New book on director Hal Ashby

Those of you who got to know the work of Hal Ashby in our Summer 2008 retrospective will be excited to hear there is finally a definitive book on the director.

Says author Nick Dawson, “This book is is the first biography of Ashby — aka “the hippie director” — who made Harold and Maude, Being There, Shampoo, Coming Home and The Last Detail, among other films.”

Here, as they say, is some “advance praise”:

“Scrupulously researched and sensitively rendered, Being Hal Ashby is the definitive biography of a protean, gone-too-soon talent.”
- David Stenn, author of Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow

“Finally, a book–and a very good one indeed–on Hal Ashby, the neglected, least appreciated director of the 1970s. Hopefully, Dawson’s excellent volume will revive his reputation and get him the attention he deserves.”
 - Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ”N” Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

You can find more information about the book on Amazon.

An Old Friend on An Old Friend

I was glad to see my old friend Rob Nelson land a gig at the Museum of the Moving Image‘s Moving Image Source. Nelson contacted me about writing a piece on our Hal Ashby series for MOMI’s web based project. The Moving Image Source is not only chock full of great writing on cinema, its also one of the newest, albeit not too lucrative, sources of income for the ever dwindling number of film journalists out there.

More on Ashby

In anticipation of our forthcoming Hal Ashby series, Kathy Fennessy us a primer by taking us on a brief tour of her own Ashby experience. The series opens July 1.

Ashby in Good Magazine

“In the 1970s, Hal Ashby made a series of films so brilliant and yet so utterly different from one another that if you didn’t know who the director was, you might not think they were made by the same person…. It is not surprising that Ashby’s films feel relevant at the moment, since our fragmented political climate isn’t that different from the post-Vietnam-and-Watergate years in which they were made.” Jennifer Wachtell introduces a feature at Good Magazine that includes Alexander Payne on The Landlord, Jason Schwartzman on Harold and Maude, Wes Anderson on The Last Detail, David O Russell on Shampoo and Judd Apatow on Being There. Northwest Film Forum opens its Ashby retro on July 1.

Hal Ashby’s Commingling 70s is coming…

Poster design by Katharine Houpt.

Jonathan Demme on Hal Ashby