Beverly Walker, Sight & Sound, Winter 1970/71
As the director-as-superstar cult has tightened its grip on American cineastes, and the search is on for new heroes, the name Monte Hellman is beginning to pop up increasingly frequently in film magazines and periodicals.
Even though most readers of these publications have never seen a film by Hellman, they are embracing the mystique of the director and his two existentialist Westerns that no American distributor will buy. While making his first film in five years, Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman was the subject of major pieces in both Los Angeles newspapers, as well as the Sunday New York Times, the ultimate recognition in American journalism. The L. A. Times' bold headline, 'Monte Hellman and Hollywood's Best Kept Secret' startled that city's citizens, who had never heard of the man and certainly didn't think anything in their town could be a secret. The town was buzzing for days after the appearance of the article, in which Kevin Thomas called Hellman 'one of the most interesting directing talents to emerge in Hollywood in the past decade.'
Hellman is the latest of several American film-makers to have his initial reputation in France. His case is more unusual, however. in that the films upon which the current interest is based, The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind, have never been released theatrically in their own country, although since they first attracted attention when shown out of competition at Cannes in 1966 one or the other of them has been screened at almost every international festival extant. (Most recently: Edinburgh in 1970)
The circumstances in which the films were made are as remarkable as the films themselves. Backed by Roger Corman and produced by Hellman and Jack Nicholson, the two films were made back-to-back in Utah in the summer of 1965. Costing 75,000 dollars apiece, they were made in three weeks each with a non-union crew of ten plus a couple of local wranglers to take care of the horses. The equipment consisted of two cameras, two reflectors, one beat-up station-wagon and a small utility truck. Neither of the trucks could go off the road, so all the equipment had to be carried to the locations by foot or on horseback. To make matters worse, the crust on the desert surface broke easily, making it necessary to change the set-up slightly after each take. The actors, friends of Hellman and Nicholson, had joined the project in a spirit of adventure which soon began to wear thin. The days were long and hot; nobody got much money. The Shooting was made first and nobody could quite understand the bizarre script. They had been coaxed to Utah to make a quick, low-budget Western, but this one wasn't quite like anything they'd seen before. Hellman and his art director parted company after the first film. He did not see one foot of film during shooting, creating a profound sense of unease m his cameraman, Gregory Sandor.
Hellman spent six months editing the films and then showed them to Roger Corman. It is not known what Corman thought of their artistic merits, but he surely must have realised what an odd pair he had on his hands. American International declined to put up the amount of money Corman was asking (reputedly 150,000 dollars) so the festival route was decided upon as a means of interesting other distributors.
After Nicholson took the films to Cannes in 1966, the French rights were sold to a distributor who subsequently went bankrupt. The dupe negatives as well as the legal rights in France were tied up for nearly a year before the films finally opened there to critical acclaim. The Walter Reade organisation finally bought them for America and sold them direct to television. There has been conjecture as to why they were never released theatrically, but the fact is that the sale came through the company's West Coast television division, so it appears they never seriously intended to release them in Since that time, Hellman and a group of investors have bought back the 35mm. rights and are trying to negotiate a release.
The films are indeed remarkable, not only for production values which in view of how they were made make Hellman seem something of a wizard, but for an almost obsessive personal vision unusual in any American film and particularly a Western. Not really 'likeable', the films are startling and discomforting in their nihilism and oddly detached objectivity. Terse and pared to the bone, they offer none of the orthodox Western entertainment values. Action is minimal, rugged individualism is out, and nobody wins.
