Behind the Scenes: The Last Detail (Ashby, 1973) with Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid

What the hell did he do, kill the old man? Robbery. How much did he live? Forty dollars. Tried to lift the polio contribution box. Yeah? Polio box is the old man's old lady's favorite do-gooder project. Very serious. Where are we going, chief? Fort Label Prison. Good duty for you guys. They're gonna get him there all right. But first they gotta take care of a few details along the way. Okay, but not me. You're the watchdog. He's just trying to show the kid a good time, you know what I mean? He can't have a good time. It ain't in him. Let me tell you how it is, Mel. We got a friend here that we'd like to do a favor for. He's going on a trip. It's just him? Just him. What kind of party after? Now, don't worry about a thing. I'm hustling this guy, understand? I got him right where I want him. Maybe he's hustling you. Oh, yeah. Maybe he is. But this is not the time to argue about it. Because if I don't win, we don't leave New York, eh? I think we're going to a party. Yeah? Eh? This could mean a big one, eh, Meadows? All we gotta do is get rid of that silly-looking creep there, and we got these three chicks all to ourselves. Doing a man's job. Talking to ships. He looks like a big penguin, don't he? Watch out for children! He sure is having a good time. Sure is, and you said it wasn't in him. Huh? All right. What do they do in this man's navy? Everything they can. I would like to drink a toast to Batman, Superman, and the Human Torch. I saw most of Ashby's films in the 70s as they came out. Not The Landlord, because that didn't get big distribution, but I saw Harold and Maude many times in the 70s, and the rest of them. But I had not seen The Last Detail, probably because it was known for being so dirty. I think it says it has 65 times, which was, at the time, a record. So I think my parents wouldn't take me to see... My parents would take me to see most R-rated films. They didn't really care, but somehow that one we didn't see. I think they just thought it was... It was known for being really vulgar. I didn't see it till maybe... I actually can't remember the first time, but maybe 20 years ago? 20, 25 years ago? And I think I saw it projected, and then it became one of that handful of films that I have to watch about once a year and try to turn other people on to. I don't feel entirely capable of discussing the novel, but I have read Robert Towne's screenplay, and I can tell you that when people say... I mean, typically among filmmakers or aspiring filmmakers, you say... They say, well, what screenplay book should I read? The answer is don't read any screenplay book. Just read Chinatown. I amend that, or in fact, instead of that, I say read Chinatown. Of course, everyone has to read Chinatown, but also read The Last of Tale for its precision and economy and depth. I always say filmmaking in general, and we're talking about screenwriting, it's a constant search for economy. In the screenplay, you want it as short as possible. The directing, you want the flexibility. You want the rhythm, the metronome rhythm, as fast as possible, given who the director is. And then in editing, of course, you look for the greatest economy, even if the movie is nine hours long. But Towne is a real master of, well, I just said it, concision, economy, and depth. You want to go in and wait for a while? What for? Plus, you might come home early. No. No thanks. Well, at least you could sit in your own house. Maybe we can get in. I was born in 1961, so I was a teenager in the 70s. I graduated from high school in 1979. You know, it was the 70s, and I was a big movie fan, so I had always liked movies from, you know, from earlier in film history, and of course still do. But the films in the 70s were the films that most made me want to become a filmmaker myself. And those films, which are now considered art films or from a different time, those are the films that taught me what an adult commercial American film is. And I am still trying to make 70s movies. Where are you going? Yeah, well, now, if that don't make you just want to ---- in your flat hat. Look what you went. Look what you... I hope you're satisfied. But you're the one who insisted we take him to see his mother. This detail. I hate this ----. Ain't ---- detail. They should never go out of style. We should always have what we think of as 70s movies. When I went to work with Jack Nicholson on About Schmidt, people would say to me, oh, but he's so over the top, and he's so big, and he, you know, the eyebrows and all that kind of stuff. And I thought, why are you pinholing this magnificent actor from some commercial version of himself he's been asked to do a few times, and I'm sure enjoys. But I very, and I told him that I saw About Schmidt very much as a continuation of the work that he had begun in the late 60s and 70s, where every part is complex and different, and the uniqueness and the individuality that he brought from his own personality and poured into the roles he was asked to play. That's the Nicholson I wanted, and he totally understood that. Come on. Come on! Take a poke at me. Come on. Hey, I'm gonna punch you out. Punch me out, you little... Go ahead. Punch me out. Hey, man, he ain't gonna punch you. I'm gonna make him. I like you. Hey, I'm taking you to jail, mother... I'm gonna make him. Probably my favorite scenes in The Last Detail, just the scenes where, I mean, I love the whole movie, but when we get to those scenes, I say, oh, good, we're here again. I love the fight between Mulhall and Badusky on the train. They go to the back of the train between the two cars and have a fight. And it's done with very long dissolves, which