In his early career Hal Ashby was an editor who won an Academy Award for In the Heat of the Night. Of course, Ashby is now known as the director of some of the best films of the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960′s through the early 1980′s including Coming Home, Harold and Maude and Being There. Ashby was a counterculture figure whose personal, idiosyncratic movies eventually gave way to his increasingly eccentric persona fueled by a gradually out of control drug habit. Ashby died on the road with the Rolling Stones, overdosing while filming the concert movie Let’s Spend the Night Together.

This year we celebrate the 45th anniversary of Ashby’s first film, The Landlord. Here’s Beau Bridges as a privileged preppy who becomes a fish out of water when he buys an inner-city tenement building…

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