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Warren's World

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"The studio system was just coming to a close, I think, when I showed up. And they didn't quite know it," Beatty says. It's the next day, and we're in a restaurant near the offices of his production company, eating some pizza before our garlic chicken shows up. It's four in the afternoon. Warren Beatty, it is well known, does not operate according to standard concepts of time. This applies both to meetings, which can slip two or three hours just like that, and to meals. He eats when he wants, and what he wants. He is the only man I have ever seen order a second dessert. A moment ago he asked for, and ate, the pepperoni slices I left on my plate. ''The studios less and less wanted to have the obligation of contracts to people,'' he says, chewing. ''And we were moving into an era of free expression, or less inhibition.''

Beatty helped speed things along. He hit Hollywood full-force with his first starring role in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961), a story of small-town sexual hypocrisy that ruffled many feathers. ''I was particularly lucky, because my first movie seemed to do it for me,'' he says. But luck was only part of it. Beatty may not have had Brando's fire, or Dean's ethereality, or Gable's gruff machismo, but he had humor, athletic grace, and something, in quantity, that all the great ones have had: mystery. Looks and talent will take you a long way in Hollywood, but if you seem to withhold some crucial part of yourself — whether it exists or not — you may enter the pantheon at will. Add salient sexuality and the mixture becomes combustible. When he romanced the aging Vivien Leigh in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone(1961), it was as though Gable's torch had been passed.

The legend began early. The columns began toting up the women Beatty kept company with — Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor, just to name some early brunets — and the public took notice. The men of Hollywood, who respect such things, had already noticed. (His catch phone-phrase to women — ''What's new, pussycat?'' — became a movie title and song.) Even Sinatra, the town's ruling swinger, acknowledged him. Beatty was a whole Rat Pack rolled into one, with a difference: He didn't like publicity. When his sense of privacy prevented him from spilling to the press, the press called him difficult. They still do. It's only helped.

''What did becoming a star so early do for you?'' I ask. ''Do to you?''

''Well,'' Beatty says, ''I would say that the main thing was early access.''

Now it's my turn to raise my eyebrows. ''To?'' I say.

''To things and people and places and opportunities that are unusual for someone in their early 20s.'' He smiles, at last. ''It was sort of like being a kid in a candy store.''

The kid grew up. As a result of Bonnie and Clyde, his first stab at producing, he was a multimillionaire by the time he was 30. Warner Bros. had so little confidence in the movie's prospects that it gave him a share of the profits instead of a producing fee. ''They gave me 40 percent of the gross,'' Beatty laughs with delight.

If there was any definitive death of the studio system, that was it: Beatty was the cutting edge, the newest and sharpest of the new breed of actor-producers. Bonnie and Clyde earned $53 million, and he was free to design the rest of his life. But with freedom came a certain emptiness. His solution was to turn to politics — lending his promotional and personal skills to the campaigns of Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, and later, Gary Hart. His sphere of influence broadened enormously, as did his sense of the world.

''In a way,'' he says, ''politics saved my life from the confections of Hollywood and movies. It gave me energy. I felt connected. And that was quite a relief for me. Because, you might say, to be more excited by reality than by fantasy is a good thing.''

''I guess my political arousal was to some extent selfish. It made me feel good. In some way, it relieved a certain stress I must have felt in life.''

But then, around the time of Shampoo (1975), the next film he produced after Bonnie and Clyde, another change came over the business. ''American movies went into another phase, which was primarily commercial,'' Beatty says. ''That came out of the discovery that if you were to mass-release movies and pump a tremendous amount of advertising money into television marketing, you could just make a hell of a lot of money.''

''We all have attempted to cash in on the commercial possibilities of movies,'' he says. ''(And so) we moved into an era of what we call 'high concept.' Can you say it in a sentence? Can you tell what this movie is in a 30-second spot? If so, we can make a lot of money our first weekend, which will then go down only 30 percent the next weekend, and then so on and so forth. And then soon thereafter, people who wrote about film began to write about the business of film rather than the content of film, and began to evaluate a film on its business.''

We are on to Beatty's pet peeve, which may be boiled down thus: Outsiders have too much influence on the business. The press is peskier (and meaner) than ever, and numbers-obsessed to boot. ''What do magazines and television do?'' he asks, warming to his subject. ''They tell you what is popular; they tell you the demographics. Because they have to adhere to demographics to sell their magazines and television shows. So they become obsessed with, What are the top 10 sellers of this? What are the top 10 sellers of that? It's always selling.''

''And what it causes is a climate in which the creative peers begin to listen more to those tabulations than to their own opinions of one another. And it's not even necessarily the money that they're interested in. It's the ratings of the money. It's the position. Because we give such a stupid amount of credit to monetary success. In business, and now in art.''

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