An Interview with the late Monte Hellman (1929-2021)
Wheeler Winston Dixon
(http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2021/interviews/an-interview-with-the-late-monte-hellman-1929-2021/)
One of the legendary figures of the American cinema, the late Monte Hellman (1929 – 2021) is best known for directing Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), considered by many to be the definitive “road movie,” but Hellman’s career goes back to the 1950s, and his work in the formative days of television. Later, he worked for maverick producer/director Roger Corman on a number of projects, before branching out on his own as a director, while continuing his work as an editor for such luminaries as the late Sam Peckinpah. He was also involved in various projects with Vincent Gallo, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Verhoeven and numerous other contemporary filmmakers. Hellman seldom spoke at length about his work in film, but in this interview he was willing to talk about nearly everything he ever did. Indeed, after this interview was conducted on January 19, 2004, Hellman made only one more feature, Road to Nowhere (2010), which was not well received by either critics or audiences. So for all intents and purposes, this is a nearly complete overview of Hellman’s work in film, and offers a number of interesting insights into his long and varied career. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity, and incorporates follow up questions asked a week later in a separate conversation.
You were born on July 12, 1932, in New York, New York. Could you tell me something about your early education and your family?
I was born in New York by mistake. My parents were from St. Louis, Missouri, and they were traveling in New York, expecting that I wouldn’t be born for a week or so, but I was born accidentally in New York.
My mother was a housewife until her kids were grown, at which point she worked in retail. She had a job as a salesperson at a clothing store, and then she sold real estate. She was also a bridge teacher. My father was in small businesses, like grocery stores and gas stations. He ultimately sold real estate as well.
So your parents were on vacation in New York, and then they went back to St. Louis, and that’s where your family was based?
No, actually they moved back to New York (laughs)! They moved to Brooklyn for about six months. Then they moved to Albany, New York, until I was about five years old, and then we all moved to California. I was exceedingly shy, and my parents thought they would bring me out by giving me drama lessons when I was about six years old, and I became interested in theater and directing. When I was 10 years old, I went to a YMCA summer camp, and wrote and directed a 10-minute play. Later I went to John Burroughs Junior High and Los Angeles High, which by coincidence coincided with Dustin Hoffman’s education. I think I always wanted to be involved in movies, but I thought that not having a family in the business, the theater was a more realistic ambition. So I really expected that I would work in regional theater, which I had an opportunity to, but I did graduate work in film at UCLA after I finished theater studies at Stanford. I must have had some kind of hope in the back of my mind that I could make films.
When did you graduate from UCLA?
I didn’t graduate. I didn’t finish my graduate studies. I was in the Class of ’51 at Stanford and I finished at UCLA in ’53. Then my first real job was as an apprentice editor on the TV series Medic, with Richard Boone, the lovely old drunk. I got that because after I had done three years of summer stock, one of the members of my stock company was offered a job in the editing department at ABC TV. He wasn’t interested, so he turned me on to it. I applied, and my first job was cleaning out the film vaults at the ABC studios. I was actually an apprentice editor, my duties being to synchronize dailies and do hot splicing and things like that, but I unofficially moved up to assistant. I can’t remember what the reason was. The assistant must have been busy doing something else, so I was working as an assistant.
The Film Editors Guild had a rule that you had to put in eight years in the Guild before you could edit. I was a member, and as long as I was a member, the clock was running. It didn’t matter whether you were working as an actual editor or not. So, I decided to put in my eight years doing something else, because I got tired of being an apprentice editor. I quit and started my own theater company in Los Angeles. It was originally called the Playgoers Company, and then we were sued because the magazine that was handed out in all the theaters in LA was called Playgoers, so they handed us an injunction. We had to change our name to the Theatergoers Company. It wasn’t a stock company, so we didn’t have a group of players. We did a season of plays, with different casts in each one.
Roger Corman was one of the investors in my theater company, and we lasted a year, at which point we got evicted because they decided to convert the theater to a movie theater. By the way, the theater was a beautiful facility, which had been built by the Actor’s Lab, with a revolving stage. The first play we put on, which I also directed, was Waiting for Godot. That was the first LA production of the play, and the fifth production in the world at that time. But then we got thrown out of the theater by the landlord in 1958, and Roger said, “Okay, the theater is being converted into a movie theater, and you should take that as a sign. You should direct a movie.” So my first movie was Beast from the Haunted Cave (released in 1960). You know, I just was looking to do anything. Roger hired me because he thought he was getting a bargain.
Was that a Filmgroup production?
Yes, it was. We had 13 days, and the reason Corman thought he was getting a bargain was that he hired me as a writer, director, and editor. The budget was about $13,000 or something like that, shooting in 35mm. Gene Corman, Roger’s brother, was actually the producer on the film. We were shooting the film on location in South Dakota, and Gene told everybody that we were from UCLA doing a student film! So he made a deal with the hotel for $1 a day per room, and he put two people in a room. We had cold Velveeta sandwiches for lunch, or sometimes salami. This is ten below zero, mind you, so not even a cup of hot soup. So, it was very low budget from every point of view.
Leo Gordon started the script, then Chuck Griffith finished it, and then I supervised some rewrites that Chuck did. And it’s funny; Roger didn’t get me as an editor either, because it wasn’t a union production, and so my union (the Editor’s Guild) wouldn’t let me edit it.
How did you get involved in Corman’s film Ski Troop Attack (1960)?
Well, Corman shot Ski Troop Attack back to back with Beast from the Haunted Cave. Then a couple of years later, when he sold everything to television, he sold a number of films that were made as companion features, B movies for a double bill, and they were all 60-minute movies. For television, they needed to be at least 70 minutes. So he hired me to expand four of his old pictures for television. One was my own picture, Beast from Haunted Cave, one was Ski Troop Attack, which he had shot back to back. And then the two pictures that he shot at Puerto Rico, Last Woman on Earth (1960) and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961).
Robert Towne starred in The Last Woman on Earth under the pseudonym of Edward Wain, in addition to writing the script; another Corman economy. And, of course, Towne went on to write many more films of his own after that, including Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). So, I shot additional scenes for all these films, just to make the sale to television.
Then you went to work on Corman’s multi-director film, The Terror (1963).
There were actually only three directors. Roger directed two days on a set he had left over from The Raven (1963), because he had Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, both of whom were in The Raven, and he’d finished that film ahead of schedule. So he shot two days, and then he shut the film down. Then Francis Ford Coppola and I shot all the rest of the stuff. Coppola did all the stuff that was down at Big Sur. (Other sources contend that Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson also shot some material for The Terror, but Hellman disputes this.) I shot all the exteriors that Coppola didn’t do; Coppola shot most the scenes with Dorothy Neumann, who played the witch, Katrina, in the film.
Now I have an interesting credit here. Harvey Hart’s film Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965), based on a play by William Inge, who refused the screenplay credit; he used “Walter Gage” as a pseudonym. You worked on that film as an assistant editor. Were you on the set at all?
A little bit, but not that much. That was cut by a great old editor, Folmar Blangsted. He was very, very demanding of assistant editors. An assistant has a lot of work to do on his own, syncing up dailies and so forth, but Folmar demanded that the assistant do all this work after hours, and that during the day the assistant would stand by Folmar, just to hold a piece of film that he might need in the cutting. The next scene, whatever, like a human trim bin. So it was demanding, but he was great. I learned a lot from him. But then I was offered two pictures in the Philippines to direct Back Door to Hell and Flight to Fury (both 1964). So I told Folmar that I had this terrific opportunity, and I was going to go to the Philippines and direct these two films. And he was furious! How dare I desert him in the middle of a film? So that was unfortunate, but I did go to the Philippines, and shot those two films back to back for Roger.
Before we get to that, I want to talk about The Wild Ride (1960). What was your involvement in that?
The Wild Ride was a picture for Corman directed by Harvey Berman, who was one of the people in my summer stock company. Roger wanted me to go up there to make sure everything went okay. It was a teenage rebel movie. That was really when I got to know Jack Nicholson, who was the star of the movie.
Now back to Flight to Fury and Back Door to Hell. These are both in the Philippines. These were your first real serious directorial credits?
Yes, I think that they were the first films that I did that I felt were real movies. They were back-to-back, but I was upset about Back Door to Hell because it was the only film that I had done that I wasn’t the sole editor on. I was shooting Flight to Fury while somebody else was cutting Back Door to Hell (Fely Crisostomo), which I didn’t like at all. And then I got really deathly ill, and I was in the hospital for a long time, and nobody could figure out what it was. It was some strange tropical disease; they never did figure it out. They gave all kinds of tests and finally Jack Nicholson came to the hospital, and put his hand on my head and said, “be well; you’re healed,” just like that.
And believe it or not, the next day I was out of the hospital scouting locations. I was not completely 100% but nearly 100% better. So, Fely put Back Door to Hell together in a rough edit while I was in the hospital, and when I came out, I was horrified – it was totally botched! So I recut it while shooting Flight to Fury, and my schedule was something like this. I would get up at 5 in the morning, have breakfast, leave for the set at 6, sleep in the car until we got to the set at 7, shoot until 6PM, drive back to the house from 6 to 7 at night, sleep in the car during that time, have dinner, and then go to the cutting room to recut Back Door to Hell, work until 2 in the morning, then sleep from 2AM to 5AM, and then repeat the same process the next day. So, I fought for that one.
It’s really hard to recut a picture once somebody has done the first rough-cut. You haven’t seen the original dailies, you can’t pick the takes. That just doesn’t work for me. I never was really happy with the way Back Door to Hell came out, even though I put a lot of effort into it. Years later, when I was brought in to recut some of the Killer Elite (1975) for Sam Peckinpah , from my previous experience I just knew that I couldn’t do it. I said, “Listen, I can’t recut somebody else’s cut. I’ll have to order all these dailies over again, and start from scratch,” and he said, “Fine,” and so that’s what I did. You just can’t do it any other way.
What was your relationship with Peckinpah?
He was a wonderful, sweet guy who was also impossible to deal with. He was a wild man. Some friends of mine made a movie about insanity called Fit to be Untied (1975). And that’s him.
What were the schedules and budgets on Flight to Fury and Back Door to Hell?
I had 18 days, and something like $35,000 on one, and $50,000 on the other.
The Shooting
Would it be fair to say that you and Jack Nicholson became good friends on Flight to Fury? At this point in your career, he’s in all your films, and then he wrote the script for Ride in the Whirlwind (1965).
