The Screengrab : two-lane blacktop

Phil's Film Faves, Part One

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

A while back, we here at the Screengrab made our best stab at listing our picks for the greatest movies of all time. This is a classification that is distinctly different from naming our favorite movies, movies that, in many cases, happened to come into our lives at just the right moment, packing a style or a mindset that happened to hit us right in the soft spot, and that entered our bloodstream, affecting our judgements from that point on--though it not unheard of for favorite movies and greatest movies to overlap. A list of one's nominations for greatest movies tells one a lot about a person's ideas about art and history, about which breakthroughs matter to him in a way that, if they were not a part of what movies have come to be, he would care a lot less about them all. Our favorite movies tell us a lot about ourselves. Permit me to bore you with a little about me.

IT'S TOUGH TO BE A BIRD (1969)

DAD, CAN I BORROW THE CAR? (1970)

Both these short films were made by Ward Kimball, one of the "Nine Old Men" remembered as having been key to the development of the animation department at Walt Disney Studios. They were eventually shown on the TV anthology series The Wonderful World of Disney in the 1970s, which is were my barely formed retinas took them in. Bird is mostly animated, with some live action mixed in; Car is mostly live action, but with lots of animation effects. These range from quick gags to sequences that suggest the surreal, politically charged animation being done in Eastern Europe at the time, as well as Terry Gilliam's brand of animated cut-outs. Kimball, whose reputation is that of the wild man among the Disney old guard, had a simple, direct approach: pick a subject and garland it with as many visual gags as he could come up with. The wildness was all in how far afield his comic imagination could go, and how happy he seemed when he was slapping things together as fast as he could. I saw these films when I was so young that I subsequently forgot having seen them at all, but a few years ago I saw Bird again, and just a few months ago I found Car on a bootleg DVD, and as soon as I recognized what they were, I realized how much I'd loved them as an infant, so much so that I wanted more stuff like that to cram into my head. In a strange way, I think this desire planted the seeds for a lot of things I like, ranging from Svankmajer to Godard at his most discursive to Monty Python to Requiem for a Dream to the rambling monologues of This American Life. Discovering something that had a major impact on shaping your tastes when they were still at the developmental stages can weird you out a little.

JAWS (1975)

This was the first feature film that I loved unreasonably, and I think it's a good pick for a first love. The story is simple and uncomplicated and involving, and Spielberg brought it to life by lavishing upon it an amazing level of inventiveness at telling it visually, so much so that, in scenes such as the famous moment when the shark unexpectedly appears in the background of the shot while Roy Scheider has his head turned and is in the middle of spitting out a line in the other, he was able to give the viewer a jolt at the same time he got you laughing at his mastery of the conventions he was turning inside out and the audience expectations with which he was playing. It also has a subversive, satirical edge that connects it to the best of '70s pop culture: even someone who'd seen as few horror movies as I had by that time knew that it was unusual for the director to implicitly side with the hippie know-it-all scientist with the unsightly beard against the blustering macho man who thinks he's scored a goal in their ongoing war of personalities by glowering and flattening an empty beer can with his paw. (For years afterwards, I was trying to impress people by imitating Richard Dreyfuss's aplomb at squeezing a paper cup in response, not recognizing that it lost a lot of context.) Not long after I saw Jaws for the first of I hate to think how many times--not very long after at all, in fact, because I was too young to see it when it first came out but was allowed, after two years of screaming and crying over my cruel deprivation, to see it when it was re-released in 1977, thanks in no smart to my parents' very well-timed and much-enjoyed divorce, Star Wars came out. I used to try to reason with people who were raving about it at the playground. "Guys," I'd say in my reasoning-with-idiots voice, "there is no shark in this movie."

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) & YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

I know that she has many suitors, but for my part, let me just say, in all selfishness, that I will always be grateful for having seen Holy Grail at precisely the moment in my life when a movie that begins with the opening credits malfunctioning and ends with a police raid on the set would strike me as the greatest thing in the world. Frankenstein's appeal was less avant-garde. Let's just say that, for all of my childhood and well into my adolescence, I got most of my information about what was going on the movie theaters of our great land from the movie satires in Mad magazine, and it was a great thrill to see what was basically the greatest Mad magazine movie satire ever projected on a thirty-foot screen.

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) & CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974)

Elliot Gould's acting in these two Robert Altman's movies is the kind of thing that cults are meant for. It's as if he were living some kind of improvised coffeehouse monologue--too sweet to be by Lenny Bruce, but not requiring the kind of hepcat skeleton key that you might need to make sense of Lord Buckley. He's funny and seemingly detached but not above showing how much he really cares when he realizes that he's made a terrible mistake--a mistake that he invariably makes for the best of reasons, for refusing to sense the worst about a friend. And if he strikes a lot of people as flaky, that may be because he's his own man in a way that, even then, set him completely against the times, which more and more looks like the most genuinely heroic position for an American to take. I tried like hell to achieve this degree of loosness for a few years in my twenties, and I even thought I had it for a while, but in retrospect, I'm afraid that I was just unemployed.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)

My other big acting man-crush from that period is Al Pacino's performance here, and it couldn't be more different in its appeal, because I'd never seen anybody channel that much controlled energy before. The whole movie is a wonder of the New York actor's art, with people like John Cazale and Charles Durning and Sully Boyer and Chris Sarandon delicately matching their styles to Pacino's and providing the quiet contrast that makes his sustained liftoff possible. I once had a new roommate who had never seen this movie, and I was very eager to show it to her. I still remember the moment, about fifteen minutes into it, when she asked, "Umm...how much longer before they get out of the bank?" It's funny, those moments when you immediately know that it's not going to work.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Excuse the appearance of cross-promotion, but I've already written about this one.

