Two-Lane Blacktop

The origin of Two-Lane Blacktop began with Will Corry, a character actor who composed the original screenplay after taking a road trip in 1968. Corry's script involved a road race between two teenage drivers, one white and the other black, and a young girl who follows the race for love. Producer Michael S. Laughlin paid $100,000 for the rights to Corry's screenplay. When Monte Hellman was brought on as the film's director, he was dissatisfied with Corry's script and hired novelist Rudy Wurlitzer to do a rewrite. Before he committed to doing the rewrite, Wurlitzer tried to pass the job onto his friend Terrence Malick, later the celebrated writer-director of Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Wurlitzer wrote Two-Lane Blacktop while holed up in a Los Angeles motel room with a stack of car magazines. Floyd Mutrux contributed to the Two-Lane Blacktop screenplay but was denied credit by Writers Guild of America arbitration because he did not hold a union card. Shopped by Michael Laughlin and Monte Hellman, Two-Lane Blacktop was turned down by Columbia, Warner Brothers and MGM before Universal gave the project a go with a budget of $900,000. Two-Lane Blacktop was eventually made for $875,000. During preproduction, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jon Voight, and Michael Sarrazin were all considered for the part of The Driver. Bruce Dern was briefly considered for the role of GTO. Monte Hellman got the idea to cast James Taylor as The Driver after seeing the singer-songwriter on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. Principal photography on Two-Lane Blacktop began on August 13, 1970. Although Jack Deerson is credited as cinematographer, the real DP was Gregory Sandor, who received no onscreen credit for union purposes. Two-Lane Blacktop was shot in sequence with a crew of 34 traveling along with the actors cross country from Los Angeles to Tennessee with location stops in Needles, California; Flagstaff, Arizona; Santa Fe and Tucumcari, New Mexico; Boswell, Oklahoma; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Memphis, Tennessee. According to Beverly Walker, the film's publicist, "Hellman frequently scheduled filming between sunset and dawn in motel interiors, diners, and gas stations. Daylight sequences were sometimes shot on lonely country roads or against the backgrounds of sleepy hamlets. By the time the company rolled back into Marysville, TN at the foot of the Smokey Mountains for the final day of shooting, Hellman had achieved his purpose of affecting every member of the cast and crew with the feeling of having moved across a vast expanse of the United States." The flat, enervated performances contributed by James Taylor, Dennis Wilson and Laurie Bird were produced by repeated takes that flattened their delivery. The actors were allowed to see only a few pages of the shooting script at a time. In an interview at the time with The Los Angeles Times, Taylor revealed his unhappiness with his role, stating, "I'm not an actor. I'll never do this again. If I ever did another film I'd have to be the director and writer, I'd have to be in control." When James Taylor threatened to quit the production, Hellman allowed him to read the entire script. In defense of Hellman's method, Oates revealed in an interview that "The script is a road map for the actor. See, Monte didn't want us to know what the end was. I didn't care how it ended! I just wanted to know what I was supposed to be doing...he thought he'd get something fresh and brand new from the kids that way. I'm not talking out of turn when I say Jimmy Taylor had terrible struggles relinquishing control to Monte. And Laurie Bird was new, too, and defending herself. Monte would say, 'Talk low' and they just didn't want to do it." Warren Oates was particularly nervous about his first scene in Two-Lane Blacktop where he picks up a hitchhiker (Bill Keller) from Texas, stating in Susan Compo's biography Warren Oates: A Wild Life: "That was a gruesome day. First of all I had to learn a lot of nomenclature to understand about the automobile that I'm not familiar with, even though I served time in the US Marine Corps as an aviation mechanic. I'd closed out that aspect of my life and I didn't understand it at all so I had to learn that dialog first and it was brutal. I think that day we began to understand something...We determined that GTO was not lying. I believe everything I say and I carry it through each character I meet. That's how I worked the first day and that's how I got into it really." Commenting on his character GTO, Oates also said, he "represents a comic and tragic figure; you have to walk a very tight line to achieve this. So if I got a little large in one area, Monte pulled me back. If I went the other way, Monte pulled me back. Sometimes Monte thought I was too funny and sometimes I thought he held me back. Maybe I'd pout a little, he'd clear his throat and we'd get it done. Monte and I knew each other." Three '55 Chevys were used throughout Two-Lane Blacktop and two of them were later repurposed for American Graffiti (1973). The scene of The Girl begging for spare change was shot without the bystanders knowing they