Well, he also wrote Flight to Fury. As I said, we had gotten to be friends on The Wild Ride. So we wrote a script together, which was never produced, and when we came back from the Philippines, we went to Roger, who had basically promised to give us the money for the script. But he’d changed his mind, and so that’s how we did Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting, two westerns shot back to back (both films were shot in 1965, but Ride was released in 1965, and The Shooting in 1967). Corman said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to make this picture. But if you want to make a western, I’ll back that. And as long as you’re making one, you might as well make two.” So Jack went away and wrote Ride in the Whirlwind, and Carol Eastman wrote The Shooting.
Cameron Mitchell was in Ride The Whirlwind, and he was crazy. We were shooting during the TV hiatus period, when all the series were shut down, so we got all of our costumes from Western Costume (a famous costume rental company). A lot of it was stuff that was used regularly on some TV series or other, Rawhide or something. So, he had these beautiful chaps that we’d rented for him, and behind my back Cameron took a pair of scissors and cut holes in them because he wanted them to look rough and weather beaten. So now, I had to explain this to Western Costume, and ultimately I had to buy his costume, because he’d ruined it. I didn’t believe what he was doing.
John Ford & Monte Hellman
Millie Perkins is in Ride in the Whirlwind, as is Harry Dean Stanton. Is this another example of Corman’s ability to pick out actors early on in their careers?
Well, Millie Perkins was my next-door neighbour. But I tried to cast Ride in the Whirlwind in a normal way. I thought about Sterling Hayden and Donna Winters for the shooting. But then I was in a bookstore in Beverly Hills called Martindale’s, a great bookstore. And I remember I had just kind of a flash, a light bulb that suddenly appeared above my head. And the light bulb said, “Millie Perkins, Warren Oates and Will Hutchins. These are your actors.” Now, Jack was a given. Jack was part of the deal; he was my partner. But I just had a flash of the three of them all together as a unit. I was so excited by it that I called Jack right away, and he was equally excited. He knew Warren Oates a little bit. I don’t know if either of us knew Will Hutchins. Hutchins was in the early TV western Sugarfoot (1957). And Will was actually the kind of catalyst that made Ride in the Whirlwind happen, because he was the best known of anybody.
Jack and I did a road trip of every known western location, trying to find one location that would work for both pictures. The pictures are vastly different, and there were key scenes that needed specific locations, and I didn’t want to compromise. So, we traveled around, searching. We went to Lone Pine, we went to Arizona, south of Flagstaff, we went to Monument Valley, John Ford’s home territory, all over the place. Then we went to Kanab, Utah, and Kanab was the only place where we thought we could shoot both pictures in the same locale without having to move the company. It worked out very well; they both came in on time, and on budget.
And what did you do after this?
I edited The Wild Angels (1966), the Hell’s Angels film Roger directed with Peter Fonda. Back to work for Roger!
Ride In The Whirlwind
How did Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting get released?
Well, that’s the sad part. They were both shot in 1965, and they actually were never released. I think they had a very brief theatrical release in 1971, for something like three days in Texas.
So how did they make money?
Straight to television! That horrified both Jack and I. Roger made the deal. He sold them both to a company named Walter Reade Sterling. They had a mess of theaters, and we thought, “Wow, we’ll get theater distribution all over the country!” But all they wanted the pictures for was a TV package. So they went direct to television, and that was it. After you do that, there’s never really a chance to do a theatrical release.
The next credit I have is easily your best-known film, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), but there’s quite a gap of time in here – about five years. What did you do in between?
I was under contract at Universal. Then I developed another picture for Corman, and I was a dialogue coach on Roger’s film The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), which he shot over at 20th, his first big studio picture. I also did some editing for Roger on a film thing called Target: Harry, which finally came out in 1969. And then I was set to direct a picture for Corman about a black sheriff in the south called Explosion and we cast it, rehearsed it, and we were set to shoot the following week. And for the first time Sam Arkoff (co-founder of American International Pictures, where Corman got his start) decided to read the script. So, this is the Friday before the shoot. And Arkoff tells me, “I grew up in Kansas, and we didn’t have any racial tension.” I said, “How many blacks were there in your town?” He said, “Well, we had one, everybody liked him.” It was impossible. So that was it. He cancelled the picture at the last minute.
Cockfighter
Was that pretty much the end of you and AIP and Corman?
Well, not totally. I did another picture for Corman in 1974, called Cockfighter, for which I ultimately didn’t get any credit. We’ll get to that in a while – not a pleasant experience.
Two Lane Blacktop
Tell me about Two Lane Blacktop. What’s the genesis of the film? What do you think when people compare your work to (directors) Robert Bresson, or Yasujiro Ozu? Does this seem ridiculous to you, or does it make sense?
Well, I was familiar with Bresson, because I was part of a film society, and I think the first picture we showed was A Man Escaped (1956). But I don’t think I had ever seen an Ozu film, until years later. But it’s flattering. I think Bresson and Ozu are great filmmakers, so I have to be flattered by that.
How did your directorial style evolve into an almost trance-like state with Two-Lane Blacktop, which is really about the locations and about the road trip more than anything else?
I would have to credit one person with my philosophy, and my approach to theater and film. Arthur Hopkins was a producer/director in the 20s, 30s, and 40s in New York. I never met him, or had him as a teacher, but I read a collection of his lectures that he gave at Cornell University. He had a tremendous amount to do with discovering some of the greatest people in the business. He didn’t really discover John Barrymore, but he directed Barrymore’s Broadway stage production of Hamlet in 1923, which really made his reputation. I think he was the first to cast Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy on the stage. He was casting the original Broadway production of The Petrified Forest in 1935, and he was having a hard time finding the right person to play Duke Mantee. But by a stroke of luck, he walked into another theater where a play was in rehearsal, and heard this dry, tired voice that belonged to Humphrey Bogart, who up until that time had only played juveniles on the stage. Bogart didn’t want to do the role, but Hopkins insisted, and the role ultimately made Bogart a star.
Arthur Hopkins taught selflessness. He believed that anyone, whether actor, director, designer, whoever, who called attention to himself, did so at the expense of the production. Everyone must be a servant to the work he’s creating. He also taught simplicity—the elimination of everything that isn’t necessary. And he agreed with the adage that you can’t serve two masters. If you do a play (or film) because you’re sure it’ll be a success, and it fails, you have nothing. If you do something you’re passionate about, and it fails, you’ve created something you love.
His approach turned me around, and gave me a kind of a vision of what I wanted to do. This leads to the approach with the actors I used in Two-Lane Blacktop. That film came about because I had been in Italy preparing a picture from Patricia Highsmith’s book The Two Faces of January. Mark Damon was the producer, and he was going to star in it. He brought me over to Rome, and I wrote the script, but he was not able to raise the money. So I came back to LA, and my agent, Mike Medavoy, brought me into his office and introduced me to (producer) Michael Laughlin, and said, “Michael has a picture that he is interested in having you direct.” Michael actually offered me two picture, Two-Lane Blacktop and The Christian Licorice Store (both 1971; James Frawley ultimately directed The Christian Licorice Store). I really was not interested in The Christian Licorice Store at all, but I liked the idea of Two-Lane Blacktop. The idea intrigued me. I think the reason that I was interested is that my father was a professional gambler and a bookmaker, besides selling real estate. So I was naturally interested in the subject of gambling, and that’s what turned me on to Two-Lane Blacktop.
When you came on board, what input did you have? Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, James Taylor, and former Beach Boy Dennis Wilson are all in the cast; how much did you have to do with this?
The picture was already pretty far along in pre-production. It was not only cast, but they had paid $100,000 for a script, which I threw away. So I was looking for somebody to write a new script, not rewrite the old one, and I found Rudy Wurlitzer (Wurlitzer’s later credits included the screenplays for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Shadow of the Wolf (1992), and Little Buddha (1993)). I gave Rudy the original script to read, and he read about five pages, and said, “I can’t read this.” I said, “That’s okay, we have the basic idea, a cross country race, and we can work from that.” So, Rudy took the names of two of the characters from the original script, which were The Driver and The Mechanic, and rewrote the whole thing.
Who wrote the original script?
The guy who wrote the original script was Will Corry, who gets a co-screenplay credit, and credit for the original story on the film. Corry wrote the script, which we threw away, and he got paid $100,000 for it, and bought a yacht. He had been recently divorced, he had a two-year-old daughter, so he took her on a trip around the world, just the two of them, on this yacht. We shot the film on the road from Los Angeles to North Carolina, driving in a caravan, just shooting a little bit, driving a little bit, and then doing the same thing again the next day. We drove and shot every day.
Are you happy with Two-Lane Blacktop?
I’m never totally happy with anything. But you know, it’s not my taste. I really like a lot of plot.
That’s funny. Two-Lane Blacktop is nearly plotless, and for many people it’s your signature film.
You’re right; a film with no plot was a little bit weird for me to get involved with, but it was a terrific experience making it, and I felt we had tremendous freedom. I think it’s the only time I have had final cut on a movie. Getting the film funded, though, was something of a hassle. Originally the picture was set up at Cinema Center, but nobody read it until we were ready to start shooting, and when they did, they cancelled the movie at the last minute. We were in turnaround, and we took the script of Two-Lane Blacktop to every studio. We took it to Columbia, MGM, Warners, and everybody said, “You know what it’s going to cost?” and we would say, “A million one (hundred thousand), and they would say, “It’s not possible, you can’t make it for that.” So the next studio we go to we would say, “A million three,” and they said, “Impossible,” said “You can’t make it for that.” Nobody believed that we could do it for that small a budget. And finally we took it to Universal and—
So, what are you up to now, 2 million?
We went back to a million one, (laughs) and they said, “If you can make it for $900,000, we’ll finance it.” Actually, it wound up costing $850,000.
What about Cockfighter?
It’s a long story. I went to Hong Kong to set up production on a picture called In a Dream of Passion, but it never got made, because the producer bailed on us at the last minute. Then I went back to Hong Kong a year later to do a film called Shatter (1974). That was a Hammer Films Production, and then I got fired by the producer, Michael Carreras, halfway through the shoot. I think that Michael really wanted to direct it from the beginning. (Carreras directed a few films in his career as a producer for Hammer, most notably the suspense thriller Maniac (1963).) We just fought a lot on the set. I didn’t like the way he was treating a black actor (Yemi Ajibade) in the film. I thought it was demeaning, the things that he wanted me to make him do, so we had a lot of fights. And I just finally said, “There is some shit I will not eat.” Peter Cushing and Anton Diffring were in that – all the stuff of them in Shatter is mine. Michael waited until all the English actors were finished before he fired me. Stuart Whitman is in the whole picture, so Michael shot some stuff with him, but I did all the stuff with Cushing and Diffring, who were very professional to work with. But we were way over schedule, because Michael had made a deal with the Shaw Brothers.
