For this month's AFI Catalog Spotlight on SHAMPOO, actress Julie Christie is pictured beside actor and co-writer Warren Beatty.

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SHAMPOO – AFI Catalog Spotlight

This month, the AFI Catalog shines a spotlight on the Hal Ashby hit comedy SHAMPOO (1975) in honor of its 50th release anniversary. Co-written by AFI Life Achievement Award recipient Warren Beatty (in his first onscreen writing credit) and the legendary Robert Towne, SHAMPOO featured a cast of stars including Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Carrie Fisher (in her film debut) and AFI DWW Alum Lee Grant (AFI DWW Class of 1974) in a role that garnered her an Oscar® win for Best Supporting Actress. Produced by Beatty on a modest budget of $4.5 million and earning nearly $50 million domestically, SHAMPOO marked one of Columbia Pictures’ greatest assets to date and ultimately became the third highest-grossing film of 1975 after JAWS and ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST.[i] [ii] SHAMPOO endures today as a compelling comedic testament to U.S. politics and popular culture, as indicated by its inclusion on AFI’s 100 YEARS…100 LAUGHS list of the funniest American movies of all time.

Beatty had been working for several years with acclaimed writer Robert Towne on a script about a promiscuous Beverly Hills hairdresser, but Beatty and Towne were often conflicted and ended up with two distinct scripts. Beatty brought the property to Ashby, who had just worked with Towne on THE LAST DETAIL (1974) which was nominated for three Academy Awards®, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Towne. Ashby diplomatically responded that a cross between the two scripts would make a sensational movie.[iii] The three men spent a demanding ten days rewriting early drafts of the film, with Beatty and Towne consistently at odds, but Ashby moderated the showdown and a shooting script was completed, setting the picture around the 1968 presidential election of Richard Nixon and establishing several powerful female leads.[iv] At the time, Beatty was publicly characterized as a romantic player, and the role of George Roundy was thought to be a composite of himself and several celebrity hairstylists such as Gene Shacove, a technical consultant on the film.[v] In another indication of fiction following fact, Beatty cast his former real-life partners, including Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn, as his onscreen love interests, and he stacked the crew with his own selections, overriding Ashby’s choice of favored collaborators; by the time filming began on the 58-day shoot, on March 11, 1974, SHAMPOO had become Beatty’s obsession. He was, in Goldie Hawn’s words, “running the whole show.”[vi]

While much has been discussed about Warren Beatty’s unequivocal influence on SHAMPOO, both behind and in front of the camera, historians have become increasingly interested in Hal Ashby’s understated impact. Ashby was committed to the principle that filmmaking is a purely collaborative venture and declined to take onscreen credit for his contributions as a writer and editor of the movie. In the hands of other directors, the idle rich and self-absorbed characters in SHAMPOO may have been delivered as unsympathetic clichés, but, as Ashby noted, “to make fun of people is easy. Life isn’t that easy.”[vii] [viii] Under the surface, Ashby himself was not unlike SHAMPOO’s protagonist, a non-conformist struggling to be autonomous, appreciated and even loved for his idiosyncrasies in a world of insatiable corporate greed that is deeply invested in maintaining the status quo, conventional beauty and boundless riches.[ix]

SHAMPOO takes place on the eve and election day of 1968, when Richard Nixon was voted into office, and it was released just five months after Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign, but it was filmed when the Watergate scandal was still looming. Throughout the film, televisions are shown in the background, covering the election returns, but the characters neither discuss politics nor vote despite their attendance at a banquet of geriatric benefactors, honoring the Republican candidate. George, the hair stylist, hops from one bed to another to serve his clients with a sexual respite from the lonely life of ceaseless beauty maintenance, reflecting, as in the mirrors that adorn much of the settings, the narcissism of the American elite where everything is simply “great.” Women, referred to as “dolls,” are captivated by the illusion that power is only attainable through physical refinement and eternal youth. George both peddles this beauty myth and subverts it, offering lovers a glimpse of freedom through sexual ecstasy as represented by youth culture in the late 1960s. However promiscuous, George ultimately resolves to uphold traditional mores and proposes marriage as a remedy to his problems, but his beloved Jackie (Julie Christie) has other plans and elects to go off with her adulterous patron Lester (Jack Warden), rejecting true love for a life of infinite prosperity. The triumph of materialism mirrors America’s political referendum in 1968 that mandated conservative values in a country that was recently teeming with a new generation of progressives, seeming to ask: What happened to our promising counterculture? As George’s jilted girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn) observed about the philandering lothario who comes to portray the country’s conflicted spirit, “You never stop moving. You never go anywhere.”

Watch the original trailer for SHAMPOO:

Watch an interview with Warren Beatty about SHAMPOO:

Watch Lee Grant talk about her career and her role in SHAMPOO at the AFI DOCS Guggenheim Symposium:

RESOURCES

[i] Beach, Christopher. The Films of Hal Ashby. Wayne State University Press, 2009.

[ii] Ford, Elizabeth. The Makeover in Movies: Before and After in Hollywood Films, 1941-2002. McFarland, 2004.

[iii] Dawson, 2009.

[iv] Dawson, 2009.

[v] American Film Institute. Shampoo.

[vi] Dawson, 2009.

[vii] Jacobs, Diane. “Coming Home—It’s Hal Ashby at His Best.” Minneapolis Star, May 12, 1978, C2.

[viii] Tonguette, Peter. “Hal Ashby’s Humanity.” DGA Quarterly, Fall 2019.

[ix] Beach, 2009.

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