Stevens Brad

Monte Hellman: His Life and Films

Monte Hellman

Monte Hellman

His Life and Films

BRAD STEVENS

foreword by Monte Hellman

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

Frontispiece: Drawing of Monte Hellman made by Joe Sison, one of the actors in Back Door to Hell.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Stevens, Brad, 1967-

Monte Hellman : his life and films/

Brad Stevens; foreword by Monte Hellman.

p. cm.

Includes [bibliographical references, filmography and] index.

ISBN 0-7864-1434-0 (softcover : 50# alkaline paper) ♾

1. Hellman, Monte, 1932-

2. Motion picture producers and directors— United States— Biography.

3. Theatrical producers and directors— United States— Biography.

I. Title.

PN1998.3.H453 ⠀S74 ⠀2003 ⠀⠀⠀791.43'0233'092—dc21 ⠀⠀⠀⠀2002154294

British Library cataloguing data are available

©2003 Brad Stevens. All rights reserved

On the front cover: Monte Hellman directing Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the memory of my father, Irving Stevens (1939-2000)

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the following: Lindsey Annison, Ed Begley, Jr., Nicole Brenez, Francis Brewster, John Charles, Jon Davison, Charles Eastman, Ernest Farino, Howard Fridkin, Steven Gaydos, Julian Grainger, Robert Guest, David Hess, Jack Hill, Carl Hose, Neil Jackson, Kent Jones, Paul Joyce, Stanton Kaye, Bill Krohn, Gary Kurtz, Charles Lindsay, Tim Lucas, Adrian Martin, Marc Morris, Bill Moseley, Sam Moyer, Alberto Pezzotta, Laurie Post, Frederick Rappaport, Jonathan Rosenbaum, John Ulrich, Rebecca and Sam Umland, Daniel Walsh, Mark Wickum and Vernon Zimmerman.

Special thanks go to Monte Hellman for his endless patience, constant willingness to answer even my most pedantic questions, and thorough proof-reading/fact-checking of the manuscript (regardless of which all errors remain my own): it may sound like a cliché, but this book would not have been possible without him.

Foreword

The idea of a frame-by-frame analysis of my movies initially struck me with horror. First of all, I had been taught by Roger Corman that no frame in a film was indispensable. And second, it seemed eerie to have someone (and possibly many people) looking at my pictures more carefully than I ever had myself. Not that I had been cavalier or hadn't taken great pains. Well, maybe I had been cavalier, but still I had taken great pains. But my way of working had been much more emotional and instinctual than analytical or mathematical.

So I was pleasantly surprised to read Brad Stevens' book and find I wasn't bored. Of course the subject matter had a unique interest for me. It's a little like the actor talking about how his performance had gone, and finally apologizing with, "But enough about me; what did you think of my performance?" It's hard to resist someone talking about you.

But beyond the ego satisfaction, I had a great trip, reliving many pleasant, as well as unpleasant, experiences. And, best of all, I found that many times the analyses of the films mirrored my own intentions, even if I had never expressed them in such a concrete or detailed way.

Brad and I have never met, but between us we have exchanged nearly five hundred e-mails over a period of a year-and-a-half. He constantly pressed me to remember, to paraphrase Borges, unforgettable events now forgotten. I, in turn, enlisted the help of friends and co-workers to try to pin down names and dates.

The result is the history of a career that now seems strange to me. But it didn't seem strange while I was experiencing it. I merely continued to pursue projects that interested me, at the same time taking whatever work came my way.

These days, the interesting projects seem to outnumber the whatevers. In any case, I'm continuing along the same path — the only one I know.

Monte Hellman

November 19, 2001

Introduction

Before World War I, Eisenstein and Griffith made completely different films, even though Eisenstein learned from Griffith. And Murnau in Germany and Chaplin in Hollywood — they all made different films. But it was all cinema. Whereas the Eisensteins, Chaplins and Murnaus of today are kept from doing films by people who demand a single universal cinema — which is a dead cinema.

— Jean-Luc Godard in

Two American Audiences (1968)

The history of the cinema is a long martyrology.

— Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1, l'Image-Movement (1983)

In 1970, a Los Angeles Times headline described Monte Hellman as "Hollywood's Best Kept Secret." Three decades later, nothing has changed. One of our greatest filmmakers still inhabits a twilight world, his genius recognized only by a few admirers who meet furtively in dark alleyways to exchange fourth generation dubs of Back Door to Hell.

Although this book's purpose is to honor Monte Hellman, it should be stressed at the outset that Hellman is only one (though certainly among the most important) of America's marginalized filmmakers: Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Albert Lewin, Nicholas Ray, John Cassavetes, Elaine May, Charles Eastman, Stanton Kaye, Sam Peckinpah, Donald Cammell, Michael Cimino, Abel Ferrara, and so on. Many of these directors were Hellman's collaborators, and all of them were (to greater or lesser degrees) victims of those financial institutions which theoretically exist to enable the production of films, but actually create obstacles for artists who refuse to conform with the dominant ideology. As Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, the great filmmakers are far more vulnerable than painters, writers, musicians and thinkers of similar stature, since "it is infinitely easier to prevent them from doing their work."1

It is not my intention to suggest that this problem is uniquely American (Dreyer, Tati and Vigo encountered similar opposition), nor to imply that the products of America's commercial cinema are worthless. On the contrary, many of the twentieth century's greatest artists—Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, Capra — flourished under this system. But the enormous gaps which punctuate Monte Hellman's career testify as eloquently as anything in the films themselves to a culture in a state of crisis, a culture both overwhelmingly powerful and neurotically insecure, monolithic and yet riven by cracks and contradictions, a culture built upon principles of free speech, yet singlemindedly dedicated to silencing voices of dissent. For this reason, my focus in the pages that follow will be as much on the "gaps" — the unmade projects, the anonymous piecework — as on the primary texts. Indeed, the collected output of those above-named mavericks itself functions as a kind of gap, a suppressed tradition existing in the margins of our "official" discourses.

It would be foolish to look for coherence in a body of work whose overall shape has been determined by luck or chance, were it not for the fact that Hellman's films so often focus on lives dominated by the whims of a "fate" in which no evident pattern, either benevolent or malevolent, can be detected. It is impossible to say whether the vicissitudes of Hellman's career shaped or were shaped by the director's existential philosophy, but the fact that he has made not one film in the last decade while Steven Soderbergh has made at least ten tells us all we need to know about the kinds of art that are currently considered valuable. Whereas the relationship between form and content in Soderbergh roughly corresponds to that between icing and cake, Hellman fuses form ("how") and content ("what") to such a degree that they become inseparable. Even for theoretical purposes, Two-Lane Blacktop, for example, cannot be discussed as if it were "about" anything other than the precise attitude (embodied in such things as camera placement, camera movement, composition, etc.) adopted towards its material by the auteur. Hellman is among those filmmakers with the ability to think visually, an ability (which we might describe as the lost art of mise–en–scène) perhaps best seen in the way his camera is often positioned at a distance which implies a moral context without ever suggesting ironic detachment, mirroring his characters' attempts to place their actions in a larger perspective (as Oberlus says in Iguana, "I hate ships, but I love the sea. It makes everything else seem small") while subjecting those attempts to extensive criticism.

The situation of the typical Hellman protagonist is neatly summed up by the intertitle with which Buster Keaton began his first film, The "High Sign" (1920): "Our Hero came from Nowhere — he wasn't going Anywhere and got kicked off Somewhere." Like Keaton's hero, Hellman's characters are not defined in terms of where they come from, where they are going or where they happen to be. As with Beckett, all these things are abstractions, the author's real concern being with mental states which are far from abstract. Consider the kinds of location to which Hellman is attracted: harsh, barren landscapes (forests, frozen wastes, deserts, roads, rocky beaches) inhabited by small groups engaged in vaguely defined projects. Although these settings seem far removed from anything we might describe as "civilization," Hellman shows ideological assumptions emerging against the unlikeliest of backgrounds, even when their context renders them both useless and ridiculous, even when the individuals concerned believe themselves to have rejected all received values.

It is, then, my contention that Hellman's cinema is one in which everything — shots, scenes, films, even the director's career — eventually returns to a point of departure. If Hitchcock's characters used verbal sophistication to ward off the threat posed by a chaos world, Hellman presents communication as a slow, difficult and frustrating process. His characters inhabit a universe where the concepts of salvation and damnation do not exist. Explicitly rejecting the goal-centered protagonist, Hellman focuses on individuals whose activities are either undefined or of questionable value,2 and it is this emphasis that enables him to work, without any discernible sense of strain, as a "film doctor," shooting additional scenes for projects whose narratives have already achieved closure. Meaning must be found in the moment, and the tendency to play games and indulge trivial obsessions reinforces the fact that mortality renders all actions ultimately meaningless; against this threat, there can be no defense.

Yet the difference between Hitchcock and Hellman is not simply that between a Catholic and an atheist. If Hellman focuses on men unable to escape self-made traps, their behavior is consistently placed by the presence of intelligent, aware and independent women who demonstrate the capacity to formulate goals that are not self-serving, futile or competitive. That these characters occupy narrative positions which are, of necessity, marginal is not a flaw of the films. On the contrary, Hellman's emphasis on marginality reinforces the critique he wishes to make of a society dominated by, and arranged in accordance with, masculine interests. Closed circles, both perfect and deathly, are, by their very nature, male constructs, and, as I hope to demonstrate in the following pages, the most striking thing about Hellman's oeuvre is the frequency with which these circles come close to being broken by an intrusive feminine force.

Chapter 1

Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

"Waiting for Godot was an enormous influence on me. I think there is a little of Beckett in everything I have done, including Beast from Haunted Cave."

— Monte Hellman, quoted in

Charles Tatum, Jr.'s Monte Hellman, page 19.

(Author's translation.)

Monte Hellman was born July 12, 1932. "Both my parents came from Missouri — my father from Kansas City, my mother from St. Louis (where my father had moved). My father had a grocery store when I was a little kid in Albany, New York (I wasn't born there — I was born in Greenpoint, which is part of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City). My whole family migrated from New York to California when I was six. In Los Angeles, my father also had a grocery store, then when I was a teenager, he switched to a gas station, and later a different gas station. After getting out of small business, he sold insurance for a time, then semi-retired to Palm Springs where he sold real estate. My mother also had experience in business, as a teenager taking over her parents' shoe store when they became ill. She was mostly a housewife while raising her two children (I have a younger brother, Herb), but also sold real estate in Palm Springs. My parents were both golfers, and both master contract bridge players. My mother also occasionally taught bridge."San

Hellman became interested in photography,2 film and theater at an early age: "It was inevitable that I should become a filmmaker, because as a child I was directing my life in a melodramatic way; I staged a jailbreak from the boarding school I was attending, and I always lied. So I think the combination of melodramatizing and lying led to only one possible career. I pretty much knew what I wanted then. And I fell in love with cinema when I was very young. I was a regular filmgoer every Saturday for as long as I can remember. I liked Tarzan always, and The Lone Ranger serial. I never saw a film I didn't like. And I loved magic. I went to every magic show when I was a kid. I saw all the great magicians: I saw Blackstone before I could even walk. I also had a complete collection of Superman comic books, which my mother threw away when I was at Stanford, thinking I was too old for comic books. That collection would probably be worth enough today to finance a low budget movie — at least a digital one. I never felt I had much chance of breaking into cinema because I thought you needed to have some member of your family already in the studios"3 Hellman directed his first theatrical performance (a short tragicomedy which he also wrote) in summer camp at the age of ten: "When I was going to school I had been an usher at a theater called the Las Palmas, just off Hollywood Boulevard, but actually only 50 yards from the Egyptian Theater, recently restored to its former glory, and now the home of the American Cinematheque. The group I ushered for was called the Actors' Lab, which was the West Coast incarnation of the Group Theater, and John Garfield was one of the members. I saw him do their revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing."4 Hellman studied for a degree in speech and drama (on an NBC radio scholarship) at Stanford University (where he directed radio plays—including The War of the Worlds—in his freshman year, and later acted in a production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard), then undertook a year-and-a-half of graduate work in film at UCLA, taking time out from the latter for a three month tour of Europe: "At UCLA I saw many classic films, and was also strongly influenced by Griffith (Broken Blossoms) and Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia). I was also influenced by Lewis Milestone (A Walk in the Sun), but I think the film that most made me want to direct was George Stevens' A Place in the Sun."5

In 1952, Hellman cofounded the Stumptown Players Summer Theater in Guerneville, California (north of San Francisco), directing their productions of Emlyn Williams' Night Must Fall, John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle and John Patrick's The Hasty Heart, and acting in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story and Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday. In the latter, he played Paul Verrall, while the other cast members included Joan Wilcox as Billie Dawn and Frank Wolff as Harry Brock: "Once, when an actor failed to make an entrance and I had asked all the questions Garson Kanin had provided me, Frank ad libbed the line 'What else do you want to know, pal?' The Stumptown Players used a theater in the middle of Armstrong Redwood State Park. We put in platforms for the seats so that every two rows would be higher than the rows in front. We also used salt water dimmers to control the lights (pickle jars with one metal plate attached to a string so that the lights would dim as the plate would rise in the jar separating it from the plate at the bottom). We shared tiny restrooms outside the theater with the audience. One night during intermission a woman went into the ladies room with her little girl. She inadvertently opened a stall with Joan Wilcox sitting on the john. After she closed the door, Joan heard her whisper to her daughter, 'That's Miss Wilcox, dear'."6

Between the second and third seasons, Hellman lived in the San Francisco area and played Tom in a production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie staged at a community theater in Sausalito: "That winter I also directed Of Mice and Men, which was for my company, but put on in the Mill Valley high school auditorium. Sausalito is just across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco, and Mill Valley is about seven or eight miles north of that. I was living in San Anselmo, another town in the same area, and working by day in San Francisco as a window dresser at the Emporium department store. One of my co-founders of the Stumptown Players, Harvey Berman (who was later to direct Jack Nicholson before I did), was also working as a window dresser with me. One day he looked around and said, 'You know, I think everyone else in this department seems to be gay, except you and me. And I'm not so sure about you.' I felt the same way. The night we did the Halloween display you never saw so many guys modeling women's fur coats!"7

During his company's third season, Hellman directed Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. After this season, he married the troupe's leading lady, Barboura Morris,8 and in 1955 moved to L.A.: "At the end of our third season the company seemed to be falling apart for political reasons, and one of our group had been offered a job at the American Broadcasting Company in the film editing department, and he was not interested and he knew I had an interest in film, and so he told me about this job. I applied for it and got it. It was a very challenging job: cleaning out the old film vaults at the ABC studios, which had been one of the first movie studios in Hollywood. So these vaults had been there for God knows how long. I have these terrible allergies, and so I suffered for my art, cleaning out these dusty vaults."9 While at ABC, Hellman would eat his lunch in nearby Griffith Park: "One day I go up there and Roger Corman is shooting something. I didn't say hello to him then, but a year or two later I had the opportunity to meet him because my wife at the time had started acting in his movies."10

In 1956, Hellman became an apprentice editor on the television series Medic (shot at Ziv Studios): "Medic dealt with doctors and medical conditions, and had episodes as various as the doctor who treated Lincoln after he was shot to a two-part study of post-partum depression. I was officially an apprentice, whose job was splicing dailies. I started syncing dailies as well, and ultimately became a kind of low-grade assistant, standing behind the editor, Bob Seiter, and handing him trims. This was when I learned most of what I know about both editing and film directing. I made no decisions. I don't remember if I got a credit, but my name was frequently used on the hospital paging system. The sound editor on the show was Jim Nelson, who became a life-long friend, and worked on most of my movies, as well as Star Wars as Post Production supervisor and Associate Producer. He took his name off, after a dispute with George Lucas over profit participation. On Medic, the hospital paging system also paged him on a regular basis."11

Following his departure from Ziv early in 1957, Hellman went to work for Columbia, "syncing dailies for all productions, not working with a particular editor,"12 but left in September: "Knowing I had to wait eight years before the union would allow me to be a full editor (you didn't have to be working, all you had to do was be in the union), I decided to quit work as an apprentice and go back to the theater. I started a company in Los Angeles, and put on a series of four plays."13 These plays were staged in the Dahl Theater: "It was named for the two brothers who owned the building. I think we changed the name during my tenure to the Playgoers Company, then later, because of copyright infringement, to the Theatergoers Company. It was an actual full-blown theater, with a revolving stage, which seated around three hundred people. It had been built by the Actors' Lab, the same group I had ushered for, but not the same theater where I had ushered. The Lab built my theater while I was away at Stanford, and I never saw any productions there."14 Roger Corman was among the investors, and the opening play was the first Los Angeles production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, staged as a Western, with Pozzo a Texas rancher and Lucky a Native American: "I'd read it and it was a brilliant play and I wanted to do it. I didn't think I would direct it, primarily because it was our first play of the season and I didn't think I'd have time to start the company and start the season going and get the theater organized and direct the first play. I hired a director, and as he began to prepare, I realized that I couldn't let somebody else direct Waiting for Godot. So I took over the directing and still continued to prepare the season, and it was probably the most important artistic experience in my life. Shortly before beginning to do the show, I happened on an evening of vaudeville that was put on by two great vaudevillians, Jack Albertson and Joey Faye. I realized that they were the characters from Godot, and I cast them. That was probably the most brilliant thing I've ever done. They were so wonderful, and the show was so great, that there wasn't one person in the company who missed a performance. During the return engagement, Jack Albertson had to take a week off for surgery on a detached retina. I tried to recast the role for a week, rehearsed a new actor for two days, then decided he couldn't cut it. I decided to play the role of Didi (Vladimir) myself. Mind you, Jack was one of the greatest comics ever. On one double-take, when Pozzo says, 'And so I took a knock' (pronounced with a hard 'k'), Jack does the take, then says, 'A knook?' looking directly at the audience. He got a laugh that lasted most nights over a minute. Trying to do it as best I could the way he did it, I got a laugh of 20 seconds, which I was very proud of."15

Hellman also directed Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown, as well as producing Jean Anouilh's Colombe and William Saroyan's The Cave Dwellers (starring Katherine Squire and George Mitchell, both of whom would appear in Ride in the Whirlwind and Two-Lane Blacktop). Although the theater only lasted one season, it became a magnet for several young L.A.-based actors, notably Jack Nicholson, who was attending Jeff Corey's acting class at the time. Other class members included Roger Corman, Barboura Morris, Robert Towne and B. J. Merholz: "I was caught between two worlds. I was trained at Stanford University by a wonderful director and teacher named F. Cowles Strickland, who was part of the great tradition of the first half of the twentieth century which was still partially indebted to the nineteenth century. And then, about the middle of the twentieth century, a new tradition sprang up out of the Actors' Studio and the Group Theater and so forth, and so I was trained in the traditions of the old and also I was trained in the new traditions when I came to Los Angeles and studied with people like Martin Landau and Jeff Corey. And I think that that combination gives me the weapons and tools with which to work with actors of various types. I feel very comfortable with all kinds of actors. I love actors."16

The company disbanded in June 1958 (soon after Hellman and Barboura Morris divorced) when the theater was converted into a cinema by its new owner, Robert Lippert (later the producer of two Hellman films): "Lippert bought the theater from the Dahls after I did my season of plays from September 1957 to June 1958 and forced me to give up the building (he wasn't interested in plays). It still exists—now called the New Beverly Cinema. For a time it was divided into twin theaters, but now it's opened up again into one theater."17 Roger Corman advised Hellman to "get healthy," and offered him work at his recently formed company the Filmgroup. It was there that Hellman made Beast from Haunted Cave: "Leo Gordon wrote the original screenplay for Beast. My original contract was as 'writer/director/editor.' Soon after I was hired, Roger decided to get Charles B. Griffith to work on the rewrite with me. He wound up doing the writing, while I supervised. Chuck's re-write bore almost no resemblance to Leo's original. I added a number of private jokes, such as Frank and Sheila calling each other 'Charles', which really came from my relationship with Frank Wolff. Frank was a school friend at Stanford, a summer stock partner, and my roommate in L.A."18 The film was shot in 12 days on South Dakota locations, back-to-back with Ski Troop Attack, a Corman film featuring the same five stars as Hellman's— Frank Wolff, Michael Forest, Sheila Carol, Richard Sinatra and Wally Campo. Roger Corman produced and directed Ski Troop Attack (from another Griffith screenplay), leaving his brother Gene to produce Beast from Haunted Cave: "Gene pawned us off as a group of UCLA students, and he made a deal at a hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota, for 50 cents a night per person, and put two to a room. And we had salami sandwiches for lunch. Just plain bread and salami, in basically 10 degrees below zero weather, so it was a grueling experience, but it was fun. I cast all the actors except Wally Campo. Mike Forest and Frank Wolff were close friends of mine. Sheila Carol was a waitress at a coffee house on the Sunset Strip when I discovered her. Mike, Frank and Sheila were cast in Ski Troop Attack because they were in Beast."19 The fact that Hellman was still technically an apprentice meant he could not edit his own footage, so the editing was carried out by Anthony Carras: "Since I was not allowed to edit Beast (it wound up as a union picture), Roger paid me for three jobs when I only performed on 1^1/2. Since I got paid a total of $1,000, I figure, by Roger's methods, I was overpaid by $500. I was present in the editing room. That's where I learned the rest of what I know about film directing, from seeing my mistakes."20 Nevertheless, Hellman regards the experience as a positive one: "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 theater and never went back. After Beast from Haunted Cave opened, I got an agent and tried to find directing assignments."21

Beast from Haunted Cave begins at the ski resort run by Gil Jackson (Michael Forest). Gangster Alexander Ward (Frank Wolff), his moll, Gypsy Boulet (Sheila Carol), and his two henchmen, Marty Jones (Richard Sinatra) and Byron Smith (Wally Campo), are using a skiing holiday as cover for their robbery of a mining company. Marty takes Natalie (Linne Ahlstrand), a waitress from the local bar, to the mine, where he plants a bomb in order to trigger a diversionary explosion. While in the mine, Natalie is killed by a monster.22 The next day, the gang carries out its robbery successfully (though a guard dies in the mine explosion), and makes the arduous journey to Gil's isolated cabin, followed by the beast. While Alex's gang waits for the plane that will fly them to safety, tensions mount as Gil begins to realize who his guests really are, and Gypsy falls in love with him. After the beast attacks, carrying off Gil's housekeeper Small Dove (Kay Jennings), Gil and Gypsy decide to slip away. A snowstorm forces them to take refuge in a haunted cave, where they discover the cocooned, half-living remains of Natalie and Small Dove (as well as Byron, who arrived earlier). Alex and Marty find the cave, and Alex is killed by the beast. Marty attacks the beast with a flare gun. As the beast dies, it lashes out at Marty, killing him. Gil and Gypsy watch as the beast goes up in flames.

Beast from Haunted Cave is peculiarly difficult to discuss. Charles Tatum, Jr. claims that "trying to see Beast from Haunted Cave as a personal film by Monte Hellman would be a form of pathological auteurism,"23 while the director himself dismisses it as "primitive work on my part,"24 Hellman once pointed out that the narrative was essentially "Key Largo with a monster added to it,"25 and later told Tatum that "Corman loved the story and had his writers make several variations on the theme. He understood that the old man/woman/young man triangle was rich in dramatic possibilities. For him, Key Largo contained the fundamental structure of the gangster film."26 But if the parallels between Beast from Haunted Cave and John Huston's film are clear enough, the monster provides a disruptive element, its presence being as ambiguous and open to multiple readings as the threat in Hitchcock's The Birds (1962).

Robin Wood has suggested that horror films can be understood by applying the formula "normality vs. the monster," the three variables being the definition of normality, the definition of the monster, and, crucially, the relationship between the two.27 Beneath the surface, it is already clear that Beast's "normality" is profoundly disturbed; the outlaw gang has little respect for human life, while the ostensible "hero" simply inflects their misanthropy in a different direction, presenting his neurotic flight from social interaction as a moral principle. The monster duplicates these tendencies while standing in marked opposition to them, functioning as less a coherent entity than a series of constantly shifting possibilities, and Hellman's visualization of the creature suggests its amorphous nature. On its first appearance (when it attacks Natalie in the mine), we see only disconnected shots of the beast's cobwebbed limbs before it gradually drops over the camera, filling the screen with a blackness which replaces that fade we might otherwise expect to end such a scene (later, Marty also blacks out the screen by advancing into the camera). When Marty observes the creature during his journey to the cabin, it is a transparent image through which the surrounding landscape can be glimpsed. In the cave, it is initially presented as a shadow on a wall, only later being shown in full view. Thus, while the human characters are never anything more (or less) than living bodies, several figural options are worked through in the beast's presentation: it is a cinematic effect, an image, an outline, a shadow.28 These options point to the problematic relationship between protagonist and antagonist. As in so many of his later works, Hellman obliges us to ask questions we will not be able to answer, and the relative straightforwardness of the central characters' motivations here ensure that it is the eponymous beast upon which our enquiries must focus.29 The complexity of its role will be clarified by the following questions. Although none can be definitively answered, all suggest avenues of exploration which enrich the text.

What is the Haunted Cave?

The superficially crude title proves to have unexpected resonances. One might expect the film to be called Beast from a Haunted Cave or Beast from the Haunted Cave. Beast from Haunted Cave suggests something both more and less precise; is "Haunted Cave" a name ("this place is known as Haunted Cave") rather than a description ("this is a haunted cave")? The film compounds the ambiguity by presenting two possible candidates for the title role. Although the climax occurs in what Gil describes as "a haunted cave," the place this beast appears to be from isn't a cave at all, but a mine.

What Is the Beast's Origin?

So is the beast from the haunted cave or the area under the mine? The closest we come to an explanation occurs when Marty tells Alex he "saw pieces of an egg in the mine ... that could have been there for millions of years until the men working on the mine found it." But Hellman's position is closer to that of Alex, who insists, "I don't care what it is. I don't care if it chews up the whole state. I don't care if it came from Mars or happened by spontaneous combustion."

Why Does It Travel?

Why does the beast journey from the mine to the cave (apparently dragging the half-dead Natalie, a source of food, along with it)? Does it follow Gil and the gangsters? Is it trying to find a new home after its old one is destroyed in the explosion? Or is it simply returning to its place of origin?

What Is Its Function?

Given the figural uncertainty attendant upon the beast's visual presentation, as well as the ambiguity of its origin and motivation, it is hardly surprising to discover that the creature's symbolic/ideological function is similarly problematic. Here, Hellman anticipates one of the horror genre's richest motifs: the tracing of America's collective nightmare to a source in the Wild West, an idea given its most thorough expression by Tobe Hooper. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the monstrous family are the true inheritors of America's pioneer tradition, a notion taken to even more outrageous extremes in Hooper's 1986 sequel, where, having set up home in an abandoned amusement park decorated with images of Western icons, the cannibals justify themselves by reference to standard capitalist practice.30 Similarly, in Death Trap (1976) a serial killer is linked with the heroes of Western mythology by the country and western songs ("a cowboy is true to his word") on the soundtrack, while Poltergeist (1982) traces its supernatural events to the Indian burial ground over which a new American town has been built (Kubrick's The Shining uses a similar explanation).

Beast from Haunted Cave frequently alludes to American history. Gypsy sings a humorous variation of "Home on the Range" ("Oh give me a home where the weight-lifters roam"), and the ski resort's bar is decorated with Western-themed imagery, including a wagon wheel and a pianola with a sign reading, "I am 75 years old — still willing to play." The laconic Gil — variously called "Cowboy," "Mountain Man," "Nature Boy" and "Davy Crockett"— is linked with America's pioneers; he owns a wooden cabin and relates Marty's sense that they are being followed to the kind of intuition which "has saved many a trapper and prospector" (for Gypsy he also recalls a more recent past of "blind dates and bobby socks"). Alex's gang, on the other hand, embodies the West's spirit of lawless anarchy. A news report describes their robbery as "The biggest story to hit the Black Hills since the murder of Wild Bill Hickock."

But the film also alludes to a much older culture. One of several possibilities is that the conflict between the beast (which "could have been there for millions of years") and Alex's gang reenacts the struggle between America's settlers and the country's indigenous population. Gil's housekeeper is a Native American ("It's Geronimo!" screams Byron upon first seeing her), his cabin contains a piece of Indian sculpture (which Byron finds endlessly fascinating), and Marty observes that "the Black Hills are sacred Indian country. Heap bad medicine for evil men from foreign lands" (though this idea is not developed consistently, since the beast's first two victims are innocent women, the second an actual Native American).

Gil and the gangsters venture into a savage wilderness to escape civilization rather than advance its cause, and in this they resemble the beast, whose desire to avoid humanity provides an ironic commentary on the similar retreats of Gil and Alex. Although they perceive themselves as moral opposites, Alex's contempt for ordinary people, "all tied down to their petty little futures," is merely the flip side of Gil's determination to withdraw from human interaction within a cabin as isolated as the beast's cave.31 One of the film's most striking moments occurs when Alex finally discovers the monster's lair. As Alex enters the cave, Hellman cuts to Byron's cocooned corpse,32 then back to Alex shouting "Good Lord!" as he looks offscreen. This is directly followed by a shot of Gil holding a rifle. The editing places Gil in the visual field that would usually be occupied by either the monster or some evidence of its activities. By establishing these connections between three supposedly hostile groups, Hellman undercuts that natural virility of which Gil is felt to be the possessor.33

As Marty's insistence that "My business with that baby outside is strictly personal. It's the most personal thing that's ever happened to me" suggests, the beast is related to tensions between the central characters, who are defined by their basic drives: Alex smokes a phallic cigar, Gil smokes a pipe, Gypsy drinks heavily, Marty seeks sexual satisfaction, and Byron is constantly eating. That this is part of a pattern connecting these individuals with the monster (which simply follows its own drives) is suggested by the beast's introduction — it attacks Natalie immediately after Marty playfully scares the woman by sneaking up behind her (much as Alex later appears behind Gypsy in the cave) — and the scene in which it attacks Byron. After Byron is dragged away, Hellman cuts to a close-up of Alex hungrily stuffing food into his mouth, the first time we have seen him eat anything. With Byron removed from the narrative, the drives he embodies are promptly absorbed by another character; as Gypsy confesses to Gil, "I've become part of Alex. Maybe a sick part, but a permanent one."

This process suggests a harsh practicality typical of Hellman — human aspiration is dwarfed by a beautiful but merciless natural order (all rocky landscapes and inhospitable terrains) which instantly accommodates any individual loss. And Beast from Haunted Cave resembles Hellman's later masterpieces in other ways. The relationship between Gypsy, Gil and Alex is essentially an early version of the Catherine/Clayton/Matthew triangle in China 9, Liberty 37, while the difficult journey undertaken by several men and one woman hiding their true motivations anticipates The Shooting. And, like Two-Lane Blacktop and China 9, it all ends in fire.34 Beast from Haunted Cave may be an apprentice work (though that complex interaction between foreground and background which would distinguish the mature films is already apparent), but if Hellman was ultimately unable to transcend the trashy concept, he certainly managed to express an oppositional coherence. The film is structured in terms of its progress through a series of increasingly primitive landscapes and emotional states: the first image shows a ski-lift's mechanism,35 the last a primeval creature dying in an ancient cave. Although the eventual formation of a "good" heterosexual couple appears to provide a sense of closure, the final shot — with Gil and Gypsy almost lost in the corner of the frame while the beast burns in the background — has a curiously desolate tone. The beast may have few positive connotations or claims on our sympathy (unlike, say, King Kong or Frankenstein's monster), but its fiery demise at least expresses a genuine energy, something conspicuously lacking in the "romantic" leads.

Chapter 2

The Filmgroup Expansions, 1962-1963

Estragon: "Nothing to be done.

Vladimir: I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle."

Waiting for Godot

In 1960, Roger Corman gave Hellman's theater associate Harvey Berman the chance to make his first film The Wild Ride. As Corman recalls, "Harvey taught a high school drama class and ran a film course in Walnut Creek. He approached me with the idea that he could shoot one of our juvenile delinquent films with his students for very little money. That sounded good to me. Harvey started shooting, but when I saw the first day's rushes I told him to stop because it was clear we were on our way to making a truly amateurish film. 'Wait for summer vacation,' I told him. I'll send up a cameraman, a leading man, leading lady, art director, and my assistant.' So we held off. Then, I got Jack Nicholson and Georgianna Carter to play the male and female leads. I sent my art director, Danny Haller, and my assistant, Kinta Zabel, and gave Kinta a check for $30,000. 'You write the checks,' I instructed her, 'co-produce the film, keep track of everything, pay the bills'."1 Hellman was also enlisted as associate producer: "I was on location in Concord, CA, and on the set every day. This was when my friendship with Jack Nicholson began. I can't remember what my work consisted of, other than to be there to insure that Harvey didn't fuck up. I came back from the shoot with infectious mononucleosis, which is an extremely debilitating disease. I had only signed on as associate producer. Anyway, no one could make any sense out of the footage — there didn't even seem to be any slates on most of it — so Roger begged me to edit it. I told him I didn't even have the strength to go to the bathroom. He told me I only had to work a few hours in the morning, and could go to the beach in the afternoon. I finally agreed to edit the picture. I did everything myself, without even one assistant. I even edited the sound and music, neither of which I had done before (or since). I can't believe I survived the ordeal. Needless to say, it turned out to be 12 hours a day — the beach was a joke."2

The Wild Ride is mainly of interest for its vague anticipations of Two-Lane Blacktop, and for the fact that, like many of Hellman's own films, it begins in the middle of a scene, with the action already in progress (the decision to open the film this way could well have been made by Hellman in the cutting room). Curiously, Hellman's name does not appear onscreen — Harvey Berman is credited as director and producer, Kinta Zertuche as executive producer, and "William Mayer" as editor: "I was a member of the editor's guild, but not yet allowed to edit. Also, it was a non-union film. So that's why I couldn't take the editing credit. I don't think William Mayer was a real person. If he was, he had nothing to do with the movie, I don't know why I didn't get the associate producer credit."3

Hellman then worked on Corman's The Intruder (1961), adapted by Charles Beaumont from his own novel, but, like Corman's earlier Sorority Girl (1957), probably inspired by Calder Willingham's End as a Man (filmed by Jack Garfein in 1957 as The Strange One). As Corman told Joseph Gelmis, "It was about white and black relationships. The film was a magnificent critical success but did not make money. Thinking back on it, I decided that one of the reasons the film was not a commercial success was the fact that I believed so much in my subject matter that I pushed my own personal thoughts a little bit too heavily into it and the film became slightly propagandistic."4 This rare financial failure particularly annoyed Corman, who kept changing the film's title in order to make it more commercial (it is variously known as Shame, I Hate Your Guts and The Stranger), and finally sold it to Mike Ripps, a distributor who had a big success with Poor White Trash. Hellman was asked to make The Intruder more suitable for Ripps' market by shooting additional sex scenes with anonymous actors: "Mike Ripps was involved in my added scenes. It is my recollection that, on one of his trips to meet with me in L. A., Mike was killed on the freeway while on his way to my house. But I see that a Mike Ripps directed a film in 1974, so if it's the same Mike Ripps, it was obviously someone else who was killed on the freeway — perhaps someone working for Mike."5 Sadly, prints of The Intruder containing Hellman's footage are no longer available: "All I remember is being embarrassed shooting the scenes, and putting pasties over the woman's nipples, and taping up the man's and woman's genitals."6

Around this time, Hellman married again (to Jaclyn Hellman) and formed The New American Film Society, an organization which, according to its manifesto, was intended for "film professionals who have banded together with the purpose of screening films they could not otherwise see." As Charles Eastman recalls, "Monte asked me to recommend some films to be considered for the program, and so perhaps the viewing of Unfaithfully Yours was my idea. Night and Fog was Monte's, my first encounter with this Resnais film."7 Although the first screenings took place at the Directors' Guild, the society soon moved to Sunset Boulevard's Lytton Center of the Visual Arts, the basement screening room of a bank built on the site of the former Garden of Allah hotel: "The New American Film Society was basically formed by John Fles and myself. The original board of directors also included my wife Jackie (as she was credited on the flyer for the second season), Louis Barron, Fred Haines, Jack Hirschman, B. J. Merholz, Bill Schipp, Jack Schwartzman (my lawyer), Lisa Stein, Paula Touber and Selwyn Touber. The first series included A Man Escaped, Zero for Conduct, Another Sky by Gavin Lambert, Broken Blossoms, A Movie by Bruce Connor, El, Entr'acte, We Are the Lambeth Boys, L'Atalante, The Curse of the Cat People, The Shop Around the Corner, The Bicycle Thief. The second series consisted of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's Summer Skin (there's a forgotten film!), White Mane, Port of Shadows, Lemon Hearts by Vernon Zimmerman, Outcast of the Islands, Swing Time, The Loves of Jeanne Ney. The third season was supposed to be Fires on the Plain, Queen Kelly, Fear and Desire, The Red Badge of Courage, Sawdust and Tinsel, The Birth of a Nation, M, The Gold Rush, Rome Open City, The Passion of Joan of Arc. I don't remember how much, if any, of this season was realized. Night and Fog and Unfaithfully Yours must have been introductory screenings before we announced our full program."8

In 1961, Hellman returned to Columbia, "working for the first time as an assistant editor. I believe one picture was Birdman of Alcatraz, and another The Notorious Landlady. The job was not like my work on Medic, where I worked closely with the editor. Columbia was more like a factory (we called it 'the prison,' which it looked like) where all the assistants from different productions worked more or less together. It was not unusual to see parts of dailies from different productions, nor to see bits of scenes on moviolas in different cutting rooms during the course of a day. I had much more of a rapport with the other assistants than with my own editor."9

In 1962, Roger Corman attempted to sell his Filmgroup catalogue to Allied Artists Television, and was told that five of these B-features—most of which ran little more than an hour — were too short for commercial time slots. Corman responded by asking Jack Hill and Monte Hellman to shoot additional footage featuring those actors who were still available. While Hill stretched Corman's The Wasp Woman (1958) from 66 to 77 minutes, Hellman expanded Beast from Haunted Cave and three Corman-directed titles: Ski Troop Attack, Last Woman on Earth (1960) and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1960).

In a 1974 interview, Hellman told Christian Braad Thomsen that, "I've always been attracted to the myth of Sisyphus, and I think there's a little bit of Sisyphus in all my films, the idea of an action that is repeated over and over again. The man who climbs the mountain to push the stone to the top, and the stone rolls down and he has to start all over, again and again. I see a lot of things in terms of circles and circling back. It just seems that's what so much of human endeavor is."10 Something along these lines must have occurred to Hellman when, towards the end of 1962, he found himself embroidering four films that had already been finished and released, his own directorial debut of three years earlier among them. Yet Hellman recalls the experience as one of total freedom. In contrast to Beast from Haunted Cave—where he had shot someone else's script and been prevented from editing the resulting footage — Hellman here assumed total control as director, writer, producer and editor. As he later recalled, "In a way, those weeks were among the most creative of my life. It was joyous work, without a trace of egotism. That experience was terrific because I really had my own unit and I was able to produce, write, and direct some stuff that I thought was very creative. That was probably the most fun I've ever had. I had absolute control over the crew and how the money was spent and everything. It was really fantastic, plus the fact that it was totally off the wall stuff—it was like Saturday Night Live."11

With Winter approaching, it made sense to start by tackling the two films set in snowy landscapes. Thus it was that in December 1962, Beast from Haunted Cave and Ski Troop Attack were once again shot back-to-back, this time with California's Mammoth Lake substituting for the original locations. Unable to secure the services of Frank Wolff ("Frank Wolff and Mike Forest went to Italy to be in Atlas for Roger. Frank never came back. Mike came back briefly, so he was available for the added scenes, but he too spent many years working in Italy"12) or Sheila Carol, Hellman was obliged to focus on the characters played by Michael Forest, Richard Sinatra and Wally Campo. By comparing the television version (currently available on DVD from Synapse Films with a running time of 71m 56s) with the theatrical print released by Sinister Cinema, we can see that the following three sequences (which have a combined length of 6m 30s) were added in 1962.

After a card reading "Allied Artists Television Corporation Presents A Film Group [sic] Picture," there is a new pre-credits sequence lasting 1m 37s. The film now begins with Marty taking photos of the building he plans to rob, then driving to the ski lodge with Byron. After telling Byron to "Get your skis and meet me at the lift," Marty photographs the skiing vacationers, and the image freezes before cutting to the 1959 film's opening credits.

Three minutes forty seconds into Sinister's tape, the shot of Gypsy and Alex on a ski lift dissolves to the exterior of their hotel. The television version eliminates this dissolve and adds a new 3m 30s sequence. As the ski lesson Gil is giving Marty and Byron comes to an end, the three men stop outside Gil's ski shop. Marty encounters Gil's sister Jill (Jaclyn Hellman), a character not seen (or even referred to) in the original. They strike up a conversation, and Marty asks Jill to have dinner with him, but Gil tells her she will have to work that evening.

Thirty-one minutes thirty-three seconds into Sinister's tape, the introduction of Small Dove dissolves to an exterior view of Gil's cabin. The final 1962 insert — a sequence shot lasting 1m 22s—appears here. Gil approaches a wooden bridge (ostensibly just outside the cabin) and talks to Marty about his life, concluding, "I like what I'm doing. I think that's about as easy as you can take it."

During the first dozen years of his career, each Hellman project represented an aesthetic advance on the one previous. Certainly the footage shot for Beast from Haunted Cave during 1962 is superior to anything in the 1959 production, and whereas the additional dialogue can be seen as padding, it also has a relaxed quality that gives the film a new depth and warmth while anticipating Robert Culp's conversations with Richard Beymer in Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (1989). The second sequence is of special interest, since it contains the (obviously uncredited) screen debut of Hellman's wife Jaclyn, as well as a cameo appearance by the director's dog. Totally lacking in affectation, Jaclyn Hellman^13 gives a pleasantly naturalistic performance which seems to have been (but apparently wasn't) improvised on the spot. It is intriguing to see how all three 1962 sections focus on Marty. In the 1959 film, Richard Sinatra's character fails to transcend the script's cliches; here he becomes a fully rounded human being, trapped in a violent gangster universe, but yearning for something better. The filmmaking is more visually fluent. Notice the alternation between shots showing Marty isolated against a grey wall and shots showing Jill (who represents an opening into a richer way of life) against a white background with other people wandering in and out of the frame. Hellman's growing confidence with actors is demonstrated by the way underlying tensions are conveyed through a few casual gestures, the manner in which Gil dominates his sister reinforcing the connection between him and the villain Alex Ward, who exercises a similar control over Gypsy. If Jill and Gypsy (like so many of Hellman's female characters) yearn for a sense of community, Gil and Alex seek only solipsistic isolation.

The television version of Ski Troop Attack is currently available from Sinister Cinema with a running time of 70m 27s, 11m 2s of which was added by Hellman in 1962. The film follows an American ski patrol as it moves through Germany during the Winter of 1944. The cast is identical to Beast from Haunted Cave's—Michael Forest stars as Lieutenant Factor, with Frank Wolff as Sergeant Potter, Richard Sinatra as Private Herman Grammelsbacher, Wally Campo as Private Ed Ciccola and Sheila Carol as Frau Heinsdorf — and once again only Forest, Sinatra and Campo appear in Hellman's additions.

After the opening credits, the film originally started with a snowy landscape accompanied by the words "The Huertgen Forest, Germany 1944." In Sinister's print, this is interrupted by the first Hellman-directed sequence, which lasts 2m 48s and begins with five members of a German ski patrol ("They were probably skiers we recruited in Mammoth"14) observed from inside a camera's viewfinder. A reverse shot shows Lieutenant Factor taking a photo, then hiding under a bridge. The Germans cross the bridge and vanish into the distance.

After some 3 minutes of Corman's film, we cut to the second (and last) of Hellman's additions, which runs 8m 14s and begins with Grammelsbacher and Ciccola sitting by a river. Unfortunately, print damage has resulted in the loss of this sequence's opening from Sinister Cinema's tape; it now begins in the middle of a conversation, during which the two men discuss their lives. Factor then appears and tells them that "tomorrow we're gonna split up into two groups. We can cover more area that way." At this point, Hellman dissolves to Factor, Grammelsbacher and Ciccola on skis the following morning. As the three men come to a halt, they are fired upon by a German patrol. Factor circles around behind the Germans and shoots several of them in the back. The last remaining German aims at Factor, but is shot by Ciccola. As the Americans look down at the dead bodies, the image fades to black.

Although the final shot of Hellman's sequence anticipates a motif from Corman's film — that of Factor standing over the corpses of Americans and Germans for whose deaths he has been responsible — the 1962 footage essentially functions as a self-contained unit. Hellman strips the World War II movie of its propogandistic element, and if his attitude is best summed up by Grammelsbacher's "they're human beings and I'm a human being," the tone is less pacifist than existential; having little interest in defending democracy, the soldiers would rather be "anywhere but here," and Factor's initial non-encounter with a Nazi patrol is marked by that vague sense of disappointment and averted confrontation which distinguishes Warren Oates' avoidance of a hostile redneck in Two-Line Blacktop. As so often with Hellman, actions exist in a vacuum, deprived of any but the most immediate resonance. The first scene added to Ski Troop Attack begins in exactly the same way as Beast from Haunted Cave's new pre-credits sequence, with a character surreptitiously taking photographs, and we are asked to draw no distinction between an action carried out as part of a robbery and an action performed in the name of America's fight against fascism. The authority invoked by Factor (who associates respect for it with the Germans) points to a conflict more internal than external, and it is significant that Factor's method of circling around to attack the enemy from the rear mirrors the way he suddenly appears behind Grammelsbacher and Ciccola.

The most interesting thing about this lengthy dialogue sequence is its aimlessness. The context — with the icy lake, the dark forest visible behind Factor and the constant sound of wind — is explicitly that of Eternity, but the actual conversation is random and purposeless. It may well be that this peculiar assignment enabled Hellman to make a connection between the cinema and his more overtly intellectual theater work. If the impression of a diversion from the main narrative, of time being filled until the plot resumes, can easily be explained by reference to the circumstances of production, it also recalls Waiting for Godot (as well as anticipating the predominant mood of Hellman's later masterpieces).

The next two films Hellman expanded were another matched pair — Last Woman on Earth and Creature from the Haunted Sea—originally shot back-to-back by Corman on location in San Juan, Puerto Rico, during 1960. Last Woman represented the screenwriting debut of Robert Towne, who also appeared (under the pseudonym "Edward Wain") in one of the three lead roles (reportedly because the script was unfinished and Corman didn't want to pay separate air fares for a writer and an actor), and Creature was written in one week by Charles Griffith when Corman decided to extend his stay in Puerto Rico. A satirical comedy of the kind Corman had already attempted with A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1959), Creature's narrative focuses on gangster Renzo Capeto (Antony Carbone) and his moll Mary-Belle Monahan (Betsy Jones Moreland), who, along with Towne's character Sparks Moran (actually a secret agent whose "real" name is XK150) and Renzo's henchman Pete Peterson (Beach Dickerson), agree to help smuggle gold out of Castro's Cuba. Renzo plans to steal the gold himself by encouraging his Cuban passengers to believe that a monster is in the vicinity. But, after Renzo arranges a shipwreck on a Puerto Rican island, the monster proves to be real. By contrast, Last Woman on Earth (one of Corman's finest films) is a somber drama in which crooked businessman Harold Gern (Carbone), his wife Evelyn (Moreland) and lawyer Martin Joyce (Towne) find themselves perhaps the last survivors of a tantalizingly vague disaster that has wiped out the human race. Interestingly, the film begins with a cockfight, foreshadowing the Corman-produced, Hellman-directed Cockfighter (1974).

Hellman's additions were filmed in Santa Monica during March 1963. The fact that he was able to recruit all three of the original principals (as well as Beach Dickerson) undoubtedly gave him more room to maneuver (though Betsy Jones Moreland is noticeably older and no longer blonde), and the scenes added to Creature from the Haunted Sea are remarkably energetic and inventive. The television version used to be available from Sinister Cinema with a running time of 74m 49s, 15m 55s of which is by Hellman. This print begins with a 5m 38s pre-credits sequence set in Havana, Cuba. The first thing we see is XK150 (Robert Towne) having his tennis shoes polished. After a piece of paper is inserted into his sock, the secret agent starts to leave, only to see his "contact" gunned down by two bearded men (John Fles and Stanton Kaye: "Stanton went on to become an apprentice grip on The Shooting, then later a film maker"15). After escaping from the assassins, XK150 reads the message in his sock, dons a ridiculous disguise (consisting of sunglasses and a fake moustache), and proceeds to the Santo Domingo bar, where he meets agent XK120, a young woman played by Jaclyn Hellman. After some comically cryptic dialogue,16 XK150 departs.

Twenty-nine minutes fifty-nine seconds into Sinister Cinema's tape, after Renzo and the Cubans agree on Puerto Rico as their destination, we find the second sequence added by Hellman (running 5m 51s and filmed in Newport). It begins with a shot of Renzo looking through a pair of binoculars which he then hands to Sparks/XK150 before telling Pete Peterson to "Ask Tostado and his men to stay below." As Mary-Belle sings a romantic ballad entitled "Creature from the Haunted Sea," the Cubans' boat pulls up alongside Renzo's. The lead Cuban (Dale Wilbourn, "who was Millie Perkins' boyfriend at the time"17) insists on searching Renzo's boat, but Renzo and the others overpower him and kill all the Cubans (one of whom is played by Stanton Kaye — his second role in the film). The scene ends with Mary-Belle contemptuously rejecting XK150's clumsy seduction attempts ("She was madly in love with me, only she didn't know it yet," he insists in voiceover).

The last of Hellman's 1963 additions, which clocks in at 3m 27s, appears 42m 49s into Sinister's transfer, soon after Renzo and his passengers arrive on the island. It begins with XK150 walking along a beach. Finding a conveniently located payphone, he places a call to XK120 at the Santo Domingo bar. Another cryptic conversation ensues ("I'll give you all my utilities and all my railroads for Park Place" says XK150, to which XK120 replies "Not a chance. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect the $200"), during which a smiling man (Richard Sinatra, here making his third and final appearance in Hellman's Filmgroup expansions) walks up to XK150 and waits to use the phone. XK150 walks away past an old man with a walking stick: "The man with a stick is an actor named Charles Macauley, who was my next-door neighbor at the time. It was on Larrabee Street, just off the Sunset Strip. I had a lot of future stars/directors/producers as neighbors at that time. Now the street is occupied mostly by prostitutes."18

Considering the circumstances, the sheer verve of Hellman's footage is astonishing. The opening sequence — with its hand-held camerawork, inspired use of locations and satirical deconstruction of cinematic clichés—has a certain nouvelle vague quality, the ironic attitude towards the secret agent and that ideal of masculine detachment he represents anticipating Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965). The presence of Jaclyn Hellman (Anna Karina to Robert Towne's Eddie Constantine?), whom Monte recalls being pregnant with their daughter Melissa at the time of filming, suggests a personal investment in the material (as does the presence of Karl Lucas, an actor who had appeared in Hellman's production of The Cave Dwellers, as the Santo Domingo's bartender), and the dialogue between XK150 and XK120 (a character mentioned but not seen in the original film) foreshadows the life-as-game motif that would become such an important aspect of the director's work. Similarly, the rocky beach XK150 walks across in the third sequence introduces a landscape to which Hellman would frequently return. The title song (added by Hellman on the assumption that a film called Creature from the Haunted Sea should have a title song, and obviously intended as a parody of The Lady from Shanghai) also marks the beginning of an important professional collaboration, since it was written by Carole Eastman.

Although the film was originally in color, television prints of Last Woman on Earth were printed in black and white to match Hellman's additions. A video of the expanded edition recorded from U.S. television runs 71m 24s, including 7m 21s shot in 1963. Hellman's first scene lasts 2m 41s and appears 9m 31s in, after Martin has visited Evelyn's room to collect some legal papers. At this point, Hellman adds a scene in a hotel bar noticeably different from that of the original film — in fact, it's the bar where Hellman shot his pre-credits sequence for Creature (with the same actor, Karl Lucas, playing the bartender — he's even wearing the same shirt). The scene begins with the bartender placing a drink in front of Harold just before Evelyn arrives. After a brief discussion, during which Evelyn reveals her unhappiness ("It's no different here than it was in the States. Even here lawyers chase after you, your business drags behind you"), Harold leaves.

Hellman's second sequence appears 40m 49s in and lasts 4m 40s. It begins with a close-up of a corpse (Jaclyn Hellman) on a beach (the same location through which Robert Towne walked in the third scene added to Creature). Martin looks down at her, wanders off into the distance, climbs some rocks and emerges on a different part of the beach, where he finds Evelyn and Harold. Martin tells Harold he has been on "a blind date ... about a hundred yards up the beach," and Harold goes to see what he is talking about. After Harold leaves, Evelyn sits on a rock and has a conversation with Martin, who admits to disliking Harold "because he's either vain enough or stupid enough to think that it really matters what happens to us." The sequence ends as Harold returns, then walks away down the beach, followed by Martin and Evelyn.

The bar sequence reveals how much complexity Hellman can bring to a clichéd situation. Rather than allow the relationship to remain at the "neglected-woman married to uncaring-macho-businessman" level, Hellman treats both characters with great sensitivity, the acting suggests many ambiguities and possibilities. The consequence of such even-handedness, however, is the sense of stasis that marks Hellman's two segments (and would soon become the defining feature of his work). The first sequence begins with Harold sitting alone and ends with Evelyn in the same position; despite the genuine attempts at communication and obvious need for companionship, the only progress is the swapping of one loneliness for another, and a similar pattern is discernible in the second sequence. Hellman's perception of existence in terms of "circles and circling back" is reflected in his filmmaking practice, which blatantly violates Hollywood's norms of narrative and character development. Shots (such as the long take here which starts with Harold walking away to find the corpse and finishes with him coming back), scenes, and often entire films, end by returning to their point of departure (a process literalized in the final frames of Two-Lane Blacktop, where the print itself returns to point zero), and the specifically circular nature of the Filmgroup expansions seems to have suggested the circle as the logical structural figure (cf. Factor circling around behind the enemy in Ski Troop Attack). Both Last Woman on Earth sequences end as they began, with individuals trapped in states of isolation, alienated from each other and their surroundings. Martin's movement across the beach, through the sea and over some rocks implies an elemental struggle he can neither lose nor win, since there is no clear objective he might reach, and in this he resembles the typical Hellman protagonist, obsessed with games and competitions but incapable of formulating worthwhile goals.

In order to understand the beach scene, we might ask of what it consists. On the one hand, there are fragile bodies struggling against nature and their own neurotic impulses while desperately trying to forge emotional connections; on the other, there are harsh landscapes whose perfection dwarfs all human aspiration. Uniting both elements is the figure of the corpse, which introduces the sequence and casts a shadow over subsequent events. It is through the corpse lying on the beach that the body reaches an accommodation with, and actually becomes part of, the landscape. For Hellman, mortality provides a context against which our actions must be judged. But this is not a form of pessimism. On the contrary it subserves a critique of death-oriented masculine obsession that is at least implicitly feminist, and is often explicitly articulated by female characters. It is Jaclyn Hellman, Last Woman's corpse, who, in Flight to Fury, speaks for the filmmaker when she rejects Jack Nicholson's insistence that death provides a form of "punctuation": "You're focusing on the punctuation and forgetting the sentence."

Chapter 3

The Terror (1963)

Throughout early Autumn 1962, Roger Corman had been busy shooting The Young Racers on various European locations. Among his crew was sound recordist Francis Coppola. When the production wrapped, Corman offered Coppola some spare change to make Dementia 13 in Ireland. Coppola shot the film in three weeks, then visited Yugoslavia to "Americanize" the dialogue for Rados Novakovic's Operation: Titian, a thriller Corman had acquired.1 Titian's unusually lengthy shoot lasted from late August to mid-December, during which time Corman had returned to America and begun filming The Raven for AIP. Boris Karloff was the star. In late September, with The Raven nearing the end of its 15-day schedule, Corman asked Leo Gordon to write The Terror, a Gothic horror film set in 1806. The Raven wrapped on a Friday, and The Terror went into production—at AIP's expense and with the clapboard still bearing the title The Raven—the following Monday. Karloff was cast as Baron Victor Frederick von Leppe, Jack Nicholson (The Raven's juvenile lead) as Andre Duvalier, a lieutenant in Napoleon's army, Nicholson's then-wife Sandra Knight as Helene, and Dick Miller as the Baron's servant Stefan. Corman managed to complete an impressive amount of footage in a mere two days.

According to Jack Hill, when Corman screened editor Mort Tubor's assembly of Dementia 13, "he broke his pencil and threw it at the screen and stomped out of the screening room, he was so angry. There were whole scenes missing and what was there didn't cut together and didn't make sense."2 Hill remembers Coppola returning from Yugoslavia and persuading Corman that "the fault was that he hadn't been able to supervise the cut, and that all it needed was a few pickups. The editor and I knew better but didn't argue the point. Francis then shot some scenes (notably the pre-credits sequence) he had written in Ireland but had not covered there, and also some new material that I wrote."3 Corman then asked Coppola to complete The Terror, a task which involved writing new material. Coppola added two characters: Caterina, a witch played by Dorothy Neumann (repeating her characterization from Corman's The Undead), and Gustav, a deaf-mute played by Jonathan Haze.4 Jack Nicholson, Dick Miller and Sandra Knight (who became pregnant during the shoot) also appear in these scenes, which were shot in Big Sur, but although Coppola filmed for 11 days (more than doubling the agreed-upon schedule) during January 1963, only a small part of his footage appears in the final version. As Jack Hill (who served as Coppola's sound recordist) later revealed, "The problem was that we went up to Big Sur for a location and a major portion of his script was day-for-night and he did not tell the cameraman that it was supposed to be night and the cameraman shot it for day. Because of the continuity in the story it was impossible to use that footage because it had to intercut with real night scenes. Coppola's story didn't make any sense anyway."5 According to Hellman, "Most of Coppola's footage was unusable because it didn't cut together to make a comprehensible movie."6 Nonetheless, more than ten minutes of Coppola's material proved salvageable.

Corman apparently found Coppola's new scenes for Dementia 13 no more useful than his contributions to The Terror. Since Coppola had subsequently found a higher paying job at Seven Arts, Jack Hill was asked to write and direct additional material that would provide Dementia 13 with an appropriate running time,7 while Monte Hellman was given the task of completing The Terror. Hellman's shoot took place in May 1963. Working from a new script by Hill, and with Gregory Sandor as DP, Hellman and his four cast members—Jack Nicholson, Sandra Knight (now four months pregnant), Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze (no longer playing a deaf-mute) — filmed on various locations around Los Angeles: "All my beach scenes were either shot at Leo Carrillo State Beach (all the rocky terrain) or Palos Verdes Peninsula. The forest scenes were shot in a small park in the center of Santa Barbara."8 As Charles Eastman recalls, "Monte was shooting some footage for Roger Corman off the rocks of Palos Verdes, and as I lived in the neighborhood I went down and watched him work."9 After only five days, Hellman emerged with 15 minutes of splendid material.

It Hellman could do nothing wrong, it must have seemed that Coppola could do little right, and with Coppola no longer around, Corman's animosity was redirected from the man to his film. Clearly believing that Dementia 13 could not be sold on its own merits, Corman resorted to a William Castle-style gimmick: audience members were given a test to determine whether or not they were potential axe murderers. Corman had Hellman direct a prologue in which Dr William J. Bryan, Jr. (previously "technical advisor for hypnotism scenes" on Corman's Tales of Terror) introduced the "D-13 test." Hellman recalls shooting this "at around midnight at the end of the fifth day of The Terror."10 Sadly, this introduction has disappeared from most prints,11 but a small part of Hellman's work is preserved in the film's trailer, which begins with a name-plate reading "William J. Bryan, Jr. MD," followed by a shot of Dr. Bryan sitting at his desk writing. A narrator says, "Introducing Dr. William J. Bryan, the first medical doctor in the United States to specialise in the practice of hypnotism." Hellman then cuts to a slightly different angle (allowing us to see some impressively framed diplomas) as the good doctor looks directly into the camera and says, "In 1960 I was consulted regarding a tragic case of a triple murderer who strangled his victims immediately after viewing the movie Psycho. His fascinating analysis under hypnosis, now a matter of record in my book, came to the attention of the producers of Dementia 13, who asked me to devise a method of preventing a recurrence of this tragedy."