were being filmed. Hellman revealed in Susan Compo's Oates biography that "My favorite scene is [the] one in which Oates gets soaked in the rain at the gas station. He's waiting by the Coke machine...and he has a lot of time there where, you know, his thoughts are racing but...he's not acting out any particular action. And it's a ballet. I mean he's really doing everything while he's doing nothing. He was always doing something. He was never at rest." The original cut of Two-Lane Blacktop was three and a half hours long. Universal studio head Lew Wasserman hated Two-Lane Blacktop so much that he refused to promote the film, dooming it to a quick death at the box office. The roar of the '55 Chevy used in the film was later dubbed into Smokey and the Bandit (1977) to stand in for the engine sound of the Trans-Am driven by Burt Reynolds. Two-Lane Blacktop's delayed debut on VHS tape in 1999 was largely due to litigation over music rights. by Richard Harland Smith Sources: Warren Oates: A Wild Life by Susan Compo (University of Kentucky Press) Monte Hellman: His Life and Films by Brad Stevens Two-Lane Blacktop essay by Pat Padua, National Film Registry Interview with Monte Hellman by Nicholas Pasquariello, Jump Cut No 10-11, 1976 Monte Hellman interview, Two-Lane Blacktop DVD, The Criterion Collection, 2008 Rudy Wurlitzer interview by Jay Babcock, Arthur Magazine, May 2008

Monte Hellman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 12, 1932, and moved to California with his family when he was five years old. As a child, his shyness prompted Hellman's parents to pay for drama lessons. Hellman directed his first stage play at the age of ten, while attending a YMCA summer camp. Hellman studied drama as an undergraduate at Stanford University and film as a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles. An early job cleaning the film vaults at ABC got Hellman work as an apprentice film editor, cutting commercials into 16mm film prints. Hellman also worked as an assistant editor on the Richard Boone TV series Medic. Hellman briefly studied acting, along with up-and-coming actors Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton and Shirley Knight. Their teacher was Martin Landau. Hellman went from directing stage plays to films when the theatre space he worked out of was slated for demolition. One of the theater's investors was Roger Corman, who hired him to direct Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), his first film. Hellman shot additional scenes for various Roger Corman films that were added to films that had been sold to television. Hellman was, along with Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Nicholson, one of several uncredited directors who worked on Corman's piecemeal classic The Terror (1963). Hellman edited the Roger Corman biker film The Wild Angels (1966), starring a pre-Easy Rider (1969) Peter Fonda. Hellman was at work on an adaptation of the political play MacBird when presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and the project was canceled. For a short time, Hellman belonged to a film director's company with B. L. Norton, Vernon Zimmerman and a young Steven Spielberg. Returning from Italy, where he had been involved in a stillborn bid to adapt Patricia Highsmith's novel The Two Faces of January as a feature film, Hellman's agent Mike Medavoy got him a meeting with the producers of Two-Lane Blacktop. Two-Lane Blacktop screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer is a descendent of the creator of the Wurlitzer jukebox. Warren Oates had first been seen by Monte Hellman while acting in a Los Angeles production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The two had worked together previously on the western The Shooting (1967). James Taylor's single "Fire and Rain" became a hit while he was working on Two-Lane Blacktop. Dennis Wilson was the last member of The Beach Boys to learn to play an instrument but the only one who could actually surf. Laurie Bird was a 17-year-old model at the time she was cast as The Girl in Two-Lane Blacktop. Bird quit acting after appearing in a supporting role in Hellman's Cockfighter (1974) and a bit in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977). As a photographer, Bird took the picture of Art Garfunkle used on his 1978 Watermark Album. Laurie Bird committed suicide in June 1979. She was 25 years old. Warren Oates died of a heart attack in April 1982. A few days before Christmas 1983, Dennis Wilson checked himself into a Santa Monica rehab center to deal with his alcoholism and drug use. On Christmas Day he left the center abruptly. While boating with friends on December 28th, he drowned. His ashes were spread at sea. After all these years, James Taylor still refuses to see Two-Lane Blacktop which was a terrible experience for him. In a column in TV Guide, he once commented on his television viewing, saying "I only watch about an hour a day, which may have something to do with the fact that I made a movie in 1971 [sic] that went very badly. Occasionally it [Two-Lane Blacktop] turns up on TV at 3 a.m. and I think the fear of seeing it may be why I'm so cautious of watching TV today." by Richard Harland Smith Sources: Monte Hellman interview by Wheeler Dixon, Film Talk: Directors at Work Monte Hellman interview by Keith Phipps, The AV Club, 1999 Monte Hellman interview by Marc Savlov, Austin City Chronicle, 2000 Monte Hellman interview by Mike White, Cashiers du Cinemart Warren Oates: A Wild Life by Susan Compo (University of Kentucky Press) Two-Lane Blacktop essay by Pat Padua, National Film Registry Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-and-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind The Films of Roger Corman by Alan Frank The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name: The Films of Monte Hellman by Kent Jones "Death of a Beach Boy," People magazine, January 16, 1984

