In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Hampton Fancher appeared on more than fifty TV shows and starred in several obscure films. Only two obstacles kept him from becoming a true leading man. One was his hair, a thick brown thatch like an oriole’s nest. “You couldn’t even find the scalp,” Fancher said the other afternoon, in his Brooklyn loft. “So, because I was also tall”—nearly six feet five—“I got cast as the oddball: the firebug, the rapist, the coward.” The second obstacle was his personality. “I exuded a lazy superiority that came from the trembling part of me I kept hidden from myself—from the fear that I was an asshole.”
Always charismatic—he had a long relationship with Barbara Hershey and shorter relationships with many, many other women—he was the smoldering figure at the edge of the frame. Fancher is now seventy-nine, and his hair has relaxed into a graying nimbus. His personality has relaxed, too. He sat on an orange exercise ball in his living room, wearing a sarong fastened with a binder clip, blithely discussing what it was like to be the subject of a new documentary, “Escapes,” made by Michael Almereyda.
The film mostly consists of Fancher telling tales that are juxtaposed with vintage footage of him riling the boys on “Bonanza” or getting busted on “Adam-12.” He details how, when he was dating Teri Garr, he stormed out one night to get her the money her old boyfriend owed her, and how, when he was publicizing a ludicrous film called “The Naughty Cheerleader,” which also starred Barbi Benton, Broderick Crawford, and Klaus Kinski, he slept with the theatre manager’s secretary in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, just so she’d drive him to the airport. We have no idea where these stories are going—Fancher will break his hand beating up Garr’s ex; the flight he misses because of the theatre manager’s secretary will crash—and he doesn’t always seem to, either. He appears to be still reconsidering the pattern, still seeking the vital detail.
His second and final marriage was in 1963, when he was twenty-four, to Sue Lyon, the seventeen-year-old star of “Lolita.” “There was a lot of bad press,” he recalled. “They accused me of being a pompous, horndog guy interested only in the world of yachts and private jets, which I thought was totally unfair. But they were mostly right!” He laughed. “There were bets in Vegas about how long the marriage would last.” Nine months, right? “Uh-huh. A lot longer than expected!” Fancher’s yearning for intimacy proved to be outweighed by his need for solitude.
Still, the sixties were a fragile joy. He recalled, “The premise of ‘Romeo und Julia 70,’ a German film in which Tina Sinatra played Julia and I played Romeo, was ‘Would Romeo and Juliet survive in the late sixties?’ And the answer was no. We went around the world twice and shot scenes with heads of state like Princess Grace and Nixon. The princess of Thailand knocked me out. We were on the grass in the back of their palace having fun things to eat, about eight of us, and I noticed these bowls on the periphery, and I said, ‘What’s in the bowls?’ ” He adopted the princess’s sensual intonations: “She said, ‘Milk.’ I said, ‘Milk for what?’ And she said, ‘For . . . cobra.’ ” He flicked his tongue rapidly.
The seventies were tougher, grainier. In 1977, after quitting the partying life, Fancher stopped acting to become a full-time writer. Over the course of several years, he turned a Philip K. Dick novel into a script that became the bones of “Blade Runner,” the dystopian Ridley Scott film.
This October brings Scott’s “Blade Runner 2049,” featuring Harrison Ford, the star of the original, and Ryan Gosling. When the filmmakers began trying to devise a story for the reboot, Fancher said, “Ridley didn’t call me for a year. He went to everyone else first, and I felt bad. The joke from him and his team, after he finally did call, was ‘We need the old magic!’ But the truth is they were desperate.” He smiled. Fancher shares a screenplay credit for the film, and has the sole story credit.
Seeing his early work in the documentary startled him, because his acting wasn’t as bad as he’d remembered. “If I were a director now, I’d use me in certain roles,” Fancher said. “Say you decide to go see the guy who wrote the ad that made you want to change your life—and it’s me! Or whatever. Of course,” he added, standing to stretch, “the film—not to demean it—but it’s pennies at the bottom of the pocket. People who know me well say, ‘Oh, that’s not your life. We want to do a film about your real life.’ ” He grinned. “Let ’em try.” ♦
