Personal Best

Robert Towne is taking a personal gamble with his new movie, Personal Best. Long known as the screenwriter of such films as Chinatown (for which he won an Oscar) and Shampoo (which he co-wrote with close friend Warren Beatty) and for his often unheralded work as a script doctor (he performed last-minute surgery on The Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde, among others), Towne has now turned to directing. Personal Best, based on his own script, captures the competitive and sometimes erotic world of women's athletics, focusing with candor on the triumphs and defeats--both on the track and off--of two young women training for the Olympics. Writer Rex McGee met with Towne several times during the filming: "Towne often seemed frantic--as befits any director, particularly a first-time one. Even when he sat down in his office and put on a Rickie Lee Jones album, the tension of the experience still came through."

[Q] Playboy: Do you find all the attention you're getting unnerving?

[A] Towne: I would like to propagate my anonymity as long as is humanly possible. I really think there's something to be said for the Bostonian, who believes that your name should be in the paper when you're born, when you're married and when you die. I think the great curse of a writer is the loss of anonymity. I hate (text continued on page 178)Personal Best(continued from page 104) even to be photographed.

[Q] Playboy: Then why have you turned to directing films with Personal Best? Directing will mean the loss of anonymity, won't it?

[A] Towne: Oh, God, tell me about it. How would you like six guys with walkietalkies following you in to take a dump and saying, "Do you have a minute?" When I was in basic training in the Army, with those open heads, I couldn't take a dump for eight days. Finally, I learned to do it, but it was a very severe invasion of my privacy. Directing opens you up. You've got 200 people staring at everything. You feel like some idiotic king. They used to watch Louis XIV wake up in the morning, then they used to watch him take a dump, then they used to applaud at the dump. They watched every fucking thing the guy did. The color of his dump was caca dauphin, so the courtiers wore it, and that's why we have khakis to this day. I'm serious. That's where it comes from. Everybody in the Army is wearing the dauphin's dump.

[Q] Playboy: But back to directing----

[A] Towne: What an invasion. You have two choices in that situation. You either just fucking cover up or figure, "What the fuck--it's the job," and you expose yourself. But to be fair, it's only to 200 idiots, not to the whole world. But that's bad enough. Directing is submitting yourself to the indignity of thinking out loud--to save time. The great thing about [director of photography] Michael Chapman and about this crew is that they gave me the greatest privilege of all--they allowed me to make a fool of myself. They allowed me to think and feel out loud. They were very kind and patient and charitable. I think that the working relationship that we obtained on the set, even under the most arduous situations, was remarkably loose. No below-the-line crew that I have ever been involved with ever felt more actively involved in every choice that was made. In fact, the joke got to be, "It's a classless society."

You always think they're [the crew] a bunch of fucking gorillas, and it's the girls against the boys. They think the actors and director and writer are a bunch of sissies. When you put in the effort in writing and directing and everything else, you feel dread at having to be beaten up by the tougher guys in the schoolyard. But that simply did not happen on this film.

[Q] Playboy: What drew you to the subject of women athletes in the first place?

[A] Towne: I'd been meeting them at UCLA and swimming with them and working out. Prior to going into the pool one day--and there's an echo of this scene in the script--I was sitting down at UCLA and looking at this exercise machine with four standards, and this person sits down next to me and starts warming up with 140 pounds, like nothing at all. And I say, Fuck, this guy is really strong. And I look out the corner of my eye, and that guy gets up and gets out of her sweats and it's very much a girl. Oh, my fucking Christ. That was probably the beginning of Personal Best, the seed of it. Then I got to know this girl who was the top pentathlete, Jane Frederick, and she introduced me to other people, and one day I said, Jesus, I think I'll write a script. I wrote Personal Best very quickly.

[Q] Playboy: With the intention of directing it? Had you been dissatisfied with the way any of your other films had been handled?

[A] Towne: A script is a little bit like a golf course. A real good script is, let's say, a par 72. Most directors are shooting in the 90s, a few shoot in the 80s. and if you're great, you get close to a scratch golfer. Your imagination is always going to be superior to the execution, no matter how great the script is.

[Q] Playboy: What did you shoot on Personal Best?

[A] Towne: I shot everything but myself.

[Q] Playboy: I mean, how close did you get to what you wanted to do?

