Keeping Clyde on a two-way street
“THE Stickup That Shook It Up” [March 23] was an outstanding piece on the making of “Bonnie and Clyde,” but didn’t Geoff Boucher skip over the problem regarding Warren Beatty wanting to tell all of the story, including the menage-a-trois that occurred between Bonnie, Clyde and the C.W. Moss character?
Supposedly Jack Warner almost dumped the project until Beatty [and screenwriter Robert Towne, brought in to rewrite Robert Benton and David Newman’s original script] agreed to make the Clyde character impotent, which was an improvement because it added to the intensity of the Bonnie character.
I teach cinema history and the mention of this perks up the students more than the fact that “Bonnie and Clyde” is a classic.
Fred Martin
Los Angeles
Martin is a professor of cinema at Los Angeles Mission College in Sylmar.
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