Hal Ashby - Decline

Decline

Because of his critical and (relative) commercial success, shortly after the success of Coming Home, Ashby was able to form a production company under the auspices of Lorimar. After Being There (his last film to achieve widespread attention), Ashby became notoriously reclusive and eccentric, retreating to his spartan beachfront abode in Malibu.

The productions of Second-Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out — the latter a Las Vegas caper film that reunited him with Voight and featured Voight's young daughter, Angelina Jolie — were plagued by Ashby's increasingly erratic behavior, such as pacifying former girlfriends by hiring them to edit Lookin' to Get Out. Studio executives grew less tolerant of his increasingly perfectionist editing techniques, exemplified by his laboring over a montage set to The Police's "Message in a Bottle" for nearly six months. Initially set to helm Tootsie after two years of laborious negotiations, reports of these bizarre tendencies resulted in his dismissal shortly before production commenced.

Shortly thereafter, Ashby — a longtime Rolling Stones fan — accompanied the group on their 1981 American tour, in the process filming the documentary Let's Spend the Night Together. The occupational hazards of the road were too much for Ashby, who overdosed before a show in Phoenix, Arizona. Although the film was eventually completed, it had limited theatrical release.

The Slugger's Wife, with a screenplay penned by Neil Simon, continued the losing streak. Ostensibly a commercially-minded romantic comedy, Simon was reportedly horrified when he viewed Ashby's rough cut of the first reel, sequenced as an impressionistic mood piece with the first half hour featuring minimal dialogue. Remaining defiant in his squabbles with producers and Simon, Ashby was eventually fired in the final stages of production; the completed film was a critical and commercial failure. 8 Million Ways to Die, written by Oliver Stone, fared similarly at the box office; by this juncture Ashby's post-production antics were considered to be such a liability that he was fired by the production company on the final day of principal photography.