When Warren Beatty was unable to stir interest in his and Robert Towne's screenplay for "Shampoo" about a befuddled but seductive hairdresser, which he had been developing since 1967, he bundled it with the more appealing "The Fortune" and convinced Columbia Pictures head David Begelman to finance both films. The fact that Carole Eastman, writing under the pen name Adrien Joyce, had yet to complete her 240-page script fazed Beatty less than it did director Mike Nichols, who needed a box-office hit after "Catch-22" and "The Day of the Dolphin", both of which were critical and commercial flops.