Tuesday, January 3, 1967

Killing Clyde and Bonnie in real time took less than half a minute. Killing them on screen takes four days—and this low-budget Warner Bros. production is already three days over schedule.

Director Arthur Penn feels the pressure. After three months of location shooting in small-town central Texas—including some of the actual places plundered by the Barrow Gang—the forty-four-year-old veteran of television, stage, and film, with a Tony Award and a Best Director Oscar nomination behind him, knows he and his collaborators are on to something, and he won’t be easily dissuaded. The ambush scene isn’t even in the script, which calls for the sequence to be related in a series of still photographs, accompanied by the sounds of gunfire. Penn knows instinctively that isn’t the right ending. “We [have] to turn them into legends,” he thinks, “move from reality into a new degree of experience.” Somewhere along the line, Penn has had a vision for the fade-out to his film. The whole sequence has dropped into his head, dreamlike, inspired by the breathtaking, almost ethereal action sequences of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 “Seven Samurai.” “It’s a kind of spastic ballet,” he explains to his star, Warren Beatty, who also happens to be making his debut as a producer.

“I don’t know what the fuck that means,” replies Beatty, unimpressed—and likely skeptical of the cost.

“Just trust me on this one,” Penn implores Beatty in one of their daily work-stopping creative arguments.“I know what I want.”

On the streets of Midlothian, Texas, for the fall 1966 shoot of Bonnie and Clyde. Director Arthur Penn despaired of having to use the same bulky equipment as his predecessors. Picture Lux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy.

What Penn wants will emerge as one of the most influential scenes in the history of American filmmaking, the moment when the factory system of the old Hollywood moguls and the outmoded Production Code that dictated on-screen morality collapsed against the onslaught of a new generation of artists and a society in the midst of a seismic upheaval. Achieving the director’s vision, however, is proving to be a slow-motion agony here on a Warner Bros. movie ranch location far removed from the actual events that occurred in Bienville Parish.

Four synchronized cameras running at different speeds are lined up to record Clyde and Bonnie’s death throes. Penn has instructed his truculent cameraman, Burnett Guffey, to capture the same action from different angles to ensure a constant match that will enhance the lyricism he intends to extract from the violence. Because of the length of time necessary to wire both the prop Ford V-8 and the actors with pyrotechnic “squibs” designed to replicate the impact of gunshots (along with the gallons of stage blood required to render them realistic), only two takes are possible each day, one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Every repetition further reduces the limited inventory of first-time costume designer Theadora Van Runkle and causes debut art director Dean Tavoularis to wonder that he may not have been able to wrangle quite enough vintage automobiles for this shoot.

As the minutes click past—and time is money when it comes to making films, especially on a chintzy $1.8 million budget like this one—Penn waits as special effects technician A. D. Flowers painstakingly attaches a strip of synthetic flesh to Beatty’s forehead. When the first off-screen shots are fired, the strip will be yanked away by invisible wires; Penn intends the effect to recall the by-now infamous Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas three years earlier. Meanwhile, costar Faye Dunaway’s left leg is tied to the emergency brake of the prop Ford V-8. So many wires dangle from her face and body she feels as if she resembles “an escapee from a mad scientist’s laboratory.” When the squibs detonate, she’ll perform a St. Vitus’s dance of death, then slump forward out of the car without falling, caught in grotesque suspended animation, her blond hair brushing the ground.

Cast publicity photo. The rifles held by Gene Hackman and Michael J. Pollard pass muster, but Clyde Barrow would never have approved of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s tommy guns. Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection.

This hasn’t been an easy shoot for the twenty-five-year-old actress, forced to lose weight before principal photography and reliant on diet pills and Coca-Colas to maintain her daily energy. Her on-screen heat with Beatty is incendiary, but it’s a different story on set. By now—at this crucial moment when Penn’s vision calls for Clyde and Bonnie to exchange one last, loaded glance before high-velocity bullets tear them apart—Dunaway and Beatty can barely stand to look at each other. In these situations, a good director does what needs to be done. Instead of having his principal actors exchange looks directly, Penn stands in their respective eye lines for individual close-ups that, in split-second crosscuts, will prove electrifying to young audiences and transform cheap hoodlums into romantic martyrs.

Candid camera. One of the poses that made Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker a media sensation when published in the Joplin Globe two days after police discovered a camera in the gang’s hastily fled garage apartment. FBI file photo.

