This week’s film, Shampoo, is another MCC favorite—we have posted about it previously, and recently reviewed the new Criterion Collection Blu Ray for Cineaste Magazine. The movie is properly associated with its triple-threat leading man Warren Beatty, who produced, co-wrote the screenplay (with his friend and celebrated seventies film scribe Robert Towne), and whose forceful personality and on-set presence inevitably stepped on the toes of director Hal Ashby. But the contributions of other key collaborators, including Ashby, Towne, legendary New Hollywood cinematographer László Kovács, production designer Richard Sylbert and an outstanding cast that includes Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Jack Warden, and Lee Grant, should not be underestimated.
As we discussed in those pages, Shampoo, nominally a sex comedy, has much to say about a number of weighty topics, including, as Beatty put it, “the intermingling of political and sexual hypocrisy.” Shot in 1974 and set on election eve 1968 (you know, the one that gave us Nixon), it is also, again in Beatty’s words, about a small colony of “myopic people going to hell in a handcart and not noticing.” Shampoo is also very much a seventies film. Sure it’s laugh out loud funny, but Beatty’s character (George) is left in that desolate closing shot as bereft and defeated as Harry Caul in The Conversation or Jake Gittes in Chinatown. To quote Beatty one last time, “I don’t know if you can call ‘Shampoo’ a comedy. There are a lot of laughs in it, but…if it is, it’s an awfully sad comedy.”
One scene from Shampoo that we have always been more or less obsessed with is the final confrontation between Jill (Hawn) and George, in which she presents him with evidence of his infidelity, and wants to know how many others there have been. It goes like this: George, having been caught in a rather compromising position with Jackie (Christie) the night before, has waited all night at Jill’s house (this subtle note signaling the changing power dynamic between them). She arrives at daybreak, explaining that she “does not want to fight,” but simply wants to know the truth. George hesitates, then stammering, and searching for words, finally offers a resigned, plaintive confession: “let’s face it, I fucked ‘em all.”
Waiting
Jill wants to know everything
“Let’s face it, I fucked ’em all”
This action, and what follows, is remarkable for two reasons—one in the movie and one that is all the more astonishing in light of what was left on the cutting room floor. Regarding the former, the scene is notable for the final transformation of Jill (compare her girlish disposition at the start of the film to her confident maturity here). As for the latter—George’s confession and lengthy, soul-searching ruminations that follow were not in the scene as it was originally written, and the change says a lot about the character (and by extension, about Warren, who shares many of George’s proclivities, not to mention lovers Hawn and Christie). In the shooting script, the dialogue is quite different, and George’s response to her query is angry and defiant. “Grow up” he lectures, towering over her imposingly, mocking her naiveté with an angry, defiant “everybody fucks everybody.” (Stage directions describe him as “stand[ing] his ground, exploding,” and his tone later in the conversation is described as indicating “disbelief and disgust.”)
As originally envisioned, rather than retreating, George hectors Jill with aggressive questions about what she had done in the intervening hours (barely gestured at in two lines in the final version), his long, introspective monologue is absent, and the couple part on a bitter, rather than a melancholy note. Cast and crew spent a grueling day trying to get that scene right (Lee Grant reports in her memoirs that Goldie Hawn threw up from the exhausting emotional intensity). But when they called it a wrap, Robert Towne declared that the scene simply was not working. Beatty reluctantly agreed to indulge his friend, and the scene was rewritten and restaged.
The result is something that we remain impressed that actor Beatty agreed to shoot, and producer Beatty left in the final film. Following his confession with a stumbling monologue, George puts forth what amounts to an indictment of his entire life, the highlight reels from his hall-of-fame sex life now reinterpreted as a desperate fear of maturity and even mortality, and a principal reason why he has accomplished so few of his professional ambitions. Jill had long been waiting for George to grow up (“Grow up, grow up, grow up!” she shouts at one point)—but now, like Jackie before her, she is done waiting.
The scene as shot emphasizes Jill’s newfound command
“It makes me feel like I’m going to live forever”
I know I should have accomplished more
Full retreat
I’d like you to go now