A couple of months after Hellman's shoot, Corman spent two more days directing additional scenes for The Terror (on the set of The Haunted Palace), notably the grand finale, with Boris Karloff replaced by stand-in Dennis Jakob.12 Once again, the filming was carried out at AIP's expense, though this time with their full knowledge, since, according to Jack Hill, "by that time Roger had a deal with AIP to release the picture."13 The participating actors were Jack Nicholson, Dorothy Neumann, Dick Miller and a very pregnant Sandra Knight ("We used a secretary in the office to double for her in the full-figure shots in the water" recalls Hill^14). According to Hellman, "I was there when Roger directed these scenes on the stage. The death of Sandra was the last scene to be shot. I originally arranged for Maurice Seiderman, who had done the eye effect for Jonathan Haze's death scene, to do a reverse stop motion effect for the flesh melting away from Sandra's face, leaving only a skull. The cost was to be $500. Roger refused to pay, so he used a can of caramel syrup instead."15 Although Corman often claims that Jack Nicholson did some directing during the final day of filming, Hellman and Jack Hill both tend to doubt this.16 As Hellman told me, "My recollection is that I didn't edit my scenes, and that the editor was Gene Corso. I see, however, that he isn't the credited editor, so I may be wrong. But Roger used Gene a lot, sometimes as a sound editor, so he may have done these added scenes."17 According to Jack Hill, "Stuart O'Brien edited the footage under my supervision after the original editor, Mort Tubor, left. Gene Corso was the sound FX editor."18 Hill also directed a handful of inserts and supervised the extensive dialogue replacement ("the only time I ever directed Jack Nicholson,"19) which is particularly noticeable in Coppola's sections. On the final print, Stuart O'Brien is credited as "Film Editor" while Francis Coppola is given the baffling credit of "Associate Producer," and Hellman the almost equally baffling credit of "Location Director" ("which sounds like I scouted locations" he later complained^20), Leo Gordon and Jack Hill share the screenplay credit, John Nicholaus is the credited cinematographer, and Corman (who was responsible for only 52 of the film's 79 minutes) takes sole director credit. The Terror was finally released in September 1963, double-billed with Dementia 13.

The Terror begins with a Corman-directed pre-credits sequence showing Baron von Leppe following a trail of blood to a door, behind which lurks a decaying corpse. This scene provides an apt introduction to the film's mysteries, since the corpse has no narrative relevance whatsoever.

Hellman's first section immediately follows the opening credits. After a shot of waves crashing against rocks (nature as violence), we cut to a much calmer sea observed through a tree's branches (nature as harmony). This image dissolves to the shore observed from a high angle, with a small figure barely visible as it moves along the sea's edge. A slightly closer view reveals this to be a man on horseback, riding in a way that suggests he is on the verge of collapse. Hellman cuts to a low-angle as the rider, Andre Duvalier, takes a small object from his pocket and looks at it. A close-up shows that this object is a compass on which the indicator is spinning out of control (Hellman even zooms in to give us a better look). In the course of half a dozen shots, Hellman has moved from a landscape to a compass, a movement (involving an intricate juxtaposition of panoramic high angles and intimate low angles) from the general to the particular that will often recur in his work. The sequence continues with Andre throwing his compass away, a gesture that defines not only Andre, but every major Hellman protagonist. Although Andre tells Helene he was separated from his regiment, his later description of himself as "a weary, disillusioned soldier" suggests that this separation involved the acting out of a subconscious wish. As the surrender of the compass indicates, Andre is a wanderer, not coming from anywhere or attempting to reach a specific destination; like Allan Grey in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr, he feels compelled to investigate supernatural events because of his profound alienation from mundane reality, and although he seems to stumble across these events accidentally, the presence of Stefan inexplicably observing him from a nearby cliff during the opening sequence suggests that Andre's role in the drama is predetermined.

Alone among the project's three directors, Hellman treated the dream-like absence of logic that was a virtually inevitable by-product of the bizarre production history not as a liability to be overcome, but as potentially the film's greatest strength. Water plays a major role in Hellman's scenes (as it does in Corman's climax, where the castle is destroyed by a flood), being consistently associated with the supernatural: Andre's manner of riding along the sea's edge (like a character in a Mario Bava film) suggests a man existing between two worlds, and the major stages of his journey into a ghostly realm occur whenever he comes into contact with water. When Andre faints and falls from his horse, ocean water revives him (or, perhaps, signals his transition to a dream state), and it is immediately after this that he first glimpses Helene, the woman "from the sea." During her initial appearance, Helene appears to be floating on water, though she is simply standing on a rock in the ocean (a stunning image which manages to be mysteriously evocative while remaining completely logical), and water proves to be the first thing they discuss. Andre asks for drinking water, and Helene indicates a stream containing "clear water from the mountain" before leading him into a nearby forest so that he can see the fish swimming in a brook.21 The transition from rocky beach to verdant forest suggests that peaceful withdrawal from the turmoil of war with which Andre associates Helene, and Hellman's seemingly instinctual grasp of landscape's ability to convey an emotional state allows him to make the character's obsession a palpable reality (though it seems likely that Coppola directed the forest scene, its effectiveness is primarily a result of the context provided by Hellman). The following sequence, which almost certainly includes fragments of Coppola's work,22 uses purely cinematic means to communicate its essential points. The dream-like atmosphere is reinforced by a series of dissolves in which images ranging from the explicable (Andre following Helene along a narrow path) to the seemingly irrelevant (a pan from the bottom to the top of a tree) are briefly glimpsed, and a disturbingly discordant note is introduced by the abrupt cut from Andre chasing Helene across a beach to the same action viewed in extreme long shot. The sequence ends as Andre attempts to follow Helene into the sea, but is attacked by a hawk. Hellman recalls that "the hawk was 'flown' into the shot tied to the end of a fish line on a fishing pole."23

Coppola was responsible for the following scene, which begins as Andre wakes up in a cottage and sees someone he thinks is Helene, but is actually the witch Caterina, who denies there is a young woman in the area and insists that Helene is the name of her hawk. Gustav appears, and Caterina disdainfully notes "he brought you here." Andre soon falls asleep again. When he awakes, the cottage is empty except for the hawk, which devours a mouse and flies out the door. Andre puts on his cloak and follows.

The next section directed by Hellman starts here with a shot of the hawk flying through a dark forest. Following the bird, Andre discovers Helene sitting by a stream. Helene kisses Andre, then runs away without saying a word. As Andre attempts to pursue Helene, Gustav appears and throws a rock onto the ground. When the rock sinks (in a shot directed by Jack Hill), Andre realizes Helene had been trying to lead him into quicksand, though Gustav insists she is "possessed" and needs help. After telling Andre he will find Helene in "the castle of the Baron Von Leppe ... There is great danger. Find Eric. Eric knows," Gustav runs off. This sequence is memorable for the matched cuts juxtaposing Andre's movement with that of Caterina's hawk. If the bird and Helene are more obviously connected — they even share the same name — Andre's affinity with the supernatural is subtly implied by Hellman's precise use of camera movement and cutting (although he did not personally edit this footage, it was presumably assembled according to his intentions). Jack Hill recalls that "There was a scene where Jonathan Haze throws a rock to show where there is quicksand. Nobody could make that scene work. So, I dug a pit in my backyard and put a net in it so the rock wouldn't sink too fast. Well, that succeeded. When you don't have a studio behind you, you have to come up with these solutions."24 According to Hellman, "The quicksand idea was originally developed as a way to kill Jonathan Haze. When we decided to use the hawk clawing out his eyes instead, the quicksand was used briefly in the forest scene."25

A dissolve returns us to Coppola's footage. Back in the cottage, Andre sketches Helene while Caterina, who still insists "there is no girl," refuses to help him find the castle. Since Gustav has "gone away," Andre sets out on his own. One intriguing thing about this sequence is Andre's explanation of why he is interested in the Baron's castle: "The girl that I followed last night and spoke to, I believe that she lives there." By watching Jack Nicholson's lip movements, we can see that the line delivered on-set was "The girl that I followed last night and spoke to told me that she lived there." Since Gustav was mute in the scenes shot by Coppola, it is clear that this information was originally imparted to Andre by Helene (who remains silent throughout the forest scene shot later by Hellman).

The next scene, in which Andre is almost killed by falling rocks, is also by Coppola. Hellman directed the shots of Andre stopping by the sea, washing his face and looking up to catch his first glimpse of the castle. Just as the earlier encounter with water preceded Andre's initial view of Helene, so here it is after washing his face that he sees the Baron's home. The impression is of someone entering a realm that exists primarily as the embodiment of his own neuroses and desires, an effect heightened not only by the blatant use of mattes for shots of the castle, but by the preceding sequences, which established that Andre had no idea where the castle was located. Now, after coming into contact with the sea, he simply looks up and sees the object of his quest looming above him.

It is here, 19 minutes in, that we finally encounter the material Roger Corman shot late in 1962, which begins with Andre arriving at the castle, seeing Helene in an upstairs window,26 and meeting the Baron. Corman was responsible for a solid 18 minutes of skillfully realized footage showing Andre prowling the castle's corridors, investigating the outward markings of a trauma which is both the Baron's and his own. The sequences in the chapel appear to have been filmed during the final phase of production in 1963, since they refer to characters and plot elements (Eric and "the old woman") introduced during Coppola's stint. It is also likely that the scene in which Andre's horse bolts from the stable after seeing Helene was shot during this later period.27

After the Baron admits to having killed his wife twenty years ago, another brief Hellman-directed sequence appears. We see Helene standing on a cliff staring out to sea. Gustav approaches and calls her "Lisa," a name Helene claims "sounds strange to me here by the sea ... my name is Helene. The old woman told me ... She summoned me here from the sea." Gustav demands she "Go back ... to the sea," but Helene says she will do so "Only when the sea enters the crypt. We shall rest there together, he and I, beneath the sea ... I must obey the old woman." After Andre tells Helene that "the Frenchman" can help her, Caterina's hawk appears, and Helene says, "The old one calls. She warns you, Gustav. Do not interfere. She has been patient with you long enough, but no more." This striking sequence again illustrates Hellman's sensitivity to landscape, his metaphysical concerns arising naturally from, but nevertheless transcending, the genre's traditional motifs. The overhead shots following Gustav's movement across the cliff (similar to those showing Martin struggling over the rocks in Last Woman on Earth) convey a sense of great effort expended to little purpose, Helene's fixed stare at the sea placing the action within a context that renders all activity futile. The moment when Helene negotiates a change of position, obliging Gustav to occupy her former place within the frame while she moves into his, is curiously disturbing. If Hellman's protagonists assert a fundamental belief in their individuality, his narratives function as traps designed to erase the distinctions between characters and place their obsessions within a critical framework. Identity in Hellman is often doubled, halved, or in danger of being completely erased, and The Terror's multiple exchanges—of which the cliff-top sequence stands as a visual correlative — anticipate Two-Lane Blacktop, in which G.T.O. alters his personality to reflect and accommodate his passengers.

The following sequence — showing Stefan's visit to Caterina's cottage — is Coppola's last. As Stefan surreptitiously peers through the window (acts of voyeurism occur in several Coppola films), Caterina uses a multi-colored lantern to hypnotize Helene, who appears and disappears as if by magic. Caterina's speech here is about as close as we come to an explanation of Helene (or rather the explanation finally settled on by Jack Hill): "Oh powers of darkness, let the spirit of Ilsa sink deeper, deeper into this mortal form. Helene, be as though you never were. Spirit of Ilsa, see through these eyes. Seek revenge. Do my bidding, for only then shall you find relief from your torment. You are becoming stronger now. Quite strong. Soon you shall have the strength to carry out my vengeance. Vengeance! And the dark powers will set you free, for I have promised them a richer prize." This dialogue was obviously created in the dubbing studio. As Caterina says, "soon you shall have the strength to carry out my vengeance. Vengeance!" Dorothy Neumann's lips form the words, "you will drive him to suicide. Suicide!"

Following Stefan's departure from the cottage (and the revelation that it once belonged to Eric), there is another section directed by Corman. Back in the castle, Stefan tells the Baron that Andre refuses to leave. Andre then searches the Baron's room and hears Helene's voice asking for help. After leaving the room, Andre observes the Baron enter it. Again hearing voices, Andre bursts in and finds the Baron sitting alone. An embarrassed Andre promises to leave immediately.

The last Hellman-directed scene, shot in front of "what was then the American Film Institute,"28 begins as Andre prepares to depart. Stefan assures him he is "doing the best thing.... The Baron often does things which may seem strange to you and me, but the death of the Baroness was a severe shock to him, one from which I fear he's never fully recovered." As Andre mounts his horse, he asks who Eric was, and Stefan responds, "Do you recall the Baron spoke of returning from the war and finding the Baroness with another? ...Eric was that other." Viewed from a low angle, Andre rides out of frame while Stefan closes the door behind him. Hellman then dissolves to Andre riding along the sea's edge from left to right, reversing the direction he was moving in when we first saw him. Gustav appears and signals to Andre from a nearby cliff. As Andre pauses, Catarina's hawk attacks Gustav, clawing out his eyes.29 Gustav staggers to the cliff's edge and falls onto the rocks below. With his dying breath, he tells Andre that Helene "awaits you. She loves you. You must help her. Tonight. Her soul cries out for release." Hellman's low angle view of a blinded Gustav moving towards the camera before vanishing screen right echoes the shot depicting Andre's departure from the castle, reinforcing the connection between these characters. Like the Baron, Gustav externalizes tendencies within the protagonist: if Andre cannot trust his senses—he hears voices with no explicable source and sees people he is told do not exist — he resembles Gustaf, who is initially presented as a deaf mute and exits the narrative after being blinded. The most telling comment on their relationship appears in the shot showing Andre listening to Gustav's dying words, which Hellman composes so that only the lower part of Gustav's face is visible, his blinded eyes obscured by Andre's head and right shoulder. It is almost as if these two incomplete men have merged to form a whole being.

The film's final 26 minutes are entirely the work of Corman (aside from a few close-ups of cascading water shot by Dennis Jakob at Hoover Dam). Andre returns to the castle and, after talking to Helene in the chapel, follows the Baron into his family crypt. Helene appears and convinces the Baron to commit suicide by locking himself into the crypt and flooding the cellars. The Baron orders Stefan to escort Andre from the castle, but Andre overpowers Stefan.30 In a scene shot during the final days of filming, Caterina arrives and tells Andre of her scheme to make the Baron commit suicide, thus avenging her son, Eric. In a plot twist apparently conceived by Corman on the spur of the moment, Stefan reveals it was really the Baron who died twenty years ago, and that Eric is still alive, having taken the Baron's place in mind and body.31 Meanwhile, the Baron has opened the floodgates that will allow the sea to enter the crypt and discovered that Ilsa is still a corpse rotting in her coffin. Helene boasts of having "damned you as you damned me. The part of me that loved you lies there, Victor, rotting in a coffin ... I am the spirit of Ilsa that your unholy sin gave over to the dark powers. But now, by giving your immortal soul to them, I will be free, Eric." As Helene attacks the Baron (mixing shots of Karloff taken in 1962 with more distant views of Dennis Jakob filmed in 1963), Andre (who has just seen Caterina struck down by a bolt of lightning) and Stefan burst into the crypt, and Andre carries Helene to safety, only to have her melt in front of him.

The most striking thing about this final section is the way it pursues the theme of transferred identity so obsessively that the text is ultimately rendered incoherent. Both the theme and the incoherence would become major elements in Hellman's work; if the Filmgroup expansions enabled him to create scenes whose function was to stall rather than advance the narrative, The Terror demonstrated just how flexible plot markers could be, how they need not lead to anything, but could simply function as free-floating signifiers. Consider the sequence near the end in which Stefan and Andre break into the Baroness' bedroom and discover a crib. Andre asks, "Did the Baroness have a child?" and Stefan replies, "I don't know. I never thought she did"— then the whole matter is simply dropped! I assume Corman originally planned to reveal that Helene was the Baron's daughter. Indeed, when Helene tells the Baron "I am the spirit of Ilsa," her lips form the words "I am your flesh." The function of Sandra Knight's character seems to have been rethought during each stage of the production, each of the abandoned concepts remaining visible in the finished film. Knight is progressively a) the Baroness Ilsa's daughter (perhaps Eric was her father) pretending to be Ilsa's ghost so that she can avenge her mother's murder by driving the Baron to suicide (Corman and Leo Gordon's original concept); b) an ordinary woman called Helene who, thanks to Caterina's hypnotic powers, mistakenly believes herself to be Ilsa's ghost (Coppola's concept); c) a woman called Helene who really has been possessed by Ilsa (the concept settled on by Jack Hill while rewriting the script for Hellman); and d) the genuine spirit of Ilsa, driving Eric (who believes himself to be the Baron) to suicide as a way of avenging herself upon the man whose willingness to commit adultery plunged her into a purgatory from which she will be released once Eric is delivered to "the dark powers" (Corman and/or Jack Hill's final concept). The released film even includes elements (notably Helene's climactic disintegration) that can't be explained by reference to any of these ideas (though Helene's fate makes perfect figurative sense — the character who has never been able to support any consistent narrative role simply evaporates). But if shifting identities appear in Corman's footage as the marks of a troubled production, Hellman's scenes use them as a consciously articulated theme, and one might trace the slipperiness of identity in, say, The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop to both the overtly intellectual interests which characterized Hellman's theater work and the more practical demands of Roger Corman's productions.

When The Terror fell into the public domain, Corman reclaimed his copyright by asking Mark Griffiths to shoot 12 minutes of additional footage starring Dick Miller, thus creating a new film entitled The Return of the Terror (1991). Over the years, The Terror has become something of an in-joke, frequently evoked as the supreme example of Corman's bizarre production methods. The most extensive of these tributes is Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1967), which was structured around footage from The Terror, but shots from the film have also turned up in Joe Dante and Allan Arkush's Hollywood Boulevard (1976), in which Paul Bartel plays a director named Erich von Leppe, Jim Wynorski's Transylvania Twist (1989) and Hellman's Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (1989). Perhaps more interesting than any of these is Epitaph (aka To Hold a Mirror), an autobiographical screenplay Hellman and Jack Nicholson collaborated on early in 1964. Nicholson would have played Josh, a struggling actor (clearly based on Nicholson himself), and the narrative would have shown Josh spending two or three days trying to raise $300 for his girlfriend's abortion. Millie Perkins was cast as the girlfriend, Lois, a character partly inspired by Sandra Knight: "Epitaph was really autobiographical in terms of Jack's life much more than mine, although I was part of the milieu. The central character was Jack. At that time, he had made many movies and done a lot of television, and he had scenes where he was in jail, and scenes where he was doing this and that: racing cars, everything. And so we were planning to do this film about a young actor who was just starting out, and use this footage from these other pictures as scenes from his movies. It would have been a lot of fun."32 Among the films Hellman planned to use clips from was The Terror. A script extract published in Charles Tatum, Jr.'s Monte Hellman shows that Epitaph was intended to begin with Josh, dressed in Napoleonic garb, leaving the set of "a horror film" in which he plays "the young lead" and going to the toilet (a task complicated by his costume) before talking to a technician who wants to know what it's like working with Boris Karloff. Sadly, Corman decided not to make the film, since he believed that the abortion theme and European tone were uncommercial: "The bottom line for Roger is what he thinks is commercial. I don't think it was the idea of abortion being controversial so much as the fact he thought it was a 'European' theme — hence, not commercial."33 But one might speculate on the possibility that Corman was repulsed by the idea of sponsoring a film about a character trying to raise such a small amount of money, a notion that flies in the face of everything Hollywood represents.34

Another film Hellman wanted to make during this period was Fraternity Hell Week, to be produced by Corman's assistant Kinta Zertuche from a screenplay by Robert Towne. According to Hellman, this "fell apart because we couldn't get the cooperation of Stanford University (or, I assume, UCLA). I can't remember whether it came before, during, or after Epitaph was started."35

Chapter 4

Back Door to Hell (1964)

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

— Pozzo in Waiting for Godot

In late 1963, after finishing work on The Terror, Hellman became an assistant editor at Universal, "where I worked on The Chrysler Playhouse, starring Bob Hope. I also worked on the Bob Hope Christmas Special, which won an Emmy that I shared reflectively (I got an award certificate). More than 25 years later, Bob Hope was honored by Variety, and took out a full page ad thanking all the people he'd worked with over the years. I was shocked to find myself included, I had been such a minor participant so many years past. I had a more personal relationship with my editor at Universal, Bud Isaacs, than I had with my editor(s) at Columbia. I believe I went directly from Bob Hope to Bus Riley's Back in Town, on which I was working as an assistant editor."1

Hellman's next two films came about as a result of The Terror. Robert Lippert (coincidentally, the man responsible for ending Hellman's theater group) was a prolific supervisor of exploitation product (his most important achievements were Samuel Fuller's first three films) who had distributed The Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), Roger Corman's initial effort as a producer.2 After taking over 20th Century-Fox's second feature unit in 1956, Lippert's specialty became "runaway productions": movies lensed cheaply (which is to say without union involvement) in foreign countries. These included two Eddie Romero films—Moro Witch Doctor and The Walls of Hell (aka Intramuros) — shot in collaboration with Romero's Manila based company Hemisphere Pictures during the early months of 1964. Working as an assistant story editor and casting director for Lippert was Fred Roos, a friend of Jack Nicholson, John Hackett and Don Devlin's. It was Roos who had found Nicholson work on two Lippert productions: John Bushelman's The Broken Land (1962), in which Nicholson played a small role, and Jack Leewood's Thunder Island (1963), co-written by Nicholson and Devlin. When Lippert mooted two more Philippines co-productions budgeted at $80,000 each, Roos, who had seen The Terror in Hong Kong and heard about it being completed by a couple of unknowns, suggested hiring either Francis Coppola or Monte Hellman. Lippert immediately cabled Roger Corman. With Coppola now at Seven Arts, the job was offered to Hellman (as he is fond of pointing out, if Coppola had been available, "he might have become rich and famous."3) Although Hellman was still at Universal working on Harvey Hart's Bus Riley's Back in Town, an Elliott Kastner production scripted by William Inge (under the pseudonym "Walter Gage"), he immediately abandoned the film (his name did not appear on the credits when it was released in 1965): "My editor, Folmar Blangsted, never forgave me for deserting him in the middle of a picture. That was the last time I worked as an assistant editor."4

Richard A. Guttman had already completed a screenplay for Back Door to Hell which satisfied no one, while the second "project" consisted of little more than a few random plot ideas concocted by Roos, lacking even a title. Hellman, Roos and Lippert all agreed that Jack Nicholson should script what became Flight to Fury while John Hackett^5 rewrote Back Door to Hell: Hackett and Nicholson would also act in both films.6 In April 1964, Hackett, Nicholson and Hellman, accompanied by Hellman's wife Jaclyn (who appears in Flight to Fury) and their infant daughter Melissa, sailed from Los Angeles to Manila on the S.S. Chusan. Roos was already organizing cameramen, supporting actors, a crew and lab services in the Philippines. Nicholson and Hackett wrote their respective scripts during the 28-day voyage (which included stopovers in Hawaii, Tokyo and Hong Kong), with Hellman actively collaborating on Nicholson's screenplay (earning himself a co-story credit), but essentially leaving Hackett to his own devices: "I'm sure I saw pages daily on Back Door to Hell, and made comments, but can't remember any specific contributions."7 When the ship docked (sometime in May), Hellman and his collaborators spent nearly a month in Manila casting and crewing both films before traveling several hundred miles southwest to Daet, a town in the Bicol River region which contained the kind of beach and jungle locations needed for Back Door to Hell. Lippert had Jimmie Rodgers—then one of America's top recording stars—flown in to play the lead, and shooting commenced, with the cast and crew confronted by harsh conditions that strengthened their sense of solidarity: "One time we broke for lunch in the middle of the jungle. I went to sit down, and fortunately noticed a little green snake curled up on my director's chair before I had a chance to sit on it. Several days later, one of our grips was going past a tree when one of these green babies struck him in the neck as he was walking by. He was dead before he hit the ground. Nevertheless, it was really terrific. We were halfway around the world, and we could kind of do what we wanted, because there was nobody there to supervise it other than Fred, who was on our side."8 After completing principal photography on Back Door to Hell, Hellman caught a bug and was hospitalized: "We had three weeks in between. I literally got sick the last day of shooting of the first one, and didn't recover until the first day of shooting of the next one. I was in the hospital for three weeks. Nobody knew what was wrong with me, but, in what became a typical pattern for our relationship, Jack [Nicholson] came to visit, laid hands on me and said he would cure me. He mumbled some stuff and sure enough, a few days later, I was well enough to go out scouting locations."9 Since Lippert wanted the films finished quickly, Back Door to Hell was edited by Fely Crisostomo while the director recuperated. According to Hellman, "I was so upset by the cut, I decided to re-edit it at night while shooting Flight to Fury. My schedule went something like this: Up at 5:00 am, breakfast. 6:00 am, leave for set. Sleep 1 hour in car. 6:00 pm, leave for home, sleep 1 hour in car, dinner, rest. 8:30 pm, leave for cutting room, re-edit, with Fred Roos keeping me company and going out for hamburgers and milk shakes. 1:30 am, leave for home, sleep till 5:00 am. I believe I finished the re-edit by the time I finished shooting Flight."10 Contractual complications prevented Hellman receiving an editor credit, so Fely Crisostomo's name remained on the film. Although the filmmakers had rejected Richard A. Guttman's hokey ending in favor of a more downbeat climax, Robert Lippert seemed delighted with Hellman's tight 69 minute cut, which he turned over to 20th Century-Fox for distribution. Fox was less pleased by the solemn tone, and insisted on adding two minutes of documentary footage (accompanied by jaunty patriotic music) near the climax, "making it look like this gung ho, pro-war movie, which is not exactly what it was."11 Fox also appended the following quotation (attributed to "editors of Life") to the end credits: "To all who fought and died ... God rest them and God forgive us all.''12 Fortunately, none of Hellman's material was removed, and the resulting 71 minute film opened in America (on the bottom half of a double-bill with Robert Aldrich's Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte) during 1965, with some British screenings the following year.

In Back Door to Hell, three American soldiers—Lieutenant Gary Craig (Jimmie Rodgers), Burnett (Jack Nicholson) and Sergeant Jersey (John Hackett) — carry out a reconnaissance mission on the Philippine island of Luzon during December 1955, 9 days before the U.S. invasion. They encounter Paco (Conrad Maga), a ruthless rebel leader who killed the Americans' contact, Miguel. Paco's lover, Maria (Annabelle Huggins), is the daughter of a local mayor. A Japanese captain (Joe Sison) threatens reprisals if the Americans are not delivered to him, but the guerillas mount a surprise attack and liberate the village. Ramundo (Johnny Monteiro), a bandit, provides information about Japanese troop movements in return for a radio, but later destroys the radio when it is not given to him immediately. While Paco's guerillas create a diversion, the Americans enter a Japanese short-wave station and send the information. Burnett is killed during the attack. Jersey carries Burnett's body to the river, where he encounters Maria, who reveals that Paco is dead.

If his previous work for Roger Corman saw Monte Hellman refining his control of mise en scene in the face of inadequate scripts and thankless assignments, Back Door to Hell is the work of a director at one with his material. The attack on the village (developing from, while easily surpassing, the combat sequence Hellman added to Ski Troop Attack) is a directorial triumph, documentary-style handheld camerawork, Ophulsian tracking shots, zooms and rapid cutting being combined with Rossellinian clarity. The precision of the filmmaking here mirrors the precision of the attack, but this is not a mere stylistic exercise: Burnett's recollection of the battle — "That whole thing was ridiculous. It went so close to the way we planned it I hardly had time to feel the usual fear" — underlines how technical proficiency can substitue for feeling. The efficiency of Hellman's filmmaking thus resembles that of the military operation while standing in marked opposition to it: if technical perfection precludes emotional involvement, Hellman does the precise opposite, using his directorial skill to prevent us from revelling in mass slaughter (see especially the battle's aftermath, with Craig stepping over dead bodies and staring at a Japanese corpse).

Much of the film's distinction must be attributed to John Hackett, whose screenplay expresses existential concerns similar to those which attracted Hellman to Beckett. It is Sergeant Jersey who articulates most of this philosophy (we can hardly blame Hackett for giving himself so many good lines); when Burnett wonders if they are the prisoners of Paco's guerillas, Jersey responds, "What difference does it make? ... We're all gonna die anyway. Tomorrow, next week, 30 years from now," and later asks, "What's so special about a human being? They get born, they just stumble around in the light for a while, they die. That's all." Jersey's position is one that Hellman feels able to neither embrace nor reject: like Burnett (who dubs Jersey "Sergeant War" and "Sergeant Blood"), we may be repulsed by this contempt for human life, but in many ways it is simply a pragmatic response to an insane situation. Craig's inability to shoot a Japanese soldier certainly indicates positive qualities ("he started thinking about Japs as human beings," according to Burnett), but leads to many more deaths when this soldier reports their presence. As Craig later says of the actions he is required to carry out, "As a man I think it's stupid. As a soldier, what can I do?"

Hellman is careful to show that there is little difference between the atrocities threatened by the Japanese (we are left in no doubt that the Captain fully intends to carry out his threat of murdering one child for every hour the Americans remain free) and those committed by Paco, who tortures his prisoners before killing them, and had previously done the same thing to Miguel (who, like the pilot in Beast from Haunted Cave, is one of those absent elements so typical of Hellman) because of what he freely admits was nothing more than a vague suspicion. But this is not a tactic designed to exempt the Americans from criticism: on the contrary, the theme of atrocity is actually introduced during the opening sequence when Jersey suggests (only half-jokingly) cutting out the tongue of a young girl who observed their arrival. Conversely, the Japanese are presented with a measure of respect: the Captain may be willing to butcher children, but his dignified behavior under torture makes him a far more complex character, while a Japanese soldier's willingness to provide information in order to end the Captain's pain suggests humanity rather than weakness. Hellman treats these scenes in a straightforward fashion which implicates everyone, the soldiers who turn away as much as those who participate or stand and watch: a 360 degree camera movement connects onlookers Burnett and Jersey with Paco as the latter circles around the Captain, and the shot of a disgusted Burnett approaching Craig while the torture continues in the background uses composition in depth to make much the same point. Burnett may turn his back on suffering, but it remains onscreen, and (like certain scenes in Pasolini's SALO) is rendered all the more unbearable by being shown from a distance.

As these examples demonstrate, Hellman is not interested in developing a thesis. Each of the points he makes— or rather the areas of experience he explores— are present as lived realities. Instead of watching an abstract treatise on the nature of violence or the insanity of war, we absorb ideas via the characters, finding ourselves torn between identification and alienation, sympathy and rejection, often experiencing these contradictory emotions within the same scene and/or in relation to a single person. The supreme example occurs when Jersey — who has previously shown a harsh contempt for human life — insists on carrying Burnett's corpse to the river (a gesture that can hardly fail to remind us of Richard Burton in Bitter Victory: "I kill the living and I save the dead"). Identification and analysis are not opposed terms for Hellman, but simply different sides of the same coin. Of course, Hellman is hardly unique in this. He is working in the tradition of Hollywood's greatest auteurs—Lang, Ford, Sirk, Sternberg, Hitchcock, Fuller, Minnelli, Preminger, Ophuls—all of whom balanced empathy with Brechtian distancing (often inspired by a direct familiarity with Brecht).

It was by emulating those classical filmmakers he admired that Hellman managed to bring John Hackett's philosphical concerns vividly to life. And we may note that the director's treatment of his characters—the delicate process of give and take which defines their relationships to each other as well as to the viewer — is reflected in his use of landscape. To better understand this, we might profitably compare Back Door to Hell with another early work by a talented filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick's debut feature Fear and Desire (1952). The scripts filmed by Kubrick and Hellman boast similar settings and ambitions (Kubrick's film was written by Howard Sackler), the frame of a low-budget war film enabling a series of ruminations on the meaning of existence, as well as an explicitly pacifist "message." In each case, there is a generalising tendency: the war in question is essentially any war, while the jungle setting suggests a return to primitivism in which fundamental questions about man's inherently violent nature can be addressed without encumbrance. Already, however, a crucial distinction is evident. For Kubrick, the war is not only implicitly generalised, it is explicitly so. As Fear and Desire's opening voiceover narration informs us, "There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind." Kubrick's stylistic choices follow on logically from this introduction: his forest is an allegorical space through which characters move as if in a dream, and the film is rich in "artistic" compositions, rhetorical camerawork, enormous closeups and striking uses of light and shade.

In Back Door to Hell, however, both the war and the issues it involves are very specific. Although Hellman, like Kubrick, wishes to make a general anti-war statement, he does so through careful attention to detail. While the setting is superficially similar to Kubrick's, it could not be treated more differently. Whereas Fear and Desire's forest is a symbolic space in which the film's themes can be bloodlessly stated, Back Door to Hell's jungle (like the Western landscapes of Anthony Mann) is first and foremost an actual place, its structural relationship to Hellman's philosphical interests arising from its tangible authenticity. Water may be used for symbolic purposes (notably in the final sequence, where it is associated with Maria), but never at the expense of its concrete reality. Hellman's river is not an abstraction, but a raging torrent that requires physical effort to cross. Similarly, the Japanese cannot be presented as simple villains (nor the Americans as simple heroes) because Hellman is so alert to their specificity. No character is the incarnation of an idea; on the contrary, ideas emerge from the portrayal of individuals.

It is, I think, significant that Kubrick's film was shot in California, while Hellman's was filmed on location in the Philippines. If Kubrick was already experimenting with that abstraction of setting which motivated his permanent move to England (where he recreated Vietnam and contemporary New York), Hellman, as in his previous work for Roger Corman, turns purely commercial requirements (which dictated that Back Door to Hell be shot outside the U.S. for budgetary reasons) to his advantage, allowing the primitive conditions in which he and his crew were living to permeate the film. That sense of struggle and discomfort Back Door so eloquently conveys apparently reflects the filmmakers' experience. According to Patrick McGilligan, "The weather was relentlessly hot and humid, frequently erupting into monsoon-strength rainstorms. Wherever they went, cast and crew had to watch out for spiders as big as saucers, parasites in stagnant water, poisonous snakes that slithered out of the bushes, and huge preying mantises and gecko lizards that penetrated their dwelling and hung upside down on the ceiling, threatening to drop."13

Much of Back Door to Hell's success is attributable to Hellman's growing confidence with actors, a confidence surely linked to the fact that the screenplay had been written by one of the leads. Whereas the determinist Kubrick conceived filmmaking as the imposition of his "pure" vision, the existential Hellman seeks out like-minded collaborators who can be relied upon to give the work a texture and depth it would not otherwise possess. Robert Bresson's influence is clear from the performances, with dialogue frequently delivered in an uninflected monotone that nevertheless manages to convey great emotional sensitivity and depth of feeling. Jack Nicholson is particularly good, but perhaps even better is Annabelle Huggins,14 whose heavily accented English suggests a vulnerability that reinforces her position as the film's moral centre. Here we see an early hint of that feminist subtext which would become increasingly important for Hellman, who frequently uses female characters to provide a critical perspective on masculine obsession. Huggins, who has the sole female speaking role in Back Door to Hell (and doesn't get to say anything until 17 minutes have elapsed), pronounces her dialogue in a halting manner that contrasts markedly with the eloquence of Rodgers, Hackett, Nicholson, Maga and even Joe Sison. Language and gender provide a series of interlocked themes: Burnett, who speaks English and Japanese, rejects Jersey's suggestion that he engage a young woman in conversation by asking "What am I gonna talk to her about?" while his hostility towards Jersey's primitive brand of machismo (at one point he sarcastically dubs him "Wild Bill," recalling Beast from Haunted Cave's references to Western mythology) is compromised by the fact that he has nothing to put in its place except his own macho cynicism.15

If Burnett, Jersey and Craig (like Alex's gang in Beast from Haunted Cave) are three sides of the same personality, it is their masculinity that prevents them achieving wholeness. They may consistently debate the value of human life and the nature of war, but it is the silent stares of the female characters—the Filipino collaborators (who are presumably executed by Paco) and the women in the bar as much as Maria — that represent the film's true morality, a morality unarguable because it is beyond ideology. Even when she speaks, Maria does not dissimulate; where the men express cynicism (Jersey, Paco, Burnett) or talk themselves into committing acts they feel are unjustifiable (Craig), Maria simply states facts or responds straightforwardly to questions, her obvious lack of familiarity with English giving her attempts at communication a sense of struggle. Notice the hesitant manner in which — without any forced emotion or hint of accusation — she tells Craig how Paco's wife and child were killed by American mortar fire following the Japanese invasion.16

Back Door to Hell's protagonists are alienated in practically every way — from their surroundings, from their feelings, from each other — and Hellman frequently expresses this by positioning them on opposite sides of the frame, the most obvious example being the climax, with Jersey and Craig standing screen left while Maria and the other surviving guerillas appear screen right. Maria's final question, "What you do now?" is made all the more poignant by the actresses' imperfect English, and Craig's response, "We'll think of something," allows Hellman to end the film on that note of irresolution which will define his mature work.

Chapter 5

Flight to Fury (1964)

We all are born mad. Some remain so.

— Estragon in Waiting for Godot

Jack Nicholson's screenplay for Monte Hellman's second film for Robert Lippert was adapted from a plot outline by Hellman and Fred Roos. According to Hellman, "I remember that Fred and I discussed the original idea (perhaps he had some ideas to begin with), and worked out the bare outlines. Jack wrote the script on the 3 week voyage by ship, giving me pages daily for approval of the direction it was going. The one thing Jack and I agreed on is that it was a kind of parody, an homage, particularly to a movie that we liked a lot, which was John Huston's Beat the Devil. Our aim was really to make it funny. Jack and I decided to call it The Devil's Game (from "Beat the Devil at his own game"), and I guess it was Lippert who changed it to Flight to Fury."1

Flight to Fury began shooting in Manila soon after Hellman left the hospital, with four of the same actors as Back Door to Hell: Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Henry Duval and Vic Uematsu. This time, the box-office draw was Dewey Martin, star of several Howard Hawks films, while Fay Spain (who had appeared in Lippert's production Thunder Island, co-scripted by Nicholson) took the female lead.

Set in a nameless part of the Far East, Flight to Fury begins with a dialogueless sequence showing Al Ross (John Hackett) being given a small pouch by a man (Jennings Sturgeon) living on a houseboat. Vincent Lorgren (Vic Diaz) and Destiny Cooper (Fay Spain) clandestinely observe this transaction from a nearby car. We are then introduced to Joe Gaines (Dewey Martin), who has just lost all his money gambling. A seemingly friendly fellow American called Jay Wickam (Jack Nicholson) buys Joe a drink, but vanishes while Joe is talking to Lei Ling Forsyth (Juliet Pardo), who was present during Al's meeting with the man on the houseboat. Lei Ling invites Joe to her room, but while Joe takes a shower, Jay appears and murders her. When Joe returns to his hotel after being interrogated by the police, he finds Jay waiting and has him deliver a message to Al Ross. Joe catches a commercial flight on which Al is the pilot, and is surprised to discover Jay aboard. The other passengers include Lorgren, Destiny, two Japanese men, and a young woman, Gloria Walsh (Jaclyn Hellman), with whom Jay discusses games and the meaning of death. The plane crashes in the jungle, killing Gloria. The older Japanese man is seriously injured, and Lorgren's leg is broken. Al also dies in the crash, but survives long enough to give Joe the pouch, which contains stolen diamonds. After Lorgren forces Joe to surrender the diamonds, a group of bandits led by Garuda (Joseph Estrada) kill the older Japanese man and take the remaining survivors hostage. Destiny is raped by Garuda, and the younger Japanese man dies as the captives escape. Jay takes the diamonds from Lorgren, then kills him and Destiny. Joe pursues Jay through a rocky landscape, managing to shoot him by a river. Jay throws the pouch into the water and commits suicide.2

Hellman edited Flight to Fury before returning to Los Angeles (on the S.S. Oronsay) in October, but was once again denied credit for contractual reasons (the editing credit went to his assistant, Joven Calub). As Hellman recalls, "The picture editing was done in the Philippines, including adjusting the sound, which got recorded at the wrong speed and was therefore out of sync and the wrong pitch. The dialogue eventually had to be sunk up much as you would do with looped dialogue. We did sound fx and music editing in Jim Nelson's garage in the San Fernando Valley."3 Dismayed by the film's quirky tone, Robert Lippert insisted on re-editing. Hellman recalls that "Lippert looked at my cut and said about some scenes: 'People will laugh at that!', which of course was our intent. He cut the discussion about death between Jack and Jaclyn Hellman, as well as some of the repartee between Dewey and Fay on the plane."4 In the end, Lippert removed 11 minutes of footage, reducing the film to a 62 minute fragment which was barely released theatrically before being sold to television. Fortunately, Hellman was later able to restore his 73 minute director's cut for the U.S. video release: "I know that the Warners version is complete, since I restored the negative and made a new print for Warners."5

One of the most curious aspects of Flight to Fury's production is that an alternate, Tagalog-language version entitled Cordillera, intended solely for distribution in the Philippines, was directed by Eddie Romero. According to Romero, "I did a Filipino version of it at the same time, which means I added some scenes and changed it around a bit. There is an outlaw in Flight to Fury, who I turned into a hero. And that character was played by Joseph Estrada, who is now running to be President of the Philippines."6 Since Cordillera is not easily available (even Hellman, who remembers Romero as "a joy to work with,"7 has never seen it), any comments on its relationship to Flight to Fury must remain purely speculative, though given that Joseph Estrada spends his few minutes of screen time in Hellman's film executing crash victims and raping women, the revisions required to turn him into a hero must have been extensive.

If Flight to Fury represents another artistic forward leap, its negative reception by Robert Lippert is clearly traceable to the emergence of those concerns which would define Hellman's later masterpieces while condemning him to commercial marginalization. The filmmakers' stated intention was to reproduce the tone of Beat the Devil (1953), a quirky work which took many years to achieve cult status (indeed, Hellman and Nicholson must have been among its earliest admirers^8). But whereas Beat the Devil's more bizarre elements are primarily satirical, the equivalent moments in Flight to Fury come across quite differently, their purpose being to disrupt the narrative's smooth progress. The film begins as a traditional thriller involving a Hitch-cockian McGuffin, the diamonds, a hardboiled hero, Joe Gaines, and what appears to be an audience surrogate, Jay Wickam. The first jolt to our expectations occurs 10 minutes in when Jay murders Lei Ling Forsyth (a name that reappears as a brand of tea in The Shooting—the reference was Carole Eastman's idea), but perhaps Hellman's boldest stroke is the plane journey, during which the narrative comes to a halt while the characters debate abstract theoretical issues. Hellman's taste for very lengthy scenes was already apparent in Beast from Haunted Cave and Back Door to Hell, but Flight to Fury takes this to a new level, and it is hardly surprising that the plane sequence — which runs a full 15 minutes in Hellman's version — bore the brunt of Lippert's cuts. The rest of the film may seem to conform more precisely with the action adventure formula, but its sheer eclecticism — a crash in the jungle and the survivors' subsequent attempts to reach safety is followed by a shoot out with some bandits and a fight to the death over a pouch of diamonds—reveals the authors' satirical intentions, while the rapid pace contrasts oddly with the meditative plane scenes.9 Hellman is here acting on the same impulse that inspired him to mix the gangster and horror genres in Beast from Haunted Cave, and the same swerves and contrasts can be found in the work of Quentin Tarantino, whose Sight and Sound article on Hellman draws attention to the influence: "As can be seen from the film I made, I like what I call 'kitchen-sink movies', which means 'there's everything in it but...,' and there are about four movies crammed into Flight to Fury."10

Flight to Fury's most obvious antecedent is Creature from the Haunted Sea, in which Hellman satirized a male adventure genre (with explicit reference to Beat the Devil). Here, Hellman undercuts both the heroic protagonist and those narrative structures that support and reinforce him, and in this he is working within a strong American anti-tradition that includes such masterpieces as Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and, supremely, Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel (1998). If the heroic role was, for all intents and purposes, absent from Back Door to Hell, it is here insistently present, but subjected to a thorough critique that goes far beyond Beat the Devil's good-humored tolerance (anticipating the much darker tone of Huston's The Kremlin Letter). Like Gil in Beast from Haunted Cave and XK150 in Creature from the Haunted Sea, Joe embodies a masculine ideal that is demonstrated to be ludicrous, untenable and ultimately destructive. Emotional withdrawal is here stripped of those positive connotations associated with Humphrey Bogart's roles for Huston (Beat the Devil included^11) and becomes an indicator of neuroticism. Although Joe goes through the motions of heroism, Hellman never lets us forget that he is motivated purely by greed.

Hellman's narrative disruptions subserve his undercutting of the heroic function, and it is hardly surprising that those absent elements (consisting of nothing more remarkable than characters who, like Godot, are often mentioned but never seen) in Beast from Haunted Cave and Back Door to Hell here play a much larger role. Although they are never overtly brought to our attention (which is what distinguishes this film from, say, The Shooting), the gaps in Flight to Fury's plot are quite blatant. The only information we are given concerning the diamond theft is contained within Al Ross' dying words, an account of splendid imprecision ("There's a pouch ... it's Lorgren ... that's why Lei Ling murdered ... stolen ... it's a payoff ... I don't know ... I don't know whose they are ... you keep em") which segues, bizarrely but appropriately, into an imitation of Ronald Reagan in Knute Rockne, All American ("Someday, when the going gets rough for the boys out there, tell em, win one for the Gipper"), again linking narrative incoherence with the satirical deconstruction of a heroic ideal. We never discover how Jay learned of the diamonds, why he kills Lei Ling, or what Joe's relationship is with Al. Even the Eastern city in which the action begins is unspecified, and when Joe boards a plane piloted by Al, we are given no hint as to either their intended destination or what they plan to do once they reach it. The title imposed by Robert Lippert thus proves curiously appropriate, since what the characters are flying to is less an actual place than an emotional state, and if the traditional adventure narrative usually emphasises meaningful movement in pursuit of a goal (even when the goal itself is random, as in Hitchcock, or valueless, as in Huston), Flight to Fury's priorities are quite the reverse. Movement (notably the constant movement from seat to seat inside the plane) is here rendered absurd, and it is apt that the film should end on a close-up of a dead man's feet. Yet these ambitions do not arise from an abstract theoretical stance any more than they embody a rigid moral position. Hellman recalls how the script developed during a long boat journey: "Jack really didn't, except for the barebones outline, take much from me on the script. He really took more from the life on the boat. Somebody would come by and get him in a conversation and ask him what he was doing, and he would talk about and develop a character out of that conversation and put that person into the script. Whatever happened during the day would go into the script."12 This writing method is most clearly felt in the plane sequence as Nicholson's character philosophizes with one passenger and enquires about the unusual game played by two others; but the whole film has the quality of a boat trip during which one encounters a wide variety of interesting individuals whose pasts are vague and whose futures we will never know. Nicholson's approach, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it violated all those rules laid down by screenwriting manuals, enabled Hellman to realize a film which was neither plot-driven nor structureless, but whose very lack of momentum became a declaration of principles.

Just as the absent plot elements which played such a minor role in Hellman's previous work here achieve a new prominence, so too the gambling references in Beast from Haunted Cave (the fruit machine, Alex's game of solitaire) now attain the status of a major motif. Gambling first appears during the scene which introduces Joe and Jay, who are initially seen playing a game involving ornately designed cards. According to Hellman, "A dealer 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."13 The relevance of this game to subsequent events is clear enough: Flight to Fury's characters conceal their true natures and motivations, only revealing them a piece at a time as their "cards" are dealt and they are obliged to "play" their "hands" (Marlon Brando used a similar metaphor in One-Eyed Jacks, which Hellman apparently screened prior to starting work on his next film, The Shooting), an image literally enacted when Joe returns to his hotel room and finds Jay lying on the bed with his arms obscuring his face. As in Budd Boetticher's masterpieces, we have the overwhelming impression of watching a game, and it is during the plane sequence that this notion is most consistently developed. Jay's fascination with the board game "Go," being played by two Japanese passengers leads to a debate with Gloria on the game-playing mentality. Gloria insists that Jay likes games because he is "competitive," but Jay rejects this notion, insisting "I just like to play." If such a lack of introspection is partly supported by Hellman's unadorned directorial style, it is also decisively placed by the context, which contrasts Jay's death-oriented (and unambiguously anal retentive) outlook with Gloria's healthy sensitivity.

Jay's obsession is simultaneously reinforced and critiqued by Flight to Fury's narrative convolutions. If Hellman uses elaborate plot mechanics to deconstruct the action genre, it is also the case that his characters perceive themselves as participants in an elaborate fiction. Jay's explanation of why he is following Joe— "I wanted to see how it all came out" — and his reaction to having survived the crash — "I'm getting kind of a boot out of it"—link him with the vicariously participating cinema viewer, while his command "no games" (as he forces Lorgren to hand over the diamonds) imbricates this view of life as a fiction-making activity with the game-playing subtext.

The film's key motif — the one that unites and clarifies each of the film's disparate elements—is that of control, a concern which emerges at several points in the dialogue (Jay claims that the idea of suicide gives a man "control" while Lorgren plans to "take control of the situation") and is expressed in several seemingly distinct but nevertheless overlapping ways:

Control of Money

Joe and Jay are introduced losing at cards, and later pursue an object of great financial value, which they also lose.

Control of Women

In Flight to Fury specifically, and our culture generally, the desire to control women always implies a repressed homosexual impulse. Joe's most intimate relationships are with Al and (in a different way) Jay. Indeed, Joe's antagonism towards the latter (evident from his hostile glances when they first meet) is surely traceable to the fact that Jay's flamboyant nature brings his sexual attractiveness close to the surface. Hellman here makes brilliant use of Jack Nicholson's tendency to play every conversation as if it were a seduction (by contrast, Dewey Martin treats actual seductions as if they were disagreeable business meetings). The indirect revelation that Jay had been hiding in the bedroom closet while Lei Ling and Joe made love suggests a barely concealed homosexuality (Hellman's play on the phrase "in the closet" is wonderfully sly) which casts a dark shadow over Joe's compulsive womanizing. The two men cement their "friendship" by subjecting women to a process of objectification in which a fear of active female sexuality is remarkably close to the surface. Jay informs Joe that if he ever wants to see "the ugliest women in the world" he should go to Boise Idaho, then boasts of how he once "dated" the "Queen" of Idaho ("she was a throwaway anywhere else"), a disc jockey who ran an all-night radio show from a tower ("I dated her right up there in the tower"), which in turn reminds Joe of "a lady fortune teller I knew once in Macao." The two men try to deny their mutual attraction by sharing stories of sexual conquests, and it is telling that once Jay leaves, Joe immediately attempts to seduce Lei Ling, whom he believes to be Al's lover.

Control of the Look

The opening sequence shows Lorgren and Destiny spying on Al, Lei Ling watches Joe playing cards, Garuda is abruptly introduced in a close-up which shows him looking at the crash site, and, as Jay observes, the young Japanese man watches the older man "like he wants to see him die." To control the look is thus to assert one's general control — over other people, events, and even death itself — and it is significant that the film ends with Joe staring helplessly into space.

Control of the Narrative

If Joe believes himself to be the star of a hero-centered narrative in which he has the power to determine his own fate, the film's erratic structure mocks him at every turn (again, one might compare New Rose Hotel), and the character names selected by Hellman and Nicholson neatly imbricate this idea with the control of women theme: Joe can control neither destiny nor Destiny.

Control of One's Self

Hellman's characters are notable for their rigorous attempts at self-control, most obvious from the uninflected, emotionless way he has actors recite dialogue. Of course, this attempt is critically placed by the director, who shows his protagonists falling prey to emotional entanglements and physical needs. Flight to Fury places great emphasis on bodily injury, and one might claim that the contrast between the meditative plane sequence and the more rapidly paced sections that follow reflects a movement from philosophy to reality. In the security of an aircraft, the characters can debate the meaning of death and play games with nothing but token penalties, whereas the injuries they sustain during the crash, as well as the savagery of the terrain, force them to translate theoretical issues into concrete necessities. This movement is reflected in the contrast between the chief of police, who complains that there are "questions still unanswered" after outlining a logical (if totally incorrect) argument in his neatly ordered office, and Garuda, who acts on sheer animal impulse in the middle of the jungle.

Control of the Phallus

The last and most important category, being the one to which all the others can be traced. Joe's and Jay's actions are entirely motivated by their determination to attain the Phallus. The symbolic function of the diamonds is clear enough, and it is significant that Joe's loss of the pouch is connected with his seduction by Destiny in the wreck. When Destiny suggests Joe is angry because he has lost the diamonds, Lorgren points out that "It's not the money. Not primarily. He feels used." To be "used" in this context means being defined as female, and it is to compensate for this that Joe attempts to conform with that model of brutal masculine power embodied in its purest form by Garuda, who is his mirror image,14 simultaneously representing what Joe would like to be whilst acting out those hostile desires he could not consciously admit to having. It is Garuda who has the injured Japanese man killed. just as it is Garuda who viciously lashes out at Lorgren. Most significant is Garuda's assualt on Destiny, an unrepressed revision of Joe's meeting with Lei Ling, where the offer of a drink was followed by a sexual encounter. Although Joe's seduction of Lei Ling enables him to play the sexual predator, he rejects Destiny's advances because he finds her "too aggressive" (a word subsequently used by Lorgren, who tells Joe not to "try anything aggressive"). It is Garuda who reduces Destiny to a traditionally "feminine" position of powerlessness by raping her.

Needless to say, this complex mesh of themes is implicitly feminist in its assumptions. Although Destiny is as corrupt as any of the men, the film's morality is embodied by Gloria Walsh, a character who is a) a woman, and b) played by the director's wife. One might even connect Jack Nicholson's habit of using his fellow passengers' behavior as material for a screenplay with the fact that Gloria is seen making notes (the subject and purpose of which she fails to divulge), and assume that she is, at least partially, a stand-in for the screenwriter. What remains beyond question is that Gloria's lack of neuroticism implictly critiques the masculine obsessiveness displayed by Joe, Jay, Al, Lorgren, Garuda and even Destiny, all of whom single-mindedly pursue financial gain. Hellman's willingness to be sidetracked by a character with no narrative relevance corresponds to that character's gentle refusal to accept Jay's death-oriented view of existence as an unchanging truth rather than a social construct, and if none of the survivors shows the slightest sense of loss at her death (even Joe's insistence on burying the bodies seems motivated less by respect for the dead than his need to win a power struggle with Jay), the warmth of Jaclyn Hellman's performance (she is essentially repeating her characterization from the 1962 version of Beast from Haunted Cave) ensures that Gloria's demise leaves a gaping hole at the film's center. Perhaps the most important moment occurs when Gloria admits she is "no good at games," a statement which is both casual and of the greatest import. Hellman's oeuvre will henceforth be devoted to examining what it means to be 'no good at games,' and the position occupied by those women who might plausibly make such a claim in a world of male game-players.

Chapter 6

The Shooting (1966)

Vladimir: Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Savior. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned. And yet how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved? The four of them were there — or thereabouts—and only one speaks of a thief being saved. One out of four. Of the other three two don't mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him.

Estragon: Well what of it?

Estragon: Well? They don't agree, and that's all there is to it.

Vladimir: But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?

Estragon: Who believes him?

Vladimir: Everybody. It's the only version they know.

Estragon: People are bloody ignorant apes.

— Waiting for Godot

When Monte Hellman and Jack Nicholson departed for the Philippines, they expected to begin filming Epitath upon their return: "I was finishing cutting on Flight to Fury, and we went to Roger one more time for money for Epitath. In the time that had elapsed he had changed his mind. He didn't want to do that film. It was too European, too arty. The subject of abortion was too difficult for American audiences. 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'."1

Although he initially planned to cast Sterling Hayden and Dana Wynter, The Shooting would find Hellman working for the first time with one of his most important collaborators, Warren Oates: "I had seen him in a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Player's Ring Theater in Los Angeles, and he was also a friend of Nicholson's. I think it was remembering him from Cuckoo's Nest that made me think of him for The Shooting. I remember there was a bookstore in Beverly Hills called Martindales and I was in there one day and — sometimes I just get flashes—I got a flash of Millie Perkins and Warren Oates and Will Hutchins. I thought of all three of them in one flash, they didn't just come to me one at a time. I was so excited that I ran out of the bookstore and called Jack to tell him my idea, and he called Warren."2

On January 2, 1965, Hellman and Nicholson, using several thousand dollars advanced by Roger Corman, rented an office and began preparing both films: "We decided that Jack would write one and we would get someone else to write another."3 Although Nicholson suggested B. J. Merholz, Hellman chose to use Carole Eastman, an actress who appeared regularly on television^4 and as an uncredited dancer in Stanley Donen's Funny Face (1956). Although Eastman had previously written some song lyrics for Hellman's Creature from the Haunted Sea additions in 1963, The Shooting would be her first screenplay: "Several friends submitted ideas. Carole submitted a script that wasn't producible 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."5

Carole Eastman recalls that "Jack and Monte Hellman were to make two Westerns for Roger Corman. Jack was to write one, and I the other. I didn't know then that Jack thrives on distraction when he writes, and as one who reaches for her sixshooter if she hears a pin drop on the next block, it wasn't the most auspicious of circumstances that we started, at his suggestion, to work in the same room. We sat at separate desks in a small office on the second floor of the Writers' Building in Beverly Hills. And while I blindly groped for something to put on paper, he planted his tree-stump legs on the floor and, looking like a seated colossus, flourished his pen over unlined pages, writing six- or seven-page scenes while he whistled annoying tunes that tended to obliterate whatever fragile concentration I had. As I recall, the following day I stayed at home, worked alone and was replaced, I think, by a portable stereo."6 According to Hellman, "I was with Jack every day but less involved with Carole. Jack and I just sat in our office and he wrote the script. I supervised the writing, pacing behind Jack during the entire process, and wrote at least one line in Ride in the Whirlwind: 'Why don't you put a tune to it?' Once we had agreed on the basic structure of Carole'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 way, and I find that an exciting way to work."7

It was during this period that Hellman directed some second unit scenes for Beach Ball, Roger Corman's attempt to cash in on the success of AIP's "Beach Party" series: "I think the likeliest time is early 65, while both Western screenplays were being written. Roger could have convinced me that taking a day or two off from the Westerns wouldn't be crucial. I remember that I shot dialog scenes in a convertible on the Pacific Coast Highway. That's probably all I did."8 According to Gary Kurtz, "Beach Ball was a typical Roger Corman project. The main script was not quite one hour long and the film was padded out with musical numbers and chase scenes that I shot all 2nd unit with a crew of 4. The only material Monte shot was the in car dialogue traveling scenes along the road at the beach: all the scenes with the 4 guys in the convertible, driving and stopped. He also shot the scenes with the 4 girls driving. This material was shot at the same time as the main unit was working on the beach. I directed and shot the musical numbers at the car show in the Long Beach arena. Most of the rest of the numbers were shot on the stage by the main unit. I think Monte was on the set one day during a musical number when we discussed and planned the car sequences."9 Hellman's footage (photographed by Gregory Sandor) is minimal, but displays a visual fluency that stands in marked contrast to the surrounding film (directed by Lennie Weinrib). Consider especially the scene — essentially a sequence shot — showing the four male leads (Edd Byrnes, Robert Logan, Aron Kincaid and Don Edmonds) getting out of the car as they discuss their financial problems. Working for the first time in a widescreen (2.35:1) ratio, Hellman stages this as a composition in depth, a boy sitting on a motorcycle in the rear of the frame adding some visual interest to what would otherwise be dead space. The interaction between the four performers is also uncharacteristically dynamic, with Byrnes catching a drum kit thrown by Logan while they talk. When Beach Ball was released by Paramount on September 29, 1965, Hellman's name was not on the credits: "If any credit had been offered, I'm sure I would have refused it. How do you think 'additional scenes on Beach Ball' would look on anybody's resume?"10

The screenplays for both Westerns were finished by March (Hellman and Nicholson took a couple of weeks off in February to scout locations). Carole Eastman's project was originally titled Gashade (the name of Warren Oates' character), later changed to The Shooting by Hellman himself. Carole asked that the screenplay be attributed to "Adrien Joyce," a pseudonym she would use throughout her career^11: "Carole is a very secretive person, and probably chose a pseudonym as a way of hiding. I know she chose Adrien because it was difficult to determine if it was male or female.12 Another name not on the credits of either film (or, for that matter, of Beach Ball) was Roger Corman's. According to some sources, Corman was under exclusive contract to Columbia, and thus could not be officially involved with outside projects. As Corman notes in his autobiography, "Because I was under contract, I could not direct for anyone else. But I backed several films during this time. Two were Westerns written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Monte Hellman."13 But Hellman believes that the reasons for Corman's anonymity were more complicated: "Roger was never under exclusive contract to any studio. He always controlled his own career, and mostly worked outside the studio system. His name does not appear on the credits of The Shooting or Ride in the Whirlwind by his choice — probably as a way to avoid conflict with unions. Since he regularly formed companies and signed union contracts, then subsequently formed new companies so that he could make non-union movies. Also, with my Westerns, he wanted to limit his financial liability — back and I were responsible for any budget overages. Even though he advanced the money, he treated them as negative pick-ups. Jack and I formed a company, opened a company bank account, etc."14 In the end, Nicholson and Hellman became the official producers. Indeed, when Corman read the screenplays, he came close to terminating even his unofficial involvement: "Corman did not want to make the two Westerns. He did not like the scripts, but he had spent a few thousand dollars on the scripts, and he was damned if he was going to just flush that money down the toilet. And so we got to make them — for no money, essentially. And it isn't true, as people have said, that they were shot in three days or something: they each had about 18 days. Other than the fact we got slowed down by three days of rain at the beginning of working on The Shooting, it went very smoothly. Even with the three days we lost, we came in on schedule, so 18 days really became 15 days. The budget on each film was $75,000. I believe Carole was paid $1,500 (in fact, the dialogue when Millie hires Warren mirrors that: 'A thousand now, and another five hundred when I get you there'). I think Jack and I each got $5,000 for each picture, total for all our services including writing, directing, producing, acting. This may have been reduced by the time we lost due to bad weather, but we may have come in on budget anyway — we didn't go over schedule."15 With Gregory Sandor (whose skill at location filming was already apparent in Hellman's contributions to The Terror) as director of photography, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind were shot back-to-back in Kanab, Utah (in the mountains near Zion National Park), from late April to June. Joining the cast and crew on location was Carole Eastman's brother Charles Eastman, a playwright who would later become an important screenwriter.16 As he recalls, "Nicholson asked me if he could rent my beard for a small appearance and some color in each of the Westerns, and I went to Kanab and hung out, and had a very good time. People wondered what I was doing there on the set every day, and some I think assumed I was the money because Monte might now and then seem to confer with me, but only as colleagues and in passing. With the set composed of so many friends and cronies, there was sometimes creative crumbling, but I found Monte indomitable, and in charge without ever having to defend or exaggerate that position; he always seemed confident and determined and unflappable, even with frequent rain eating into the schedule and other frustrations. I also did the stills on the Westerns; I was taking pictures for myself initially and then I graduated into functioning on the picture in that way, with the camera, at first just to be helpful and then with a sense of participation and while I have never seen all the stills, when I do chance on one or two I am often impressed."17

Principal photography was followed by 6 months of editing: "The normal time for picture and music editing, plus mixing, is anywhere from four months to two or more years (Apocalypse Now). Since I was the only editor, under six months for two pictures is very fast."18 Although Hellman insists "We thought they would be a couple more Roger Corman movies that would play on the second half of a double bill somewhere,"19 the films' obvious intellectual ambitions made them difficult to sell. Despite playing at several international festivals, including Edinburgh and Cannes (Nicholson personally escorted prints around the world, carrying them in square cardboard shipping boxes rather than special film containers), and being well received when they were released theatrically in France during 1969 (the films were initially acquired by a French distributor that went bankrupt and held them up in legal technicalities for three years), Corman failed to interest AIP in buying the rights (probably just as well, given AIP's habit of reediting Corman's directorial efforts during this period), and eventually sold both films to the Walter Reade organization, which in turn sold them to television. Neither film had an American theatrical release until 1971, when Jack H. Harris purchased them on the strength of Jack Nicholson's new-found fame.2^0

The Shooting begins with Willett Gashade (Warren Oates) returning to the gold mine he is working with his brother Coigne, Leland Drum (B. J. Merholz), and their young partner Coley (Will Hutchins). Coley tells Willett that during his absence, Coigne and Leland visited the nearby town of Winslow, where Coigne accidentally rode down a man and a "little person" ("maybe it was a child"). After Coigne vanished, Leland was killed by an unseen assassin. The campsite is soon visited by a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) who demands that Willett escort her to Kingsley. Shortly after the group stops off in Crosstree, where they find Coigne's horse and a bearded man (Charles Eastman) gives the woman a letter, they are joined by Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson), a professional gunman familiar with the woman. It becomes clear that the woman is actually pursuing Coigne. Billy and the woman insist on leaving Coley in the desert, but he follows them on a horse belonging to the bearded man (who has broken his leg), and is killed by Billy, who subsequently has his gun hand smashed by Willett. When the group encounters Coigne — who is revealed as Willett's identical twin — there is an exchange of gunfire.