The Shooting was written by Adrien Joyce (who has since come to prominence with Five Easy Pieces) and features Warren Oates, Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins and the then unknown Jack Nicholson. Extremely complicated and quirky in its story development, it tens of a man, Gashade (Oates), who returns home to find a murder which involves his twin brother, Coigne -- now missing. Suddenly a woman appears on foot, out of nowhere, and hires Gashade to escort her to a distant town for an unknown purpose. Gashade reluctantly agrees ('I've got my reasons') but insists his simpleminded side-kick, Coley, accompany him. The trio set out in hostile, awkward silence, and are soon joined by Billy Spear (Nicholson), evidently the woman's hired gun and possibly her lover. In one of the film's most chilling moments, a perfectly realised visual evocation of its theme, the three men, on their horses, chase each other around and around in a circle until Spear kills Coley. In the film's final minutes, Gashade crushes Spear's gunhand in a brutal fight and goes after the woman, who has abandoned her horse and is following a trail of footprints up a hill. We briefly glimpse a figure at the top and realise that it is Coigne, Gashade's twin. Gunshots follow in which Coigne attempts to kill the woman -- or possibly his brother -- and the woman kills Coigne. The final image is of Billy Spear, dazed, his hand dangling uselessly by his side, walking towards the hill under the broiling sun. None of the questions are ever answered; and, finally, are irrelevant.
Written by jack Nicholson and starring himself, Cameron Mitchell and Millie Perkins, Ride the Whirlwind is a simpler film than The Shooting although thematically identical. Here we have a pair of ordinary cowboys (Nicholson and Mitchell) who inadvertently become implicated in a murder they did not commit, flee to avoid a vigilante hanging party, and eventually murder an innocent man to avoid being caught. One of them dies along the way and the other is seen riding off in a cloud of dust to nowhere.
The spare screenplay was based upon Nicholson's extensive research into diaries and records of the period, a bleak time when justice rested upon the presumptions of the largest number of people. The stylised, archaic dialogue, although sometimes a bit self-consciously spoken, adds to the feeling of authenticity which spreads through the film.
In each of the films, an immediate atmosphere of terror is stated with great economy. A freshly-dug grave is a premonition of coming violence. A quick shot of the moving wheels of a stagecoach over a rocky road brings us closer to a yet unknown confrontation. A tired horse's whinny reminds us that it, too, is made of flesh and blood. The lunar-like landscape, reminiscent of Antonioni but infinitely tougher, leaves a man exposed and vulnerable. Again and again, Hellman cuts to extreme close-ups, to reveal a glance, a sigh, weariness. We never learn more about the people than what we see -- but no matter. Hellman brings us right into their lives at that point in time and we are compelled to care about them.
Born in New York and raised in California, Heliman graduated from Stanford University in speech and drama and went on to do graduate work in cinema at UCLA. For the first several years after school he worked in theatre, directing the first West Coast production of Waiting for Godot. Roger Corman was impressed by the production and offered Hellman the chance to direct a movie. His first film, then, was Beast from Haunted Cave, made in 1959 and released by Corman's company, Film Group.
He spent the next couple of years doing second unit work for Corman, expanding films for television and directing almost half of The Terror. In 1963, after working as an assistant editor at Universal, he went to the Philippines to make two films for the producer Robert Lippert, Back Door to Hell, starring Jimmy Rodgers, and Flight to Fury, with Jack Nicholson, Dewey Martin and Faye Spain. Then came the Westerns, in 1965.
A number of abortive projects followed, and only now, five years later, has Hellman had the chance to direct again. He was brought to Two-Lane Blacktop by producer Michael S. Laughlin (The Whisperers, Joanna and the unreleased Christian Licorice Store). Cinema Center Films was to finance the film, part of a two-picture deal with Laughlin. The original story by Will Corry, about two men, one black and one white, who drive across country followed by a young girl, seemed to Hellman 'interesting but not fully realised'; a new script was written in four weeks by Rudolph Wurlitzer, a young Eastern intellectual best known for a strange book called Nog which enjoyed a considerable underground reputation.
In February 1970 Hellman took to the road to pick his locations and was a few weeks away from the start of shooting when Cinema Center abruptly cancelled the project. Major studios which Hellman approached were all impressed by the script but had their own ideas about casting and how to make it. Finally it was Ned Tanen, a young executive at Universal supervising a new slate of pictures for the studio (Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, Milos Forman's S.P.F.C. and Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife) who gave Hellman 850,000 dollars to make the picture his way. As with all Tanen's projects, the director has right to final cut.