Towne: I don't get tired looking at the movie. So I suppose that whatever else is true, that must have been what I wanted to see at some level, or I'd get tired and irritated by it. And I find that I don't. I enjoy it.

[Q] Playboy: Had you spent a lot of time watching directors work over the years?

[A] Towne: I've been on sets more than anybody I've heard of. I worked every day on the set of Shampoo. But you really don't pick up that much. I mean, what happens when you're on a set? As a writer, it's easy. Not everybody is asking you everything in the world at a certain moment in time, so you're fairly free to sidle up to somebody and ask questions without having that incessant bombardment of logistical and creative considerations. Directing is like trying to think in a hurricane.

I think the greatest asset I had--and one that is not generally known--was that I had studied acting for about seven years. All of my friends are actors. It was really the best training I had as a writer, but I think it was useful to me as a director, too.

I knew I would not be uncomfortable with the actors. I knew that I would work well with actors who like to improvise, as. indeed, all these actors [Mariel Hemingway, Scott Glenn, Jim Moody and Patrice Donnelly] did. I felt very much at ease, and that was probably the most important thing.

[Q] Playboy: Can you talk a little about how you work with actors?

[A] Towne: I always said--and meant it--if it comes to violating the scene or violating yourself, violate the scene. For example, in the script, there was a very crude line that a huge male shot-putter was going to deliver: "Hey, girls, come over and sit on my face. I wanna see how much you weigh." At least it was friendly. Well, the guy who played the shot-putter, Al Feuerbach, could say that about as well as Pat Nixon could say it. It was simply not in him. But Al said, "I can say it. I'll act." So I said, "Don't act. Let's talk about it." So I took him aside. "What would you really say to those girls?" I asked him. "I'm a sensitive giant," he said. "I don't think of girls that way." "Really?" I said. "How do you think of them?" He said, "I think of them as conversationalists." So I said, "Why don't we play the scene that way?" So I rewrote the scene with these two great-looking girls running toward two shot-putters, and one of them says to Al Feuerbach, "We should say something to them." Then Al says, "I don't talk to people I don't know," and then he goes into the same rap he gave me. I had another camera on these two girls, focusing on their crotches, getting bigger and bigger as they got closer and closer until it was just an eye close-up of two great-looking pussies. They run by and I have Al say, "I must say, they look like two great conversationalists."

With every actor, you're different. I have a very personal relationship with every actor, and I think that what you have to do is make actors vulnerable--and it's why some directors are seen as being sadistic. It's usually a process of tearing down. You can appeal to certain personal things in people, if you know them, without a direct, frontal assault. I guess what I tried to do was say, "Don't be ashamed of anything. Whatever you're giving, as long as you feel it, I will like it."

I think it is the task of a director to allow an actor to show you his fear, his loathing, his disgust and to love him for showing it to you. That allows you to get something different from him. It creates a moment unexpected. You permit an actor to act the way you permit a woman to come. You don't make it a big deal. You allow. You create a very passive climate to allow it. I think directing is a woman's game, a curiously passive process. You sit there as you watch the actors, and you feel, then you tell yourself what you feel and then you tell the actors. You watch and encourage. I find it, ideally, more maternal than paternal. Make me come, make me feel good. Am I going to be in love with you after this?

[Q] Playboy: Was it your intention to make an erotic movie?

[A] Towne: First, you don't know what your intention is, exactly. You have a sort of general idea, but it's like a dream. Your intention is clear, I think, only after you dream the dream. It was, in part, a dream I wanted to have. I love the way women move, in or out of Adidas shoes. I just fucking love the way they iron clothes, I love the way they put on their little mascara or whatever the fuck it is.I just love the way they do just about anything that is trivial and not so trivial. I guess the movie has in it everything I was ever demented about in women, which is just about everything. And I think if you're a writer, in both a general and a specific way, you tend to identify with women.

[Q] Playboy: Why is that?