The Shooting is the first Hellman film that can be described as a masterpiece. Elements provisionally present in the earlier works here coagulate into a mature artistic vision, the creation of a director totally in control of what he wants to say and the manner in which he has chosen to say it. Despite the obvious excellence of Carole Eastman's script, the film is primarily a triumph of directorial skill, with sublime mise en scene transforming material that could have inspired a traditional B Western into the expression of an existentialist impulse closely comparable to Beckett's. As in his previous work, Hellman subjects the "hero" concept to extensive criticism, but, even more than in Flight to Fury, he also performs a demolition job on those narrative structures the heroic ideal both reinforces and is reinforced by. In S/Z,21 Roland Barthes claimed that Balzac's Sarrasine was structured according to the operation of five codes: the Proairetic code, relating to a series of actions and events; the Hermeneutic code, relating to the establishment, development and resolution of mysteries and enigmas; the Semantic code, relating to the narrative's thematic level; the symbolic code, relating to the presence of symbolic oppositions (light and dark, water and fire, etc.); and the cultural code, relating to cultural references (to works of literature, political events, etc.).22 The implication was that these five codes structured not just Balzac's novella, but all classical narratives. If this is the case, then The Shooting can be described as the cinematic equivalent of S/Z, since Hellman systematically deconstructs each of the codes; actions and events are confused, the theme is never clarified, symbolic oppositions are stripped of their usual connotations (light and water, for example, have no positive implications), and the cultural references exist in a virtual vacuum (most obvious from the odd dialogue—"I can't tell a twit from a twig," "I don't give a curly-haired, yellow bear'd, double dog-damn"—that may well be attempts to reproduce authentic period speech patterns, but could just as easily be flights of Joycean fancy^23). But the most thorough work of deconstruction is performed upon the second of Barthes' codes: the Hermeneutic. Narratives tend to be structured around a series of enigmas which, though they may vary in status or significance, will all be resolved by the story's conclusion, a process which, at its most basic level, is profoundly reactionary. Robert Bresson's films often display their opposition to this by eliminating enigmas. But Hellman, despite the inspiration he has drawn from Bresson, takes a quite different (though complementary) approach. One could hardly describe The Shooting as lacking in mysteries. On the contrary, Hellman fills his film with enigmas while violating perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the Hermenutic code: that all mysteries will eventually be resolved. Consider these questions:

Why does Willett deliberately leave a trail (by cutting a hole in the bag of flour) when he suspects someone is following him? And what happened to his gun? (When he asks to borrow a weapon, Coley asks where his own is, and Willett responds "It plainly ain't there.")

Who is the woman? Why is she determined to kill Coigne? Why does she kill her own horse? And why does she refuse to reveal her name? She admits that Willett wouldn't know the name if he heard it, and when he remarks "I don't see no point to it," she replies, "There isn't any."

What is Billy Spear's relationship with the woman? Willett observes how she "looks like him," implying that they are brother and sister, but Coley claims not to see any resemblance.

Who is the bearded man? Why does he give the woman a letter? Is he the rider who joined Coigne on the trail? How did he come to break his leg? What does the woman ask the man when she finds him stranded? And what does he whisper to Coley?

What happens at the climax? Is Coigne (and/or Willett and the woman) killed?

Needless to say, just because we are not provided with solutions does not mean we cannot hazard a guess as to what they are, and it is quite possible to construct a perfectly conventional Western narrative out of these strands. Coigne accidentally kills a man and a child, and is pursued by the child's mother. Even those elements about which we cannot reasonably speculate might have banal explanations. Indeed, when I asked Hellman what happened to Willett's gun, he replied, "This was not an intentional confusion. There were originally 8-10 pages of prologue detailing Gashade's misadventures before arriving at camp. This was the reason for his leaving a trail of flour. These pages were discarded or left on the cutting room floor. I think Carole deliberately wanted to be mysterious—hence Millie's appearance on the hill top in the blink of an eye. I merely didn't care about explaining those kinds of details (the gun, the flour), felt their lack of explanation was in keeping with the theme."24

The fact that Hellman could have provided solutions to these mysteries makes his refusal to do so all the more consequential. Of course, The Shooting is hardly the first American genre film to leave crucial elements unresolved, but even in as ramshackle a work as Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, we are not encouraged to notice holes in the narrative weave. By contrast, Hellman constantly foregrounds our enforced ignorance by having his characters question each other's motivations and bemoan the gaps in their knowledge. For example, Coley asks what happened to Willett's gun, and examines the bag of flour with a hole cut in it. Even Coley's essentially straightforward account of what occurred during Willett's absence is immediately subjected to interrogation, with Willett—who complains that "my mind's all unsatisfied with it ... got no understanding of it at all" — pointing out that if Leland had been involved with the events in Winslow he would have left with Coigne.

Hellman's account of the script's origin suggests he would be prepared to define such an unusual artistic strategy as "realistic": "There are questions that remain unanswered, but they are not mysteries in the sense that The Lady or the Tiger is a mystery. The theme of the movie is the idea that, as observers of events, there are certain things which we can never know. These are simply questions which we can't answer, but they are not necessarily mysterious. They are just facts we don't have access to."25 Indeed, we are explicitly shown the process by which explicable events become the stuff of myth in the scene where a sheriff (Brandon Carroll) and his deputy (art director Wally Moon) try to decipher the word scratched off on a tombstone — we know, though they do not, that Coley wrote the date of Leland's death as April, then removed this when the woman pointed out that it was actually March — and speculate on the possibility that "they're just trying to throw us off with this here grave." But the film's tone — with a crystal clear mise en scene counteracting the narrative obscurity — suggests a more explicitly metaphysical concern, one which enabled the director to reconnect with Waiting for Godot. Of course, these explanations need not necessarily be mutually contradictory for a filmmaker who sees life in existential terms. As he once told a journalist, "Even if you believe in determinism you're living an existential life. You're an existentialist whether you know it or not."26 Hellman's characters are like Jack London's in their lack of information, but unlike London's in that the gaps in their knowledge parallel our lack of information about them. That sense of mystery which infects every frame of The Shooting is less "like life" than it is a metaphysical principle. Even Willett seems unable to fully comprehend his own actions, explaining his decision to help the woman hunt Coigne as "just a feeling I got to see through."

Hellman's stylistic decisions create a sense of disparity (almost certainly influenced by Bresson) that is at its clearest when Coley recalls Leland's death. According to Coley, "just like that, his face all spitters out, spilling in his coffee and all over his self, with none of his face left on"; but what we are shown in the accompanying flashback subtly contradicts Coley's statement, since the injuries to Leland's face are fairly minor. The Shooting takes place in a dream world determined by the fears and neuroses of its characters, the increasingly barren settings providing an objective correlative for Willett's arid emotional state.27 This symbolic use of landscape connects Hellman with such American filmmakers as Andre De Toth, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, all of whom explored the expressionistic possibilities of real locations, but also with a European school (the cinematic locus classicus is perhaps Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) in which decor, explicitly divorced from the demands of realism, expresses psychological trauma.

Yet as much as the landscape reflects the characters' neuroses, it also contradicts them. As in Last Woman on Earth and The Terror, Hellman sets the struggles of his flawed protagonists against a background of harsh, unforgiving nature which provides a critical perspective on their behavior. The question of how a setting can embody a neurotic state while enabling a judgment of it is perhaps the ultimate disparity, the deepest of the Hellman mysteries, unanswerable except by reference to the films' distinctive tone. In his article "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name: The Films of Monte Hellman,"28 Kent Jones discusses Hellman's "gift for uniformity," claiming that "Hellman is not a director of rhetorical flourishes or sudden jolts of action — he concentrates on the whole picture, and sets his action in one key. His films tend to unfold in a smooth, even fashion, the better to follow small events and large trajectories." It is here that we can best understand Hellman's precise authorial identity, as well as his ability to maintain it over a series of seemingly disparate works. Hellman likes to boast that he never turns down an assignment, preferring to accept whatever he is offered and see what can be done with it. It is not that he applies the same sylistic devices to a wide range of subjects, but rather that his aesthetic decisions express a coherent worldview, the validity of which must constantly be challenged. Thus, a landscape can be both a mental projection and a critical tool while retaining its integrity as an actual location. If Hellman's cinema is one of contradictions, these contradictions are most strongly felt in the struggle between a fully thought out belief system and this system's need to test itself against the evidence of external reality. While most Western protagonists are aggressively goal-centred, Hellman deals with individuals who are either incapable of formulating worthwhile projects, or obsessed with activities explicitly depicted as meaningless. Stylistically, this concern is reinforced in that conflict between The Shooting's narrative obscurity and its absolute visual clarity, as well as in the levelling process described by Kent Jones, whereby seemingly significant and insignificant events are forced to coexist on the same level. This is at its clearest in the shot (apparently suggested by Warren Oates) preceding the woman's entry to Willett's camp: as Coley sings and unpacks supplies in the background, Willett waits apprehensively in the foreground; suddenly, a shot rings out, and a panicked Coley runs for shelter, leaving a trail of flour behind him; but Willett remains in the same position, rising slowly to his feet as if unbothered by the apparent threat, his absolute calm suggested by his comment "something's coming ... Yes sir." Hellman's camera shares this certainty and composure, keeping Willett in the foreground while slowly panning around to show Coley's frantic movement at the rear of the frame.

Although this suggests an apparent unity, The Shooting's overall movement is towards a state of collapse, with the landscapes becoming increasingly inhospitable as the film fragments. Throughout much of its running time, The Shooting's editing patterns follow the classical norm, but when Billy and the woman force Willett to abandon Coley, the cutting becomes far more eccentric. After Coley is left behind, Hellman cuts directly to a scene showing Billy, Willett and the woman resting in another (inevitably similar-looking) location, an abrupt transition recalling Garuda's introduction in Flight to Fury; a shot of Coley looking screen-left is followed by a shot of the bearded man, implying that this is what Coley sees, but the next image shows Willett pointing screen-left, establishing the previous shot as his point-of-view; when Billy throws a rabbit he has killed in front of the woman and says, "Let's eat it," the woman responds, "No, Billy," and Billy replies, "You don't want any?" At this point Hellman cuts to Coley handing something to the bearded man and saying "It's candy,"29 and as the bearded man whispers in Coley's ear, Hellman cuts to Billy Spear holding an empty canteen while declaring "I said it's all gone," followed by a low-angle shot of Coley drinking from his canteen. The effect is to collapse the physical space separating these characters; although the landscapes remain "real," Hellman's editing reinforces their function as indicators of strictly internal states. This is taken to its logical conclusion at the climax, wherein the use of slow motion, still frames and echoing gunshots indicate a refusal of closure. If the hero-centered narrative traditionally moves towards an ending in which the hero's goals are either achieved or (as in the films of John Huston) frustrated,30 the extent to which Hellman has defined his project in opposition to Hollywood norms can be gauged by his gradual abandonment of classical editing patterns. It is apt that the disintegration of both sound and image should be followed by a shot of Billy Spear wandering aimlessly through the desert, with no conceivable goal or purpose. Hellman claims that the final sequence was inspired by Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, and although it is doubtful that any viewer would make this connection unless suitably primed, it is intriguing to note how Hellman relates the climax to John F. Kennedy's assassination, an event which decisively undermined America's confidence, its belief that the relationship between history and the individual was inevitably coherent. It is appropriate that Hellman's cinema should collapse under the weight of those contradictions on which it is built,31 but this collapse has strong positive connotations; the "hero" concept and that masculine ideal to which it refers are destroyed alongside the aesthetic norms which support and reinforce them.

Chapter 7

Ride in the Whirlwind (1966)

"A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread.

Then cook up with a ladle

And beat him till he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running

And dug the dog a tomb

And wrote upon the tombstone

For the eyes of dogs to come:

'A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread...'."

— Song sung by Vladimir in Waiting for Godot

The team's second Western was jointly inspired by Vittorio de Seta's Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits of Orgosolo), a 1960 film (released in America during 1964) about a Sardinian shepherd who shelters some bandits and eventually joins their gang, and Bandits of the Plains, a collection of diaries and Western stories that Jack Nicholson found in the Los Angeles Public Library. Aside from containing some authentic period dialogue, one of the stories described a siege on a cabin full of outlaws, an event Nicholson worked into his screenplay. The resulting film — entitled Ride in the Whirlwind at Carole Eastman's suggestion^1 — went into production a few days after principal photography on The Shooting had been completed. Nicholson, Millie Perkins, Brandon Carroll, Charles Eastman and B. J. Merholz were all retained from the first film, with the other lead roles filled by Cameron Mitchell, Rupert Crosse (from John Cassavetes' Shadows and Too Late Blues), Harry Dean Stanton (then billed as Dean Stanton), who would become a Hellman regular, John Hackett, here making his third and final appearance for the director, and George Mitchell and Katherine Squire, a husband and wife team here cast as husband and wife (they had previously appeared in Hellman's stage production of The Cave Dwellers): "Our whole posse consisted of rodeo cowboys who were in town for a rodeo and stayed over to be in our movie."2

The plot involves three cowhands, Wes (Jack Nicholson), Vern (Cameron Mitchell) and Otis (Tom Filer), en route to Texas who spend the night camped outside a cabin occupied by a gang — Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton), Indian Joe (Rupert Crosse), Hagerman (Peter Cannon), Edgar (B. J. Merholz) and the injured Adam — who recently carried out a stagecoach robbery. The next morning, a posse led by sheriff Quint Mapes (Brandon Carroll, who also played a sheriff in The Shooting) and his deputy Winslow (John Hackett) arrives and assumes that the cowhands belong to the gang. Adam, Edgar and Hagerman die during an assault on the cabin, while the posse hangs Blind Dick and Indian Joe. Otis is also killed, but Wes and Vern escape into the mountains, where they seek refuge in a farmhouse occupied by Evan (George Mitchell), his wife Catherine (Katherine Squire) and their daughter Abigail (Millie Perkins). As they leave, Evan opens fire, injuring Vern, and is killed by Wes. A dying Vern holds off the posse as Wes rides away.

Although obviously a companion piece to The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind in many ways provides a contrast with the earlier film. The sense of unresolved mystery so prominent in The Shooting is here relegated to a much more minor, though not insignificant, role. The most important example involves a character called Cain, whom Wes and Vern discuss at two points. As they bed down outside the outlaws' cabin, Vern asks if Wes intends to join up with C-Bar outfit again, and the following dialogue is heard:

Wes: No.

Vern: Account of Cain?

Wes: Might be.

Vern: Didn't seem much to me.

Wes: That's the way you seen it, Vern.

Later, as Wes tries to sleep in Evan's house, Vern asks, "What was that with you and Cain?" a question Wes refuses to answer. This dialogue inspired Derek Sylvester to propose an entirely fanciful plot synopsis in his book about Jack Nicholson: "Jack played a ranch cowboy, Wesp [sic], forced to abandon his home in the company of a friend, Vern, because they are being pursued by an unseen character portentously named Cain. Nicholson, who once again doubled as co-scenarist, never offers the slightest clue as to the identity of this Cain or the reasons for his unrelenting pursuit of the two protagonists."3 The naturalization of Hollywood's storytelling codes, as well as the extremity of their rejection by Hellman, inevitably gives rise to such confusion; if a conflict with a character called Cain is mentioned, then it must have a direct bearing on the narrative. As Hellman informed me, "The comment about Cain refers to some dispute between him and Wes which is not explained further. We, the audience, are merely eavesdropping on a conversation whose meaning is clear to the conversants, but which we can't fully understand because we don't have all the information. We don't need to know this, and to explain this unnecessary information to the audience through exposition would be unrealistic."4 Again, we find Hellman defending his narrative audacities by reference to a concept of realism, and we need not look far to find "realistic" details that are unusual for the genre at this point in its development. The film virtually begins with Edgar complaining about his carbuncle while preparing to rob a stagecoach. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Ride in the Whirlwind is neither more or less realistic than My Darling Clementine, The Maltese Falcon or The Wizard of Oz. All filmic narratives are, by nature, stylised (Whirlwind's stylistic attributes being particularly clear), and the dialogue about Cain — like The Shooting's mysteries—serves to shake up our received ideas about how an American film should function.

It should, then, be clear that Ride in the Whirlwind is, as its director insists, an intensely political work; as in Flight to Fury and The Shooting, an American ideal is dismantled alongside the narrative codes that reinforce it, the target here being less heroism than the notion of "justice for all" on which U.S. democracy prides itself. The subtext is considerably clearer than The Shooting's, and it seems reasonable to assume that many viewers will perceive Whirlwind as an allegory for the McCarthy era's political persecutions without prompting by the filmmakers.5

Ride in the Whirlwind's relationship to 1960s America becomes easier to grasp once one notices the extent to which this film differs from The Shooting. Although Hellman and his writers take care not to specify a period (none of the usual references used to establish a time frame in the genre — the Civil War, Custer's last stand, etc.—are mentioned), it seems that The Shooting occurs at a significantly earlier historical point, in a West touched by few signs of civilization, where a town consists of nothing but a collection of tents and some hastily assembled shacks. Ride in the Whirlwind's landscape is hardly more advanced, but already one senses the presence of that corporate consensus culture whose growth Sam Peckinpah would trace from the America of The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hague and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid to that of The Getaway, The Killer Elite and The Osterman Weekend. Native Americans, those traditional emblems of savagery and energy, appear to be dying out. When Edgar asks if the cowhands encountered any Kiowas on the trail, Wes admits to seeing only "two or three." In The Shooting, the object of the manhunt seems to have been responsible for the death of a child; here, Wes, Vern and Otis are guilty only by association, pursued relentlessly (through one of those barren landscapes that now defined Hellman's work) because of a misunderstanding.

At one point, Otis asks if a nearby town contains a place called "Golden Nugget," and Vern replies, "There's either a Golden Nugget or Silver Dollar every place between here and Rose's Cantina." This may technically still be the Wild West, but we are already in the land of McDonalds and Burger King, the America of the franchise and the corporation in which crime and punishment connect less with an Old Testament "eye for an eye" morality than with the kind of business-like detachment that distinguishes both the Corleones and their ostensible enemies in Francis Coppola's The Godfather trilogy. Winslow even uses corporate double-speak to describe the posse, which he refers to as a "citizens' vigilance committee." Blind Dick's gang may be a particularly "uncivilized" bunch (they're even racially integrated), but their stagecoach robbery is conducted with something beyond even cold efficiency — a kind of bored professionalism; notice how they laconically move a log blocking the stagecoach, as if they had done this so many times that it had become a daily chore. In Godard's A Bout de Souffle, Jean-Paul Belmondo defends the actions of an informer who has betrayed him to the police. Informing, after all, is what informers do. Hellman's outlaws seem motivated by much the same attitude: they steal because they are thieves. Similarly, the posse track them down not in anger, but because that's what a posse does. There is no trace of Anthony Mann's violent psychosis, Howard Hawks' commitment to the group, or John Ford's defense of a democratic cause. But nor is there any of the social protest found in William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1942). Injustice in this world is accepted as an inevitable reality, and when Blind Dick and Indian Joe are asked if they have "anything to say" before being lynched, they remain stoically silent. Hellman's characters, like the films in which they appear, are strikingly lacking in goals—whether the pursuit of revenge or the building of a nation — and in this Hellman flies in the face not only of the genre, but of American culture itself. Only Evan — explicitly a remnant of the pioneer experience in his isolated cabin — acts out of anger, and Hellman's unsympathetic character portrait prevents us from jumping to the conclusion that we are being offered a nostalgic lament for the Old West. As we watch Evan repetitively chopping away at a tree stump, we feel the Western ideal of the pioneer working for a meaningful future shading into a more contemporary reality of alienated labor in which one's actions have no personal worth or relevance.

Hellman constantly leads us to expect generically typical situations and events, only to pull the rug out from under our feet; the romance we believe will develop between Winslow and Abigail never quite happens, while the scene in which Wes takes Abigail out to the barn fails to proceed in the way we might have predicted. As Hellman told Beverly Walker, "We hated the predictability of certain situations. For example, the scene where Jack takes Millie out to the barn. That's an obligatory scene — you expect some kind of sexual thing. Ours was totally non-sexual."6 But Hellman's most extreme attack on conventional Western motifs can be seen in his typically unillusioned attitude towards the heroic ideal. The sheriff is first seen sitting on a porch in a position that recalls Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine, but Hellman's purpose is to emphasize the distance between this unimpressive individual, who will subsequently hunt down a group of innocent men, and the natural law embodied by Fonda's Wyatt Earp. Similarly, Otis may be the film's ostensible "hero," but, as the director notes in his DVD commentary, he is "the only inauthentic character," since he refers more to Western myth than to that historical reality with which the film is directly concerned. Hellman's lack of interest in the idea of larger than life individuals is suggested by the fact that he chose a totally uncharismatic actor to play Otis—as Hellman points out on the DVD, the character's status is suggested only by the fact that he has the kind of outfit (bright blue shirt, red bandana) usually associated with the hero — the contrast between the determinist myth such a figure usually implies and the random existential world with which Hellman is concerned coming to the fore approximately thirty minutes in, when Otis is unexpectedly killed off (in a plot twist Hellman claims he and Jack Nicholson borrowed from Hitchcock's Psycho).

Hellman's vision is close to that of Werner Herzog. According to Robin Wood, "For Herzog, the roots of dissatisfaction are not merely in contemporary society but in the nature of man himself.... He replaces the social radicalism of Wenders with what one might call a metaphysical radicalism — a sense of fundamental disharmonies in (to adopt the apt phrase of Norman O. Brown) 'man, the neurotic animal' that make him a disruptive anomaly in the universe, his restless aspirations at once grand and monstrous."7 Such concerns—already present in Last Woman on Earth—will become increasingly important to Hellman, achieving perhaps their supreme expression in Iguana. In Ride in the Whirlwind, they are felt in the attention granted not only to the relationship between individual and landscape (which attentive viewers had already come to expect from Hellman), but in the use of animals as a kind of mute chorus commenting on the essentially ridiculous activities of those "neurotic animals" that surround them. When the sheriff first sees the stagecoach, Hellman cuts to a close-up not of the passengers, but of the exhausted horses pulling the vehicle, before introducing Wes, Vern and Otis in a scene that begins with Vern's horse rearing up as it senses danger ahead. The specific source of this danger is a hanging corpse, and the horse's fierce reaction stands in marked contrast to the behavior of Otis (who calmly observes that this "ain't no country to be set afoot"), Vern (who matter-of-factly notes that the corpse has been there for "two or three days") and Wes (who merely remarks "man gets hung").8 There is also a careful emphasis on the horses responding to every gunshot outside the outlaws' cabin. Even the use of horses during the lynching scene has a resonance not usually found in this potentially clichéd situation; these entirely innocent creatures—like the chickens of Cockfighter—have unwittingly become the instruments of murder.

This theme — which one might describe as embryonically environmentalist — is intimately linked with the director's rapidly developing feminist consciousness. As Millie Perkins reveals during her DVD commentary, the peculiar manner in which Abigail walks developed from her idea that a girl who grew up surrounded by chickens would subconsciously imitate their behavior.9 Abigail is thus the only character who lives in harmony with the natural world. By contrast, Wes and Vern are in touch with nature only to the extent that they are capable of killing in self-defense. They may have been forced into these actions, but we can hardly ignore the skill with which they take to violence in the final scenes. Although Hellman (on the DVD commentary) describes Ride in the Whirlwind as being about "the making of a gunfighter," the film goes out of its way to remind us not only that gunfighters are born rather than made, but that they are inevitably born male. Hellman's critique of masculinity is explicitly linked with his female characters; it is Evan's wife who responds to Wes' comments about the loneliness of life on the farm by observing that "what you do is lonesome." The woman may be assuming that Wes and Vern are professional outlaws, but her remark suggests an insight the men (especially Evan, who reacts to the intrusion with nothing but sullen hostility) are incapable of achieving. As so often in Hellman, men — and, inevitably (given that this is a male-dominated society), women — drift through their lives without making meaningful connections, united only by their shared loneliness, and the concept of violence as a masculine disease infecting everyone is best illustrated by the climax in which Catherine stands over her husband's corpse and tells the posse "I hope you hang them." The masculine world in Hellman's oeuvre is consistently presented as a construct, an artificial mode of existence governed by neuroticism and focused on the achievement of worthless goals. The inevitable consequence is that men are alienated from the feminine world of community and emotional responsibility. Unable to comprehend femininity, Hellman's male characters are all in the same position as Evan, standing outside a house asking, "What's going on inside there with you women?"

The meaning of the ending, in which Wes rides off into the sunset, thus becomes clear. Although Wes appears to have escaped the posse, there is no sense of triumph. We simply watch as he vanishes into the distance, and the final fade to black occurs only after we have spent what seems an eternity looking at the dust raised by his horse.10 Kent Jones has noted that most Hellman films begin in media res, but it is worth pointing out that, even more audaciously, many of them end the same way. Bewildered studio executives attempted to give Back Door to Hell a more definite sense of closure, but were still unable to obscure Hellman's intentions; and there is no clear-cut conclusion to The Shooting, simply a sense that the narrative has been abandoned at the point where it ceased to interest the filmmaker. Two-Lane Blacktop will take this idea perhaps as far as it can possibly go, and if Ride in the Whirlwind's climax appears traditional by comparison, that is because the lack of closure is more a question of tone. Hellman may have believed himself to be making a classical Western, but his refusal to manipulate an audience's emotions suggests the extent to which he has rejected the genre's ideological underpinnings.

Chapter 8

In Between Projects, 1966-1970

In Hollywood, most of one's time is spent waiting. You're waiting for your name to be called, you're waiting for your project to get on, you're waiting for your money to be paid, you're waiting to meet somebody, you're waiting for an actor to say yes. You're just waiting. Endlessly, endlessly waiting. You're waiting in your car. You're driving. Endlessly driving. Out of 24 hours, 22 are spent waiting. You're waiting to get laid, you're waiting to get stoned. You're waiting.

— Rudolph Wurlitzer, interviewed by Chris Petit for the BBC series Moving Pictures in 1994

If the years 1964-1966 had seen Hellman working at a remarkable speed (he actually managed to shoot four films in twelve months), the period between Ride in the Whirlwind and his next completed feature, Two-Lane Blacktop, initiated a pattern — sporadic directorial assignments interspersed with long stretches of inactivity — that would recur throughout his career. Of course, inactivity is hardly the correct word; when Hellman was not directing, he was busy developing projects, as well as contributing, in various capacities, to other people's films.

Hellman's first job after Ride in the Whirlwind was editing The Wild Angels (1966), a controversial biker film which Roger Corman directed in the spring of 1966: "I wasn't on the set because, as is customary, I began editing at the beginning of shooting. Roger is not hands on with the editing. He makes minor suggestions after the first cut is completed. More often, he merely asks for the cut to be tightened by trimming a few frames at the beginning and end of each shot."1 In his biography of Peter Bogdanovich, Andrew Yule claims that "when union problems arose at American International, Bogdanovich helped cut some of the footage, after being shown how to work a Movieola and moving the device into his living room."2 When I mentioned this to Hellman, his response was, "I can't vouch for what Peter did in his living room. I only know that he did direct a couple of second unit shots, but that no scenes left my cutting room unless gremlins took them out at night and returned them before 9 am. I was the only editor, and I followed the picture through the final mix. Also, I don't know of any editors' union strike during that period."3 The Wild Angels reportedly suffered from AIP's editorial interference, beginning a conflict that would end with Corman's departure from the company following their butchering of Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It four years later. In his autobiography, Corman recalls that "AIP made a bizarre cut in Angels that made no sense whatsoever. They changed the pan shot outside the church, before the orgy sequence, to a shot of a sign that said it was a funeral home. It wrecked the shot."4 According to Hellman, "AIP didn't care about the editing, they were only worried about having an orgy in a church."5 It should, however, be pointed out that I have never seen this "funeral home" insert — every print of The Wild Angels I've encountered includes exterior shots which clearly show the orgy to be taking place in the Sequoia Groves Community Church, so it is entirely possible that this alteration occurred only in Corman's imagination.

Hellman next collaborated with Corman on an even more troubled production. Corman was at this time under exclusive contract to Columbia (The Wild Angels had been made during a leave of absence), an association that proved completely fruitless. Corman recalls, "Columbia gave me the go-ahead to make The Long Ride Home, based on a novel the studio had acquired. I got Bob Towne the assignment to work on the script."6 When this Civil War Western began shooting in mid-1966, Monte Hellman again signed on as editor. After what he recalls as "a series of disagreements,"7 Corman was removed from the project and replaced by Phil Karlson. According to Hellman, "I was editor on the film for a couple of weeks, and resigned when Corman was fired. I never saw the film, and have no recollection of which scenes I may have worked on. It's another CRAFT moment: Can't Remember A Fucking Thing."8 When it was eventually released in 1967, Corman, Hellman and Towne were all uncredited. Phil Karlson took sole directorial credit, while the screenplay was attributed to Halsted Welles (adapted from the novel Southern Blade by Nelson and Shirley Wolford). George White was credited as "supervising film editor." The cast included such Corman and Hellman regulars as Dick Miller and Dean Stanton, as well as one "Harrison J. Ford." Dan Haller was the art director. The Long Ride Home was released in some territories as A Time for Killing.

Following his split with Columbia in late 1966, Corman immediately moved to 20th Century-Fox for what he described as "one more try at working within the studio system. Here things went better. I made The St. Valentine's Day Massacre on a budget of slightly over $1 million, the largest I've ever worked with."9 Hellman was enlisted as "dialogue director," a job that usually involves rehearsing actors and making sure they know their lines. But, as Hellman has pointed out, there was no real need for a dialogue director on The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: "This was the first time that Roger had worked with 'serious' actors, and he was worried he wouldn't know how to talk to them. He hired me to communicate with the actors. I don't believe I actually tried to give direction, but I became a friend to Jason Robards and particularly George Segal, and did the same as I usually do with actors — gave them an audience which reacted to their performances. I remember being shocked at Jason's difficulty doing an emotional scene in which he was supposed to cry, but I don't think I was much help to him."10 Hellman's name did not appear on release prints. Two actors from The Terror—Jack Nicholson and Dick Miller — also made uncredited appearances.

Early in 1967, Hellman moved to Universal, where he spent six months developing a project entitled Interval, from a screenplay by Carole Eastman: "It was about the popular music world, paranoiac, mysterious—probably influenced by Blowup. Universal dropped it, I set it up elsewhere, but Carole wouldn't sign the deal."11 While under contract to Universal, Hellman also worked on an adaptation of Paul Bowles' 1966 novel Up Above the World, "which Carole brought to my attention."12

Around August 1967, immediately after his Universal contract ended, Hellman did some editing on Bob Rafelson's Head (1968), a satirical deconstruction of The Monkees written by Jack Nicholson. Hellman remembers editing "all the musical sequences. I had a lot of fun doing it, because I used a lot of multiple exposures—sometimes three or four images simultaneously. I thought at times there were too many — to the point where you couldn't see anything, but it was the way Bob wanted it. He was never satisfied. Once it was good, he'd add to it until perhaps it wasn't so good anymore. These days, we have digital editing, and you can save every version. But back then, once something was changed, the other footage got lost. It was frustrating for me because I felt we'd had something better than what we ended up with in Head."13 Curiously, Hellman's name does not appear on currently circulating prints. When I asked him about this, he insisted, "My name is on the credits, but it's printed as a mirror image, I haven't seen the film since it came out, but my credit was definitely there, and I doubt it's been removed. But it is hard to read. Try looking for editing credits—there should be several. And it's not spelled backwards, but a true mirror image: "namlleh etnom"—but with the letters flopped, maybe even upside down."14 Hellman subsequently watched the film on DVD, and told me that "the credits were totally different from the ones I originally saw, and my credit has been removed.15 Head includes a sequence in which Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, as well as a number of people not otherwise connected with the film, such as Dennis Hopper, emerge from behind the camera. Monte Hellman, however, is not among them: "I don't remember being in the picture. It's likely that I started work after shooting had ended.''16

Immediately after this, in late 1967, Hellman again linked up with Roger Corman to edit a film initially known as What's in It for Harry? then variously retitled How to Make It and Target: Harry. The film was essentially a homage to the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart films to which Hellman had already paid tribute in Flight to Fury, and would later allude to in Shatter ("I do enjoy this genre"17). According to Hellman, the film was made for television (possibly as a pilot), though it was later released theatrically, with two added nude scenes featuring anonymous actors^18: "Corman was in Europe shooting the pic, so he didn't supervise at all. I believe I had it cut by the time he returned. The nudity was added later for the foreign theatrical release. Roger did this on a regular basis. But it was made for TV."19 Curiously, Corman (who makes a brief cameo appearance) signed this film with the pseudonym "Henry Neill," though Hellman thinks his real name may have appeared on the original television prints.

The editing of What's in It for Harry? spilled over into early 1968, and Hellman subsequently spent the winter and spring of that year developing Explosion, a film about a black sheriff in a southern town that Roger Corman was producing for AIP. Hellman was asked to direct, and assembled a cast which included Tom Skerritt, Richard Bright, Georg Stanford Brown and Toni Clayton (whom he had discovered in Eric Morris' acting class). Hellman cannot remember who wrote the script ("Roger developed it before I became involved"20), but does recall that "I was hired, cast the picture, hired a crew, rehearsed for several weeks, and the Friday before the Monday we were to begin shooting, I went to a meeting with Sam Arkoff and Roger. Sam said he had finally read the script — it wasn't unusual for a picture to go into production without the studio head reading it, Lew Wasserman never knew anything about Two-Lane Blacktop until he saw the cut picture — and he didn't believe there could be that much hatred towards blacks. He said he grew up in a town in the Midwest where there were two or three black families, and there was no prejudice. Roger tried to explain that that was because they didn't represent an economic threat, and that in the South it was very different. But Sam didn't believe him and cancelled the picture. I was paid in full, and was added to the rolls of the DGA pension plan. The DGA became home. It's comforting to have protection on every level, to know that you will be taken care of in any kind of dispute, to know that your artistic rights are being protected, and to know that you're going to be paid and you're going to get your residuals.21

Unknown to Hellman, AIP did not abandon Explosion, but instead turned it over to Sam Fuller, a director apparently determined to stress precisely the element that had so disturbed Sam Arkoff. Here is Fuller's description of his involvement, from an interview conducted in 1969: "A few months back I made a deal, through AIP, on another script. They had a script of a negro sheriff in a small southern town who goes after a negro. They threw it out and asked me to write another and I wrote it. The title of the picture, their title, is Explosion. Now, in the last couple of months they're driving me crazy because I was supposed to go out to look for a small southern town as a location and the budget was a little too much for them to handle. So right now they're talking to another group where they can split the budget, so the picture is to them under the line — that means without the cast, a little over seven hundred grand. I've a funeral and there's an assassination or two. The hearse's gas tank is hit, the casket catches on fire, there's a riot during this and I want all hell to break loose on this main street with all the people. I've got bloodhounds going into a movie house following the scent while a movie is on. And going into a home where somebody's eating, going into a store, going into a bathroom because they're following this man. I'm impatient waiting because of this doggone financial thing."22 Of course, Fuller never did get to make Explosion,23 presumably because, in late 1969, MGM produced a film on the same subject: Ralph Nelson's ... Tick ... Tick ... Tick..., from a screenplay by James Lee Barrett. Fuller would eventually rework several of the elements described here in his films White Dog (1981) and Street of No Return (1989).

Hell man's next project was an adaptation of Barbara Garson's MacBird, a satirical play about the Kennedy dynasty. Hellman spent the summer of 1968 working on the screenplay: "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. My agent, Robin French, was negotiating my deal on MacBird with Wolf Schmidt, the producer, over the phone. The conversation went on for nearly an hour, with me sitting in the room. When Robin hung up, I asked him what Wolf had said. Robin said he didn't remember — he only remembered what he, Robin, had said. The studio didn't like our screenplay — they wanted Bob Altman to do it. But Barbara wouldn't do it without me."24 The project was abandoned following Bobby Kennedy's assassination on June 5.

Hellman then formed a director's company with three unknown filmmakers: Vernon Zimmerman, Bill L. Norton and "a kid that we just didn't know whether he was going to work out or not named Steven Spielberg. We openly wondered whether we wanted to be involved with someone who was so wet behind the ears."25 The company eventually broke up without producing a single film ("The closest we came to a deal was with Milton Sperling"26), and, just after Christmas, Hellman left for Italy by ship (sailing from New York). He spent January, February and March of 1969 in Rome writing Labyrinth, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1964 novel The Two Faces of January: "It's not a Tom Ripley book, but it's the same character. It's just a different name. I wrote the script with Jaclyn. Mark Damon was the producer, and was also to play Rydal Keener, the younger of the two men. The older man, Chester MacFarland, was to be Eli Wallach, with whom I met in Rome. I can't remember if we had anyone in mind for the girl. I mentioned the project to Patricia Highsmith when we were both on the jury in San Sebastian 12 or so years later."27 When Mark Damon proved unable to raise the money for this project, Hellman visited France — where, as he recalls, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind were "taking Paris by storm"28—then sailed for America "on Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by family including new dog Braid (who had arrived in Rome from UK in January).29

Back in America, Hellman was offered two projects as part of a five picture deal with Cinema Center: "I came back to Los Angeles in, I guess, the beginning of 1970 and met producer Michael Laughlin at my agent Mike Medavoy's office, and Laughlin offered me two movies. One was from a script that he had called Two-Lane Blacktop, and the other was called The Christian Licorice Store, and I said I was interested in Two-Lane Blacktop but not The Christian Licorice Store, and he said 'Well, if you don't like the script you can change it. Take the scene that takes place in Laurel Canyon; you can set it in Cold Water Canyon or Beverly Drive.' Michael was one of the funniest people I've ever met, but I did wind up turning down The Christian Licorice Store. The five picture deal was just a standard contract in those days, with the studio having the option (but not the obligation) to hire you again at a set price. There were no other projects discussed."30

Hellman also nearly made the film of Leonard Gardner's novel Fat City: "There were three producers fighting over a weekend for the rights to Fat City, and believe it or not, all three, independently of each other, called me on a Friday to ask if I could do it. One was Jay Weston. A second, and the one who prevailed, was Gerry Ayers representing Ray Stark. I've used July 16, 1969, to jog my memory. That was the date of the first lunar landing, and I remember I was having a meeting in Malibu with one of the producers of Fat City, David Dworski, who was producing for Ray Stark. So Fat City actually pre-dated Two-Lane Blacktop, but Two-Lane closed first. I agreed to do Fat City, spent several weeks scouting locations and doing research in Oakland, Bakersfield and Fresno. The deal ultimately fell apart when Ray Stark wanted me to sign a five picture deal, with each picture paying me exactly half what I was to receive on a five picture deal with Cinema Center for Two-Lane Blacktop. In fairness to Ray, I believe he negotiated his deal first, then when the deal was made on Two-Lane Blacktop, my agent and lawyer were embarrassed to sign a significantly lesser deal on Fat City. I was heartbroken. I told Ray I would make the picture for nothing, if only he would let me out of the other four pictures. He refused. Then the Cinema Center deal fell apart anyway. I lost out on Fat City, and wound up making Two-Lane Blacktop for Universal for less than either deal, with no additional pictures. Such is life."31 John Huston, one of Hellman's favorite directors, made Fat City for Ray Stark in 1972.

It was during this period that Hellman came close to directing an adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel The Last Picture Show, eventually made by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971: "My first talks on Last Picture Show were at about the same time, but by the time they actually offered it to me, I had already committed to Two-Lane, and there was a conflict in schedules."32 Sergio Leone also approached Hellman and asked him to direct Duck, You Sucker: "I was probably suggested to him by Mike Medavoy. I don't remember the date. I only remember we met in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. But I think I must have met with him before I began on Two-Lane, which would have been mid-1969. I know it was long before he shot the picture. I know he had seen The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, because he thought I had been influenced by him, not realizing they had been shot before Fistful of Dollars was released here. I don't remember if there were actors in mind. I think the title on the script I read was Fistful of Dynamite."33 Hellman agreed to make the film, but was rejected by United Artists: "Leone told me they wanted him to direct it, but it's possible they just didn't approve me at the time. Remember, this was before Two-Lane Blacktop."34 At UA's recommendation, Leone hired Peter Bogdanovich ("Peter and I were getting a lot of the same material at that time"35), who either resigned or was fired after spending the last three months of 1969 doing pre-production in Italy. Leone then attempted to interest Sam Peckinpah in taking over before finally agreeing to direct the film himself in April 1970.

Another project dating from this period is Logan's Run, a screenplay by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson,36 based on their own 1967 novel: "Logan's Run was a script I fell in love with, but could never get on."37 According to Steven Gaydos, Hellman "was going to shoot it in Brasilia, which then was a brand new futuristic city."38 It is easy enough to see why Hellman was interested in this material, since the novel's concerns—mortality and the youth revolution's conservative nature — are very much those of Two-Lane Blacktop. Logan's Run, which was to have been produced by George Pal, was part of an entire slate of films cancelled by a cash-strapped MGM in the Summer of 196939: "I wasn't involved with MGM or anyone else. I was given the script by my agent, and wasn't able to do anything with it. Maybe it was after MGM shelved it."4^0 The novel was finally filmed (with a new screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and an uncredited Richard Maibaum) by Michael Anderson in 1975 and released the following year. Saul David was the producer.

Hellman also considered adapting Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow's 1959 novel about a middle-aged millionaire's search for meaning: "lust on my list of wanna-dos. I don't remember who I thought I could realistically cast, but I remember thinking how perfect Frank Wolff would have been. Jack Nicholson now owns the rights to the book. At the time, Frank Wolff seemed closer to the character than Jack. Jack only grew into the role, but for optimum casting he's now too old."41

In the spring of 1970, Cinema Center decided not to make Two-Lane Blacktop. Typically, the film Hellman turned down, The Christian Licorice Store, went ahead as planned under the direction of James Frawley, like Bob Rafelson a graduate of the television series The Monkees. It's cast boasted a number of directors, including Jean Renoir, Theodore J. Flicker, James B. Harris, and ... Monte Hellman: "I recall that Christian was shot early in 1970. There were originally two scenes involving Jean Renoir playing himself. I believe Renoir shot one, and for some reason was unable to do the other. Jim Frawley, the director, asked me if I would sub for Renoir. I didn't have to gain weight, since the role was changed so that I played myself as well. The scene was shot in Griffith Park as a picnic on the grass. My wife and two kids were with me in the scene, as well as the two stars, Maud Adams and Beau Bridges."42 The Christian Licorice Store previewed badly and was not released until 1971 (after being re-edited by Frawley). It is now rarely revived. According to published cast lists, Monte Hellman played "Joseph," while Jaclyn Hellman played "Mary." The cast includes Mike Medavoy, Francis Coppola's sister Talia Coppola (later Talia Shire) and Toni Clayton, the actress Hellman had discovered for Explosion.

Chapter 9

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

— Pozzo in Waiting for Godot

For the first time in my life I could see no way out; at least no direct way out.... Until then I had had so many ways out of everything, and now I had none. I was pinned down. Had I been nailed down, my right to free movement would not have been lessened.... I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by "way out." I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not use the word "freedom." I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now. In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime.... No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! Only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall.

— Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy

America has never been easy, and is not easy today. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension.... Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps less free. Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away.... Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

— D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

G.T.O. is time. God, that sounds pretentious.

— Monte Hellman, Sight and Sound Winter 1970/71, p. 37.

Will Corry's screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop was first offered to Monte Hellman by Michael S. Laughlin, who planned to produce the film for Cinema Center in the autumn of 1969. According to Hellman, "what attracted me to the story was, initially, the aspect of gambling. My father was a gambler, and so I have a kind of feeling for films that have that subject. And in this case it's really the frame of the picture, but it's still what attracted me, initially. The original script was just not very interesting. It 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. But it was about a race. I was attracted to just the idea of a cross-country race. When I think about it, it's absurd: they paid $100,000 for this script that we totally threw out. Will Corry got what he wanted. I mean, he's the only one who got paid a decent salary on this picture. He sold his script. He bought a yacht. He got custody of his two-year-old daughter for one year, and they sailed around the world. So more power to him."1

Hellman selected cult novelist Rudolph Wurlitzer (who had already co-written Jim McBride's film Glen and Randa) to write what amounted to a completely new screenplay: "I read a novel that he had written called Nog. There was one scene in particular that was so absurd and so brilliant that I couldn't resist him as a writer. These three people are camped out in the wilderness, two guys and a girl. And the hero of the story is sent off to gather firewood. He comes back to find the girl and the other guy fucking. And the hero says, 'So I started fucking her from behind.' And he said 'First he came, and she came, and I plunged on alone.' That was the human condition."2

Hellman tracked Wurlitzer down in San Francisco. As the writer recalls, "he just flew me out to L.A., put me in a hotel, sat me down with a bunch of car magazines, told me to keep to the general idea of a race across the country, and got me to turn out what became Two-Lane Blacktop. It all came together so fast. I really thought, Wow, this is the way it happens, that you're left alone, that you get to write straight into screenplay form, which is a wonderful form in which to think and write about film, and you get on set to plug any gaps—I played the guy with the green hot rod — and then you get the money and the chance to take a year off to write a novel. Of course, it never was that good again."3 Terrence Malick was also briefly involved with the film: "Terry recalls sending me a treatment for Two-Lane Blacktop, at the suggestion of Rudy Wurlitzer. I have no recollection of this, but knowing Rudy I can believe it. I certainly wasn't soliciting submissions of ideas for re-writing the movie, and had already offered the job to Rudy. But Rudy, then and now, was always looking for ways to avoid work if at all possible. He apparently told his friend Terry about the movie, hoping Terry would succeed in taking the job away from him. I'm sure I never read the treatment (I dislike reading treatments, and cannot judge anything from them), and had no interest in the (then) unknown Mr. Malick."4

According to Hellman, Will Corry's screenplay was about "four college kids in a convertible racing this Chevy, and the mechanic falls in love with the girl who has a little VW Bug, and she's chasing them across the country, and he keeps dropping his rags out the window to let her know where they are, I gave Rudolph Wurlitzer the original script, and he read five pages and said, 'I can't read this,' and I said, 'Well, you don't have to read it. The basic idea is a cross-country race between two cars.' And so he wrote a completely new script that had pretty much no relationship to the original, other than the fact that there was a driver and there was a mechanic. There was no character of G.T.O."5 Wurlitzer's script focused on four central characters—a driver, his mechanic, a young female hitchhiker, and the owner of a G.T.O.—all of them nameless. As Hellman points out, "Nobody in the film ever uses his or another character's name. Nor do most people in life, unless they're identifying themselves on the phone or using a salutation in a letter or calling someone in another room. I guess it was representative of the era, still echoing the hippy mentality of freedom from the bonds of place, possessions, and invading other people's privacy."6

Hellman recalls that "I had a sensational casting director named Fred Roos who actually produced the two movies in the Philippines. He brought in everybody. I went to New York and did casting there and I went to San Francisco. The hardest part seemed to be the girl. I really had a nationwide search for that part. It was hard to cast the other roles as well. The only role that wasn't was G.T.O. I thought of Warren immediately. At one point it didn't look like he was going to be able to do it. I actually made an offer to Bruce Dern, but he wouldn't have been as good for that part as Warren. He didn't make the decision fast enough, and Warren became available so we withdrew the offer. I saw a lot of people for the driver. I saw Al Pacino, I saw Robert de Niro, and I saw Michael Sarrazin, and I saw Jon Voight. You can't think of a young actor at that time that I didn't interview. I just didn't think anybody was right for this character. Fred Roos was getting frustrated and finally he said, 'Well, what about composers? What about singers? What about this?' He was suggesting all kinds of people. I saw a picture of James Taylor on a billboard, and I'd never heard of him before, but I wanted that quality. I just flipped over his face. James came out and did a screen test, and he had a moustache. We weren't sure whether we wanted him with or without it, so in the screen test he shaves it off."7 Hellman (along with Fred Roos) then spent some time trying to cast the girl: "In New York we met Laurie Bird, and she seemed like a prototype for the kind of character that we had in mind, but, because she had no experience, it never occurred to us that she could play the part, so we spent several hours recording an interview with her which we used in the creation of the character, and then, months later, when we couldn't find anybody to play the part, somebody had the bright idea to screen test Laurie Bird."8 According to the production notes, "Laurie was asked to fly to Little Rock, Ark., this time as a candidate for the role. A screen test in Hollywood was arranged after she was rehearsed by Hellman and his wife. A few days later, she was signed for the picture."

Although scheduled to begin shooting in May, Cinema Center cancelled Two-Lane Blacktop in April. Hellman spent several months trying to interest other studios in the project: "MGM thought it would be a boring film because it all took place in a car. One of the things I had to do when we were presenting it to them was demonstrate how many different camera angles you could get in a car. I think I came up with 24."9 It was during this period that Hellman and his wife separated, though they continued to collaborate: "Jaclyn was an acting coach. She and I broke up in 1970, just before I started Two-Lane, on which she also worked as a coach and played a role."10 Hellman finally managed to set Two-Lane Blacktop up at Universal, where it joined a series of ambitious films supervised by Ned Tanen; the others were Milos Forman's Taking Off, Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie and Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand.11 Hellman was given a budget of $950,000 (he actually managed to bring the film in for $875,000) and granted final cut, with the proviso that the film not run longer than 120 minutes. Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys was cast as the mechanic ("He had actually lived the part. He had spent half his young life taking apart automobiles and putting them back together"12), and principal photography commenced on August 13, 1970. Although lack Deerson is credited as director of photography, the real DP was "photographic advisor" Gregory Sandor, who had previously collaborated with Hellman on The Terror, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind: "Up until the last minute, the cameraman's union agreed to take him in, and then they changed their mind just before we were ready to go on location and we had to hire a union cinematographer who literally spent everyday in his hotel room, and Greg shot the picture."13 The filming took place in sequence and on location, starting in L.A., then proceeding to Needles, California, and gradually moving through the southwest — Flagstaff, Arizona, Santa Fe and Tucumcare, New Mexico, Boswell, Oklahoma, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee and Marysville, North Carolina: "These were the major stops, where we stayed overnight. There were minor stops between these, where we would shoot a few hours (such as the scene where they're stopped by the Texas cops—"He's dangerous, Officer") and then drive on."14 Aside from the four leads, a handful of professional actors accompanied the production, with smaller roles being cast en route. For most of the filming, Hellman refused to let his cast read the script in advance: "The only actor who had read the whole script was Warren, and the rest just took the part based on a description of the movie and, I guess, just the idea of it. I'd give them pages the night before the next day's shooting, and the idea was that, since we were shooting in sequence, they didn't need to know any more than what happened before, but not what was going to happen, because in life you don't know what's going to happen the next day. That was the theory. 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 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. I knew fairly soon that they were uncomfortable. James, who is probably a bigger control freak than I am, got very upset. He really felt like he was out of control, that he had no control over his life, and so he refused to go on unless I gave him the script. So, after two or three weeks of filming, I gave him the script. As far as I know, he never read it. I wouldn't work that way again with someone like James. He's very intellectual, so nothing would be lost in letting him read the script."15

Editing lasted from November 1970 to April 1971. Several complete sequences (which can be found in the published screenplay) were removed — notably a section (prominently represented in the film's stills) in which the girl goes swimming, as well as the revelation that the driver and the mechanic gave a phony pink slip to G.T.O. (who probably never posted it anyway) — but Hellman insists that this reduction was motivated by artistic considerations: "We literally had in our contract 'final cut.' With one provision being that the picture be under two hours. Well, my first cut was three-and-a-half hours. Then I brought it down to two-and-a-half and then two-and-a-quarter. Then I got it under two hours and I liked the process of whittling away so much, I brought it down another 15 minutes. So I didn't feel any restriction at all in the process of making the picture. I wouldn't have prepared a longer cut for release. There were a number of beautiful scenes I hated to lose, but did so in the interest of the whole. There's an expression that the hardest thing for creative people to do is to 'let go of their darlings'."16

Unfortunately, Universal failed to support the film: "The sales department at Universal was very enthusiastic, and they thought they had something they could really sell. I think they had it in more theaters than any other picture in Universal's group of films for the year. What happened was that Lew Wasserman, who was then head of the studio, saw the film and literally hated it. He was just offended by it. I don't know whether it was just his personal taste or whether it was this whole group of pictures that Two-Lane Blacktop was part of. What happened was that Wasserman had agreed to produce these pictures through Universal but really didn't believe in them and really wanted to kill the whole program. And so he didn't promote any of the pictures, and in particular Two-Lane Blacktop. It was praised by Time and The New York Times and all over the place. And when these reviews were shown to Lew Wasserman, his response was, 'They were bought.' It opened in New York City on July Fourth weekend without one single newspaper ad. People didn't even know it was playing. The excuse was that it was Fourth of July weekend and nobody would be in town, so what's the point of advertising? But then if nobody's going to be in town, why open the picture?"17

Wasserman's reaction might, on the face of it, seem curious. Although Two-Lane Blacktop lacked the obvious commercial appeal of Easy Rider (whose success Universal clearly hoped to duplicate), it was not as blatantly anti-establishment as Dennis Hopper's film. When I asked Hellman about this, he admitted, "I never had a conversation with Lew Wasserman on this or any other subject. I am only conjecturing that he was offended. But Easy Rider is much more a political film, with villains that I'm sure Lew Wasserman could hate. Two-Lane Blacktop is not political so much as sociological and philosophical. The characters don't use drugs, aren't violent, aren't blown away at the end. They have just decided not to marry, raise a family, etc. They're not making a statement — they're just not interested. It's interesting that Two-Lane was invited to the Moscow film festival, and when the politicians saw the film they decided not to screen it. Again I'm surmising, but I think they felt it was subversive. I think Lew Wasserman felt the same way."18

It is by means of a comparison with Easy Rider that one might begin a critical examination of Two-Lane Blacktop, for Hellman's film could almost have been conceived as a direct response to Hopper's. It must, however, be noted that Hellman insists this was not the case, at least on the level of conscious intention: "I was not influenced by it in either a posiitve or negative way. I can't believe Rudy could have paid much attention to it either. In any event, we never discussed Easy Rider. It didn't even occur to me that our deal at Universal was due to the success of Easy Rider until years later when journalists started trying to make sense out of the era."19 Nevertheless, Two-Lane Blacktop, although part of the same countercultural movement that made Easy Rider possible, is directly opposed to everything that film stood for: "In a way, Easy Rider was a kind of pop song, or even a religion. I think the reason that Universal, and really the other studios as well, hated Two-Lane Blacktop so much is the same reason that the audience loved Easy Rider so much. These films were against everything that they believed in, and they were for all the things that they disliked."20

Though perceived as an innovative work, Easy Rider belongs to a long-established tradition in American literature and cinema, that of the homo-erotic flight from civilization of two male wanderers: examples include Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. For Hopper (as for Kerouac), one is either Square or Hip, a division roughly corresponding to that between Civilization and Wilderness in the Western, but here equated with a simple-minded distinction between good and evil. Easy Rider's hippies are all peace-loving, its "straights" caricatured sadists. More importantly, as Joan Mellen has pointed out, "The most refreshing, if inadvertent, truth brought out in Easy Rider is that the counterculture indeed perpetuated the same notions of masculinity that had always been current in American culture and glorified in the American film. If clothes and hair length were to become unisexual and the rigid male pattern of behavior was assailed, the attitude of men to women was not."21 It is this attitude that Two-Lane Blacktop sets out to interrogate, partly by foregrounding the homosexual subtext usually suppressed by both the road film and the "buddy" movie, two closely related sub-genres that flourished in the wake of Easy Rider. According to Robin Wood," their popularity suggests a desire (on the part of audiences and filmmakers) to acknowledge bisexual impulses. Like Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port, these films can all be described as love stories between two men, but most of them shy away from the implications of this formula, their most obvious defense being the inclusion of explicitly gay minor characters who are presented as either ridiculous or repugnant. As Robin Wood has pointed out, these overt homosexuals have "the function of a disclaimer — our boys are not like that."23 Hellman seems to have intuitively grasped the meaning of this tactic, which Two-Lane Blacktop subverts. Although the true nature of the driver's relationship with the mechanic is clear enough—consider what is implied by the scene in which the former waits outside the motel room while the latter makes love to the girl — we are not asked to laugh at or feel contempt for the gay hitchhiker (played by Harry Dean Stanton) who attempts to seduce G.T.O., and his brief appearance does not make us feel secure in our knowledge of the central characters' sexuality. Indeed, quite the opposite is true, since G.T.O. rejects the idea of a homosexual encounter not because he is a confirmed heterosexual, but because "I got no time."

