Monte Hellman’s "Cockfighter": Work from a Minimalist Master

It’s been a tough year for Roger Corman alumni, who’re dying off at a rate that gives me the shivers. The latest to fall, at the ripe old age of 91, is Monte Hellman, known for such minimalist fare as Two-Lane Blacktop, a road movie that sacrifices action and suspense to focus on the minutiae of life along America’s highways. That love-it-or-hate-it 1971 film, made after Easy Rider had taught Hollywood to view indie sensibilities with respect, was heralded by then-hip Esquire magazine as the movie of the year. Esquire’s April ’71 edition was devoted to the film, which featured the music world’s James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, along with Warren Oates and Laurie Bird, as competitors in a somewhat lackadaisical cross-country road race.

 I had never heard of Two-Lane Blacktop when I went to work for Roger Corman in 1973. The day I first reported to the Sunset Strip offices of Corman’s New World Pictures, not sure how my ability to discuss Hemingway and Shakespeare would translate into work on nurse movies and biker flicks, I was handed a script for something called Cockfighter. It was written by Charles Willeford, a crusty Floridian adapting his own hard-boiled novel for the screen. Frankly, I found the story a bit strange: a tough-as-nails guy who scrapes together a living raising and betting on fighting cocks has made a vow not to speak until he’s awarded the Cockfighter of the Year medal he’s convinced he deserves. Having no idea how to critique a screenplay, I called on my literary instincts, and this seemed to do the trick.

 While my colleague Frances Doel and I worked on our script notes, Monte Hellman came aboard as the film’s director. A longtime friend of Roger Corman, as well as a fellow Stanford graduate, he seemed to find the potential grittiness of the cockfighting world much to his liking. I have a vivid mental picture of Hellman in those days: a tall, thin man with an austere look and a corona of wispy black curls. He had already filled two roles with actors from the Two-Lane Blacktop quartet. Warren Oates, a longtime character actor who had also appeared in Hellman’s so-called “existential western,” The Shooting, would take on the non-speaking lead role. And Laurie Bird, who had played the aimless hitchhiker in Two-Lane Blacktop, was cast as a sexy young thing in the film’s early scenes. Now, making her second film ever, Bird was officially Hellman’s girlfriend, and I often saw her around the office. But hers was a troubled life, and I was sad to hear she’d committed suicide at age 26, in 1979.

 I was not part of the film’s on-location shoot in rural Georgia. But I remember the excitement of the premiere in Atlanta: Roger thought local audiences would flock to a lurid film about a sport that was, in the words of our ad campaign, “dirty-violent and outside the law.” In fact, Atlantans seemed to regard the legacy of cockfighting with embarrassment, and we were soon trying out titles, like “Born to Kill,” that bypassed the film’s subject matter entirely. I quipped that we should consider “Naked Under Feathers,” but no one else seemed to find that funny. (Simultaneously we were working to convince the Humane Society that no animals had been harmed . . . yeah, right!)

 I’m still not sure why Monte warmed to this unappealing material. But he filled the screen with great character actors, and obtained the services of the brilliant Spanish cinematographer Nestor Almendros, seven years before his Oscar-winning work on Days of Heaven.

 Farewell, Monte!  Thanks for the memories.

 

Running on Empty with Two-Lane Blacktop

Years ago, when I was interviewing for a job with B-movie mogul Roger Corman, he insisted I read and prepare to discuss with him Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film. As his subtitle, The Redemption of Physical Reality, suggests, Kracauer saw film as fundamentally a visual medium, one that captures photographically the way the world looks and moves. Of course I felt obliged to read this ponderous tome from cover to cover, and waited for my chance to have an in-depth discussion about its merits. But, though I got the job, Roger never mentioned Kracauer again.

