Hal Ashby: The one that got away

The troubled circumstances of the movie's production and release are well recounted in Nick Dawson's meticulous new biography "Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel." The director was juggling the postproduction of another doomed comedy, "Second-Hand Hearts" (1981), and the development of "Tootsie" (a gig he eventually lost to Sydney Pollack because "Lookin' to Get Out" fell far behind schedule).

Unhappy with the version of the film he turned in, Paramount executives demanded a reedit, and Ashby, fed up and beaten down, left it to his editor, Bob Jones, who worked with Voight to produce a shorter cut.

It was in the course of researching his book that Dawson realized that Ashby's preferred edit, a further fine-tuning of the cut he submitted to the studio, still existed. The director's cut of "Lookin' to Get Out" is no lost masterpiece, but you can easily see how a truncated version would have stifled its loose-limbed energy.

The obvious reason for its failure, as Dawson points out, is that the movie, a shaggy-dog farce with an unsympathetic, even pathetic protagonist, was conspicuously "out of line with the popular cinema of the 1980s."

Even then, it must have seemed like a throwback. There are shades of Robert Altman's 1974 gambling buddy-movie "California Split." The pseudo-improvised macho theatrics, especially on Voight's part, often suggest a lesser John Cassavetes film.

"Lookin' to Get Out" is part of Warner Home Video's Directors Showcase series, devoted to underappreciated work by major filmmakers. Other new titles include David Cronenberg's "M. Butterfly," John Boorman's "Beyond Rangoon" and Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" -- all better and more interesting films than their reputations suggest.

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