Shooting began on August 13th in Los Angeles and continued for six weeks as the crew of thirty moved in a gypsy-like caravan through the southwest towards Memphis, Tennessee. Two-Lane Blacktop is now the story of four displaced people, three men and a girl, speeding across the United States in a superstock '55 Chevrolet and an orange Pontiac G.T.O. It stars singer-composer James Taylor, Warren Oates, Dennis Wilson (drummer with the Beach Boys) and newcomer Laurie Bird. The cameraman was Gregory Sandor, who also shot the Westerns.
This interview with Hellman was done a few days after he completed shooting.
Were you a frequent moviegoer as a child?
I guess I went to my first movie at the age of four. They became part of my fantasy world ... I was more seriously interested in the theatre. I started acting in junior high school and went to Stanford on an NBC radio scholarship. 1 began to direct radio plays in my freshman year -- things like War of the Worlds -- and then to direct stage plays. I wanted to go into radio, but nobody was interested. They advised me to go out and direct theatre in some small town, and I had an offer from a stock company in northern California and went there.
What prompted you to go to the UCLA cinema school right after Stanford?
I'd always been interested in photography. I had built my own enlarger when I was about fourteen and I was always shooting pictures and printing them myself. I started shooting portraits and making money at it while I was still in high school. But I eventually got into films by accident. After three seasons of stock our company folded, and I came back to Hollywood and had to find work to support a new wife. I took a job cleaning out the film vaults at ABC for 55 dollars a week. It was a union job and that's how I got into the film editors union. I stayed at ABC for a few months and worked in film shipping and eventually began cutting commercials into shows.
Did you learn cutting at UCLA ?
I guess so, but it didn't matter. They can teach you in an hour. After ABC, I went to work on The Medic, a television show, as an apprentice editor. Somebody left and I was temporarily promoted to assistant editor. I stayed there awhile and then went to work at Ziv Studios, where I was coding dailies and all sorts of tedious things. I finally got fed up and left to start a theatre.
What about your first film, BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE?
Fools plunge in ... I just did it, and I probably made more mistakes than the average person who makes a first film. I didn't really have any help and I wouldn't take any help. I had to do it on my own. Once I made my first film I considered myself a film-maker. I lost all interest in the theatre and never went back. After Beast from Haunted Cave opened I got an agent and tried to find directing assignments, but nobody was interested until I got the offer from Robert Lippert to make two pictures.
Was FLIGHT TO FURY the beginning of your association with Jack Nicholson?
Before that, Jack and I had written a script called Epitaph: a semi-autobiographical thing about life on the fringes of Hollywood, a young actor knocking about, with a story about a couple of days in which a guy tries to raise money to get his girl an abortion. It would have been the first of the abortion movies ... that was still a taboo subject. Roger (Corman) had offered to back it, but we went to the Philippines first.
How did the Westerns come about?
I was finishing cutting on Flight to Fury, and we went to Roger one more time for money for Epitaph. He was afraid it was too downbeat: at that time there was a prejudice that you could make that kind of movie in Europe but not in America. But he said that if we wanted to make something commercial he would finance that. So we said 'What's commercial,' and he said, 'Well, a Western is commercial. My first movie was a Western and I still believe in Westerns.' So we said 'Okay'. Then he said, 'Well, if you're going to make one Western, you might as well make two.'
So we rented an office and decided that Jack would write one and we would get someone else to write another. Sevend friends submitted ideas. Adrien Joyce submitted a script that wasn't producable but was very interesting, and I had faith in her talent so we decided to go with her. She did some research and came up with a story by Jack London. It was about a couple of guys who were looking at a painting in a bar -- a moment of crisis in which somebody is shot -- and they were talking about how interesting it is to observe a scene like that and not know anything about what happened before or after ... and how much that's like life. One of the men says that something like that once happened to him. He was hired by a woman to take her across the snows and he never knew where they were going, or why, and finally at the end of several weeks they saw a man ahead of them in a sled. She told him to go faster. When they got close to the man she pulled out a gun and started to shoot at him. And killed him. Then she paid the driver off and he never saw her again.
And that was the start of THE SHOOTING. How involved were you in the development of both scripts?
