Repo Man

Repo Man (1984) was part of a fascinating trend during the 1980s of foreign filmmakers seeing America through the eyes of an outsider and making films that identified with marginalized figures hanging out on the fringes of society. Some of these directors included German director Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas), Czech Ivan Passer (Cutter’s Way), the Franco-Swiss filmmaker Barbet Schroeder (Barfly), and Liverpool, England-born Alex Cox. Teaming up with legendary Dutch cinematographer Robby Muller, Cox offered a fresh perspective on Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis that has been the setting for countless films and television shows, by picking locations that hadn’t been seen all that often – “dirty, dingy locations in East L.A. and downtown” with all sorts of abandoning buildings and vacant lots, as the Los Angeles Times observed, naming the film one of the best set in the city in the last 25 years.


Repo Man came out at the height of the Reagan era and was notable for how it proved to be a sharp contrast to the prevailing trend of rampant commercialism with its generic branding of food and drinks and a protagonist that openly rejected material items and a traditional job in search of something else. The film follows the misadventures of a white suburban punk named Otto (Emilio Estevez) who we meet stacking cans of food in a supermarket while co-worker Kevin (Zander Schloss, who’s look and demeanor anticipated Napoleon Dynamite by two decades) sings the jingle for 7-UP to pass the time. For Otto this is the last straw and he quits his job after being confronted by his boss for not properly spacing the cans. He’d much rather party with his punk rock buddies until he catches his best friend Duke (Dick Rude) having sex with a girl he was just about to get with himself before going to get her a beer. Not only rejecting his crappy job but also his punk rock friends, Otto ends up wandering the streets aimlessly until he meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a veteran repossessor of cars, and who unwittingly gets the young man to help repossess his first car.

It’s Otto’s first introduction into a subculture he never thought about before and once he realizes what Bud is, rejects his offer to be a repo man. Otto soon finds out how true the old adage is that you can’t go home again when his perpetually stoned ex-hippie parents have given all of his European trip money to buy a place on Reverend Larry's Chariot's of Fire Honor Role to send Bibles to El Salvador. Otto starts working for Bud who takes the young man under his wing and shows him the ropes, telling him how to dress and how things work. Most importantly he tells Otto the Repo Code. The young man takes to the job instantly, getting off on the excitement of not just dealing with angry car owners but also the run-ins with other highly competitive repo men like the Rodriguez brothers – Napoleon (Eddie Velez) and Lagarto (Del Zamora). In some respects, the repossessing racket infuses a lot of the punk rock attitude as Bud famously tells Otto, “An ordinary person spends their life avoiding tense situations. Repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.”

"Not many people got a code to live by anymore," says Bud to Otto early on in Repo Man. This film is all about personal codes and philosophies. It seems that everyone has their own take on life, from Bud's Repo Code ("I shall not cause harm to any vehicle or the personal contents thereof, nor through inaction let that vehicle or the personal contents thereof come to harm.") to Lite (Sy Richardson), another repo man, who has his own code of conduct – he won’t ride with anybody unless they wear a seatbelt. However, Repo Man’s core belief, if you can call it that, comes from pseudo-guru/mechanic Miller's (Tracey Walter) Lattice of Coincidence philosophy. He views life as "a bunch of unconnected incidences," with a "lattice of coincidence that lays atop of everything." This is the structure that Cox imposes on Repo Man, creating several seemingly random events and characters that only occasionally interact with one another, but eventually all are linked together at the film's end.

Cox uses the initial scenes in the film as a springboard to introduce a variety of unusual characters and situations that contribute to the satirical commentary on everything from television evangelists to hippies to punk rock. Initially, he presents these situations as meaningless, random events: a Chevy Malibu driven by a lobotomized scientist with four dead aliens in the trunk that fry anyone who dares open it; three old friends from Otto’s punk days that rob various variety stores for kicks (“Let’s get sushi and not pay!”); a UFO cult dedicated to finding the dead aliens and exposing them to the world on Johnny Carson; and the FBI who is also in pursuit of the Chevy Malibu. Cox has all of these characters, and many more interact with one another throughout the film, keeping Otto and Bud as the focal point, illustrating that what seems like random, arbitrary events are really all connected. Lattice of coincidence indeed.

Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton are excellent as the student and teacher, playing well off each other with the former learning the ropes, and the latter doling out words of wisdom. Liberated from Brat Pack fare that he has been most closely identified with, Estevez is quite good as Otto, a directionless young man trying to find a purpose and thinks he’ll find it initially with the repo men but thanks to Miller discovers a higher purpose. Legendary character actor Stanton is in top form as veteran repo man Bud. His weather-beaten features and the laconic way he smokes a cigarette help convey Bud’s world-weariness. After seeing him in countless films as a supporting actor it’s great to see him in a substantial role. Repo Man only reinforced his considerable range as he plays a cranky guy who’s seen it all and has an opinion to go with it. This is in sharp contrast to his nearly mute and extremely vulnerable loner in Paris, Texas (1984).

The supporting cast is also excellent. Sy Richardson is one of the stand-out repo men, playing a cool guy with a badass attitude and a habit of self-mythologizing – he’s the John Shaft of the repossessing set. In one of the film’s reoccurring gags, he introduces Otto to a book that changed his life – a thinly-veiled jab at Dianetics entitled, Dioretix: The Science of Matter Over Mind by X. Rum-Bubba. Tracey Walter as space case Miller is also superb. In most films, Walter has been relegated to nothing roles, but here Cox gives him room to do his thing and he uses the time wisely presenting Miller as maybe the most intelligent guy in the film, or the most insane as he expounds his strange theories ("The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.") to anyone who will listen. He’s given an opportunity to deliver a fascinatingly wonky monologue about how UFOs are really time machines that comes across as a pisstake on New Age hokum but is ultimately embraced by Otto and proven true at the end of the film. According to Walter, this now famous speech was not in the script. Cox wrote it with no intention of using it but the actor told him, “Alex, you can’t be serious about not using that!”

Repo Man is chock full of hilarious bits pitch black humor, like when a highway patrolman asks a government agent what happened to his comrade who was vaporized in the film’s opening minutes to which she deadpans, “It happens sometimes, people just explode. Natural causes.” There are also all kinds recurring and throwaway gags, like the car with the dead aliens passing by the government truck pursuing it but the FBI agents fail to notice because they have engine trouble. Bud and Otto repeatedly and narrowly miss meeting the latter’s punk pals who have become inept criminals. There ‘s also punk rock band the Circle Jerks who make an appearance in the film as a cheesy lounge band (“I can’t believe I used to like these guys,” Otto says with disdain). One also has to pay attention to background dialogue to get a few funny gems, like the scene where Otto enters a hospital and over the intercom Dr. Benway is being paged for surgery. Benway was one of the main characters in William S. Burroughs’ surreal novel, Naked Lunch.

From the get-go, Cox also establishes a refreshingly uncompromising, bare bones approach and tone to the whole film that, unlike other supposedly anti-establishment films (Heathers and Pump Up The Volume), never lets up. This tone is established with a great punk rock soundtrack with the likes of Black Flag, Fear, and the Circle Jerks contributing songs and almost documentary-like photography from Robby Muller. Best of all, Cox isn't afraid to cast a critical eye on anyone, even poking fun at the film's own punk aesthetic in a scene where Otto's friend, Duke dies from a gunshot wound and leaves this touching soliloquy, "I know a life of crime led me to this sorry fate. And yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am." It's the old juvenile delinquent/punk cop out which Cox exposes so well as Otto replies, "That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk, just like me." Repo Man is unforgivingly anti-materialistic, anti-commercialism, anti-consumerism, and anti-establishment – a welcome relief from the cultural wasteland that was the mid-1980s.

After graduating from the UCLA film studies department, Alex Cox met British film director Adrian Lyne who, at the time, had only directed Foxes (1980). He told Cox that his next film was going to be about the impending threat of nuclear war. Cox scouted locations in Seattle and Vancouver for Lyne while also writing a screenplay entitled, The Happy Hour. Lyne never made the film and Cox subsequently ran into two friends from UCLA – Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy. They had formed a production company and each had made a film and were now making commercials and public service announcements.

Cox suggested that they produce feature films and that he should direct one of them. Wacks and McCarthy agreed and told him to write a script. So, he wrote The Hot Club, which he described as “a comedy about nuclear blast veterans and nerve gas thieves set in the early years of the 21st century.” It was budgeted but ultimately deemed too expensive and so Cox went off and wrote Repo Man based on his experiences living in L.A., working as a car repossessor and inspired by punk rock music and underground comic books that came out of San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s by the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. To entice potential investors, Cox drew four pages of a comic book based on his script with the notion of expanding it into an entire comic book but found it to be too much work and abandoned the idea.