I love in most all of Hal Ashby films. He's a master of doing very long and beautiful dissolves, very emotional dissolves. And you can tell that he used dissolves in this sequence to shorten it. You can tell that the script was much longer and they had to find a clever way to condense in that moment. But the way they did it, like all good editing, the way they did it makes it feel deliberate. Ashby uses the long dissolves in pretty much all of his films, at least that I haven't seen his 80 films. But in the 70s films, there's a beautiful sequence in The Landlord when Beau Bridges is out on a date with the dancer and he winds up with her at the end. But they stay up all night and they meet at the club where she dances and then they go to a restaurant and talk and then it's now daybreak and they're walking across the street to her apartment and he's asking her how old she is. And you see they're walking in wide, wide, wide shot but you hear their voices in your ear. And it's done with very beautiful long dissolves. Bound for Glory has beautiful dissolves. Harold and Maude has beautiful dissolves. But we use a lot of dissolves in my pictures and nowadays people don't use that many dissolves in modern film and I don't know why. Somehow, somehow it's dissolves have entered the unfortunate club with voiceover and zooms. You're not, things in film you're not supposed to use and I don't know why. Dissolves go, dissolves even predate movies. They go back to the age of the Magic Lantern. And that's how they go from one image to the next. And there's a beautiful shot when Jack Nicholson sitting alone at the table and the train is vibrating and there's a sound of a glass hitting a plate and it's quite loud and I like that sound of a glass hitting a plate vibrating against a plate on the train. So I like that scene a lot. And the other scene I like is the party scene when they meet the Nam-myoho-renge-kyo people and then bump into them at a restaurant or a bar and they get invited back to this party and they have this, they smoke pot and drink and have a party and that's a really delicious scene. They are cute, aren't they? I like the way, you know what I like about it? One of my favorite things about this uniform is the way that it makes your dick look. This movie also has my favorite extra in any film. They're walking down the street, I think they're in, I can't remember if they're in Washington or in New York. Supposedly New York, they shot a lot of that in Toronto. And they're walking down the street, it's a lateral tracking shot and a short guy in a corduroy jacket who looks like he's in a hurry to go somewhere just walks right past them and I always notice that extra. I go, that's a great extra. The wonderful patheticness of these guys is I love it when they're drinking, they somehow can't go to a bar and they buy cans of beer and drink them in a parking garage. The human torch, when he goes like this, he throws a ball of flames off on you and the whole building goes off. And he had a littler guy flies around with him. And I also like later when it's really cold, I think there's even snow on the ground and they have a picnic with hot dogs out in the park and one of them forgets to bring the buns. Those are very beautiful scenes. Bye bye. And then when they have to chase Larry through the snow and he trips and in that long shot they have to beat him up. I don't think it is almost a love story, I think it is a love story among those three men. And that's another thing of the age too is love stories among men, I'm blanking on others, but this and Midnight Cowboy are very beautiful love stories among men. And the thing that's so heartbreaking about The Last Detail is that it's an impossible love because they have these roles which are defined for them by the military. Part of them wants to just go on a lifelong road trip together. And just the fact that they take such pity on this poor guy and want him to have a beautiful experience before he goes to prison. As I say, they love him and he loves them. He tells them how much he loves them. He says, they're my best friends. I couldn't. Why not? I'd beat their ass. What do you owe them? They're my best friends, Donna. I'll tell you what I don't like about the movie. I don't, it's the one thing I don't like. I don't, and I understand the choice, but ultimately I don't think it works as well as another choice I might have for the film, which is the mock military music. He has some regular score, but then when he wants to sort of make fun of the fact that he and Ashby make fun of the fact they're the military and supposedly military people who act with such appropriateness and they're acting like such scoundrels, he plays kind of a military march. And it's okay maybe once or twice, but he keeps using it. And I've seen the picture maybe, I don't know, 15 times and it starts to really pull me out of the picture. At least the score is fantastic and it's a very old English piece with the low woodwinds when they drop meadows off at the prison. That works beautifully and really, really gets you. The sequel to The Last Detail, Ponnexson wrote a sequel that reached my hands, I don't know, maybe six years ago. We're speaking now in 2016, so maybe around 2010, maybe earlier. I can't exactly remember. But anyway, the idea was to take the three characters and where they are now in their 60s or 70s or whatever they are and put them on a mission together. And the mission had something, I don't remember, it's been a while since I read it, it had something to do with getting a body, the body of a soldier killed in Iraq to burial or to his mother or something. And I believe maybe it was Meadows' son. And it was pretty good. I liked it, I flirted