Shampoo: First as Farce

Yet viewing this film now, the other side of Beatty, the driven producer, is equally apparent. While he had yet to become a director—a role he wouldn’t take on officially until the 1978 Heaven Can Wait—he by all accounts played a larger creative role in Shampoo than the first-rate director he hired, Hal Ashby, much as he had with Bonnie and Clyde, where the billed director, also excellent, was Arthur Penn. By the time Shampoo was nearing production and Ashby was hired for a shoot that would commence in March of 1974, Beatty had been nursing the project for six or seven years, a typically prolonged gestation period for him. (Early on, it carried the title Hair.) He and Robert Towne had each written screenplays along the way—they would share the final credit—and it was Ashby who served as referee for a volatile ten-day collaboration in which they merged their two versions. It was “the most creative ten days of my life, probably,” Beatty would later say. 

Shampoo directly followed production of Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown, which went into release in June 1974, just as Shampoo wrapped, and the affinity between the two projects is apparent. As Chinatown weds the noir genre to a fictionalized recounting of real-life corruption among Los Angeles’ elites in the early decades of the twentieth century, so Shampoo blends farce with a portrait of corruption LA-style in the 1960s. The film opens with a card announcing that it is set on November 4, 1968, election eve; the gala at which all the principals subsequently converge is an election-night dinner for fat-cat Republican donors—chief among them Warden’s character, Lester Karpf—held in a private dining room at the reigning Rodeo Drive power restaurant of the day, the Bistro. The well-heeled revelers are inclined to strike a high moral tone: “Some of us are trying to make this country a better place to live in,” Lester lectures his wife while holding forth at a table festooned with American flags. (Elsewhere at the party, he can be heard conferring with male cronies about “offshore-drilling permits.”) No less sanctimonious are the diners’ political standard-bearers, whose sound bites occasionally float above the din from the scattered Sony Trinitrons tuned in to NBC’s election coverage. Richard Nixon vows to “restore respect for the United States of America,” while his running mate, Spiro Agnew, promises an end to “permissive attitudes.” The ironies are clear enough. By the time Shampoo was in production, Watergate was nearing its endgame, and Nixon would resign when it was still in the editing room that August of 1974. The timing of the film’s release—the following February—could not have been more in sync with the country’s post-Nixon moral reckoning.

In retrospect, though, the film captured a bigger and more enduring slice of political history than Watergate, albeit one not yet visible to the audiences of 1975. At the time of Shampoo’s premiere, it’s worth recalling, American conservatism was thought to be in its death throes. Barry Goldwater had been humiliated in the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide, and Watergate had negated Nixon’s victories of 1968 and 1972. But obituaries for the New Right of that time would soon prove laughably mistaken. Along with the mammoth oil portraits of Nixon and Agnew that decorate the Bistro dinner in Shampoo, there is a much smaller black-and-white portrait of Ronald Reagan, who had been elected California’s governor in 1966. While Nixon and Agnew would indeed be swept away soon enough, the Reagan Revolution would survive and flourish, capturing the White House just six years after Nixon’s demise and five years after the release of Shampoo.