I brought up this little story when I interviewed one of Roger’s many famous alums, the cult filmmaker Monte Hellman. Monte, who had been fairly detached throughout most of our conversation, suddenly sat up and took notice. He explained that throughout his career he had spent a good deal of time talking to interviewers like me, and that it was rare for him to learn anything new. But I had managed to surprise him. He’d had no idea that Roger was interested in Kracauer’s Theory of Film, but said:  “That happens to be one of my Bibles, so I’m very amazed at that.”   

My own hunch is that Roger, who loves being au courant about intellectual matters,, had picked up on Kracauer through Monte himself. Back in the early days, while preparing to make one of Roger’s cheapie films, the two had together driven Highway One from Carmel to San Francisco. A lot of their talk involved their feelings about Nietzsche, but I suspect Kracauer raised his head as well.

In any case, I thought about Kracauer recently while watching Monte’s most well-known film, 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop. As Charles Taylor explains in his fascinating chronicle of movies in the Seventies, OpeningWednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You, Two-Lane Blacktop was not an indie but a genuine studio release, bankrolled by Universal Pictures as its response to the success of Easy Rider. Like Easy Rider it’s about young men in motion, traveling aimlessly across the American landscape in search of  . . . whatever. Instead of motorcyles, the taciturn characters known only as The Driver and The Mechanic roar through the Southwest in a souped-up ’55 Chevy sedan. There’s also a young woman, equally adrift, who’ll hook up with any male who happens by. Then there’s G.T.O., a middle-aged would-be hipster in a spiffy canary-yellow muscle car. He’s as talkative as the others are silent, but his self-aggrandizing stories don’t usually convey the ring of truth. A challenge is issued, and the race is on. They’ve wagered their cars’ pink slips, so the outcome ought to be important.

Except it’s not. Monte’s original cut ran 3 ½ hours. Contractually he was obliged to get his film under 120 minutes, and so he did. But what he cut was surprising. Gone were most of the film’s racing footage and the drama of combat behind the wheel. Monte retained instead the dingy diners, the small town gas pumps, the tedium of going nowhere for no particular reason. The cast was unusual too, featuring musicians James Taylor and the Beachboys’ Dennis Wilson along with another acting novice, Laurie Bird. Only the blabby G.T.O. was played by an experienced actor, the marvelously manic Warren Oates. The result is less a story than a haunting mood piece. 

Here’s a viewer comment I found on IMDB:  “This is either the best film I've ever seen, or just an interesting exercise in film-making that is ultimately of little value. The problem is that I can't decide which.” But Kracauer would have been proud.

“Innocence of Muslims”: A Casting Session from Hell

In an era when a no-budget movie can create a furor halfway around the globe, my chief concern is for those who’ve died at the hands of angry mobs. But a front-page L.A. Times story reminds me that there are other (if undeniably lesser) victims: the actors who were duped into playing roles in this fiasco, thinking that they were being cast in a sword-and-sandal adventure drama, rather than an inflammatory attack on the fundamentals of Islam.

The bottom-of-the-barrel actors in Innocence of Muslims insist they had no knowledge of the filmmakers’ intent, that their lines were re-dubbed in the editing room to insert scurrilous anti-Muslim propaganda. But it was clear to them from the start that this was no high-class venture. Why did they sign on? Because actors are always on the look-out for ways to advance their careers. Even if the film they knew as Desert Warrior had vanished without a trace, at least they’d have another credit for their résumés, as well as some clips to pad out their demo reels.

I never worked on a film as tacky (or as scurrilous) as Desert Warrior, but I do know something about casting low-budget pictures. In fact, one of ours (filmed by the inevitable Cirio Santiago) was called Dune Warriors, and the official New Horizons synopsis tells the tale: “After the end of the world, Earth is a thirsty planet ruled by vicious warlords. One woman is brave enough to fight back; she bands together five warriors to save her town and their precious water.” A deathless premise, right? But you can be sure that a goodly number of young actors flocked to our offices, ready and eager to fly to Manila and show off some kung fu moves for the camera.