with it for a while. Chose not to do it. But I think it got published and it's worth it. I think it's Two Flags Flying or Three Flags Flying, Ponnexson's a wonderful writer. Richard Linkletter was supposed to, that he picked it up around the time that I also read it, but I haven't heard anything about it since. One of my criteria for a great film is that no matter how many times I see it, I can still cry in it. And so far, the last detail never disappoints me. I still, the film gets me every time. We had problems with the studio. They had problems, they were afraid of the language, that the film had never come out with that raunchy language yet. But it was real and it was honest. Nicholson was unbelievable. And Randy Quaid was terrific. He was a goofball sailor. So it was a wonderful experience. Jerry Ayers, my friend who produced Cisco Pike, called me one day and asked if I'd be interested in doing a film with Hal Ashby, who had a really good reputation at the time. Enough of a reputation that I didn't want to do the film because it was a crazy one. He'd work all night and worked in his home, which meant the editor really didn't have any freedom at all. The editor would go out to get a bite to eat and Hal would recut everything. So no, I didn't want to do it. And he didn't want me either. He said, Bob, that guy's too fast. I don't want somebody that works that quickly. They don't catch everything they should. So good, we don't have him. Talk about me. So they went back east to start shooting. They shot one day. The editor that they hired put something together. It is something. I don't know what it was. But Hal saw it and blew his top. He said, I don't want that man touching my film again. Don't let anybody cut anything. So it all piled up. And when they came and finished shooting and came back, I get another call from Jerry Ayers. He's saying, please, Bob, come and look at it. We've got a couple hours of master takes strung together. I want you to see it. I go look at it and it was terrific. Something like I had never seen before. I saw actors who were no longer actors to me. They were people and they were real people. They had major problems and they had wants and needs and it wasn't a movie. These dailies were not a movie. They were real. I would look at these master shots. One in particular where the three sailors are in a hotel room trying to decide who gets the bed and bedding down and it just goes on and on and on as they cannot set these cheap hotel beds up and it's hilarious. All the way through the dailies there were scenes like that where he let the camera run and let these guys make fools out of themselves. It was great. One scene where they're in a parking lot at night drinking beer. I'm sure they were smashed. I don't think they could have acted that drunk. It was an honesty and just a pleasure to see and it was the kind of film that I've been wanting to do since I started in the business, that style of film. Prisoner, on your feet. Hal would, on some of these master shots, just let the camera run. He wouldn't say cut. He'd just let them go. I said, I'll do it. I'll do it. So I went to meet Ashby in his home and he seemed good. He seemed like an okay guy but it was still going to be a major decision on my part whether I wanted to dive into somebody who was really crazy but he wasn't. He really respected my work. He did not go near it to the best of my knowledge. I really don't think he went near it at all. And it turned out to be one of the most rewarding editing assignments I've ever had. There's a scene near the end in the snow where Randy Quaid tries to run away, tries to escape. There's a long, long master where he's running, running, running. He falls. Nicholson falls on top of him. Mulhall falls on top of the two of them. Nicholson's hitting Randy in the head with a pistol. All from the long shot. He covered it in tight angles. Which I used a couple of quick cuts of but then dropped back to the long shot because I felt in that shot, I see pain. I see somebody trying to, fighting for their freedom. Just, it spoke to me a lot more than cutting into normal handheld shots of a fight. Also, I tried in that film working, it felt like a road picture to me. So, I felt like trying long, long, slow dissolves going from one place to another. And maybe they were overused. I don't know. Not everybody liked them, but I did. I liked them and I liked the imagery of the superimposures. Some of it came out like it was planned. Nothing was planned in that, but it felt like it was planned. There's one scene where Mulhall chews out Jack Nicholson for giving the kid, Randy Quaid, too much freedom and too much hope. There's a scene that went on way, way, way too long. So, in shortening it, I thought, what the hell? I've used the dissolves before. I'll try them in the middle of the scene. I consider myself in jeopardy with you, man. Understand? In jeopardy. This ain't no farewell party and he ain't retiring. Understand? He's a prisoner and we're taking him to the jailhouse and you have a tendency to forget that. You're a menace, man. You ain't no simple ---- badass. You're a motherfucking menace. From now on, M.A.A. can go piss up a rope. He ain't no honcho. And I want to hear no more of this horse ---- psychology chive. No more turning that boy's head around to prove what a big man you are. Your life are like me. David's the best thing ever happened to me. And I don't want you to **** me up. Understand? So, I tried him in the middle of the scene and had the dialogue working in a strange way. It's something that went from like four or five pages in the script to one page on film. I saw the film at a film festival somewhere and this scene came up and I went, who the hell