While Easy Rider does not resort to the overt homosexual convention, it nevertheless manages to make much the same point by portraying women as brainless bimbos who exist only to prove that our heroes are not gay. But if Two-Lane Blacktop is not Easy Rider, the driver and the mechanic essentially see themselves as "characters" in a fictional narrative governed by the same moral codes as Dennis Hopper's counterculture classic. Hellman's point is that they are not, and that Easy Rider's morality is the ultimate cop out. Hellman's intelligence and sensitivity are closely allied to his preferred production methods, the decision to use genuine locations suggesting an openness to the various communities through which he was moving. Rather than illustrate a thesis, Hellman constantly tests whatever preconceived ideas he might have against the evidence of lived experience. Two-Lane Blacktop shows those romantic fantasies which made Easy Rider such a popular success disintegrating in the cold light of reality. G.T.O. may be the film's most obvious fantasist, changing his identity and background to suit whoever happens to be listening, but the driver and the mechanic inhabit a similar fantasy world, perceiving themselves as free souls escaping the restrictions of civilization by taking to the open road. Like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, they remain ever alert to the hostility of mid-America, even taking care to change their license plates ("I get nervous around this part of the country"). But this hostility exists purely in their minds: although the driver and the mechanic treat them as inferiors (the latter sarcastically observes that a local car would "Probably blow our doors right off, wouldn't it?" a line not in the screenplay), the townspeople the racers encounter demonstrate neither hatred towards nor any great interest in these rebels (even the police are unfailingly polite).

The most obvious exception is the scene in which G.T.O., the driver, the mechanic and the girl stop at a roadhouse where they are approached by a redneck (played by Alan Vint) who attempts to provoke a fight. Although Hellman denies it, this scene could easily have been conceived as a direct answer to the moment in Easy Rider when Hopper, Fonda and Jack Nicholson enter a roadside cafe and beat a hasty retreat after hearing the hostile remarks of some locals (who also make racist comments, just for good measure). In Two-Lane Blacktop, G.T.O. avoids a confrontation by claiming that himself, the driver, the mechanic and the girl are all members of a family. The overall tone is one of mutual disappointment: the redneck (who has clearly seen Easy Rider) appears resentful about not having rooted out a nest of "hippies," while G.T.O.'s response reveals just how unwilling these dropouts are to stand up for what they ostensibly believe in.

It is important to remember that Hellman is not accusing the counterculture of superficiality or insincerity. Indeed, the hitchhiker G.T.O. picks up near the end serves to remind us that some people were genuinely challenging America's institutions at this time. By refusing to buy into G.T.O.'s macho fantasies and insisting on getting out of the car, this character clarifies one of the film's most important points: that, although the driver and the mechanic perceive themselves as having rejected the lifestyle of suburban America, they nevertheless inhabit a mental suburbia in which the fundamentals of respectable society — keeping up with the Joneses, bourgeois marriage, the corporate rat race (of which the racing circuit provides a distorted mirror image) — are recreated as if in a bizarre counterculture! parody. Tellingly, although they appear to have cut all domestic ties, the male characters consistently refer to traditional family structures. The driver tells two policemen that G.T.O. "scared my wife 'bout half to death," while G.T.O. claims that his wife "happens to be having a set of twins." G.T.O. later informs the driver "Everything fell apart on me. My job, my family. Everything," and talks his way out of trouble by claiming "we're a big family, but we know how to keep it together." As Richard Harland Smith has pointed out, "In the presence of real families, the facade crumbles—at the scene of a car wreck, The driver runs away from witnesses that turn out to be a mother and her children,"24 a scene that becomes even more resonant when we realize that one of the children is played by Monte Hellman's own son.

To see G.T.O. as somehow different from or opposed to the driver and the mechanic is thus to risk misunderstanding the film, for G.T.O. and the younger racers function as variations on the same imaginative dilemma. Several critics have described G.T.O. as mercurial, but it is, I think, important to distinguish Oates' character from such genuinely mercurial figures as, say, Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita or Christopher Walken in Abel Ferrara's King of New York. Whereas those individuals constantly play with identities and motivations, the shifting masks worn by G.T.O. compensate for a personality which is either absent or can only be defined in negative terms; like the driver and the mechanic, he believes himself to be a modern cowboy, a free spirit roaming the asphalt range (it is a wonderful irony that so many of the characters are heading East, reversing the Westerner's usual direction). but is actually an exemplary product of corporate America. G.T.O. has internalized the values of Madison Avenue, mistaking the claims of sales brochures, with their emphasis on "performance and image," for a model on which one can construct a satisfying way of life. Helllman and Warren Oates bravely reveal the desperation and emptiness lurking behind this façade. Notice how G.T.O. drinks from a coke bottle at the gas station, replaces the half-empty bottle in the rack, then immediately picks it up again when he feels the need for a prop. This sales brochure mentality speaks to a modern crisis in masculinity, a crisis relating to the undermining of a masculine norm brought about by the conflicts of the 1960s. If the driver conforms to an ideal derived from Easy Rider and On the Road, G.T.O. subscribes to a somewhat older but nevertheless complimentary fantasy, one absorbed from James Bond films and Playboy magazine, and it is Two-Lane Blacktop's purpose to expose this ideal to scrutiny.

Such a project vitally connects with the feminist concerns becoming increasingly important to Hellman, and it is telling that the girl — who, like one of Jean Renoir's heroines, is involved with three men — should eventually become Two-Lane Blacktop's moral center. The key moment is her final rejection of the driver, the mechanic and G.T.O., a rejection motivated by their implicit demand that she choose between them rather than relating sexually to all three. If the men perceive themselves as removed from the demands of domesticity, what they secretly desire is a slightly updated variation on the norms of traditional heterosexual relationships: marriage and sexual exclusivity. Ironically, it is the girl they treat so casually who emerges as the only genuine rebel, her final words—"no good"—having the force of a radical protest against those assumptions which unite the driver and the mechanic with G.T.O.

By this point, it should be clear that Hellman's aesthetic approach is distinguished primarily by its contradictory nature, despite the fact (another contradiction) that it remains among the purest in American cinema. A visionary determined to follow his own uncompromised path, Hellman often works as a director for hire, boasting of how he never turns down a project and frequently completing films begun by others; an advocate of improvisation and spontaneity, he was nevertheless able to present MGM with diagrams representing the 24 camera angles possible in a car; an artist constantly reaching for universal meanings, he refuses to shoot a scene in a location other than the one in which it takes place. These contradictions go to the heart of Hellman's approach and achievement. As he once observed, "I suppose there may be a conflict between my love of road movies and my wanting to tell a story. And I think what it does is it dictates the kind of stories that I wind up telling, and I think that they're stories that are without a beginning and without end, so really they're the middle of the classic story."25 These contradictions are summed up by the quote at the beginning of this chapter: "G.T.O. is time. God, that sounds pretentious." Hellman remains half-way between the philosopher fascinated by ideas ("G.T.O. is time"), and the straightforward storyteller ("God, that sounds pretentious"). His films exist in the gap between these two statements, which is the gap between classical American cinema and those European works that inspired the New Hollywood.

It is the use of location that provides the key. Despite his pronounced existential concerns, space for Hellman is never abstract, never used to make a point or illustrate a concept (and certainly not for its plastic beauty). On the contrary, such concepts as exist in his oeuvre arises naturally from the characters' interaction with the landscape, something as true of Beast from Haunted Cave as it is of Two-Lane Blacktop (in which the central characters do not make a spectacular entrance, but instead emerge gradually from a "documentary" background). In Back Door to Hell, the jungle is not a lifeless symbol for some greater metaphorical struggle, but an actual place that must be traversed laboriously and at great length, and one can already feel Hellman responding to the influence of that authentic (and authentically hazardous) location in which complicated co-production requirements (as opposed to artistic considerations) required him to shoot: "For me, space is not neutral, not only in life but also in my films. New Mexico is not Oklahoma, and I never used a scene outside of its geographical context. The landscape is different and, from this point of view, everything was very precise. It's like the sound or the dialogue; I don't want to make an element of the film obvious. In a sense I'm a landscape painter, but I don't want to show a landscape only for its beauty, or to enhance its value. I love shots involving foreground, middleground and background action. It's really, for me, what movies are all about, and it's one of the great things about shooting on location. The set actually becomes a collaborator. It contributes to the overall drama. You discover things as you go along. It's impossible to get that same kind of feeling of discovery when you shoot on a soundstage."26

Hellman's Bazinian faith in external reality is part and parcel of his humanism, the casting of individuals encountered en route giving the film an authenticity that enables rather than contradicts its overt philosophy. Improvisation plays a considerable role in this process, and while Two-Lane Blacktop does not, perhaps, contain as much actual improvisation as Hellman originally intended,27 one key speech was spontaneously invented by James Taylor. As Taylor and Laurie Bird sit on a wooden fence outside a gas station, Bird is distracted by some cicadas, and Taylor uses the opportunity to improvise the following dialogue: "You talk about survival, man, those are some freaky bugs. They come out of the ground every seven years, and they live underground the rest of the time, and the only time they come out of the ground is to crawl out of their skins and grow some wings so they can fuck, and then they die, but before they die they manage to lay some more eggs." Clearly, Taylor's intention is to indirectly state the film's philosphical underpinnings, and Laurie Bird's response—"We've got a better life, haven't we? We make them look sick" — demonstrates how completely the actress understands this. But what is even more remarkable is that James Taylor is here rephrasing a line John Hackett wrote for Back Door to Hell: "What's so special about a human being? They get born, they stumble around in life for a while, they die. That's all." Nor is this the only dialogue from Back Door to Hell that reappears in Two-Lane Blacktop. In the earlier film, Hackett responds to a question by asking, "What difference does it make? We're all gonna die anyway, tomorrow, next week, thirty years from now," while in Two-Lane a hitchhiker tells G.T.U., 'It doesn't matter. What do we have, thirty, forty years?' a line written by Rudolph Wurlitzer. Such connections reinforce one's faith in the auteur theory while demonstrating both the importance of Hellman's choice of collaborators and the fluid nature of his filmmaking. For Hellman, theme is expressed not through the imposition of an already defined vision, but rather as part of an organic process in which writers, performers and locations all play a crucial role: "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 writers to do scripts with a similar point of view. Just like there are certain actors who interest me, certainly I am very particular about the writers I choose to work with, and every bit as particular about the scripts I choose to make."28

As the previous examples make clear, Two-Lane Blacktop's progress involves a growing awareness of mortality, something that becomes particularly obvious during the final scenes. In quick succession, we see: the driver, the mechanic and the girl discovering the aftermath of a fatal car crash in the middle of the road; G.T.O. picking up a hitchhiker who insists on the relative unimportance of all aspirations; and G.T.O. giving a lift to an old woman (Katherine Squire, from Ride in the Whirlwind) and her granddaughter (Monte's daughter Melissa) who are "going to the graveyard" to visit the graves of the girl's parents, both of whom were recently killed by a "city car." It is here that we become aware of the significance that should be attributed to Hellman's game playing motif. Games— the fruit machine and solitaire in Beast from Haunted Cave, chess in Creature from the Haunted Sea, the buckshot toy in The Shooting, checkers in Ride in the Whirlwind— have been evident in most of Hellman's previous films, but it was Jack Nicholson's character in Flight to Fury, obsessed with both games and death, who most clearly suggested something clarified by Two-Lane Blacktop: that it is the inescapable fact of our ultimate demise which reveals how random contests of chance or skill function as substitutes for more meaningful action. In Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman's exploration of this theme is given a specifically feminist slant, for it is really only the men who insist on the importance of game playing: Hellman's women, notably Gloria in Flight to Fury and the girl here, are able to live in the moment, along with everything this implies (a genuine, as opposed to willed, rejection of male/female relationships based on possession and sexual exclusivity). The male protagonists may be goal-centered, but Hellman's stylistic evenness (that "gift for uniformity" noted by Kent Jones) implicitly contradicts them, giving every event (as well as every character) an equal value.

Hellman's camera adopts what is essentially a female (or feminine, or even feminist) perspective. Notice how he refuses to film Two-Lane Blacktop's races in a manner that might excite the viewer. We are not kept on the edge of our seats as we watch two opponents approach the finish line; instead, these contests seem as meaningless to us as they unquestionably are to Hellman.29 As always, the point is made stylistically. Consider the shot that begins the final sequence, with the camera focusing on a white line in the middle of the road, then moving upwards to show that line receding into the distance. The road — along with its promise of escape from responsibility and domesticity — implies not freedom, but rather a nightmare that will never end. Two-Lane Blacktop presents us with a joyless world, an America which exists primarily to provide corporations with a means of increasing their profit margins (the Coca-Cola signs that litter the landscape are far more terrifying in their implications than all the nameless organizations of the 1970s conspiracy cycle), and forbids demonstrations of generosity (the sign warning drivers not to pick up hitchhikers) or joy (the "no dancing" placard in the madhouse). This joylessness is embodied by the three men (the driver especially), but fought against by the girl, who expresses recognizably human emotions. Notice the way she reacts to the sight of a corpse lying in the road, or the look of delight on her face when she manages to start the car.

For all its emphasis on mortality, none of Two-Lane Blacktop's principal characters actually dies. Whereas Easy Rider ends with the fiery deaths of its two heroes, Two-Lane Blacktop's climax is, in a sense, even more despairing. At least Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper went out in flames, one of the most popular exits reserved for the American cinema's heroes and anti-heroes. But Hellman, who would doubtless agree with the sentiment expressed by Fritz Lang in Godard's Le Mépris—"Death is no solution"—refuses to allow his characters such an easy exit, instead ending his film with an epilogue (added to Wurlitzer's original script at the director's insistence) in which, as the driver and the mechanic take part in another race, the image slows down while the film catches fire and burns: "I don't know how the idea came to me, but I do remember being unsure of it because I felt it had an intellectual rather than emotional source. Against the advice of almost everyone, I decided to stick with it, and I don't regret it. Even if the idea was intellectual, I feel the effect is emotional. Some people still hate it, but I don't."30 Intellectually, we should be aware that the narrative has collapsed under the weight of contradictions inherent in the capitalist system whose inner workings it has exposed; or, to put it another way, with the already fragile barriers separating the driver and the mechanic from G.T.O. having finally disintegrated, the idea of individual identity, like the film itself, returns to point zero.31 However, as with Hellman's use of landscapes, the effect is not abstract but devastatingly emotional, leaving the viewer with feelings of sadness and loss which would be difficult to achieve in any other medium. Whatever else it may be, this is cinema.

Chapter 10

Shatter (1974)

While editing Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman was offered Kid Blue (written by Edwin Shrake), but turned it down "because I thought I was going to make Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid."1 As with The Christian Licorice Store, James Frawley eventually directed Kid Blue (the cast included Dennis Hopper and Warren Oates), which was released in 1973.

Hellman recalls that the screenplay for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was commissioned by Gordon Carroll, who "hired me to supervise the writing. Rudy Wurlitzer and I together came up with the idea to deal with the only period of Billy's life which was not documented, when he disappeared after escaping from jail, and before he was killed. Rudy was staying at the Chateau Marmont, and I worked with him daily. I was editing Blacktop in November-December of '70, and in January of '71. I did not have to work full-time during the sound and music phases of the editing in February and March. I wasn't needed full-time until the mixing and answer print stages in approximately April and May. I believe Rudy and I were working together approximately February-March, but it may have extended beyond that. I did not sit with him while he was working. We met at the end of each day, or even every other day, to discuss what he had written, and decide whether it was going in the right direction. So, even if I was still doing some work on Blacktop, it wouldn't have interfered with my working with Rudy. We were offered a deal to make the picture at Columbia, which I begged Gordon to accept. Instead, he took a development deal at MGM, because his friend Doug Netter was an executive there. First rule of the biz: always take a picture deal over a development deal."2 MGM lost interest in Pat Garrett when Two-Lane Blacktop flopped at the box-office. As Wurlitzer recalled in the introduction to the published version of his Garrett screenplay, "The producer took the script to other studios. There were no takers. The original director, who had just suffered through a failure of his own which the writer had been involved with, was thought to be unmarketable. He was forced to bow out." Wurlitzer continued making changes to the screenplay (it is his final draft that was published by Signet), and the project eventually ended up back at MGM, where, in 1972, it attracted the attention of Sam Peckinpah, who did a major rewrite, incorporating scenes he had written for a screenplay based on Charles Neider's The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (an early incarnation of Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks). The film, which is perhaps Peckinpah's masterpiece, was shot in Mexico between November 1972 and March 1973. One of the most memorable sequences—Pat Garrett shooting at a bottle floating in a river—was taken directly from the original draft. According to Hellman, "It was great in our script, and he photographed it beautifully. I was unhappy with the film that MGM released. It wasn't until I saw Peckinpah's cut many years later that I felt he had actually made the film I helped Rudy create. I don't remember the details of either version. I just remember feeling the mood was lost in the studio version, and that Peckinpah restored it in his cut. I think that, as usual with studio meddling, there were a lot of small changes that added up to a big negative. I felt the Peckinpah version was true in spirit to Rudy's script, if not faithful to every detail. Peckinpah always changes the order of things."3

In the early 1970s, Hellman's career often overlapped with Peckinpah's. Aside from their shared taste in actors (Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton) and the fact that Sergio Leone had offered Duck, You Sucker to each of them, Peckinpah greatly admired Two-Lane Blacktop. As he told a Playboy interviewer in 1972, "I get so goddamn angry when the critics don't pick up on good films and go along with bullshit, as they did on Bogdanovich's film, The Last Picture Show, which was a crashing bore, and ignore something like Two-Lane Blacktop, which I thought was a potential work of art."4 It was Hellman who, early in 1971, was asked to direct Junior Banner (from a script by Jeb Rosebrook), but turned it down because "I didn't quite know what to do with it."5 Peckinpah made the film later that year: "I was amazed at how Sam transformed a not-good script into a quite-good movie. The difference between Peckinpah and myself was that Sam chose to be at war with absolutely all producers — the good ones and the bad ones. If our goals are divergent, the producer's and mine, I'll fight for what I believe in. With Sam, it was just scorched earth with all of them. Sam was a difficult person, very defensive with this wall around him. He was extremely sensitive and he kind of created fantasies. He was in a lot of pain. It was hard to break through all that, and hard to have a direct conversation, because he'd go around the subject. I adjusted to that and I had a great affection for him. In a way he was like Don Siegel, in that he was a really good technician. Outside of the fact that he made interesting films, he knew how to direct; he knew how to place a camera, he knew how to move his actors, which a lot of directors, strangely, don't know how to do. I mean, Kubrick didn't know how to do it. It's not something you take for granted. Kubrick made interesting films because he had an interesting mind, but he didn't direct interestingly. Peckinpah, besides making interesting films, was a good director, as was Siegel."6

It was during this period that Hellman met one of his most important collaborators, Steven Gaydos: "I saw Monte on a television interview with Warren Oates promoting Two-Lane Blacktop, and the picture looked and sounded like a real slice of Americana. I wrote Monte a letter, sent him a sample of my writing (Poetry!) and said perhaps we'd talk some time and he should keep me in mind for slice of Americana type stories. Lo and behold, he invited me over to meet him, Laurie and her brother Don. Don and I became great friends. I submitted some story/script ideas to Monte (one of which, The Anywhere Killers, he thought was kind of cool) and we stayed loosely in touch."7

After Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid collapsed, Hellman started working on The Mechanic, adapted by Lewis John Carlino from his own (then unpublished) novel: "I was asked to direct The Mechanic, and spent several weeks developing the story with Lewis John Carlino before my deal was finalized. The script was totally written under my direction. I don't usually start writing dialogue till later, but I do participate in the process of outlining the plot, setting up the structure, suggesting scenes, etc. Carlino was fast, and easy to work with. We worked in an office at what was then Goldwyn Studios (now Warners Hollywood) in the heart of Hollywood, only a couple of blocks from my earliest studio home at Ziv. I can't recall the name of the producer, who was merely renting space as far as I remember. My recollection is that we worked for approximately three weeks, and that it was developed for Charles Bronson. Then they changed studios, decided to hire Michael Winner, and I never got paid for my work. All this was in mid-1971. I saw Winner's film, and I believe it was pretty much the same script."8 In Michael Winner's The Mechanic, Charles Bronson's solitary protagonist, a hit man obsessed with his own perfection ("Money is paid, but that's not the motive. It has to do with standing outside of it all, on your own"), suggests the traces of a Hellman theme, while the dialogueless 15-minute opening sequence may also be attributable to Hellman's influence. The film's main claim to fame is that its trailer provided the source material for Kirk Tongas' The Politics of Perception (1973), a classic of the avant-garde/experimental movement.

Another project Hellman worked on in mid-1971 was When the War Is Over, from the novel by Stephen Becker: "It's about a young Lieutenant named Marius Catto who is trying to decide whether to re-enlist. It's during the last days of the Civil War. He captures a 15-year-old boy who is accused of being a spy for the South. The boy becomes the mascot of the regiment while awaiting execution. He is reprieved once, then finally becomes the last man to be executed for treason in the Civil War, because Lincoln was killed before he had a chance to pardon him. Marius re-enlists. I worked on this originally when it was developed by Columbia. Marshal Backlar was the producer, and he still owns the rights. I have tried to revive it a number of times over the years, one time as recently as 1999 or 2000. I lost track of Marshal and it for long periods, but always kept coming back to it whenever he re-surfaced."9

Also in the early 1970s, Hellman came close to making two Alan Sharp-scripted Westerns, Ulzana's Raid and Billy Two Hats: "Since Ulzana was released in 1972, and I was interviewed during early pre-production, it was almost certainly before I became involved in Billy Two Hats. Ulzana was a project that very briefly found me (much like most of the films I have made, except I didn't get the job). After deciding not to hire me, Burt Lancaster actually had the nerve to call me and ask how to find the locations I had used for the Suplicio in The Shooting. I told him they were under water and no longer existed. I was given the script of Billy Two Hats by my lawyer Jack Schwartzman (father of Jason), who also represented Alan Sharp. I can't remember whether he had set it up, but it was far enough along for me to give it to James Mason for the lead. I remember calling Mason at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He answered the phone. I said, 'May I speak to James Mason?' He said, 'Who wants him?' I said, 'Monte Hellman.' He said, 'Who's he?' I thought this was pretty funny. Anyway, I satisfied him as to my credentials, met with him at his hotel, and gave him the script. He didn't choose to do it. I actively tried to get it made over a period of several months, but the project fell through the cracks. It was made a couple of years later with Gregory Peck. I can't remember which of his scripts began my friendship with Alan Sharp, but he was living in L.A. during the early 70s, and I saw him frequently."10

In late 1971, Hellman began developing In a Dream of Passion, an adaptation of Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel La Maison de Rendez-Vous (The House of Assignation), about an American called Sir Ralph and his experiences in a Hong Kong brothel: "It's about a man searching for something — searching for money to win his woman. Very similar to Epitaph, since the character has one night to raise a million dollars so he can pay his girlfriend to come with him to Macao. Not really about a trek, I guess, but it still has this quality of trying to get somewhere. The same events take place seemingly in reality as well as in a little stage production, but we don't question whether it's real or in his mind. It was originally going to be produced by Roger Corman for Columbia, but the deal fell apart."11 In the early months of 1972, Hellman "started work on adapting a book by Stanley Ellin called The Bind, which I did in Miami with the author. That was another Columbia deal contingent on casting, and we never got the right cast. It was a thriller, a detective story. In February, when I finished work on the script, I returned to L.A. by way of New Orleans, and it happened to coincide with Mardi Gras. I was on a train, coming back across America. At that time I didn't fly and had it written into my contract that I must go by other means of transportation. And so I was on this train, and in Texas there was a signpost that said 'China 9, Liberty 37,' and I kind of made a note of it, and when the time came I thought 'What a good title that is.' Maybe it isn't, but I thought it was.''12

In the autumn of that year, Hellman revived In a Dream of Passion, with Max Palevsky as producer and Gary Kurtz as line producer: "I went to Montana with a writer (whose name I've mercifully forgotten) to supervise writing the screenplay. After three days, I realized he was not capable of delivering an acceptable script, so I replaced him, using him as a typist, and wrote the script in a single week. Martin Landau wrote one scene at my request, and Laurie Bird wrote some dialog for the character 'Lauren' (there was a possibility that she might play Lauren, but she was never finally cast). I was under a deadline, and had to meet a sailing date for a freighter to take me to Hong Kong. I arrived to do pre-production in November 1972, spent three months in Hong Kong (production designer Al Locatelli was there as well) finding all the locations, designing sets, casting other roles, etc., until the project was abandoned because we couldn't cast the lead to Max's and my satisfaction, then took a freighter to Europe for 35 days. I spent March through May going between Paris and London trying to cast Dream, and trying to keep it alive, find new producers, etc. In London I found that Jon Finch, whom we wanted for the lead, had never been given the script by his agent. He fell in love with it, but it was too late. I gave it to Sean Connery, who had been my first choice but was vetoed by Palevsky, and Sean agreed to do it. He gave it to David Picker at United Artists, but Picker left UA before we could make the deal."13

In May 1973, Hellman attended the Cannes festival: "Cannes was the launching pad for The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, but I wasn't there. I stayed home working as a film editor, paying for Jack Nicholson to take the films to Cannes. The first time I went there, in 1973, the festival put me up for three nights, and I didn't even have a film. They merely wanted to use me as a shill to attract other Hollywood folk. This was the beginning of Cannes going Hollywood. In subsequent years, as they became Hollywood, they didn't put up anybody — they expected the film companies to pay for everything. The Cannes festival was a major source of personal networking for me, and for a while I went every year. I even threatened to write a book on how to do Cannes on no money. There was one year when I stayed at the Carlton Annex (a building behind the main hotel, usually reserved for hotel staff) for $25 a night instead of the normal rate of $250. This deal was only available to starving directors, and even then only through connections. I think there were only 10 rooms in the Annex. I also always knew where the free breakfasts were, as well as the parties with dinner attached. My main expense was buying a pain bagnet for lunch. Venice does pay for the filmmakers' hotels. All the other festivals I've been to not only pay for hotel expenses, they frequently also pay for food, and they all provide airfare — I've usually gotten two, and frequently business class. So rather than going begging, I've frequently had two or three months a year subsidized by my old movies. Even as a pauper at Cannes, I've been like Cinderella at night, dressed in my dinner jacket and mingling with the stars. These journeys had a lot to do with the networking that made a number of my films possible, and particularly helped launch some of the near misses. It has been my only networking in the business, since I'm such a hermit in L.A. Almost all my friendships in the business were started at festivals. A friendship with Jerry Schatzberg was begun at Cannes in, I think, 1973, and I met John Ford, Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir in Montreal (Renoir in 1967)."14

In mid-June, Hellman sailed for America and spent several months in L.A. working on In a Dream of Passion. Then, in November, Michael Carreras asked him to direct Shatter, a co-production between England's Hammer Films and Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers.15 As Hellman recalled 25 years later, when he recorded an audio commentary for Shatter's laserdisc release, "Michael Carreras came to my agent, ICM, and they suggested me, and I think one of the selling points that made him want to hire me was the fact that I had had some experience in Hong Kong. I had done pre-production on In a Dream of Passion the year before, and so I knew locations, I knew my way around. I think that was the primary reason I was hired. I literally got a call from my agent on Thursday morning late in November and went to meet with Michael Carreras and was hired instantly and left the next day for Hong Kong and started pre-production the following Monday. And I think we only got a couple of weeks of pre-production. Up until that time I had refused to fly. I went to Hong Kong and the Phillipines before then by ship, and the only reason that I started flying was because I had to start working in three days. There was no other way to get there."

Don Houghton's screenplay tells a complex story about a contract killer, Shatter (Stuart Whitman), who assassinates Ansabi M'Goya (Yemi Ajibade), president of Palawaya, an East African state, and flies to Hong Kong to collect his fee from bank chairman Hans Leber (Anton Diffring). Leber refuses to pay, and Shatter (who has already survived one attempt on his life) is told to leave Hong Kong by Rattwood (Peter Cushing), a British security agent. Shatter is befriended by martial artist Tai Pah (Ti Lung) and masseuse Mai Ling (Lily Li).16 With Tai Pah's help, Shatter is able to see off the thugs employed by Rattwood, who reveals that M'Goya was a puppet dictator running the country for an international crime syndicate which was using it as a center for opium production. Rattwood offers Shatter £10,000 for a list (which Shatter took from M'Goya's aide) of European laboratories where raw opium is processed into cocaine, but Shatter instead offers the list to Leber (who is the syndicate's banker). At the arranged meeting point, Shatter and Tai Pah are attacked and Mai Ling is killed. Shatter finds Leber and the president's twin brother Colonel Dabula M'Goya (Yemi Ajibade in a second role), who turns out to be the man responsible for hiring Shatter, at a Casino in Macao. Tai Pah arrives just as Leber is preparing to cut Shatter's vocal chords. Leber and Dabula are killed, and Shatter — who will certainly be murdered if he ever leaves Hong Kong — is given £10,000 by Rattwood.

Hellman remembers, "We had a very short time, I had a lot of problems with the script, and the screenwriter was also the producer at the time, Don Houghton. And I just found it a difficult situation. I had barely time to read the script and scout locations. I did as is my wont, make some suggestions to the writer, who grudgingly incorporated small changes as we proceeded into the shoot. I can't remember any details. But given the time restraints, I'm sure many of my suggestions involved cutting dialogue, since you can always depend on there being more than you need. I think it's one of those cases where, if you have a script that doesn't work, all the doctoring in the world can't really make anything out of it. If I had more creative control, I wouldn't have shot this script. It would have been a better script."17 On December 6, after two weeks of pre-production, Don Houghton resigned due to "irreconcilable differences" with Hellman: "He felt we had such different ideas about the script that he couldn't give me the support I deserved. I think he was a very decent person."18

Hellman's "irreconcilable differences" with Michael Carreras would be resolved in a less amicable fashion: "We fought every day. I can't remember the specifics now, but I know that he really must have been a frustrated director, and probably wanted to take over. He really tried to inject his opinions, and I don't take well to that. I'm a control freak while I'm directing. I can't have somebody directing over my shoulder. In the pictures with Corman, I was essentially producer and director. I could pick my crew and I could basically be responsible for the production. Here I had no control over the production, and it was a mess. It was an impossible situation."19

Principal photography began on December 17. Although forced to accept an already assembled cast ("The leading lady was selected by Run Run Shaw. I got the feeling that she was one of his girlfriends"20) and crew, Hellman seems to have been happy with the personnel: "John Wilcox was the original cinematographer, and he was one of my favorites. He had done a lot of the Carol Reed films that I like so much. When he became ill during the production with liver problems, his assistant took over for a while.21 I didn't treat it any differently than any other picture, other than the fact that I was dissatisfied with the script, but given that I just tried to make the performances believable and tried to make the action flow as best I could given the production problems. A 'B' movie is the same as any other movie: you have to tell the story as best you can. In this case there wasn't that much story and it's a lot of filler, so it makes it hard. It was an interesting situation at the Shaw studios at the time, and this was one of the reasons that I had a problem with Michael Carreras. We were sharing a crew with two other productions. They were literally working around the clock, three eight-hour shifts. We would start shooting at eight in the morning, and the crew wouldn't show up until noon because they were exhausted. So, with a five-week schedule, or maybe even a four-week schedule, at the end of three weeks I had only finished half the picture, because we were only shooting half a day. So essentially I was fired because I was behind schedule. I know for certain I was 'terminated' (fortunately not 'with extreme prejudice') on January 8. I don't know whether this was at the beginning or end of the day, but believe it was at the end from the implication in my letter in response to my termination letter, and the fact it was dated January 9. So it appears I actually worked three weeks plus two days. What Michael Carreras offered was first, for me to resign (so that he wouldn't have had to pay me in full — I refused), and second, for me to edit the material I had shot (I refused). I insisted on removing my name as director, since the picture could no longer possibly be my film. Carreras took over, and I guess it took him another 6 months to shoot the rest of the picture."22

In a 1974 article on Hong Kong cinema, Tony Rayns described Shatter as a film "begun by Monte Hellman, who was apparently suspended for shooting 'incomprehensible rushes'."23 When asked if there was any truth to the "incomprehensible rushes" story, Hellman replied, "Not a whit. The ostensible reason for my suspension was that we were behind schedule. The real reason was conflict with the producer, and his ambition to direct the picture."24 After taking over the film, Michael Carreras hired a new director of photography, Brian Probyn (all three cinematographers are credited on release prints), and wrote a letter to his father, Hammer chairman James Carreras, complaining, "In my opinion, the action scenes lack excitement, the dialogue scenes are dull and Hong Kong looks like a slum. I just don't know how to salvage it."25

The final version of Shatter (or at least the version available on laserdisc26) runs 90 minutes, of which approximately 26 minutes were the work of credited director Michael Carreras. Leaving aside a handful of inserts, Carreras' scenes are as follows:

1. Twenty-seven minutes, fifty-five seconds to twenty-nine minutes, one second. Two assassins drive up to a building opposite Shatter's hotel and wait on the stairs.

2. Thirty minutes, twenty-four seconds to thirty-four minutes, fifty-four seconds. The assassins attempt to kill Shatter with a small rocket, but blow up the wrong room. The men then chase Shatter through the streets. Shots of Shatter in his hotel room during this sequence are taken from Hellman's footage.

3. Thirty-six minutes, fifteen seconds to forty minutes, seventeen seconds. We see Shatter and Tai Pah traveling on a boat, then pulling up outside Tai Pah's apartment in a taxi. Inside the apartment, Tai Pah leaves after assuring Shatter he will be safe there. Mai Ling then arrives and talks to Shatter. On the audio commentary of the laserdisc, Hellman says, "I don't remember shooting this scene, but it's possible that I did. I wouldn't swear that I didn't shoot it and I wouldn't swear that I did." Although Hellman notes that the final shot of this sequence "does seem familiar, so possibly I shot that scene," the fact that Carreras shot all the other scenes in Tai Pah's apartment suggests he was also responsible for this one. After watching the film once more in 2001, Hellman told me, "I may have shot the first apartment scene, but probably not (the style just isn't mine). I think I was remembering the apartment from scouting. It may have been in the middle of these scenes that I left. I'm not even sure I actually shot the kung fu class on the roof (I can't believe I wouldn't have noticed all those terrible zooms), but I may have. When I watched the laser for the commentary, I did it cold, and as soon as I saw Tai Pah's apartment, I kept waiting for the kung fu class. It is my strongest memory, because it was possibly a scene I suggested, since it was one of the things I found most interesting in Hong Kong — the fact that so many young men get up at 5 am to practice kung fu on rooftops."27

4. Forty-two minutes, fifty-eight seconds to forty-nine minutes, thirty-six seconds. After Shatter watches Tai Pah teaching a rooftop kung fu class (a scene Hellman vaguely recalls shooting, but which may have been reshot, in whole or in part, by Carreras), Shatter, Tai Pah and Mai Ling attend a kung fu tournament which ends with a real fight breaking out: "I had nothing to do with this sequence. And this is one of the things that makes the movie really fall flat, because it has nothing to do with anything. This is just a scene about kung fu. And I don't remember this being in the script either."28 When Shatter refers to Tai Pah putting on "an exhibition like you did tonight" in the next scene, the line has clearly been dubbed.

5. Fifty-one minutes, forty-seven seconds to fifty-six minutes, eighteen seconds. Shatter is seen in bed with Mai Ling. Flashbacks to earlier scenes are used to both illustrate Shatter's nightmare and pad out the running time. On the laserdisc, Hellman notes, "I can't believe there was that little material that they had to keep filling it like this, because I don't remember the script being that spare. Maybe they just literally couldn't finish shooting it." The next morning, Tai Pah enters the room and talks to Shatter, another scene not by Hellman: "I can spot certain stylistic things that make me know that it's not mine, like those low-angle shots looking up at the ceiling that I don't do very often."29

6. Sixty-six minutes, thirty-four seconds to sixty-nine minutes, fourteen seconds. After Shatter's long conversation with Rattwood, there are three brief sequences directed by Carreras: Shatter, Tai Pah and Mai Ling walk along a street as Tai Pah reads a newspaper report describing the conflict in Palawaya; after a few documentary shots (some of which had already been seen at the beginning of the film), we see the leader of the rebel forces being taken from a cell in Palawaya and shot in the head by Colonel Dabula's soldiers; back in Hong Kong, Tai Pah discovers that his apartment has been ransacked.

7. Seventy-eight minutes, forty-one seconds to eighty minutes, thirty-eight seconds. Following the death of Mai Ling, there is a little transitional footage directed by Carreras. We see Shatter and Tai Pah sailing to Macao, hailing a taxi and arriving outside the casino. Shatter then tells the casino's doorman that he wants to see Hans Leber.

Exactly how Michael Carreras could have taken such a long time to shoot such a small amount of footage remains something of a mystery to Hellman: "I wasn't there, but I do remember being pleased that Carreras was facing the kind of problems I had faced with Run Run Shaw not giving us crews on time, and that he spent much more time on his half of the picture than I had spent on mine, thereby vindicating my being behind schedule. I'm sure Stuart Whitman wasn't there for six months, but he could easily have been there for another two or three. The rest of the European cast had departed before I left. Carreras could easily have been shooting with the Chinese cast, doing pickups, etc., long after Stuart left. What I shot was supposed to be less than half the movie, and it turned out to be about two-thirds or three-fourths of the movie. It seems like what they did is that they padded that out and kept in a lot of things that should have been cut, because they weren't able to get much else. The movie is short, so maybe Michael threw out a lot of what he shot. It's too short a script as well, and consequently everything is paced too slowly just to add time. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's hard to watch."30

Studio records note that the film returned to Elstree for editing on June 15, 1974, so Carreras could well have shot for five months following Hellman's departure. Although Carreras expected Shatter to be an enormous hit, and even planned to produce a television series based on the characters, it was not released in America until January 1976 (under the title Call Him Mr. Shatter), while in England it opened (under the original title, but in a slightly censored version) during November 1977. Summing up the film, Hellman insisted, "It's a piece of crap, I'm not proud of it, and it proves what I was saying about not working well when I don't have freedom."31 But if Shatter is no masterpiece, it is hardly as bad (or as uncharacteristic) as Hellman implies.

Given the way Shatter emerged from an aborted adaptation of La Maison de Rendez-Vous, one is tempted to search for traces of Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel, especially since Hellman once described Sir Ralph, Maison's protagonist, as "Humphrey Bogart in Hong Kong"32—which is a pretty good description of Stuart Whitman in Shatter. But Hellman emphatically rejects this notion: "Whatever similarities there may be had most to do with the same locale and nothing to do with me. The Robbe-Grillet story and script are nothing like Shatter, nor are the central characters more than superficially similar — Shatter is rough, Sir Ralph is smooth; one wears a sweatshirt, the other an evening jacket."33

As so often, it is through Hellman's use of landscape that one might best approach the film. Not only is this Shatters most direct connection with In a Dream of Passion (since the fact Hellman had scouted Hong Kong locations for that unmade film proved to be one of the reasons he was hired by Michael Carreras), but, as the director later admitted, "The reason I agreed to do this picture was that I love Hong Kong so much. The fact that I had just been there and there was a chance to go back. And I think that that happens to me a lot. I pick scripts by the location."34 We have already seen how the relationship between character and setting is at the heart of Hellman's aesthetic. The idea of characters being implicitly judged by the landscape through which they move was especially clear in Last Woman on Earth, Back Door to Hell, The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop. In Shatter, the privileging of landscape subserves an explicitly critical attitude towards the hero, who relates closely to the secret agent played by Robert Towne in Creature from the Haunted Sea. Essentially, Shatter lives out the lifestyle G.T.O. could only dream of in Two-Lane Blacktop. But this is not to imply that Hellman is here indulging something he had previously criticized; Shatter simply attacks the ideal of "cool" masculine detachment from a different direction, being intermittently haunted by the recognition (which one might posit was the real, if subconscious, source of Hellman's conflict with Carreras) that Shatter is an intolerable figure. This recognition motivates the film's stylistic practices, which make use of an unobtrusive but coherent visual rhetoric to keep Shatter at a distance. He is often framed in doorways, obscured by crowds and various pieces of bric-a-brac, observed on a television set in Leber's office, and consistently seen through glass or reflected in mirrors (most strikingly during his scene with Harry Yip). Indeed, Shatter's introduction seems to cast him as the villain of the piece — dressed in a curious mask, assassinating a man who, although later described as a dictator, is here presented quite sympathetically135 — rather than the ostensible "hero." Hellman admits that "It's hard to get audiences to get behind a movie where the hero doesn't really have any redeeming qualities. I don't know if I ever stopped to analyze how difficult it is to deal with a character who starts out so unsympathetically,"36 but this analysis is nonetheless carried out via the film's imagery.

Like most Hellman protagonists. Shatter's conflict is more internal than external, his public battles acting out private neuroses. Hellman's lack of control over the production prevented this idea from being fully explored, but the proposition that this is the kind of structure he had in mind is supported by one of the film's most beautiful shots: as Shatter cautiously enters his hotel room and looks around for signs of danger, he is surprised to find himself confronting his own reflection in a strategically placed mirror.37 The notion of a symbolic struggle against personal demons explains the parallels drawn between Shatter and M'Goya. The two characters are twinned in various complex ways; M'Goya is introduced telling a subordinate, "I don't like being disturbed," while Shatter orders a receptionist at his hotel to "See that I'm not disturbed." Both Shatter and M'Goya are involved in interracial relationships which end with the non-white partner's death. This pattern is developed further by the couple — a prostitute and her client — Shatter surreptitiously exchanges hotel rooms with, an action that will also result in their deaths (the explosion that destroys the hotel room of the naked couple as they are about to make love clearly recalls M'Goya's demise in similar circumstances). Shatter is consistently associated with a restriction on sexual pleasure: he is the perfect, unfeeling representative of that repressive social order on whose behalf he acts. Indeed, the fact that the man in the hotel room dies just as he is preparing to pay a prostitute suggests that the violence associated with Shatter also has some intimate relationship with the everyday workings of capitalism, which reduce sexuality to the level of a financial transaction (though Hellman does not recall directing this material). The narrative thus follows the logic of a dream, and it is especially appropriate that these games of doubles and doubling should culminate in M'Goya's climactic reappearance as his own doppelganger, in the form of a twin brother played by the same actor. The entire pre-credits sequence has a particularly dream-like quality: M'Goya pours champagne onto his lover's stomach (Mai Ling will later be shot in the stomach), then throws the bottle onto the floor; a close-up of the bottle as it 'shatters' is followed by the first appearance of Shatter, who is thus introduced as less a fully fleshed-out character than an effect of the text, a killing machine that has achieved its aim of suppressing emotion and identity in violent action.

Like the central characters of Two-Lane Blacktop, Shatter is essentially nameless; we are never told his first name, and tend to think of "Shatter" as a nickname. Mai Ling, who initially calls him Johnny ("Everyone who comes in here is called Johnny"), actually points out that "Shatter" is "not a name," to which Shatter responds, "more like a way of life." If the absence of genuine names in Howard Hawks' films implies something positive, for Hellman the exact opposite is true. His male protagonists' immmaturity — evident in their inabilty to commit to an identity or a relationship—condemns them to a lifetime of aimless wandering as they attempt to live out "Boys' Own" fantasies of freedom.

As so often in Hellman's films, women are the real victims of these masculine fantasies.38 The female's role in this world is neatly defined by the scene in which Shatter meets Mai Ling. Lying on a bed after being attacked by Rattwood's bodyguards, Shatter looks up and sees pictures of nude women on the walls. Close-ups of these pictures are intercut with close-ups of Shatter, and the sequence ends by cutting from Shatter to a close-up of Mai Ling,39 who thus appears to emerge from the previous series of shots depicting women as objects for the male gaze. Shatter's point-of-view is thus conveyed to us while being subjected to extensive criticism, and if his grief over Mai Ling's death seems real enough, the self-serving and hypocritical nature of his insistence that she "had no part in this filthy business" is immediately foregrounded by Tai Pah, who points out that "This filthy business started in East Africa. Didn't you fire the first shot?"

Chapter 11

Cockfighter (1974)

Estragon: Let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.

Valdimir: You're right, we're inexhaustible.

Estragon: It's so we won't think.

Vladimir: We have that excuse.

Estragon: All the dead voices.

Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.

Estragon: They all speak together.

Vladimir: Each one to itself.

Estragon: They talk about their lives.

Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon: They have to talk about it.

(Long silence.)

Vladimir: Say something!

Estragon: I'm trying.

(Long silence.)

Vladimir: (In anguish.) Say anything at all!

— Waiting for Godot

After returning to America early in 1974, Hellman was immediately offered Cockfighter by Roger Corman ("Roger called me almost the minute I returned"1). The script, adapted by Charles Willeford from his own novel, had been commissioned a year earlier. Detailed memos concerning its development published in Charles Tatum, Jr.'s book are dated December 13, 1973, when Hellman was still in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, Hellman insisted on having Earl Mac Rauch (a protege of Terrence Malick's and later the co-writer of Martin Scorsese's New York, New York) rewrite the script with him: "After the first week Roger started getting depressed, because it was really his baby and not mine, and he told me that I could have Mac for just one additional week."2 Pressed for time, Hellman and Rauch concentrated on rewriting those scenes involving the love story: "I think if we could have gotten more scenes like the ending and like the scene by the river and the scene on the porch, which are three of the things that Mac contributed to, I think we could have had more understanding of Warren's character and of some of the other characters, and I think it could have been a better picture."3

Like Willeford's novel, Hellman's film follows cockfighter Frank Mansfield (Warren Oates) as he fights chickens in order to qualify for the Southern Conference Tournament. Mansfield's boastful nature had already resulted in his losing a previous competition after fighting his prize chicken against a bird owned by Jack Burke (Harry Dean Stanton) in a hotel room, and he has now taken a vow of silence which he will not break until he wins the "Cockfighter of the Year" award. Mansfield is initially traveling in a mobile home with Dody White (Laurie Bird), but both Dody and the home are given to Jack Burke when he defeats Frank in another cockfight. After staying overnight with judge Ed Middleton (Charles Willeford), Frank visits his family home—where his brother Randall (Troy Donahue) and Randall's wife Frances (Millie Perkins) are living, but which Frank owns—and spends some time with his fiancée, Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy). Frank sells his house and uses the money to buy some more chickens. As Frank, with his partner Omar Baradinsky (Richard B. Shull), participates in various cockfights, he runs into Jack Burke, who has now married Dody. Frank invites Mary Elizabeth to the SCT, but after seeing the chickens owned by Frank and Jack fight to the death, she expresses her contempt and leaves. Upon being informed that he has won the "Cockfighter of the Year" award, Frank turns to his partner and declares, "She loves me, Omar."

As Hellman informed me, "I frequently seem to wind up writing the last lines in my movies. I wrote, 'Show him your nuts' in China 9, Liberty 37, and I wrote 'She loves me, Omar.' This line infuriated Roger, and caused him to walk into the production office in Atlanta a couple of days before we were to start shooting, and without saying a word, throw the script with all his might against the wall, then walk out and drive to the airport. He had just read the final draft of the script, and that was his only comment."4

Nestor Almendros — who had previously worked with Corman on Daniel Haller's The Wild Racers (1967)5 — was hired as director of photography. Hellman, along with Almendros and Roger and Julie Corman, scouted locations in Georgia. As Roger Corman recalls, "We found this old cockfighting arena that must have been fifty or a hundred years old. There were old chewing tobacco signs everywhere, and these craggy old Georgia farmers sitting in wooden bleachers around the dirt pit, throwing down their bets, yelling and screaming for their cocks. I got myself in on the action and started betting. 'Where's Monte?' Nestor asked. We found him in the parking lot. 'Monte, what are you doing out here?' I asked. 'It's so incredible in there.' Monte didn't agree. He was thoroughly repelled. 'I don't want to look at anything like that,' he said. Well, I thought, there goes my cockfighting picture. The director hates cockfighting."6

Hellman responded to the people and locations with the same sensitivity he had displayed in Two-Lane Blacktop: "I became fascinated with subcultures while doing The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind—I was much more interested in the lives of the rodeo guys working on it than I was in the movie I was making. I became stimulated by the idea of worlds within our own world. And the world of cockfighters was right there for us in Georgia — we just stepped into the cock pits and started shooting. And I discovered that these guys are not inarticulate rednecks. A lot of them are poets — literally. Jimmy Carter came onto the Cockfighter set and told me his family were cockfighters for generations. It was such a complete world that I became immersed in it. The picture is at least 50 percent documentary, in the sense that we were shooting on location at real cockpits. Almost everybody in the film, other than the main actors, is a cockfighter. I had come to Georgia with no knowledge of cockfighting other than reading the book and the script, and had never seen a cockfight. I just had this gut reaction to seeing an animal killed, which really upset me tremendously. I wanted to convey that feeling to an audience. Really, what I was interested in was trying to share that emotion. To that end, I wouldn't let Patricia Pearcy see a cockfight during the entire shooting of the movie until the final scene where she has to see one for the first time, because I wanted to get her reaction to seeing a cockfight for the first time. It was a very fast shoot. I think it was 23 days. It was long hours and Nestor Almendros had a difficult time shooting for more than a normal workday. He suffered from problems with his eyes. He was also the camera operator. We were really limited in how long we could shoot. Charles Willeford became an actor in the film at the last minute. I had someone else cast in that part and fired him the night before we were to start shooting, because I just thought that I wasn't going to be able to get what I needed from his performance and had the idea to read Charles because he was there. I enjoyed working with him as an actor. I was unaware of his later novels until he became a cult writer."7

Charles Willeford was present throughout the shoot, and recorded his impressions in a journal.8 Steven Gaydos was also involved with the film: "While working briefly in Nashville, I got the word about Cockfighter and fought like hell to get a job on the picture. I did. Cruised around Georgia with Nestor, Warren, Harry Dean, talking script, life, etc. with Monte and Laurie."9 Aside from being a production assistant, Gaydos also played an uncredited role as an armed robber wearing a Richard Nixon mask (and a suit borrowed from Nestor Almendros).

Although Lewis Teague receives sole editing credit, he only worked on the cockfighting scenes, all the dramatic scenes being edited by Hellman himself: "The reason I had a second editor was that Roger wanted the picture finished in three or four weeks. Lewis was a friend, so we divided up the work. I, as always, controlled the edit, supervising Lewis's work."10 Roger Corman was unhappy with Hellman's initial cut, complaining that the director "pulled away from the action, the bloody stuff, and we never got the graphic close-ups that we should have had. I knew we'd have to shoot them second unit later. For the postproduction shot of a dirt floor with the fighting cocks, the film's editor, Lewis Teague, volunteered. 'I can direct that.' And he did direct it. He and a cameraman had to go to Arizona, one of the states, like Georgia, where cockfighting is legal. Lew just got in there with the camera. This was his chance. His stuff was so good, with such bloody close-ups of the action, that we had to cut back on it in the final cut. People looking at the dailies in the projection room had to turn away. Nobody wanted to see what he had put on the screen, including me. It was too rough."11 Shots of fighting chickens taken from Teague's footage were edited into the final cockfight, as were shots (filmed by another second unit) showing blood spraying onto a pair of shoes, a spectator eating the leg of a chicken, and a metal spur being pulled out of a chicken's body: "If it's gratuitous gore, I didn't direct it. That metal spur shot was added by someone else, and I don't believe it was Lewis Teague. I now believe that the close-ups of the chickens used during the betting were shot as second unit on location in Georgia, and not during post by Lewis, since it seems they were the same birds as the ones used in the sequence. Obviously I can't be sure at this late date, other than that I remember I didn't shoot those shots."12

This version premiered in Georgia, where it was poorly received. Corman's response was to have Joe Dante recut the film, adding footage from Night Call Nurses (Jonathan Kaplan, 1972) and Private Duty Nurses (George Armitage, 1971): "The recut eliminated the porch scene with Mary Elizabeth (one of my favorites) and added several dream sequences of tits-and-ass and car explosions, supposedly to justify their use in trailers. This cut was variously titled Born to Kill (we used to joke about that — we used to call it Hatched to Kill) or Gamblin Man. Any version titled Cockfighter is my original cut."13 Jon Davison, who would become a friend and collaborator of Hellman's, was working on the film's publicity. As he recalls, "I did the advertising and publicity for Cockfighter and worked a bit on the recut Born to Kill. I was responsible for numerous ad campaigns: 'Frank Mansfield strolled into town with his cock in hand. And what he did with it was illegal in 47 states!' 'Women flock to see his cock,' that kind of stuff. We actually made a phony trailer for the MPAA and Dick McCay, who was in charge of rating trailers, had a fit. Ah, youth."14

It was Hellman's cut (though with the graphic cockfighting inserts added by Corman) that played at various European festivals. In America, this version was screened on cable TV, as well as being released on video by Embassy Home Entertainment (in 1984) and DVD by Anchor Bay (in 2000): "I was furious about all of Roger's changes at the time, but now I only care about the porch and dream sequences, since they are crucial to telling the story. I didn't care enough about the blood and chicken to remove them from the DVD. In any event, I didn't restore the picture for cable. When Roger sold it, the distributor insisted on my version, so that's what Roger gave them."15

Cockfighter opens with an image that, without being in any way didactic, manages to sum up not only this film, but virtually the entire Hellman oeuvre. As the shot begins, we see a landscape observed from the window of a moving vehicle. The camera moves towards the right, showing us the interior of Frank Mansfield's mobile home (a whiskey bottle and some cockfighting magazines are dimly visible), and comes to rest on a fighting cock in a cage. On the soundtrack, Frank tells us how he came to be obsessed with cockfighting: "I learned to fly a plane and lost interest in it. Water skiing, and lost interest in it. But this is something you don't conquer. Anything that can fight to the death and not utter a sound, well...."16 By means of a simple camera movement, Hellman has shown us both the world through which Frank moves — the green landscape speeding past — and the obsession upon which his life is based — the caged chicken. In his journal, Charles Willeford complains that Hellman "thinks that this is a film about cockfighting. He doesn't seem to understand that it's a story about a man with an obsession, and that cockfighting is merely coincidental." Willeford clearly believes that an artist should start with a theme and then find a subject to illustrate it, but what Hellman does is begin with something concrete — a lifestyle, a story, a relationship — and allow the theme to emerge naturally, an approach far more likely to produce complex results, since whatever insights are arrived at will always have a firm foundation. But whereas Hellman's films characteristically move from the particular to the general, his characters reverse this trajectory, rejecting the richness of life in favor of an essentially fetishistic obsession, and the director's moral vision is conveyed to us primarily in this contrast between form and subject. Morality is not imposed from above, a judgment on characters deemed inferior to their author, but arises naturally from Hellman's interaction with his material. In a recent interview, Hellman expressed his admiration for Anthony Minghella's film The Talented Mr. Ripley (1998), but admitted that he "winced at some of the dialogue at the end where they tell you what you're supposed to think of him."17 The comment is revealing, for Hellman, like Jean Renoir, is a humanist who insists on understanding before judging. Indeed, Hellman has spoken of his admiration for individuals obsessed with perfection: "I don't think it's about winning the prize. I think it's about being as good as you're able to be. I was never a competitive athlete, but I really do identify with that kind of mentality. I think that there's something very human and very understandable about obsession with perfecting one's self and perfecting one's craft."18 Hellman's fascination with sub-cultures — road racers, cockfighters, rodeo riders, etc. — is one of warm involvement rather than detached interest, and it is surely significant that many of his favorite performers—Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Everett McGill—derive from the ranks of character actors who usually play only supporting roles. Hellman's cinema is a cinema of outcasts, of societal rejects who, however else they might differ, exist outside the mainstream.

It is Hellman's documentary impulse, rather than a need to impose his own vision, that lies behind one of the film's most haunting and resonant images: that of a boy (presumably repulsed by the fighting chickens^19) covering his eyes with a dollar bill during the first cockfight. One could ask for no finer encapsulation of the relationship between America's dominant and sub-cultures, but the boy's gesture was simply a spontaneous action Hellman's camera happened to catch: "I would not have had the intelligence or foresight to predict a scene like that. All of that stuff is real crowds reacting in the way they do. We had several cameras and we were able to capture a lot of those things."20 Unlike so many American independents, Hellman, here and in Two-Lane Blacktop, does not feel the need to laugh at "ordinary" people, and it is telling that Cockfighter only encourages feelings of complacent superiority during the two shots of a man eating a chicken leg, which were added by Corman.

And yet, despite its debt to a realist tradition, Cockfighter also functions as a dream film. Consider the scene in which we learn why Frank came to take his vow of silence, a scene marked off from the surrounding narrative not only by its status as a flashback (a device in many ways opposed to Hellman's usual artistic practice, with its emphasis on life lived in the here and now), but by certain details — the hint of bad luck and superstition provided by Frank's leaving his hat on the bed,21 the use of slow motion, the way both Frank and the camera disappear into darkness at the end — which suggest that what we are seeing is more dream than memory (tellingly, the following sequence begins with Frank waking from a deep sleep). This implication is reinforced by the later scene in which several cockfighters are robbed by a gang of masked men. This scene connects with the flashback in two ways: it takes place in a hotel room, and is explicitly separated from the surrounding narrative, being the only sequence wherein Frank is not present. Given that Hellman's film is quite singlemindedly focused on Frank Mansfield, what is this section's purpose? This question can best be answered by considering the robbery as an event taking place not within the fictional world, but inside the protagonist's head. Although Hellman rarely emphasises the chicken's traditional sexual connotations (the main exception being Omar's "faggot rooster" joke), Frank's earlier hotel room defeat by lack Burke has strong overtones of sexual humiliation, as does a later scene in which he is publicly attacked by Dody. Frank's absence from the hotel robbery is, therefore, crucial, since it has the effect of suggesting that the entire scene is a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Frank corrects the memory of his earlier humiliations by imagining the humiliation of Jack and Dody (even Frank's boasting is here projected onto another character — promoter Fred Reed). The robbers' insistence on having the cockfighters remove their pants thus becomes particularly resonant, especially when we see Dody, who is wearing a skirt, comply with the demand by taking off her underwear.

If Hellman's first five films belong unambiguously to clear-cut genres—horror, war film, Western — he subsequently tended to approach genre in a more circuitous fashion. Cockfighter, like Two-Lane Blacktop, can be described as a modern-day Western, but by placing this genre's themes and motifs in 1970s America, Hellman subjects them to a thoroughgoing critique.22 Frank conforms to the archetype of the Westerner, the strong, silent male leaving the safety of hearth and home to tame a savage wilderness. But now, silence connotes less stoicism than neuroticism, while the commitment to progress has been replaced with a cruel sport which involves encouraging chickens to endlessly repeat that act of spontaneous violence in defense of territory which the modern cowboy can no longer carry out. Needless to say, Hellman (all of whose protagonists can be described as in flight from civilization) is simply clarifying something already evident in many of the finest classical Westerns (which I take to be Ford's The Searchers and the Anthony Mann-James Stewart series): that the Westerner habitually ventured into an untamed land in the name of a community from which he was thoroughly estranged. Energy is here defined as everything that is not of civilization, and if the Westerner cannot be assimilated into the domestic sphere, it is because he brings with him a hint of anarchy inherited from his supposed enemy the Native American, who provides a legitimate outlet for his internal conflicts. In Cockfighter, the frontier becomes the cockfighting circuit, while the nature of Frank's obsession is suggested by the shot which begins the flashback. Standing before a mirror, Frank tries to make his prize rooster fight its own reflection, thus literally becoming his own antagonist.

Cockfighter's porch scene, of which Hellman is justifiably proud, perfectly illustrates this complex mesh of themes. Before the scene begins, Frank has been summoned from his old bedroom in the Mansfield house (his childhood home) by his brother Randall, who informs him of Mary Elizabeth's arrival. Frank approaches Mary Elizabeth and kisses her, an action we observe from outside the screen door, while Mary Elizabeth's mother (who is waiting in the car) honks the car horn. Hellman's choices—not only the choice of camera angle, but the decision to have this romantic reverie disrupted by a noisy horn — are very cunning, for this shot would play quite differently if the camera had been placed on the other side of the door, or if the lovers' embrace had not been interrupted by a sound emanating from outside the house. Like Frank, the camera does not belong "inside," and Hellman's directorial decisions remind us of those irreconcilable pulls which prevent his protagonist from wholeheartedly committing to Mary Elizabeth.