Set Your DVR!: March 13 - 20, 2009

Phil Nugent — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

After a demoralizing post-New Year's stretch where Turner Classic Movies' late-Friday-night "TCM Underground" slot seemed to have been turned into a dumping ground for toothless crap fit only for drive-ins catering to viewers who are still using training wheels--The Amityville Horror!? TCM, please!--things have started hopping there again, and I don't mean Night of the Lepus. Last week saw the channel's premiere of Willie Dynamite, a 1974 blaxsploitation movie about a flamboyantly dressed pimp played by Gordon from Sesame Street, and this week, March 14 at 1:00 am central/2:00 am eastern, TCM unearths a Cold War artifact beyond Rorshach's more feverish nightmares: Shack Out on 101 (1956), one of the strangest and most seldom-seen movies of its day. A poverty row production, it's set in a greasy spoon restaurant, with Keenan Wynn as the proprietor, Terry Moore (once the love object of both Howard Hughes and Mighty Joe Young) as the waitress, and Frank Lovejoy as a nuclear scientist--"a big, big man" in Moore's words--who regularly stops by to get into different kinds of trouble with Moore and with Lee Marvin, who plays the cook, known as Slob, who's moonlighting as a Commie agent. If the intense mixture of steaminess and paranoia and the energy that the cast gives off trying to keep the claustrophobic picture alive aren't enough to hold your interest in a vise, you can kill time during the dead spots by trying to figure out whether it's more implausible that Marvin would have been approved by the KGB recruiting office or the Board of Health.

Then, a week later, March 20 at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern, TCM Underground has the greatest counterculture roap trip of them all, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). James Taylor yes-that-James-Taylor, with a hawkish profile and great greasy-looking dark locks, is the nameless driver who tools around the country with his mechanic sidekick (the late Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys), getting into races for money; the magnificent Warren Oates is the middle-aged fantasist who finds their very existence so objectionable that he goads them into a race to Washington, winner take the other's wheels. Neither Taylor (who in an interview included in a 2007 Criterion Collection DVD release says that he's never seen the picture) nor Wilson ever acted again, and if Oates had never acted in anything else, his work here would be enough to secure him a position in Character Actor Heaven. When it was first released, Esquire ran a picture of its leading lady, Laurie Bird, on its cover and proclaimed it the movie of the year, a boast that the magazine later sheepishly retracted after it flopped in theaters. It would have to settle for being one for the ages.

TCM has so many hours of programming to fill up that it can hardly restrict the weird stuff to the witching hour, so Friday morning, March 13, 8:45 am central/9:45 am eastern, the network premieres Zotz!, a 1962 comedy directed by the scary-movie gimmickmeister William Castle. Little seen (and, like Shack Out on 101), not available on DVD), the film has acquired a cult reputation over the years based largely on its far-out title and the change of pace it marked for Castle, who soon moved back to plastic skeletons. It stars Tom Poston, the thinking man's Jim Nabors, who plays a professor who, Wikipedia says, "obtains powers to cause pain or slow movement, and even kill. He immediately suffers the consequences of his discovery: Jones realizes that when he points at another living creature, it causes a great pain. This prevents any intimate encounters with a woman. It is a metaphor of the age of nuclear weapons." Sounds hilarious!

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland

Criterion’s Shaman of Design

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In addition to their many other virtues, Criterion Collection DVDs are justly praised for their lavish packaging. Not content to simply slap the old familiar one-sheets on their covers and stuff two-page booklets inside flimsy slipcases, Criterion often starts from scratch, creating all-new key art and design elements that lend fresh context to the treasures inside. One of the artists responsible for this shelf candy is Marc English, profiled this week in the Austin Chronicle. Once you learn that English is member of the Austin Film Society’s board of directors, it’s no surprise to learn that his first assignment for Criterion was their 2004 edition of Slacker, directed by Film Society founder Richard Linklater.

“From a corporate identity standpoint,” English explains, “the existing Slacker logo had a certain amount of equity, so I didn't want to mess with it too much. What I did was take the iconic image of Pap smear girl [Teresa Taylor], print it out on a laser printer, soak it in water to make it look beat, duct-tape it to a telephone pole, and then just hold a stencil of the title up in front of it and shoot the whole thing in camera. Which created an instant extension of the film's DIY edge.”

