Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

first editor he had worked under, Gene Fowler Jr., had progressed to directing and by the end of the decade had made a clutch of films, such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), that were bound for classic B-movie status. One of the senior editors he had worked alongside at Walt Disney, Basil Wrangell, had combined editing with directing short films, second-unit material, television shows, and even a few features and was about to direct Cinerama's South Seas Adventure (1958). But there was another example even closer to home: Bob Swink.

      Swink was desperate to become a director like Wyler, and the love-hate relationship between the two was greatly fueled by this desire. Wyler encouraged Swink by allowing him to shoot second unit on Big Country and Friendly Persuasion (1956) and, when he was too ill to make it to the set, had Swink oversee directorial duties on the latter for a few days. But though Wyler tantalized Swink with tidbits of directing work, he needed him as his editor and never really intended to let him go.

      It wasn't just their shared dream of directing that bonded Ashby and Swink. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind asserts that the absence of Ashby's father in his life from age twelve onward led him to seek out paternal substitutes, namely, Swink and, later, Norman Jewison. While there is definitely truth in this, Ashby and Swink were also particularly well-matched professional partners. In Swink, Ashby saw a master editor and mentor figure who could take him up through the system; Ashby, conversely, was the ideal pupil, a keen young man quickly becoming a skilled editor who, like Swink, was willing to work incredibly long hours to get the job done.

      Ashby worked throughout the week but devoted weekends to Mickey and his friends. Ian Bernard had moved to Laguna Beach in 1956, and it was only a matter of time before Bill Box, and then Ashby and Mickey, followed. The Ashbys rented an apartment in Villa Rockledge, a beautiful cliffside house on the seafront. Both Mickey and Ashby loved it: she could paint at her leisure and soon had a little menagerie of animals made up of the strays that always seemed to gravitate toward her, and he was thrilled to be near the ocean. Bernard says the house was “a joy” to Ashby: “That's one thing I'll say, he did love the ocean. He never sat out and sunbathed, and I never saw him swim, but it was the bitch of the ocean, you know? It had a romantic implication to him.”¹⁹

      When Ashby was working on a film, he'd get up before dawn to beat the traffic and then drive up the coast to Los Angeles with the glow of the rising sun on the open road. According to Bernard, Ashby's workload and commuting “took the constitution of an eighteen-year old,” but he never needed more than four hours' sleep. “He would leave before anybody was up and came back when we were all in bed,” Bernard remembers. “We would leave some food out for him. I don't know how he did it.”²⁰

      The Laguna crowd was described by Tom Blackwell as “artists, surfers, vagabonds,” all getting by as best they could.²¹ Blackwell was a young painter who had come from Chicago to try and make his name but was still a decade or so away from his breakthrough success as part of the photorealist movement. He enjoyed being part of this bohemian group and was a regular visitor at Ashby's seafront house. On weekends, everybody would gather together on the beach to smoke weed, drink, listen to music—Miles Davis, Art Pepper, John Coltrane—and talk about every conceivable topic. Blackwell was still wet behind the ears and latched onto Ashby, who quickly became his friend and mentor.

      The aspiring artist was living on the breadline and was “so poor,” Bernard says, “I think Ashby gave him clothes and some shoes. I have this weird recollection that he gave him a pair of sandals!”²² Ashby took Blackwell under his wing and brought him along to jazz clubs, braving some of the rougher Los Angeles neighborhoods to share musical delights with the young man.

      “He was the smartest man I'd ever met,” says Blackwell. “Funny, as well. Without him being showy, you would know that he was the smartest guy in the room. The thing about Hal was the commanding way he spoke. He was so verbally acute, he would immediately gain your respect. He would get to the essence of things in an offhand and unforgettable way. He could summarize a scene in a way that made it so compelling, after that you could only see it his way.”²³

      In his early days of editing, Ashby was already thinking a lot about directing. Blackwell recalls a car journey they took together during which they discussed Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which Blackwell had just read. Over the course of the ride, the two talked about the possibility of turning it into a film, but Ashby decided it wasn't viable, that it was “way too far ahead of the zeitgeist.”²⁴ (According to Blackwell, Ashby was always a year or so ahead of everybody else's tastes.)

      Ashby continued to read widely and watch a lot of films—Hitchcock and Fellini were among his favorite directors—and whether he was making industry connections or broadening his cultural horizons, everything he did was in some way geared toward readying himself to direct. In a letter written in the early 1980s, Mickey reminded Ashby of “the days we used [to] sit around digging Basie or whom ever and throwing ideas around about making films to the music instead of vice versa.”²⁵ She maintains that more than ten years before he started directing, Ashby already knew exactly what kinds of films he would make. “He was a very idealistic man,” she says. “He wanted to make films that had a message but didn't hit people over the head with it. You know, like a subtle thing. He believed he was going to become a director; that was what he'd wanted from the very beginning.”²⁶ Ashby was particularly influenced by Wyler because he made films marked by realism, restraint, and humor. Ashby respected Wyler because he “didn't want to be untruthful. He had very strong feelings that way, and he would make films for reasons.”²⁷

      In around 1958, the year that Mandel broke into Hollywood with his groundbreaking jazz score to Robert Wise's I Want to Live, the Susan Hayward melodrama, Ashby and Bernard came up with a plan for a movie inspired by their activities with the antinuclear group SANE. The Sound of Silence, written by “Ian Bernard and Wm. Hal Ashby,” is set in 1965, twenty years after the dropping of the atomic bomb. It centers on David Cassidy, a war correspondent obsessed with Hiroshima who begins a personal crusade to prevent further nuclear activity. The script showcases pacifist perspectives and reveals the writers' belief that art can precipitate change. The last meaningful statement in the script is from David's wife, Allyn, who tells him that as a writer he has “the ability to reach men's hearts; you can make them feel and understand. You can do a lot of good because of this. That's the way I think you should fight.”²⁸

      Cassidy is a lot like Ashby: married with a young child and unsure whether the conventional happiness of family life can give him all he needs. Like Ashby and many of his 1970s male protagonists, he is essentially still a child, an adult whose immaturity and insecurity lurk just below the surface. He too gets angry and impassioned about events outside his control, that anger and distress coming predominantly from an inability to affect things, rather than from the wrong itself.

      Ashby and Bernard were friendly with Reva Frederick, Robert Mitchum's personal assistant, and The Sound of Silence was written with Mitchum in mind as they felt he would be ideologically sympathetic with the film's views. Mitchum was supposedly interested, but nothing came of it, and the film was never produced.

      The Sound of Silence was too personal and polemical to be entirely successful: certain characters are stereotypes, some scenarios lack realism, and the dialogue is at times clunky. Yet considering how inexperienced both writers were, the script succeeds much more than might be expected, and its powerful pacifist message was a sign of things to come.

      As soon as The Big Country was completed, Swink moved base to Twentieth Century–Fox to begin work on George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), taking his keen-eyed protégé with him.

      Stevens, like Wyler, was a veteran who had as much power and sway as any director in Hollywood and a reputation for shooting a lot of footage. In the past, Stevens had infuriated his bosses with overblown production times and lengthy editing periods, but the consistent commercial and critical success of his films made him an asset to any studio. Three of his previous four films—Giant (1956), Shane (1953), and A Place in the Sun (1951)—had been huge successes, and Giant and A Place in the Sun both