Michael Nesmith, one of The Monkees and now a movie producer, read the script/comic book pages, liked it and showed it to then-head of Universal Studios Bob Rehme. Amazingly, he green-lighted Repo Man, offering Cox a $1.5 million budget on the condition that the film be delivered on time and resemble the original script. Repo Man was shot on location in L.A. over six weeks from late July to August 1983. The crew were asked to work for free for the final three days when the production went over budget and over schedule. For the most part the production was able to fly under the radar as the studio was focusing most of its attention on the big budget production of Streets of Fire (1984). Unfortunately, just as principal photography was being completed, Rehme was fired and the new studio head proceeded to marginalize anything his predecessor had been attached to, including Repo Man and Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983).

Repo Man had its world premiere at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival. When the film made its North American debut, it only played major cities. In frustration, Cox and his producers took out an ad in Variety reprinting the good review they gave it as “a challenge” to Universal to give their film a proper theatrical release. Fortunately, an executive at the studio by the name of Kelly Neal championed Repo Man, prolonging its theatrical life somewhat. The film’s soundtrack, composed almost entirely of West Coast punk rock bands, became quite popular with fans of the music and through word of mouth Cox’s film began to develop a cult following.

Repo Man received positive reviews from mainstream critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “What's best about Repo Man is its sly sense of humor. There are a lot of running gags in the movie, and the best of them involves generic food labels, of all things.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Repo Man frequently seems to be as zonked as Mr. Stanton's cocaine-sniffing Bud. It's not a big- budget, Ghostbusters of a movie, but it's very entertaining, and though it's rude in an R-rated way, it has the good taste never to promise more than it can deliver.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott called it, “a non-stop, shoestring trip with more adventures and a helluva lot more smarts than you'll find in most American movies. The ride in Repo Man may be bumpy and there may be a few wrong turns and a few false starts, but the scenery is always, well, scenic and, despite their nihilism, the travelling companions are enlivening and weirdly affirmative.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote, “The movie gives you the feeling that you’ve gone past alienation into the land of detachment … A movie like this, with nothing positive in it, can make you feel good.” In his review for the Washington Post, Gary Arnold wrote, “Cox gives the denizens of Edge City wacky ways of expressing themselves whether they're principals, passers-by or disembodied voices.” Most memorably, notable author Harlan Ellison reviewed the film and wrote, “Unless you are one of those dismal unfortunates who thinks Jerry Lewis is funny, you are guaranteed a filmic experience that can only be compared, in terms of a good time, with watching Richard Nixon sweat on television.”

Repo Man is a clever social satire that attacks consumer culture on a small scale. Many of the characters have brand names like Miller, Bud, and Lite, while all the products in the film are labeled "Beer" and "Food." Cox twists the whole idea of consumerism on its ear, commenting on how we have all become commodities of one form or another to be bought and sold. On one level, the film is a bizarre comedy with memorable dialogue (hence its cult film status) and a killer soundtrack (the title song performed by Iggy Pop no less), but look a little harder and you will find much more going on under the surface. Many obscure films are often labeled a "cult film," but this one deserves the label with its eclectic cast, a take-no-prisoners attitude towards social commentary and an unconventional plot structure.

 
NOTE: The bulk of the production info was taken from Alex Cox's official site and from the liner notes of the special edition DVD tin by Anchor Bay.

Escape from New York

John Carpenter is one of those rare filmmakers that entertains while also trying to say something about the society in which we live in. It is a tough balancing act that few can maintain but Carpenter's films make it look easy. From the special effects opus/remake drenched in paranoia of The Thing (1982) to the two-fisted diatribe against Reaganomics of They Live (1988), he hasn't been afraid to sandwich a thought-provoking message in between action sequences. In this respect, his films are much more than genre pictures; rather they critique the problems of contemporary society. And for its time, Escape From New York (1981) was no different. Carpenter's film examined the validity of the Presidency and the increase of crime and disguised it as a slick, futuristic race against time that was very prescient, going on to influence similarly-minded and looking films for years, including a fascinating sub-genre of Italian rip-offs.