Yes, (producers) Run Run Shaw and Run Me Shaw.
Right. Run Run basically had his crews working 24 hours around the clock in three shifts. But because we were not a real Shaw Brothers picture, but rather a Hammer co-production, like a facilities deal, we would get on the set at 6AM, and our crew wouldn’t show up until noon. So at the end of three weeks, I was only halfway through the picture, and I think it was supposed to be a four-week picture. Then Michael Carreras said, “All right, I’m taking it from here.” He spent four months doing the other half of the film, and of what he shot, only a tiny portion made it into the final cut. Basically, the film is two-thirds mine, even though I only shot half of it.
What about Cockfighter?
I came back from Hong Kong, having been fired, and I got a call from Roger Corman. This was completely out of the blue. Roger just called me up and said, “I’ve got this film set up; will you do the picture?” Again, I did a total rewrite on the script, but since this was Roger’s baby, he got very upset and anxious. After two weeks he put a stop to it, and said, “Okay, that’s as much as you can do. Whatever you’ve got now, you have to work with.” This is for Corman’s own company, New World Pictures.
Once again, the cast seems awfully familiar. You have Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Millie Perkins, all actors you’d worked with before. How much control did you have over the casting?
Well, because of the fact I couldn’t get really the script that I wanted, it’s my least favorite of my movies, with the exception of Beast from Haunted Cave. But I like the authenticity of the kind of milieu; I think as a documentary about the “sport” of cockfighting it works fairly well. It was shot in Atlanta. But I was never really happy with it; it just didn’t work for me, basically because of the script.
What about (the TV series) Baretta (1975), with Robert Blake? What was your involvement with that?
You’re really trying to hurt a guy, aren’t you? (laughs) That’s the other case where I was fired, but I still get residuals. I just directed half of one Baretta. Bobby (Blake) had been an old acquaintance of mine. We had known a lot of the same people. But he was just hostile from the moment I walked on the set. He kept saying, “I know you’re a feature director, but this is television. We do things differently here,” and that kind of stuff. Every time I tried to do something, he would say, “No, we don’t do it that way,” so it was impossible. So I just directed half of one episode, and that was it.
What about The Greatest (1977), the Muhammad Ali biopic that you took over from Tom Gries?
Well, I’ve had a small secondary career taking over for deceased directors on films (laughs). Tom had died, the film wasn’t completed, and they brought me in to finish it. I’m kind of like the kiss of death (laughs). But all these experiences were interesting. On The Greatest, I had a lot of ideas that couldn’t be realized because of budgetary problems. Since we had Muhammad Ali starring in it, I wanted to open a picture with stock footage of his Olympics fight to open the picture. But the Olympics committee just wanted so much money for the stock footage that Columbia wouldn’t pay it.
What can you tell me about China 9, Liberty 37 (1978)? It’s a really unusual project. Sam Peckinpah appears in it as an actor, along with Warren Oates and Jenny Agutter. It’s a very peculiar western. It seems to have also gone through a lot of different titles, including Amore, piombo e furore, Clayton & Catherine, Gunfire, and Love, Bullets and Frenzy. And who is Tony Brandt, who gets a director’s credit on some prints of the film?
The titles are the result of different versions that the producers put together, one of the things that was very frustrating. But for all of that, I think it’s the best experience I ever had in a movie, the most fun shooting a movie I have ever had. (Director of cinematography) Giuseppe Rotunno and his crew were fantastic to work with. We had taken over this hotel in Al Maria, Spain. The camera crew would go into the kitchen at night and cook pasta. We would have caviar and chilled vodka every Saturday night.
I got involved in the film through (producer) Elliott Kastner. Elliott and I have been tossing around ideas for a movie for a couple of years, and then he found a script he wanted to produce, and I got a call from him just before Christmas in 1976. He called me up, and said, “I’m over in Rome, I want you to fly over right away to talk about doing this script with me.” And I said, “You know, Elliott, the script is really not very good. I don’t know if I want to do it.” He said, “Maybe you can do a little work on the ending. You’ll put it in shape, don’t worry about it.” I said, “Well, it’s Christmas, I can’t fly over now. I’ve got to spend some time with my family.” But he kept after me, and finally asked me point blank, “Well, when can you be here?” I said, “Give me ten days.”
Well, in ten days, I flew to Rome, with a new script written by Jerry Harvey. Jerry just took the original script, and rewrote it. So I came over with the new script under my arm, and Elliott hated it. But the Italian producers loved it. So, Elliott left me in the lion’s den with the Italian producers. We did the picture, it was a lot of fun, a lot of fights, but nothing that made it too unpleasant, and we had a great time. The picture was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. It was basically a western, and I thought it turned out well. I had made a deal that I would take my name off the picture in Italy as director and that Tony Brandt, who was my assistant, would be listed as the director. In exchange for that, everywhere else in the world I would not only be listed as director, but as one of the producers. So, that was a trade.
Anyway, the producers apparently were having trouble with their subsidy (funding), which was based on the fact that Tony Brandt was the director of record, because there was all this publicity about me during Cannes actually being the director. And so the producers withdrew China 9, Liberty 37 from the festival; it made the front page of Variety. Gilles Jacob (director of the Cannes festival) was outraged. Everybody in the world knew that I directed the movie. So, it was a terrible situation, and I was very disappointed, because obviously I wanted my picture in the Cannes Film Festival. So, it turned out it played in the Cannes Festival market, out of competition, in a terrible theater where they had two projectors, which were mismatched. One was so dark you couldn’t even see the screen. And then they started recutting the picture, which is my fate on a lot of my movies; changing the title and doing all of that stuff.
On Avalanche Express (1979), you took over from Mark Robson, who died during production. How much did you direct of that?
I would say I directed maybe 10% of the principal photography, and all told I worked a year on the picture, shooting all the other stuff. I did all the special effects; all the avalanches, all the miniatures of the train and so forth. I worked with Lee Marvin and Maximilian Schell, but not with Robert Shaw, who was also in the picture, because he died during the shoot! I worked with Max because I had to re-loop him through the whole picture. We had to replace Robert Shaw’s voice with another actor (Robert Rietti), and that took a lot of time. I directed a lot of the interiors on the planes, and some of the action sequences.
What about Iguana (1988)?
This was another one of these strange Italian deals where I was very uneasy about the whole thing. We had literally the worst script I had ever read. It was taken from a novel by Alberto Vázquez Figueroa, and the entire script was, much like the novel, written as a diary. So the whole thing was voiceover, there is no dialogue. It was just unbelievable, so unprofessional you can’t believe it. Again, I was allowed to hire not one but two writers, and I was the third writer.
I hired Steven Gaydos and David M. Zehr as additional writers, and I wound up being the third writer, because I went to Cannes again, and while I was there, David and Steve had written essentially two different scripts. I kind of put them together, and did a lot of writing of my own.
How did you get involved with the splatter film Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989)? And is that your daughter in it?
Yes, that’s my daughter Melissa, as Dr. Newbury’s assistant. She was also in Two-Lane Blacktop, in a small role, when she was much younger. One of my best friends was producing, Arthur Gorson, and he asked me to do it, and I said, “No.” Once again, the script was no good. But finally I said, “Well, if we can throw the script out, I’ll do it.” And so we rewrote the script in, I guess, a week. It had a good schedule. We had 23 days, and something like $800,000.
You appeared as yourself in Wim Wenders’ Chambre 666 (1982), a film that Wenders made during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, in which he asked a number of directors for their thoughts on the future of film. Quite a cast: Michelangelo Antonioni, Jonathan Demme, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Yilmaz Güney, Werner Herzog, Susan Seidelman, Steven Spielberg and you, to name just a few of the many filmmakers who were interviewed. Wenders set up a camera in a hotel room, and asked everybody where they thought the future of film was headed. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?
Well, it was a horrifying experience. Wenders turns the camera on and then he leaves the room and leaves you sitting there, and you got to talk to a wall! It was terrible, just terrible.
Did you ever see the finished film?
I don’t think I did.
You know what Jean-Luc Godard did in the film? Wenders turned on the camera, as you know, and left the room. Godard talked for awhile, stared at the camera for a bit more, then got up, walked towards the camera, and turned it off. And that was that.
That’s great. I should have done that.
How did you wind up working as a second unit director on RoboCop (1987)?
Well, Mike Medavoy, who was the head of the studio, wanted me to direct it, but Jon Davidson, who was an old friend of mine and a fan, felt that I was not an action director, and he wanted somebody else to do it. And then (Paul) Verhoeven was hired, and it got behind schedule, so ironically I was brought in to direct a lot of the action.
You’re listed as executive producer on Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). How did that come about?
Again, I was asked to direct the picture, and they set up a meeting between me and Quentin, and we met. But the day that we met, Quentin sold his script for True Romance (which was made into a film by (Tony) Scott in 1993). So he said, “Now I have the money to hold out to direct Reservoir Dogs, which is what I really want to do.” Quentin said he was sorry that he had wasted my time, but by the time we finished our hot fudge sundaes, he asked me if I would help him get the picture made. So I sent the script of Reservoir Dogs to Richard Gladstein, who had been the executive at Live Entertainment when we did Silent Night. Richard loved it, and agreed to do it if I would kind of stand behind Quentin, and kind of guarantee that he would finish on time and on schedule. Which he did; he did a great job.
What about Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66 (1998)? You get a “thanks” (both laugh). Thanks, Monte!
I know. I set it up for me to direct, and Vincent Gallo was unhappy with the deal, because the producers had this strange idea of wanting to wait for snow. And Vincent wanted to shoot the film on reversal (as opposed to negative) film, and the whole thing got very complicated.
The producers wanted to wait for it to snow?
Yes. The studio wanted to wait for snow, and Vincent wanted to shoot right away, so he decided to direct it himself.
What about the films that you didn’t get to make, projects you wanted to get off the ground, but never were able to?
Well, I’m still working on most of them. One of them is a picture called Dark Passion, which Bert Schneider hired me to direct at Paramount about 20 years ago. Dark Passion has been called by Oliver Stone, and a number of other people, the best unproduced screen play in Hollywood. It’s from a novel by Lionel White. Lionel White wrote the novel (Clean Break), which was the source material for Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). Lionel knew that Kubrick was doing Lolita (1962), and was campaigning to be the screenwriter. But Kubrick decided not to hire him. And so, as a kind of revenge, Lionel wrote this book, which was kind of his take on Lolita.
I hope you get it off the ground, needless to say. But looking back over your long career to date, what do you think of your past work?