While Mary Elizabeth sits on the porch swing, Frank runs out to the car, leaps onto its roof, gesticulates wildly at his fiancée's mother, then returns to the porch and kisses Mary Elizabeth, who violently rejects him. As the two estranged lovers confront each other silently, they are distracted by the sound of a motorcycle on a nearby road (a beautiful gesture improvised by the actors when a motorcycle drove past the location). If Mary Elizabeth belongs to the domestic sphere, Frank, like Huckleberry Finn, yearns to "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest."23 The only place where such a strikingly ill-matched couple can meet is on the porch, an area precisely located between interior and exterior worlds. Indeed, when Frank leaves the porch, he displays energy for the first time in this scene, and when he subsequently returns, he kisses Mary Elizabeth in such a passionate and unrestrained manner that his behavior angers and confuses her. What we see being acted out in microcosm is the tension on which both this film specifically and the Western generally is built: the energies celebrated in the Westerner are felt to be irreconcilable with domesticity.

These tensions are also behind the moment in Vincente Minnelli's Home from the Hill (1960) when Captain Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) lists the things a "real" man should not have in his pockets: "No identification, because everybody knows who you are; no cash, because anybody in town'd be happy to lend you anything you need; no keys, 'cause you don't keep a lock on a single thing you own; and no watch, because time waits on you." As Edward Gallafent has pointed out, "Why such a figure should be alienated from the family is not perhaps entirely obvious until we recognize the origin of this list: a configuration normally associated with the world of the hunt has been relocated as an assertion of patriarchy."24 This image of the ideal patriarch as a man without (in Gallafent's words) "the usual props of urban life" is strikingly applicable to Frank Mansfield. Several commentators unaware of Hellman's participation in Shatter described Cockfighter as an appropriate follow-up to Two-Lane Blacktop. Richard Combs, for example, claimed that "To all intents and purposes, Frank Mansfield is the Warren Oates character from Two-Lane Blacktop, punished for his compulsive boasting and now as protectively reticent and self-controlled as the two young men he had hoped to leave in the dust of his fast-talking, fast-moving style."25 Once Shatter is reinserted into the oeuvre, however, a slightly different picture emerges. In Two-Lane Blacktop, G.T.O. talks constantly; in Shatter, the eponymous protagonist is often sullenly silent (he barely speaks at all during the film's first third) and at one point comes close to having his vocal chords removed; in Cockfighter, Frank Mansfield has taken a vow of silence. The progression is from plentitude to sparseness, the protagonists being denied access to the world of language as Hellman reveals the true nature of their masculinity. Indeed, Frank lacks more than a voice: only a few minutes of the film have elapsed before he loses his mobile home, girlfriend and prize bird. For Hellman, "masculinity" defines less what a man is than what he isn't (a woman), less what he is rich in than what he is lacking (femininity), and it is significant that Mary Elizabeth condemns Frank by listing those things he does not have: "No pity, no love, nothing." Frank "is" a lack, an absence, and once we realize this, we will have a good chance of understanding perhaps the film's most enigmatic moment: when a cockfighting fan takes a photograph, the resulting image frames Frank from his ankles to his shoulders, cutting off his head entirely.26

Of course, this image also reinforces the resemblance between Frank and his chickens, many of whom end up headless, and Frank points out the connection when he asks Mary Elizabeth to give him "a fighting chance." But the symbolic relationship is far from straightforward, for Hellman provides the chickens with a wealth of meanings, working through a whole series of figural possibilities — objects of obsession, sexual symbols, embodiments of pure instinct, parodies of the human condition, "a substitute for a heart," "the mystic realm of the great cock," etc. — which compensate for (while bringing into sharp relief) the protagonist's sparsity: the less he means, the more they mean. As Mary Elizabeth tells him, "I think that bird had more of a heart than you ever will have. He sure as hell had more of a voice."

It is, then, only appropriate that the final parallel drawn by the film should be between woman and chicken. The connection is first made comically, when Dody attacks Frank in a cockfighting arena before being carried out like one of the roosters, then more seriously in the series of intercut close-ups juxtaposing Mary Elizabeth with a dead bird during the final cockfight.27 A female (and implicitly feminist) critique of Frank Mansfield specifically and masculinity generally is evident throughout, notably whenever the subject of Frank's muteness is raised. In the masculine world through which Frank moves, his refusal to speak creates few problems — the cockfighting circuit demands little in the way of communication, and Frank need only use a few basic gestures to convey such information as may be required to place a bet or decide what kind of spurs his bird will wear. Although the male characters never seem put out by Frank's silence — his helper Buford (Robert Earl Jones) even claims to prefer Frank this way — the film virtually begins and ends with women making adverse comments about it. Dody, who is introduced informing Frank that he said something in his sleep the previous night, insists, "You can't fool me. If you can talk when you're asleep, you can talk when you're awake. I just want you to know I know it," and Mary Elizabeth departs after observing that Frank's chicken was more eloquent than its owner.

Although Mary Elizabeth's rejection of Frank is taken almost verbatim from Willeford's novel, what follows is quite different. In the book, after Mary Elizabeth's departure, Frank observes, "I was immobilized by thought. I've grown up, I reflected. After 33 years, I was a mature individual. I had never needed Mary Elizabeth, and she had never needed me. Finally, it was all over between us — whatever it was we thought we had. My last tie with the past and Mansfield, Georgia, was broken. From now on I could look toward the future, and it had never been any brighter." Cockfighter, like many of Willeford's novels (Pick-Up and The Burnt Orange Heresy, for example) are narrated by men with whom the reader maintains a problematic relationship: although they are responsible for actions most of us will surely find monstrous, we are nevertheless lulled into an at least provisional acceptance of their behavior by the tone of confidential intimacy which, as in so many of Poe's tales, takes our tacit approval (and perhaps even complicity) as a given. If I read Willeford correctly (the effect is far from didactic), the "future has never been brighter" speech marks the point where we are asked to distance ourselves from Frank Mansfield, since it implies his unambiguous rejection of all those merely human values represented by Mary Elizabeth.

In the film, however, Mary Elizabeth's departure is followed by Frank's "She loves me, Omar" declaration, a moment whose function is somewhat similar to the novel's "future has never been brighter" speech, but which comes across as more delicately nuanced. Instead of finally telling us what to think about Frank Mansfield, Hellman unexpectedly introduces a series of new possibilities precisely when we are primed to expect a summing up. Indeed, there seem to be as many interpretations of this line as there are critical accounts of the film. For Richard Combs, it suggests Frank's assertion of an "obdurate will,''28 while Tom Milne finds reason for optimism in the fact that Frank has worked through his obsession: "[Mary Elizabeth] certainly doesn't [love him] at that moment, but since he is now free to love her, she may again."29 For Hellman, "It's not a logical ending. What we had was a very poetic line that can be taken many different ways."30 The most useful reference point here is perhaps the riverbank sequence, during which Mary Elizabeth tells Frank about a boy whose need to urinate indirectly lead to his death in a car crash. Although Mary Elizabeth feels compelled to draw an appropriate moral from this tale — according to her, it illustrates "the value of self-control" — her story demonstrates nothing except the sheer randomness of existence: the point is that there is no point. Like Polonius, many critics have attempted to reduce "She loves me, Omar" to a homily, but if Hellman's films teach us anything, it is surely the necessity of abandoning such reductive modes of thinking, whereby behavior can be explained or explained away. For Hellman, there are no short-cuts to understanding, and life must be experienced in all its irreducible complexity.

Chapter 12

In Between Projects, 1974-1977

So long as he kept moving he would be all right. For men like himself the ends of the earth had this great allure: that one was never asked about a past or future but could live as freely as an animal, close to the gut, and day by day by day.

— Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord

While shooting Cockfighter, Hellman struck up a close friendship with Steven Gaydos. According to Gaydos, "When we wrapped, I moved back to L.A. and moved in with Monte and Laurie Bird. We lived on Sunset Plaza until I got beat up by the porno mafia gangsters next door who came to Monte, brandished a gun, and said, 'Move'."1 As Hellman recalls, "They told me I had 24 hours to move. I called my lawyer. He said we could file a complaint with the City Attorney, or call some mafiosi higher on the ladder than my neighbors, or I could move. He advised me to move. I was out in 24 hours. I think, by the way, that their main business was nursing homes for the aged. This was one of the more lucrative rackets going at the time. One of the gangsters was a medical doctor, another a psychologist. But they were surrounded by a number of sub-human thugs, who were the guys who kicked in Steve's head."2

Soon after completing the editing of Cockfighter, Hellman undertook an odd assignment. The American broadcast rights to Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars (Per un Pugno di Dollari, 1964) had just been acquired by ABC. Much of the violence was removed to make Leone's film suitable for television, but ABC's censors were still worried about the protagonist's immorality. In order to address this concern, Mike Medavoy, who was then an executive at United Artists, asked Hellman to visit Mexico and shoot new footage demonstrating that Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name was really a representative of law and order. Hellman invented a five minute precredits sequence showing Eastwood's character in prison. Summoned to the warden's office, he is promised a pardon if he will take care of some trouble in the nearby town of San Miguel. Harry Dean Stanton, who had acted with Eastwood in Brian G. Hutton's Kelly's Heroes (1970), was hired to play the warden. Although Eastwood did not participate in Hellman's shoot —"His non-participation was a given. This wasn't a big budget operation"3— he later watched the film on television, and was astonished to see himself acting in a scene of which he had no memory.4 Hellman would later remake this sequence in China 9, Liberty 37, as (coincidentally?) would John Carpenter in Escape from New York (1981). Intriguingly, Carpenter's film features an appearance by Harry Dean Stanton, as well as Kurt Russell doing a blatant Clint Eastwood imitation.

Hellman was involved with this project from June to September of 1974: "I wrote the material myself, undoubtedly in late June or early July, before I left for Mexico. I don't know if I was ever told why it was shot in Mexico—the location was a given when I was hired. But I think the existence of some of the sets may have had something to do with it. I went to Mexico City sometime in July (my children were with me), and was given a company who would put together my small shoot. They hired all the crew, equipment, etc., and a casting director sent me Clint look-alikes. The guy I picked was much shorter than Clint, but had a good-enough 3/4 profile for my purposes. Even from the angle we shot, most people wouldn't have passed. The way he was shot, I remember he worked fairly well. We couldn't find an exact match for the serape/poncho, but again did the best we could. We shot near the beginning of August (I was in Mexico when Nixon resigned) at a resort hotel in Cuernevaca that had preserved an ancient jail in its cellars. I then spent a couple or three weeks traveling in Mexico, and came back to L.A. in September to edit my footage. The result wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny by someone who knew what we did, but, as I have said, we even fooled Clint. It's probably the worst work I've ever done, making my initial efforts on Beast from Haunted Cave look masterful, but the trip to Mexico was memorable."5

Hellman's version of Fistful of Dollars seems not to have been broadcast until August 29, 1977 — it was certainly not shown again after this date. According to Ernie Farino, "Many of my Leone-fan friends and I were quite annoyed to have missed it (I didn't bother watching because I knew the film would be pan-and-scan and censored for violence). Having heard about this new scene, I made it a point to tune in to subsequent ABC airings, but the sequence never showed up again."6

The scene begins as Eastwood's Man with No Name is removed from his prison cell and taken to see the warden, who delivers the following monologue: "Sit down. They tell me you can read. Good. You'll know what that is. That pardon is yours if you do a job for us. No, just listen. You've got two choices: one, you can spend the rest of your life in this hole; two, you do what I tell ya. Do you know the town of San Miguel? It's about three days ride south, just across the border. The town is a hellhole. Two gangs have moved in and taken over. The town's people are slaves to them. And they're trading guns and whiskey across the border to the Apaches. I want the place cleaned out, and I don't care how you do it. Chances are you'll get yourself killed. Fact is, there's little doubt of it. The two gangs are at each others' throats all the time, but one thing they do get together on, that's how to handle strangers that come into their town. They kill them, no questions. I've lost seven men in as many months. But I want the place cleaned out, do you understand? Good. One thing more. They may be trading with the Cavalry, gold for guns, so don't count on anyone trying to get you out. We'll see if that gun of yours can pull you out of this one. You've got sixty days. After that, we come gunning for ya. You'll be treated like any other escaped prisoner, shot on sight. Your horse and your gun are waiting for you at the main gate." Outside the building, The Man rides away after being given his gun and other belongings.

Despite setting out to demonstrate that Leone's immoral Man with No Name is really on the establishment's side, Hellman actually shifts the charge of immorality from the individual to the system. It is intriguing that he should recall being in the middle of this shoot when Richard Nixon resigned, since the use of a criminal for political ends has the authentic stink of Nixonian politics (with San Miguel — "just across the border" — perhaps standing in for Cuba). Visually, this scene functions as an epilogue to Cockfighter: in that film, a photograph eliminated Frank Mansfield's head; here, The Man is, of necessity, framed in this way throughout (though two extreme close-ups of Clint Eastwood's eyes, taken from Fistful of Dollars' climactic gunfight, have been cut into the conversation with the warden). The prison cell's door is designed in such a way that only The Man's legs are visible from outside, and Hellman shoots from angles which ensure that the actor's face is obscured (often by the brim of his hat), or frames him so that his head is cut off at the top of the frame (as when he rides away). While Leone's protagonist had no name, Hellman's has no head, face or voice! Like Frank Mansfield, he is depicted less in terms of what he is than in terms of what he isn't, a man without individual attributes whose possessions (the gun he meticulously checks, the holster, the horse, the poncho, the hat, the cigar) do not give clues to his personality, but compensate for its absence. As he rides away, the camera holds on a building as first The Man and then his shadow vanish off-screen, reminding us of the danger—that of total erasure—which constantly threatens Hellman's characters. Stanton's warden, sitting behind a massive desk next to an American flag, and under a map of the territory, is associated with a castrating political and financial power (he seems to combine the functions of warden, sheriff and governor), and The Man inevitably becomes a pawn in his chess game, a castrated individual — mute, faceless and without concrete presence — whose estrangement from the capitalist system and limited access to money have defined him as a lack. Tellingly, when the warden finishes talking, he turns away and reads a newspaper, as if alone in the room. It is difficult to imagine a more negative "hero" in any commercial American film (one would have to look towards the avant garde for comparable examples), and it is pleasing to see Hellman once again finding a way to explore his favorite themes by accepting some particularly stringent conditions: the more restricted his remit, the freer he seems to become.

Hellman did not work on another project for close to a year: "For the rest of 1974 and beginning of 1975,I was involved in a legal battle over custody of my kids."7 In August 1975, Sam Peckinpah asked him to edit two action scenes — a fight at an airport and the aircraft carrier finale — in his film The Killer Elite: "Sam had four editors working on the film, and they had struck out several times with the fight sequences. I don't know how he thought of me, but I guess Mike Medavoy suggested me. Mike frequently brought me in to 'save' problem pictures. Peckinpah just told me to try my hand at it. I'm not able to recut someone else's work, so I ordered new prints of all the dailies, and started from scratch. I was editing these scenes alone. What Sam would do is he would let us all work until about ten at night, and he would call a meeting at about ten which the other editors dubbed CWOT meetings, which was Complete Waste of Time. And the amazing thing was that they were anything but that. Sam would come around at ten and look at the sequence and he would kind of mumble, and you had to lean in to understand what he was saying. He would speak very quietly, and he was hard to understand. And he would have these brilliant ideas, out of all of this kind of fog, that would then send the thing off into a new dimension. He felt something was missing from the airport sequence. Then he came up with the idea of intercutting the sequence with the sequence that follows it. It was a brilliant idea."8 On release prints of The Killer Elite, Garth Craven is credited as supervising editor, Tony De Zarraga and Monte Hellman as editors. Of all the films Hellman contributed to during this period, The Killer Elite is the only one in which his name appears onscreen.

Hellman worked on The Killer Elite from August 15 to mid-October, leaving the edit to direct an episode of Baretta, a popular television series starring Robert Blake as Detective Tony Baretta.9 The episode assigned to Hellman was entitled "A Bite of the Apple." Written by Robert Janes and Paul Magistretti from a story by Robert Janes, it focuses on Holly, an ex-prostitute who has become elderly Mafioso Artie Jay's lover. When Artie is killed by his henchman Dave Martin, he gives Holly a book containing the names of all his criminal contacts. Holly tells Baretta she knows nothing about the book, but is actually using him to sell it to Artie's Mafia cronies. Holly negotiates the sale successfully and departs on a world cruise ... after mailing a photocopy of the book to Baretta.

Hellman recollects, "I got the job through my agent at William Morris, maybe the only job I ever got from an agent, except for Two-Lane. They never tried to get me another TV job."10 Hellman cast Cristina Raines (who had recently appeared in Robert Altman's Nashville) as Holly and Ed Begley, Jr. (from Cockfighter) as dog trainer Ernie Wilcox. Also in the cast were series regulars Tom Ewell and Ed Grover, and Elisha Cook, Jr. (credited as "Elisha Cook"), who played a semi-regular character named Bingo^11: "I think I may also have hired Eleanor Zee, and perhaps Anne Revere. I worked for the first three days of what was supposed to be a five day shoot. Bobby Blake made my life miserable from the beginning of the first day, when I spent an hour or so preparing a scene in a jail cell, only to have him come on the set to tell me he'd decided to shoot the scene on a different set. He criticized my decisions all through the day, with the effect of demoralizing me and slowing down the work. I remember I gave the parrot some gag lines that Blake said were out of character. I can't believe how seriously everyone on this show took their baby, without any sense of humor. Then, on the second day, Blake didn't show up, and I was forced to work around him. About three-quarters through the third day, while I was working on the Elisha scene, Bobby just pushed me out of the way and started directing the scene. He didn't say anything, he just did it. Elisha took me aside and said, 'Just take the money and run.' At the end of the day —just after Elisha's good advice, which I had decided to take — I was told by one of the producers that my services would no longer be needed. There was no reason given. Bobby's wife, Sondra, came up to me to tell me how sorry she was. She was very embarrassed by her husband. The position of the director in TV is not compatible with my make-up. I was fired because Bobby was resentful of my coming from features while he was stuck in TV, and because I didn't like taking orders when I felt it was my job to give them. I committed the crime of arguing with the star."12

According to Ed Begley, Jr., "We filmed the episode A Bite of the Apple in October of 1975. I was hired for one day for a small part, Ernie (a man who works with trained dogs). I think I deliver the mob book to someone using my trained dogs. We were told on the set that Monte was fired. Cristina Raines was the next to go, as (we were told) she was very late one morning. Robert Blake called Karen Valentine and asked her to fill in. The dog was then replaced (I'm not kidding!) and I wound up with three days work for what should have taken three hours. I can't remember the replacement director's name, but he was basically just a traffic-cop. Robert Blake called all the shots. He told them where to put the lights and even placed several props for the prop man, including moving a heavy park bench into position."13

Hellman's replacement was actually Robert Douglas, a popular Hollywood actor who had begun directing series television. One guesses that Douglas' relationship with Blake was more harmonious than Hellman's, since he went on to direct several Baretta episodes. According to Hellman, "I never met him. There was no passing of the torch."11 Needless to say, all the scenes Hellman shot with Cristina Raines were immediately dumped. The part of Dave Martin was also re-cast at this point, with Scott Glenn recruited to play the role (coincidentally, Glenn and Raines both appeared in Nashville). Hellman can no longer recall whom he originally cast in this part. When A Bite of the Apple was broadcast on November 5, 1975 (as the ninth episode of series 2), Hellman's name was not on the credits. Upon recently viewing the segment, Hellman declared, "There's not a frame of my footage in it. Nor is anything about it familiar to me. The Elisha Cook scenes bear no resemblance to the Elisha scenes I shot, which were on a set. I notice that Bobby does a lot of improvising, so it's possible that they did a lot of rewriting and resetting of locations. In fact, I don't remember even scouting any street locations, though since I didn't shoot any, it's possible I wouldn't remember. And judging by the way the show was run, Bobby and the producers didn't really want the director to do much of anything. So I might not have even been shown any of the locations before shooting. I was involved in casting, and they didn't really like my choices, as you can see by the recasting when I left. The producers wanted Karen Valentine, and they eventually got her. The only scene that I possibly shot is the one with series regular Ed Grover on the phone while eating. Apparently, this was a running gag. But I'm reasonably sure it wasn't my shot. The scene I remember shooting was much longer, and I believe a different angle."

Comment on the episode would thus seem to be superfluous in the context of a book about Monte Hellman, but it is worth noting that the climax, in which Holly is left free to enjoy the fruits of her criminal labors, is actually quite daring for a mid-1970s network television show. Aside from that, Robert Douglas' direction is mostly pedestrian, while Robert Blake embodies an ideal of "cool" masculine detachment which the director of Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter would presumably have subjected to stringent criticism; one might even speculate that this was at the heart of Hellman's conflict with Blake (as it may have been at the heart of his conflict with Michael Carreras).

In January and February 1976, Hellman did some uncredited editing on Jonathan Demme's Fighting Mad: "I believe I did another extensive re-edit at the director's request. I don't think it took more than 3 or 4 weeks. Roger Corman was the producer, and I was brought in by Jonathan. I don't believe I worked on the whole picture, and I'm not even sure that the scenes I worked on had already been cut. I know I always work from dailies, not from someone else's cut. I think I really came in very briefly to do quick surgery. I wasn't much interested in an editing credit on one more low budget programmer."16

For the rest of February and throughout March, Hellman worked as an uncredited editor on Mark Rydell's Harry and Walter Go to New York: "I was brought in by the producer, Don Devlin, against the director's wishes, and did a parallel cut, while the director was working with his own editor. It was not a pleasant situation, and Mark Rydell avoids talking with me to this day. I would not have taken a job under these circumstances other than for my friendship with Don Devlin. I also consulted with the Columbia brass, who watched the progress of my cut, and I believe they used most of my material. I didn't work with any of the other editors,17 nor did I even meet them. If I had been hired as a director, it would have been against DGA laws. But I was hired as an editor, and it was sleazy but not illegal. The studio had little faith because the film was bad, and Mark was in love with every frame. I had a thankless job, because it wasn't possible to make it good, only less bad. The editors working with Mark couldn't be as ruthless as I could be, because they had to follow Mark's wishes. I suppose the release schedule didn't allow waiting until Mark had finished his cut, then barring him from the cutting room, as is the normal studio policy in situations like this. He certainly had good reason to be unhappy with both the studio and me. You can understand why I wouldn't want a screen credit."18

Hellman was also developing several of his own projects around this time, including That Nairobi Affair, based on Betty Leslie-Melville's book (described by its publisher as "A novel of love, murder and perfidy, from Kenya to Paris, London, New York and Philadelphia"), which was published in 1975. Hellman says, "I never saw a script. I was given Betty Leslie-Melville's book (in long/thin galley form) by a producer (whose name and face I can't remember — I'm beginning to sound like Borges), and was attracted by the location more than anything else. It never got very far. The only thing I can recall about it was that it was a melodramatic love story, and there was a murder and possibly a trial."19

Hellman was also involved with Tepic in the Morning, based (like Ulzana's Raid and Billy Two Hats) on an Alan Sharp screenplay about a man and a woman trying to find some money that the woman's father stole from a bank and buried in a Mexican ghost town. Hellman planned to cast Warren Oates and Candy Clark. Sharp directed the film himself a decade later, under the title Little Treasure (1985). Ted Danson, Margot Kidder and Burt Lancaster were the stars. Another film he developed was A Man in the Wheatfield: "It was a novel by Robert Laxalt, which I had in galley form, that was subsequently published. It concerned a man who was persecuted because he kept snakes. Probably my darkest and least commercial project."20 Ronald Shusett's Kiss and Pull the Trigger was "Another noir. Shusett wrote the original story for Alien, as well as the story and screenplay for Total Recall. I think he may also have been the one to turn me on to A Man in the Wheatfield. I made several attempts at Kiss throughout the 80s."21 Death in Gentle Grove, a television adaptation of the Peyton Place-style novel by Francis K. Allan, published in 1976, was another project: "I worked on the script with Larry Hauben."22 Hellman was also involved with At Play in the Fields of the Lord, from the 1965 novel by Peter Matthiessen. Although Bob Rafelson also made an abortive attempt to set this up a few years later (with a screenplay by Walon Green), it was eventually made by Hector Babenco in 1991.

During this period, Hellman began working on a number of projects to be produced by Elliott Kastner: "I met Elliott on Bus Riley's Back in Town. We remained friendly over the years."23 The first Hellman/Kastner collaborations were to have been The Fast Lane and Terry and the Pirates, the latter based on Milton Caniff's comic strip: "I inherited the misogyny of Hawks and the sadism of Hitchcock. Terry appealed to the Hawks in me. Fast Lane was the story of a race driver in Europe who drives a super-cooled body at top speed across the continent for medical treatment, or some such nonsense. Another macho thriller, part Hawks, part Hitchcock, all Hellman. It was developed during November/December 1975. Discussions continued through 1976. Elliott had a deal with Lew Grade in London, but it fell through before production could begin."24 Later in 1976, Kastner offered Hellman a screenplay by Larry Cohen entitled A Man for Deajum's Wife, which eventually mutated into China 9, Liberty 37. Hellman went to Rome for meetings relating to this project in January 1977.

Hellman's next assignment came about when Tom Gries (once a collaborator of Sam Peckinpah's) died on January 3, 1977, shortly after completing principal photography on the Muhammad Al i biopic The Greatest: "According to DGA rules, the director was entitled to supervise the first cut, or 'director's cut.' I was hired to represent Tom Gries in this regard. I had total control, which the director does until he finishes his cut. I didn't shoot any additional footage, but I had a number of creative ideas, some of which were rejected on budget grounds. I wanted to open the film with documentary footage of Clay (as he was called then) in the Olympics, but the footage proved to be too expensive. The fight footage is all documentary, which worked because Ali played himself in the film. The best thing about the experience was meeting Ali, and working with him, if briefly (he came into the cutting room a couple of times—I can't remember if I had to loop him). Buzz^25 is a good editor, whom I had known before during my stint as an assistant editor at the studios, although I had never assisted him."26 The end credits include the following dedication: "Tom Gries. The director of The Greatest passed away on January 3, 1977. This motion picture is dedicated to his memory." "I can't remember whose idea it was to dedicate the film to Gries," claims Hellman.27

In its final form, The Greatest contains a few audio and visual effects (including a brief use of split-screen) that were presumably invented by Hellman. When one of Ali's associates is asked if Ali or George Foreman is likely to win an upcoming fight, the man's reply, "I have to say George," is repeated several times on the soundtrack, while the speech Ali delivers after landing at an airport near the beginning is partially drowned out by the sound of another plane. Of special interest is Hellman's treatment of the Ali-Foreman fight which abruptly ends the film. After Ali delivers his knockout punch, Foreman begins to fall in slow-motion; the image then slows down even further, before finally freezing as Foreman hits the floor. The soundtrack is also slowed down and distorted. In other words, the film ends in exactly the same way as The Shooting (and, to a lesser extent, Two-Lane Blacktop). Although it is difficult to believe that Hellman was not responsible for this effect, the matter cannot be settled decisively: "I worked for several months on The Greatest, but unfortunately can't remember any details, other than fighting for my idea for the opening. I supervised the entire post-production process, but have no idea which ideas were mine and which were the editor's or someone else's. I never saw the film after seeing the answer print, and I don't think seeing it again would make me remember any more."28

Chapter 13

China 9, Liberty 37 (1978)

Vladimir: Do you not recognize the place?

Estragon: Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I've crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! Look at this muckheap! I've never stirred from it!

Vladimir: All the same, you can't tell me that this (gesture) bears any resemblance to ... (he hesitates) ... to the Macon country, for example. You can't deny there's a big difference.

Estragon: The Macon country! Who's talking to you about the Macon country?

Vladimir: But you were there yourself, in the Macon country.

Estragon: No, I was never in the Macon country. I've puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Cackon country!

— Waiting for Godot

Hellman's next film began as a Larry Cohen screenplay entitled A Man for Deajum's Wife: "Deajum was a peg-legged monster who beats his wife, and who is finally hunted and killed by the stranger who falls in love with his wife."1 Unhappy with the script, Hellman asked Jerry Harvey (who ran the Z channel in LA, and later committed suicide) and Douglas Venturelli to do a rewrite: "Jerry was a friend of mine, and he brought Doug Venturelli into the mix. 'This is terrible, we can't rewrite this,' they said, and I said, 'Well, just write me a new script.' All that was used was the idea of a wife who falls for a stranger."2 In this script, Deajum became Matthew Sebenek (Warren Oates), a farmer who used to work as a hired killer for the railroad, and whose former employers now want him eliminated because he refuses to sell his farm. Gunfighter Clayton Drumm (Fabio Testi) — presumably a relative of The Shooting's Leland Drum — is released from prison and promised a pardon if he agrees to kill Matthew. Clayton spends a night at Matthew's farm, secretly makes love to his wife, Catherine (Jenny Agutter), and departs the next morning after becoming friendly with Matthew. Catherine stabs her husband during an argument and, believing him to be dead, joins Clayton. However, the still very much alive Matthew and his brothers pursue the couple. Many of China 9's elements can be traced back to Beast from Haunted Cave: both films feature an isolated cabin as a central location, and involve a young man (Gil, Clayton) helping a woman (Gypsy, Catherine) escape from an oppressive relationship with an older man (Alex, Matthew) who, together with his male associates (Alex's gang, Matthew's brothers), pursues the couple. Both opposed groups are also hunted by an anonymous menace (the beast, the railroad employees) against which they are finally obliged to unite.

China 9, Liberty 37 was planned as an American-Italian co-production, but Elliott Kastner hated the new script and lost interest in the project. Gianni Bozzacchi and Valeric De Paolis agreed to make the film as an Italian-Spanish co-production (Rolf Wegener put up a large part of the money, and received a presentation credit on American theatrical prints), and it soon began shooting in Spain under the new title. Hellman remembers, "China and Liberty are actual towns in Texas. I saw the road sign from the window of a train. Wim Wenders visited both when he was traveling in Texas (perhaps when he was germinating on Paris, Texas) as an homage to the movie. Also, I acquired two puppies shortly after making the movie, and named them 'China' and 'Liberty.' China lived to the ripe old dog age of 181/2. Liberty lived to 15. We used nothing of the original script. In fact, I don't believe Jerry Harvey ever read more than a few pages of it. I do recall there was no friendship between the two men, as there is in China 9, and that it was more of a tracking and hunting story, ending in the shooting of the husband. It is my recollection that Elliott Kastner left with the script, and that he tried to set it up, feeling there was no similarity between it and China 9."3 Hellman's father died during pre-production, and the film was dedicated to him.

With Giuseppe Rotunno as DP, the shoot proceeded smoothly: "That was probably the happiest experience I ever had. We were in this beautiful town in the South of Spain, Almeria. We had a hotel all to ourselves. The crew was all Italian. The cameramen would go into the kitchen at night and make pasta for eveybody, and on Saturday nights we would go into town and have caviar and baby eels and it was just idyllic. Jerry Harvey and Douglas Venturelli were both on location, continued to work on the screenplay throughout production (they were also in Rome during pre-production), and were both in the whorehouse scene, sitting on a couch with a working girl. It was one of those shoots where we didn't exactly make it up as we went along, but we made a lot of changes in the script, put in jokes. Literally everybody was involved in the creative process. I believe the 'Show him your nuts' joke was told to me at dinner one night by Warren's wife. It went into the script immediately. I love jokes, and even the first line in the film, 'Pretty soon, no more Japanese,' is the tag line of a joke never told.4 As you must know, many things in my movies are cryptic, decipherable only by me and a few friends. When we started shooting, we didn't know how the movie was going to end — I think we originally thought Fabio would kill Warren, but I was never satisfied with that ending. Fortunately, we shot more or less in sequence, so that once the 'nuts' joke went in, it became logical to tell it a second time. I can't remember at what point I thought of using it to end the movie, but it was one of those revelations that was instantly apparent as 'right.' In the original script that Elliott Kastner had, the husband is killed. Even in our total re-write, we didn't know that Jenny would stay with Warren until a few days before we shot it. This is the only movie I've directed where we re-wrote the script as we went along."5

The part of writer Wilbur Olsen, based on Ned Buntline, was played by Sam Peckinpah: "We actually had several roles pinpointed for him. Each time he was supposed to come and didn't, the role would be cast with someone else. His original role was the sheriff, the role played by Richard Adams, who just happened to drop by the set while traveling through Spain with Sidney Lassick. There was one last role on the last day of shooting, and I was amazed when Sam got off the plane. He wound up with a better role than the one we originally had in mind for him. He played a newspaper writer and he was terrific. He wrote his own dialogue. The scene was in the script, which he rewrote and embellished in his dressing room just prior to shooting. In fact, he was so terrified that I could barely get him out of the dressing room. We had one day to shoot, and he would come on the set and he would say two words and then he'd say 'excuse me' and he'd go back to his dressing room. I finally just kind of nursed this performance out of him. He was incapable of completing a sentence without ad-libbing something that made the take unusable. I'm sure this was out of fear. The first thing he said when he got on the set was, 'Yes, I have dreams in my pockets and things up my sleeve, but I'm the opposite of a stage magician. He brings you illusions in the guise of reality. I bring you reality in the pleasant disguise of illusion.' Now this is from Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. It's the opening speech, and I had played that part on the stage, so I was in a very good position to negotiate this situation, and I said, 'Okay, Tennessee, that's very nice, but now can we get back to the scene we're supposed to be doing?' And so he finally started to say the words, but he would never say his name. He had to introduce himself and say, 'I'm Wilbur Olsen,' and he would never say 'Wilbur Olsen.' I finally got him to say the name off-camera in rehearsal with just a microphone going and I laid it in. But he's good in the film, in spite of himself. He was a born actor. I joked, 'How did you learn to act?' and he said, 'I've been doing it all my life'."6 On the opening credits, the film proudly claims to be "Introducing Sam Peckinpah," which is actually untrue, since Peckinpah's first credited role was in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "It was my idea, as a gag. We knew about Body Snatchers."7

Complicated co-production requirements ensured that the film circulated in a number of versions with completely different credits and titles. In Italy it is known as Amore, Piombo e Furore (Love, Guns and Fury) and in Spain it is called Clayton Drumm, while in America it has been released as Gunfighters and Clayton and Catherine (as well as under the original title). Italian quota regulations even resulted in Antonio Brandt being given the director credit on Italian prints (which also removed the dedication to Hellman's father and gave Fabio Testi star billing): "I agreed to take my name off as director in exchange for the producer credit throughout the rest of the world. We were invited to show China 9 at the Cannes Film Festival, were actually in the printed program, when the producers withdrew the film for fear of losing their Italian subsidy if the government realized I had directed it. The festival directors were furious, and the film got more publicity for being withdrawn than it probably would have as an entry. Tony Brandt was my assistant director. He also was the body of the circus owner — the voice is Mike Forest, who was the hero of Beast from Haunted Cave. I edited the film myself, but Cesare D'Amico was given the editing credit in order to get more Italian names on the credits. Cesare was post-production supervisor, and arranged for hiring crews, setting up equipment, mixing, etc. I can't remember for sure, but he may also have functioned as my assistant editor. He was a good guy."8 China 9's writing credits were the subject of even more confusion. On the original English-language version, the screenplay credit reads "Story and screenplay by Jerry Harvey and Douglas Venturelli with the collaboration of Ennio De Concini and Don Vicente Escriva"; on the pan-and-scan version prepared for television screenings by Lorimar, only Harvey and Venturelli are credited; and on Italian prints, the screenplay is attributed solely to Ennio De Concini, from a story by Concini and Vicente Escriva Soriano: "Ennio De Concini and Don Vicente Escriva had nothing to do with the screenplay, but were included for purposes of subsidies. I don't really know why this was necessary, since it was always planned to release an Italian (and also Spanish) version. De Concini was a friend of the producer, Gianni Bozzacchi. He was a very prolific writer whose major claim to fame was Il Grido as well as Divorce Italian Style. He actually did write Bozzacchi's next film I Love You, I Love You Not. Vicente Escriva was the Spanish equivalent of Concini. Neither had anything to do with China 9."9

The film was also cut for the Italian market, the major loss being an entire sequence in which Clayton and Catherine encounter a midget^10 and visit a circus: "I haven't seen the Gunfighters version, but I believe it was the same as the Italian version, which not only cut certain scenes (mostly for superstitious reasons: circuses, as well as the color purple, are considered bad luck, Fellini notwithstanding) but also changed a lot of the dialog — they didn't understand the humor. I believe there are also a number of small picture cuts throughout."11

Like Cockfighter, China 9, Liberty 37 sets out its agenda in the opening shot. As in Flight to Fury, the film begins with the camera tracking behind a moving individual. As this person — whom we will soon discover is a hangman — turns towards the left, the camera holds for a few seconds on a signpost reading "China 9, Liberty 37" before following him. The camera's pause suggests this world's sheer randomness; had it moved towards the right — towards Liberty — a completely different story might have unfolded. Randomness and universality are the two opposed notes which introduce the narrative (and are inscribed in the actual title), suggesting once again those contradictions which define Hellman's cinema: he is a classicist and an anti-traditionalist, a working director and a self-conscious artist, his stories both meaningless and suffused with meaning. It is ironic that the camera declares its freedom from traditional filmmaking grammar in precisely the gesture with which it moves away from a town named "Liberty." But the camera also pauses for a more basic reason, since the signpost appears on-screen at precisely that point in the credits where we would expect to find the title. Shortly afterwards, we see that the hangman is playing a mouth organ, presumably the source of the music on the soundtrack. By working what would normally be extra-diagetic elements — the printed credits and main musical theme — into his fictional world, Hellman subtly disturbs (but, crucially, does not deny) our investment in the narrative. Habitual patterns of audience identification are not erased, but rather made part of something else. We will be emotionally involved in the ensuing events, but with a heightened sense of critical awareness which can be described as Brechtian.

Such disruptions are not confined to the opening, but suffuse the film, and will perhaps be especially obvious to Hellman aficionados. As the fact that the first line of dialogue is the punchline to a joke we never hear suggests, Hellman is working on an intensely private, almost secretive level; only slavish devotees of the director will recognize that the scene which introduces Clayton Drumm is a remake of the sequence Hellman shot for the TV version of Fistful of Dollars. Yet, despite all this, Hellman has less to do with the new auteur cinema of the 1970s than with an older Hollywood tradition. China 9, Liberty 37 is not intended for a specialist audience nor sold on the strength of its director's name, but rather belongs to one of the more easily identifiable exploitation categories—that of the Euro-Western. Additionally, the overall structure bears a striking resemblance to two great classical works: William Dieterle's Elephant Walk (1953) and Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (1949). Each of these films presents us with an unhappy marriage in which the woman suffers under a tyrannical husband. A young lover is introduced, and the viewer is prepared for a climax in which the husband is disposed of and the woman leaves with her lover (or perhaps a tragic ending in which the lover is killed). Instead, the marriage's strength is affirmed and the lover departs. Hellman claims to have been quite unconscious of China 9's antecedents ("I never saw, and still have not seen, Under Capricorn"12), but it seems appropriate that a work which addresses the kind of popular audience frequently reached by Lang, Sirk, Boetticher and Hawks should now only be able to do so surreptitiously, via a series of in-jokes and not easily deciphered references, and with a dependence on improvisation and last-minute inspiration. As Hellman admits, "we didn't know that Jenny would stay with Warren until a few days before we shot it," and the nature of Hellman's relationship to classical Hollywood is suggested by the fact that he managed to achieve spontaneously what Hitchcock and Dieterle arrived at through a process of meticulous script construction.

We are, perhaps, used to thinking of improvisation as in some way opposed to form, but for Hellman — as for Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Jacques Rivette, Leo McCarey, John Cassavetes and Abel Ferrara — the two terms are not contradictory. Overall structure, rather than being established at the outset like an architect's blueprint, is allowed to develop organically from the filmmaker's interaction with material, locations and collaborators. The results, far from being chaotic or shapeless, often reveal great thematic richness. We need look no further than China 9, Liberty 37, in which a general sense of mystery pervades what is clearly a work of precision and clarity, fully living up to Hellman's formula for great films, which he believes "teach me something that I already knew. The same is true of philosophers, poets. I think that we respond to things that we feel instinctively, but that somebody else expresses for us."13

Although China 9, Liberty 37 displays perhaps the most elaborate mise-en-scène of any Hellman film (as with Ophuls, meaning is often conveyed through elegant and complex camera movements), it nevertheless comes across as one of his more relaxed works, the circumstances of its production clearly evident, the cast totally at ease. Notice the way Hellman shoots the sequence in which Matthew's brothers and their wives sit around an outdoor table and sing while Clayton approaches his horse, followed by Matthew. Although the action is observed from a distance, the effect is not one of estrangement from the characters, but rather of events unfolding with maximum freedom. To watch Warren Oates as he stands up and walks towards Fabio Testi is to observe an actor existing in the moment, unconcerned by such things as hitting marks, staying within camera range, etc. Another example would be the shot (a splendid demonstration of Hellman's skill for composing in depth) in which we see Clayton washing in the midground, Matthew fetching a chicken from its coop in the background, and Catherine looking at Clayton through a window in the foreground. The complex relationship that will emerge between these three characters is already suggested by the composition, while their freedom from any tightly constricting formula is implied by the way Catherine and Matthew eventually vacate the frame, leaving Clayton alone onscreen (much as he will be left alone at the film's climax).

Freedom (or "Liberty") and repression are the two poles between which the drama is played out, an idea beautifully illustrated by the shot immediately following the credits, in which what seems to be the camera's free movement as it surveys a landscape turns out to be the view from inside a prison cell.14 China 9, Liberty 37, like so many Hellman films, is about a journey, but one that covers no more than those 46 miles referenced by the title. The Western myth of ceaseless movement, with its implications of freedom, is here evoked only so that it can be subjected to stringent criticism. China 9 has less to do with the pioneers' dynamic Westward movement in the name of civilization than it does with those journeys of dubious value we find in Godard, Fuller and Kubrick.15 Meaningful activity is not an option for Hellman's protagonists, who lack the ability to formulate worthwhile goals. Hence the importance attributed to games of skill or chance: two children play with stones; Matthew and his brothers shoot at bottles; and both the prison guard and a brothel client play a game which involves throwing cards into a hat. In this Beckettian universe, all human aspiration becomes trivial and meaningless.

Matthew and Clayton are more weighed down by their pasts than any of Hellman's other protagonists; Matthew tells Clayton of how he once slaughtered an entire family, "down to the dogs and the cats and the chickens," and Clayton later talks to Catherine about how "everyone I ever cared for either died or went away." The temptation to abandon the present is constantly felt by both characters, and Clayton is repeatedly given the opportunity to live off"his past exploits in either a circus ("Clayton Drumm would pull in a hundred people a week") or the dime novels of Wilbur Olsen. As the striking use of mirrors and mirror imagery suggests, the landscape Clayton moves through is essentially an interior one wherein his personal dilemmas can be confronted and eventually resolved. Clayton's memory of his previous affair with a married woman ("I shot her husband, right after he killed her") haunts the sequence which begins with a prostitute undressing in front of a mirror. As Clayton embraces the woman, she is shot by a gunman who had been aiming at him from outside the building, and Hellman zooms into a mirror wherein we can see the dead woman's reflection. When Clayton approaches the window, the corpse remains visible in a smaller mirror. As the imagery suggests, this scene finds Clayton entering a dream state in which he can work through his fear that the past will repeat itself, that Catherine will die because of him. The towns and deserts through which Clayton moves resemble dream vistas, marked by the signs of trauma, full of temptations and shadowy doubles. To take only one example, the dwarf — a ridiculous figure, lost, separated from his community, lusting for sexual companionship — is clearly Clayton's doppelganger. But Clayton's most obvious double is Matthew, who also fears that a traumatic event will be repeated (after describing how he murdered a family, Matthew adds "I guess it's my turn now") and is consistently seen in mirrors (at one point, he shoots his own reflection in a stream). The concrete embodiment of Matthew's obsession is the house which he refuses to abandon out of stubborn pride (he admits it is "a shithole"), and which stands for an entire set of relationships — with his brothers, with his wife, with his rifle — he eventually learns to either abandon or rethink.

Matthew's house becomes the emblem not only of this character's obsession, but of all the obsessions—with racing, with cockfighting, with violence—that have gripped Hellman's protagonists. If his cinema is one of vicious circles, it is a tribute to China 9's fundamental healthiness that Matthew and Clayton are both allowed to break with their established patterns of behavior. The burning of the house contains an unambiguous feeling of release not present in any previous Hellman film. It seems likely that one or more of the central characters will die, but, as in Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman steadfastly refuses this option. And whereas the flames that end Two-Lane have much darker implications than any mere on-screen death, China 9's climactic fire is cleansing, suggesting that Matthew has outgrown his obsessions rather than being condemned to endlessly indulge them.

The optimism of China 9 is indistinguishable from Hellman's increasing feminist awareness. Although Clayton tells Matthew he changed his mind about killing him because "I got to like you," the film's mise-en-scéne makes it clear that he arrives at this decision after seeing Catherine and Barbara (Matthew's sister-in-law) singing together. By intercutting between shots of the two women and shots of Clayton isolated in front of Matthew's house, Hellman implies that Clayton is moved less by Matthew's relationship with his brothers (at least one of whom is actively unpleasant) than by this vision of female solidarity. The point is made even more explicit shortly afterwards, when the men demonstrate their masculine skill by shooting at bottles while the women silently clear the table.

As in Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter, it is the female characters who articulate Hellman's criticisms of masculinity. Whereas the men repeatedly refer to their pasts, we learn virtually nothing of Catherine's previous existence. She is (judging by her accent) an Irish immigrant, and while it is highly likely that her life was as marked by hardship as Clayton's, she refuses to assume that her past (or gender) determines her future. Implicitly rejecting Clayton's insistence that her only options are "whoring or teaching school" while he must continue to live the life of a gunfighter, she points out, "You live the way you do 'cause you want to. You're a coward. You're afraid to care about anything." Clayton's account of his mother's death, delivered as a response to this accusation, is extremely touching, but there seems little doubt that Catherine has Hellman's support when she says, "That's the past. Don't you feel anything for me right now? Look at me. I can make you happy. I know I could." If the words "no good" served as Two-Lane Blacktop's devastating condemnation of patriarchy, their negativity suggested an inability to move beyond the expression of despair. In China 9, however, Hellman focuses on people capable of growth and progress, qualities he associates with women and those men who are willing to learn from them. The key moment occurs when Matthew, unconsciously echoing Catherine's speech to Clayton, tells his wife, "I want you to forget about what's happened." In many ways, China 9 is less a Western than a screwball comedy of remarriage (like The Awful Truth and Two-Faced Woman, it shows masculine presumption being chastised by an active, independent woman), and one is tempted to imagine what the film would have been like if Leo McCarey had made it with Cary Grant as Matthew and Irene Dunne as Catherine (though Ralph Bellamy as Clayton would be a bit of a stretch). What Hellman affirms is the ability he expresses as a filmmaker, the ability to be constantly alive, which is to say creative, inventive and energetic. It is crucial that the line "show him your nuts" should sum up the film's value system while remaining an afterthought, an aside, the punchline to a joke told by the lead actor's wife during dinner.

Although Hellman's feminist concerns permeate the text at every level, China 9 is far from didactic. We experience Catherine's openness as a moral positive because it is supported by the film's emphasis on spontaneity and unpredictability; working in a traditionally masculine genre, Hellman plays against our expectations of form (by deconstructing the opening credits), narrative (by allowing the story to take several unexpected turns) and gender (by stressing the female role). Just as he had problematized such things as the opening title and musical theme, Hellman makes us aware of cinematic conventions determining the presentation of nudity. The first time we see Catherine, she is bathing naked in a river, and the shots of her relaxing, her breasts clearly visible, construct her as an object for the male viewer's gaze. But Catherine soon discovers she is being watched by Clayton, and the voyeur, safe in the darkness of the cinema, is startled to find himself represented on-screen, his gaze unexpectedly mediated. Later, Clayton swims naked in the same river, and is observed by Catherine. Hellman here presents Fabio Testi's naked body much as he had earlier presented Jenny Agutter's, as a sexualized object. It is this moment, in which Catherine returns the look to which she had been subjected, that eventually allows her and Clayton to achieve a relationship, however tentative, based on genuine equality, an achievement all the more striking for being the first of its kind in Hellman's oeuvre. In a cinema distinguished by both its circular nature and its sense of dynamic progression, Hellman here seems to be circling back to the Jill/Marty scene he added to Beast from Haunted Cave in 1962, and asking what paths that couple might have taken had their relationship not been abruptly terminated. The problem of how men and women can relate in a society constructed upon the rigorous separation of genders, a separation responsible for creating a heterosexual couple of quite striking incompatability, is what Hellman's next two films (which he sees as part of a "beauty and the beast" trilogy) will be concerned with.

Chapter 14

In Between Projects, 1978-1987

In May 1978, Hellman accompanied China 9, Liberty 37 to Cannes. Although the planned screening was eventually cancelled (as described in chapter 13), Hellman's visit was not a complete waste of time, since he ended up being one of several directors (including Sergio Leone, Paul Mazursky and Marco Ferreri) who made uncredited cameo appearances in Michael Ritchie's An Almost Perfect Affair, much of which was shot (under the title Cannes Game) at that year's festival: "I am having a brief conversation with Barbet Schroeder on the terrace of the Carlton. Michael asked Barbet and me to be in the film, and the scene was staged, even though improvised."1

Hellman's next "film doctor" assignment was on Lorimar's production of Avalanche Express, based on a fanatically anti-Communist novel by Colin Forbes. Inexplicably, the screenwriter chosen by director Mark Robson to adapt the novel for the screen was ex-Communist Party member and HUAC victim Abraham Polonsky, who simplified the plot — which involved the attempts of spies Harry Wargrave and Elsa Lang to help KGB chief Marenkov defect on board an express train — and developed the romance between Harry and Elsa. The cast included Lee Marvin (as Harry Wargrave), Robert Shaw (as General Marenkov — ironically, in the novel Marenkov is said to resemble Lee Marvin), Linda Evans (as Elsa Lang), Mike Connors (as Julian Haller) and Maximillian Schell (as Colonel Nikolai Bunin). Robson died on June 20, 1978, towards the end of principal photography, and Hellman was hired in early August to clear up the mess, a mess exacerbated by the death of Robert Shaw on August 28: "There was still a tremendous amount of shooting to be done, and of course all the post-production and a lot of special effects and about three principal scenes with the actors. I believe Bruce Logan photographed all the additional scenes that I worked on. I was hired to finish the picture. I spent nearly a year on it, and made more money than I had made on any film up until that time. It was a lot of fun. It was the first time I'd ever done anything on this scale. It was a $12 million dollar picture. I had $3 million that I was spending myself. There was already a rough cut of Robson's material when I came on board. Robson's editor, Dorothy Spencer, had edited 70 films, including some of my favorites like Stagecoach, To Be or Not to Be and My Darling Clementine. Without blaming her, she was not able in her initial attempt to make a coherent and dramatic cut of the material she had to work with. I felt I had to replace her, not because I didn't feel she was capable of performing the job, but because I felt she was so loyal to her former boss that she wouldn't be able to accept the kinds of changes that I felt were needed to make a passably acceptable movie. Firing Dorothy Spencer was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. She didn't take it well either. I hired Garth Craven, whom I had met on The Killer Elite, to replace her. We threw out everything Dorothy had done, and started from scratch. The next part of the process involved finding a new writer, Rospo Pallenberg, to write a revised script, based on what had been shot and on what we anticipated shooting. Much of what we hoped to shoot, including new action scenes to be shot in Europe, was cancelled for budgetary reasons. I was sent to Munich to research some of these new scenes. Originally I had been hired as producer/director. It was decided to bring on Gene Corman as producer, and I would be confined to just directing. From this point on, the process became very political. I had to fight for all my ideas, usually sending a memo each day to Peter Bart, then head of production at Lorimar, with copies to about 20 other people. It was my idea to have the new opening sequence in Russian, with English subtitles. We wrote new dialog, and Anatoly Davidov, who had defected from the Soviet Union while working with Kurosawa in Japan, translated the scene and co-directed the looping with Max Schell and Robert Rietty (whom I hired to revoice Robert Shaw). All of Shaw's dialog throughout the film was replaced by Rietty. To keep consistent sound quality, all of Max Schell's dialog was looped, as was much of Lee Marvin's. One of the side benefits with Schell was eliminating some of his German accent, which had been distracting in his original dialog. The side benefit of Rietty doing Shaw was eliminating Shaw's Scottish accent, which was hard to explain in a Russian. I met several times with Abraham Polonsky, and we became friends. I admired him as a director."2

Hellman was responsible for all the special effects, notably the entire sequence in which an avalanche is started to destroy the train (though all shots of the principals dealing with the chaos inside the train were by Robson), as well as the scene, just prior to the avalanche, in which we see a helicopter from the Davos weather institute surveying the mountain pass: "I did some terrific matte work, traveling mattes. I shot anything connected to the avalanche, including all the people in the town, at the tavern, etc. I did an avalanche that wipes out a village and wipes out all the people in the foreground. It was a 70MM matte shot. Each take cost $100,000, and we did two takes and failed. I convinced them to let me try it one more time, and we got it. And that was a great joy. I directed all the exterior train footage (miniatures), including the main title sequence. The interior helicopter shots were taken on a sound stage, with process background. I shot the entire sequence, including the dialog. One of the pilots was my neighbor on Appian Way; I believe the other was military consultant Anthony Foutz, but I may be wrong. Everything was shot in L.A., mostly on the Warners lot, though part of the big matte shot was filmed at Universal, and we did part of the same scene at Paramount. I was also involved in a lot of new material for the boat battle just before the end, but it was directed by a stunt director, Alan Gibbs. The sequence was part of the new script I helped create, and I did a lot of the planning, location scouting, etc., because I thought I was going to direct it. Then the powers that be decided to use a stunt coordinator. I believe he had shot second unit on one picture before he worked on Avalanche Express, but he had done stunts on dozens."3

Hellman's first dramatic scene begins II minutes in with Harry Wargrave driving onto an air-strip and boarding a plane (though Hellman no longer recalls whether or not he directed this shot). Inside, he exchanges a few words with Julian Haller. Only when Haller moves aside does it become clear, to us and Harry, that Elsa is also on board. When asked about his directorial style on a patchwork project such as this, Hellman responded, "Since Robson had been ill through much of the shoot, I think the only style came from the individual style of the actors. I also used this style to the best of my ability and theirs. I tried to be as true as possible to what I could discern to be Robson's intent, at the same time trying to beef up the tension in what was in some ways a terribly underwritten story filled out with a lot of overwritten exposition. When I cut away as much as I could from the dead weight, there wasn't much left."4 Nevertheless, the shot in which Harry sees Elsa reveals Hellman's skill for composing in depth (his scenes are the only ones to make full use of the widescreen ratio), and the dialogue has an authentically Hellmanesque feel. Lee Marvin, who is particularly good here, was very much in Hellman's genre of actors, and it is regrettable that their collaboration was so brief: "I enjoyed Lee tremendously, and admired his work. I was told to beware of his drinking problem, but I didn't find him hard to work with in any way."5

Hellman also directed the continuation of this scene — with the plane taking off and Elsa, Harry and Haller listening to Marenkov's message — as well as a later sequence in which Elsa, Harry and Haller fly home with Marenkov. The final shots of Marenkov are taken from Mark Robson's footage: "Shaw was not on the set at the end — it was merely an identical set, which we tried to match to the original. The song he sings was not part of the original script, but it was easy to loop onto his back. The airplane scenes I shot were not substitutes for scenes shot by Mark Robson, as far as I remember. There was the shot of Robert Shaw at the end, but I don't think there was a complete scene. In any event, we rewrote the script so much, if there was a scene at the end, it was obviously not usable in our new scenario. I don't recall that there were any additional scenes with Shaw that needed to be shot. There were scenes with Marvin and Evans that had not been shot, and which I shot. We could have used Shaw in the final plane scene, but it was written with the knowledge that we didn't have him."6 Inevitably, Shaw does not appear in the same shots as the other actors during this climactic sequence, another example of Hellman finding a way to express one of his central concerns — that of isolation — by solving a technical problem. This scene ends the film, and the final credits play alongside more Hellman footage showing the plane in flight. Curiously, prints currently distributed by Warner Brothers use different takes during the latter part of the end credit sequence (the original distributor was 20th Century-Fox). When asked about this, Hellman responded, "I've never seen the Warners version, so can't comment on a possible reason."7

Although Hellman was not credited for his work, the following acknowledgment appears at the end: "The producers wish to express their appreciation to Monte Hellman and Gene Corman for their post production services." When the film was released in England in July 1979, Richard Combs noted that "what supplies an altogether unexpected cutting edge is an editing style which reduces this lush tushery to absolutely bare bones ... the film's dynamics are simply a matter of never pausing for breath from one cut to the next — which makes Avalanche Express the most impressive work of 'montage' to emerge from a big-budget adventure movie, cleanly abstracting the effect of every set-piece. Given the credit acknowledgment of the post-production services of Monte Hellman, it would be tempting to ascribe something of this quality to him ... Which is not to claim that Avalanche Express is exactly to the espionage movie what The Shooting is to the Western, but it is close."8

For Hellman, narrative is essentially a found object; Ride in the Whirlwind was inspired by diaries and stories of the Old West, several of his projects were originated by others, he has shot new scenes to expand films for television, and so on. Even his work as an editor suggests a desire (the determinist impulse?) to work within an existing framework. Hellman's interest was less in Avalanche Express' ludicrous espionage plot than in the technical challenge this assignment posed: action sequences are cut in a rapid manner which is both exciting and mechanical, Hellman's objective treatment effectively stripping the project of its ideological underpinnings while introducing a tone of clinical detachment which connects neatly with his existential outlook. But Hellman cannot be described as a cold filmmaker, and if he is bored to distraction by Forbes' Commie-bashing, he is clearly captivated by the emotional depths Lee Marvin can suggest via a few lines of dialogue and some exchanged looks with Linda Evans. The film may have only a tangential relationship to Hellman's oeuvre, but it is worth noting that, like China 9, Liberty 37, it ends on a note of reconciliation.

In May 1979, shortly after completing Avalanche Express, Hellman again visited Cannes and sold China 9, Liberty 37 to Lorimar: "This was the only deal I actually made at a festival. I literally hid the only videotape from my competition, who were trying to sell the badly cut Italian version to a schlock distributor, until I could close the deal with Lorimar."9 In June, he attended the Moscow Film Festival.

The following year, Hellman met another of his most important collaborators, Rene Baker: "Rene wrote to me from Quebec early in 1980, and asked if he could be my apprentice. He moved into my house, and worked as a writer on all of my projects during the early 1980s. This led to a writing career for him. He has been producing the TV series Law and Order for many years now."10 Later in 1980, Hellman did some editing on Vernon Zimmerman's Fade to Black, an amusing horror film about a homicidal cinephile: "I was hired by the director Vernon Zimmerman. There was an edit in progress when I came on. The head editor had been imposed on Vernon by the producer, Irwin Yablans. Vernon got permission to bring me on as an additional editor, so that he could have someone on his side. I only worked a couple of weeks, at which time Irwin managed to get rid of me. Rene, who was my assistant, remembers that I was fired and rehired a couple of times before finally departing."11 Hellman's name does not appear on the film's credits. According to Vernon Zimmerman, "None of the editing that Monte did on Fade to Black survived the final cut. That's why he did not get any credit. This is normal. He only worked a short time. As editing proceeds on a film, as you know, the cut changes throughout until the final cut. Any work he may have done was obliterated in the normal course of business."12

Hellman next worked on Mike Newell's The Awakening (1980), an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars, previously filmed by Seth Holt under the title Blood from the Mummy's Tomb in 1972.13 The Awakening was a co-production between Orion/Solofilms in America and EMI/British Lion in Great Britain. Newell's director's cut was released to British cinemas in October 1980, the British Board of Film Censors having passed it uncut, with a recorded running time of 105 minutes 3 seconds, on June 4th (Newell's cut was also released throughout Europe). However, Orion was unhappy with this version, and asked Hellman to recut it for the American market: "I worked for over two months in May, June, and July 1980, then spent two weeks in London from August 10 to 24, supervising the final mix. I supervised the cutting of the original negative after I returned from London, so the British prints would have to have been made from a dupe negative made prior to the work I did. I was not given any instructions by Orion — only make it play better and be more scary and exciting. There were probably many small trims, a few frames here and there, to tighten the pace, which is what I was supposed to do. One of the main things I did was create a 'voice' for the mummy, done by manipulating a variety of sound effects. I also changed the sound in other ways. I remember there was a lot of waiting on decisions from higher up, and I also remember many days when I only worked for an hour or so. I should add that I had tremendous respect for Mike Newell, and tried not to destroy his intent. I spoke to him several times re what I was doing. Although the producer, Robert Solo, was a close friend of mine, the work I did was under the auspices of and for Mike Medavoy at Orion, also a close friend of over 30 years."14 Hellman eventually shortened the film by a mere 5 minutes, reducing the running time to 100 minutes.

