Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/747534
with the lovely and talented Annette Bening. There was a pause... silence on the other end of the phone. What could the guy say? Annette and Ed Harris were starring in The Face of Love, a low- budget independent labor of love, like Warren's, but a whole lot smaller. Of course, I had to turn down other, bigger projects I would have liked to have done over the next years. But that's the life I chose. I did it to myself. I learned that that's who I am... or who I was. And over the course of the years I was waiting for Warren, I ended up doing two more low-budget movies with the same producers, both interesting and wonderful experiences. During the second round of production, Warren and I were driving together one day to San Bernardino, to see a location. (Persuading Warren to get into his car and drive that far just to see a possible location is not easy.) But Warren was excited that day about a new idea he had just had: It wasn't simply that he wanted to be Howard Hughes. That was obvious. But he was sure that Howard Hughes would have wanted to be Warren Beatty. At first I laughed, thinking it was just another example of Hollywood narcissism. But that wasn't it exactly. Some narcissism was there, certainly, and necessary. But the idea was strangely right: the two men—each extremely handsome, tall and desirable, powerful, well-off, extraordinarily charming and intelligent—were mirrors of each other. When I watch the film, I honestly don't know who is who. It's Warren up there, for sure, but it's also an interpretation of Howard Hughes that no one has met before. Rules Don't Apply was quite an odyssey, and, like Homer's Penelope, I have been knitting, unraveling and reknitting the tale in my own head every night. But now the five years are up, the film is coming out, our work is on screen and it's time for other people to make of it what they will. Warren has finally thrown it up and gotten it out. What's next, Warren? We'll all be waiting. ADG Clockwise from top left: Interior of the London hotel suite on stage at Sunset Gower. At war with a rented translight for the London hotel suite. In the end, translights that Ms. Oppewall had shot for THE GOOD SHEPHERD were used for this. Oddly enough, they were the only ones available that seemed to work. The outside of the London hotel suite, on stage. Three images show Howard Hughes' hospital bed as built by special effects supervisor Lars Anderson, based on a design by Dennis Bradford; the hospital room set with the bed in place; and Mr. Bradford's sketch of the bed.