Well, I think the thing that gives me the greatest satisfaction is the fact that there are some filmmakers who say, whether it’s true or not, that they were inspired to make movies because of Two-Lane Blacktop. And so I really feel, as Sam Peckinpah would say, “justified.”
The Shooting (Stills)
Links:
Monte Hellman @Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Hellman
Monte Hellman @IMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0375494/
Monte Hellman obituary @Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/apr/27/monte-hellman-obituary
Videos:
Plunging On Alone: Monte Hellman’s Life In A Day documentary:
Monte and Roger on their western collaboration:
Monte on Sam Peckinpah and Cross of Iron:
Monte on Warren Oates:
John Boorman on The Shooting:
Beast from a Haunted Cave:
Cockfighter:
Two-Lane Blacktop (trailer):
The Shooting:
Ride in the Whirlwind:
Iguana (trailer):
China 9/Liberty 37:
Road to Nowhere:
Cockfighter: A Fable of Failure by Kier-La Jannise
There is no shortage of loaded — and often gendered — symbolism in the sport of cockfighting. And this becomes a starting point for author Kier-La Janisse (who broke new ground in film criticism with her 2012 book House of Psychotic Women) to investigate the themes of obsession, competition, mobility and nobility that dominate the hyper-masculine world of Monte Hellman’s existential and controversial film, Cockfighter (1974), based on the 1962 novel by crime writer Charles Willeford (Miami Blues).
Infamously touted as the only movie that producer Roger Corman ever lost money on, Cockfighter stars character actor Warren Oates as Frank Mansfield, a career cocker who has taken a vow of silence until he can win the Cockfighter of the Year Award. Surrounded by fellow cockfighters played by Harry Dean Stanton, Ed Begley, Jr, Steve Railsback, Richard B. Shull and even author/screenwriter Charles Willeford himself, the film traverses the underground cockfighting world of the Deep South, with a highly detailed documentation of this unique subculture brought vividly to life by esteemed cinematographer Nestor Almendros.
Densely illustrated and featuring interviews with director Monte Hellman, producer Roger Corman and several surviving cast and crew members, Janisse’s study explores the many mythologies that intersect in Cockfighter, approaching the story and its backdrop through a variety of lenses, using a combination of cultural criticism, production history and even personal anecdotes, as the author delves into the contradictory world of cockfighting in the American South. At its core it is a story about work, honour, conviction and finding religion and beauty in strange places.
Get here:
https://www.spectacularoptical.ca/store/product/cockfight/
Cockfighter (Stills)
Two-Lane Blacktop: Slow Ride
By Kent Jones (Criterion)
The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The Graduate is not really a very good film,” said Monte Hellman when I interviewed him in 1984, “but it’s a great film because of just what it is.” In other words, nothing much as a film, strictly speaking, but quite something as a cultural event, the Saturday night at the movies that in 1967 gave the American middle class its first real glimpse of the paltry value placed upon its legacy by its own sons and daughters. “There are certain very strong stories or ideas for films that touch the core of the psychology of the audience so profoundly that they absolutely cannot fail,” Hellman went on to explain. The Graduate marked the beginning of countercultural consciousness in American movies. In the fading memory of that moment, now layered with so many ironic reversals, retrenchments, and disappointments, it is less the film that is recalled than the potent effect it produced, an effect largely unavailable to artists more nuanced and less fixated on the public eye than Mike Nichols. Shorn of its contemporary context, Nichols’s film is a nicely executed comedy of romantic embarrassment tarted up with Felliniesque close-ups, Antonioniesque spatial configurations, and Bergmanesque silences. If nothing else, The Graduate is a terminally “esque” experience.
A similar fate has befallen Dennis Hopper’s 1969 bombshell, a far better movie that finally breached the already crumbling fortress of old Hollywood. Andrew Sarris hit the nail square on the head, as he often did: “See Easy Rider for Nicholson’s performance, easily the best of the year so far, and leave the LSD trips and such to the collectors of mod mannerisms.” As Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Buck Henry were to The Graduate, Jack Nicholson and, to a slightly lesser extent, Peter Fonda were to Easy Rider. Hopper’s chosen cinematic forebears were, if anything, even headier than Nichols’s (Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Jean-Luc Godard), but ultimately, both films rested their thematic affectations, stylistic embellishments, and musical accoutrements on the shoulders of less noticeable elements: bravura comic timing in the former and beautifully crafted characterization in the latter.
Hellman was able to make his greatest film thanks to the massive success of these two cultural coups, Easy Rider in particular. “We realized that the reason that deal was made was because of Easy Rider,” he told me. “There was no question that we appreciated its success as a ticket to a kind of freedom that wouldn’t have been available to us otherwise.” The now celebrated moment of youthful enfranchisement that began sweeping through Hollywood in 1969, allowing films as diverse as Taking Off; The Hired Hand; Drive, He Said; Five Easy Pieces; and Hopper’s infamous Easy Rider follow-up, The Last Movie, to be made, did not last long—three years to be exact, until The Godfather ushered in a new era of high, wide, and handsome Hollywood moviemaking. They are not all great films, to be sure, but they inaugurated a wave of invention and exploration in Hollywood that more or less thrived all the way through the early eighties.
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) was, to quote screenwriter and former Time critic Jay Cocks, easily the best of the “odd, off-pitch movies that followed in the wake of Easy Rider and were immeasurably superior to it.” (Just as The Heartbreak Kid, made a year later by Nichols’s old partner Elaine May, was immeasurably superior to The Graduate.) In Easy Rider, the fabled “road” equals freedom, befouled by ugly Americana, another big “theme.” But in Two-Lane Blacktop it becomes something altogether different and far more interesting: a repository of dreams and fantasies, for squares, hipsters, and obsessives alike. Where Hopper’s film is set in the Great American Dreamscape, Hellman’s vision of the American West is far less pretentious, parceled out in nicely measured, seemingly offhand portraits. Where Hopper wears his hipster credentials on his sleeve, Hellman obscures his and even tones down his well-made soundtrack choices in the mix. Where Hopper and Fonda “play” disenchantment and disaffection (offset by Nicholson’s authoritative charm), James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, and Laurie Bird are three nonactors who embody a sense of youthful restlessness (offset by Warren Oates’s heartbreakingly eloquent woundedness). And where Easy Rider is finally a series of choices and strategies and inventions clustered around a big thesis, Two-Lane Blacktop is a great film devoted to nailing the particulars of something far less likely to launch magazine think pieces or talk-show digressions. It is a movie about loneliness, and the attempts made by people to connect with one another and maintain their solitude at the same time—an impossible task, an elusive dream.
That is to say, Two-Lane Blacktop is not Easy Rider II—posters of Taylor and Oates did not adorn the walls of adolescent bedrooms. Defeated before its release by a well-meaning but misconceived advance publicity campaign (Rudy Wurlitzer’s original script was published in Esquire under the unfortunate heading “The Movie of the Year”—wish fulfillment run amok, or aground), misunderstood by critics and audiences in search of the next big Youth Movie, and subsequently reviled by the very studio that had produced it, Hellman’s film was something of a buried treasure for many years. There were prints here and there, but they were scarce. Universal studio boss Lew Wasserman maintained a deep-seated personal dislike of the film, presumably because it both epitomized the generational upheaval of its era and failed to incite the new youth audience to empty its pockets. Universal’s studio projectionist took an equally dim view, and for years the studio print was shorn of its final images (in which the film appears to burn out from the center—every projectionist’s worst nightmare). Two-Lane Blacktop turned up on public television once in the eighties, panned and scanned. A few new prints were struck in the following years, but it was not until the late nineties, when it appeared on laserdisc and then DVD in the correct aspect ratio, that it assumed its proper place as one of the most striking American films of its era. At this point, it is well on its way to being recognized as one of the greatest, and most moving.
* * *
The man who was characterized by Sam Peckinpah on national television in 1973 as “the best director working in America today” got his start in movies the same way many of his contemporaries did: working for Roger Corman. After establishing a solid track record as a stage director (Martin Landau, in an introduction to Charles Tatum’s book on Hellman, remembers his old friend’s production of Waiting for Godot (1957), with Jack Albertson and Joey Faye, as exemplary), Hellman was thrown headfirst into the deep end of the moviemaking pool by Corman, with Beast from Haunted Cave (1959). A drive-in quickie shot in a matter of days in Deadwood, South Dakota, it is infinitely superior to its “sister film,” Corman’s own utterly forgettable Ski Troop Attack (the cost-conscious Corman was famous for piggybacking one production on another). From there, Hellman became a kind of in-house fixer—working as associate producer on The Wild Ride (1960), chipping in on the direction of the misbegotten The Terror (1963), and shooting extra footage for assorted Corman productions in order to bulk up their running times for television broadcast sales. “That was probably the most fun I’ve ever had,” Hellman said.
Producer Fred Roos, then developing properties for legendary producer-exhibitor Robert Lippert, saw The Terror and inquired as to its true directorial provenance. Corman got the credit, but according to Hellman, he was himself responsible for about a third of the film, Corman for about half, and the young Francis Ford Coppola for the rest. Roos hired Hellman to direct back-to-back Lippert productions in the Philippines, both from 1964, a war movie called Back Door to Hell and a crazily plotted thriller called Flight to Fury (later to become a Tarantino favorite), written by Hellman and his friend Jack Nicholson. Hellman and Nicholson were members of a loose-knit group of Los Angeles theater/film artists that also included Landau, Shirley Knight, Robert Towne, and Harry Dean Stanton, and the two men formed a kind of partnership that soon led to another, more legendary doubleheader. The Shooting (starring a brilliant young actor named Warren Oates, with the young Nicholson as a mysterious gunman) and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966) are twin westerns, the first and more enigmatic of the two written by Carole Eastman (under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce; Eastman would later write Five Easy Pieces), and the second by Nicholson himself. The productions were financed by—who else?—Corman. “Roger saw the scripts that we came up with and was ready to chuck the whole thing. But he realized that . . . if he canceled them, he’d be out five thousand dollars,” Hellman said. There was a three-week break between the Lippert movies but only a week between the westerns. Along with Corman himself, Monte Hellman was one of the hardest-working men in show business.
Hellman and Nicholson began with the idea of making a pair of “classic” westerns in the tradition of The Gunfighter and My Darling Clementine, “but we were also influenced by various European filmmakers of the time,” Hellman said. His European influences dovetailed with those of Nichols, but they appear to have been more fully absorbed—in many ways, the westerns were exemplary hybrids of old Hollywood and new Europe, beautifully recombined offspring of Beckett (a Hellman hero), Rio Bravo, and L’avventura, with powerful genetic instruction from Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (“What struck me,” Hellman said of Rivette’s film, “was that people kept walking in and out of doors—scenes that would be cut out of most other pictures became the basis of the movie”). Appropriately, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind gained their first notoriety in Paris, in 1969.