"Two-Lane Blacktop is a far from perfect film (those metaphors keep blocking the road), but it has been directed, acted, photographed and scored (underscored, happily) with the restraint and control of an aware, mature filmmaker." - Vincent Canby, New York Times "The road itself has a real identity in Two-Lane Blacktop, as if it were a place to live and not just a way to move. There may be homes and gardens hidden behind those interstate terraces, but for the four people in this movie -- the road, as the saying goes, is home... The movie is intended, I suppose, to be a metaphor. But unless I missed the point, it doesn't have much of anything new to tell us. Sophomores in literary criticism could probably decode it as a metaphor involving the kinds of characters we meet, and our lack of communication with them, and yet our fundamental dependency on them, during life's journey -- but so what? Hardly anyone needs to be told that." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times "The strong and compelling plot fibre is supplied by the writing, direction and performing of Warren Oates' role... Much of the story's import is on Oates' back, and he carries it like a champion in an outstanding performance." - Variety "Two-Lane Blacktop manages to speak compellingly of contemporary alienation without ever tumbling into the visual clichés of sex, drugs, and violence." - Roland Gelatt, The Saturday Evening Post "... a unique, thematically interesting film that has deservedly become a cult favorite. Film bogs down toward the end, but there's a literally mind-blowing ending." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic "The quintessential road movie..." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice "Hellman makes extraordinary use of his camera, with mesmerizing down shots of the road markings flashing by, and experimental elements like the melting celluloid at the end." - The Rough Guide to Cult Movies "Oates' performance is about as good as you'll ever see and should have had the Oscar. Quintessential movie of its time..." - Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide "Two-Lane Blacktop is deliberately slow – dull for those who don't fall for its hypnotic allure, fascinating for those who do. It's less a road trip than a road study, as Hellman contemplates the ordinariness and emptiness of his characters' motor-obsessed lives. He gives us a plain, unadorned world that speaks to the quiet dissatisfaction and endless yearning in all of us." - Joel Wicklund, Centerstage "There's not another character like Oates' in all American cinema." - Kent Jones, The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name: The Films of Monte Hellman "If Jean Paul Sartre had directed a drive-in movie, he might have crafted Monte Hellman's existential, car noir Two-Lane Blacktop... A masterpiece." - Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun

THE DRIVER (James Taylor): "That Plymouth had a hemi with a torque flight. I believe we sawed the guy off, even if we did lose two hundred." THE GIRL (Laurie Bird): "You guys aren't the Zodiac Killers or anything like that, are you?" THE DRIVER: "Clean machine." HOT ROD DRIVER (Rudy Wurlitzer): "It's clean enough." THE DRIVER: "Not bad for home grown." HOT ROD DRIVER: "It's a little bit more than that, sonny." THE DRIVER: "Say, you must have something real special here. Gee, mister, I'll bet it's pretty quick." HOT ROD DRIVER: "You wanna find out?" THE DRIVER: "Well, ordinarily I'd jump at the, uh, opportunity. But the thing is, I'm just not in the habit of seeing the Chevy work against a two-bit piece of junk." HOT ROD DRIVER: "Let's make it fifty." THE DRIVER: "Make it three yards, motherfucker, and we'll have an automobile race." GTO (Warren Oates): "Performance and image, that's what it's all about." GTO: "Boss, she's a real road king, all right." THE GIRL: "Why can't I ever sit up front? What is this anyway, some kind of masculine power trip? I'm shoved back here with these goddamn tools. Screwdrivers and wrenches don't make it for me, you know." THE MECHANIC (Dennis Wilson): "We gotta get some action soon. We'll need bread to do a little work on the carburetors and check out the rear end." THE GIRL: I don't see anybody paying attention to my rear end." GTO: "I don't like being crowded by a couple of punk road hogs clear across two states. I don't." THE DRIVER: "I don't believe I've ever seen you. 