[A] Towne: Well, I think partially because women tend to have more power and more acumen than they're generally credited with. The same with being a screenwriter. Everybody concedes you're important, but the political leverage has never been consonant with the contribution. I've always felt that about women. Myself, I like to think that I'm very conventional about women. I mean, the idea of being a feminist or any of that shit is loathsome. I've met a lot of dumb male jocks, but I don't think I've ever met a dumb lady athlete who was really successful. Men have cultural antecedents dating back to Waterloo, to Trafalgar Square and to the playing fields of Eton. "Win one for the Gipper." Women, on the other hand, have no cultural antecedents. They've got to think it through all by themselves. In fact, they're encouraged not to compete with men, with one another. Some years ago, when thematic apperception tests were done on women and men, they would ask the men who had just passed the bar at Harvard, summa cum laude, what they planned to do. They said things like "Apprentice myself to Felix Frankfurter" and so on. A surprising number of women, however, would say something like, "I'm going to throw myself off the top of the Empire State Building." They don't know how to cope with success. They have to think it through at each step. Lady athletes are attempting to do it. That's an interesting problem all by itself.

[Q] Playboy: What is Personal Best about, to you?

[A] Towne: It's always dangerous to say what a film is about. Going beyond women, three things are involved in the film for me: purity, pleasure, pain. Pain is a teacher, and if you look at an athlete under great stress, you never know whether he's in exquisite pleasure or great pain, whether she's about to come or to have a child.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you take on the roles of both director and producer in your first film?

[A] Towne: Because I couldn't get anybody else to do it. I asked everybody I knew who was any good at it. I asked Bob Evans, Frank Yablans, Larry Gordon, Stanley Jaffe, David Puttnam, my mother. But they were all busy. They all had commitments. A good producer is hard to find.

[Q] Playboy: Would you have preferred to have a producer?

[A] Towne: Are you kidding? Yeah. I begged, I pleaded, I wept. One thing I learned as producer was that it's important to hire everybody on the movie personally and, whenever possible, to talk about money with them face to face. Agents usually do it, but I think it's an abrogation of responsibility, because if you let them do it, chances are that the time and the acrimony involved are going to affect what's on the screen. I think the creative people should take on more of the financial responsibility; that is, be willing to endure the embarrassment of talking to one another about money. This is what I feel I'm worth, this is what I feel you're worth, etc. Once you've done that with a man and gotten past it, there's a bond already there. Hey, he says, he thought enough about this to talk with me directly. I think it enriches the creative part. In the 19th Century, people would tell one another about their salaries but they wouldn't tell you about their operations. Today, though, they'll tell you about premature ejaculation or anything else about the body, no matter how physically intimate, but they won't talk about money. That's a mistake.

[Q] Playboy: Much has been made of the fact that Personal Best portrays a very open lesbian relationship. While you were filming, Billie Jean King was sued by her lesbian lover for palimony. Do you worry that the public will think you're taking advantage of that situation?

[A] Towne: I have no idea.

[Q] Playboy: Do you care?

[A] Towne: My only care about it would be in the additional unhappiness, anxiety, attention that it might bring to Billie Jean King. That would be painful. I happen to know her; not well, but we have had a kind of funny nonrelationship over the years. We've run into each other at odd times and places. She's got a very wicked, mischievous smile. Whatever else is true of her adventures in life, I just find her very feminine and very sexy.

[Q] Playboy: You've already taken a lot of heat for including the lesbian relationship in the film. Are you concerned that the backlash will spill over and hurt the film's chances at the box office?

[A] Towne: The fact is, I admire these ladies. I admire no people more. I consider no people that I've ever known less corrupt. More pure, more about doing what they're about. There's a certain sense in which the lesbianism is necessary to demonstrate that virtue has always been associated with chastity. Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy could both drill oil wells and both fuck Myrna Loy, and they could have that implicit homosexual relationship that you see in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but there's never been any confusion that drilling oil wells in the ground gave them their identities. Well, in Personal Best, jumping over sticks and pits of sand gives these ladies their identities. It's about the purity of that, their commitment to excellence. And it's also necessary to say they also fuck each other once in a while. So fucking what? We don't judge men that way. We don't remember that Lawrence was a fruit; we remember that he helped free Arabia. What men do is more important than whom they fuck. Women, too.

If the picture doesn't demonstrate that, then it will have been my failing. But I have to believe that audiences are fair-minded. And if they see that what's involved is friendship, loyalty, a commitment to excellence and an abiding love beyond any kind of sexual weirdness, I have to believe they'll respond.

[Q] Playboy: In certain circles in Hollywood, Personal Best was controversial for different reasons. You and David Geffen, your executive producer, had a feud about business and he literally pulled the plug--shut down production of your movie for several months--while you reached a new agreement. How did that experience affect you?

