Two-Lane Blacktop: Classic or Dud?

Monte Hellman presented this in Tucson maybe a year or so ago and all I could think to ask him during the Q & A was if Criterion would ever release this, since it's pretty singular. I should have asked him how it was pitched instead. So James Taylor, Warren Oates and, I don't know, one of the Beach Boys are sort of racing and chilling across the country....

Does anyone know who does the version of "Hit the Road Jack" in this movie?

Jerry Lee Lewis

I should have asked him how it was pitched instead.

"it's easy rider, starring real rock stars" **

**naturally assumes that hollywood execs don't know the difference between dennis wilson / james taylor and "rock stars"

from what I understand the script created a real buzz, and esquire serialized it. then felt sheepish when it bombed in the theatres.

two-lane blacktop is like an american making a european film about america. it captures the rootless alientation of american life in this removed, critical way, yet it's still quintessentially american, nothing rings false.

Dave Kehr, NY Times:

The Criterion package includes a full disc of recent interviews conducted by Mr. Hellman with some of the film’s surviving personnel, including Mr. Taylor — who says he still hasn’t seen the picture.

ha!

well, neither have JT's fans.

God, I really do want this, but $29.99? That's a little steep, eh?

not for a newly released CC.

I guess. Me buying this is inevitable, but I think it'll be a post holiday gift to myself rather than an impulse purchase right now. I hope it's as great as I remember...

Speaking of which, Amazon has Vanishing Point on DVD for only $7.99!!

Now...make with White LIne Fever already!!!

http://originalalamo.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-honor-of-monte-hellman-and-two-lane.html

"performance by a driver" is supposed to be "performance by a drummer," it's always wrong when that list is quoted

http://www.citypages.com/2000-03-29/arts/austin-powers

Pretty damn cool.

This is the sort of thing you could find on Terrestrial TV, back in the day (which is where I saw it)

Now we have 50+ channels, of which 10 could conceivably play a movie on, and what do we get? Basic Instinct, repeated 3 times in a week, just in case you missed it...

just watched this, a wondrous movie. full marks.

warren oates 4eva

two-lane blacktop is like an american making a european film about america. it captures the rootless alientation of american life in this removed, critical way, yet it's still quintessentially american, nothing rings false.

― Edward III, Friday, November 30, 2007 3:58 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

this is almost exactly how a friend of mine described dead man, and i think it's true of both movies. (as opposed to, like, wim wenders making movies about america and filling them up with poetry where they need prose.)

anyway, just watched this. pretty great. i already wanna see it again.

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

I first read about two-lane blacktop in danny peary's cult movies back in the 80s and spent the next decade or so trying to see it. once I finally did, I reread peary's essay on the film, and noticed he mentioned a nonexistent skinnydipping scene. I just assumed he was confusing two-lane blacktop with easy rider. every once in a while I'd come across a reviewer who would mention the scene, and thought people were just repeating peary's error.

well apparently it exists...

http://www.danaddington.com/denny/mag.html

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/maggroup4a.jpg

so did this film get edited in the 90s?

Huh.

hellman looking like henry spencer, love it

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/maggroup1.jpg

I'm going to watch this this weekend. My brother got me the Criterion a couple of years ago, and I've only managed to watch it once since then.

the skinnydipping scene is in the script (which is worth reading)

i have only heard of this bc of the mary heilmann painting named after it

http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_3_467172_mary-heilmann.jpg

so wait I don't get it - scenes were cut from the DVD release? That seems really strange

anyone got the criterion release? these scenes are into it?

might be lost!

is this movie kinda like badlands y/n?

in some ways

yeah, but i found it much more pleasant

About as much like Badlands as Sunn O))) is like Whitesnake.

I'm going to watch this this weekend. My brother got me the Criterion a couple of years ago, and I've only managed to watch it once since then.

― Clerk all KNOWIN (B.L.A.M.), Friday, January 8, 2010 5:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah dogg

Just got done revisiting this. Way more awesome than I remember. Maybe the ultimate car porn movie as well. I geeked out during the first scene at the dragstrip, when they're parking the 55 in a wide shot and you can see a AMC Hurst Sc/Rambler coming into the lot in the back.

