Why the Oscar-winning ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ was hated by its own studio chairman: “It’s a three-piss picture”
Throughout the 1960s, Warren Beatty was viewed as the sexy young playboy of American cinema. A critic at the time even noted that he was a handsome socialite with seemingly little interest in his craft. That all changed in 1967, though, when a 29-year-old Beatty produced and starred in a motion picture that changed the American movie business forever and helped give birth to the ‘New Hollywood’ era. Suddenly, Beatty was a fiercely unique, intellectual man of cinema who saw the future coming – which would have rankled the chairman of Warner Bros at the time, who absolutely hated the future Oscar-winning classic and tried to sabotage its release.
The movie that would cause Beatty and Jack L Warner to be at loggerheads began life as a script written by two young Esquire staff writers, David Newman and Robert Benton. They had become intoxicated by the French New Wave, specifically the films of Francois Truffaut, and wanted to translate that style to US cinema. They got their script about the Depression-era criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow to Truffaut, who was interested for a period but eventually dropped out of the running. This left it open for Beatty to swoop in and buy the rights to the script, which he then got to his Mickey One director, Arthur Penn.
Beatty had to, in his words, “bludgeon” a reluctant Penn into agreeing to direct the film. In the end, he accomplished it by promising the director daily spirited creative arguments, which doesn’t sound overly appealing. However, as Penn told The Los Angeles Times, “Warren is one of the most persuasive people you will ever meet.”
Unfortunately for Beatty, who had a lot riding on the success of Bonnie and Clyde, studio head Warner was considerably harder to convince of the film’s merits. By the mid-1960s, Warner was one of the final Old Hollywood moguls still working and was viewed as the last of a dying breed. He hadn’t actually greenlit Bonnie and Clyde – that honour belonged to Walter MacEwen, the head of production – and when he finally paid some attention to the film, he didn’t like what he saw. As he put it, “these gangster movies went out with Cagney” – referring to the classic James Cagney mob movies that dominated Warner’s output in the ’40s.
Beatty wound up fighting his corner with Warner on a number of occasions, including one memorable clash that took place in front of the iconic WB water tower on the Burbank studio lot. Beatty claimed Warner told him, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s fine, kid, that’s your opinion. You have your opinion, but you do know whose name is up on the water tower, right?” To that, Beatty quipped, “Yeah, hey, look, it’s got my initials!”
Warner probably didn’t take Beatty’s smart-aleck response too kindly. Indeed, when the star showed the mogul a rough cut of the movie at Penn’s house, his response was cutting. Beatty and Penn had been warned that the number of times Warner went to the toilet during the screening would be a good indication of how he felt about the film. In the end, he relieved himself three times and told Beatty, “It’s a three-piss picture.” He also groused, “How long was that picture?” and when he was told it was two hours and ten minutes long, he shot back, “That’s the longest damn two hours and ten minutes I’ve ever spent.”
To Beatty’s horror, Warner’s distaste for the film led to him scheduling it for release in August—a notorious box office dead zone—and refusing to commit the proper funds to market it adequately. Therefore, the movie debuted with extremely modest box office figures and received some vitriolic reviews from critics.
However, Warner sold a third of his shares in the company in November 1966, and the corporate churn allowed Beatty to work his hardest to keep the movie in cinemas for as long as possible. He pounded the pavement for eight long months, promoting the movie everywhere he could, and gradually, its perception began to shift. When it was all said and done, Bonnie and Clyde became the second-biggest movie in WB’s history and was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including ‘Best Actor’ for Beatty and ‘Best Actress’ for Faye Dunaway, winning two in total.
Amazingly, the film was also reevaluated by many critics who had initially panned it, which is extremely rare in Hollywood history – although it’s likely Warner didn’t have a similar change of heart.
