

People have no idea how long these things take.

Amy Scott: It's unfunded. But you know, then we got lucky after that, because we nearly killed ourselves on Hal. Then we kind of fell into the era of streaming deals and streamers. And then people were like, oh, we want to make biopics and we want to give you money to make a biopic. And that was truly our first rodeo. We're like, oh, my gosh, what? This is incredible. We can get paid for this.

Now that's falling away. This streaming industry is, you know, collapsing in on itself as it should, because there's no curation anymore. And it's like, let's return to form a little bit here, guys. So, we're just riding the wave. I say it's like we're riding trying to learn how to ride a mechanical bull this industry. I’m a tomboy. So, every local Oklahomans is up for the ride.

Let me ask you one last question. I'll let you go then. So, as a filmmaker, what did you learn doing a deep dive into the work of this director and editor and you are a director and editor? So, that's sort of a scary thing to do anyway, to be the person who's going to edit Hal Ashby. What did you learn in the process that you can still take away today?

Amy Scott: Well, listen, we joke about it all the time. My producer, Brian Morrow and I are constantly going, oh, what would Hal do? Everything that he stood for, as a filmmaker. The film will tell you what to do. Get in there, be obsessed be the film, all of those things.

I get this man because I feel the same way. So, when we like took a real bath in Hal Ashby's words for years, that sort of that shapes the rest of your life as a filmmaker. You're not like a casual filmmaker after going through like the Ashby's carwash. That stuff's sticks.

But I'm proud. I'm proud that that we pulled it off. I'm proud that we were able to make the movie. Somebody would have done it, because Hal is too great and too good, and he just has deserved it for so long.

The only thing that we've ever wanted was that we wanted people to go back and watch his films, or to watch him for the first time if they had never seen him. And then to take his creative spirit forward. Be in love with the thing that you make. It’s your lifeforce.

So, otherwise, what is it all for, you know? So, yeah, that's what I got from him.

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