It sounds like fun to participate in a casting session: you’re sitting in a room with like-minded colleagues, hearing the words of your script approached in many different ways, waiting for that one special performer who can bring your vision (such as it is) to life. But casting is grueling, and not just for those who are looking to land a role. I realized at the end of one long day why I felt so tired. It seems that audition spaces are permeated by an air of desperation. Everyone wants work so badly that those in a position to grant it feel weighted down by the hopes and fears the actors are trying to conceal beneath an air of bravado or a pasted-on smile.

It’s not only newcomers who can feel desperate. Years ago, I was helping indie director Monte Hellman on the New World film Cockfighter. Monte requested that I bring in a certain New York stage actor to audition for a major role. The actor’s name was very close to that of an L.A.-based TV performer, and I made the honest mistake of getting in touch with the wrong guy. He arrived at the office looking thrilled: although he’d enjoyed a modest career of his own, he happened to be married to an actress who’d just hit it big on a popular sitcom, and I’m sure his morale was in the toilet. Of course when he learned he was not the man on Monte Hellman’s radar, his spirit sunk lower than ever. I’ve felt guilty about that goof ever since.

To all the actors who show up for auditions eager to be cast as bikers, or businessmen, or librarians or Latin lovers, I tip my hat –- and hope they can manage to stay out of films that become famous for all the wrong reasons.

The Full Monte, or Naked Under Feathers?

Monte Hellman’s got a new movie. Actually, his Road to Nowhere premiered at the Venice (Italy) Film Festival last September, and will open in L.A. and New York City in June. Hellman’s filmography is not long, but he’s been making his spare, enigmatic, but powerful little dramas since 1959, when (who else?) Roger Corman gave him his start. I interviewed Monte for my Roger Corman bio and found him to be reserved and pensive. He has, though, some terrific stories to tell. He filled me in on what it was like to shoot Beast from Haunted Cave back-to-back with Corman’s Ski Troop Attack in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was the dead of winter, and Roger was aiming to keep the budgets at $50,000 or less. As a result, said Monte, “He told everyone in town that we were UCLA film students doing a student film, so we got hotel rooms for, I think, a dollar a night, but we had two people in a room so it was fifty cents a night per person, and we were shooting in ten below zero and he served salami sandwiches on plain white bread for lunch. I think if we’d just had a cup of soup. . . . Those kind of economies don’t pay off in the long run. You get a lot of bad will that’s generated.”

Having somehow survived Beast from Haunted Cave, Hellman went on to join forces with future Hollywood icon Jack Nicholson. With Corman’s backing the duo turned out two provocative westerns, The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind (Nicholson wrote the screenplay for the latter). Then came the film most admired by Hellman fans, a 1971 cross-country drag-race odyssey called Two-Lane Blacktop. Three years later, Hellman was once again directing for Corman, who had optioned a Southern novel called Cockfighter. Roger, as I can attest, liked the thought of bringing to the screen the raw vigor of an outlaw sport. And he was convinced that the faint lewdness of the title would give Cockfighter added allure.

Despite impressively gritty work by Hellman and by veteran character actor Warren Oates, Cockfighter was one of Roger Corman’s rare miscalculations. He planned a world premiere screening in Atlanta, then discovered that most Georgians view cockfighting as an embarrassment. The public was staying away, so something drastic had to be done. Joe Dante, who was then a Corman editor, told me how Roger phoned him with a concrete plan of action: “We’re going to take the sex scenes from Private Duty Nurses, and we’re going to take the dynamite truck chase from Night Call Nurses, and we’re gonna cut ‘em all together in a one-minute montage. And I want you to cut it into the movie right when Warren Oates goes to bed and turns the lights out. And that will be a dream sequence. . . . Put all this stuff in the trailer, and now we’re going call it Born to Kill.” Later, we tried other titles, including Wild Drifter and Gamblin’ Man. But a rose (or a chicken) by any other name. . . .