Art glamorizes life. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway re-create Clyde and Bonnie’s Joplin photo for a moment not included in the final version of the film. Courtesy of Everett Collection.

Penn has no illusions about the story he’s telling.“These two people were killers,” he says flatly.“They seemed to have almost no conscience.” But he also says, “the justice meted out by the forces of law and order . . . seems to me far worse than the crimes they’re avenging.”

“Bonnie and Clyde” has come together in an atmosphere of all-pervasive violence.

On August 1, 1966, shortly before production on the film began, a clean-cut, twenty-five-year-old white man by the name of Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower in Austin and committed what was then the largest mass murder in American history. Armed with a 6 mm Remington rifle with a 4× scope (with which he did most of the killing), a .35-caliber Remington carbine, a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver, a 9 mm Luger pistol, and seven hundred rounds of ammunition, Whitman killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-one others in just over ninety minutes before being fatally shot by two Austin police officers. The unprecedented killing spree put an “ordinary” face on murder to an American public already reeling from the slaughter of the Clutter family of Kansas by a pair of violent ex-cons (dramatized in book and film of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and the shocking close-quarter slayings of eight student nurses in Chicago by a psychotic drifter, Richard Speck.

Something in the fabric of the “traditional American way of life” was coming unhinged.

Penn had already tapped into that current in his previous film, “The Chase” (1966), made for Columbia Pictures and producer Sam Spiegel in the shadow of the 1965 Watts riots. The story of a manhunt that takes place over the course of a single day in a Texas town ripe with social and sexual tensions, the movie was badly compromised in production, but nonetheless emerged as what one critic called “a dissection of the violence oppressing America. The film’s seething, hothouse atmosphere and soap-opera story, scripted by Lillian Hellman, is underlaid with a sense of boiling ferocity that bubbles into moments of unexpected savagery, then erupts into a junkyard Götter- dämmerung that sees an entire population transformed into a lynch mob.

“The Chase” served as a dry run for the themes Penn is now bringing to this Barrow Gang story by a couple of first-time New York writers, David Newman and Robert Benton. It is an angry, unforgiving film, devoid of redeeming characters (even Marlon Brando’s principled sheriff is deeply compromised), full of gun-toting, alcohol-fueled vigilantes. At the climax, with order finally restored, a Jack Ruby–like avenger assassinates the fugitive. That ending wasn’t scripted either: Penn, Brando, and Robert Redford, playing the fugitive, Bubber Reeves, improvised it on the spot. The image is depressingly familiar: As Brando’s sheriff escorts Redford’s prisoner through a crowd of townspeople, a figure on the jailhouse steps unloads a concealed weapon into Redford’s guts.

The movie flopped. Penn is determined to make sure this one doesn’t.

Assistant director Jack Reddish double-checks Beatty and Dunaway’s marks and calls “Last looks!” Makeup man Robert Jiras, hair stylist Gladys Warren, and their teams scurry around another of Tavoularis’s soon-to-be- pulverized prop Ford V-8s, making last-minute adjustments. Director of photography Guffey readies his quartet of cameras to roll in unison. Special effects chief Flowers mans the electronic board that will set off his explosive charges in pre-timed sequence. Penn takes a seat next to the principal “A” camera. In this era before the regular use of video monitors and instant playback, a director can only rely on his own eyes.

The waiting is finally over. Four days of shooting are about to reach their culmination.

Maybe.

A silence falls over the Albertson Ranch. The ritual roll call of production begins.

“Speed,” calls sound recordist Robert Miller.
“Set,” chimes in Guffey.
“It was one of those insane moments where, as a director, you’re saying to yourself, ‘I see it this way, I see it no other way, so I’m not going to economize,’ ” the director thinks, “and meanwhile, you can see people whispering on the set, ‘ This guy is nuts. What the fuck is he doing?’ ”

A beat, then Arthur Penn launches what he dearly hopes will be the final take.

“Action!”

Shot to pieces. Lawmen in Arcadia, Louisiana, converge on the shattered remains of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s last stolen Ford V-8.“I literally could not have heard thunder,” one posse member said of the fatal barrage. Dallas Municipal Archives via University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas.

Dying over and over. Faye Dunaway replicated Bonnie Parker’s death throes over eight takes and four grueling days of filming on a Warner Bros. ranch location far away from the real events. Warner Bros./Cinematic/Alamy.

—Hampton Sides, “New York Times” bestselling author of “Blood and Thunder” and “The Wide, Wide Sea.”