Hal Ashby

William Hal Ashby (September 2, 1929 – December 27, 1988) was an American film director and editor.

His work exemplified the countercultural attitude of the era.

He directed wide ranging films featuring iconic performances.

He is associated with the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking with filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, and Sidney Lumet.

Ashby was born September 2, 1929, in Ogden, Utah, the youngest of four siblings born to Mormon parents Eileen Ireta (née Hetzler) and James Thomas Ashby, a dairy farm owner.

Ashby's parents divorced in 1936, after which his father remarried.

Following the divorce, Ashby and his siblings lived with their mother, briefly in Logan, Utah, before relocating to Portland, Oregon, where his elder brother took a job in the timber industry.

His mother, a cooking enthusiast, opened a restaurant in Portland.

After several years in Portland, the family returned to Ogden, where Ashby primarily lived with his father.

When Ashby was 12 years old, his father committed suicide.

Ashby subsequently dropped out of high school.

Ashby-approved studio biographies concealed this, falsely stating that he graduated from Utah State University (situated in nearby Logan, Utah) to ensure he fit into the social milieu of college-educated peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Ashby was married and divorced by the time he was 19.

As Ashby was entering adult life, he moved from Utah to Los Angeles, California, where he pursued a bohemian lifestyle and ultimately became an assistant film editor through a long apprenticeship.

While his birth date placed him within the Silent Generation, the filmmaker (who had been a habitual marijuana smoker since 1950) eagerly embraced the hippie lifestyle, adopting vegetarianism and growing his hair long before it became de rigueur.

Over the next ten years, Ashby directed several acclaimed and popular films, many were about outsiders and adventurers traversing the pathways of life.

Although Southern (who had not had a screenplay go to production in a decade) was rejuvenated by the prospect of working with the duo and produced a script that was said to be on par with his 1960s oeuvre, the project went into development hell after Sellers' sudden death from a heart attack in July 1980.

During this period, the productions of Second-Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out —the latter a Las Vegas caper that reunited him with Voight and featured Voight's young daughter, Angelina Jolie—was plagued by the increasingly strained relationship between Ashby and Lorimar.

His career gained momentum when he served as the editor of The Loved One (1965), an adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel that involved such New Hollywood contemporaries as screenwriter Terry Southern and cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

Before his career as a director Ashby edited films for Norman Jewison, notably The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), which earned Ashby an Oscar nomination for Best Editing, and In the Heat of the Night (1967), which earned him his only Oscar for the same category.

After being nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing in 1967 for The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, his big break occurred one year later when he won the award for In the Heat of the Night.

Ashby often stated that the practice of editing provided him with the best filmmaking background outside traditional university study and he carried the techniques learned as an editor with him when he began directing.

Other films directed by Ashby include The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), and Being There (1979).

At the urging of mentor Norman Jewison, Ashby directed his first film, The Landlord—an early rumination on the social dynamics of gentrification in Park Slope, Brooklyn—in 1970.

They included the off-beat romance Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), and the social satire Being There (1979), with Peter Sellers, giving the star a well-received role after many felt he had lapsed into self-parody.

In June 1973, Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz hired Ashby to direct One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, after the original director Miloš Forman became unavailable due to the reimposition of censorship in his native Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and after Forman's initial replacement Richard Rush was unable to secure studio funding.

Ashby was responsible for casting Jack Nicholson as R.P. McMurphy, but this resulted in a nine-month delay during which Forman fled to the United States and was rehired as director.

His most significant commercial success was Shampoo (1975), a collaboration with Warren Beatty and Robert Towne that satirized late-1960s sexual and social mores through the life of a hairdresser modeled after such contemporaneous figures as Jay Sebring and Jon Peters.

Bound for Glory (1976), a muted biography of Woody Guthrie starring David Carradine, was the first film to utilize the Steadicam.

Ashby received a third Oscar nomination, this time for Best Director for Coming Home (1978).

Aside from Shampoo, Ashby's most commercially successful film was the Vietnam War drama Coming Home (1978).

Starring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, both in Academy Award-winning performances, it was for this film that Ashby earned his only Best Director nomination from the Academy.

Arriving in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era, Coming Home was one of the last films to encapsulate the modestly budgeted, socially realistic ethos of the New Hollywood era, earning nearly $15 million in returns and rentals on a $3 million budget.

Because of his critical success and dependable profitability, shortly after the success of Coming Home, Ashby was able to form a production company, Northstar, under the auspices of Lorimar.

After Being There, Ashby became more reclusive, often retreating to his home in Malibu Colony, a gated enclave in the city.

Later, it was widely rumored in a likely whisper campaign from Lorimar (whose executives clashed with the director) that Ashby had become dependent upon cocaine, a drug that he only used intermittently after the production of Bound for Glory.

As a consequence of these rumors, he slowly became unemployable.

Eva Gardos, an editor who worked with Ashby during the period, has asserted that his drug intake remained largely confined to marijuana and psilocybin.

Following Being There, Ashby was provisionally set to reunite with Sellers and Terry Southern on Grossing Out, a black comedy inspired by the actor's chance meeting with an international arms dealer on an airplane.

Filmed in 1979, Second-Hand Hearts only received a poorly reviewed limited release in 1981 before being pulled from circulation for nearly thirty years.