'Course, there's lots of cars on the road like yours. They all get to look about the same. They perform about the same." GTO: "If I wanted to bother, I could suck you right up my tailpipe." THE DRIVER: "Sure you could." THE DRIVER: "Hear those cicadas?" THE GIRL: "Yeah." THE DRIVER: "You talk about survival, man, those are some freaky bugs. They spend, uh, they come out of the ground every seven years and they live underground the rest of the time. And the only time they only come out of the ground is to crawl out of their skins and grow some rings-grow some wings so they can fuck. And then they die. But before they die, they manage to lay some more eggs so that these bugs can-- THE GIRL: "We've got a better life, haven't we?" THE MECHANIC: "How are your eyes?" THE DRIVER: "Good. It all feels good." THE MECHANIC: "I figure we can go straight through. Three or four stops for gas. Eat light. It's best to keep the hunger on. I'll relieve you in six hours." THE DRIVER: "I feel good. I can take it all the way." THE MECHANIC: "Okay." THE GIRL: "There's a little muscle jumping around in your neck." THE DRIVER: "I like it that way." GTO: "Well, here we are on the road." THE DRIVER: "Yeah, that's where we are all right." GTO: "You got to have a foreign taste just to keep a balance. Otherwise you fall apart." THE MECHANIC: "You'd have yourself a real street sweeper here if you put a little work into it." GTO: "I go fast enough." THE DRIVER: "You can never go fast enough." GTO: "What're you tryin' to do, blow my mind?" THE GIRL: "Is this a game?" THE DRIVER: "I don't know. Not yet." MAN IN ROADHOUSE (Alan Vint): "Well... sure did talk to ya." GTO: "Sure did see ya." OLD WOMAN (Katherine Squire): "Goin' to Pine Grove. Ten mile on. Goin' to the graveyard." GTO: "Glad to help you out, ma'm." OLD WOMAN: "Goin' to the graveyard. Her folks, buried there. Both of 'em... killed on Saturday night. Out of state." GTO: "Well, yes, ma'am, I'm driving through to Florida. I bought my mother a house in St. Petersburg and I want to get down there and fix it up before she gets there." OLD WOMAN: "City car." GTO: "Well, it could be a city car or a country car, ma'am. Folks all over have 'em, you know." OLD WOMAN: "City car is what killed 'em." GTO: "Oh. I'm sorry, Ma'am." OLD WOMAN: "City car is what killed 'em." GTO: "I'll tell you one thing. There's nothing like building up an old automobile from scratch and wiping out one of those Detroit machines. That'll give you a set of emotions that'll stay with you, you know what I mean? Those satisfactions are permanent."

Director Monte Hellman was a talented early Roger Corman associate who didn't share in the early success that favored hopefuls like Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Coppola. Hellman's interesting monster picture The Beast from Haunted Cave had little impact and his critically acclaimed westerns The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind were never properly released. Hellman's best movie Two-Lane Blacktop follows the exploits of a pair of young drifters who make their living with illegal drag races. It's a lean, existential road trip and an American art film without pretensions. Synopsis: The Driver (James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) cruise the American South in a souped-up '55 Chevy, eking out a living by challenging other drivers in drag races. The stakes can range from eating money to the pink slip for the Chevy itself. Hustling illegal races is a precarious lifestyle. They slip into town, locate the local car club and quickly promote a challenge. There's always the danger of arrest by the cops, or violence from the racers they beat. In Arizona they pick up The Girl (Laurie Bird), a hippie vagrant who sleeps with most of her rides. The Mechanic takes The Girl to a motel room but it is The Driver who builds an emotional attachment to her. The trio then clashes with GTO (Warren Oates), an even odder wanderer of the highways. The loner GTO invents ridiculous personal back stories, claiming to be a test pilot or a secret agent. GTO and the boys decide to bet pink slips to see which car can get to Washington, D.C. first. The wager tests the uncomplicated relationship between The Driver and The Mechanic. Car engines rumble and roar over the Universal logo, opening the show on a nighttime street race somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. Two-Lane Blacktop is by far the best of the early-70s 'road trip' movies that appeared in the wake of the Beverly Hills counterculture hit Easy Rider. Unfortunately, Hellman's film almost disappeared after a short theatrical run, showing up only infrequently on television in terrible pan-scanned TV prints and censored to the point of incomprehensibility. Seen intact and full screen, Blacktop takes on a much broader dimension. The nomadic Driver and Mechanic are modern men engaged in a day-to-day struggle with risk and uncertainty. Their few words are almost exclusively about the Chevy's condition; nothing else seems to matter. The Mechanic keeps the car running while The Driver skillfully taunts local hot rodders into high-stakes drag races. They are the next generation of Howard Hawks rogue males, professionals that define themselves by their skills. The gambit of casting musicians