After a few years of kicking around, doing odd jobs for Corman, and suffering an assortment of false starts on, among other things, an adaptation of Barbara Garson’s play MacBird!, Hellman said, his agent “found some people in Hollywood who had read a few French reviews,” and he was hired to direct a script called Two-Lane Blacktop. In its original incarnation, he claimed, Two-Lane Blacktop read like a Disney version of The Gumball Rally. “It was the most insipid, silly, sentimental, dumb movie you could imagine. But it was about a race. I was attracted to just the idea of a cross-country race.” Hellman and his producer, Michael Laughlin, hired novelist Rudy Wurlitzer to do the rewrite, on the basis of his 1969 novel Nog (which came with a ringing endorsement from Thomas Pynchon: “Hopefully another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead and some kind of reenlightenment is beginning to arrive”).
The casting of James Taylor was Hellman’s brainchild. “I saw a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, and I just flipped over his face,” Hellman told me. “James came out and did a screen test, and he had a mustache. We weren’t sure whether we wanted him with or without it, so in the screen test he shaves it off.” (This footage, sadly, has been lost.) A May 1970 shoot was set, but the production company Cinema Center suddenly dropped the project in April. Hellman and Laughlin made the studio rounds (“MGM thought it would be a boring film because it all took place in a car. One of the things I had to do when we were presenting it to them was demonstrate how many different camera angles you could get in a car. I think I came up with twenty-four”) and finally made their deal with Ned Tanen, who was heading up a new, youth-oriented production unit at Universal. The film was made for $850,000, and it was shot in sequence. Hellman took his crew caravan-style on a real cross-country trip—from Los Angeles to Needles, California, to Flagstaff, Arizona, to Santa Fe and Tucumcari, New Mexico; then to Boswell, Oklahoma; Little Rock, Arkansas; Memphis, Tennessee; and Maryville, North Carolina. This highly unusual practice did not exactly endear the director to his actors, who were doubly exasperated by getting their script pages only the night before their scenes. “In life you don’t know what’s going to happen to you next week, so I didn’t feel that that was crucial to being able to play the scene,” Hellman told me. As a result, his first-timers—Taylor, who had just been anointed the singer-songwriter of the moment with Sweet Baby James; Wilson, drummer for the Beach Boys and musical mentor to Charles Manson; and Bird, a teenager with a strange history that fit her role as a drifting hitcher perfectly—stay off-kilter but fresh, maintaining a Bressonian early-morning clarity.
The rough cut of Two-Lane Blacktop was three and a half hours long. “We were contractually obligated to deliver a two-hour movie, so we lost half the script,” said Hellman. “We lost some good scenes, for sure, that I fell in love with.” Gone are the flavor and color of street-racing life and the road, evoked so beautifully in Wurlitzer’s script. What is gained is a trancelike absorption in movement and ritual. Hellman’s film, like Paris Belongs to Us, is composed of many of the in-between moments that most filmmakers would cut. In the process, a strange terrain of tenderness and disconnection inhabited by the four principal characters is mapped out: their shared remoteness is exactly what makes it safe for them to venture into one another’s company. This movie about a cross-country race between a car freak in a lovingly souped-up ’55 Chevy and a fantasist in a store-bought GTO moves at an even, gliding pace, and it’s all about stopping to gas up, eat, make some bread in local quarter-mile drag races, pick up hitchhikers, let the engine breathe, share a drink. The characters think they’re in a race, but they’re really players in a theater of life, the stage of which stretches from sea to shining sea.
Though he reads “hippie,” Taylor is the classic introvert-specialist, for whom everything is swallowed up and contained by the road (if Two-Lane Blacktop were made today, he and Wilson would be tech-heads). Oates is the smiling extrovert-dreamer, for whom everything becomes a part of the Playboy dream he’s spinning on his drive across America. Taylor’s aquiline face may be the visual center of the movie, buoyed by Bird’s pout and Wilson’s pudgy, stoned softness, but Oates is its emotional core. There’s not another character like Oates’s in all of American cinema. Fredric March’s drunken manager of small loans in The Best Years of Our Lives and Bogart’s forlorn convict in Dark Passage come close, but neither recedes so completely into the lonely smallness of a bruised ego. Oates’s nameless would-be hipster is perfect in every way: V-neck sweaters (they keep changing color), driving gloves, a wet bar in the trunk, music for every mood, a cocky grin that looks like it’s been practiced in the mirror. This nameless driver has bought the James Bond ideal of the well-rounded man, but he prefigures Woody Allen’s Zelig in the desperate speed with which he adapts himself to every new situation and passenger. I can’t think of another performance that registers even the slightest prick of wounded feelings with such care. “Why aren’t you in Bakersfield?” says a down-home cracker in response to the GTO driver’s spiel, and Oates tries to Band-Aid the hurt on his face with a touching smile (his weathered face and toothy grin were never as beautiful as they are here). The actor imbues his character with a strong sense of physical maladaptation—he can’t even lean against a building comfortably—and puts the softness in the American character on display to devastating effect.
Unlike Oates’s GTO, who projects his desperate longing out onto the open spaces, for Taylor’s Driver the road, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell (coincidentally, she joined Taylor for a good portion of the Two-Lane shoot), is a refuge. Or perhaps a cocoon. That’s why the film’s last image is no modish affectation. “It was really the most intellectual, conscious manipulation of the audience that I’ve ever done,” said Hellman. “I thought it was a movie about speed, and I wanted to bring the audience back out of the movie and into the theater, and to relate them to the experience of watching a film. I also wanted to relate them to, not consciously but unconsciously, the idea of film going through a camera, which is related to speed as well. I think it came to me out of a similar kind of thing that Bergman did with Persona.” Hellman is literally arresting his character’s fantasy of dissolving into pure speed and limitless road (the burn of the image begins in Taylor’s head), a fantasy shared by countless movies, then and now. Including Easy Rider.
Two-Lane Blacktop is the least romantic road movie imaginable. Nonetheless, Hellman saw it as a romance, in the tradition of The Clock, A Man and a Woman, and The Apartment. On the drawing board, perhaps. In finished form, it is a great film about self-delusion. Warren Oates’s GTO (as he’s credited) is every pontificating drunk, every reformed junkie or born-again proselytizer, every guy who moves to another town to begin again. “We’re gonna go to Florida,” he tells Bird in the film’s most acutely poignant moment. “And we’re gonna lie around that beach, and we’re just gonna get healthy. Let all the scars heal. Maybe we’ll run over to Arizona. The nights are warm . . . and the roads are straight. And we’ll build a house. Yeah, we’ll build a house. ’Cause if I’m not grounded pretty soon . . . I’m gonna go into orbit.” Meanwhile, she’s ready to doze off in the passenger seat. Like all dreamers, he’s just talking to himself.
(https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/621-two-lane-blacktop-slow-ride)
Two Lane Blacktop (Stills)
Interview
(from BFI – https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/monte-hellman-career):
Matthew Thrift: How did you first get involved with Roger Corman?
Monte Hellman: It’s kinda funny. I was working as an apprentice film editor at American Broadcasting Studios, just east of Vermont Street, and my job was cleaning out the film vaults originally, stuff that had been in there 100 years. These were the studios that Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford started. I used to take my lunch up in Griffith Park, and I saw this young director shooting a movie who turned out to be Roger Corman. I didn’t say hello to him at the time but I was married to a young actress and she began working on Roger’s movie and that’s how I first met him.
Were you confident going into Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)? It must have been reassuring being surrounded by filmmakers in a similar position to yourself – Coppola, Bogdanovich, Jack Hill…
Well, at that time I didn’t know how many there were! I wasn’t aware of all these other people, I was very early on in the Corman stable. I didn’t have any confidence at all, I didn’t know what I was doing! OK, I take it back, perhaps I knew a little as at the time I’d been working as an apprentice editor, observing a wonderful film editor and I learnt a lot from him, perhaps more than I did going to film school.
What exactly was your contribution to The Terror (1963)?
As far as I know there were three directors: Roger Corman, Francis Coppola and myself. I was the third and Jack Hill was my screenwriter. Roger started making the movie without a full-blown script – he’d shot for two days on a set he had left over from a previous movie with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, and had asked Francis to write a script and finish the movie. Francis worked for about five weeks and Roger didn’t really feel that he was getting anywhere, so he hired me for five days to finish it and I think I had maybe twice as much footage after five days as Francis had shot after five weeks!
How did your relationship with Jack Nicholson come about?
I don’t remember when we actually met, but we became friends when I was associate producer on a picture a friend of mine was shooting for Roger called The Wild Ride (1960) in northern California. We formed a partnership and began working on a screenplay which never got made.
Was that Epitaph?
That’s right. We worked on The Terror and then the four pictures together after.
Can you describe the writing process with Nicholson?
We took a ship to the Philippines and he wrote the script for Flight to Fury on the ship. He’d go down to the lobby or whatever you call it on a ship, and write each day, getting feedback and information from whatever passengers were kibitzing at the time. On Ride in the Whirlwind, we rented an office in Beverly Hills, right next door to Fred Astaire’s office, in a building called the Writer’s Building, appropriately enough. We’d go there every day and I would pace and he would sit down and write the script out in longhand.
I understand you did a bit of acting yourself back then, right?
Well, I acted in Summer Stock but not in the movies really.
Didn’t you go to acting classes with Jack Nicholson and Robert Blake, taught by Martin Landau?
I did, but as a director. I did the same exercises the actors did but I wasn’t really interested in it at the time.
Didn’t you know James Dean too?
I knew James Dean at UCLA. I had the honour of telling him he’d never make it because he was too short.
How did he take that?
I don’t think he believed me [laughs].
It must have been a steep learning curve, filming two features back-to-back in the Philippines. Did you enjoy the process?
It was enjoyable and it was a nightmare. I loved the weather, I just love hot weather, I don’t care if it’s dry or wet. So I directed the movies in shorts, with a handkerchief on my head and drank coconut juice every day, eating fresh pineapples straight off the tree. We had great beer too! I don’t know how they got it cold, they didn’t have any refrigerators but they managed to get ice from Lord knows where.
It was a great experience. The first picture we shot was Back Door to Hell and I enjoyed it a lot. We were really in the middle of nowhere, deep in the jungles south of Lausanne. It was fantastic, we had a typhoon in the middle of the shoot and everyone said, “You can’t shoot,” so I said “Let’s shoot!” So we shot the typhoon [laughs]. Then I got some mysterious illness and I was in the hospital for the three weeks between the two pictures. It was time for me to go out and scout locations but I wasn’t up to it, then Jack came in to my hospital room and put his hands on my head and said “You will be well! You will be well!” and the next day I jumped out of bed and got in the jeep and we went scouting locations – I was fine!