I was with Jack every day but less involved with Adrien. Jack and I just sat in our office and he wrote the script. Once we had agreed on the basic structure of Adrien's story, she simply began writing, without really knowing who the characters would be or how it would develop. She would show me about 15 pages at a time and I would comment: she just wanted to know if she was going in the right direction. Jack also writes in an evolutionary sort of way, and I find that an exciting way to work. Jack is a very black person, very wry and funny but very cynical, and I'm sure that appeals to me.
How conscious were you when making the Westerns that they would be somewhat bizarre ?
I don't think we really thought anybody would ever see the films. We thought they would be a couple more Roger Corman movies that would play on the second half of a double bill somewhere. So any thoughts about doing something different were for our own personal satisfaction. We never thought that anybody would ever notice.
You have said that you set out to debunk certain myths ...
We hated the predictability of certain situations. For example, the scene where Jack takes Millie out to the barn (in Whirlwind). That's an obligatory scene-you expect some kind of sexual thing. Ours was totally non-sexual.
What have you been doing since the Westerns ?
I've done a lot of editing; I edited The Wild Angels and I worked as a dialogue director on The St. Valentine's Day Massacre with Roger. I was hired by Roger and AIP to direct Explosion, a film about a black sherrif in the South, but they became afraid of the subject matter and decided not to do it. And I was hired to do the move of MacBird
I find that a very strange choice on your part.
Well, I didn't go headlong into it, but I found a way to do it that I thought would be interesting. I went to San Francisco to write the screenplay with Barbara Garson. The studio didn't like our screenplay -- they wanted Bob Altman to do it. But Barbara wouldn't do it without me. The project had to be discarded when Bobby Kennedy was assinated.
What interested you in the original script for TWO-LANE BLACKTOP? And what did you think was missing?
The fact is that I've never been presented with a script I liked. Here I liked the idea of two guys travelling across the country in a '55 Chevy challenging guys to race. The rest of it was banal.
What intrigued you about Wurlitzer's writing?
I liked his sense of humour. He was extremely funny. I think all my scripts are funny.
Do you think your films are funny?
Yes, The Shooting set out to be a comedy... and I think it is.
Why did you decide not to let the actors read the script, and to give them dialogue pages only an the day of shooting? Warren Oates told me that you didn't work this way on the Westerns.
When my wife, Jackie, and I were working on Explosion, we began work with the actors that way. And they contributed a lot to the script. I wanted to leave myself open to that possibility here. I work with an actor or a writer the same way, which is really anonymously: I act as a catalyst, make them do all the work, but try to give them a lot of confidence so that they will feel free to say or do anything. On this film, I figured that if they knew what the written script was, the actors wouldn't be able to improvise.
But in fact almost no improvising took place.
That's right. It turned out that way.
The actors complained bitterly about not being allowed to read the script. Were you aware of this?
I knew fairly soon that they were uncomfortable. I wouldn't work that way again with someone like James (Taylor). He's very intellectual. so nothing would be lost in letting him read the script.
Another point of contention was that you insisted on going cross country when so much of the action takes place inside the two cars.
I thought it would be the only way of convincing the audience that we actually travelled across the country. That we would never get the feeling of covering that ground unless we actually did it. Beyond that, I knew it would affect the actors -- and it did, obviously. It affected everybody.
To what extent do you work as an editor while shooting?
I shoot as an editor only to the extent that I am limited by money and time. I say, well, I've got this part of the scene in this take, and this part in this one and so on. I may never get the performance on the set but I know I can build it in the cutting-room. If I were a more perfect director, I wouldn't have as much fun in the cutting-room.
TWO-LANE BLACKTOP is going to be like the Westerns in the sense that it contains one man's view of things, and that is your view. How do you manage this?
I couldn't define what view of life I impose, but I do know, after the fact, that I have somehow managed to get several different writers to do scripts with a similar point of view. I don't know how conscious my objective ever is, but I think I have a feeling for the fulfilment aspects of films and what an audience should ideally get from a movie. For me, one of the most perfect movie stories is The Graduate. If I can get that perfect an empathetic situation into a film, then I'm happy. I know I have something basic that can't help but psychologically satisfy an audience. As well as myself.
What were you after in this film ?