Curiously, the version released on video in the UK was Hellman's American cut. By comparing the two versions, we can see that Hellman made a series of minor trims-eliminating a shot here, shortening a shot there, cutting superfluous dialogue, and so forth. The most obvious change appears at the climax, since Hellman chose to remove three shots of Margaret (now possessed by Kara) leaving the museum. The intention seems to have been to make the end (which implied that Kara's spirit was now free to destroy the world) less downbeat, though, according to Hellman, "The ending was changed purely for dramatic effect — I felt the shots of Margaret leaving were anti-climactic. Certainly, nobody wanted to make it less downbeat."15 For an example of the sound effects added by Hellman, look at the scene depicting the death of Paul. In Newell's version, Paul's death was shown elliptically via a shot of a light going out in a window; in Hellman's edition, growling noises have been added to the soundtrack.

"Also during 1980 (possibly the end of 1979) I began working for Francis Coppola on King of White Lady, based on a novel by Lance Hill, about cocaine smuggling from South America. The screenplay was written by Mike Moody, under my supervision. Francis and I were interested in different things, I in telling a good story, he in making a philosophical treatise on money. We went through 17 drafts of the screenplay. Warners committed to making the movie, but Francis couldn't let go, and finally lost his studio in Los Angeles before we could make the picture. The project collapsed sometime late in 1981."16

In April 1981, while working on King of White Lady, Hellman directed a short film about Coppola's One from the Heart. This documentary was commissioned for a video compilation by French photo agency Sygma. The video — which includes Bob Rafelson's hilarious mock-autobiographical Modesty as well as several softcore porn items — was released in the UK by Iver Film Services under the title New Look No. 1. Hellman's segment is entitled Inside the Coppola Personality (Charles Tatum, Jr.'s book lists it as Francis Coppola: A Profile). Hellman was not the only important director documenting the making of One from the Heart, since Jean-Luc Godard was also shooting footage of the production: "I never saw Godard, nor was I on the set much. I shot the documentary in two days, I believe after Francis had finished shooting the movie. I didn't operate the camera. What I shot was interviews with Francis in various locations: his trailer at the studio; his kitchen at his house nearby; another room in the house; his editing room; his storyboard sketches; his surprise birthday party (on April 7th); his lunch with the crew, etc. I shot on 16mm. Everything else in the short was video footage that had been shot by others, and was made available to me: Nastassia Kinski on the high wire; her practicing juggling, etc. My 16mm footage ran several hours in length. I went to Paris and spent 5 days editing and transferring and mixing on line. I was under the impression that the final piece would be 11 minutes. I finally had to cut it to 7 minutes."17

Inside the Coppola Personality is an amiable piece that, perhaps by default, contains thematic echoes of Hellman's other work. While listening to Coppola describing The Silver Fish, an equipment-filled trailer from which he often supervised activity on his sets, it is difficult not to think of such obesessional figures as Two-Lane Blacktop's drivers or Cockfighter's Frank Mansfield. But it would be misleading to describe Hellman's film as critical of Coppola; the portrait is essentially a warm one, and scenes depicting family gatherings (such as Coppola's 42nd birthday party), kitchen activity and a lunch with the crew reveal how similar scenes in The Godfather trilogy were drawn from the filmmaker's own life. With his habitual practice of allowing theme to emerge naturally from precise observation of human behavior and his interest in subcultures, it seems inevitable that Hellman would be attracted to the documentary form. As we will see, Hellman would work on more than one documentary during the early 1980s, and would later marry documentary director Emma Webster: "My wife is a documentarian who I think wants to make fiction films, and I'm a fiction filmmaker with a documentarian trying to get out."18

On April 3, 1982, Hellman's close friend and collaborator Warren Oates died of a heart attack in Los Angeles: "I was very angry that he died, because I felt that he literally killed himself. He called me the day before and said 'I just had a heart attack.' I said, 'What?!' and he said, 'Ahhh, just kidding. I had bad indigestion last night.' Those kind of jokes were not kidding. He was telling me something and he was telling himself something. And I know he was experiencing pain for six months or so, and he wouldn't go to a doctor. So I was really angry. I was mad at him when he died. Warren and I had one disagreement during The Shooting. That was it — we never argued again. Warren hated going on location — that's why he didn't do Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. But he would've gone to the ends of the earth for me. He was the embodiment of the philosophy of acting of somebody like Spencer Tracy. No fuss, no torture. He just came in and did his work. His one passion in life was investing. Far more so than acting. He was obsessive about his stock portfolio; that's where his real desire was. Warren was one of my closest friends, and I felt he was my alter ego. The fact that I identified so strongly with Warren's characters freed me in a way. I didn't have to think about how to express myself, because it just came naturally, as part of the process. In a funny way, it enabled both of us to be less self-conscious, to be less intellectual, to be more intuitive about the work that we were doing. He was the most extraordinary actor that I've ever worked with, and I don't think I'll ever find anybody that replaces him in that regard. He had a quality that harked back to the great Western actors like Gary Cooper, the silent man whose honesty and integrity are apparent from his face. What was intriguing about Warren was that he was quite different from how he appeared. Not unlike Peckinpah — they're both very Western characters who were loving friends and bitter enemies with adjoining property in Livingstone, Montana. They had the same reluctance to show anything soft. I was very close to Warren until the day he died, and I never knew he wrote poetry. He was very much like my heroes in the sense that he didn't reveal a lot about himself. He was a great friend — a great companion, but you had to dig for a long time to find out who Warren really was. I think this quality of mystery is very important for an actor. It's something that too few actors today have."19 Of the four principal actors in Two-Lane Blacktop, three died within a few years of each other; Laurie Bird, who had been living with Art Garfunkel in New York, took an overdose of valium in 1979,20 and Dennis Wilson drowned on December 28, 1983.

While attending the 1982 Cannes Festival, Hellman became one of several directors attempting to answer the question, "Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?" for Wim Wenders' Chambre 666, filmed in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez: "I happened to be at Cannes, I can't remember what I was doing — probably peddling projects. I was available and Wenders kind of latched onto me. And then when I found out what it involved, I suddenly dreaded this terrifying experience he had gotten me into. He literally just turned the camera on and walked away. I'm not a great monologuist."21 The answer given by Hellman is as follows: "I don't go to the movies very much anymore. I have a video recorder and I record movies off the air, but I don't watch them while they're being recorded and I very rarely look at them after I've recorded them, so I have a library of about 200 movies that I never see. I think that it doesn't really matter much whether movies look like TV or TV looks like movies or whether the language of cinema is changing. I don't think that pictures are dying, I think that there are good times and there are bad times for movies and I think that the last few years have been a bad period. I think that there haven't been a lot of movies that I cared to see, and the ones that I have seen I've been disappointed in, so I find that if I go to see a movie that disturbs me because it's not very good, then I'll look for an old movie that I've seen before, that I like, and I'll go to see it and I'll get some kind of nourishment from it."22

Later in 1982, Hellman again did some work on a documentary: "A friend of mine who's a French producer, Stephane Tchalgadjieff, was producing and directing a documentary on prostitution in Hollywood, and he asked me not to direct, but to just kind of help out, to be an advisor. I worked for several days as a non-paid 'consultant.' There wasn't much 'direction,' other than setting up the situations and hiding the camera. We were shooting a scene with hidden cameras on Sunset Boulevard, at the corner of what years ago was Schwab's Drugstore but is now something else. We were in this truck, shooting through a window that people couldn't see into, and our actress, who was a real hooker but who was demonstrating for us, was talking to a couple of prospective clients. She made a deal, and they promptly handcuffed her. They were plainclothes policemen. She said, 'I'm not a prostitute, I'm an actress,' and pointed to the truck where we all were. So they came in, confiscated everything, and arrested us. It turns out there's a law against using what they call 'concealed electronic devices,' and it's a very serious offense: the fine is $50,000 and two-and-a-half years in jail. I was very unhappy about that situation. Stephane and I went to the county jail to bail out our star. We had already filmed some interview material with her, but I can't remember whether Stephane or I or both asked the questions. She was 18 or 19 and black. She was planning to work for three years in order to save enough money to buy a small apartment house in Fresno. Anyway, I was booked but not jailed. I needed $2,000 in order to retain a lawyer, and called the first 75 or so names in my rolodex asking for $35 to be used towards my defense. Almost everyone I called offered to help, and within the space of about half a day I raised the $2,000. Christopher Isherwood actually got out of a sick bed and got a friend to drive him over to my house (about 20 miles from where he lived in Santa Monica) in order to give me a check. And I got off. Case dismissed. I didn't shoot anything for the film after the arrest, but I can't say for Stephane. I don't know the title or whether it was finished. Years later, I tried to make a documentary entitled Love and Money, about my traveling all over the world to pay back all of these friends, but couldn't get any company interested in financing it."23

Some time after this, in 1984 or 1985, Hellman came close to making a television commercial: "I bid on a job for Panasonic. I was given a script with the basic idea of a man 'driving' a piano (that is, playing it while it moved on wheels). I embellished the script using specific San Francisco locations, and Laurie Post had the idea of casting Ray Charles. Panasonic appropriated the idea of a blind man driving a piano, but gave the job to a French company whose bid was slightly lower. It's very difficult to copyright an idea. Even scripts are stolen every day in Hollywood. I don't know how many of our elements they actually used, since I never saw the commercial. Laurie's not sure, but thinks they used Ray Charles, even though he was asking $300,000."24 Whether or not Ray Charles appeared in the Panasonic advert, he certainly starred in a 1994 commercial for Peugeot (directed by Gerard Pires), which made use of a broadly similar idea: a blind man driving.

Of course, Hellman was also developing his own projects throughout this period: "I know all this must sound vague and sketchy, because it was. There was no clear demarcation between projects, and I was actually working on several at any given time. Shortly after finishing China 9, I got involved in another Jerry Harvey script (written with Dick Lochte) called Hot Bodies, a black comedy set in a cemetery. During the early eighties, I also was interested in a script called The Kollenstrom Project (that anticipated the kind of morphing used in Terminator 2, but before the technology existed). I then worked on Projections for Martin Poll (about out of body experiences, or OOBE), and two projects for Michael Gruskoff; Going Down and Falling. Gruskoff had a writer working on Falling who wasn't very good, so Rene Baker started writing behind him, and Gruskoff liked Rene's stuff, so Rene wound up doing the script. It was supposed to be about the MIA situation, but it was essentially a Hitchcockian-type thriller about a TV chef whose brother is a Vietnam vet. There's a scene where the hero is in a building which is being wrecked, and he's attacked by a wrecking ball. I can't remember if we got to the point of thinking about casting, Going Down was based on a novel called In Deep, the author of which I've forgotten. It was originally brought to me by Fred Roos, but I can't remember if he was still involved. Jerry Harvey did a draft of the screenplay, and Rene re-wrote it. It was about a diver who kept trying to dive deeper and deeper (to the point of endangering his life — depth narcosis interfering with judgment, etc.) in search of his own devils, mainly his relationship with his father. Sort of Hamlet as a spy thriller. Harry Dean Stanton was going to be a CIA agent. There was a sort of Harry Lime-type villain, as well as our hero the diver. And a love story. I can't remember any of the other casting ideas. It took place in Cuba originally, but we were planning to shoot in Puerto Rico. Then came War Games, later called Toy Soldiers, which I developed myself with Steve Gaydos and Rene. I spent several years trying to set this up, and came close with Paramount and a couple of others."25 As Steven Gaydos recalls, "Rene Baker and I wrote War Games, which led to our working on several projects for the studios. We gave Monte a free option for two years and he wasn't able to set it up. He killed a deal with Tony Garnett (Ken Loach's producer) which would have paid $75,000 — half to Monte, half to us — for Monte to executive produce and to be set up in the UK as a Euro-financed project with a UK director. He was totally broke and in deep debt. This project could have helped him. He said, 'If I don't direct, it doesn't do me any good/ Monte helped us tremendously in providing guidance on the script, but we wrote it. He would have made a great film. But no film was made. It was extremely dangerous material, as it was a powerful statement against the deployment of the Pershings, which was a centerpiece of the Reagan strategy to beat the Soviets. Guess what? Maybe Reagan was right!? He bankrupted the Soviets and the Pershings were part of it. But he risked World War III and the end of the world. Our script was extremely damning in its portrayal of all the loose nuclear weapons lying around Europe."26

Hellman then tried to set up Dark Passion, an adaptation of Lionel White's novel Obsession (already filmed by Godard as Pierrot le Fou), about a teenage girl and an older man: "I believe I was working on Dark Passion in 1982, for producer Bert Schneider at Paramount. I supervised one screenplay with Mark Peploe, a second with Charles Eastman, and finally wrote a third screenplay, using elements from Mark and Charles, myself, writing some new scenes and narration. I used Charles' structure, which was radically different from Mark's and from the book's. Rene Balcer wrote a couple of scenes near the end. As usual, I wrote the last line. I think I was involved on this project for a year and a half, before it fell apart, because of a misunderstanding between Bert Schneider and Barry Diller."27 According to Peter Biskind, "Bert refused to go to Barry's office, and Barry refused to come to his. Instead, Schneider sent Steve Blauner, who always did Bert's dirty work. Blauner walked into Diller's office, remonstrated, said, 'How could you do this? Come in now, after a year's work, say, 'Who cares about an older man with a younger woman?' So fine, we'll make it an older man with a younger boy! Now do you understand it?' Needless to say, after an exchange like this, the picture was never made."28 In 1987, an excerpt from the Dark Passion script was published in a Cahiers du Cinema special (edited by Wim Wonders) devoted to unrealized projects. In his introduction, Hellman notes, "I still hope I can make it some day, after the adventures occupying me right now."

In 1984, Hellman tried to set up a film of Paul Bowles' 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky (the second attempt he had made to adapt Bowles for the screen). Robert Aldrich, who owned the rights, had died the previous year: "It was Julie Corman who turned me on to The Sheltering Sky. I tried to get the William Morris Agency to help me get it to actors, but they never gave it to anyone — only said that they did. I finally got Jack Nicholson to help me get it to Daryl Hannah. I was trying to get actors attached before doing a screenplay, and Daryl was my first shot. I never even owned the rights, just thought I could get them from the estate of Robert Aldrich. I didn't realize how difficult they would be."29 Nicolas Roeg also dreamed of adapting The Sheltering Sky — his Bad Timing (1980) bears a few traces of this project, notably a scene in which Theresa Russell reads Bowles' book — but the film was eventually made by Bernardo Bertolucci (from a screenplay by Mark Peploe) in 1990: "I didn't like the Bertolucci film. He may have been right and I wrong, but that wasn't the way I saw the characters when I read the book."30

The Sheltering Sky, like so many of Hellman's unrealized projects — At Play in the Fields of the Lord, In a Dream of Passion, Labyrinth, Tepic in the Morning, Henderson the Rain King, Up Above the World, The Mechanic—deals with Americans abroad, suggesting this was a theme of particular importance, though Hellman insists, "There was no overriding theme — just a passion for travel."31

Another project dating from this period was Deep in the Heart, "for producer Don Phillips— a love story written by Don's then-wife, Dorothy Pearl, to be shot in Israel, and for which I went on a scout to Jerusalem."32

In June 1985, Henry Jaglom cast Hellman in a film that was released two years later as Someone to Love. Essentially playing himself, Hellman is onscreen for just over two minutes: "The whole picture was shot over a period of 4 days, at the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica. There was no script, and my scenes were improvised. It was a few months before Orson Welles died. Welles was present. I was cast because I was a friend, as were all the other cast members. Henry told me to seduce Oja Kodar, which wasn't difficult (to attempt, not necessarily to succeed)."33

Mike Medavoy then asked Hellman to help prepare the network television version of Code of Silence (1985), a Chuck Norris vehicle directed by Andy Davis for Orion: "I merely worked on dialog changes for the TV version. All I did was cut in some alternate dialogue (words) to replace words unacceptable for TV. There may have been a few picture cuts as well, all for reasons of censorship to meet free TV standards."34

In April 1986, Hellman was interviewed by British documentarian Paul Joyce for Out of the Blue and Into the Black, a film about BBS produced by the UK's Channel 4 (it was completed the following year and screened in 1988). While in Hellman's house, Joyce used some film left over from the BBS project to shoot a feature-length documentary entitled Plunging on Alone: Monte Hellman's Life in a Day: "Paul had the idea of making a movie without cuts. He shot a role of 16MM without stopping, then bridged to the next role by intercutting the last shot of one of my films, which he photographed on a TV screen. It was made over a period of two days. He wound up throwing out the first role, but otherwise everything else was in continuity."35 According to Joyce, "I made sure that the film was shot over a 24 hour period (on April 27). It was also important for me to make this on film, with all the disciplines that this entails. I have never worked quite in that way before or since, and I do feel the film stands the test of time — insofar as I can judge at least."36 Indeed, Plunging on Alone is among the finest documentaries ever made about a filmmaker. Hellman discusses his life, career and philosophy in a relaxed but intelligent manner, as well as mentioning some of the projects he was then developing (including In a Dream of Passion and Love and Money).

Later that year, Hellman worked as an uncredited second unit director on Paul Verhoeven's Robocop: "I actually was put up to direct the movie by the studio, and the producer (Jon Davison), who was a friend of mine, said he didn't see me as an action director. Then they hired me to direct the action. You tell me what that means."37 According to producer Jon Davison, "The original second unit director was Mark Goldblatt. He left to go do The Punisher in Australia. Mike Medavoy (the head of Orion) asked me to hire Monte as he was in some kind of financial distress. I was glad to and Paul just hated him. However, Paul hated a lot of people. Monte and I were simpatico and he shot some good stuff. I hired my friend Rick (Jamie) Anderson to be DP on second unit and he was hated despite the fact that he did a very good job. As is often the case, the second unit was the most fun place to be and I spent a fair amount of time there."38 As Hellman recalls, "I spent four weeks working as second unit director, from September 30 to October 24, 1986. Second unit was somewhat of a misnomer, since most of my scenes were with Peter Weller and sometimes Nancy Allen. The crew would fight to be assigned to my unit, since working for me was less stressful than working for Verhoeven. I worked with Robocop almost every day, I think I only worked with Nancy a couple of times. I did anything that could conceivably be second unit during the time the company was in Dallas: my second unit was the only one for the bulk of the Dallas shoot, and I was there every day from about the third week until they finished in Dallas. For budgetary reasons, and because they were no longer so behind schedule, they decided not to take me to the other location. I was really just a hired gun, going out each day with a list of isolated shots, sometimes in one location but intended for many places in the story, and not fully aware of how my stuff was being used. This experience was in no way like directing a movie, or even like doing the added scenes for the Corman movies. It wasn't my movie, so I had nothing to relate the work I was doing to. I have a clearer picture of the scenes I did with Peter and Nancy, just because we had such a good time doing them. But when I look at the picture now and see a set I remember, I know I was there, but can't remember every shot I made there. You can safely assume that any shot of Robocop driving was by me, except where a shot culminates in a big dialog scene after he gets out of the car. I shot tons of footage of Robo driving through the city at dusk, but only a fraction is in the movie. All of the scenes I shot that are in the movie are only fragments of the total footage I shot. But that's the way movies are. Like most directors, Paul hated the idea that there was a second unit at all, particularly one that was shooting with his actors and not just sunsets. I'm sure he was happy when he could minimize the work I did. They did want to credit me as second unit director, but I wasn't able to accept that credit because Verhoeven was not a member of the DGA, and the company had not signed an agreement with the DGA. I had got into trouble once before with the DGA over Cockfighter, which unbeknownst to me was non-DGA, even though I was paid DGA scale. I was put on trial and nearly suspended, so I couldn't risk another offence. I did try to keep my involvement with Robocop quiet, but it's so long ago, and the DGA is not quite as hard-ass as they once were. I didn't break all the rules: I did get DGA scale for my work, and my assistant director was DGA. They were hard times."39

Aside from various shots of Robocop driving, Hellman worked on the following scenes:

1. The boardroom scene in which the malfunctioning ED-209 robot kills OCP executive Kinney (Ken Page): "I did the close shots of Ed shooting the employee who falls on the model city (on the employee getting shot, not Ed). You can pretty much tell what I shot by whether there are other characters in the shot. On bullet hits, both in the scene where he falls on the model city, and at the end, my material is always isolated on the characters getting the hits."40 Hellman also recalls shooting "blood running through the streets of the model city, close shots of the model being shot up and the blood running through it,"41 but none of this footage was used in the final version: "They may have been forced to cut the footage of the model, since it was possibly too graphic for sensitive audiences. Verhoeven usually tries to stretch the envelope."42 After Hellman's departure, Jon Davison was asked to shoot footage that would make this scene even more graphic. As Davison recalls, "Paul felt there wasn't enough blood and carnage in what he shot; he felt the same about what Monte shot, so it is my recollection that I was the last to have a go at it. I sent the FX guys down to 7-Eleven to buy the biggest baggies made, filled them full of stage blood and taped them all over Kinney's body and blew the hell out of him. Paul was happy, the MPAA wasn't."43 Hellman also directed two exterior shots of the glass elevator at the Plaza of the Americas in Dallas—one showing it going up at the beginning of the sequence, the other showing it coming down at the end — as well as a single close-up of a scientist's hands pulling wires out of a computer in order to shut down ED-209.

2. The sequence in which Murphy (Peter Weller) and Lewis (Nancy Allen) chase the van that Clarence (Kurtwood Smith) and his gang are using to escape from a robbery. Hellman directed all the second unit material for this scene on location in Dallas, working with Weller, Allen and Smith. Everything relating to the actual chase — including all of Weller and Allen's dialogue — up to the point where Bobby, a member of Clarence's gang, lands on the windshield of Murphy's car, is by Hellman, though he was not responsible for the dialogue inside the van: "I frequently had the use of Peter and Nancy, but not always the other actors. But in the van chase, I had the actors inside the van, but as seen from the outside. Verhoeven gave me storyboards for the car/van chase. I followed them, but found them very restricting. I felt I could have done a better job if I had been given more freedom. I didn't have storyboards for any of the other scenes I worked on."44 According to Jon Davison, Verhoeven later shot some additional footage for this sequence on Long Beach in California: "Basically, everything with the tall, skinny space needle looking building in the background (sometimes with an overpass) is Dallas. Everything after Bobby hits the roof of the police car is in Long Beach (notice the sign that says 'Marina')."45

3. The scene in which Ron Miller (Mark Carlton) holds the Mayor and his staff hostage at City Hall contains one Hellman-directed image of Miller being thrown through a window by Robocop (shot from the outside).

4. Hellman directed all the exteriors of Murphy's house on Primrose Lane — a single shot of Murphy's wife (Angie Bolling) and son (Jason Levine) standing outside the house waving at a retreating camera (inserted into the sequence in which Murphy undergoes an operation), and the later shots of Robocop driving down Primrose Lane, pulling up outside the house and getting out of the car. Hellman also recalls directing part of the sequence inside the house: "I believe all I shot inside the house was the picking up of the polaroid picture, and the insert of it."46 Jon Davison agrees: "I believe Monte is correct. He filmed only the exterior shots. He may originally have shot some of the interior of the house but I doubt any of it was used. Paul did film that sequence himself."47

5. During the sequence in which Clarence kills Robert Morton (Miguel Ferrer) with a hand grenade, Hellman was responsible for some shots of television screens displaying OCP executive Dick Jones' (Ronny Cox) farewell message. He also filmed two exterior shots showing Clarence leaving and Morton's house exploding.

6. Hellman directed the brief sequence in which Robocop, on his way to see Dick Jones, drives into an underground car park, gets out of his car, walks towards a glass elevator, and takes the elevator up to the OCP boardroom. Following the confrontation with Dick Jones, Hellman directed "some of the ED-209 chasing Robocop down the stairs scene, only without Ed (he was added in post)."48 When Robocop then returns to the underground car park, Hellman was responsible for "some of the scene where the troops shoot at Robo, mostly pans across shadowy figures firing."49

7. When Robocop returns to the OCP building at the end, Hellman directed "Robo arriving outside the building and shooting Ed (again without Ed). My memory is dim on this scene (I don't remember the small cannon he uses) so maybe I didn't do that part of the scene."50 Hellman also directed the climactic shots of Dick Jones being riddled with bullets and falling through a glass window: "I don't believe I did the shot from the inside of the man going through the glass. I definitely did the one from the outside."51 Visually, this material is almost identical to the death of Hans Leber in Shatter (as Hellman observes during Shatter's DVD commentary).

It was around this time that Hellman came close to making Cold Sassy Tree, from the novel (set in a turn-of-the-century Southern town) by Olive Ann Burns: "Cold Sassy Tree was turned down by Barbet Schroeder, who suggested me to Faye Dunaway. She and I were old friends, and I spent some time developing it and working on a budget. The television production company didn't like the fact I wanted to shoot it like a low-budget movie, with more bang for the buck, rather than the traditional way that TV movies are shot."52 The film was eventually made by Joan Tewkesbury in 1989.

"Another project I was involved with during this period was Secret Warriors, originally titled Tag, based on the novel The Miernik Dossier by Charles McCarry. The first screenplay was by Jerry Harvey, and was going to be produced in 1979 by Klaus and Juergen Hellwig for Janus Films. Klaus and Juergen were involved over a fairly long period, and I had various deals at different times, culminating with a deal with Limbo Films, Switzerland, in 1988, and Cannon Films in 1989. At one time Donald Sutherland was attached to play Miernik, later Daniel Day Lewis. The script was ultimately revised by Steve Gaydos. I went to Seattle in 1987 to meet Daniel, and later went to London to meet Chris Reeve for another role, and to Paris to meet with Daniel again, and with Juliette Binoche. The title Secret Warriors was suggested by Sergio Leone when I visited him in his home outside Rome while he was editing Once Upon a Time in America. I went to Paris, I believe around Christmas, 1986, to sign contracts on a deal with a guy who was arranging financing through a German bank. I was supposed to meet him at one of the five-star hotels on the right bank near the Etoile. I was there with my lawyer, and we waited three days. I discovered during those three days that there were a number of other producers waiting for the same purpose. The guy finally showed up, only by then I had done some research and discovered he was a wanted Nazi war criminal, now living in Bolivia. He left the hotel at 4 am the morning after our meeting, Interpol hot on his trail. We never signed the agreement (it turned out to be some kind of scam). I asked one of the other producers, whom I knew, how he felt about taking money from a Nazi war criminal. He said, 'What better way to screw them!' "53 According to Steven Gaydos, "Secret Warriors is the greatest movie never made. Monte found this book, loved it, and has such a brilliant vision for this film. The script never quite came together, but that's only a function of money and time. It's a simple story, powerful, perfect. The source material is absolutely unbreakable. It's a crime that he hasn't made this or In a Dream of Passion. They would add two masterpieces to his oeuvre."54

Hellman recalls, "There was one more project during these years, and it too covered almost the whole period: The Typhoon Shipments. It was based on a newspaper article about the smuggling of heroin inside the bodies of U.S. casualties being flown home from Vietnam. The original script was by Phillip Dearborn and Tony Fingleton. Final script by Steve Gaydos and David Zehr (written just after Iguana), with a couple of scenes by me. I finally set it up with Viking Pictures, cast it with Harry Dean Stanton in the lead (a narcotics agent) and Michael Madsen in a role in the Washington, D.C., section, went location scouting with my production designer Phillip Thomas, in Washington, D.C., and Manilla, P.I. We had a casting director (Andrea Stone, who also cast Iguana), and had cast a number of the other roles. The picture was announced at Cannes, then the production was cancelled because the production manager thought it was too risky to shoot in the Philippines during the typhoon season, even though I told them it was the best time to shoot. I went to Spain instead, to make Iguana. The pictures of me on the set of Iguana show me wearing the Viking Pictures t-shirt."55

Chapter 15

Iguana (1988)

Estragon: We're not from these parts, sir.

Pozzo: You are human beings none the less. As far as one can see. Of the same species as myself. (He bursts into an enormous laugh.) Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God's image!"

— Waiting for Godot

The absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered in this essay as a starting point. The fundamental subject of The Myth of Sisyphus is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning: therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

To be born is to be wrecked on an island.

— James M. Barrie

Iguana has its roots in the real-life figure Patrick Watkins, sometimes known as Oberlus, an Irishman who, in 1807, took up residence on Hood Island in the Galapagos, where he remained for two years, kidnapping sailors at gunpoint and forcing them to become his slaves. Watkins' activities were mentioned by several voyagers, and eventually caught the attention of Herman Melville, who described the hermit Oberlus in sketch nine of The Encantadas.1 It was Melville's story that inspired Alberto Vasquez-Figueroa's novel La Iguana, in which Oberlus is given a facial deformity that makes him resemble an iguana. According to Steven Gaydos, "Vasquez-Figueroa was a kind of Cousteau-like authority on marine life, and he wrote sex novels. Iguana is a combination of the both."2 Vasquez-Figueroa's major change to Melville's narrative was the addition of Carmen, a Spanish woman whom Oberlus imprisons, rapes, and forces to bear his child. Vasquez-Figueroa suggested making a film of the book to Italian producer Franco Di Nunzio,3 and the project was offered to Ate de Jong. As Hellman recalls, "I was told about the project by a friend of mine, Ate de Jong, who had been asked by a friend of his if he were interested. He wasn't, but he recommended me, and I was given the phone number of Franco Di Nunzio, who was in New York. I called and left my number, and he called back and told me he had selected me based on the fact that my phone number had two threes in it. He was a numerologist and he was superstitious and he thought I must be the ideal director because of my phone number. So I went to New York, met with Franco, and read an early script he had that was pretty awful. It consisted of Carmen's letters to her mother, and there would be like four pages of monologue. It bore no resemblance to any script I'd ever seen before. So I came back to Los Angeles and I just felt I couldn't do this picture, and another friend of mine, Leonard Mann (now reverted to his real name, Manzella), who had worked in Italy for a long time, told me he would never speak to me again if I didn't do the picture. When I met with Franco Di Nunzio in a Beverly Hills hotel room, Leonard, who was functioning as our interpreter, purposefully mistranslated the conversation, during which I tried to turn down the job. Whenever I would say I couldn't do it, he would translate it as 'Well, there are some problems, but if we did this or that, perhaps we could work them out.' He was so determined that I take the job, and I was ultimately so grateful, I gave him a special thanks on the end credits. Since I had been instrumental, with the help of some friends (notably Ivan Passer), in raising the bulk of the production money through a video presale, I had a little bit of weight that I could throw around, and I insisted on getting a new script, writers that I chose. And we wound up with a script that I really liked a lot."4

Sadly, Vasquez-Figueroa's novel has never been published in English — Steven Gaydos recalls that the translation he read existed only in manuscript form: "Monte hired David M. Zehr and myself to work with him, and, crazy as it sounds, we all fell in love with the book. I think we saw a great "Beauty and the Beast" myth in it, and so we started doing copious research on the period. And then Monte carved up the project: David wrote a lot of scenes between Carmen and her lovers while I tackled a lot of action-oriented scenes and Monte came in and rewrote everything. The three of us had a really interesting experience."5 Hellman remembers the final screenplay being assembled in the same manner as Dark Passion's: "The idea was that David and Steve would each write a full screenplay on their own, and I would basically edit the two scripts into one. In the script, we had scenes of Oberlus as a child, being abused and so forth, and they were never shot, partly because we came to the conclusion that they weren't necessary and partly because we didn't have the time to shoot them."6

One major change concerned the film's ending, which involves Oberlus committing suicide by walking into the sea holding his newborn son: "The novel ends with Oberlus not walking out into the ocean but dashing the baby on the rocks and then they all go sailing off in the little boat, with many more adventures. Carmen lives to a ripe old age. I forget how Oberlus dies, but he doesn't walk into the ocean. I don't remember how we came up with this ending. I'm sure it came out of discussion between David and Steve and myself, and I don't know who came up with this idea, but I think it's very poetic and it's much better than in the book. I think this is one case when I can honestly say I feel we improved on the book."7

Everett McGill, a fine character actor perhaps most familiar from his work with David Lynch, was cast as Oberlus: "He was my first choice for the role. However, at one point it seemed he wouldn't be available, and I offered the role to Alan Rickman. From that point on, I couldn't seem to get Alan out of my mind."8 Other cast members included Fabio Testi as Gamboa, Maru Valdivielso as Carmen, Michael Madsen as Sebastian, Tim Ryan (son of Robert Ryan) as George and Joseph Culp (son of Robert Culp) as Dominique ("He was brought to me by our casting director, and he was a great find.'"9)

Much of the film was shot on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands: "Lanzarote is an amazing place, because it's a volcanic island that has been inactive for a couple of hundred years, but it has a history of the volcano erupting every hundred years or so, and it's just completely covered in this black rock and black ash and it's like being on the surface of the moon. The original story, even the book Iguana, is set on the Galapagos, which is the setting of the historical character in the Melville story, but Figueroa himself has a home on Lanzarote and he sugested Lanzarote as a location. We tried to find a cave in Lanzarote. They had some wonderful caves, gigantic caves that would have been a nightmare to light, but they were tourist attractions and we would have had to lay thousands of feet of cable and then remove it all every morning for the tourists. We decided to shoot those cave scenes in Rome in a natural cave fairly close to Cinecitta Studios. And so all the cave scenes are in Rome and the bedroom scene was at a villa that was south of Rome. Most of the other exteriors and interiors are on Lanzarote."10

Unfortunately, Franco Di Nunzio's penny-pinching approach stretched the film's schedule from six weeks to nine weeks: "It was the single worst experience I've ever had making a film. It was horrible, because we had a producer who was unable to part with a single dollar. One day we needed a rowboat on the set at 8 o'clock in the morning. He found somebody to supply the boat, and he was supposed to pay them the night before so that they would be there at 8. Instead, he said, 'I'll meet you tomorrow morning and I'll give you the money then.' And by then they had gone off fishing somewhere. For the scene involving a feast on the beach, he had gone to the local grocery store and brought on the set one bunch of bananas, three oranges and a pineapple. I said, 'I'm sorry, I can't shoot the scene,' and actually went on strike. I left the set and went back to the hotel and refused to work. We would eat lunch in a restaurant that could only seat half the crew, so we would have to eat in two shifts and lunch would take two hours instead of an hour, and then they would argue for 15 minutes about who had an ice cream because they had to pay for it themselves. There was just no sense that time was money and how valuable time was. We didn't have lights for three weeks. They were being sent from Europe and they just never arrived on time because, I guess, they hadn't been ordered on time. So we had no lighting for any of the scenes for the first three weeks of shooting. It was a little bit like making a production of Our Town which takes place on a bare stage and two ladders represent the two houses. We had so little that it became the style of the film. It became a movie about minimalization."11

During the editing, Hellman decided that Iguana should be dedicated to Warren Oates (identified simply as "Warren"). As is common with European co-productions, some of the credits were determined by quota demands; Franco Campanino is credited with both composing and arranging the music, but "did not write one note of the music in this film. He was just one of those contractual obligations."12 The actual score consists of traditional pieces performed by Joni Mitchell ("Wayfaring Stranger," heard over the beginning and end credits)13, and actors Amaya Merino ("Oh, Love"14) and Joseph Culp ("Women's Delight").

Hellman's cut of Iguana ran 100 minutes and was screened at the Venice festival. Franco Di Nunzio insisted on removing 8 minutes from the European version (shown at Cannes): "The producer became obsessed with the idea that the movie should be no longer than 90 minutes. He didn't speak English, and never understood a word of the film. He made cuts that destroyed the rhythm and logic of the film, and made it incomprehensible, as well as seemingly longer. I'm reminded of the American 2-hour version of Seven Samurai, which is unbearably long, compared to the 31/2 hour version, which is over before you know it. Not that I'm comparing myself to Kurosawa."15 In the end, neither version had any real distribution: "It didn't get released because this crazy producer had made a $10,000 shocker (Cannibal Holocaust) that he sold to Japan for $50,000, and the picture wound up doing $27 million. And so he felt he'd been really screwed and demanded such exorbitant sums for Iguana that he never sold it. We had many offers of sales throughout the world that were refused by the producer. Every offer was too small."16 Although one of the principal sources of finance had been Media Home Entertainment,17 Iguana was eventually sub-licensed to Imperial, which released Hellman's original cut on video in the U.S., but distributed it so sparsely that Steven Gaydos claims fewer than ten cassettes were in circulation. According to Gaydos, "I always believed in the film, which was hard, given that everybody, including every friend and associate, thought it was a complete disaster. There were notable exceptions: Bill Krohn of Cahiers Du Cinema and Richard Jameson of Film Comment. And the folks at Venice who took the film, then whoever gave us the RAI "Best of Fest" award. And strangely, powerfully, Joni Mitchell. I sat with her when I screened the movie for her and her husband to see if she'd do the music. When the film was over she turned to me and said, 'It's a poem. I'd love to do the music.' God bless them. Then Quentin Tarantino, on the set of Reservoir Dogs, said the magic words to me: 'Are you done with the interview? Okay. Now I have a question for you. Are you the guy who wrote Iguana? Wow. That movie should have made Monte a household name.' Then he proceeded to recite the dialogue, line by line, from the beheading scene. Everyone else challenged me for defending it."18 Hellman also feels justifiably proud: "Iguana is a very special film. It's a very hard film, a very difficult film for the audience. It's a film that disturbs people tremendously."19

In 2001, Iguana finally found a wider audience when it was released on DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment in a transfer supervised by Hellman himself. Unfortunately, an oddity in the way the reels had been labeled for storage resulted in a crucial 2-minute sequence (present in the old Imperial release, and even the producer's version) being eliminated.20 After attempting to finance a remastered edition of the disc himself, Hellman eventually convinced Anchor Bay to pay for the restoration, which is in progress at the time of writing.

Iguana finds Hellman refining what had already become one of the most distinguished styles in world cinema to an extraordinary degree of perfection. It is a film as beautiful as Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, and marked by the same atmosphere of defeat, a sense that fragile yet sublime poetry has been wrought from sparse technical resources and is being meekly offered to a world that will inevitably reject it. Everything not essential has been eliminated, and the result is often astonishingly elliptical (for example — as with the plane journey in Flight to Fury—we never find out where Carmen was going or why she was going there when she arrives on Hood Island). Yet this extreme compression enables Hellman to develop a complex narrative spanning a period of several years in a leisurely manner, with much nuanced observation and many long takes. Even so important a gesture as Dominique's abandonment of his crucifix is portrayed in long shot, rather than emphasized by significant close-ups. Such respect for the audience's intelligence places Hellman well outside the norms of contemporary American cinema. One need look no further to understand why he has become a marginalized figure.

Although Iguana is a work in which one can detect traces of Beckett and Herzog, it's thematic richness is surely attributable to the manner in which it combines these European figures with such specifically American artists as Joseph Conrad,21 Mark Twain and Tod Browning. If Oberlus, in his savage yet all too recognizably human acts of cruelty, resembles the characters Lon Chaney played for Browning (in a series of films with which Hellman is not familiar), he also takes to its logical conclusion the Romantic view of civilization as something to be escaped from, but in whose name the adventurer sets forth to conquer an untamed wilderness. Manhood can only be affirmed in flight from precisely that community which defines it as desirable, and Oberlus' activities and ambitions are virtually indistinguishable from those of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Consider Tom's account of the life of a "robber": "You don't kill the women. You shut up the women, but you don't kill them. They're always beautiful and rich, and awfully scared... Well, the women get to loving you, and after they've been in the cave for a week or two weeks they stop crying, and after that you couldn't get them to leave. If you drove them out, they'd turn right around and come back. It's so in all the books."22

In a remarkably prescient analysis of Hellman's output prior to Two-Lane Blacktop, Claire Johnston observed that "Unlike Lang, whose heroes are marked out by a sense of violence and ruthlessness, Hellman's are betrayed into captivity almost with their own co-operation; the structures of society have become internalized and have become the structures of their own consciousness."23 If Two-Lane Blacktop's protagonists unconsciously recreated the mores of a society from which they were in flight and whose values they believed themselves to be rejecting, Iguana's Oberlus does precisely the same thing, but as a consciously articulated project. Abused because of his deformity, Oberlus withdraws from the world, declares war on it, and recreates its power structures with himself as tyrannical king and oppressor rather than subject and victim. Far from rejecting his tormentors' brutal masculinity, Oberlus sets out to reproduce it (one of the sailor's who humiliates him ironically anticipates subsequent events when he asks "Where are all the women? Come on, we know you've got one stashed away").

Oberlus somewhat resembles Beast from Haunted Cave's Alex, in that his sense of self is intricately connected with his ability to dominate others. But his real prototype is Back Door to Hell's Paco, who also uses a philosophical viewpoint to justify sadistic acts.24 In both cases, the capacity for cruelty is traced to past injuries suffered by the characters, while being linked with wide-ranging cultural knowledge: Paco's bookshelves contain works by Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Thomas Aquinas; Oberlus reads The Odyssey and Don Quixote and tells Gamboa he likes "all books, except The Bible." This comment is especially interesting in light of Hellman's attitude towards religion, which he presents as a purely repressive force whose emblems lack any spiritual dimension (in Back Door to Hell, for example, the church is simply a neutral background for a scene of combat) and must be rejected. Oberlus' faith in voodoo is quickly shattered, while Dominique throws aside his crucifix after being forced to execute George. Hellman does not explore the ramifications of God's silence, but rather accepts this silence as a given, depicting the world as an absurd place in which actions have no meaning. Yet Hellman is far from cynical; like Camus, he considers the absurd not as a conclusion but as a starting point, since "even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism."25 Hellman's social vision is highly developed (though, as in the films of Edgar Ulmer, it is often expressed in negative terms). His characters—whether Gil in Beast from Haunted Cave, the driver in Two-Lane Blacktop, or Matthew Sebenek in China 9, Liberty 37 — attempt to hide behind secure emotional (and often physical) walls, but find themselves drawn back into the world by another individual.

Whereas Bresson repeatedly expressed his belief in transcendence, the concept has no meaning for Hellman, who regards humanity as something to be celebrated rather than transcended. His protagonists make the mistake of assuming social interaction can only exist in the corrupt form that has constituted their experience of it; once their innate need for human contact has been reawakened, they automatically define it in the only terms available — those of power structures and gender-based inequality. In Two-Lane Blacktop, the girl suggested a way out of this labyrinth, a way of redefining sexual relationships. Iguana's Carmen, despite occupying a structurally similar position, serves a quite different function. As the intercutting between Carmen in Spain and Oberlus on Hood Island makes clear, beauty is as much a "monster" as the beast. Consider especially the series of shots showing a) Sebastian telling Oberlus he is a "monster," b) Oberlus looking at his own reflection in a stream, and c) Carmen sitting in front of a mirror insisting "I'm not a monster."

The cutting between Carmen and Oberlus prior to their initial encounter (with which one might compare the cutting between Coley and the other characters once they become separated in The Shooting) is one of Hellman's most striking touches. As Kent Jones has pointed out, it owes a great deal to the films of Jacques Rivette (among Hellman's favorite directors), and can perhaps be traced directly to the treatment of Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto in the early sections of Out I (1971). Yet in order to appreciate the audacity of what Hellman is doing, we should note that this kind of intercutting — whereby we follow the separate lives of two individuals who initially have no obvious connection — is actually a standard feature of the traditional romance (Borzage's Desire and Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces, for example). Iguana's use of this convention is subtly disturbing, since the generic label we need to relate Oberlus' narrative with Carmen's is lacking. Their romantic involvement seems literally unthinkable, yet romance (of a peculiar kind) is precisely what develops.26 Hellman is here making use of generic language in order to subvert both romantic ideals and the ideological assumptions to which they refer. The cutting between Carmen and Oberlus during the film's first part is highly disorientating because we are given not the slightest hint as to how their lives are related. Indeed, Hellman completely overturns one of classical narrative's fundamental principles: that symbolic and thematic concerns will be strictly subordinated to narrative ones. In Iguana, the thematic and symbolic relationship between Carmen and Oberlus is made blatantly clear long before their narrative connection emerges.27

Hellman's invocation of the romantic subserves a critique of melodramatic form. In melodrama, the world is divided into good and evil, whereas in tragedy the protagonist is divided. Iguana expresses a tragic vision which nevertheless contains strong traces of the melodramatic. Oberlus and Carmen function as variations on a single imaginative problem: if Oberlus sets out to recreate the values of a world he detests, Carmen finds satisfaction in a relationship which embodies, in a particularly brutal form, that submission of the female to the male which society sees as desirable, but which she, as a liberated woman, believes herself to have rejected. Although many viewers have been angered by the scene in which Carmen experiences an orgasm while being raped by Oberlus, Hellman's purpose is not to present Carmen's willing submission as admirable, but rather to foreground those internalized power structures to which her behavior refers, and of which we are all victims.

In such a world, the heroic ideal can only be evoked negatively, as a form of farce. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, it is embodied by Fortinbras, who assumes the hero's role but actually arrives just in time to have the corpses carried out.28 Hellman is well aware of this convention, to which he first referred in Beast from Haunted Cave, wherein the ostensible "hero," Gil, strikes a dramatic pose while Marty destroys the beast with a flare gun. The equivalent moment in Iguana is the rescue mission conducted by an officer from the Galatea (who returns to the island on a ship significantly called The Adventurer), which has absolutely no bearing on the eventual outcome (Oberlus' suicide is provoked less by the officer's arrival than by the birth of Carmen's baby, which would have happened anyway).

This critique of "the hero" is essentially feminist in nature, the feminist subtext that had increasingly structured Hellman's oeuvre here achieving a new prominence. In terms of their declared interests, both Hellman and Oberlus progress from metaphysics to sexual politics; Oberlus' belief in voodoo gives way to a Nietzchean philosophy before finally being replaced by an awareness of gender. The turning point occurs when Oberlus and Carmen discuss the differences between men and women:

Oberlus: What gold is there for a woman?

Carmen: We are not so different.

Oberlus: Women and men, or you and I?

Carmen: I meant women and men.

Oberlus: And you and I? We're both monsters.

As an independent woman in a patriarchal society, she insists on her right to assert an active sexuality, but the structures (psychological, ideological, legal) of patriarchy ensure that this sexuality can only emerge in a corrupt form. The scene in which Carmen playfully threatens her lover Alberto with a knife while telling him, "You are in my power. I can make you do anything I order. Be my slave," anticipates her relationship with Oberlus. Yet, in a world composed of interlocking patterns of oppression, the slave/master relationship is regarded as normal rather than perverse. The point is made explicit during Carmen's conversation with the priest:

Priest: It is a woman's duty to submit to her husband, and to have children within the sanctity of marriage. It is part of God's holy plan.

Carmen: What if I do not wish to submit?

Priest: My child, we must all learn to accept the discipline of submission. The alternative is the anarchy of personal desire, the illusion that each of us is free to do anything we wish. And that is the work of the devil.

In the priest's terms, Carmen is a monster because, refusing to accept this discipline, she insists on engaging in a series of purely sexual relationships. But Hellman's point is that Carmen is a monster because, like the driver and the mechanic of Two-Lane Blacktop, she has unconsciously internalized the standards of a society she believes herself to be rejecting (something Oberlus does consciously). When Oberlus lets her believe she is holding a loaded gun on him, Carmen admits, "You suddenly remind me of all the weak, pathetic men I've ever known. They had me, I belonged to them, but they still lived in fear that I would leave them at any moment." Carmen's "monstrosity" consists in her thorough embodiment of a norm, rather than her deviation from it: "She acts like a libertine, which makes her as much a monster in the eyes of society as Oberlus, but her pretense at being a libertine is really a denial of her sexuality."29 Carmen tells her husband, "I am your wife. But I can't be your slave. I need to be free," and later claims she continued to love him despite their lengthy separation (which inspires Alberto to describe her as "a strange woman"). Although Carmen has grasped the fact that love can only exist outside those patterns of domination and possession (neatly summed up by Alberto's "If I cut your throat, you'll never be able to go away with anyone") associated with marriage, her intellectual refusal of male domination cannot move beyond a certain point because she has been raised in a society which associates female sexuality with submission. Like Oberlus, she rejects this society's power structures while attempting to recreate them with herself in the predatory role, but can only achieve orgasm while being raped by a man who fulfills patriarchy's ideal (albeit in a nightmarish form). As Oberlus' first words to Carmen—"If you keep our home clean and open your legs when I order you to, I guarantee you a life of peace for as long as you please me"—make exceptionally clear, what he offers is a parody of bourgeois marriage, his insistence that "You don't belong to yourself. You belong to me" providing a precise realization of the "discipline of submission" referred to by the priest.

After arriving on Hood Island, Carmen makes love (for the first time) with her fiance, Diego, but the expression on her face is one of boredom. It is at this point that Oberlus attacks (and soon kills) Diego, appearing as if in response to desires Carmen could not consciously acknowledge. Oberlus insists that "You like being my slave and getting screwed in the ass. If you ever escape from here, you'll have a hard time finding someone else like me," and the nature of those needs Oberlus satisfies in Carmen are suggested by the fact that both he and her father have scarred faces. The Kris Kristofferson song Hellman used on the soundtrack of Two-Lane Blacktop maintained that "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," but Iguana suggests a much darker variation in which "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to choose." As Oberlus points out to Carmen, "You are free to do whatever you like. So now, how would you like to suck me until I come all over your precious dress?"

At the heart of what we might call the "normal perversion" subjected to such stringent analysis by Hellman is the division of men and women into rigidly defined and mutually exclusive groups which enable males to assume positions of psychological and legal superiority simply because they possess, in the words of the song "Women's Delight," sung in the film by Joseph Culp, "a thing that I have not, a little above the knee." The irony of Iguana's final section is that it is Oberlus rather than Carmen who develops a feminist awareness—specifically an awareness of the fact that his suffering (as well as all the suffering he has caused) can be traced to societally imposed gender roles. When the baby is born, Oberlus looks at it with affection, but when Carmen asks, "Is it a boy or a girl?" (a question that is never answered), his expression changes. It is in that moment — the silent equivalent of Laurie Bird's "No good" in Two-Lane Blacktop—that Oberlus, seeing the vicious circle about to begin all over again, decides to kill the child and commit suicide.30 Yet, despite the unrelieved harshness of this conclusion, one can hardly accuse Hellman of pessimism. Robin Wood's account of Fritz Lang's American films is relevant here: "Already in his late German films, Fate for Lang is becoming more a matter of social mechanism than of metaphysical principle: the individual is still trapped and ultimately helpless, but the entrapment can be subjected to analysis and explained. If the protagonist is trapped, the spectator is set free."31 Although Oberlus' newfound awareness leads only to his death, Iguana's climax leaves one with a curious combination of emotions; simultaneously oppressive and liberating, it depicts a situation of total devastation (as in King Lear, nothing survives to be rescued from the wreckage) while implying that the vicious circle can be broken. It is one of the cinema's great tragic endings.

Chapter 16

Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (1989)

Pozzo: The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.

Vladimir: Well just fancy that! I could have sworn it was just the opposite.

— Waiting for Godot

According to Hellman, "I finished Iguana in early March 1988. Went to the Cannes Festival in May. Possibly another festival before it in April. Then another trip in June, the Midnight Sun Festival. Traveling again the first three weeks of September, showing Iguana at the Venice Festival. It won a Film Critica award."1 Hellman then visited the Amiens festival in France, where, on November 22, Romauld Karmakar shot (on Super-8) the documentary Hellman Rider. Filmed inside a moving car and a café, Hellman answers random questions about his career and discusses recent projects, including Dark Passion ("a trip from New Jersey to Reno via Miami") and Secret Warriors ("a trip from Geneva to the Sudan"). He says, "I think to stick it out in America now as a filmmaker, you've got to be a little bit crazy and have tremendous patience. I'm never without a project."

Predictably, Hellman's next film was not any of those outlined at Amiens, but rather a second sequel (produced by Live Entertainment) to Charles E. Sellier, Jr.'s Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), a notorious slasher film featuring a serial killer dressed as Santa Clause^2: "This is really a movie I did not want to make, I agreed to do it, reluctantly, because Arthur H. Gorson, one of my closest friends, had been trying to become a producer for a long time, and this was his first shot and he begged me to do it. Again, it was a situation where I started with a script that was so bad I regretted having agreed, and I said, 'Listen, I can't go on with this unless we throw this script away.' This was late February, about a week before we were supposed to start preproduction. And within that week Arthur and myself came up with a new story, and Rex Weiner did the first draft of a new script. Steven Gaydos and my daughter Melissa (who also played a small role as Dr. Newbury's assistant) then did a dialogue polish; Steve spent several days writing the scenes between Robert Culp and Richard Beymer, and Melissa wrote the dialog when Laura and Jerri meet for the first time. I pasted it all together in a day, and wrote the joke Laura tells her brother about how a mentally deficient person gets his belt off. I think I may also have done some polishing here and there, possibly in the Santa scene in Ricky's hospital room. It's hard to remember, since it really was a group effort, more like a bunch of comedy writers sitting around writing the Sid Caesar TV show than a normal movie writing experience. It was also done very quickly, taking no more than two weeks for the whole process. The screenplay was credited to "Carlos Laszlo" (the name of Rex Weiner's new baby, which can be seen in the hospital lobby, along with its parents), as a pseudonym for Rex, Arthur, Steve, Melissa and myself.3 We started prepping the first week in March, even before we had a script — we knew we needed Granny's house. I cast another girl in the role of Laura, had bad dreams about my choice, and changed my mind the next day. I brought back Samantha Scully, whom I had initially rejected because of her facial tics, and worked with her on relaxation. We reduced the tics to the point where I felt they actually worked for the character, and I cast her. She did research at the local school for the blind, and found some of her own props (the watch). We shot the movie in four weeks in April. I was happy and had a great time working on it. Robert Culp was a lot of fun. It took about one day for us to get used to each other. The first night of shooting was very nerve-wracking. I had a hard time and had to shoot about ten takes before I got what I wanted. After that we both relaxed and had a good time making the picture. I did the picture edit, though the editing credit was given to associate producer Ed Rothkowitz. Ed was the owner (meaning he had the hardware) of an editing system called Touchvision, which was an early version of a non-linear system using numerous VHS tape decks. Ed loaded the dailies onto the system, and I edited the film in 10 days, telling Ed where to make the cuts. It was my only film where I didn't edit on film. I then went to the Cannes Festival to relax, came back to supervise the sound, music, and final mix. We had an answer print before the Fourth of July, just in time to hand-carry it to the Barcelona Festival."4

In Silent Night, Deadly Night, a traumatized man called Billy commits a series of murders while dressed as Santa Claus. In Silent Night, Deadly Night Part II, Billy's younger brother Ricky Caldwell (played by Eric Freeman) also becomes a serial killer, and is finally shot down by the police. In Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!, Laura Anderson (Samantha Scully), a young blind woman with psychic abilities, is being encouraged by Dr. Newbury (Richard Beymer) to make a mental link with the comatose Ricky (Bill Moseley). When Laura, along with her brother Chris (Eric Da Re, who, like Beymer, would soon become a regular on David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks) and his girlfriend Jerri (Laura Herring), leaves to spend Christmas at her grandmother's house, Ricky follows, killing several people (including the grandmother) along the way. He is pursued by Dr. Newbury and Lieutenant Connelly (Robert Culp, essentially repeating his characterization from Abel Ferrara's 1986 film The Gladiator). When Connelly reveals that he has no intention of allowing Ricky to live, Newbury arranges to arrive at the house first, but is himself killed by Ricky, who also murders Chris and Jerri. Inspired by a vision of her dead grandmother, Laura uses her special powers to trick Ricky into falling onto a stake.

Bill Moseley recalls, "We were out in the orange groves of Valencia, CA, doing a night shoot. As an actor, my biggest fear to that point in my career was that someday I'd be called upon to cry in a scene. I knew that I was incapable of doing that — I'd been raised by a marine, and I'd been taught that tears are for sissies. So there I sat as Granny served me soup, and Monte and the crew recorded the scene. I made an actor's choice to eat the soup with my opposite hand just to make Ricky appear more clumsy and zombie-like. Granny hovered over me as the camera rolled, and I awkwardly brought broth to lips. Her presence was so loving, and the soup was so good, that something wonderful happened: tears, real tears, welled up in my eyes, broke over my lower lids, and started trickling down my cheeks. In that moment, I had an out-of-body experience, looking down at myself in brain cap and monster makeup, and there I was having a profound emotional surrender that led me to the crying place I knew I'd never find. As the scene ended, Monte, in a reverent, hushed tone, whispered, "And ... cut." The crew broke into a spontaneous and muted applause—they'd all felt it, too! On that night, I became a real actor."5

Screen International's "Mifed" special issue for 1989 includes a full-page advert for Silent Night, Deadly Night III— except that the title is given as Blind Terror, with nothing to indicate it is a sequel to the first two Silent Night, Deadly Nights. The distributor presumably hoped to sell Hellman's film as an "auteur" rather than a "genre" work, though this attempt was clearly a failure, since it was never released theatrically: "It was also called Blind Terror when it was shown at the Brussels Festival of Film Fantastique, and at the Bergamo Festival, but the title on the print was never changed. I was very disappointed when it became apparent that Live had no intention of releasing it theatrically—they were only interested in video and TV."6

Nevertheless, Hellman remains proud of the film,7 and has even described it as "My favorite of all my movies. I love it because it's the most professional. It's kind of a satire and kind of a pastiche. It's an homage to a lot of movies I love, like Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. I think it's the lightest of all my movies. I'll put it this way: I like my work in it the best, whether or not it's the best of all my movies."8 When I asked Hellman to explain why he considered this his finest film, he replied, "I do think it's my best work as a director, but I wouldn't say 'finest film.' I might have said 'best film,' if there's any difference a word makes. I like the fact it does what it's supposed to do—make the audience jump out of their seats. It doesn't try to do it as often as most films of the genre, but as a result, I think it succeeds better with the ones it does try. Also, I think the humor succeeds, sometimes in unexpected places. I always like the laugh Ricky gets, hitchhiking in his hospital gown. The homage to Touch of Evil is in the scene where Beymer plays back dialogue for Ricky on a small tape recorder as he approaches him. Not an exact match for the finale of Touch of Evil, but it reminded me of the Welles movie."9

Steve Voce has suggested that the film also includes a tribute to Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962).10 However, although the sequence in which Laura's psychiatrist turns out to be Ricky does bear a marked resemblance to a scene in Carnival of Souls, Hellman claims never to have seen that film (as does Steven Gaydos, who wrote the scene). Nevertheless, Silent Night is full of conscious in-jokes, such as the clips from Roger Corman's The Terror seen playing on various television sets. One memorable sequence has Ricky decapitating a gas station attendant and placing the man's head in front of a TV so that it can watch The Terror, while another has the blind protagonist "watching" a (Hellman-directed) scene in which Jonathan Haze is blinded.11 But perhaps the most telling joke is one that appears during a conversation between Lieutenant Connelly and Dr. Newbury:

Connelly: Do you know what they call it when you get déjà vu twice?

Newbury: A reoccurring extrasensory phenomenon.

Connelly: No. Stupid!

As Bill Krohn has pointed out, this dialogue (written by Steven Gaydos) neatly sums up Hellman's attitude towards making the second sequel to one of the most reviled examples of the generally despised slasher genre.12 In a similar vein, Connelly's function as "the hero" is neatly undercut by the fact that, like Gil in Beast from Haunted Cave, he doesn't actually do anything. After spending much of the film speeding to the rescue, he arrives just after Laura kills Ricky.13 But this satirical deconstruction of generic conventions is undertaken with a decidedly serious purpose, namely to reinforce the feminist subtext. If the feminist aspects of Hellman's oeuvre tend to become clearer with each succeeding film, it is appropriate that his final work to date should present us with an independent, assertive female protagonist, one who is quite capable of killing her monstrous male adversary without any assistance from the rugged men who insist on defining her as a helpless blind girl.