You shot Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting back-to-back soon after. Were you able to utilise lessons you’d learnt in the Philippines for the two westerns?
I don’t know. Whatever you learn, it’s incremental. You don’t know if you’re learning it when you’re shooting or when you’re between pictures. It’s been 20 years between my last feature and Road to Nowhere and I’ve learnt an enormous amount in that time. Maybe it’s because I was teaching and I learnt from my students? I’m not sure what the process is but of course you learn on every movie. On Back Door to Hell I used a dolly for the first time. Then we used several kinds of dollies; I used a wheelchair as a dolly, I used a bicycle as a dolly, we didn’t have a real dolly, but I made my first dolly shots! Every time you try something you learn from it.
How did Carole Eastman get involved with The Shooting?
I had done a few additional scenes for some of Roger’s movies that needed to be expanded for television. He had shot the movies as second features for theatrical release and they were 60-minute movies, which for television needed to be expanded to 70 minutes. So I added 10 minutes to not only Beast From Haunted Cave, which was my movie, but to three of Roger’s movies that were in the same situation: Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961), Last Woman on Earth (1960) and Ski Troop Attack (1960). Carole was a friend of mine and an actress primarily, and I asked her to write a title song for one of the films, so she wrote Creature from the Haunted Sea, a very funny song which the lead actress, Betsy Jones-Moreland, had to sing in one of the scenes I shot. That was my initial involvement with her creatively, as opposed to just socially.
Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting seem to purposefully subvert and reject traditional western archetypes. Did you set out to put a new stamp on the genre?
I don’t know how much was really conscious. I know that at least in the development of Ride in the Whirlwind – when I say development I know that’s a strange term to apply to a script which was written in four weeks and then went immediately into production – but we knew we wanted to play a few tricks on some of the traditional aspects of the western. With John Ford, you know that if a character is revealed as liking his mother, or his dog, then he was going to die. We decided not to do that kind of thing; to start with traditional scenes but let them play out with a different conclusion. With The Shooting, I don’t think I ever had that discussion with Carole, she just kinda did her thing! I would go and read her five or seven pages at the end of each day; I’d be shooting with Jack all day then I’d go see her at night to decide if we were going to go in the same direction or take a different road. It was a very incremental and open-ended process; she didn’t have an outline she’d work from, she’d just let each scene lead her into the next one.
You made four films with perhaps my favourite actor, Warren Oates. How did you both meet?
He was someone that Jack knew, I’d only seen him in a stage production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I was toying with the idea of Sterling Hayden and Donna Winter for The Shooting, and one day I was in a bookstore in Beverley Hills and in a flash I had the single idea of Millie Perkins, Warren Oates and Will Hutchins, all three. I don’t know where the idea of Will Hutchins came from, but I’m sure that the idea of using Warren Oates came from the experience of seeing him in Cuckoo’s Nest. Millie was my next door neighbour, so that was easy.
What would you say the differences were between his acting style and Jack Nicholson’s? Who was easier to direct?
At that time, Jack was really discovering who he was as an actor. I think he made some connections when we were in the Philippines. I remember when we were shooting Flight to Fury, there was a scene where he was sitting under a tree apart from everyone else, and whilst he was sitting under that tree, a chestnut or something must have fallen on his head, because afterwards he said he’d had a real revelation and that he finally understood what it was all about, what acting was for him. Apparently it was a real breakthrough moment for him; he certainly thought it was. Warren had a few years more experience, but was a little more sure of who he was as an actor. Jack was still making a lot of discoveries, even when we made the westerns.
I understand Warren was something of a poet too. Have you read any of his work?
I never saw any of his poetry until after he was dead. I don’t think anything was ever published, I’ve only ever seen a few pages of things.
You also had the experience of directing Sam Peckinpah, who has a great little scene in China 9, Liberty 37 (1978). Did he take direction well?
I was grateful that he made the trip to appear in the movie and I was also grateful that it was only one day of shooting (laughs). Any more would have been the end of me. He was so difficult! He wouldn’t say the lines, he would just do anything to avoid making a commitment as an actor.
Was that a conscious thing do you think? Was he just being mischievous?
No, I just think he was afraid, I think he was seriously afraid.
How did that experience compare to when you cut The Killer Elite for him?
That was earlier. We’d go into the cutting room at nine in the morning and he’d keep us there until he came to review our work at the end of the day, which was usually at around 10 or 10:30 at night. We’d have to stay until he arrived and he’d always arrive completely drunk – it was alcohol at that particular time – and you’d think that he would just be completely incapable of doing the job, but he was just brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. He would speak so quietly that you would have to put your ear an inch away from his lips to hear what he was saying, but he would come up with these simply astounding ideas. I think I learnt more from him in those few weeks of editing than almost anything else I’ve done.
Am I right in thinking you were going to direct Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid?
Yes, I developed it. I was originally hired to direct it by Gordon Carroll, I’d developed the screenplay with Ray Wurlitzer, but then it was put into development hell at MGM and shelved for three years. Then a new administration came in, headed by the man who had just produced Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), and they found the script and decided to make it with Sam.
I’m particularly fond of China 9, Liberty 37. There’s a romanticism in the film that’s absent from many of your other works; the characters’ decisions are governed as much by love and lust as by their sense of honour. How did that film come about?
I’d been having meetings for several years with (producer) Elliott Kastner, who sent me a script that he had. He was in Rome setting it up and he asked me to direct it. I said that the script had a lot of problems which he replied were fixable, then he asked how quickly I could get to Rome.
This was a couple of days before Christmas, which I was planning to spend with my family, so I said, “How about I come just after the first of the year?” So in those eight days I wrote a new script, which was essentially China 9, Liberty 37, loosely based on his script. I arrived in Rome and his partners there loved the script, and he hated it! So he dropped out of the project and I made the picture for these very ‘colourful’ Italian producers. It was a great shoot.
Your compositional sensibilities have always been extraordinary – the way you utilise the foreground and background of a frame for emotional impact. The hanging man at the start of Ride in the Whirlwind, the gas station paraphernalia in Two-Lane Blacktop, the tree-trunk separating Oates and Hutchins from Perkins in The Shooting, Jack Nicholson standing over Dewey Martin in his hotel room in Flight to Fury, Fabio Testi and Jenny Agutter close together but miles apart emotionally after the dinner scene in China 9. Do you spend much time storyboarding these kinds of elements, or discussing them with your DoP, or are you generally clear of a scene’s requirements once you’re on location?
The only picture that I ever storyboarded, in a very crude way, was Beast From Haunted Cave. I did it late at night and would arrive on the set having had no sleep, and I soon realised that wasn’t a good way for me to work. I don’t think I ever did it again.
Two-Lane Blacktop is like an anti-mythic update on the western. How did you arrive at the decision to end the movie with the famous ‘burn-out’ of the celluloid itself?
The original screenplay ended with ‘Those satisfactions are permanent’ and the GTO going off into the sunset, which is probably the logical place to end it. But I had a dream one night, which is the way that I do a lot of my creative work, and I dreamt the new ending. I wrestled with the idea for a few days because I was uncomfortable with it from the point of view that I felt that it was an intellectual concept – this idea of the film burning in the gate was somehow not organic but intellectual. I immediately thought that it referenced Persona (1966), so I played with the idea and ultimately thought that as intellectual as it might be, there was an emotional resonance to it, it did have an impact on me, it certainly had an impact in my dream, so I decided to go for it, and sure enough half the world thinks it’s an intellectual conceit and the other half likes it, so who knows?
You’re often labelled an existentialist, and you’ve spoken in the past of the influence of Sartre and Camus on your work – there’s certainly something of L’etranger in The Shooting. Is that a label you’re comfortable with?
I don’t mind being called an existentialist as there may be a little bit of truth to that; but my two westerns that are often called existential westerns, I don’t see that they relate to existentialism. People refer to them that way, and I guess it’s become an easy label, but I don’t see how it applies.
Literally, existentialism refers to the idea that ‘existence exceeds essence’. Dramatically in Sartre it’s the idea that a character has to make a choice, that he has freedom of choice but he’s going to do what his experience has led him to do at that moment. He can change his direction but he doesn’t. Maybe if I really thought about it I could find a way that that connects to Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting but I don’t see it immediately (laughs).
You’ve spoken about the impact of the JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations on the making of The Shooting, and Two-Lane Blacktop feels in some way reactionary to the period that preceded its production. Would you consider yourself politically motivated in the making of your films? There are certainly a number of different academic readings of those two pictures in particular. Are you interested in those kinds of intellectualised readings of your films, or are you more concerned with their emotional impact?
I love reading everybody’s interpretation of any movie that I make, I’m fascinated by all these different readings, but my primary intent is to move the audience. It goes back to D.W. Griffith saying “What I’m trying to do, above all, is to make you see.” I would agree with that but also add to it “…and make you feel”.
There’s an elegiac quality to your films, a certain fatalism that suggests the end of a given era or way of life. Few of your characters seem to get what they want by the end of your pictures, and even fewer make it to the end in one piece. Many are victims of circumstance, fighting forces beyond their control – essentially good men who are punished for their bad decisions (Warren Oates in The Shooting and China 9, Nicholson in Ride in the Whirlwind), whilst others suffer as a result of their own flaws, whether it’s greed (in Flight to Fury) or an obsessive need to compete (Two-Lane Blacktop; Cockfighter, 1974). All seem to be searching for something, yet few seem to find it. You seem to hold little stock in redemption. When Gashade asks Millie Perkins’ character what the point of it all is in The Shooting, she simply tells him there isn’t any. Do you think your early films in particular tend towards the nihilistic or the fatalistic? Or is there humour to be found in the futility of the characters’ battles against inevitability?
I think those kind of stories appeal to me, and that’s what draws me to them or guides them in that direction, especially if I’m involved in the writing process. Obviously it’s not much fun making a movie that you wouldn’t want to go see, so those are the types of film I inevitably end up making.
There’s a real economy in the cutting of your films: they’re all incredibly lean and brilliantly paced. What are your principle concerns when it comes to cutting and shaping a picture? Do you cut to the strength of the performances, narrative momentum, or more to establish a mood in a given scene?
Having worked in the editing room with some brilliant editors, they’re always kind of shocked at the way that I edit because I do edit for performance. There’s no academic approach to it, it’s purely the way the chips lie and it creates a kind of arrhythmia in a way that startles film editors. Performance is always the most important aspect and that’s what I go for.
