My good friend David Rensin, whose new book, All for a Few Perfect Waves: the Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora, comes out in April 2008, always has a few projects on the simmer. One was a bio with Hollywood ur-agent Freddie Fields, who passed away last week. A columnist for one of my must-read sites, LA Observed, David has up a post about Fields, and from what would have been a chapter in their proposed book, POSTCARDS FROM HOLLYWOOD: Things I Did and Things I Think I Did, Fields' involvement with putting together the movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This story -- which comes at the second half of the post -- is absolutely fantastic, and talk about dishing about the A-list! Come on, you don't get any better than this:
Warren Beatty, as always, already had the news about the movie. He talked to everybody in town all the time, and always knew what was happening. He knew about weddings before people got married, and about divorces before couples broke up. He knew who’d get a picture before they knew. He knew release dates and grosses. He’d talk to Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, to studio heads, and the guys running distribution. He was on the phone all day. Part of what drove him is paranoia. He needed information like he needed sex...
There's also an incredible exchange between Fields and Steve McQueen, which I thought about clipping here but it's so delicious, as well as so cockamamie, that you really need to read it yourself.
Yeah, didn't the poster for The Towering Inferno need to be arranged in such a way that neither Newman nor McQueen were really top-billed? Like McQueen's name was first, but a little lower than Newman's? If only these guys realized how ephemeral fame really is...
Posted by: Jim Treacher | December 19, 2007 at 09:33 AM
It WAS a fascinating exchange. I always strive to behave like Newman, but end up coming off all McQueen. Must try harder.
Posted by: Matt Davis | December 19, 2007 at 01:20 PM
I love McQueen, but he comes off as such a nincompoop!
Posted by: nancy | December 19, 2007 at 01:26 PM
Hmmm, not so great. Like many other "Marlon and I were having a few beers..." memoirs. Nobody is ever, EVAH going to beat Julia Phillips at the Hollywood dirt game.
[grinch mode off]
Posted by: Stu | December 21, 2007 at 01:43 PM
The Warren Beatty bit is renowned Hollywood lore, covered almost verbatim in books like William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade and Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ...
Posted by: Jack Baker | December 22, 2007 at 09:01 AM