[A] Towne: Regardless of any argument over the respective merits of my noncon-frontation with David and the sort of standoff that resulted, it raises a very serious issue: Those of us who make movies are less adept at helping one another than those on the other side are at helping one another. Businessmen and executives are more organized. Part of it is because we, the moviemakers, are to some extent natural-born anarchists. And we're all isolated in our own world, and each movie is its own world. Also, we are hired to go mad. That's what our job is. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to fulfill a dream." Well, anybody who takes that job on is a nut and belongs in Camarillo. And we are hired to do it in a disciplined and systematic manner over anywhere from 60 to 100 days with men and material amounting to tons of God knows what, $5,000,000 to $50,000,000 and 200 people, many of whom want to be out playing golf and not dealing with you. And all in the service of creating a fantasy. So you're a nut to begin with. All of us who do this are off with our own little armies, fighting or tilting at our own little windmills. And so by definition, we are unable at any given moment to form a cohesive unit to attack our attackers. Which isn't good even for them. I mean, they need opposition. We're natural adversaries, the money men and we. And we should be.

[Q] Playboy: But don't you both need each other?

[A] Towne: I'm saying that we both need each other. These executives count for a living. For them, it's a matter of more, and for us, it's generally a matter of better. And more is usually more powerful than better. They seek power through numbers, and we seek it through beauty. And you know, just by definition, it's not going to be a fair fight. We're usually going to lose. I don't say always--don't kid yourself. There's real power in beauty--whether it's Gandhi standing his ground. Ruffian racing down the backstretch or Gene Kelly smiling--these things that remind us of the joy and sanctity and fragility of life have power in them. But there has to be a greater degree of organization among us than the system or our temperaments currently permit. Unless artists distribute their own films, they will forever be in this position. We have a natural inclination to have somebody else be daddy. We want to be the rebellious kids. And I understand that only too well. But somebody among us has to be willing to be a daddy for a time to protect the rest of us. I mean, we all have to be one another's collective daddy and collectively distribute our films to cut the cost of making them and be responsible for how they're made. Or else we will continue to be victimized, rightly and wrongly, by the system. These executives tend to bet forever on the grocer and not on the farmer. And I personally consider that a very foolish bet. If I'm hungry, I'm going to want to know another farmer, me, before I'm going to want to know another grocer--David, for example. Because the day I decide not to sell him my produce, then whoever wants to eat had better come to me. It all comes down to distributing your own movie--and making your money on the product and not on the manufacturing of the product.

As far as talking about David or any other money men is concerned, there's another element involved, and that is that these guys have a natural edge because they're mad at you all the time. The minute they give you the money, they're mad at you. It's a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk sort of thing--they give you a cow, you give them a hill of beans. They give you $10,000,000 and you give them a few reels of film. They just can't get over the fact that they're bad businessmen, that they made this shitty deal with you. They know it's the deal they made, but they still can't get over it because they're pretending that they're good businessmen. And you, on the other hand, simply know what the deal is. You want to play with your mud pies. But they're trying to pretend like it's a good business deal. It isn't. Movies are a shitty business. If you want to be a good businessman, you should work in real estate or at the Chase Manhattan Bank but not with movies.

[Q] Playboy: And no one knows a good business deal until the picture's re-leased, right?

[A] Towne: Just statistically, one movie in God knows how many makes money. What kind of business is that? At some level, all these guys want is to fuck Raquel Welch, or what they take to be the glamorous equivalent. When they're saying, "Upsidedownsideinsideoutside," all it really comes down to is they're trying to pretend it's a decent business so they can go out and fuck Raquel Welch or whomever. Maybe for some executive it's Robert Redford. They want to rub up against that glamor, but they want to pretend it's business. It's a profoundly hypocritical position they're in. And I assure you that as much as I'm not immune to wanting to fuck Raquel Welch or, if not Raquel Welch, my glamorous equivalent of Raquel Welch, I guarantee you that when push comes to shove, if it comes to mixing that fucking reel the way I want it or fucking Raquel Welch cubed, I'm going to want to mix that reel before anything in the world because I love that more than anything in the world. In any case, my motives are less mixed than theirs and less hypocritical. And that's true of most people who care about what they're doing.

"The color of his dump was caca dauphin, and that's why we have khakis to this day. I'm serious."