What was it about the production of Cockfighter that made it such a bad experience for you?
It wasn’t so much a bad experience, I just wasn’t happy with the script because I was cut short in my work on it. I was allowed to bring in a writer for a number of weeks and at the end of the first week we were told we could only have one more week, so instead of being able to go through the whole script methodically from beginning to end, we just had to pick certain scenes that we would work on.
Roger Corman notoriously re-cut Cockfighter without your involvement. He’s clearly an incredibly astute businessman, but do you think his need to sell a picture can often cause it to suffer from an artistic perspective?
I don’t know if the things he did ultimately had any impact at all. As you know, the people who bought the movie for video wanted the original version, they wanted the director’s cut, so what we see now is the version I intended to be seen. It’s happened on many of my pictures: the producer has come in with what he thought were better ideas but the marketplace has finally exonerated me.
What are your thoughts on the film now?
I’ve always liked the documentary aspects of it; some of that stuff is amazing, especially those people who are real cockfighters. I’ve always enjoyed that part of it.
We’re still waiting for a UK home release; I think there are still certification problems due to the cockfights.
The US DVD is pretty great. Nestor Almendros [the film’s cinematographer] preferred that to any of the prints because the colour was finally corrected properly. It really looks great.
Your films are pretty much all road movies in some form or another. Some in an explicit sense, like Two-Lane Blacktop and The Shooting. Ride in the Whirlwind is a journey interrupted, followed by an escape, its characters on the run, much like Flight to Fury. Even Beast from Haunted Cave involves a trek across the mountains, and Cockfighter and Iguana (1988) have a certain circular structure to their journeys. What is it that attracts you to this type of story? Is Road to Nowhere structured similarly?
The idea of the road movie as a separate genre is, in a way, a little absurd because every movie is in some way a road movie. [The German film theorist] Siegfried Kracauer said that any legitimate movie had to take place in the street or in the road; if you had a set with no windows onto the road then it wasn’t a real movie, it was a play.
Was making Road to Nowhere an enjoyable experience?
The best ever. One of my characters says a line that I’ve frequently said in real life, which is, “The first job of the director is casting. The second job of the director is casting. The third job of the director is casting.” It’s 90 per cent of the job and I can’t remember what the other 10 per cent is.
I ended up with a fabulous cast, and any of the casting decisions that could have gone awry, and nearly did, could have destroyed the movie. I was very lucky. One of my mentors was Arthur Hopkins, and he talks about the casting gods, and if the casting gods smile on you there’s nothing more auspicious for a successful endeavour.
You shot Road to Nowhere on a Canon 5D, I understand?
Yeah, it’s the first feature film to be shot entirely with a DSLR.
I’ve not seen it yet, but I understand it’s a movie about the making of another movie, or certainly contains that element. Where do you think the film fits into your filmography?
It’s a road movie, it covers three continents, it’s a movie about real life and it’s a complete fantasy. It’s anything you want it to be [laughs].
How do you think the business has changed in the past 50 years in terms of getting a picture made?
I think it just gets harder, and harder and harder. I hate to be a conspiracy theorist but I think that part of it is really by design. The studios literally put themselves out of business by destroying the video industry. They set up these little kiosks where they were renting their movies, and only their movies, for $1 a day and our biggest video store, which was Blockbuster, was destroyed. Blockbuster was the only place that the independents could get a fair shake, if someone came in and came across your video box and liked it, there was a chance they might rent it. That’s not there anymore.
You made Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting in 35 days in 1965. Why isn’t it possible any more to go to Utah with a bunch of actor pals and a digital video camera and come back with two masterpieces 35 days later?
Those movies couldn’t get made today. It’s possible to make a movie for under $100,000 today with a digital camera, but it’s not going to look like what we think a movie should look like. Road to Nowhere looks like a movie that was shot on film, only it’s shot digitally; it’s only because we took the same pains with lighting and so on that it looks so good. You don’t need lights to shoot with a digital camera, but it won’t look real, it won’t be representative of cinematic reality anyway. That’s the bottom line.
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p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog has the giant privilege of granting squatting rights to the great writer New Juche who has made a very rich post for you about the singular American auteur/filmmaker Monte Hellman. Greatness all around. And all you have to do is set some time aside to read and peer and click. So, I hope you will. Thank you ever so much, New Juche. If the blog could manifest its current state of mind, it would look and act thrilled. ** jay, Okay, thanks for the warning. I’m curious enough to push Play and see what happens. I just need to find it. Oh, I fully agree in the sense that I too think the teeniest percent of the slaves/masters physically hook up, at most. Sure, I’ve never stopping loving and playing games. I’m on an extended break because I get so consumed by them that my work suffers, and I had a lot of constant work for a while, but my Switch is staring at me over to my right, and there are five games waiting in the cue. You’re a player, I’m guessing? don’t think I’ve used that phrase in anything before, or if I did I have no memory of it. Maybe something in the same ballpark? ** Arno, Hi, Arno! Oh, yes, Rome, February, so did you write that book? Oh, that’s strange about the ordering. New Directions says it’s in print and gettable? 35, wow, thanks. I hope Belgian customs aren’t picky types. I’m sorry to hear your writing is stuck in that Infernal ring. It needs that approval to kickstart? I hate when I’m not writing, so I feel for you. It’s great to have you back. ** David Ehrenstein, It wouldn’t shock me (re: CB-R -> Rivette). Sad that I would never have known it was Book Lovers Day if you hadn’t mentioned it. ** _Black_Acrylic, It is fun. And I’ve never played Fantasy Football, but, even so, imagining what it is, that comparison seems very apt. No, I don’t think I’ve ever played a sports game ever. Other than maybe opening Mario Tennis and trying a few swats. ** Tosh Berman, She’s one of the greats, I think. Very, very worth exploring. ** Uday, That’s wicking? How very kind and sweet of you then. I might post-date your wish because we’re supposed to go up to 38 degrees on Monday!!!! You have tons and tons of time, absolutely. I like that sentence. And I like a little awkwardness, as you must know. In fact I sometimes work hard to make my sentences awkward. But I trust your judgement, of course. White streak: go for it? Off the top of my head. I don’t know about fascinated. I briefly dyed my hair pink and blue in my Glam Rock phase. I briefly dyed my hair black in my Punk phase. That’s it. I do really like dyed hair though. Not, like, Mick Jagger dyed, but when I see people with brightly colored hair, I always want to ask them a lot of questions. So maybe I am a little fascinated. Are you now Diaghilevian? ** Joseph, Yeah, I’m massively glad we made that trip even though the severe seasickness on the way there and back is up there with the worst experiences of my life. I’ve never been to Madagascar, no. I would recommend Iceland to you. That place is kind of as close as one can get to an unearthly beautiful place within not so difficult reach. Duke University Lemur Center sounds like a perfectly fine destination though. I 100% agree with you about CB-R! 100% I tell you! I get to enjoy the end of the Olympics this weekend, so I’ll be okay, except for the brutal heatwave arriving tomorrow. May your weekend rule even more. ** Lucas, Hi! I hate being angry. I hate confrontation. I’m pretty good at slipping and sliding around it, or I was until our monstrous, infuriating film producer appeared in my life. I really like Weerasethakul’s films. In fact our other, less monstrous producer produced his most recent films. That said, I was very disappointed by ‘Memoria’. I thought it was kind of off. But I don’t like Tilda Swinton, so that was probably part of it. What did you think? Weekend’s looking okay except for the heatwave coming tomorrow. 38 degrees, dude! Oh my god. Help! ** Jeff J, Hi. Oh, wow, I highly recommend you read CB-R. I think she’s amazing. ‘Life, End Of’ is great, so you can start there or with ‘Textermination’, it’s all good. The Barrett doc is interesting if you’re a devotee of his work and his era of Floyd. Lots of footage I’d never seen before. The doc itself is not particularly noteworthy in and of itself. And it does that annoying thing where it never plays out a full song or live clip, just snips. But if you revere Barrett, it’s worth seeing. I don’t know ‘All That Breathes’, but I’ll definitely look it up. Thanks, man. ** Harper, Hi. Agree, agree about Pynchon. Super well and beautifully put. Oh, when I said early Bresson, I just meant ‘Les Anges du péché’ and ‘Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne’. I think he found his style starting with ‘ … Country Priest’. I love those early films a ton. ‘Pickpocket’ its insanely great. I actually really love ‘… Balthazar’. The only early one that I’m not 100% in love with is ‘… Country Priest’. For me, personally, the greatest of all are everything of his starting with ‘Mouchette’ though. I did like the new Anne Carson a lot. And CB-R is really, really worth investigating. Have the best weekend possible! ** Jacob, Well, I haven’t seen The Curry live, but I’m sure they attempt the accent. The Smith wannabe simulacra dude wears a hell of a wig. I’m really interested in these Roblox games now, thanks to you. I’ll use part of my weekend to dig in. I love ‘Epic Mickey’. It’s so underrated. I think there’s a new kind of sequel, but people don’t seem so high on it. Oh, um, I know people who think Blanchot and Deleuze, for instance, are more like language/social theorists than old style philosophers, so I don’t know. Blanchot is my man. He’s my #1 brainy dude. I recommend him of course. The philosophy set sounds as contentious as the poetry set. I never got all that into Derrida, but Derrida adherents think that makes me stupid. You’re not stupid, so I’m hoping I’m not. ** Diesel Clementine, I only use my phone for calls, texts, photo-video shooting, and occasionally GPS, so a little one might suit me. Mm, candywise, I remember being really, really into candy necklaces. And Pixie Stix. And SweeTarts. Nice, multifaceted day you had there. The fascists are still rioting over there?! They’re so violence horny. Lord. ** Dev, She’s really under known, it’s not just you. Competence seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to manifest? But I’m no actor. My vibe is that you’ll pull it off bigly. Knowing what I know about you. That’s cool: Saul Williams being your entree into poetry. For me as a teen, it was Bob Dylan, yawn. I think for a lot people of a slightly younger than my age, it was Patti Smith, kind of yawn. You have a great weekend too. A great, great weekend even. ** Thomas H, My memory says you’re welcome via me. Yeah, link me if you find it. ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ … that’s an interesting comparison. Yeah, that’s really good. Hopefully they’ll see you as a covetable go-getter, not a desperate flinger. And, really, you are a go-getter, no? A weekend of greatness is my wish and possibly even prediction for you. ** Justin D, I think if I didn’t believe there are infinite interests and fascinations out there, I would … I don’t know what … mope. I think there’s a reason why Truffaut was once considered a top-level director and is now thought of as a top-level film critic who made uneven movies. ‘Jules and Jim’ is pretty good though. Can’t argue with your recent viewing habits, obviously. Given the impending heatwave here, a comfortable weekend is exactly what I need. How did you know? Do you need a comfortable weekend? My fingers are poised and ready to be crossed on your behalf, if so. ** Okay. Let New Juche carry you far, far away this weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday.
