From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

Hal Ashby went from Utah Farm Boy to editor of some of the most innovative films of the 1960s,

director of some epicical films, films such as, well, let's see now, shampoo and Being There.

And the author of an amazing new book on Halal Ashby, Being Hal Ashby, is sitting right across me, Nick Dawson,

and he's going to give us the last

detail of the book. I'm sorry, you must see that upon all the time. First of all, Nick, thanks for being

here. Thank you, Elvis. And you were saying before we got started, the book has been a real passion

project. You just threw yourself into it with no real place for it, but it was something you had to get Right. Did you have a favorite Ashby film at that point? The weird thing is that I probably maybe only seen being there at the time.

The way into the book for me was the life rather than the work.

And over the course of writing the book, I discovered that I'm a massive Hal Ashby fan.

I love a lot of his films, maybe two-thirds of his films, I think, are really superb,

and the rest, well, there's different reasons why I don't love them quite so much.

There are probably films he lost, I'm guessing, eight million ways to die.

Yeah, I mean, that's the classic case of the Ashby film that was taken away from him.

He had a lot of troubled production history, post-production histories on the films that he made in the

in the 1980s, but this one was literally taken away from him before he stepped into the editing

room and was, you know, the plan that he'd had to edit the film was scrapped and the film was

reimagined by the studio essentially.

And another editor, but as you quote from Jeff Bridined by the studio, essentially.

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