Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [175]
As the week wore on Albarino realized that the current ending didn’t work. At around ten o’clock one night, he drove to a local supermarket, where he suddenly came up with a way to fix it. He rushed back to Pauline’s and told her his idea. She approved of it, and he sat down to write. “I typed about four words,” said Albarino, “and she burst in and said, ‘Is it done?’ I broke down crying. That’s how fraught this circumstance was.”
With the script completed, Pauline and Albarino flew out to Hollywood together. A few evenings later she reported to him that the script had met with general enthusiasm. Behind the scenes, however, all was not well. For one thing, both Beatty and Toback were growing weary of Albarino’s lengthy digressions during meetings. They weren’t sure he was the right person for the project, but Pauline appeared to be quite dependent on him.
Pauline found a second-floor apartment in Beverly Hills. It was a lovely old-style L.A. setting, and she quickly made herself at home there. She took taxis to and from her office at Paramount, where Beatty was headquartered, and enjoyed getting caught up with old friends such as Joe Morgenstern and Piper Laurie, Marcia Nasatir, Paul Mazursky, and Irvin Kershner.
In a short time, Pauline demonstrated her lack of finesse at the game of studio politics. It led her to deliver a number of blunt judgments to various executives, who weren’t used to being spoken to quite so sharply. She and Toback also had major disagreements about various aspects of Love and Money. Disagreements, of course, are a standard part of the production process in Hollywood, but Pauline had had no experience in this atmosphere. Her battles with William Shawn over copy may have been ongoing, but the process of putting together a movie involved far more people and ideas, and she was not accustomed to such a complex mix of opinions and points of view from creative, marketing, and merchandising personnel.
One principal conflict between Pauline and Toback involved the sanctity of the script. Toback looked at it in much the same way that Altman did—as a constantly evolving work in progress. He knew that on the set any number of changes would be made, because he regarded a script as nothing more than “a blueprint which may or may not work.” Pauline, however, thought that her greatest asset as a producer was attentiveness to the screenplay; she believed that many potentially good films of recent years had gone off the rails because the producers hadn’t cared enough to weigh in on the writing. “I found it impossible to work with her,” Toback remembered, “because she was fetishistic about the script. There are certain things that work theoretically that don’t work practically. She was insistent on mapping things out, with the most precise and neat sense of certainty, in a way that made me feel she had never actually been on a set.”
Both Pauline and Toback were also becoming increasingly anxious about another project that was occupying more and more of Beatty’s attention: a large-scale drama based on the lives of the socialist revolutionary John Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant. It had became clear, once Pauline arrived in Hollywood, that Beatty was far more interested in making that film than he was Love and Money. She was dead set against the Reed film and repeatedly tried to talk Beatty