Now available in North America 
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Hi Dennis,
I’m catching this at 2am Vancouver time, lucky me! After I wake up properly later this morning I’m off to a friend-date so hooray for that!
It just came to me, another thing the premise of Textermination reminds me of: Drew Hayden Taylor’s absurdist play ‘Dead White Writer On The Floor’, which brings together half a dozen fictional indigenous archetypes – Billy Jack, Pocahontas etc. I remember thinking it was pretty interesting.
I definitely wouldn’t describe myself as a “go-getter” – I’m basically allergic to doing things I know I won’t enjoy, and lack any kind of stamina or stick-to-it-iveness. If there a way to automatically apply to job without any input from me whatsoever, I’d sign up instantly.
In positive news, I found that comic I referred to in yesterday’s comment – ‘Boys Are Slapstick’, by Rory Frances, and it’s as good as I remember. Contains adult content! https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/boys-are-slapstick-6d520fdd27e1 Hope you enjoy.
And of course thank you to New Juche for this enormous retrospective!
Hi!!
Looks like the blog ate my message once again! I’m glad I popped in to check, though, because this post is fantastic! Thank you – and thank you, New Juche!
I’m signing off for another short period because first my mom’s coming for a visit, then Anita’s parents. (It’s funny how we don’t see anybody for months and then everybody all at once.) I’ll be back on Tuesday, the week after next! I hope you’ll have the loveliest time ‘til then!!
Love pulling himself together and finally helping “Room Temperature” find its way into the world, Od.
Merci New Juche!
Monte is a great and very subtle filmmaker and off screen was a great guy. “The Shooting” and “China 9 Liberty37” are my faves. Funny his saying Jack was discovering himself in the making og “The Shooting” and “Ride in the Whirlwind” cause he seems to be already there. Jack is one the greatest of the great. Millie Perkins is fabulous in “The Shooting” — sort of “Marnie Rides the Range”
Hey! Yeah, Raw should be really really easy to find cheaply, particularly if you’re in Paris. It’s sort of become this generation’s “endurance film”, like something people put on during parties to fuck with people. So there are copies basically anywhere you look!
Yeah, I do game a little, it’s something I used to be massively into but I haven’t actually played a ton recently. I mostly just play the usual stuff, lots of Dark Souls, stuff like that, anything that requires a lot of focus and concentration always relaxes me. How about you? What’s the last game that really pulled you in?
Also, RE that quotation from Flunker – it’s in Zac’s Drug Binge, on the first page. Flunker is obviously spectacular btw, the second story really took it out of me, the way you write about being unable to look at someone without crying is so… agh it’s so wonderful. I’ve been looking for a bit of your work to show my boyfriend, and that might be it.
Un Amico di Pasolini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4IjJav7xbg
My Favorite Pasolini film “Che Cosa Sono Nuovole? / What Are Clouds?”
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=Che+Cosa+Sono+Nuovole&qpvt=Che+Cosa+Sono+Nuovole&mid=7DEFB44C87C6669F113B7DEFB44C87C6669F113B&&FORM=VRDGAR
Ninetto/Othello doesn’t understqnd why Toto/Iago hates him so much. The audience revolts at this change of dramatic focus and ruuuuuushes the stage. Then the sining garbage man (Domenico Modugno) takes the bbroken puppets away to the tgarbage heap.
Thank you Dennis and everyone, this was a pleasure! My favourites are Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter.
Dennis, Thank you! Chickenfeed, hahaha.
Well, you know me, I do embellish sometimes but I don’t lie. And I will tell you that you did indeed get an audible gasp. No embellishment there at all.
So, today is the start of year 53. I’m 32 years older than Alex again. 😛
He got me, so far, a Dogpool Funko Pop (from the new Deadpool movie) and a $50 Amazon card. His big gift is coming later tonight. No, not that! 😛
We’re doing family dinner tonight and then cake and ice cream and gifts and then videogames. Should be a good day.
Hope your weekend is swell, too.
And New Juche, Congrats!
On this awesome day, btw. It’s really good. I hit post before I typed out the rest. 😛
Thanks to New Juche for this detailed overview. The Shatter story is pretty funny. I really have to see Two Lane Blacktop. Doesn’t seem to be streaming in the usual places (I don’t have Critierion), but my library has DVDs, yesssss.
Just starting this, very excited!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61288425-the-traumatic-surreal
Bill
This is one of the best film days you’ve run, with two comprehensive interviews. Great job, New Juche! How did Hollywood produce TWO LANE BLACKTOP, even in 1971? Time to watch IGUANA & CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37.
I’m having more issues with my laptop – one row of keys no longer works. I’ll have to take it to the repair shop Monday morning. (I need to see the Holly Woodlawn vehicle SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS and write a review first.)
I hope the weekend was a break from your worries about ROOM TEMPERATURE. Does Zac return next week?
Have you ever been to Finland? After Iceland, it’s on my travel bucket list, because my father’s family comes from there.
hellman, hellman… god monte hellman. have you ever seen that one intro he did for a tv airing of a fistful of dollars? for two sublime minutes, you get some incredible shadow work, slanted angles and tension build up, practically to hide the fact it’s a double, atmopherically though? amazing. it does just go back to being dull once harry dean stanton — even being one of my favorites — starts to talk, it does have funny interjections with closeups of clint from the movie poorly edited in, and then for the last minute you get a long beautiful take of hands close ups of the stand-in preparing himself for war, bressonian tm, and soon enough he is riding to the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppZuqec9lq0
those incredibly considered five minutes for something that is honestly all context pointless, and a joke is why i love hellman, and that type of thinking shines through in his best work. i think i’m gonna watch his western duology again. — i once wanted to do an whole essay on that prologue but i realize that is asking too much.
i turned in my zweig report to my dom, he was not impressed, i can still smell his ass on my nose. that lingering note of long-dried sunscreen mixed layered on top of his salty musk. brr.
got ‘from a broken bottle–‘ in, i’m enjoying it alot, i can get a deep sense of how much mackey loves jazz and words. some of it feels like i need a reader’s for, but a lot of it is deeply enjoyable. how he plays around with jazz as music, jazz as a style, and how that intersects with the main character’s viewpoints and writing. i did also laugh at some paragraphs, hope i was meant to do that. it feels acidic without being biting, in on the fun sorta thing. it is tickling my itch to really yap about it, but i’m half way through the first book only, so i’ll wait until i got a bigger grasp, and hope i’m not too euro to miss the ocean for the trees, or land in an island across the planet.
not much else, writing hit a slump, that happens, nothing about it. maybe in the shower i can figure out if there is just an aspect that is fucking me up, if not so it goes again.
that should be all, if not uh… oh boy.
@ New Juche, you are Scotland’s finest! Major congratulations and I’m very happy to be introduced to the work of Monte Hellman.
🙂
I have noticed your awkward sentences! This bit from Try is very moving despite being coltish: “ Horrified, Ziggy laughs, but it’s an ugly honk thing. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I’m too verbal, I know. The school therapist says I’m, uh … I’m afraid if I don’t tell you I like you all the time— oh, ‘cos I told her how important our friendship is now-that you’ll have a reason to reject me. But she says it works the opposite way, and, uh, that I’m really just trying to make it impossible for you to say how you feel about me, ‘cos I’m afraid what
you’ll say is I don’t really matter to you. But I told her, ‘No, our friendship’s really mutual back and forth.’ ” He looks up hopefully. “That’s what’s so brilliant about it, that we’re so bonded.””
But I’m sure you get praise about that paragraph all the time, or at least have it noticed. Do you have any pictures of you with dyed hair? Sounds fascinating. I’m not Diaghilevian unfortunately. I’ve got the flexibility for ballet but not the ability to follow choreography, and as for his critical work… well.
Hope your weekend went as well as mine, and ended better. Sending hugs and air kisses, which is what I thought “French kissing” referred to when I was very young.
hi! I think being angry is a totally extremely reasonable response to your horrible producer’s antics. hoping you can put an end to them soon. I’m relieved you didn’t like ‘memoria’ either, I was so disappointed by it too. I don’t have any strong feelings on tilda swinton normally but I thought her perpetually dismayed/confused face in the film was grating and just didn’t really make much sense. there were some individual elements I found really cool — the audio design, obvs, as it was definitely a good movie to watch with headphones, and the sets/locations too — but I felt like it really failed at making everything come together. maybe it’s because I was spoiled about the noise being the aliens before I watched it but eh. and I thought the spaceship design was kind of lame. I watched ‘blissfully yours’ the day before and thought it was much better. oh I hope you get through the heatwave!!! it’s getting hot here too but my weekend was just incredibly boring so I hope you at least did something fun or just enjoyable. I’m still not religious but praying that this heatwave will be the last.
My favorite R and B singer is a transgender woman
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=jackie+shane+walking+the+dog&qpvt=jackie+shane+walking+the+dog&mid=78ED4E17961804184A0A78ED4E17961804184A0A&&FORM=VRDGAR
Hey, Dennis! Thanks for the tip on ‘Jules and Jim’. I guess I just figured that during these dog days of summer we could all use a comfortable weekend. Did it end up working for you? My weekend was comfortable. This evening, I watched ‘Fallen Leaves’ on MUBI. Loved it! It felt like such a love letter to cinema. I really liked the scene with the two guys leaving the theater and trading their thoughts on the zombie film, comparing it to that of Bresson and Godard. Too cute. Happy Monday to you!
Thanks very much to all who commented above!
Howdy! No clue what I’ve been up too lately it’s just been random blah and waiting for summer to end at this point. Hum I’ve excavated some stuff from my psyche and it’s been killer going over it! Do you consider yourself a vulnerable person? And if so how so? Not as in prey to be slaughtered or attacked but as I guess willingness to be harmed more emotionally less physical. I know myself and I’m definitely not I don’t value sympathy as much as I value things like influence and knowledge but that’s cause of all the chaos magic, mild psychopathy, high self esteem and critical awareness honestly. I’m
Just realizing the length of time that stretches between me and everything I want is solely extended or shortened simply by myself and like a snake that’s full id rather lay down. Anyways what’s up with you? Oh after you tell me that answer this if you had to write a song from one of your books which one and what genre would it be? TTYL xoxo brb.