This title analyzes the films and filmmaking career of director Hal
Ashby, placing his work in the cultural context of filmmaking in
the 1970s. Hal Ashby directed eleven feature films over the course
of his career and was an important figure in the Hollywood
Renaissance of the late 1960s and 1970s. Though he was a member of
the same generation of filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford
Coppola, and Robert Altman, Ashby has received comparatively little
critical or scholarly validation for his work. Author Christopher
Beach argues that despite his lower profile, Ashby was an
exceptionally versatile and unusually creative director. Beach
focuses primarily on Ashby's first seven films - "The Landlord",
"Harold and Maude", "The Last Detail", "Shampoo", "Bound for
Glory", "Coming Home", and "Being There" - to analyze Ashby's
contributions to filmmaking culture in the 1970s. The first two
chapters of this volume provide an overview of Ashby's filmmaking
career, as Beach makes the case for Ashby's status as an auteur and
provides a biographical survey of Ashby's most productive and
successful decade, the 1970s. In the following chapters, Beach
analyzes groups of films to uncover important thematic concerns in
Ashby's work, including the treatment of a young male protagonist
in "The Landlord" and "Harold and Maude", the representation of the
U.S. military in "The Last Detail" and "Coming Home", and the role
of television and mass media in "Shampoo" and "Being There". Beach
also examines the crucial role of the musical score in Ashby's
films, as well as the rapid decline of the director's career after
Being There. "The Films of Hal Ashby" is based on Beach's extensive
use of unpublished archival materials, as well as a number of
interviews with actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, and
others involved in the making of Ashby's films. This volume will
interest film and television scholars, as well as readers
interested in filmmakers of the 1970s.
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