Everything seemed possible decades ago in Hollywood. People who went on to become stars — Stephen Spielberg and Harrison Ford — were young and experimented with new ideas. Candy Clark, a reluctant Hollywood actress who earned an Oscar nomination for American Graffiti (1973), was swept up in the scene. With her Polaroid camera, she shot candid photos of her friends and boyfriends. The latter included actor Jeff Bridges, director Nicolas Roeg, and artist Ed Ruscha. Her images are relaxed and intimate, taken in living rooms and backyards, and at parties. Clark tucked away the images in an unused bedroom in her San Fernando Valley home for years.
Then recently, she showed 18 images to LA writer Sam Sweet, who published them (and reflections on what was happening at the time) in a book called Tight Heads. The project captures a fleeting moment of so-called New Hollywood.
“I was really interested in not so much these Wikipedia-style descriptions of each person's career, but Candy's subjective associations in the moment she would look at the photo,” Sweet tells KCRW.
Jeff Bridges — Candy Clark met him at a screen test for “Fat City.” Credit: Candy Clark.
The book’s first image is Jeff Bridges, and next to it, Clark writes, “We met on the screen test for Fat City. I remember they had a cutaway car with back projection. When I saw him across the room, it was love at first sight. And luckily for me, he felt the same. He probably said, ‘Pick her.’”
Clark says Fat City was her first experience in the film business, which instantly hooked her. “If you look at these stories, there's a lot of instantaneous falling in loves. And that's just, I guess, the way I am, for better or worse.”
George Lucas — Candy Clark says he isn’t as quiet as he used to be. Credit: Candy Clark.
The book’s next photo is George Lucas crossing his hands and looking guarded and introverted. Candy says he was quiet back then, but is much more chatty now, “becoming a billionaire and having a beautiful wife and everything.”
Sweet says he was immediately struck by how boyish and disarmed these men looked — they were key figures of 1970s Hollywood. “What makes the photo so special is not just that they're beautifully composed, and that they capture the light of LA and the atmosphere of that era, but the effect that Candy's presence as the photographer would have on these people. They just look completely different in her presence than they would for any other photographer.”
Clark says she didn’t seek permission from the men — she just shot. In fact, she photographed Harrison Ford, who she says is camera-shy, just to tick him off a bit.
Harrison Ford (left) sits next to Steven Spielberg (right). Credit: Candy Clark.
Why didn’t Clark want to become an actress initially? She says she was happy living in New York City, where she broke into modelling and got regular clients like Seventeen magazine. She wanted to do just a little extra work, including one walk-on in Dustin Hoffman’s film Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?
She says the perks of being a film extra were free lunches, being able to see movie stars, and hanging out with people.
She told the casting director of Who Is Harry Kellerman that she wanted more extra work, who then introduced her to Fred Roos, a casting director from California. He invited her to watch him shoot the screen test for The Godfather, and she agreed. “No one knew what The Godfather was at that point, just some movie,” she says.
“Then Fred Roos got the bright idea that I should come to California and try out for this part in the movie Fat City. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to learn lines. … I was a very poor student in high school, so I had no idea how to memorize anything. Didn't care, didn't want to, and he just kept nagging me and nagging me. … I said, ‘Okay, I'll come, but I want to go to the Academy Awards, and I want to go to Disneyland.’”
However, after getting a taste of being on a movie set and hanging out with other actors, she got hooked, Clark recalls. “Then I dumped the modeling world and moved to California. Plus I had a nice boyfriend, Jeff Bridges.”
Clark ended up having many boyfriends, and in the book, they are Jeff Bridges, Nicholas Roeg, Ed Ruscha, Robin Williams, Ed Begley Jr., Mikhail Baryshnikov, and William Hurt.
Ed Ruscha — Candy Clark says he has “Modigliani eyes, one lower than the other.” Credit: Candy Clark.
The book includes four close-up images of Ed Ruscha, who Clark says she met when exiting a party. “He was coming in as I was starting to head out. And we met in the hallway, under almost the porch lights. And suddenly I wasn't so interested in leaving. So I hung about, and then he was talking about what he does. And I had no idea who he was. I just knew he was super handsome. … And he said, ‘Yeah, you ought to come to my studio and check out my work.’”
After meeting Ruscha, her relationship with him lasted three to four years, the same duration everyone else seemed to last, she says. Even today, Clark and Ruscha remain good friends and have lunch monthly.
In the book, Clark describes Ruscha: “I like his face. He's got those Modigliani eyes, one lower than the other.”
Nicholas Roeg has lots of photos in the book. Clark had a complicated relationship with him because he drank a lot, and her father was an alcoholic.
“I was drinking like six drinks a night, so I tallied it up. I'm like, ‘Huh, like 40 drinks a week. This has got to stop.’ And so I pulled way back on the alcohol. But I have a tendency, from childhood, liking alcohol. And so I really have to watch myself with alcohol. But yeah, I see he's very impish. … He's a very mischievous person. A lot of fun, a lot of fun,” she says.
However, she married actor Marjoe Gortner to get away from Roeg. She explains, “I really needed to break the relationship because it was exhausting. Really, he was 20 years older than me, but had more energy than me, and it was just wearing me out. And I was trying to do this film called Handle With Care, and he'd be up all night with … for example, the last episode, he was with Richard Brautigan, a writer. And they were wrestling, and he kept calling me over and over — and I had to be up for work the next day on that film — and waking me up and stressing me out. And Richard Brautigan and he were wrestling, and I think Nick got his ankle broken that night. I mean, this is [sic] the people I was hanging with. I just had to stop that world. So on the rebound, to make it over with, I married someone. It was brief. Married Marjoe. I told you, I make these instantaneous plans. And some of them don't work out. Most of them do.”
Her marriage with Marjoe Gortner lasted a few months. “It was just to get me out of another situation,” she says.
In the 1980s, Clark moved to New Jersey and stopped acting for a while. That was due to another love-at-first-sight episode, she says, which lasted about 12 years. They never got married, and are still friends.
“The relationship ran its course, and he met another woman, but that's great. And he's happily married, and that's great. … I'm back here in LA. I've been back for 25 years now.”
Does looking back on all these photos make Clark reflect on her past differently? She says she’s removed from that. “I know it was me. I know I was there. But it's like a whole other chapter that has come and gone, and I'm just doing different things.”
Candy Clark with her SX-70 Polaroid camera in the desert, late 1970s. Courtesy of Sam Sweet.
Sweet points out, “I think one of the things about being so in the moment, which Candy was back then and … is in her life now, is you're just not fixated on a set identity. … You're just always focused on what's happening now. … That's one of the things that makes you unique, and one of the things that makes the images so unique, they're so in the moment.”
He adds that the portraits feel antithetical to the inflated mythology of 1970s Hollywood. “All of a sudden, it was as if you're seeing these people for the first time, as if they were people sitting next to you on a couch, or next to you on a porch. Or they were just … a group of friends suddenly, rather than these larger-than-life stars. And I think that's just such a rare way to look at this business.”