The Critic And The Star

With her impassioned defense of the widely panned 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, The New Yorker’ s Pauline Kael helped launch the American New Wave and propel Warren Beatty into permanent orbit. More than a decade later, the powerful critic would leave her perch to accept the invitation of Beatty to co-produce James Toback’s Love & Money. The experiment failed, and Kael left Hollywood under a cloud. LILI ANOLIK tracks the seduction: Who was taking advantage of whom? And what exactly was at stake?

- Lili Anolik

The facts, verifiable:

In 1979, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, 59, accepted an offer from actor-director Warren Beatty, 41, to help him produce Love & Money, a script his production company had acquired and set up at Paramount. Love & Money was to be the second feature of writer-director James Toback, 34, whose first feature, Fingers, Kael had reviewed ecstatically the year before. Toback was also a personal friend. She took a leave of absence from The New Yorker, headed to L.A.

Kael and Toback began working together. She wanted substantial changes to the script. He did not want to change the script substantially. She was removed from the project. Beatty secured a new deal for her at Paramount as a creative production executive. At the time, Paramount’s chairman was Barry Diller, a fan. It was not to Diller, however, that she would be reporting. It was to Don Simpson, senior V.P. of worldwide production. There were a number of properties she wished to develop. Simpson rejected all but one. Her contract was for five months. When it lapsed, it wasn’t renewed. She returned to The New Yorker in the spring of 1980.

These, as I said, are the matters of fact, checked and established, of the situation. And before I obscure them or re-arrange them, deface them with conjecture and speculation, intuition, feminine and otherwise, I wanted you to see them plain. Now you have. We still can’t get started, though. There are a few more things you should know first, mostly about the leads, Kael and Beatty: who they are and where they came from, what they meant in Hollywood and in America, in the worlds of movies and letters and politics, in the late 1970s.

Flashback, Hers