Hal Ashby Trailers
Hal TrailerLookin' to Get Out TrailerBeing There Trailer
Hal Ashby (September 2, 1929 – December 27, 1988) was an American film director and editor associated with the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking. Before his career as a director, Ashby edited films for Norman Jewison, notably The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Editing, and In the Heat of the Night (1967), which earned him an Oscar for the same category.
Ashby received a third Oscar nomination, this time for Best Director, for Coming Home (1978). Other films directed by Ashby include The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976) and Being There (1979).
Born William Hal Ashby in Ogden, Utah, he grew up in a Mormon household. His tumultuous childhood as part of a dysfunctional family included the divorce of his parents, his father's suicide, and dropping out of high school. Ashby was married and divorced by the time he was 19.
As Ashby was entering adult life, he moved from Utah to California where he soon became an assistant film editor. After being nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing in 1967 for The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, his big break occurred in 1968 when he won the award for In the Heat of the Night. At the urging of producer Norman Jewison, Ashby directed his first film The Landlord in 1970. While his birth date placed him squarely within the realm of the prewar generation, the filmmaker quickly embraced the hippie lifestyle, adopting vegetarianism and growing his hair long. In 1970 he married actress Joan Marshall. While they remained married until his death in 1988, the two had separated by the mid-seventies, with Marshall never forgiving Ashby, along with Warren Beatty and Robert Towne, for dramatizing certain unflattering elements of her life in Shampoo.
Over the next 16 years, Ashby directed several acclaimed and popular films, many were about outsiders and adventurers traversing the pathways of life. Aside from Shampoo, Ashby's most commercially successful film was the Vietnam War drama Coming Home (1978). Starring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, both in Academy Award-winning performances, it was for this film that Ashby earned his only Best Director nomination from the Academy for his work. After Being There (his last film to achieve widespread attention), Ashby became notoriously reclusive and eccentric, retreating to his home in Malibu Colony. Later it was learned that Ashby was using drugs, and he slowly became difficult and unemployable.
Attempting to turn a corner in his declining career, Ashby stopped using drugs, trimmed his hair and beard, and began to frequently attend Hollywood parties wearing a navy blue blazer so as to suggest that he was once again employable. Despite these efforts, he could only find work as a television director.
Ashby died on December 27, 1988 at his home in Malibu, California.
The Last Detail, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There were all nominated for the Palme d'Or.
Most Popular Hal Ashby Trailers
Total trailers found: 27
01 January 1976
Adaptation of a Strindberg play by Lee Grant for the 1974 AFI Directing Workshop for Women. Restored in 2022 by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation.
02 August 1967
African-American Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs is arrested on suspicion of murder by Bill Gillespie, the racist police chief of tiny Sparta, Mississippi.
11 October 1965
Newly arrived in Hollywood from England, Dennis Barlow finds he has to arrange his uncle's interment at the highly-organised and very profitable Whispering Glades funeral parlour.
19 December 1979
A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man.
28 March 2019
Hal Ashby's obsessive genius led to an unprecedented string of Oscar®-winning classics, including Harold and Maude, Shampoo and Being There.
26 June 1968
A debonair, adventuresome bank executive believes that he has pulled off the perfect multi-million dollar heist--until he must match wits with an insurance investigator who will do anything to get her man.
13 August 1958
Retired wealthy sea captain Jim McKay arrives in the Old West, where he becomes embroiled in a feud between his future father-in-law, Major Terrill, and the rough and lawless Hannasseys over a valuable patch of land.
11 February 1975
On Election Day, 1968, irresponsible hairdresser and ladies' man George Roundy is too busy cutting hair and dealing with his girlfriends and mistress Felicia Karpf, whose husband Lester is having an affair with his ex-girlfriend Jackie.
20 December 1971
A deadpan young man obsessed with death meets an eccentric septuagenarian who teaches him to live life to the fullest.
18 December 1981
It was recorded at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia on 18 December 1981, for what was the penultimate show of the band's U.
11 December 1973
Two Navy men are ordered to bring a young offender to prison, but decide to show him one last good time along the way.
15 February 1978
In 1968 California, a Marine officer's wife falls in love with a former high school classmate who suffered a paralyzing combat injury in the war.
25 April 1986
Scudder is a detective with the Sheriff's Department who is forced to shoot a violent suspect during a narcotics raid.
19 December 1961
An unruly student at a private all-girls boarding school scandalously accuses the two women who run it of having a romantic relationship.
16 December 1969
After runaway Ben Young is robbed and left on his own, he is taken in by Lil, the head of a Chicago brothel.
25 May 1966
When a Soviet submarine gets stuck on a sandbar off the coast of a New England island, its commander orders his second-in-command, Lieutenant Rozanov, to get them moving again before there is an international incident.
15 October 1965
An up-and-coming poker player tries to prove himself in a high-stakes match against a long-time master of the game.
08 May 1981
A boozy drifter tries to get to know the widow he married while on a bender.
05 December 1976
A biography of Woody Guthrie, one of America's greatest folk singers. He left his dust-devastated Texas home in the 1930s to find work, discovering the suffering and strength of America's working class.
05 April 1964
The other party is in disarray. Five men vie for the party nomination for president. No one has a majority as the first ballot closes and the front-runners begin to decide how badly they want the job.
20 May 1970
At the age of twenty-nine, Elgar Enders "runs away" from home. This running away consists of buying a building in a black ghetto in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.
29 March 1985
Darryl Palmer is a major league baseball player who meets and pursues an attractive singer. After some setbacks, the two are married and sent on an emotional journey that sees his career take off, while hers doesn't.
24 April 2007
This film contains interview material and archival footage presented all on one film. It begins with very rare black and white Australian documentary from the 60s with Jagger looking like the rebel, and Keith, looking somewhat wasted, talking about Brian Jones in some depth.
08 October 1982
Two gamblers must leave New York City after one loses a lot of money. Doing what all gamblers in trouble would do, they hurry to the gambling capital Las Vegas to turn their luck around.
29 October 1982
The Rolling Stones' record-breaking 1981 North American arena tour documented by director Hal Ashby. Featuring the biggest Rolling Stones songs from the first 20 years - in the words of Mick Jagger, "a feel of what it's like to be there", as 20 cameras take you onstage with the band in this groundbreaking, dynamic tour.
01 January 1988
A normal teenager is transported to a Monty Pythonesque medieval fantasy land where an odd, adamant knight takes him on a quest.
01 January 1984
Solo Trans is a concert film by Neil Young, released in 1984. It was recorded at the Hara Arena in Dayton, Ohio on September 18, 1983 during Young's Solo Trans tour.