Now looking at the script and came across this pearl cut from the scene when Taylor picks up Laurie Bird after she ran off while they were waiting at the garage:

GIRL: I like the other car. I like the way the seats feel and the tape deck. I could get to like the backseat.
DRIVER: It's just another Goat.
GIRL: What do you mean, Goat?
DRIVER: GTO. They call it a Judge, too.
GIRL: I like Judge. I don't get along with Capricorns.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/PSB-5-38.jpg

http://bombsite.com/images/attachments/0008/1197/MaryHeilmanat303Gallery_body.jpg

I'd never even heard of this until very recently.

Laurie Bird went out with Art Garfunkel.

?!

And committed suicide in his apartment, age 25. She was only in 3 movies.

weird I was just posting about that elsewheres

laurie bird had such a weird life, made a handful of films (she was in annie hall!), was art garfunkel's lover, committed suicide. garfunkel wrote a book of poetry about it.

― it made me wish batman had written an article on mfas (Edward III), Friday, February 18, 2011 1:43 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

In August 1981, Art released his fifth solo album Scissors Cut (U.S. #113, U.K. #51). This album included the Gallagher & Lyle hit "A Heart in New York" (U.S. #61). The U.K. version contains the track "The Romance" rather than "Bright Eyes." The album was co-produced by Roy Halee, who also co-produced the Simon & Garfunkel albums, including Bridge over Troubled Water. Paul Simon makes a brief appearance on "In Cars" performing background vocals. Near the end of the song, Art sings, rather mystically, lines from "Girl From The North Country" ("Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine") The album is dedicated to Laurie Bird and includes a partial photograph of Ms. Bird on the rear cover.

Art was devastated by Ms. Bird's death in Art's New York apartment while he was in Europe filming Bad Timing - A Sensual Obsession. Art was quoted at the time, "Laurie was the greatest thing I ever knew in my life, now I've lost it."[1] In 1988, he added, "I took her death terribly and remained moody over it through much of the 80's." Probably why he did not release another solo album until 1988's Lefty (excluding 1986's The Animals' Christmas with Amy Grant).

http://www.d2.dion.ne.jp/~takanomo/LOVELOG_IMG/esquire_april_1971_01.jpg

Would love a poster of this cover.

Would love to have the magazine. Old Esquires are the best.

More Bird/G-funk trivia: Laurie took the cover photo for the Watermark lp, now resting in a dollar bin near you.

Yeah,the old Esquires are the shit. Expensive tho, I found listing for that ish online for about 45 bucks.

I couldn't find one on Ebay. Put in bids on a few lots from the early '50s, though.

It's funny, on ebay you can find upteen copies of the March and May '71 Esquires, but never the April.

^^Funny that, I scored a fairly expensive copy of the mag last week (arrived in the mail Tuesday), and now there's another up on ebay.

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

Great clip, thanks

JT does not seem chill

Do people like his last film. Road to Nowhere?

Expiring soon from MUBI USA. Seems intriguing.

Forgiveness is the killer of snakes, my friend.

my

They’re all planets, they only reflect light.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52025/sonnet-xxv

I haven't seen Road To Nowhere, but casting both Dominique Swain and Shannyn Sossamon was some serious 'keeping the millennium--era hawt dream alive' move for 2010.

quick callback to the discussion above - I think this is the sweater JT mentions which Joni knitted for him, with the two-lane blacktop across the middle:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/10/25/63/10256381b7a9e9c5a35a13fb246b19f3.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/GZ7UYFG.jpg
(bit of a Nirvana Unplugged vibe for me)

Watched The Shooting the other day. Not quite as radical as Two Lane tho it does end in a similar way.

I haven't seen Road To Nowhere, but casting both Dominique Swain and Shannyn Sossamon was some serious 'keeping the millennium--era hawt dream alive' move for 2010.

(bit of a Nirvana Unplugged vibe for me)

Son of Kurdt and Krist.

xp to self
Guess he had to end it somehow. Anyway really enjoyed watching this, thinking about it and reading about it.