did that? Then I realized I did. But so different to try and shorten a scene by using these long dissolves. Shortened dialogue scene by using these long dissolves and playing a lot of it on Randy Quaid who wasn't saying anything. It was quite effective, I think. The photography on Last Detailed was special. Michael Chapman worked with low levels of light. Some of the train stuff was wonderful. It would have cost more to do it in LA because they would have used more electricity plugging the lights in. You're chanting. It saved money on their power supply because they didn't use many lights. It didn't look like they did. Sound was another thing. Several areas were covered by background noise but I didn't want to loop or ADR anything so we just did the best with what we had. Sometimes you can't understand it but it's real. I think that had a bearing on the reality of the film also. Nicholson, there's a scene in the train where he's thinking about... Actually, it's a scene that precedes the one I was just mentioning with all the dissolves where Nicholson is sitting in the train car thinking about the detail they're on and how much he hates the Navy. Close up in his eyes and you see that hatred. I don't know how Nicholson can control his eyes like he does but it's very effective. It's great for me to use in editing. Shots like that that tell a story through a man's face. Hal Ashby was an Oscar-winning editor. He never had the Oscar engraved with his name on it because he wanted to be able to honestly say he couldn't remember what picture he got it for but he was one of the better editors of the time. He was terrific. Films like the Thomas Crown Affair where they worked with split screens which hadn't been done up to that time. He had a wonderful vita as an editor but I didn't have a problem working with him. We got along great. I did not think of him as an editor. He would take too long to make up his mind. It's not my DNA to sit there and fuss about it and go back and forth and back and forth. It is in his and our two ways of work are drastically different but we both come to pretty close to the same conclusion. I have been asked about this several times how it is working with an editor. How it is editing with a top editor. I certainly didn't feel competitive with him. I felt more like we were a team. It was a good feeling. I wouldn't have stayed with him if I didn't feel that. The first cut on Last Detail was about four and a half hours because I used all this stuff that wasn't meant to be used. All this off-the-cuff dialogue and sometimes whole scenes were unwritten and they were just playing as they wanted. So we had to get it down to a releasable length although Hal liked the first cut, the four and a half hour version. He liked it a lot. So that made me feel good. So we had to shorten it massively to get it releasable. It was not easy. It's not easy to trim these scenes down and still have the story work. So it took a lot of try this, try that, try this, try that. A lot of experimentation with the film, in the editing to get it to play and get it to make sense and not lose the soul of the film. So we shortened scenes quite a bit but I don't think we dropped any scenes completely. I think we used pieces of scenes but we didn't make huge lifts. We finally got it down to two hours. We took it to Santa Barbara to preview it which is a fairly conservative little spot, beautiful and conservative. About half the theater emptied out by the time we'd played five or ten minutes. Half the theater walked out wanting their money back. Then the theater projection system, the interlock broke down so we were running picture and track separately and it wouldn't hold sync. So it started going out of sync. I'd run up to the booth and amazingly guess how much it was out of sync and have the projectors rethread it and it would work for five minutes and then blow out again. So we had to give everybody their money back because of the language and the interlock. We didn't have a preview and I don't think we did another one. Robert Downe was involved in his reaction to what we were doing. The studio was not that involved. They just wanted to take it over. I think the way they released the film, they released it for like a week in December or something. They were about to get it Oscar qualified but then didn't bring it back until April. So by then any momentum had died out. I still think it's one of the better films I've ever been involved with. After we finished, the studio asked me to do a television version. Well, that was unheard of with that dialogue. And I said, I'll do a television version but I'm not going to dub any dialogue. I'm not going to make Friggin or any of those things. I'm not going to do that. If you want me to do it through editing, I will but I won't do anything. They said, okay. So I did it in editing and I ordered a few prints of the soundtrack and intercut words and all this stuff. Actually, it was a pretty good job but it castrated the film. Taking all that dialogue out was not a good idea but that was one of the things the studio had to deliver, an airline version and a TV version. So I thought by doing it myself and not allowing the aid any looping or dubbing, it would be better than having somebody else do it. I think what made Hal Ashby special as a filmmaker and as a person was, it sounds simple, but a search for truth, both in his work and in his relationships. I think his letting the camera run was a search for truth from his actors to see where they'd take it and what they'd give to him. It worked. I think it was a masterful way to go because he got performances that other people wouldn't get just by allowing them to explore their unconscious or subconscious.