Two-Lane Blacktop: Classic or Dud?

yeah it sounds bad. oh well.

christ, this movie is good.

weird how this is on TV all the time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLhKh0RQ5Eg

"five hundred.. foot pounds of torque. whatever that is."

i love how bored his hitchhiker looks.

Good Lord

You scared me for a second there... I thought that your good lord bump might have been that they were remaking the film with Justin Bieber or something like that.

make it three yards motherfucker and we'll have us an automobile race

― 鬼の手 (Edward III), Thursday, January 7, 2010 10:40 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RGnd4jOr64

My old band had a song about this movie. I won't link to it though bc it's one of our worst.

Was it just the words "Two Lane Blacktop" sung to the chorus of Baba O'Reilly?

Saw this in the mid-'90s (on a double-bill with Panic in Needle Park), another rep screening tonight. Some great lines, nice landscapes, Warren Oates, and the incredible ending. (I was interested in what kind of reaction that would get tonight: dead silent, with some laughter--nervous? embarrassed?--from one person. My favourite line, Warren Oates' line about getting grounded--which I waited all night for--got no reaction whatsoever.) I don't think I'll ever see it again, though, and from what I remember of Cockfighter, I think I liked that better.

cockfighter was a horrible movie compared to 2 lane!

why would you base your reaction to this movie off of some reaction that randos in 2015 would have!

You misunderstand--their reaction has nothing to do with my reaction, I'm just interested in that kind of thing. And, as I said, the two things I singled out--the ending and the one line--are two things I love about the movie.

I've only seen it the one time on an old VHS I bought in a liquidation sale, but I remember quite liking Cockfighter.

Cockfighter is pretty solid for exploitation level material, but Two Lane is a legit great film.

Suddenly very interested in Dennis Wilson (already true after Shakey and the Manson bio I read). I downloaded Pacific Ocean Blue yesterday, and I'd love to read this if it weren't so ridiculously expensive ($50 minimum online).

http://thejonstebbins.com/photos/rbbbook.jpg

One thing I wondered watching Blacktop the other night: did it have more language (specifically, the use of "fuck") than any studio-released film up to that point? I'd have to check Joe--I think that probably has more but milder profanity. I can't think of anything else offhand.

I have that book, it's good

not much in it about the movie tbh

The inflated-value of this book really doesn't make much sense to me in view of its comparatively recent publication date (2000) and the fact that it basically looks to be a standard-issue celebrity bio (which is not to say that it isn't good). Checked the Toronto library system, and the only copy they have doesn't circulate.

I can't remember how much I paid for it, it was several years ago. I'm sure the inflated value is due to the (assumed) small print run in proportion to the level of fanaticism (and Dennis fans can get p fanatical)

xp do an interlibrary loan to get it from outside your library system.

One thing I wondered watching Blacktop the other night: did it have more language (specifically, the use of "fuck") than any studio-released film up to that point? I'd have to check Joe--I think that probably has more but milder profanity. I can't think of anything else offhand.

Probably. "Shit" had only started popping up in the late '60s, and "Fuck" (and derivatives) only made it's studio debut the year before in M*A*S*H* and Myra Breckenridge. In the Rudy Wurlitzer commentary on the TLB Criterion, he mentions that James Taylor was the first White guy to say "Motherfucker" in a Hollywood film.

New noise: thanks, I didn't know libraries do that--will look into it.

One thing I like was how the profanity wasn't treated as a big deal. I only barely noticed it until it occurred to me after the film that this was unusual for '71.

Which contradicts my previous post--it was really after the film that I thought about it.

Fixing to see this in 35mm.

nice

this movie is such a trip

G.T.O.: I'm not into that!
hitchhiker: I just thought it might relax you while you drive.
G.T.O.: This is competition, man. I've got no time.

i love this movie so much. SO MUCH. hope you can see it on 35mm! (i've managed to see it that way three times, though spaced about 8 years apart.)

It looked fantastic! But the projectionist did a weird thing where they let the classical music they'd been playing prior to the screening continue quietly under the film. For the most part it wasn't noticeable, but it became very obvious under the final, mostly dialogue-less scenes.

wait, that's really weird and wrong. you should get yr money back!

The box office was already closed :-(

Speaking of the music in the film*, how did Hellman latch onto Terry Allen's "Truckload of Art" for the soundtrack a good number of years before it was available commercially?

*One of my favorite small details in this film full of them is how the source music is pretty much all songs about cars, travelling, hitchhiking etc.

Monte not too high on contemporary cinema

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/seeing-clearly-in-the-dark-a-profile-of-monte-hellman-in-present-day-los-angeles

decided to skip the Oscars and watch this instead. love it more now than i did before. what little dialogue there is remains so memorable. love the scene where JT tries to make random go-nowhere philosophical small talk with Laurie Bird about cicadas and she cuts him off and he wanders away and she says, "You bore me."

Warren Oates is incredible, he goes between hilarious and moving so quickly. and the scene w/Harry Dean Stanton's hitchhiker coming onto him is (for the era) pretty understated and not especially homophobic.

In the Rudy Wurlitzer commentary on the TLB Criterion, he mentions that James Taylor was the first White guy to say "Motherfucker" in a Hollywood film.

i gotta use this to stump someone in 20 questions one of these days.

Warren Oates is amazing in this.

(xpost) Fantastic piece of trivia. Take that, Lester Bangs.

I swear I'll like this movie one day.

Who was the first person ever to say that on film?

^^Somebody in Myra Breckenridge, iirc.

RIP Monte Hellman

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/78/4f/f2/784ff2394a3747d7c6049344dec16205.jpg

Still haven't seen either of his two 1966 films, Ride in the Whirlwind or The Shooting.

There is a quote about the original pitch of the movie in Warren Oates biography that I kind of wish existed in tandem because it’s wildly unlike the finished product.

By August, Oates would be playing a drifter again, with horsepower gunning in place of a horse's hooves. Two-Lane Blacktop had a meandering origin. Its original screenplay, by Will Corry, was the story of two men, one black and one white, who drive across the country with a young girl. Michael Laughlin, one of Hollywood's youngest producers at thirty-two, optioned the script for $100,000 for Cinema Center. Laughlin approached Monte Hellman with Corry's script, which the director told Brad Stevens was "The Gumball Rally." "Only it was a Disney version of that, if you can imagine such a thing. It was the most insipid, silly, sentimental, dumb movie you can imagine."

It was completely written by Wurlitzer.

Up until recently, China 9... was a free title on Prime (now a rental starting at $1.99). However, Cockfighter is up on there and still free to view (can't vouch for the quality; hopefully better than the grey market DVD I have somewhere).

I saw The Shooting late at night on TV, it's a severely underpopulated but well-made dusty existential Western. They were showing Ride in the Whirlwind right afterwards, but I'd heard it wasn't as good.

Now James Taylor has free rein for his movie comeback, Three Lane Blacktop.

xp agreed but I think the idea that the final script came from was Corry’s.

it’s too bad there’s not documentary footage from the shoot. I find it fascinating some of the seedlings that would become Joni Mitchell’s Blue grew during the shooting of this movie.

Oops, I meant REwritten. Yeah, it was Corry's concept, and Floyd Mutrux did some uncredited rewriting as well (iirc he was responsible for most of the technical car talk).

Aw. Monte Hellman was a very fun facebook follow, even when he bafflingly stanned for "Blame It On Rio".

TLB is not on the Criterion Channel currently (Ride in the Whirlwind is). Is there a legitimate stream out there?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MDNTdnw0fE

james taylor squirming is a delight to watch