English is also responsible for the recent Criterion edition of Two-Lane Blacktop, which has met with director Monte Hellman’s enthusiastic approval. “His work just exemplifies Criterion's style in that it catches your eye immediately…I'm just really overwhelmed by Marc's work on the design. I think it's one of the most gorgeous packaging jobs I've ever seen. I just like everything about it.”

The artist’s latest effort will be on shelves next week, as Alex Cox’s much-maligned Walker finally makes its DVD debut. The Chronicle site features a number of cover designs English produced before arriving at the Cox-approved version below.

Two-Disc "Blacktop"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:10:00 GMT

Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop was last released to home video in an Anchor Bay edition that came out on VHS and DVD in 1999, and it's been out of print for the better part of the twenty-first century. This past week, the movie has been released in a handsome, "director-approved", two-disc edition from the Criterion Collection, and this news will divide the public into two groups: the ones who are turning cartwheels down Main Street and the ones asking, "What's that about Diane Lane's black top?" It was always thus. When the movie was about to be released in the summer of 1971, Esquire put its female lead, Laurie Bird, on the cover of an issue that included the text of the entire shooting script, along with the claim that this readymade cult item was destined to become "the movie of the year." Six months later, that claim was included in the magazine's annual "Dubious Achievements" feature. Hellman's scheduled follow-up project, to direct Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, from a script by novelist and Blacktop screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer, was quickly reassigned to Sam Peckinpah.

In retrospect, it's easy to see how the studio and the media might have gotten their hopes up that they had the next big thing on their hands. It's also easy to see why those hopes were so quickly dashed. Two-Lane Blacktop was produced by Universal as part of its short-lived "youth division", which was set up as a direct reaction to the success of such films as Easy Rider and the old studio bosses' dawning realization that they had no idea what the kids out there wanted to see. Whatever they wound up making in this case, it sure isn't Easy Rider, and it's harder now than it must have been in 1971 to see that as a failing. It is in fact a mesmerizing film, especially if you just stumble across it--as your humble correspondent did when, as a sleep-deprived adolescent, he first encountered it on TV one night around four AM--but it was probably always too abstract for mass popularity, and it doesn't flatter anyone on either side of the generation gap the way the big counterculture hits did. As Dennis Lim points out in his appeciation of the film the director Richard Linklater has described it as being both the last film the 1960s and the first film of the 1970s, and he has a point. It does feel as if it were taking place in the wake of something and that it marks the subsequent beginning of something, something uncertain and with wide-open possibilities that may or may not be acted upon. (By contrast Easy Rider looks and feels like something that Time once did a cover story on, back before you could read.)

Our heroes are the nameless driver (played by lanky-haired James Taylor--yeah, the singer), who pilots his '55 Chevy from town to town getting into drag races for money, his mechanic (Dennis Wilson, of the Beach Boys), and Laurie Bird (a non-actress with a period-specific look) as the girl they pick up hitching. This near-mute trio meet up with Warren Oates, an older man in a GTO who seems to regard their existence as some insufferable challenge to his very being, and they agree to race him to Washington, D.C., with the loser agreeing to forfeit his car to the winner. But this turns out to be not so much an actual plot as an excuse to keep the characters tearing across the back roads, taking in the scenery and interacting (or, in the case of Taylor and Wilson, not interacting) with a procession of folks who briefly drop into the movie and drop out again. (One of them is Harry Dean Stanton, who has a memorably squirmy encounter with Oates.)

Seen now, the movie has a special tension that develops between the characters and the landscape they pass through. The small roadside lunch counters and empty country roads have the attraction of an lost, unexplored, now unexplorable America, yet neither the driver nor his mechanic nor the motormouth "GTO" seem to be really interested in taking it in. They just want to keep in motion, perhaps as a distraction from the fact that they obviously aren't going anywhere. Taylor and Wilson don't seem able to focus on anything beyond their forelocks, and their antagonist is busy tailoring and re-tailoring his fantasy persona; he sees every meeting with a new person as a curtain going up, reeling off a different back story for everyone who steps into his car. Oates was in full bloom as a character star in 1971, and his funny, strangely beautiful performance here serves the movie well, even as it turns it on its head. This middle-aged fantasist, who might be the last of the Beats--the one who never got off the road long enough to write his book-- envies Taylor and Wilson for their youth and inscrutable cool and longs for their approval, but he takes the movie away from them as easily as breathing. The younger men are locked inside their affectless poses, cool in a way that looks comatose. Maybe someday, if they ever develop their imaginations, and they'll be so regretful about all the things they've passed through without noticing it that they'll be trying to fill in the blanks of their past by making up stories about it, like GTO. Maybe not; maybe the simulated immolation of the film print that ends the picture amounts to the burning out of whatever life is in them.

Now that it's once again available for home viewing, and just in time for Christmas, Two-Lane Blacktop is primed to excite and bewilder people again. Here's hoping that a lot of people whose families know that they like racing pictures and "Sweet Baby James" are going to find this beautifully packaged DVD under the tree next week, just waiting for the chance to perplex and bewilder them. The circle of life continues.