I was interested in what has happened to love, for one thing. What contemporary attitudes towards love are as opposed to traditional attitudes, and how much romance is left in a non-romantic world ... I don't know how much is left in the world, but there's a lot left in our movie. We're in a world where love has been rejected, but people still have a nostalgia for it, and I think that's what we deal with in this film.
Are you a romantic?
I'm romantic in the sense that Camus was romantic. I ... feel a nostalgia for what cannot be.
Would you describe BLACKTOP as a love story? Who loves whom?
I always felt it was a love story. The girl loves the driver; the mechanic loves the girl and the driver, and he can't decide between them and can't accept his love for either. And the driver wants to love the girl, but can't.
I've always felt there was a profound absence of love in BLACKTOP ...
Well, I've expressed these things to Rudy, but I don't know if he wrote exactly that story ... Maybe audiences will see it differently, too. But I've always seen the driver as the same sort of character that Aznavour plays in Tirez sur le Pianiste. He appeals to me too. It's a guy who is so involved with his own existential dilemma, just dealing with himself as a person, that he throws away the thing he wants most, which is love. He can't deal with those needs in time, and that becomes his tragedy.
You don't think the cars, the roads, and the quintessential Americanness of the characters are significant ?
That's just a cultural appendage ... side effects. A way to augment the reality.
You haven't mentioned one of the two major characters, G. T. 0. (played by Warren Oates). What function does he serve ?
G.T.O. is time ... God, that sounds pretentious. Look, I'm evolving, I'm getting older. My films have to reflect this. G.T.O.'s function is as a reference to the process of time. A reminder of mortality. The idea of time is a double-edged element. The illusion and delusion of time ... Cars, roads, speed are one thing. G.T.O. sings 'Time Is On My Side'. Well, it's not. And the love thing is involved with him too. The temporal nature of love, or at least of sexual love. He has been through it. He's part of the generation gap.
There is a confusion in people's minds about what the essential elements of a movie are. We create 'genres' -- the road picture, the melodrama, the Western ... I don't think those are good categories. Certain movies are made over and over again, each through a different director's vision. The prototypes for Blacktop are Minnelli's The Clock, Lelouch's Un Homme et une Femme, Nichols' The Graduate, Wilder's The Apartment. They are all the same story, told against a different background.
A recurring pattern in your films is the use of games. Is this a deliberate device ?
It wasn't a conscious thing to begin with. Well, Jack and I talked about it in Flight to Fury. But in Beast from Haunted Cave there's a slot machine and there is a game of solitaire. In The Shooting there's the game of getting the buckshot into a hole. And in Blacktop we have the pin-ball machine and pool. I wanted those.
Those games are kind of heavy, aren't they ?
Well, yes, I guess so ... I love the oriental gambling game in Flight to Fury with cards -weird cards with strange pictures on them. A dealer with long, polished fingernails peels off one card at a time. As a little bit of the picture is revealed, people can begin to tell whether they've won or lost. It's really exciting.
Do those games sum up your view of things ? The pointlessness of life.
I don't know ... 1 think it's best expressed in Flight to Fury, when Jack is asked what is this preoccupation with games, and he says, I just like to play.
Maybe, but it seems to me you have a very black point of view. You present a world where there is no justice, or mercy or hope, and where a man's fate is completely dependent upon accidental things. Has anything in your own life contributed to this feeling?
I don't think that the kind of feelings I have come from personal fortunes or misfortunes: they really come from how you are affected by the world. It's there for everyone to see, and some people are more sensitive to certain aspects of it than other aspects.
What directors or films do you especially like? Who has influenced you?
At the time I began making films, the directors who influenced me most were John Huston and Carol Reed. If I had to list what I thought were the greatest films I'd ever seen, I'd say 8½ and Persona. But I dont think Fellini or Bergman influenced me: the influences took place earlier. As far as my taste in subject matter goes, my favourite film of all time is Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands. I'm really attracted to the black side of Huston and Reed: I guess every film I've made has been either The Maltese Falcon or Outcast of the Islands.
Posted by Nic Dafis at Ebrill 9, 2003 06:00 yh