and put an unknown actress from the film, Laurie Bird, on the cover. All her efforts were for naught, as the film crashed and burned with the all-important New York critical fraternity and audiences were no friendlier. Within weeks, “Blacktop,” designed to be Universal’s new “Easy Rider,” was more like a low budget “Howard the Duck,” an embarrassment to the Studio and the last film Hellman would ever make inside the Hollywood “system.
Director Monte Hellman, left, with Warren Oates and James Taylor, on set for “Two-Lane Blacktop” in 1971But Walker’s ambivalence isn’t simply about Hellman’s idiosyncratic Samuel Beckett on Route 66 take on Hollywood’s “youth movie” craze of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, it’s also a reflection of her proximity to the making of film art and memories of an immersion into an unorthodox filmmaker’s unyielding artistic quest that didn’t serve the needs of the Hollywood studio that made it, or the...
“I begged Monte not to use amateurs,” says Walker of legendary singer-songwriter James Taylor, who starred in his only film role as The Driver, Dennis Wilson, drummer for the Beach Boys as The Mechanic and teen model Laurie Bird as The Girl. The lone acting pro was Hellman favorite Warren Oates, the subject of a current Lincoln Center retrospective that includes “Blacktop.”
Which bring us back to Walker’s take on the film, which has, as Cocteau surmised, has never been less than “difficult” to hold. In Walker’s rear-view mirror, “When I first saw it, I didn’t project what the film would be. I was worried about Laurie and James. I really didn’t like Laurie in the film. I loved her as a person, but in the film, I thought she was kind of disastrous.
“I’ve seen it relatively recently and quite a few times. The things that were troubling me then, now contribute to the somber aesthetic of the film. The gravity takes your breath away, if you have the patience to go with it. But I still can’t separate its qualities from the fact that it didn’t find an audience. It doesn’t seem fair that ‘American Graffiti,’ which is a delightful cotton candy, succeeded so spectacularly and ‘Blacktop’s’ failure was so extreme.