The tendency to see Better Watch Out! as either a humiliating failure or a send-up of slasher films obscures the nature of Hellman's achievement. It was made at a time when virtually all horror films (with a handful of honorable exceptions) were essentially parodies. If Better Watch Out! contains several overtly satirical elements, Hellman scrupulously separates them from those aspects of the narrative which he takes seriously; the grandmother's message to Laura from beyond the grave, for example, could easily be played as camp, but is actually treated with considerable gravity. Indeed, given that Hellman's satire is confined exclusively to scenes focusing on the male characters, we would do well to consider the possibility that this separation is itself of thematic relevance.

If Hellman has nothing but contempt for the earlier Silent Night, Deadly Night films (when asked if he had even bothered to watch them, he complained, "Unfortunately, I had to, since I was asked to use any stock footage I could from the first two"14) and the slasher cycle to which they belong, his film — described as part two in a trilogy on the theme of "Beauty and the Beast"—has a much wider frame of reference: the grandmother (who inhabits an old-fashioned house which, like Beast from Haunted Cave's bar, uses a wagon wheel as part of the decor) evokes Western legends of pioneer life, the monster (Ricky) who turns on its creator (Dr. Newbury) recalls Frankenstein, Laura's destruction of Ricky is filmed in a manner that suggests Murnau's Nosferatu, and the heroine's journey to "Granny's house" is taken directly from "Little Red Riding Hood." When Ricky, like the wolf, arrives at the house before Laura and kills her grandmother, a series of degraded conventions is suddenly imbued with mythic resonance. Like the beast from haunted cave and the chickens in Cockfighter, Ricky suggests several possible interpretations: he is simultaneously a serial killer (what Bill Krohn calls "the prototype for the cinema of sequels"), Frankenstein's monster (his arrival at grandmother's house also evokes the blind hermit scene in Whale's Bride of Frankenstein), a vampire and a fairy tale "boogeyman" (as Chris describes him) who lurks beneath the bed to terrify children (literally so when he pulls Jerri under Granny's bed).

To be capable of sustaining such a wide range of figural possibilities is to be incapable of definitively committing to any single one, and we need only consider the multiple identities adopted by G.T.O. in Two-Lane Blacktop to realize that for Hellman, this is a specifically masculine condition. At the film's heart is that psychic power passed down through the female line of Laura's family — although Laura has inherited this power from her grandmother, there is not the slightest hint that it is in any way shared by her brother (one might see this as an answer to the exclusively male "force" of George Lucas' Star Wars films). The film is structured around different kinds of communication: there are repeated close-ups of clocks and watches, various characters tell jokes, Laura has a mental link with both her grandmother and Ricky, the grandmother knows when her phone is about to ring, the gas station attendant likes to "talk dirty" on the phone, Newbury and Connelly discuss the virtues of cellular phones,15 Newbury plays Ricky a tape of Laura's voice, and so on. Even the use of clips from The Terror is itself a kind of coded communication (with those viewers who know something about Monte Hellman). But there is a crucial difference between the crude, trivial and essentially pointless communication associated with the men, and the subtler yet far more powerful variety which connects the women. For Bill Krohn, Newbury's conflict with Connelly suggests a debate between two different attitudes towards Hollywood's sequel-mania: "Newbury, who thinks he was right to awaken Ricky from his coma, wants the sequel to be made, while Connelly, who would prefer that he hadn't, does not" (one might also relate Newbury's relationship with Connelly to that between artist and critic, or Hellman's own conflicting attitudes towards the film he is making). Yet, although Newbury eventually comes around to Connelly's way of thinking (he admits he should have let Ricky sleep, while his final words are "don't be stupid"), their debate is ultimately sterile and unresolvable, and in this it resembles those films which subject the horror genre's language to ridicule, thus neutralizing it's radical potential.

Better Watch Out! is the point Hellman's cinema had been inexorably moving towards. The earlier works' feminist elements here solidify around an active heroine, while the masculine viewpoint is unambiguously rejected. Newbury's speech (written by Steven Gaydos) about how "There are no innocent people. We're all guilty. Guilty of being stupid, irrational, human and badly designed" may superficially express a philosophy highly relevant to, say, The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop and Iguana, but here it is neatly placed by Hellman's belief in a feminist politics which counterbalances (and perhaps renders irrelevant) his previous work's metaphysics (just as Newbury's insistence that "only science can restore our innocence" is contradicted by Laura's supernatural skills).

Ricky's main function — his key figural role — is, then, as a representative of masculinity; this deranged killer is connected in some way with every male character, from the self-satisfied psychiatrist whom he "replaces" to the seemingly gentle Chris (who at one point hides behind a fence in order to scare his girlfriend).16 Even Newbury reveals a barely explicable hostility towards Laura. Practically the first thing we see him doing is shining a light in her eyes (which clearly causes her discomfort), while his interest in her psychic abilities is rooted in a desire to control and dominate this terrifying source of female strength. Consider the following speech (written by Steven Gaydos and delivered by Richard Beymer in an almost Brechtian manner), with its clear overtones of male sexual domination: "I think that she's playing little girl games. Her body may be young, but her soul is old. Older than we can imagine. She'll be back, and then she'll let me go as deep as I want. She likes it. Loves it. Knowledge. She can't resist it. She wants to penetrate his mind. See what he sees, the way that he sees it."

In this light, the psychiatrist sequence is of special interest. It begins with the psychiatrist facing Laura, then swiveling around in his chair, addressing his remarks to Laura while looking away from her; when he turns to face Laura again, we see Ricky sitting in the chair saying, "Laura, no one is normal." At this point, Laura screams. This scene's startling climax is predicated on our sharing Laura's shock when she "sees" Ricky. Except, of course, that Laura cannot "see" anything; her scream implies that the entire sequence — and perhaps the entire film—functions as a dream (as Newbury informs her, "That's what you're here for: to dream"). When we next see Laura she seems quite calm and does not say anything to her brother about the psychiatrist.

Better Watch Out! actually begins with a dream that neatly sets out the film's thematic concerns: pursued by Ricky, Laura believes she has reached safety when she enters Santa's grotto, but even Santa Claus, that figure of benevolent masculine authority, proves to be a killer in disguise. The film's status as a dream text gives added resonance to Laura's plight. As a blind woman, she has no access to the traditionally male prerogative of asserting one's power through control of the look, and must instead discover a specifically feminine strength based on principles of female community (her link with the grandmother). This leaves the male characters paralyzed and incapable of carrying out any decisive or meaningful action (something that holds true whether their intention is to destroy the heroine or act as her protector). Laura's defeat of Ricky takes place in the basement of her grandmother's house, a setting which transforms the climactic struggle into a confrontation within deeply buried regions of the subconscious.

The suggestion is that Laura's experiences have a therapeutic value. Although generally friendly with the men she encounters, Laura twice expresses hostility towards other women, once when it is justified (the clinic's receptionist), and once when it is not (her brother's girlfriend, Jerri). Both these women are killed by Ricky, who thus seems to be acting out Laura's desires (compare Oberlus' attack on Diego in Iguana). Laura must learn to reject her masculine aggressiveness and redirect it towards a more appropriate (male) target before accessing that benevolent power (which her grandmother claims can "do good for people") she eventually uses to defeat her nemesis.17 Ironically, it is the complacent psychiatrist who articulates this when he tells Laura, "There's a pool of anger inside of you, and you have to let it go." The notion that Laura and Ricky are in some sense "lovers" (after Laura awakes from a dream screaming Ricky's name, Chris asks if Ricky is her "new boyfriend," while she finally lures the killer to his doom with the seductive phrase "I'm over here, Ricky. Come and play") is both disturbing and extremely resonant. If Better Watch Out! is the second part of a trilogy that began with Iguana, then it makes sense to connect Laura's relationship with Ricky to Carmen's relationship with Oberlus; two sets of male/female "monsters" wherein the woman's unacknowledged impulses are represented in their unrepressed form by a hideous man who desires her. Yet whereas Oberlus took his own life, leaving Carmen's situation unresolved, Laura's killing of Ricky enables her to defeat neurotic forces present within herself. The sense of dynamic progression which distinguishes Hellman's oeuvre has never been clearer.

Chapter 17

In Between Projects, 1989-2002

It's too much for one man. On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.

— Vladimir in Waiting for Godot

Although Silent Night, Deadly Night III would be the last film to date on which Hellman stood behind the camera, he was far from idle during the 1990s, his most prominent credit being as an executive producer on Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs: "I became involved early in November 1990. The script had been sent to me by a friend of mine who rented an apartment in a house owned by a friend of Lawrence Bender's. The idea was for me to direct. I met with Lawrence at the home of his friend, and a meeting was set up between me and Quentin. We met at a famous ice cream parlor on Hollywood Boulevard called C.C. Brown's, a few doors from the Chinese Theater. I think Quentin chose the place because it was on the streetcar line more or less direct from Glendale, where he was living. He didn't own a car. On the day we met, Quentin had sold True Romance, and he decided he could afford to hold out to direct Reservoir Dogs himself. He apologized for wasting my time. By the end of our hot fudge sundaes (mine without ice cream), I had agreed to help get the film made. He and Lawrence and I signed an agreement whereby we would be equal partners on the movie, and I would help find the money. I retyped the script onto my computer, correcting spelling and punctuation, and formatting along the way, then sent the script to a number of companies I knew. A couple wanted to do the picture, but had ideas about how it should be made that differed from Quentin's. I delivered it to Richard Gladstein at his home. His first picture as an executive for Live Entertainment had been Better Watch Out! Richard called me within a few hours. He loved the script and asked to meet Quentin. We all met, and made a deal. This was all long before Harvey Keitel had ever heard of the script. Harvey was one of fifteen names that we submitted to Live, any one of which would have been acceptable. I sent the script to Dennis Hopper and a few others. Lawrence got the script to Harvey. I had been going to the Sundance lab for the previous two or three years, and Quentin was invited to the lab. I went along with him and gave him whatever help I could on his trying out his hand at directing for the first time, and a couple of months later we were actually making the movie. Lawrence Bender and I worked with him in getting to do enough preparation so that we were convinced that he would be able to finish the picture on the schedule he had, and so forth. It was a lot of fun. He's really a terrific guy, a great director and great writer, and it was amazing to be there at the beginning."1 With Iguana's Michael Madsen cast in one of the key roles, Reservoir Dogs was shot during the summer of 1991 and released the following year. The film contains a scene in which Tim Roth mentions Baretta, though Hellman insists this was not an in-joke.

In 1991, Hellman appeared in Paul Joyce's documentary Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron, and the following year was interviewed for the BBC series "The Late Show" (which was running an item on road movies) and Tom Thurman's documentary Warren Oates: Across The Border, as well as writing about his admiration for Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive in the 400th issue of Positif.2 He also worked as an editor on four other films during the 1990s. The first of these was a George Hickenlooper film variously known as Grey Knight, The Killing Box and Ghost Brigade (1993): "I was the original editor. My assistant editor, Jim Makiej, worked on fine-tuning a couple of scenes with George while I worked on other scenes. I believe Hickenlooper's cut restores some footage removed by the producers, but I haven't seen it."3 Next up was William Curran's Love, Cheat and Steal (1993): "I believe most of the work I did on this was changed. I think it was the producers, not the director, who wanted the changes. It wasn't a very good film, and I guess the producers thought someone else might be able to make it better — sort of the reverse to my usual situation of coming on to fix someone else's work. With due respect to (credited editor) Carole Kravetz, I don't think she made it better. I took my name off because it wasn't my work, and because I didn't think it would add in any way to my reputation. To be honest, I did most of these editing jobs in the '90s to bring a few bucks in, and I would have preferred not to have my name on them at all. I do like editing, though, and enjoy the process even on bad films."4 Although he asked to remain anonymous, Hellman is credited with "additional editing" on Love, Cheat and Steal. When I told Hellman about this, his response was, "The bastards cheated me!"5

Early in 1993, Hellman did some editing on It's All True, a film about Orson Welles' unfinished Mexican project from 1942. Co-directed by Bill Krohn, this documentary consisted of Welles' surviving footage and interviews with his collaborators. Hellman was one of the first editors hired by Krohn: "While I was editing Love, Cheat and Steal, I was moonlighting as editor on It's All True. I wanted to use the Lightworks system, since I am familiar with PCs, but the French producers insisted I use an Avid, which is based on the Mac. I had an assistant who was familiar with the Avid, but who refused to help me (claiming he had too much work to do), because he was bucking for my job. He got it. I was fired after eight weeks or so, partly because I wanted to go to the Cannes Film Festival to get married, but mostly because they felt I was too slow on the Avid — which I was. I insisted they not put my name on the film, and I believe they complied. I finished editing the Welles material, and had edited some of the documentary scenes. I have not watched the film in its entirety, but believe all of my work was re-done."6 According to Bill Krohn, "None of Monte's work is in It's All True. He left to get married and the new editor preferred to start over from scratch because Monte, thru no fault of his own, had been working with incomplete rushes. That fact emerged just as he was leaving to marry Emma Webster, and since there was a new guy coming in, he made that decision."7

In 1994, Hellman was interviewed outside his house for the BBC's "Omnibus" documentary Quentin Tarantino: Hollywood's Boy Wonder, while in 1995 he appeared on the BBC series Close-Up discussing favorite scenes from A Place in the Sun, The Third Man and Spirit of the Beehive. On January 3, 1995, Hellman gave a lecture at London's National Film Theatre to accompany an incomplete retrospective of his work. The final film he edited was The Westing Game (1997), a family movie produced (for Showtime) by Julie Corman and directed by Terence H. Winkless: "I can't remember ever meeting the director. I was hired by Julie Corman, and pretty much was left alone. I don't think Julie ever came into the cutting room. Jim Makiej was co-editor, and I looked at his scenes, but pretty much left him alone as well. I even went to England for a couple of weeks, leaving Jim to run the ship. I preferred to give the editing credit to Jim, who needed it to pursue his editing career."8 Although Hellman is not credited on the film, he is thanked in the acknowledgments. As Laurie Post recalls, "I line produced The Westing Game, and asked Monte to edit it, which he did, and which I still consider a personal favor to me."9

Also in 1997, George Hickenlooper made a 14-minute documentary (for MSNBC) entitled Monte Hellman: American Auteur, which includes interviews with Hellman, Roger Corman and Harry Dean Stanton. This short can be found on the Two-Lane Blacktop DVD. The DVD releases of his films have done an enormous amount to bring Hellman back into the spotlight, and he has recorded audio commentaries for several of them; the first was for the Shatter laserdisc in 1998, followed by the DVDs of Two-Lane Blacktop (1999), The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, Cockfighter and Iguana (all 2000). "I have a series I'm trying to get Anchor Bay to to put out: 'Monte Hellman's Favorite Movies.' And I have quite a lot of them."10

Hellman's last screen credit was for an acting role as himself in Mika Kaurismaki's L.A. Without a Map (1998). He appears briefly sitting in a restaurant and being greeted by the head waiter (L'Amour Fou's Jean-Pierre Kalfon), who addresses him as "Mr. Hellman": "Since I was playing myself, I came on set wearing the clothes I wear at such restaurants. The wardrobe department gave me a jacket to wear that essentially made me into someone else. In the scene, the star came by my table and spoke briefly to me. I don't recall anything other than an adlib hello. I've not seen the movie. I met Aki (Kaurismaki) and Mika in Finland when I was invited to the Midnight Sun Festival. I've met one or the other occasionally ever since, Mika more frequently than Aki."11

Throughout the 1990s, Hellman was also developing several projects. Aside from continuing work on Secret Warriors and Toy Soldiers, he was involved with the following:

In a Dream of Passion

A revival of this adaptation of Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Maison de Rendez-Vous, to have been produced by Anatole Dauman (who died in 1998). Hellman was working on this from 1991 to 1994: "It seems unlikely that I will ultimately make this film, since this type of 'art' film has become so unfashionable in today's Hollywood, and Europe is even more inhospitable to American directors trying to usurp their domain. Perhaps, if I make a series of successful films, someone will pay me back by letting me make this pet project of mine."12

The Second Death of Ramon Mercader

An adaptation of Jorge Semprun's novel: "Ramon was begun early in '92 until late '94. It was foiled by Semprun, who wanted a fortune for the rights. My friend Patrick Bauchau was to have played the hero (he was also penciled in for the part of Manneret in In a Dream of Passion)."13

Dark Passion

More work on this adaptation of Lionel White's Obsession, from 1992 to 1993, then 1996 onwards: "I've kept my basic combined screenplay, but have made various updates over the years. At one point New Line was interested, and gave me extensive notes. I edited the script, and wrote some new scenes based on their notes. They ultimately passed on the project, but I felt the script had been improved as a result of their suggestions."14

Colt

A TV series about a gun, originally a Sergio Leone project entitled Colt, an American Legend. Leone's biographer Christopher Frayling notes that, "It's plan was to tell the story of a single weapon from its manufacture in Hartford, Connecticut, to its various uses and abuses in the Wild West."15 According to Hellman, "That was how the project was presented to me. It was an idea that had been out there for a long time. Gianni Bozzacchi, who produced China 9, stole it from Sergio Leone (or his estate). Again, we came close to making a deal, but Gianni has a reputation that may not precede him, but usually follows him before signing a deal. He's burned too many bridges. I didn't know that Gianni stole it from Leone until I accidentally saw a fax that was supposed to have been sent in Italian, but was in English. By then the project had pretty much died because of Bozzacchi's reputation."16

The Irish Way

1992-1993. "About a real-life Irish kung fu master. I was to produce with Barry Cooper."17

White Leopards

From 1992. To star Fabio Testi and Robert Mitchum. "White Leopards came from a book given to Fabio Testi by a friend. The screenplay was written by John Fonseca, who was Fabio's dialogue coach on China 9 and Iguana. He, like Fabio, has become a friend for life. Set in South Africa (diamond mines), it's based on a supposedly true story about an inside job scheme to rob De Beers of their payroll, or something like that. It's reminiscent of The Dirty Dozen and about a dozen other movies, but it's classic stuff."18

Strange Girls

1993. "Written and to be directed by Michael Laughlin. Barry Cooper and I were producing. We had it set up at Live, but Michael refused the deal. It's never been made. It would have been a follow up to Michael's Strange Behavior and Strange Invaders in title only: totally different from the other two."19

The Last Go-Round

From a novel by the late Ken Kesey. "It's about the beginnings of the Pendleton (Oregon) Rodeo, at the beginning of the twentieth century (around 1910), and about a great Native American cowboy, Jackson Sundown, and an African American cowboy, George Fletcher. I was working on this all of 1993 through at least March 1994. Katherine Wilson was the producer who brought me into this mess. She wrote a screenplay, which needed a page one re-write by a real writer. Charles Eastman was to be that writer. But Katherine only had a promise from Kesey that she could have the rights to the material, and she was never able to actually get the rights. She told us many times that she did, but she never did."20 According to Charles Eastman, "I have over the years been writing a very long screenplay on rodeo called sometimes Cowboy Christmas, sometimes Outside. Barry Cooper had once attempted to option this material, with me as director, a grandiosity that didn't come off. So when The Last Go-Round came up, I was in Barry's mind as an ideal person to do the screenplay. I would rather not have been involved, but once again I needed the money and had to play ball — I felt the material, while a period piece, was still too close to my cowboy story, and that I would steal from myself and weaken any chances I might have of ever seeing my own rodeo piece done. And finally, as we bickered about something — availability, money (I don't think they had the funds yet) — it became obvious to me that there might be problems with Kesey and the rights; and when I saw the published novel, it seemed that, if this was news to everybody (as it appeared to be), things had certainly fallen through, and that was the last I heard about this project."21

Nothing More Than Murder

An adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1959 noir classic (about an act of fraud perpetrated by the cynical owner of a small movie house) which Hellman worked on from 1993 to 1995.

Red Rain

From late 1993 onward, still active until late 1998. A prison story — set on Christmas day in San Quentin, and focussing on the friendship between white convict Snuff and black convict Rashad — that was to be produced by Barry Cooper and executive produced by Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender. According to Hellman, the script of Red Rain "was sent to me by the author, D.B. Smith, who was an ex-convict. He wrote it in the margins of a Bible when he was in solitary. He was accepted into the graduate screenwriting program at UCLA before he was released from prison on the basis of this script. Normally with prison literature you just see the story, but Red Rain had all this background texture about survival that made it really live. Quentin read it in 1994, thought it was fantastic, and offered to help me. I met with Willem Dafoe to discuss his playing Snuff, and came close to getting it made, but finally abandoned this project in favor of somewhat easier sells."22

Silver City

From April 1995. Written by Jones Clark, who would become a regular collaborator: "He comes from a family of lawyers, and knows a lot about that world. Silver City is about a South-Western public defender living in a corrupt world, who sells out his half-breed client, then after spending six hours supposedly trying to find the piece of evidence to keep his client from being executed, comes back to confess that he's the evidence, and face his punishment."23

Ghost of a Chance

"A fantasy love story begun in 1995 by my wife, Emma Webster. It went through a number of revisions, until finally Jones joined Emma as co-writer."24 Set in contemporary London, the plot has Ambassador's wife Anna Knight and CIA operative Wes Mitchell dying on the same day, falling in love in the afterlife, and being allowed to return to life for 24 hours: "Most days I'm a devout atheist. But on no days do I believe in an afterlife. Ghost of a Chance is an allegory that expresses my beliefs about choice in the human condition, not to be taken as a literal depiction of death. Or maybe to be taken, if the audience chooses. I like the audience to make these choices."25

Freaky Deaky

An adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 1988 novel (once a Jim McBride project) about Police Sergeant Chris Mankowski and the attempt of two sixties radicals, Robin and Skip, to blackmail millionaire Woody Ricks. Hellman began working on this project, which he hoped to set up at Miramax, in July 1995. "In early 1996, Barry Cooper and I made a deal with the Japanese company Shochiku to make four pictures. Part of the deal was that Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender would be executive producers on the pictures that I would direct, and that Quentin would write a remake of Ride in the Whirlwind. The three other pictures were Red Rain (which Quentin had agreed to exec produce two years earlier), Dark Passion and Freaky Deaky (in which we believed that Miramax was no longer interested). We had the rights to Red Rain, and we negotiated a deal with Paramount for Dark Passion and Talia Shire for Ride in the Whirlwind. Quentin was to obtain the rights to Freaky Deaky. Quentin and Lawrence and their agent, Mike Simpson, came to a meeting with Shochiku, and we made a verbal deal. Contracts were drawn, and we had a cast that included Vince Vaughn (as Chris), Cher (as Robin), Mickey Rourke (as Skip), Mike Starr (as Woody) and Don Cheadle (as Donnell, Woody's driver). Then, when Quentin went to Harvey Weinstein for the rights to Freaky Deaky, Harvey freaked, and wouldn't let Quentin make the deal, even though Quentin and Lawrence were non-exclusive as producers to Miramax. He asked what the bottom line was, and Quentin said he wanted to help me do Freaky. That's when Harvey said he would make it for me to direct. As Samuel Goldwyn once said: 'A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on.' At any rate, the Shochiku deal fell through, I spent two more years working on the Freaky Deaky screenplay (with Emma), reluctantly incorporating Miramax executive Jack Lechner's suggestions in a limited way. This was followed by Miramax bringing in a new team of writers who really fucked it up. Essentially, what they wanted was to build up the 'love' story, and play down all the other characters. They wanted the camera always on Chris. Quentin refused to become involved, and between three executives at Band Apart, a total of three at Miramax, plus me, it became a committee system that was totally anathema to me, and we created a stew of a script that no one liked. Even Miramax realized the new script didn't work, but they also realized they didn't want to make Elmore Leonard's story."26

Fool's Gold

"By Jeff Monahan. From around 1995 or 1996. A quirky western, but very compelling. Probably the best of the lot, but a hard sell. Nicky Katt (the actor) is working as a co-producer, and is simultaneously giving the script to actors and production/financing companies. He's devoting a lot of energy to it, and I have no doubt he'll succeed."27

Buffalo '66

From September 1996. A screenplay by Vincent Gallo, who was also to star. According to Gallo, "I had a director that I liked, the great Monte Hellman. And we started collaborating to prepare to do the movie, and I realized that my hero had become a stubborn, miserable, out-of-touch man. In a way that shocked me, because his earlier films, the ones I liked very much, seemed so inspired. He was very against cinematography. I had this whole idea of the reversal film, the film stock, and methodical storyboarding, and he felt that the cinematography should be unnoticed. That it was an insignificant part of cinema. The cinema was only about performance and characters. And I'm a very visual artist and I became deeply seduced by the visual part of cinema and we parted ways."28 In response to this, Hellman told me 'Vincent can't help himself. He's actually very fond of me, and I of him, but he's completely nuts.' Barry Cooper and I worked very hard on setting up Buffalo '66, and finally made a deal with Lakeshore. But it was too late for the kind of snow Vincent described in the script, so Lakeshore wanted to wait 'til the following winter. At this point we had spent several months dealing with abuse and threats from Vincent, who never had given us a contract, and was constantly making ultimatums. Anyway, Vincent had secretly been pursuing side deals which would allow him to direct instead of me, even though he swore I was the only director he could possibly let direct his baby. But Vincent only cares about money, and he would have taken the Lakeshore deal with me directing because it meant a bigger budget and more money for him, except for the delay. So he decided to go ahead with the lo-ball deal, even though there was no snow, I think it's unfortunate that Vincent saw my beliefs as a sign that I had changed. I've been consistent throughout my creative life in my admiration for the great theater director Arthur Hopkins. I'm certainly not against cinematography! I have chosen to work with some of the greatest cinematographers. But I'm against any element, including the acting and the directing as well as the cinematography, that calls attention to itself at the expense of the whole. To quote Hopkins: 'When manufacturing jewelers have an especially fine stone, a square cut diamond, or pear shaped emerald, they are careful to so conceal the setting that the stone shines alone in its unobstructed glory'."29 Buffalo '66, directed by Vincent Gallo, was released in 1997. Monte Hellman was thanked in the end credits.

Boom

1997. A remake of the Japanese film Baku! "From a story by a Japanese writer, originally for him to direct. Jones Clark did a new screnplay. Boom is about a young scientist who invents a 'bullet bomb' — a bomb the size of a bullet. He's kidnapped by some gangsters who want to use the invention to rob an armored car, etc. They run out of bullet bombs, and call his girlfriend to bring some more in order to save his life. She's caught in a road block, and forced to swallow the bombs to avoid detection. She becomes a human time bomb, at the mercy of anyone who has the detonator. Real comic book stuff."30

Spano

"About the relationship between a New York cop and a young black kid who either witnessed or committed a murder. I was working on this in late 1998, but finally decided I didn't want to do it."31

The Payoff

From mid-1996. A crime movie which Hellman describes as a "Western noir," to be shot in Texas. Jones Clark's screenplay focuses on Joe Don Home, a criminal defense lawyer (Luke Wilson) who becomes involved with beautiful young con artist Lucille (Leelee Sobieski) and a drug cartel family: "By coincidence, the opening scene involves heroin being smuggled inside dead bodies, which was the theme of The Typhoon Shipments. Jones Clark came up with the idea completely independently. I lucked out with Leelee Sobieski, one of whose parents is European, and both of whom were familiar with my work. And they could relate to a script that defied categorizing."32

In 2002, Hellman was briefly involved with some producers who wanted him to direct Night Shoot, a Paul Mayersberg screenplay that was to have been filmed in the Canary Islands: "Night Shoot disintegrated because of an unfortunate disagreement between the producers and writers. There are a few friends who are determined to see the next film by yours truly: Rick Linklater, Wes Anderson, and especially a young actor named Nicky Katt, who is a friend of Rick's. Nicky phoned me out of the blue, introduced himself, and also introduced me to some people who may be instrumental in helping me get one or another of my projects on. He has been tireless in his efforts, particularly to help get Fool's Gold cast and made. I also made a deal to produce, along with my partner Barry Cooper, Lost Dogs, a terrific script by a young writer/director, Scott Sampler, whom I've known since he was born. It's The Big Sleep, only Humphrey Bogart is a 21-year old rock drummer, and Lauren Bacall is a 19-year-old Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. Aside from that, I was interviewed for the Reservoir Dogs 10th anniversary DVD, and Allison Anders will soon be interviewing me for a 5-hour oral history for the Director's Guild. And I'm continuing to develop The Payoff (with William Morris, Leelee's new agent, now helping with casting and finding a distributor), Dark Passion and Ghost of a Chance."33

At the moment, the only thing which can be stated with certainty is that, to quote Quentin Tarantino, "Movie theaters would be much happier places with a new Monte Hellman movie playing in them."34

Notes

Introduction

1. Preface to Cinéma 1, l'Image-Mouvement (Les Editions de Minuit, 1983).

2. Consider, to take only one example, the opening of Ride in the Whirlwind. For Hellman, it is not enough to simply show a group of bandits robbing a stagecoach. He must first spend nearly a minute of screen time watching them laboriously make their way to the bottom of a cliff.

Chapter 1. Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

1. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 31, 2001, and "Moving Along with Love and Obsession" by Gordon Gow, Films and Filming October 1974, p. 61.

2. In an interview conducted by Beverly Walker (published in Sight and Sound, Winter 1970/1971 and reprinted in a slightly different form with the Two-Lane Blacktop screenplay), Hellman notes, "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." Martin Landau's foreword to Charles Tatum, Jr.'s Monte Hellman contains some interesting information about the director's photographs, many of which (including portraits of Landau, Jack Nicholson, Sal Mineo and Robert Towne) were exhibited as part of a Hellman retrospective held in Austin, Texas, during March 2000.

3. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 31, 2001, Paul Joyce's film Plunging on Alone (1986) and "Moving Along with Love and Obsession." Asked to choose his ten favorite films, as well as favorite director, actor and actress, for a poll conducted by London's Time Out magazine (No. 1095, May 10-17, 1995), Hellman responded with the following list (in order of preference): Spirit of the Beehive, A Slave of Love (Mikhalkov), Outcast of the Islands, Persona, Broken Blossoms, Stavisky, A Place in the Sun, Sherlock Jr., It's a Wonderful Life, Celine and Julie Go Boating. Director: Hellman. Actor: Depardieu. Actress: Binoche.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 21, 2001, and Bill Krohn's "You Get Screwed Either Way," 1997 Locarno Catalogue, p. 203.

5. "Monte Hellman: In His Own Words," Cashiers du Cinemart 7 (1998, available on the Internet).

6. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 24, and September 3, 2001.

7. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 31, 2001.

8. Barboura Morris, who was occasionally employed as Roger Corman's secretary, acted under the name "Barboura O'Neill" in Corman's Sorority Girl (1957), then under her own name in many other Corman films. She died in 1975. According to Hellman, "She was named after a grandfather whose surname was Barbour" (e-mail to the author, February 1, 2001).

9. Monte Hellman, National Film Theatre lecture, London, January 3, 1995.

10. "Monte Hellman: Exploitation or Existentialism?" by Ron Wells, November 7, 2000. Available on the Internet.

11. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, February 1, and August 21, 2001.

12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 3, 2001.

13. NFT lecture, ibid.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 31, August 21 and September 2, 2001. Patrick McGilligan's biography of Jack Nicholson mistakenly claims that the theater owned by the Dahl brothers was called The Store Theater. According to Hellman, "I don't know what it had originally been called when the Lab built it, but certainly not The Store, which didn't exist until after my theater was converted into a movie theater. The Store was one of several 'hole in the wall' theaters that sprang up after I closed. I believe there were only two 'off-off-Broad way' theaters contemporary with mine — The Circle Theater (the first) and The Players' Ring — both of which were 'theaters-in-the-round'" (e-mail to the author, August 21, 2001).

15. Monte Hellman, NFT lecture and e-mail to the author, September 2, 2001.

16. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD (2000).

17. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, September 2, 2001.

18. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, February 1, 2001, and February 7, 2002.

19. Steve Voce, "Monte Hellman," Psychotronic 25, 1997, p. 77, and Monte Hellman, email to the author, February 4, 2001.

20. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, February 1, 2001, and February 7, 2002. Although the film's score is credited to Alexander Laszlo, the music actually consists of library tracks by Laszlo which had already been used in many Corman productions. As Sam Moyer pointed out to me, Beast also makes generous use of Fred Katz's score for Corman's The Wasp Woman. According to Moyer, "Katz's music is often run into Laszlo's in mid-phrase" (e-mail to the author, August 27, 2001).

21. Walker, ibid.

22. The monster was designed and played by Chris Robinson (who also appears as an extra sitting at the bar — not, as the IMDB claims, the bartender). According to Tim Lucas, "Robinson won the opportunity to provide the monster for that film by winning a Famous Monsters of Filmland contest for best homemade monster. He went on to work as an actor in prime time TV dramas like Twelve O'Clock High" (e-mail to the author, November 30, 1999). Robinson continues to appear on network soap operas such as General Hospital and Another World.

23. Charles Tatum, Jr., Monte Hellman (Festival d'Amiens/Editions Yellow Now, 1988), p. 24. Author's translation.

24. "Monte Hellman: In His Own Words." Cashiers du Cinemart 7 (1998, available on the Internet).

25. Gow, ibid.

26. Tatum, p. 24. Key Largo's structure was first used by Corman in Thunder Over Hawaii (aka Naked Paradise, 1956). According to Charles B. Griffith, "That was successful, so we did it again in South Dakota. Roger says, 'I want Naked Paradise using a gold mine instead of a pineapple plantation. Put it in South Dakota and add a monster.' I didn't know how to add a monster to that script, so I had it all wrapped up in a cocoon in a cave just threatening to break loose all the time. That became Beast from Haunted Cave" (Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s by Patrick McGilligan, University of California Press, 1997, p. 163).

27. Robin Wood, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, (Toronto Festival of Festivals, 1979), pp. 7-27. Reprinted in Movies and Methods, Volume 2.

28. For information on the figural approach to cinema, see Nicole Brenez's De la Figure en Général et du Corps en Particulier (De Boeck Universite, 1998).

29. Although ambiguity is associated with the beast, one thread relating to the gangster plot is also left hanging. Like Godot, the plane Alex awaits at the cabin never appears and is simply forgotten about. Hellman's later films often abandon narrative elements in this manner.

30. See Robin Wood's "Leavis, Marxism and Film Culture" in Cineaction 8.

31. Ironically, a voiceover narration on Beast from Haunted Cave's original trailer describes the male characters as "four men who live by killing," thus inadvertently reinforcing the sub-textual connection between Gil and Alex. Incidentally, some of the takes used for the trailer are different from those in the actual film.

32. The monster's cocooned, half-living victims strikingly anticipate an image from Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). Although Scott did not use this sequence in his final cut, it can be found on the laserdisc and DVD.

33. As in Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!, Hellman undercuts the male protagonist's assumption of a heroic role. Although familiarity with the genre's rules may lead us to expect that Gil will kill the monster, it is the dying Marty who destroys it with his flare gun.

34. Additionally, when the beast approaches the cabin, Byron scares it away with hot coals. Hellman frames this so that the coals are thrown directly into the camera, a curious anticipation of Two-Lane Blacktop's ending, wherein the actual film catches fire and burns.

35. Unfortunately missing from Sinister Cinema's video because of print damage.

Chapter 2. The Filmgroup Expansion, 1962-1963

1. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime by Roger Corman (1990), p. 70. The person Corman refers to here as "Kinta Zabel" is actually Kinta Zertuche. According to Hellman, "I've never heard the name 'Zabel.' She was Kinta Zertuche until she married Daniel Haller, after which she sometimes used 'Haller.' Roger must have been smoking some good stuff. Kinta can be seen sitting at a table in Beast from Haunted Cave's bar scene" (e-mails to the author, August 27, 2001, and February 6, 2002).

2. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 2, 2001.

3. Ibid. According to Hellman, Harvey Berman "has been teaching high school in Concord, and directing many plays. He has now semi-retired, moved back to L.A., but still commutes to the San Francisco area to direct plays."

4. Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (Seeker & Warburg, 1970), p. 171.

5. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 2, 2001.

6. Ibid.

7. Charles Eastman, e-mail to the author, July 2, 2001.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 22, 2001.

9. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 3, 2001.

10. Christian Braad Thomsen, "Monte Hellman: A Profile," Take One Vol. 4 No. 2, 1974, p. 29.

11. Quoted in Charles Tatum, Jr.'s Monte Hellman (author's translation), "Cars and Speed and Flight: The Continuing Career of Director Monte Hellman" by Marc Savlov (available on the Internet) and "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name: The Films of Monte Hellman" by Kent Jones (English-language original courtesy of the author).

12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 4, 2001.

13. Aside from appearing in two more of her husband's Filmgroup expansions, Jaclyn Hellman had small roles in Flight to Fury (1964) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). She also acted in James Frawley's The Christian Licorice Store (1971), and was "assistant to the director" on B. L. Norton's Cisco Pike (1971).

14. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 8, 2001.

15. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, June 6, 2000. Stanton Kaye's films include Georg (1964), Brandy in the Wilderness (1968), In Search of Treasure (1970) and He Wants Her Back (1978). He is currently the President of Bouquet Multimedia. John Fles' article "Are Movies Junk?" can be found in Film Culture 29. He also contributed to Robert R. Branaman's anthology Fuxi Magascene (Ari Publications, San Francisco, 1965). Both men were associated with Kenneth Anger. In Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger (HarperCollins, 1995), Bill Landis notes that "By 1965, Anger's sour grapes had grown heavy. He complained of being beat up on stage at the Cinema Theater as Jack Smith and Gregory Markopoulos laughed and jeered. Anger claimed a print of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome was stolen during this melee, saying that Stanton Kaye had pinpointed the culprit as John Fles. A most unlikely suspect, Fles had actually written a poem in Film Comment inspired by Scorpio Rising about looking tough in a leather jacket" (pp. 128-129).

16. In an e-mail dated February 5, 2001, Hellman confirmed my suspicion that XK120's repetition of the phrase "in point of fact" during this scene was intended to evoke memories of Jennifer Jones in John Huston's Beat the Devil (1953), "The first of several homages to Beat the Devil in the course of my career."

17. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 8, 2001.

18. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 5, 2001.

Chapter 3. The Terror

1. See Tim Lucas' three-part article "The Trouble with Titian" in Video Watchdog 4, 5 and 7.

2. Quoted in "Jack Hill: Exploitation Genius" by Sean Axmaker in Psychotronic 13, Summer 1992, pp. 32-33.

3. Jack Hill, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2000.

4. Although Corman recalls Haze participating in the original two-day shoot, he appears only in footage shot by Coppola and Hellman. Haze himself (interviewed in Psychotronic 27) mentions acting in "a few scenes with Boris Karloff."

5. Axmaker, p. 34, and Jack Hill, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2000. The cameraman during Coppola's shoot was Alfred Taylor, whom Hill later used on Spider Baby (1964). According to Hill, "Francis thought Jack Nicholson was a very frustrating actor to work with, as he really didn't seem to take the work seriously. Once, Francis had had men out catching butterflies for hours so they could release them in front of the camera as Jack and Sandra came down a mountain trail. Jack came around the corner doing a fag act, and all the butterflies went up into the sky. Jack said, 'Oh, was that a take?' That experience may be the reason why Francis never worked with Jack after that" (e-mail to the author, August 25, 2000). Coppola's own recollection is that, when the butterflies were released, "Jack walked right up to the camera and stuck his tongue out at it" (quoted in Michael Schumacher's Francis Ford Coppola, Bloomsbury, p. 33).

6. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 20, 2000.

7. Hill directed the scenes involving a poacher (Karl Schanzer), as well as "many little inserts, such as feet walking along a floor (I shot that one in my grandmother's house), a hand holding an axe, etc.—all the little connecting pieces that go into putting a suspense picture together" (Jack Hill, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2000).

8. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 26, 2000.

9. Charles Eastman, e-mail to the author, July 2, 2001.

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 12, 2000.

11. It's not in any of the American DVDs/laserdiscs, and seems to never have been included in UK theatrical prints (retitled The Haunted and the Hunted), though I'm told it occasionally turns up on American TV. All versions retain the credit "Technical Advisor: Dr. William Joseph Bryan, Jr. MD."

12. Dennis Jakob spent three days at Hoover Dam shooting cascading water for The Terror's climax (Corman suspects Jakob used this time to complete his own graduate film). A friend of Jim Morrison's at UCLA, Jakob was "creative consultant" on Coppola's Apocalypse Now, to which he supposedly introduced the Fisher King concept. Jack Hill notes (in Psychotronic 13) that "Dennis Jakob, Francis and I all shot our student films at UCLA the same semester. That was one reason why the third act of Apocalypse Now is based on my student film The Host (1962)."

13. Jack Hill, e-mail to the author, September 7, 2001.

14. Jack Hill, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2000.

15. Monte Hellman, email to the author, August 12, 2000. Corman had already used a similar effect for the climax of Tales of Terror (1962).

16. In Psychotronic 13, Jack Hill insists "Nicholson was the actor. Of course he didn't shoot anything. Roger's not very reliable. You have to take what he says with a grain of salt." According to Hellman, "All I know is, Jack didn't direct any of the exterior scenes that were shot by Francis or me. He may have 'directed' a shot on the two days when Roger did the interiors, before Francis or I came on board. There was also a final day when the last shot of Sandra was done, plus several other things (maybe even the flooding of the tomb was done that day — at least I was there when it was done). I don't remember Jack directing that day, but it's not to say he didn't" (Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 11, 2001).

17. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 12, 2000.

18. Jack Hill, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2000.

19. Ibid.

20. Voce, Steve. "Monte Hellman." Psychotronic 25, 1997.

21. These shots are part of a section for which authorship cannot be definitively established. It begins as Helene shows Andre "clear water from the mountains": Hellman suspects Coppola shot this at Big Sur, "since there's no waterfall at Leo Carrillo Beach" (e-mail to the author, August 1, 2001). The shots of Andre following Helene into a forest and saying, "I'm a weary, disillusioned soldier, and you're the only pleasant sight that I've seen in seven months" are almost certainly Coppola's; Jack Hill insists "Only Francis could have written that awful dialog. Francis wrote and directed all these forest scenes" (e-mails to the author, August 1 and 2, 2001), as are the following shots of Helene showing Andre some fish in a brook. Coppola actually recalls shooting this: "I think Jack Nicholson took some delight in ribbing me. One day, we were about to shoot a scene where he's supposed to look into a brook and see fish swimming, and say, 'Look, there must be thousands of them.' But he refused to say the line" (Schumacher, p. 32). Although Hellman could have reshot this material, Jack Hill claims "Monte did not, to my recollection, retake anything shot by Francis. I know that because what he shot was my script only" (e-mail to the author, August 25, 2000). According to Hellman, "This is like detective work, because any shot might be from the earlier Coppola shoot. I think it's impossible to know at this point in time. What we were doing was patching together a movie, using whatever we could from previous shoots. In spite of what Jack Hill says, I think that I may have shot these forest scenes. But probably not" (e-mails to the author, August land 2, 2001).

22. Coppola may have directed the shot of Andre following Helene along a narrow path. According to Hellman, "I'm not sure it isn't mine, but I can't remember where that could have been shot. There is the railing, which I don't remember, and you can see the ocean on our left below. It could have been shot in Palos Verdes, but not in Santa Barbara. Also, I don't remember shooting the long shots on the beach that follow the railing shot, before the return to Leo Carillo beach. The running shots on the beach don't seem to be Leo Carillo — the rocks seem different — except that the little stream running down to the sea seems to be Leo Carillo. It's so difficult to be sure of anything that happened on one day 38 years ago, but my guess is that I didn't shoot the railing shot or the two running shots. The railing shot looks like something I could have shot (stylistically), but the running shots don't" (Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, February 10 and 11, 2001). Hellman later watched the scene again, and informed me that "I now believe I shot the long shots on the beach, since they look more like Southern than Northern California" (e-mail to the author, August 1, 2001).

23. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 20, 2000. Jack Nicholson recalls nearly drowning while filming Andre's walk into the sea, but misremembers both the director and the location: "This was Francis's idea. I went out into that big fucking arch up there in Big Sur" (quoted in Corman, p. 93). Unsurprisingly, Coppola denies all knowledge of this incident, insisting, "I really don't remember anything in the least like that happening" (Schumacher, p. 33). According to Hellman, "I definitely shot the scene, and I do remember he felt he nearly drowned" (e-mail to the author, August 1, 2001).

24. Paul Parla and Charles P. Mitchell, "More Voices from the House on Spider Baby Hill: Director Jack Hill Interviewed." Filmfax 65, February/March 1998, p. 62.

25. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 12, 2000.

26. It seems likely that Corman and Leo Gordon intended this to be the film's opening sequence. Although Andre can be seen saying "Hello" to Helene, his next comment, "It's me, Andre" (which implies they have already met), is delivered offscreen, and was probably added in the dubbing studio by Jack Hill.

27. When Andre asks what happened to his horse, the Baron claims it bolted during the night. In the film as released, the Baron is shown to be telling the truth, but it seems that Corman's original plan was to have the Baron kill the horse. Describing his difficulties making sense of Corman's material, Coppola noted that "a young soldier from Napoleon's army comes to this castle and meets Karloff. So what does Karloff do? He kills the soldier's horse. I've got to figure out why Karloff killed the horse when he wanted the soldier to leave" (Fred Baker's Movie People, Lancer, 1973, p. 71). Whatever solution Coppola arrived at, the scene showing the horse bolting was obviously added by Corman during the last days of shooting.

28. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 12, 2000.

29. The shots of Gustav's bloody eye sockets (which Jack Hill remembers preview audiences applauding) are curiously similar to the image that ends Corman's The Man with X-Ray Eyes, made the same year. According to Hellman, "Roger probably got the idea from our scene" (e-mail to the author, August 12, 2000).

30. Andre's fight with Stefan was shot during the final days of filming. Jack Hill recalls that "Jack Nicholson and Dick Miller worked out a little fistfight scene which Roger shot with two cameras, and it was edited so that each bit of action was used twice, from the two different angles; in other words, it lasted twice as long on screen as it was actually played" (e-mail to the author, September 8, 2001).

31. Although this twist has some unfortunate repercussions (we are now required to accept Dorothy Neumann as the mother of Boris Karloff, who was 25 years her senior), it also adds to the thematic density. How appropriate that the Baron's line "Twenty years ago I was not the man you're looking at now," delivered by Boris Karloff in 1962, should be demonstrated as literally true by material invented nearly a year later. And the similarity between Andre and the Baron, already suggested by Andre's noble background ("My father was the Count Duvalier. Was, until they spilled his head into a basket"), is reinforced when the Baron is revealed to be Eric. This simple soldier is the "real" nobleman, his aristocratic host the "real" plebian.

32. Monte Hellman in Paul Joyce's film Plunging on Alone (1986).

33. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, May 28, 2001.

34. Hellman greatly admires Ken Loach, whose films often feature working class characters unable to find relatively small sums of money: "I feel kinship with Ken Loach (I only wish I had his talent for documentary reality). The one director most of my director friends are in awe of is Ken Loach" (e-mail to the author, May 28, 2001).

35. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, April 5, 2001.

Chapter 4. Back Door to Hell

1. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 3, 2001.

2. Corman's original title had been It Stalked The Ocean Floor, which Lippert felt was "a bit too literary" (see How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, p. 21).

3. Steve Voce, "Monte Hellman." Psychotronic 25, p. 78. Ironically, Fred Roos later became one of Coppola's closest collaborators, even returning to the Philippines for Apocalypse Now (on which Eddie Romero was again involved). Roos also worked on Two-Lane Blacktop.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 3, 2001.

5. John Hackett had previously appeared in Corman's Tales of Terror (1962). He went on to become a long-term associate of Jack Nicholson's, acting in Hoffa, The Two Jakes and Blood and Wine. He can also be seen in Ride in the Whirlwind (which Hellman directed) and Harry and Walter Go to New York (which Hellman re-edited). Back Door to Hell was his only screenplay.

6. Like Roger Corman, Lippert was probably hoping to save money on transport costs by hiring one person to write and act in a film shot abroad, though in practice Nicholson was so reluctant to leave America that he ended up striking a better deal than anyone else, receiving twice as much as Hellman.

7. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 30, 2000.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 16, 2000, and Voce, ibid. "Re: the grip getting killed by the snake, I don't think I was aware of this at the time. I was legitimately fearful of the snakes, and had heard stories of young children in the rice paddies cutting off their own hands if they got bit. So I may have been protected from this news at the time. I only learned of it from John Hackett at Don Devlin's wake" (Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 22, 2001).

9. Quoted in "Monte Hellman" by Kevin Lewis, DGA Magazine, Dec 1997/Jan 1998, p. 67 and "King Leer" by Martin Aston, Neon 1, Dec 1996/Jan 1997, p. 66.

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 20, 2000.

11. Voce, ibid.

12. These words appear prior to the end credits, underneath photographs of Jack Nicholson and Conrad Maga. If Fox's intention was to make the conclusion more "upbeat," one can only marvel at the sheer oddity of their chosen quote, which actually reinforces the downbeat tone.

13. Patrick McGilligan, Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994), p. 146. One of these giant spiders can be seen in Back Door to Hell during the attack on the village.

14. According to Hellman, Annabelle Huggins "was famous (and therefore castable) because she eloped as a teenager and then confessed to being abducted — sending her young husband to prison" (e-mail to the author, September 8, 2000).

15. One detects here a criticism of Jack Nicholson's still-emerging star persona, which reduces political opposition to an attitude of cynical masculine detachment. The consequences of this can be clearly seen in Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), wherein the status quo is equated with a powerful, castrating femininity.

16. Though Huggins brings this dialogue to life, the attempt to explain Paco's behavior by reference to a past trauma (underlined by Craig's "I think maybe that explains a few things") is precisely the kind of neat psychology Hellman would subsequently go out of his way to avoid.

Chapter 5. Flight to Fury

1. Monte Hellman, quoted in Jack's Life and e-mail to the author, September 14, 2000.

2. Flight to Fury's climax is curiously reproduced in Bob Rafelson's Blood and Wine (1996), which also ends with a helpless Jack Nicholson throwing stolen diamonds (here a diamond necklace) into a river (John Hackett has a small role in Rafelson's film). When I pointed this out to Hellman, he replied, "I never saw Blood and Wine, but in light of the characters involved I would bet the replay of throwing away the diamonds was no coincidence" (e-mail to the author, September 14, 2000).

3. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, September 18, 2000.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, September 14, 2000.

5. Ibid. Warners' video would still appear to be missing a few moments. Hellman recalls Lippert cutting the line "What did he say?" when Destiny returns disheveled after being raped by Garuda, but this line does not appear in Warners' transfer: "I guess line cuts like that never made it back into the restoration. We were only able to restore big chunks like the 'death' dialog on the plane" (e-mail to the author, September 17, 2000). Warners' video is sadly difficult to find these days. Some sources claim that the transfer sold to television was the director's cut (or at least longer than the theatrical version), but Hellman thinks this unlikely.

6. Quoted in "Eddie Romero: Our Man in Manila" by Lee Server, Film Comment March/April 1999, p. 49. Joseph Estrada was subsequently elected President, convicted of corruption and jailed.

7. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, September 14, 2000.

8. Jack Nicholson, quoted in Patrick McGilligan's biography, fondly recalls his encounter with Peter Lorre on the set of The Raven in 1962: "Lorrre would sit and I'd get him to tell me Bogart stories, and about Brecht and the Nazis and World War II." It seems likely that Beat the Devil would have been among the films they discussed. According to Hellman, "Lorgren (who's played by a Peter Lorre lookalike) was named after both Lorre and Sydney Green-street" (e-mail to the author, August 22, 2001).

9. Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (1958) uses a similar strategy, balancing an opening so heavily compressed it borders on the abstract with a second movement focused on the protagonist's apparent inactivity.

10. Quentin Tarantino, "A Rare Sorrow." Sight and Sound February 1993, p. 32. Although "the film I made" refers solely to Reservoir Dogs, Flight to Fury is structurally much closer to Pulp Fiction, which Tarantino was preparing when he wrote this article, while Beast from Haunted Cave was almost certainly a significant influence on Tarantino's screenplay for Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn (1995).

11. The only Huston film in which Bogart becomes directly unsympathetic is the one in which he loses his self-control, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947).

12. Quoted in Jack's Life, pp. 144-145.

13. Beverly Walker, "Two-Lane Blacktop." Sight and Sound Winter 1970/1971, p. 37. I had assumed that this card game was invented for the film, but Monte assures me that "It's a real game, coincidentally called 'Monte'" (e-mail to the author, September 17, 2000).

14. Notice how Joe's words to Destiny as she removes the diamonds hidden in his clothing — "You have a soft touch"— are later echoed by Garuda, who tells Destiny she is "Soft, very soft."

Chapter 6. The Shooting

1. Quoted in Jack's Life, p. 150, and Beverly Walker's "Two-Lane Blacktop," Sight and Sound Winter 1970/1971, p. 36.

2. Walker, ibid.

3. Marc Savlov, "Cars and Speed and Flight: The Continuing Career of Director Monte Hellman." Austin Chronicle, March 13, 2000.

4. Carole Eastman's television acting credits include a 1961 episode of The Untouchables entitled "Death for Sale," directed by Stuart Rosenberg.

5. Walker, ibid.

6. Quoted in "King Leer," Neon December 1996/January 1997, pp. 66-67.

7. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, November 5, 2000 and August 22, 2001, and Walker, ibid.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 24 and 28, 2001.

9. Gary Kurtz, e-mails to the author, January 9,10 and 21, 2002. Aside from the car chase and some musical numbers, Kurtz's second unit was responsible for a race track sequence shot in a semi-documentary style that anticipates Two-Lane Blacktop (on which Kurtz was Associate Producer).

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 24, 2001. Gary Kurtz's work as second unit director/cameraman was also uncredited.

11. Carole Eastman co-wrote the English dialogue for Jacques Demy's Model Shop (1968), and wrote Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), Jerry Schatzberg's Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970) and Mike Nichols' The Fortune (1974), as well as an episode of Run for Your Life entitled "Hang Down Your Head and Laugh" (directed by Michael Ritchie in 1966), under her standard pseudonym. She used her own name only for Rafelson's Man Trouble (1992), on which she was also one of the producers.

12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, October 10, 2000.

13. Corman, p. 126.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 11, 2000.

15. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 22, 2001, Matthew Wilder's "Monte Hellman Is in No Way Bitter" (June 2000, available on the Internet) and Steve Voce's "Monte Hellman," Psychotronic 25,1997, p. 78.

16. Charles Eastman is credited with writing Little Fauss and Big Halsy (Sidney J. Furie, 1970) and Second Hand Hearts (written in 1969, filmed by Hal Ashby in 1978, released 1980). He also did some uncredited work on The Cincinnati Kid (1965), This Property Is Condemned (1966) and Heaven Can Wait (1978), as well as writing unused drafts of The Loved One (1965) and Who'll Stop the Rain (1978). He collaborated with Hellman on an unmade adaptation of Lionel White's Obsession (to be called Dark Passion). His single directorial effort, The All-American Boy (1970, released 1973), is among the American cinema's unknown masterpieces.

17. Charles Eastman, e-mails to the author, July 2 and 3, 2001. A selection of Eastman's stills can be found on the DVDs of The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind.

18. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 5, 2000.

19. Walker, ibid.

20. In original prints of The Shooting (as well as the transfer currently available on DVD), Will Hutchins was billed first, Jack Nicholson third. Jack Harris reversed the billing in order to emphasize Nicholson's role: in the process, he was obliged to remove the shots over which these credits played and replace them with still frames. Harris added his logo to Ride in the Whirlwind's credits, but otherwise made no alterations to that film.

21. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).

22. For more on the five codes and a demonstration of how they can be applied to a classical Hollywood text, see Robin Wood's "Notes for a Reading of I Walked with a Zombie" in Cineaction 3/4, Winter 1986, pp. 6-20.

23. As Hellman explained to Kent Jones, "I think it was based on Carole's idea of Germans in Texas or something, this kind of sentence structure that was not really English."

24. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, October 29, 2000.

25. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, October 28, 2000.

26. "Starting Over, and Over," The Village Voice, 1991.

27. Our understanding of the characters is always mediated by the relationship between them and the landscape. Willett, who is emotionally dead throughout, instinctively sits in the place where Leland was killed.

28. Written in 1995, published in French translation in Trafic 21, Spring 1997. English-language original courtesy of the author.

29. This is precisely the kind of image/sound transition Mike Nichols would use in The Graduate (1967), a film Hellman finds interesting: "I appreciate the central conflict more than I do the film itself, which I find painted too broadly" (e-mail to the author, August 22, 2001). See also the end of Ride in the Whirlwind's lynching sequence, which dissolves from the legs of Blind Dick and Indian Joe to those of Wes and Vern.

30. Our uncertainty as to whether or not Willett dies is at the heart of Hellman's project. Capitalist ideology may be able to encompass despair, but it cannot tolerate uncertainty, which always points towards the possibility of radical change. According to Hellman, "There is no intentional uncertainty regarding whether Willett dies. If one looks at the film carefully, it is possible to see who is shot and who isn't. The woman fires the first shot. Coigne fires a shot on screen, then two off screen. Neither the woman nor Willett are hit. The woman moves to a better position while Willett lunges toward her to try and stop her. She fires. Coigne is hit and falls, without firing again. Willett falls only because he has lunged toward the woman. But it doesn't really matter. I think it's clear from the text that whether a character is shot or not, there in 'no exit' from this hell called Suplicio" (e-mails to the author, August 22 and 23, 2001).

31. Seen this way, even the lengthy periods during which Hellman was unable to make a single film take on a thematic relevance.

Chapter 7. Ride in the Whirlwind

1. "Carole got the title from a line from Addison's The Campaign: And pleas'd th' Almighty's orders to perform, Rides in the whirl-wind, and directs the storm"' (Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2001).

2. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2001.

3. Derek Sylvester, Jack Nicholson (Proteus Books, 1982). pp. 28-29.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 5, 2000.

5. Which is more than can be said for High Noon (1952). Although Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman insist that their film is an attack on the witch hunters, this ambition is not evident on-screen. Indeed, the only way High Noon film could be perceived as commenting on America's contemporary political situation is from a right-wing perspective. Gary Cooper (himself a prominent HUAC supporter) is Senator McCarthy, attempting to rally his community against the "reds" (Frank Miller's gang) who are about to invade.

6. Beverly Walker, "Two-Lane Blacktop." Sight and Sound Winter 1970/1971, p. 36.

7. Robin Wood, "Notorious and Notable." Times Educational Supplement, December 17, 1976.

8. There is a similar moment in Two-Lane Blacktop. When the victims of a car crash suddenly appear, the girl is distressed while the driver and the mechanic remain impassive. Women and animals (unlike men) express a natural aversion to violence.

9. Hellman appears to have been unaware of this during the filming, though it would clearly have been relevant to the thesis of Jon-Stephen Fink's book Cluck: The True Story of Chickens in the Cinema (Virgin, 1981), in which Hellman is interviewed on the subject of chickens in his oeuvre.

10. Retrospectively, this moment achieves a curious resonance. Jack Nicholson, who is here making his final appearance in a Hellman film, would go on to become one of Hollywood's most celebrated stars. As he rides away at Ride in the Whirlwind's climax, one can almost sense his departure from Hellman's brand of adventurous low-budget filmmaking.

Chapter 8. In Between Projects, 1966-1970

1. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 6, 2000.

2. Andrew Yule, Picture Shows: The Life and Films of Peter Bogdanovich (Limelight, 1992), p. 26.

3. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, May 3, 2001.

4. Roger Corman. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, p. 153.

5. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 6, 2000.

6. Corman, p. 125.

7. Corman, p. 126.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, November 9, 2000, and July 31, 2001. It seems likely that Corman was responsible for the prison camp scenes that open the film. In Monthly Film Bulletin 576 (January 1982), Tim Pulleine claims that A Time for Killing/The Long Ride Home "can be seen quite interestingly to recapitulate and extend the thematic implications of [Phil Karlson's) mid-50s films," but admits that "the resulting work is as readily susceptible of analysis in terms of [Roger Corman's] themes as of Karlson's."

9. Corman, p. 126.

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 7, 2000.

11. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 14, 2000.

12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 22, 2001.

13. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 2, 2000, and interview on the Barnes & Noble website, January 30, 2001.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, November 2 and 14, 2000.

15. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 29, 2000.

16. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 2, 2000.

17. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 11, 2000.

18. One of these scenes, depicting the murder of Charlotte Rampling's character (actually a faceless stand-in for Rampling), was so explicit that Britain's state censor insisted on removing 49 seconds of it from Video Gems' 1986 video release before granting an adults only certificate.

19. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 11, 2000.

20. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 21, 2000.

21. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 16, 2000 and "Monte Hellman" by Kevin Lewis, DGA Magazine Dec 97/Jan 98, p. 67.

22. Mark Shivas, "Samuel Fuller: 2 Interviews," Movie (UK) 17, Winter 1969-70.

23. Jules Bricken's Explosion, shot in Canada during 1969, has no connection with this project.

24. Beverly Walker, "Two-Lane Blacktop," Sight and Sound Winter 1970/71, p. 37, and Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, March 24, 2001.

25. Monte Hellman, commentary on Ride in the Whirlwind DVD, 2000.

26. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 24, 2000.

27. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 28, 2001, and "Monte Hellman Interview: Exploitation or Existentialism?" by Ron Wells, November 6, 2000 (available on the Internet).

28. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 24, 2000.

29. Ibid.

30. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, September 6, 2001, and commentary on the Two-Lane Blacktop DVD (1999). According to Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg lobbied unsuccessfully to direct The Christian Licorice Store in 1969: "Definitely news to me," says Hellman, adding, "I probably would have turned down most of the scripts Steven has picked" (e-mail to the author, January 3, 2001).

31. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 22 and 24, 2000.

32. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 24, 2000.

33. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 12 and 13, 2001.

34. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 13, 2001.

35. Ibid.

36. Coincidentally, Nolan and Johnson had both acted in Roger Corman's The Intruder. "No connection. I never met either," insists Hellman (e-mail to the author, August 17, 2001).

37. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 22, 2001.

38. Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, January 25, 2001.

39. The other cancelled projects included an adaptation of the Broadway hit Baker Street, John Frankenheimer's The Homecoming, John Boorman's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Blake Edwards' Say It with Music, a musical (to star Julie Andrews) on which MGM had already spent three million dollars in pre-production.

40. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 29, 2001.

41. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 28, and February 25, 2001. Frank Wolff died in 1971.

42. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 22, 2000. According to his published correspondence, Renoir was suffering from a mild case of Parkinson's Disease at this time.

Chapter 9. Two-Lane Blacktop

1. Steven Gaydos and Jerry Roberts' Movie Talk from the Front Lines (McFarland, 1995), pp. 16-17, Sight and Sound Winter 1970/71 and "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name."

2. "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name."

3. Paul Taylor, "Not Fade Away," Monthly Film Bulletin 620, September 1985.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, March 18 and 19, 2002.

5. Movie Talk from the Front Lines, p. 17 and audio commentary on the Two-Lane Blacktop DVD, 1999.

6. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, November 30 and December 1, 2000. During the scene at the Oklahoma gas station, the driver refers to the girl as "Higgens. Whatever her name is." According to Hellman, this is "suggested by the name on the shirt she wears." Indeed, when the girl first appears, the screenplay describes her as being "dressed in old Levi's and an Army fatigue shirt that is much too big for her. The name tag on the fatigue shirt reads 'Higgens,'" but this detail is virtually invisible in the film.

7. Ron Wells, "Monte Hellman Interview: Exploitation or Existentialism?" (November 11, 2000, available on the Internet), Movie Talk from the Front Lines p. 14; Brian Case, "The Full Monte," Time Out Jan 1995, p. 15 and "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name."

8. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Two-Lane Blacktop DVD.

9. "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name."

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 23, 2000. Jaclyn Hellman would subsequently be credited as "assistant to the director" on Bill L. Norton's Cisco Pike (1971). According to Hellman, "Jaclyn was an acting coach, and it's possible that she met Bill Norton through me, but equally possible she met him on her own."

11. Although some sources claim that Hellman was set to direct Alan Sharp's screenplay The Hired Hand, he has no recollection of ever being involved with this project.

12. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Two-Lane Blacktop DVD.

13. Ibid.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2001.

15. Sight and Sound, Winter 1970/71, p. 37, and audio commentary on the Two-Lane Blacktop DVD.

16. Carlye Archibeque's "On the Reissue Highway," Independent Reviews Site, June 2000 (available on the Internet) and Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 30, 2000. The actual running time of the released film is 102 minutes 18 seconds.

17. Marc Savlov, "Cars and Speed and Flight: The Continung Career of Director Monte Hellman," Austin Chronicle March 13, 2000, and Matthew Wilder, "Monte Hellman Is in No Way Bitter."

18. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 5, 2000.

19. Ibid.

20. Monte Hellman in Paul Joyce's documentary Out of the Blue and Into the Black (1987).

21. Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film (Elm Tree Books, 1977). p. 280.

22. See the "From Buddies to Lovers" chapter in Wood's Holllywood from Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia University Press, 1986). See also author's article on Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky in Cineaction 31, Spring/Summer 1993.

23. Wood, p. 229.

24. Richard Harland Smith, review of Two-Lane Blacktop's video release, Video Watchdog 58, April 2000, p. 26.

25. Out of the Blue and Into the Black.

26. Positif 50, May 1973, translated by Kent Jones, and audio commentary on the Two-Lane Blacktop DVD.

27. Improvised moments retained in the final cut include shots of the girl begging for change (filmed with a hidden camera and some real bystanders who did not realize they were taking part in a film) and the scene showing the girl and the mechanic alone in a motel room.

28. Sight and Sound Winter 1970/71, p. 37 and e-mail to the author, August 31, 2000.

29. Of relevance here is the racetrack sequence in Harvey Berman's The Wild Ride, which has a sluggish quality that is probably the product of directorial incompetence, but could just as easily have originated in Monte Hellman's editing, being the first expression of an impulse fully realized in Two-Lane Blacktop.

30. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 1, 2000.

31. Although Hellman was not directly responsible for the sequence, Helene's disintegration at the end of The Terror is traceable to similar pressures, the character collapsing under the weight of the various narrative roles she is required to support.

Chapter 10. Shatter

1. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 7, 2000.

2. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 12 and 13, 2001.

3. Brian Case, "The Full Monte," Time Out, January 1995, p. 15, and e-mails to the author, January 13 and 17, 2001.

4. "Playboy Interview: Sam Peckinpah," Playboy August 1972, p. 74.

5. Quoted in Marshall Fine's Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah (Donald I. Fine, 1991), p. 216.

6. Monte Hellman, quoted in Fine, ibid. "Monte Hellman Is in No Way Bitter," by Matthew Wilder, "The Full Monte" by Brian Case and Romauld Karmakar's film Hellman Rider (1989).

7. Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, January 8, 2001.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, November 24, 2000, and February 4, 6, 7 and 18, 2002.

9. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, April 5, 2001.

10. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, August 24, 2001 and February 7 and 8, 2002. Ulzana's Raid's director Robert Aldrich was also involved with Billy Two Hats: "I hadn't met the writer Alan Sharp then, but I loved the script. I thought it was one of the best Western scripts I'd read. We optioned it originally for six months, then for a further nine, but I couldn't get anyone to take it. I intentionally stayed away from the film, Gregory Peck being in it. Terrible casting" ("Interview with Robert Aldrich," Robert Aldrich edited by Richard Combs, BFI 1978, p. 46). United Artists' production of Billy Two Hats, directed by Ted Kotcheff, was released in 1973. According to Hellman, "My involvement preceded everyone else" (e-mail to the author, February 8, 2002).

11. Monte Hellman, quoted in Gordon Gow's "Moving Along with Love and Obsession" (Films and Filming, October 1974, p. 61), Paul Joyce's film Plunging on Alone: Monte Hellman's Life in a Day (1986) and e-mail to the author, December 8, 2000. 12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 9, 2000, and National Film Theatre lecture, London, January 3, 1995. Stanley Ellin's 1970 novel The Bind was eventually filmed by Richard C. Sarafian under the title Sunburn in 1979. Charles Grodin and Farrah Fawcett-Majors were the stars. The screenplay was by John Daly, Stephen Oliver and James Booth. When I asked Hellman about it, he responded, "I don't think I was aware of this film. In any event, I never saw it, nor was I connected with it" (e-mail to the author, January 10, 2001).

13. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 8 and 9, 2000, January 5 and 6, 2001.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 4, 5 and 6, 2001.

15. Hammer and the Shaw Brothers had already co-produced Roy Ward Baker's The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974).

16. Although the end credits identify Lily Li's character as "Mai-Mee," she is referred to as "Mai Ling" throughout the film (presumably a nod to Flight to Fury's Lei Ling, though Hellman insists this was a coincidence).

17. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Shatter laserdisc and e-mails to the author, December 9 and 10, 2000.

18. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, August 25, 2001.

19. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Shatter laserdisc.

20. Ibid.

21. John Wilcox's assistant, Roy Ford, was cinematographer for the fight in the Macao casino. On the laserdisc's audio commentary, Hellman notes that the quick Zoom backs during this sequence were a choice of the camera operators: "I didn't ask for them and, seeing them now, I'm surprised that someone's zooming, but that was just the way they covered the scene."

22. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, August 3 and 25, 2001, and audio commentary on the Shatter laserdisc.

23. Tony Rayns, "Threads Through the Labyrinth: Hong Kong Cinema," Sight and Sound Summer 1974, p. 139.

24. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 9, 2000.

25. Quoted by Tim Lucas in his review of Shatter's 1998 video release, Video Watchdog 47, p. 17.

26. The Roan Group's laserdisc (identical to Anchor Bay's video) is actually taken from a U.K. print which is missing a few seconds of violence during three scenes: the flashback sequence, the fight with Leber's thugs by the sea, and the fight in the casino. All prints bearing the title Shatter are cut in the same way, whereas all prints bearing the American title Call Him Mr. Shatter (such as Charter Entertainment's U.S. video) seem to be uncut. Apparently, a completely different edit was prepared for release in Hong Kong.

27. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, August 2, 3, 4 and 5, 2001.

28. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Shatter laserdisc.

29. Ibid.

30. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 9 and 10, 2000, and audio commentary on the Shatter laserdisc.

31. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 9, 2000.

32. "Moving Along with Love and Obsession."

33. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 9, 2000.

34. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Shatter laserdisc.

35. As Hellman reveals on the laserdisc, one of his most heated arguments with Michael Carreras arose when the producer insisted M'Goya should not be wearing a shirt under his jacket, which Hellman thought was "a kind of racist suggestion."

36. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Shatter laserdisc.

37. One might compare this sequence with the one in Flight to Fury where Joe Gaines cautiously enters his hotel room and discovers Jay Wickam inside.

38. Notice how Hellman uses Lily Li's lack of familiarity with English (she apparently spoke all her dialogue phonetically) as something positive. Like Annabelle Huggins in Back Door to Hell, the hesitancy, vulnerability and sensitivity with which Li invests Mai Ling's scenes give the character a warmth and humanity that stand in marked contrast to Shatter's cold masculine detachment.

39. It should be noted that this effect is created by the editing, in which Hellman did not participate, and that Hellman does not recall shooting the close-ups of pictures on the wall.

Chapter 11. Cockfighter

1. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 11, 2000.

2. Kent Jones, "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name."

3. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Cockfighter DVD (2000).

4. "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name." "She loves me, Omar" is not, strictly speaking, the final line of Cockfighter, since it is followed by a brief sequence in which Frank turns to Omar and says "Come on. You go collect the winnings and I'll go get that medal."

5. In his autobiography, A Man with a Camera, Almendros notes that Corman anonymously directed "about a third" of The Wild Racers.

6. Corman, pp. 200-201. According to Hellman, "I question Roger's memory in this quote. I'm sure I was repulsed by cockfighting, but I remember immersing myself in the experience so that I could convey the emotion to the audience. I may have walked out at some point to get some air, but Roger's description doesn't ring true to me. As Jack Hill states elsewhere, Roger's memory can't be trusted. And Roger wasn't around for much of the pre-production period, only coming to Atlanta for a couple of days a week or so before we were to start shooting" (e-mail to the author, February 7, 2002).

7. "Monte Hellman Interview: Exploitation or Existentialism?" by Ron Wells, November 6, 2000 (available on the Internet), Jon-Stephen Fink's Cluck! The True Story of Chickens in the Cinema (1981), p. 76, audio commentary on the Cockfighter DVD (2000) and "Monte Hellman: In His Own Words," Cashiers du Cinemart 7 (available on the Internet).

8. Charles Willeford's journal was published in 1989 (in a limited edition of 300 copies) under the title Cockfighter Journal: The Story of a Shooting. Shortly after the filming of Cockfighter, Willeford wrote a 17 page treatment entitled Last Flight from Hong Kong for Roger Corman, but this project (with which Hellman was not involved) was never made.

9. Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, January 8, 2001.

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 11, 2000.

11. Corman, p. 201. Hellman insists that "Cockfighting was not legal in Georgia. I'm not sure about Arizona, but I believe it isn't legal anywhere in the U.S. It may be tolerated in some places, like Georgia, where there are only infrequent arrests and fines" (e-mail to the author, February 7, 2002).

12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 10, 2001. These shots, one of which was used on the DVD's menu, can be found 50 minutes in, just after Jack Burke tells Frank of his marriage to Dody.

13. Monte Hellman in Paul Joyce's film Plunging on Alone: Monte Hellman's Life in a Day (1986) and Cashiers du Cinemart.

14. Jon Davison, e-mails to the author, May 2, and 7, 2001.

15. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 11, 2000. Anchor Bay's DVD is framed at 1.77:1, and actually includes less visual information at the bottom and especially top of the image than Embassy's full-screen video: "I chose the DVD framing, which is slightly taller than the theatrical release aspect ratio, but which matches the 16:9 widescreen TV ratio. The video includes information that was only included for TV release, and was not our intended framing" (Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 10, 2001).

16. The voiceover does not derive from Willeford's novel or screenplay, but was created by Hellman and Earl Mac Rauch: "We recorded some interviews with a lot of cockfighters and took a line here and a line there from these interviews to create his narration" (Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Cockfighter DVD).

17. "Monte Hellman Is in No Way Bitter" by Matthew Wilder, June 14, 2000 (found on the Internet, subsequently removed).

18. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Cockfighter DVD.

19. When Hellman read this comment, he responded, "I would not presume the boy was 'repulsed by the fighting chickens.' Far from it. I feel he's just bored (the action is rather redundant), and playing with whatever's at hand" (e-mail to the author, August 25, 2001).

20. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Cockfighter DVD.

21. As Hellman pointed out to me, "there's also a hat on the bed in the tent scene near the beginning of The Shooting, which upsets Willett" (e-mail to the author, August 25, 2001).

22. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind achieved much the same effect by importing concerns relating specifically to the climate of 1960s America.

23. Charles Willeford was clearly aware of the tradition to which he belonged. In his novel, he cites "a beat-up copy" of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as one of the few books owned by Frank Mansfield ("I suppose I've drifted down the river with Huck Finn & Co. fifty times or more").

24. Edward Gallafent, "The Adventures of Rafe Hunnicutt: The Bourgeois Family in Home from the Hill." Movie 34/35, Winter 1990. p. 60.

25. Richard Combs, Cockfighter, Sight and Sound Autumn 1974, p. 246.

26. The idea of masculinity as a lack, a minus compared to the plus of femininity, is most strikingly expressed in Edgar Allan Poe's The Man That Was Used Up (1839), wherein Brevet Brigadier-General John A. B. C. Smith, "that truly fine-looking fellow ... of a presence singularly commanding," with an air "which spoke of high breeding, and hinted at high birth," is revealed to be nothing more than an assemblage of artificially constructed props.

27. Compare the shots juxtaposing Andre with a flying bird in The Terror.

28. Combs, p. 247.

29. Tom Milne, review of Cockfighter, Monthly Film Bulletin 523, August 1977, p. 166.

30. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Cockfighter DVD.

Chapter 12. In Between Projects, 1974-1977

1. Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, January 8, 2001.

2. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 8, 2001.

3. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 25, 2001.

4. Hellman also managed to fool Joan Mellen, whose account of Fistful of Dollars in her 1977 book Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film is clearly based on a viewing of the television version. According to Mellen, "Eastwood, far from being appreciated for his manly skills, is in prison when the film opens. He is pardoned on the condition that he will clean up the corrupt town of San Miguel."

5. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 13 and 14, 2000, January 30, February 25, March 24 and April 19, 2001.

6. Ernie Farino, e-mail to the author, January 29, 2001.

7. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 13, 2000.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 12, 2000 and February 21, 2001 and Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron (1991).

9. One amusing piece of trivia: Baretta's pilot episode includes a scene in which Baretta is chased by someone driving a G.T.O. — the same G.T.O. Warren Gates drove in Two-Lane Blacktop (it was the property of Universal, who produced both Baretta and Two-Lane). Shots from this sequence, showing Baretta holding onto the car as it crashes through a fence, became part of the show's regular opening credits montage.

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 7, 2001.

11. Elisha Cook, Jr., and Robert Blake had also appeared together in James William Guercio's Electra Glide in Blue (1973).

12. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 12 and 18, 2000, January 28 and February 7, 2001.

13. Ed Begley, Jr., e-mail to the author, December 17, 2000.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 18, 2000.

15. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 19, 2000, February 6, 7 and 11, 2001.

16. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 13, 14 and 16, 2000.

17. There are three editors credited on Harry and Walter Go to New York: Fredric Steinkamp, David Bretherton and Don Guidice.

18. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 14 and 16, 2000.

19. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, April 4 and August 28, 2001. There is no connection between this project and Nairobi Affair, a television film (starring Charlton Heston and John Savage) directed by Marvin J. Chomsky in 1984.

20. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, April 8, 2001.

21. Ibid.

22. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, November 24, 2000.

23. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 9, 2001.

24. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 13, 2000.

25. Byron "Buzz" Brandt, the film's credited editor.

26. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 14 and 16, 2000.

27. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 14, 2000. In Patrick McGilligan's Backstory 3, the film's writer Ring Lardner Jr. claims that "the Columbia studio people specifically declined to consult with either of the two people who had the clearest idea of (Tom Gries') conceptions: the assistant director and me. Instead, it was edited by committee, with predictable results" (p. 227).

28. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 2, 2001.

Chapter 13. China 9, Liberty 7

1. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 8, 2001.

2. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 7 and 8, 2001 and "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name."

3. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 8, 2001.

4. According to Hellman, the complete joke is as follows: "During the Sino/Japanese war, a Chinese and a Japanese are passengers together on an ocean liner. They receive daily reports via short-wave about casualties. First day, killed: 35 Chinese, 3 Japanese. The Japanese smiles gloatingly. Second day, killed: 85 Chinese, 7 Japanese. The Japanese smiles again. Third day, killed: 239 Chinese, 32 Japanese. The Japanese starts to smile again, but the Chinese stops him: "Pretty soon, no more Japanese.' " The implication in the movie is the same. Two Chinese and one Japanese are being hanged. The significance was lost by the fact I didn't have any Chinese or Japanese extras, only Koreans. But as Rotunno rightly remarked, only the Chinese and Japanese would know the difference" (Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 9, 2001).

5. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 16, 2000, and January 7, and February 9, 2001 and Psychotronic 25, p. 81.

6. Monte Hellman, quoted in Marshall Fine's Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah (Donald I. Fine, Inc, 1991), p. 323; National Film Theatre lecture, London, January 3rd 1995; Romauld Karmakar's film Hellman Rider (1989); "The Full Monte," Time Out January 1995, p. 15, and e-mails to the author, December 16, 2000 and August 26, and 27, 2001.

7. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 16, 2000.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 16, 2000, and August 16, 2001.

9. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 16, 2000, and January 8, 2001.

10. Ironically, when China 9 played at the 1978 Edinburgh Film Festival, Richard Combs described the circus dwarf as "a gratuitous eccentricity representing the contribution of the Italian Western" ("There's No Such Thing as a Soft-hearted Gunfighter," Sight and Sound Winter 1978/1979, p. 35).

11. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 16, 2000. In the English-language version, Clayton responds to Catherine's question, "What'll you do?" by saying, "That's my problem. Show him your nuts." In Italian prints, Clayton's line becomes "Non faccio piani. Stavolta ha vinto lui" ("I don't make plans. This time it's him who has won"). Thanks to Alberto Pezzotta for pointing this out to me.

12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 16, 2000.

13. Taken from Hellman's description of Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive in the BBC series "Close-Up" (1995).

14. The effect seems to be modeled on the ending of Antonioni's The Passenger (1975): "Antonioni had bars that swung open, and once outside the window the camera (which was on a gyroscope) was moved to another crane. It took several days to shoot. We just used a Zoom lens from inside the jail cell, and slowly zoomed back and dollied back until we revealed the bars from the inside. It took no more than 30 minutes" (Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, March 13, 2001).

15. In Samuel Fuller (Secker and Warburg, 1971), Nicholas Garnham observes that "Quests and meaningless journeys abound in Godard, during which the protagonists find out as much about themselves as they do about their ostensible goal" (p. 158), a comment that is obviously relevant to China 9. See also P.L. Titterington's "Kubrick and The Shining" in Sight and Sound Spring 1981, pp. 117-121.

Chapter 14. In Between Projects, 1978–1987

1. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 4, and 5, 2001.

2. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 17, and 19, 2000, and NFT Lecture, London, January 3, 1995.

3. Monte Hellman, NFT lecture and e-mails to the author, December 17, 18, 19 and 20, 2000, and March 28, 2001.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 18, 2000.

5. Ibid. Lee Marvin's next film was Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (1980), another Lorimar production on which Gene Corman was a producer. Although several sources claim that Hellman directed second unit scenes for this film, he was not connected with it in any capacity.

6. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 17, and 19, 2000, and March 28, 2001.

7. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 19, 2000. Warners' prints also make some minor changes to the actual credits.

8. Richard Combs, review of Avalanche Express, Monthly Film Bulletin 546, July 1979, p. 144.

9. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 5, 2001.

10. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 20, 2000.

11. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 20, and 21, 2000.

12. Vernon Zimmerman, e-mail to the author, February 22, 2001.

13. Holt died before finishing the film, which, like Shatter, was completed by its producer, Michael Carreras.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, October 14, 15 and 16, 2000.

15. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, October 14, 2000. A complete list of the cuts Hellman made to The Awakening appeared in the author's "Choice Cuts" column in The Dark Side 90 (December 2000, pp. 22-23).

16. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 20, 2000.

17. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 20, 2000, and January 4, 2001.

18. "Monte Hellman Is in No Way Bitter."

19. Monte Hellman, quoted in Tom Thurman's film Warren Oates: Across the Border (1992), "Monte Hellman is in No Way Hitter," Movie Talk from the Front Lines, p. 16, Plunging on Alone and "The Full Monte," Time Out, January 1995.

20. Charles Willeford's Cockfighter Journal contains a completely inaccurate account of Bird's death ("Laurie ... leaped out of a window and killed herself in New York"). According to Hellman, "Although the overdose of valium was not accidental, Laurie expected Art Garfunkel to arrive momentarily and save her, and therefore didn't intend to die" (e-mail to the author, August 26, 2001). The actual details of Bird's overdose curiously parallel events in Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing, which Garfunkel had just finished filming.

21. Monte Hellman, interview on the Barnes and Noble website, January 30, 2001.

22. A curiously rephrased version of Hellman's statement appears in the English-language edition of Wenders' book The Logic of Images. The text had presumably been translated into German for this book's original publication, then translated back into English.

23. Monte Hellman, NFT lecture and e-mails to the author, December 21 and 22, 2000, and February 24, 2001.

24. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, August 1, 3 and 4, 2001.

25. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 20, 2000, and April 5 and 6, 2001.

26. Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, March 28, 2001.

27. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 20, 2000, and January 28, 2001.

28. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, pp. 397-398.

29. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 22, 2000, and January 22, and April 6, 2001.

30. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 23, 2001.

31. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, April 4, 2001.

32. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 22 and April 5, 2001.

33. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 22, 2000, and January 3, 2001. Orson Welles died October 10, 1985.

34. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 12 and 22, 2000.

35. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 22, 2000.

36. Paul Joyce, e-mail to the author, April 18, 2001.

37. "Two-Lane Revisited."

38. Jon Davison, e-mail to the author, May 1, 2001.

39. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 20 and 21, 2000, and January 1, April 30 and May 1, 3 and 28, 2001.

40. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, April 30 and May 28, 2001.

41. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 1, 2001.

42. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 1, and 3, 2001.

43. Jon Davison, e-mail to the author, May 1, 2001. It seems that none of the footage Davison shot of Kinney's death was used in Verhoeven's final cut. Although Davison claims responsibility for the final high-angle shot of Kinney — removed from Robocop's theatrical version by the MPAA, but restored to the laserdisc and DVD — he would appear to be misremembering, since a reel of outtakes included on MGM's UK DVD (released in 2002) contains a longer take of this shot, preceded by a slate dated 22-10-86 (when Hellman was still working on the film). On the slate, second unit cinematographer R. Anderson is listed as director, since Hellman's involvement was strictly unofficial. Other Hellman-directed shots (all from the conference room scene) included on this outtake reel show Kinney standing in front of the model city as squibs explode on his chest (look carefully and you can see Hellman in the background, partially obscured by the slate) and two close-ups of hands pulling wires from a computer.

44. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 1, and April 30, 2001.

45. Jon Davison, e-mail to the author, June 10, 2001.

46. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, May 28, 2001.

47. Jon Davison, e-mail to the author, May 7, 2001.

48. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, April 30, 2001.

49. Ibid. On the commentary track of MGM's DVD, Paul Verhoeven incorrectly attributes these shots of troops firing at Robocop to Mark Goldblatt: "A lot of this was second unit. The long shots with Robo and everything we shot, but then Mark Goldblatt came in and stayed another couple of days to get all the close-ups and all the things that take forever to stage.... That's all Mark Goldblatt's work." According to Hellman, "Mark Goldblatt was long gone. I did some of the stuff with Robo, as well. To be charitable, maybe Verhoeven was trying to protect me. Or maybe he forgot I was even there — he barely and grudgingly acknowledged me when I was there" (e-mail to the author, February 12, 2002).

50. Ibid.

51. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, May 28, 2001.

52. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 22, 2001.

53. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 20, 2000, and April 8, 2001.

54. Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, March 28, 2001.

55. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 20, 2000, and April 8, and 16, 2001.

Chapter 15. Iguana

1. The Encantadas had loosely inspired Allan Dwan's film Enchanted Island (1958).

2. Steven Gaydos, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD (2000). Alberto Vasquez-Figueroa's novel Ebano had already been filmed by Richard Fleischer as Ashanti (1979).

3. Franco Di Nunzio is best known for having co-produced two of Ruggero Deodato's most notorious films: Cannibal Holocaust and House on the Edge of the Park. There are some similarities between House on the Edge of the Park and Iguana, both of which show individuals dominating a helpless group. Coincidentally, Deodato would himself collaborate with Alberto Vasquez-Figueroa on an unscreened television series entitled Ocean (1990), shot on location at Lanzarote two years after Iguana.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, April 19 and August 26, 2001, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD and NFT lecture, January 3, 1995. Kent Jones' "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name" includes a garbled and inaccurate account of the mistranslation incident: "an interpreter mistranslated a letter from an Italian producer who did not want to do the film and made it appear that he was giving Hellman a green light."

5. Steven Gaydos, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD.

6. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD.

7. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD and e-mail to the author, December 23, 2000. Melville, following Captain David Porter's account of Patrick Watkins in Voyage Into the Pacific, has Oberlus sailing to Payta, convincing a "tawny damsel" to "accompany him back to his Enchanted Isle," and finally being jailed. Another account (from Coulter's Adventures in the Pacific) has Watkins inducing a Spaniard's wife (presumably the inspiration for Vasquez-Figueroa's Carmen) to accompany him, but being killed by the woman's husband while preparing to depart.

8. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 23, 2000.

9. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD.

10. Ibid.

11. Monte Hellman, NFT lecture and audio commentary on the Iguana DVD.

12. Monte Hellman, audio commentary on the Iguana DVD.

13. On the audio commentary of the DVD, Hellman recalls, "I got Steven Gaydos to locate Joni Mitchell and deliver her a tape of the rough cut of the picture." Mitchell was already familiar with Hellman's work, having visited James Taylor on the set of Two-Lane Blacktop (in which, according to Hellman, she can be briefly glimpsed).

14. According to the film's credits, "Oh, Love" was written by Miguel De Cervantes. Indeed, the lyrics can be found in Don Quixote (part 2, chapter 68, "The Adventure with the Hogs"). As Hellman pointed out to me, Cervantes took the verses in question from a Spanish translation of Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani, an edition of which was published as early as 1515, while the Spanish version appeared at Salamanca in 1551.

15. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 23, 2000. Di Nunzio's cuts include the funeral of Carmen's husband (as well as some later dialogue in which she explains that he died searching for treasure in the Amazon), the introduction of Alberto, Carmen's conversation with the priest and the dialogue about The Odyssey, as well as numerous brief shots and parts of shots.

16. Monte Hellman, NFT lecture and audio commentary on the Iguana DVD. According to Steven Gaydos, "Franco sold Cannibal Holocaust too quickly and missed a bonanza in Japan. So he held out when Japan offered $250,000 for Iguana. He could have recouped one-fourth of his budget in one territory. After they saw the movie, they didn't offer him a dime. It's called fighting the last war. A cautionary tale" (e-mail to the author, July 30, 2001).

17. Media Home Entertainment was a subsidiary of Heron HomeVideo, the company that purchased Iguana's presale rights for North America. According to Di Nunzio, Heron bought the film on the strength of Hellman's name alone: "They didn't even want to see the script" (Jennifer Clark, "New Monte Hellman Film Iguana Lifts Hopes of Producer," Variety, February 3, 1988, p. 39).

18. Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, April 17, 2001.

19. Monte Hellman in Romauld Karmakar's film Hellman Rider (1989).

20. The cut occurs 40 minutes 26 seconds in, just after Diego finds himself in a cave near a chained Carmen. The missing footage shows Diego wandering into the darkness. After a short pause, he screams. Oberlus then appears and delivers the following speech: "Diego is gone, Carmen. You have no one to turn to but me. My name is Oberlus, and I'm king of Hood Island. Those who obey me live, and those who don't die. And death is not the worst punishment I can inflict. If you keep our home clean and open your legs when I order you to, I guarantee you a life of peace for as long as you please me. Now it's time for you to receive your husband and king. Lie down and spread your legs."

21. Hellman often cites Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands (1951), based on the Joseph Conrad novel, as a particular favorite. As he told Beverly Waker in 1970, "I guess every film I've made has been either The Maltese Falcon or Outcast of the Islands" (Sight and Sound Winter 1970/71, p. 37).

22. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876, Penguin edition 1986), p. 204.

23. Claire Johnston, "Monte Hellman," Cinema (UK) 6/7, August 1970, p. 39.

24. There is actually a direct reference to Back Door to Hell in Iguana. In the former film, Sergeant Jersey enters a Japanese radio station, approaches a sleeping soldier, places one hand over the man's mouth and cuts his throat, causing blood to spray onto Jersey's fingers. The action is repeated in Iguana when Oberlus sneaks onto Gamboa's ship and kills a sleeping sailor. The only difference is that here the blood sprays onto Oberlus' face. When I mentioned this to Hellman, he responded, "I don't know about reference, but I was borrowing from myself" (e-mail to the author, May 22, 2001).

25. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (Penguin edition), p.7.

26. Carmen's relationship with Oberlus is strikingly similar to Kit's relationship with Belqassim in The Sheltering Sky, a book Hellman hoped to film: "Perhaps it's a theme that moves me on some unconscious level" (Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, April 19th 2001).

27. There is an echo here of John Cassavetes' Love Streams (1984).

28. For an even more disenchanted use of this convention, see the treatment of Scatman Crothers' character in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), a significant departure from Stephen King's source novel.

29. Monte Hellman, sleeve notes for the Iguana DVD.

30. When I asked Hellman about this, he replied, "I always like to get individual responses from the audience. But, if you're interested in what was in my mind at that moment (which was purposeful), I wanted to convey that it was neither a boy or a girl but rather a monster like him" (e-mail to the author, May 21, 2001). Asked during the recording of his DVD commentary if the baby looked like Oberlus, Hellman more ambiguously insisted, "That's what we have to answer for ourselves."

31. Robin Wood, "Rancho Notorious: A Noir Western In Colour," Cineaction 13-14, Summer 1988, p. 91.

Chapter 16. Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!

1. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 11, 2001.

2. The first sequel, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part II, was directed by Lee Harry in 1985.

3. The screenplay credit actually reads, "Screenplay by Carlos Laszlo, from a story by C. Laszlo, M. Hellman and A. H. Gorson." Rex Weiner and Steven Gaydos are credited as "creative consultants." According to Gaydos, "I asked Monte what he wanted, and he said he thought it should be funny. I said, 'Thank God, because the only thing I can do is make it funnier.' Which I think I did. And along the way gave some dimension to the Culp and Beymer characters and their relationship" (e-mail to the author, July 10, 2001).

4. Monte Hellman, NFT lecture (January 3, 1995), "Monte Hellman" (Psychotronic 25, p. 82) and e-mails to the author, January 11, June 10 and July 2, 2001.

5. Bill Moseley, e-mail to the author, November 19, 2001. According to Hellman, "Bill's comments about crying reminded me of two things. One, in addition to Bill, Harry Dean Stanton cried in Two-Lane, and Jack Albertson cried in Waiting for Godot. Every night, as a matter of fact. And two, Marlon Brando once told me that I couldn't be a good director because I was too nice. All the best directors, according to Brando, were sons o' bitches. Little did he know I had the ability to make strong men weep!" (e-mail to the author, November 19, 2001).

6. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 11, 2001. The Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise continued with Brian Yuzna's Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 (1990), whose only connection with previous series entries is a scene in which a character watches Hellman's film on television!

7. Kent Jones is quite wrong when he claims that "at a recent season of his work at the BFI [Hellman] would not allow it to be shown" ("The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name").

8. "Monte Hellman Is in No Way Bitter."

9. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 11, 2001.

10. See Psychotronic 25, p. 82.

11. According to Bill Krohn, "the idea of using The Terror came to Hellman late in the game; the script merely specifies that the characters are all watching a movie starring Boris Karloff" ("Letter from Hollywood: The Summer of Sequels—Hellman and the Others," English-language original courtesy of the author). Hellman had previously attempted to exploit the comic potential of blindness in an advertisement he wanted to make for Panasonic, which involved a blind man driving.

12. When I asked Hellman about this, he replied "I think it's Bill's comment, not mine. I don't think about the films I'm making while I'm making them, other than to wonder how I'm going to get finished on time. I enjoy reading comments like Bill's after the fact, while sipping a margarita. If I put jokes in my movies, it's without political intent" (e-mail to the author, July 4, 2001). Steven Gaydos agrees: "I came up with the line, but not as a comment on sequels. That is Bill Krohn's brilliance, not mine. It was from a book of sports quotations. Monte and I had more discussions about that joke than anything else I wrote for the movie" (Steven Gaydos, e-mail to the author, July 5, 2001).

13. Connelly and Newbury's long drive belongs with those journeys of doubtful purpose in which Hellman's films are so rich. Indeed, the image of Ricky successfully thumbing a ride, despite the fact that he is wearing a hospital gown and his brain is clearly visible, humorously evokes the various hitchhikers encountered in Two-Lane Blacktop. The ideal of freedom on the road which Two-Lane had already subjected to thoroughgoing critique here becomes the stuff of both parody and nightmare.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 11, 2001. Two clips from Silent Night, Deadly Night were used. The first shows a serial killer in a Santa suit murdering Ricky's parents, while the second has young Ricky watching the killer being shot down.

15. Steven Gaydos, who wrote this dialogue, claims that "someone told me they thought it was absolutely where Tarantino got the idea for the burger talk between the two hit men in Pulp Fiction" (e-mail to the author, July 5, 2001).

16. It is a nice irony that Rex Weiner, the film's original writer, makes a cameo appearance as a father pulling faces in order to scare his baby.

17. Bill Krohn sees the "hackneyed idea" of Laura's psychic powers as being "discarded in the film's closing scenes: trapped in the darkened cellar with Ricky, Laura does not use her psychic powers; instead she calls seductively for him to come and take her, and when he falls on her and embraces her, she thrusts a sharpened stick through his heart." However, according to Hellman, "I don't think Laura's psychic ability is a red herring. Her blindness and psychic abilities are merely preventing her from finding her true powers as a human being, which she does at the end through her 'dream' about her grandmother and her very real confrontation with Ricky. The powers aren't special — she just has to believe in herself, just like everyone" (e-mail to the author, July 14, 2001).

Chapter 17. In Between Projects, 1989-2002

1. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 13, and July 15, 2001, and "Monte Hellman," Psychotronic 25.

2. The English-language original of Hellman's Spirit of the Beehive text can be found in Projections 4 (Faber, 1995). He also contributed to Projections' "The Burning Question" section, discussing cinema after the millennium (Projections 2, 1993), the relationship between dream and film (Projections 3, 1994) and the greatest gift or worst legacy of the movies (Projections 4, 1995).

3. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 13, 2001. Hickenlooper's cut was released on laserdisc under the title Ghost Brigade.

4. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 17, and 18, 2001.

5. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 18, 2001.

6. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 18, and 22, 2001.

7. Bill Krohn, e-mails to the author, January 22, and 23, 2001. According to Hellman, Emma Webster "made several films for the History Channel: Spies in the Sky, about aerial espionage photography; a film about the first astronauts in balloons; a film about the Roswell alien invasion; a film for the series Secrets of War about intelligence organizations in various countries; a film about the real Robin Hood, etc. She's currently making a film for MTV called Drag Kings, about women who masquerade as men" (e-mail to the author, January 10, 2001).

8. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 18, and February 11, 2001.

9. Laurie Post, e-mail to the author, July 22, 2001.

10. "Monte Hellman Is in No Way Bitter."

11. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, February 8, 2001.

12. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, December 8, 2000.

13. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 22, and 23, and April 19, 2001.

14. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 28, 2001.

15. Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death (Faber, 2000), p. 481.

16. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 25, and 29, 2001.

17. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 24, 2001.

18. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 11 and 29, 2001.

19. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 24 and 25, 2001.

20. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 23, and 24, 2001.

21. Charles Eastman, e-mail to the author, July 5, 2001.

22. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 24 and 30, and July 23, 2001, and Time Out, January 1995.

23. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 26 and 29, 2001.

24. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, January 24, 2001.

25. Monte Hellman, e-mail to the author, July 24, 2001.

26. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 9, 2000, January 24 and May 21 and 28, 2001. Some sources incorrectly claim that Hellman was to direct 40 Lashes Less One, an Elmore Leonard adaptation scripted by Tarantino.

27. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 24 and 29, 2001, and February 8, 2002.

28. Tim LaTorre, "Vincent Gallo: Artist, Auteur, or Just Plain Annoying?" Available on the Internet.

29. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 25 and August 27, 2001.

30. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 24 and 29 and July 24, 2001.

31. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, January 24 and 29, 2001.

32. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, December 9 and 20, 2000 and April 8, 2001.

33. Monte Hellman, e-mails to the author, April 27, June 23 and October 31, 2002 and January 23, 2003.

34. Quentin Tarantino, "A Rare Sorrow," Sight and Sound February 1993, p. 33.

Filmography

Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith (based on an original screenplay by Leo Gordon, uncredited). Photography: Andrew Costikyan. Editor: Anthony Carras. Music: Alexander Laszlo (and Fred Katz, uncredited). Producer: Gene Corman. Production Company: The Filmgroup. Cast: Michael Forest (Gil Jackson), Sheila Carol (Gypsy Boulet), Frank Wolff (Alexander Ward), Wally Campo (Byron "Smith"), Richard Sinatra (Marty "Jones"), Linne Ahlstrand (Natalie), Christopher Robinson (The Beast/Man Sitting at Bar), Kay Jennings (Small Dove), Kinta Zertuche (Woman Sitting at Table, uncredited). Running Time: 65 minutes

The Wild Ride (1960)

aka: Velocity. Hellman was the editor (credited as "William Mayer") and uncredited associate producer of this film.

The Intruder (1961)

aka: Shame, I Hate Your Guts, The Stranger. Hellman directed some additional "nudie" scenes for this film (uncredited).

Beast from Haunted Cave (expanded television version, 1962)

Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Editor: Monte Hellman (uncredited), Cast (Hellman's additional scenes only): Michael Forest (Gil Jackson), Wally Campo (Byron "Smith"), Richard Sinatra (Marty "Jones"), Jaclyn Hellman (Jill Jackson, uncredited). Expanded Running Time: 72 minutes.

Ski Troop Attack (expanded television version, 1962)

Director: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Screenplay: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Editor: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Cast (Hellman's scenes only): Michael Forest (Lieutenant Factor), Richard Sinatra (Private Herman Grammelsbacher), Wally Campo (Private Ed Ciccola). Running Time: 71 minutes (running time of original 1959 film: 60 minutes).

Creature from the Haunted Sea (expanded television version, 1963)

Director: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Screenplay: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Editor: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Cast (Hellman's scenes only): Robert Towne (XK150), Anthony Carbone (Renzo Capeto), Betsy Jones Moreland (Mary-Belle Monahan), Beach Dickerson (Pete Peterson), Jaclyn Hellman (XK120, uncredited), John Fles (First Man Chasing XK150, uncredited), Stanton Kaye (Cuban/Second Man Chasing XK150, uncredited), Dale Wilbourn (Cuban Leader, uncredited), Richard Sinatra (Smiling Man, uncredited), Charles Macauley (Man with Walking Stick, uncredited), Karl Lucas (Bartender, uncredited). Running Time: 75 minutes (running time of original 1960 film: 59 minutes).

Last Woman on Earth (expanded television version, 1963)

Director: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Screenplay: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Editor: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Cast (Hellman's scenes only): Robert Towne (Martin Joyce), Anthony Carbone (Harold Gern), Betsy Jones Moreland (Evelyn), Karl Lucas (Bartender, uncredited), Jaclyn Hellman (Corpse on Beach, uncredited). Running Time: 71 minutes (running time of original 1960 film: 64 minutes).

The Terror (1963)

Directors: Roger Corman, Monte Hellman (credited as 'Location Director') and Francis Coppola (credited as "Associate Producer"). Screenplay: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill (and Francis Coppola, uncredited). Photography: John Nicholaus (Corman's scenes), Gregory Sandor (Hellman's scenes, uncredited) and Alfred Taylor (Coppola's scenes, uncredited). Editor: Stuart O'Brien. Music: Ronald Stein. Producer: Roger Corman. Production Company: The Filmgroup. Distributor: American International Pictures. Cast (Hellman's scenes only): Jack Nicholson (Andre Duvalier), Sandra Knight (Helene), Richard Miller (Stefan), Jonathan Haze (Gustav). Running Time: 79 minutes.

Dementia 13 (1963)

Director of Prologue: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Cast (Hellman's scene only): Dr. William J. Bryan, Jr. (Himself).

Bus Riley's Back in Town (1965)

Hellman worked on this film for a short time as assistant editor (uncredited).

Back Door to Hell (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Richard A. Guttman and John Hackett, from a story by Richard A. Guttman. Photography: Mars Rasca. Editor: Monte Hellman (credited to Fely Crisostomo). Music: Mike Velarde. Producer: Fred Roos. Production Companies: Lippert Inc. and Medallion Films. Distributor: 20th Century-Fox. Cast: Jimmie Rodgers (Lt. Craig), Jack Nicholson (Burnett), John Hackett (Jersey), Annabelle Huggins (Maria), Conrad Maga (Paco), Johnny Monteiro (Ramundo), Joe Sison (Japanese Capt.), Henry Duval (Garde), Ben Perez, Vic Uematsu. Running Time: 70 minutes.

Flight to Fury (1964)

Original Title: The Devil's Game. Title of Tagalog Version: Cordillera. Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Jack Nicholson, based on an original story by Fred Roos and Monte Hellman. Photography: Mike Accion. Editor: Monte Hellman (credited to Joven Calub). Music: Nestor Robles. Producer: Fred Roos. Production Companies: Lippert Inc. and Filipinas Productions. Cast: Dewey Martin (Joe Gaines), Fay Spain (Destiny Cooper), Jack Nicholson (Jay Wickam), Joseph Estrada (Garuda), Vic Diaz (Lorgren), Jaclyn Hellman (Gloria Walsh), Juliet Pardo (Lei Ling), John Hackett (Al Ross), Vic Uematsu, Lucien Pan, Henry Duval, Serafin Secat, Joe Dagumboy, Robert Areralo, Jennings Sturgeon. Running Time: 73 minutes (originally released at 62 minutes).

Beach Ball (1965)

Second Unit Director (uncredited): Monte Hellman. Second Unit Photography (uncredited): Gregory Sandor. Cast (Hellman's scenes only): Edd Byrnes (Dick Martin), Chris Noel (Susan Collins), Robert Logan (Bango), Aron Kincaid (Jack Williams), Mikki Jamison (Augusta), Don Edmonds (Bob), Brenda Benet (Samantha), Gail Gilmore (Deborah).

The Shooting (1966)

Working Title: Gashade. Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Carole Eastman (credited as "Adrien Joyce"). Photography: Gregory Sandor. Editor: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Music: Richard Markowitz. Producers: Jack Nicholson and Monte Hellman. Production Company: Proteus Films. Cast: Warren Oates (Willett Gashade), Will Hutchins (Coley), Millie Perkins (Woman), Jack Nicholson (Billy Spear), B. J. Merholz (Leland Drum), Charles Eastman (Bearded Man), Guy El Tsosie (Indian), Brandon Carroll (Sheriff), Wally Moon (Deputy), William Mackleprang, James Campbell. Running Time: 81 minutes.

Ride in the Whirlwind (1966)

Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Jack Nicholson. Photography: Gregory Sandor. Editor: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Music: Robert Drasnin. Producers: Jack Nicholson and Monte Hellman. Production Company: Proteus Films. Cast: Cameron Mitchell (Vern), Millie Perkins (Abigail), Jack Nicholson (Wes), Katherine Squire (Catherine), George Mitchell (Evan), Rupert Crosse (Indian Joe), Dean Stanton (Blind Dick), John Hackett (Winslow), Tom Filer (Otis), B. J. Merholz (Edgar), Brandon Carroll (Quint Mapes), Peter Cannon (Hagerman), William A. Keller (Roy), Neil Summer, James Campbell, Walter Phelps, Charles Eastman (Drummer), Gary Kent. Running Time: 82 minutes.

The Wild Angels (1966)

Hellman edited this film.

The Long Ride Home (1967)

aka: A Time for Killing. Hellman did some editing on this film (uncredited).

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967)

Hellman was this film's dialogue director (uncredited).

Head (1968)

Hellman edited this film's musical sequences (uncredited).

What's in It for Harry? (1968)

aka: How to Make It, Target: Harry. Hellman edited this film.

The Christian Licorice Store (1970)

Hellman had a small role in this film, playing a character named Joseph.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry, story by Will Corry. Photography: Gregory Sandor (credited as a "Photographic Advisor"). Editor: Monte Hellman. Producer: Michael S. Laughlin. Production Companies: Universal and Michael Laughlin Enterprises. Cast: James Taylor (The Driver), Warren Oates (G.T.O.), Laurie Bird (The Girl), Dennis Wilson (The Mechanic), David Drake (Needles Station Attendant), Rudolph Wurlitzer (Hot Rod Driver), Jaclyn Hellman (Driver's Girl), Bill Keller (Texas Hitchhiker), H. D. Stanton (Oklahoma Hitchhiker), Don Samuels (Texas Policeman #1), Charles Moore (Texas Policeman #2), Tom Green (Boswell Station Attendant), W.H. Harrison (Parts Store Owner), Alan Vint (Man in Roadhouse), Illa Ginnaven (Waitress in Roadhouse), George Mitchell (Driver at Accident), A.J. Solari (Tennessee Hitchhiker), Katherine Squire (Old Woman), Melissa Hellman (Child), Jay Wheatley (Man #1 at Race Track), Jim Mitcham (Man #2 at Race Track), Krag Caffey (Boy with Motorcycle), Tom Witenbarger (Pick Up Driver), Glen Rogers (Soldier #1). Running Time: 101 minutes.

Shatter (1974)

U.S. Title: Call Him Mr. Shatter. Directors: Monte Hellman (uncredited) and Michael Carreras. Screenplay: Don Houghton. Photography: John Wilcox and Roy Ford (Hellman's scenes); Brian Probyn (Carreras' scenes). Editor: Eric Boyd-Perkins. Music: David Lindup. Producers: Michael Carreras and Vee King Shaw. Production Companies: Hammer Film Productions and Shaw Brothes. Cast: Stuart Whitman (Shatter), Ti Lung (Tai Pah), Lily Li (Mai Ling, identified as 'Mai-Mee' on the credits), Peter Cushing (Rattwood), Anton Diffring (Hans Leber), Yemi Ajibade (Ansabi M'Goya/Dabula M'Goya), Liu Ka Yong (1st Bodyguard), Huang Pei Chi (2nd Bodyguard), Liu Ya Ying (Leber's Girl), Lo Wei (Howe), James Ma (Thai Boxer), Chiang Han (Korean Boxer), Kao Hsiung (Japanese Boxer). Running Time: 90 minutes.

Cockfighter (1974)

aka: Born to Kill, Gamblin Man, Wild Drifter. Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Charles Willeford (and Earl Mac Rauch, uncredited), based on his novel. Photography: Nestor Almendros. Editors: Monte Hellman (uncredited) and Lewis Teague. Music: Michael Franks. Producer: Roger Corman. Production Company: New World. Cast: Warren Oates (Frank Mansfield), Richard B. Shull (Omar Baradinsky), Harry Dean Stanton (Jack Burke), Ed Begley, Jr., (Tom Peeples), Laurie Bird (Dody White), Troy Donahue (Randall Mansfield), Warren Finnerty (Sanders), Robert Earl Jones (Buford), Patricia Pearcy (Mary Elizabeth), Millie Perkins (Frances Mansfield), Steve Railsback (Junior Hollenbeck), Tom Spratley (Milam Peeples), Charles Willeford (Ed Middleton), Pete Munro (Packard), Kermit Echols (Fred Reed), Ed Smith (Whipple), Jimmy Williams (Buddy Wagoner), John Trotter (Hansen), Lois Zeitlin (Lucille), Joe Bentley (Peach Owen), A.B. Gresson (Pete Chocolate), Bob Earl Hannah (Deputy Sheriff), Sara Rickman (Martha Middleton), Meg Brush (Mary Elizabeth's Mother), Oliver Coleman (Senator Foxhall), Donnie Fritts (Gangleader), Steven Gaydos (Robber in Nixon Mask, uncredited), Bobby Dunn (Gambler), Kim Bernard (Gambler), Ank Carleton (Captain Mack), Billy Abbott (Referee). Running Time: 83 minutes.

Fistful of Dollars (television prologue, 1974)

Director: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Screenplay: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Editor: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Production Company: United Artists. Cast: Harry Dean Stanton (Warden, uncredited).

The Killer Elite (1975)

Hellman was one of several editors who worked on this film.

Baretta. Episode: "A Bite of the Apple" (1975)

Original Director: Monte Hellman (uncredited). Replacement Director: Robert Douglas. Screenplay: Robert Janes and Paul Magistretti, story by Robert Janes. Photography: Harry L. Wolf. Editor: Robert L. Swanson. Music: Tom Scott. Producer: Howie Horwitz. Production Company: Universal. Cast: Robert Blake (Tony Baretta), Tom Ewell (Billy Truman), Ed Grover (Lt. Hal Brubaker), Karen Valentine (Holly), Scott Glenn (Dave Martin), Elisha Cook (Banjo), Paul Stevens (Artie Jay), Anne Revere (The Dragon Lady), Michael D. Roberts (Rooster), Titos Vandis (Mr Nicholas), Harry Caesar (Tucker), Ed Begley, Jr. (Ernie), Chino Williams (Fats), John Ward (Foley), Eleanor Zee (Clerk), Al Ferrara (Pasquale), Tom McCorry (Steve). Running Time: 49 minutes. Holly was originally played by Cristina Raines. None of Hellman's footage was used in the final cut.

Fighting Mad (1976)

Hellman did some editing on this film (uncredited).

Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976)

Hellman did some editing on this film (uncredited).

The Greatest (1977)

Hellman supervised this film's post-production (uncredited).

China 9, Liberty 37 (1978)

aka: Gunfighters, Clayton and Catherine. Italian Title: Amore, Piombo e Furore. Spanish Title: Clayton Drumm. Director: Monte Hellman (credited to Antonio Brandt on Italian prints). Screenplay: Jerry Harvey and Douglas Venturelli (based on an original screenplay by Larry Cohen, uncredited). Additional Dialogue: Sam Peckinpah (uncredited). Screenplay credited to Ennio DeConcini (from a story by Concini and Vicente Escriva' Soriano) on Italian prints. Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Editor: Monte Hellman (credited to Cesare D'Amico). Music: Pino Donaggio. Producers: Gianni Bozzacchi, Valerio De Paolis and Monte Hellman. Production Companies: Compagnia Europea Cinematografica/Aspa Producciones Cinematograficas. Cast: Warren Oates (Matthew Sebenek), Fabio Testi (Clayton Drumm), Jenny Agutter (Catherine Sebenek), Sam Peckinpah (Wilbur Olsen), Isabel Mestres (Barbara), Gianrico Tondinelli (Johnny), Franco Interlenghi (Hank), Carlos Bravo (Duke), Paco Benlloch (Virgil), Sidney Lassick (Sheriff's Friend), Richard C. Adams (Sheriff), Natalia Kim (Cassie), Yvonne Sends (Whore, identified as 'Prostitute' on prints distributed by Lorimar), Romano Puppo (Zeb), Luis Prendres (Williams), Helga Line (Cottrell's Wife), David Thompson (Jack), Tony Brandt, dubbed by Michael Forest (Jefferson), Piero Fondi (Tanner), Luciano Spadoni (Hangman), Frank Clement (Tom), Daniel Panes (Joe), Jose Murillo (Jimmy), Raphael Albaicin (Guard), Luis Barboo (Henry), Jerry Harvey and Douglas Venturelli (Brothel Clients, uncredited). Running Time: 102 minutes (Italian running time: 96 minutes).

An Almost Perfect Affair (1979)

Hellman made a brief uncredited appearance as himself in this film, shot at the 1978 Cannes Festival.

Avalanche Express (1979)

Directors: Monte Hellman (uncredited) and Mark Robson. Screenplay (Hellman's scenes only): Rospo Pallenberg (credited as a "consultant"). Photography (Hellman's scenes only): Bruce Logan. Editor: Garth Craven. Music: Allyn Ferguson. Producer (Hellman's scenes only): Gene Corman (uncredited). Production Company: Lorimar. Distributor: 20th Century-Fox. Cast (Hellman's scenes only): Lee Marvin (Harry Wargrave), Linda Evans (Elsa Lang), Mike Connors (Julian Haller). Running Time: 88 minutes. Though not actually credited, both Hellman and Gene Corman were thanked on the end credits.

Fade to Black (1980)

Hellman did some editing on this film. None of his work was used, and he was not credited.

The Awakening (1980)

Hellman recut this film for the American market (uncredited).

Inside the Coppola Personality (1981)

Director: Monte Hellman. Editor: Monte Hellman. Production Company: Sygma. Cast: Francis Coppola, Eleanor Coppola, Sofia Coppola. Running Time: 7 minutes.

Chambre 666 (1982)

Hellman was among the interviewees in this documentary, shot at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.

Untitled Documentary (1982)

Hellman worked with director Stephane Tchagadjieff on this uncompleted documentary about prostitution in Los Angeles.

Someone to Love (1987)

Hellman played a small role in this film, which was shot in 1985.

Code of Silence (1985)

Hellman reedited this film for television (uncredited).

Out of the Blue and Into the Black (1987)

During April 1986, Hellman was interviewed in his home for this documentary about BBS.

Plunging on Alone: Monte Hellman's Life in a Day (1986)

Director: Paul Joyce. Cameraman: Peter Harvey. Sound Recordist: Mandy Rose. Editor: Miranda Watts. Production Company: Paul Joyce Productions. Running Time: 86 minutes. A documentary shot in Hellman's home simultaneously with his contribution to Out of the Blue and Into the Black.

Robocop (1987)

Second Unit Director (uncredited): Monte Hellman. Second Unit Photography: Rick Anderson. Cast (Hellman's scenes only): Peter Weller (Murphy/RoboCop), Nancy Allen (Lewis), Ken Page (Kinney).

Iguana (1988)

Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Monte Hellman, David M. Zehr and Steven Gaydos. Based on the novel by Alberto Vasquez-Figueroa. Photography: Jose Maria Civit. Editor: Monte Hellman. Music: Joni Mitchell (credited to Franco Campanino). Producer: Franco Di Nunzio. Production Company: Film Production Enterprise Iguana. Cast (in order of appearance): Everett McGill (Oberlus), Michael Bradford (White-Bearded Sailor), Roger Kendall (Roger), Robert Case (One-Eyed Sailor), Fabio Testi (Gamboa), Jack Taylor (Captain "Old Lady II"), Maru Valdivielso (Carmen), Pierangelo Pozzato (Rodrigo), Alessandro Tasca (Priest at Funeral), Fernando Gebrian (Ibarra), Charly Husey ("Zombie"), Michael Madsen (Sebastian), Guillermo Anton (Alberto), Riccardo Navarrete (Priest in Church), Amaya Merino (Girl Who Sings), Joseph Culp (Dominique), Tim Ryan (George), Augustin Guevara (Knut), Fernando De Juan (Diego), Yousaf Bokham (Officer "Galatea"), Carmelo Reyes (Captain "Galatea"), Lam Coleman (Gamboa's Son), Jose Alvarez (Captain "Adventurer"), Juan Manuel Marquez (Carmen's Baby). Running time: 100 minutes (European running time: 92 minutes).

Hellman Rider (1989)

A 43-minute documentary about Hellman, consisting of an interview shot at the Amiens festival on November 22, 1988.

Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (1989) Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Rex Weiner (credited as "Carlos Laszlo"), from a story by C. Laszlo, M. Hellman and A. H. Gorson. Uncredited contributions by Steven Gaydos and Melissa Hellman. Photography: Jose Maria Civil (credited as "Josep M. Civit"). Editor: Monte Hellman (credited to Ed Rothkowitz). Music: Steven Soles. Producer: Arthur H. Gorson. Production Company: Quiet Films. Cast: Samantha Scully (Laura), Richard Beymer (Dr. Newbury), Lt. Connelly (Robert Culp), Bill Moseley (Ricky), Eric Da Re (Chris), Laura Herring (Jerri), Elizabeth Hoffman (Granny), Melissa Hellman (Dr. Newbury's assiatant), Leonard Mann (Laura's Psychiatrist), Richard C. Adams (Santa), Isabel Cooley (Hospital Receptionist), Carlos Palomino (Truck Driver), Marc Dietrich (Gas Station Attendant), Jim Ladd (Newscaster), Richard M. Gladstein (Detective), Tamela Song (Nurse), Michael Amen (Coroner), David Mount (Policeman), Tom Herod, Jr (Policeman), David Umstadter (Policeman), Joe Torina (Policeman), Tomczek Bednarek (Paramedic), The Weiner Family (Themselves). Running Time: 89 minutes.

Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron (1991)

Hellman was among the interviewees in this documentary.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Hellman was an executive producer on this film.

Warren Oates: Across the Border (1992)

Hellman was among the interviewees in this documentary.

Grey Knight (1993)

aka: The Killing Box, Ghost Brigade. Hellman edited this film.

Love, Cheat and Steal (1993)

Hellman was the original editor on this film. He is credited with "additional editing."

It's All True (1993)

Hellman was one of the original editors on this documentary. None of his work was used, and he was not credited.

Quentin Tarantino: Hollywood's Boy Wonder (1994)

Hellman was among the interviewees in this documentary, made for the BBC series Omnibus.

Close-Up (1995)

Hellman appeared in two episodes of this BBC series, discussing favorite scenes from Spirit of the Beehive, The Third Man and A Place in the Sun.

Buffalo '66 (1997)

Hellman is thanked on the end credits of this film, which he was originally supposed to direct.

The Westing Game (1997)

Hellman edited this film. Although not credited, he is thanked on the end credits.

Monte Hellman: American Auteur (1997)

A 14-minute documentary about Hellman.

LA. Without a Map (1998)

Hellman appears briefly as himself in this film.

Index

Content

Stevens Brad Monte Hellman: His Life and Films