as actors has paid off handsomely. Dennis Wilson was already a car nut and didn't need coaching to come off as authentic. The intense James Taylor carries the show with hardly a change of facial expression. The closest thing to a love scene occurs when Taylor attempts to teach Bird how to drive; he even relates to women through his car. As director Hellman explains, these guys behave, as opposed to act. Their 'unprofessional' performances are actually quite nuanced. Hellman isn't making myths, he's showing people living myths. As GTO, Warren Oates has the 'actor's showcase role' that corresponds to Jack Nicholson's breakout part in Easy Rider. If the younger racers are lone Ronin seeking their own path, GTO is a mass of male insecurities and overcompensations, an up-tight square grasping for a sense of identity. He dresses like a member of the Rat Pack, drives a showy Pontiac muscle car and hides behind a smokescreen of tall tales. GTO is constantly mythologizing himself - when he formally meets our racers, the scene is like gunslingers sizing each other up. At the end, he even makes a legend out of his racing foes, casting himself in the leading role in yet another tall tale. GTO's failed attempts to relate to a series of incompatible hitchhikers (including Harry Dean Stanton as a gay cowboy!) make him a vaguely comic character, but Hellman sees GTO as a potential soul brother to our young heroes. The three men are soon repairing each other's cars and setting up races together. Whether loner pros or loner psychos, we're all God's lonely men. Whomever we meet on the road can become a companion. Laurie Bird is the era's most memorable hitchhiking vagabond. Her "The Girl" is neither sentimentalized nor objectified as a girl-toy. Beneath her delicate appearance is a strong instinct for self-preservation. Bird made bit appearances in only two more films, including Annie Hall, and died tragically at age 26. With so little dialogue in Rudy Wurlitzer's script, the relationships are established almost entirely with visuals. Hellman has an excellent sense of camera placement. His scenes just seem to happen, instead of being structured to showcase performances (Bob Rafelson, Five Easy Pieces) or to promote a hipster agenda (Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider). Blacktop's changing relationships fail to follow a standard dramatic pattern. Taylor's exact attraction for Bird is never spelled out but he gradually becomes more committed to her. But The Girl also seems to need the Road's anonymity and independence; when guys get too close, she simply changes rides. Monte Hellman eventually declares his own independence by abandoning his race-to-Washington story hook in favor of an Antonioni-like conclusion. His western The Shooting finishes as a cosmic puzzle with a pre-Kubrick 2001 ending, yet can still be interpreted along genre lines. Two-Lane Blacktop isn't really like any other road movie made before or since. Its self-conscious meltdown finale comes off as a masterstroke, even as it leaves everything about the movie unresolved. Criterion's DVD of Two-Lane Blacktop eclipses an earlier (2001) Anchor Bay release. The enhanced transfer is slightly improved, and the only grain on view can be sourced back to the original 2-perf Techniscope filming format. The old disc has good extras but Criterion's selection is more comprehensive. Original talent weighs in on two commentaries. Director Hellman responds to questions from director friend Allison Anders, remembering particulars of the road trip filming and his efforts to get unself-conscious performances from his actors. On a second track screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer analyzes the movie with author and film teacher David Meyer. The second disc carries a series of relaxed interviews. Hellman talks to James Taylor about the experience, while Kris Kristofferson remembers being asked to use one of his songs on the soundtrack. A round table of producers also weighs in on the film and the brief period after Easy Rider when Hollywood briefly let young filmmakers loose on counterculture subject matter. We see screen tests for Laurie Bird and James Taylor as well as the film's excellent original trailer. Locations then & now are compared, showing how the roadside America depicted in Two-Lane Blacktop has largely disappeared. The longest extra is a 'road trip' interview with Hellman recorded in an SUV between Coldwater Canyon and Needles, California. Hellman's daughter Melissa remembers her acting bit as a little girl going to visit a graveyard. Performance & Image is a slide show account of the restoration of the film's 1955 Chevy picture car, which was re-used in American Graffiti. In addition to a fat insert booklet with essays by Kent Jones and Richard Linklater, Rudy Wurlitzer's complete screenplay is included as a separate publication. The DVD packaging carries GTO's dialogue line, "Those satisfactions are permanent." That could very well be Monte Hellman's personal motto, as his Two-Lane Blacktop is a real gem. For more information about Two-Lane Blacktop, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Two-Lane Blacktop, go to TCM Shopping. by Glenn Erickson