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Wright. 22
    By the end of the meeting, it didn’t seem impossible that, if the two would-be producers got the script into the right hands, they could raise the money to make a lean, no-frills, black-and-white version of Bonnie and Clyde themselves. And they had a well-placed ally: The Joneses’ attorney was the powerful entertainment lawyer Robert Montgomery of the New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Elinor Jones sent Montgomery the treatment for Bonnie and Clyde almost immediately. Montgomery agreed to send it to another of his clients, Arthur Penn. 23 Penn got the seventy-five pages, glanced at them, turned it down on the spot, and barely gave Bonnie and Clyde another thought for two years. 24
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    By 1963, François Truffaut and Arthur Penn were already friendly acquaintances and admirers of each other’s work. Early that year, while working on what was to become a seminal book about Hitchcock, Truffaut, whose English was tentative and whose insecurity about it was great, had asked Helen Scott, who worked for the French Film Office in New York, whether Penn might be able to review some of the technical passages in his manuscript to make sure the English translation was accurate. 25 A few months later, Penn had begun to direct The Train , a World War II suspense drama for United Artists that starred Burt Lancaster. Lancaster had just made a greater foray into European filmmaking than many of his Hollywood peers by starring in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard , a poorly edited and dubbed version of which had opened in the United States and flopped. Lancaster was now interested in making a hit, not in working with a director whose taste for sophisticated European moviemaking might get in the way of success. “He wanted a lot of hoopla and derring-do and I wanted a serious film with an ironic twist,” said Penn a couple of years later. “He won.” 26 Lancaster clashed with Penn and had him fired, replacing him with John Frankenheimer. 27 In September, Truffaut had dinner with the dejected Penn and his wife in New York and wrote sympathetically about his firing to Helen Scott, dismissing Frankenheimer as “someone Lancaster can manipulate as he pleases.” 28 Soon after, when Penn was considering a film adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms , Truffaut recommended his Jules and Jim star Jeanne Moreau as a possible lead.
    Penn, then forty-one, had cut his teeth on New York City’s thriving television production business in the 1950s, working on episodes of The Philco Television Playhouse and Playhouse 90. His first feature, 1958’s compelling revisionist western The Left Handed Gun , which starred Paul Newman as Billy the Kid, was an adaptation of a Philco one-act on which he’d worked. Penn shot the movie in just twenty-three days, only to have Warner Brothers take it away from him and add an ending he called “terrible…. I never heard ‘Boo’ from Warner Brothers, I never saw a cut, nothing. It got a bad review in The New York Times and bing, it was gone.” 29 (The film was much more appreciated in Europe, where its maltreatment by a Hollywood studio only helped to burnish its status among critics and directors like Truffaut.)
    Penn walked away from the movie business and went home to New York, where he began a robust career as a Broadway director. In less than three years, he mounted five successful shows, including Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic and the immensely popular An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. One of them, William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker , became his return ticket to Hollywood. This time, working for a sympathetic producer, fellow TV veteran Fred Coe, and United Artists, a more director-friendly studio than Warner Brothers, Penn was able to make the movie largely on his terms, which included using the Broadway production’s original stars, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. The