Escape From New York is set in 1997 (?!) and crime in the United States has gotten so bad that Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison with one simple rule: "Once you go in, you don't come out." One night, the President's plane is taken over by terrorists who crash it into the prison. The President escapes but quickly becomes a prisoner of the inmates led by the Duke (Isaac Hayes). It seems that the President is carrying a vital piece of information that is to be delivered to a historical summit in Hartford. Enter Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive who has been captured by the government and is scheduled to be transferred into the prison. Instead, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) offers him a deal: go into the prison, find the President, and bring him and the information back in exchange for a full pardon. Sounds easy, right? There's a catch: Snake only has 22 hours to do all this because by then the conference will be over and the world will be thrown into chaos. As an incentive he has two explosive charges lodged in his neck to keep him focused on the task at hand. And with this enticing opening, the film kicks into high gear as Snake enters the world's most dangerous prison to find the President and save the world.

Carpenter had just made Dark Star (1974) and no one wanted to hire him as a director so he shifted his focus to screenwriting. Inspired by the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay in 1974. He didn’t agree with the film’s philosophy but liked how it conveyed “the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines. He was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the President. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it" because the general feeling was that “it was too violent, too scary, too weird.” And so the director went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the successes of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), Carpenter was in a position to make a motion picture with a big budget. He decided to revive his Escape script. But something seemed to be missing. "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." So, he brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) character and came up with the film's humorous conclusion that offset the bleak tone of the film with a skewed sense of satire.

The film's setting proved to be another potential problem for Carpenter. It is apocalyptic in tone: a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York City. How could Carpenter create this world on only a budget of $6 million (his biggest at the time)? As fate would have it, in 1977 there was a big fire in St. Louis that burnt out several blocks of the downtown area. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to these blocks at night and then proceeded to transform the burnt out remains into a New York City of the future. They even found an exact replica of Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot that Carpenter had never experienced before. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 am and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the Sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 pm, depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going the Sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." This approach paid off, creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere of a futuristic film noir.

In addition, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles and New York City. He and his film company were the first ones ever to be allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let Carpenter have free run of the entire island. He remembers, “We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble.” With Escape, the director created two distinct looks: “one is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England.”

The heart of Escape From New York lies in its main character: Snake Plissken. His cynical, world-weary attitude flies in the face of the earnest authorities who send him off to the save the world. Snake could care less. All that matters to him is "the next 60 seconds," as Kurt Russell commented in an interview. "Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." It is this kind of intensity that makes Snake such an interesting character. He is the ideal anti-hero ¬– intent on getting the job done and content on being left alone. Snake doesn't need anyone. Russell's performance clearly echoes Clint Eastwood's style of acting – the strong, silent type. Snake is a clever hybrid of The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. It is an amusing riff on Eastwood's two most famous characters, which is only reinforced by the appearance of Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in a few films opposite Eastwood). It is to Russell's credit that he makes Snake a character you want to root for, that you want to see win at the end. There is something charismatic about Snake that makes you automatically want to like him. What is so great about the character is that Carpenter and co-screenwriter Nick Castle remain true to him throughout. They don’t saddle him with a love interest or dilute his intensity by having him crack the occasional joke. Snake remains an unrepentant badass, the proverbial fly in the ointment with a surly disregard for authority right up to the last shot of the film.

And to think that the studio did not want Carpenter to cast Russell in the role. Up until then the actor had done a string of Disney films as a youth and worked with Carpenter on a T.V. movie about Elvis Presley. The studio did not see Russell as a tough action hero. In fact, Charles Bronson expressed an interest in playing Snake (Tommy Lee Jones was also considered). However, by Carpenter’s own admission, “I was afraid of working with him. He was a big star and I was this little-shit nobody.” Fortunately, the filmmaker had faith in Russell and Escape From New York continued a long-standing relationship between the two men – both personal and professional – that continues to this day.

Escape From New York also features a strong supporting cast of character actors like veteran thespian Harry Dean Stanton as Brain, the smartest man in the prison, and Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, a hack who stayed in New York even after it changed into a prison. Let’s not forget Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain’s girlfriend Maggie and yet she is anything but that, as the talented actress plays her character as the tough-minded female equivalent of Snake. The film contains an eccentric assortment of characters each of who get their moment to shine and this only enhances the enjoyment of watching Escape. One of the best things about it is how these characters interact with Snake and how he views them. The supporting cast also fleshes out more of this fascinating world. They continually offer all sorts of tantalizing tidbits that allude to Snake's colorful past, to conditions in the prison and how the inmates have created their own world.

Of interest to fans of Escape From New York is a ten-minute sequence that was cut early on. Filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, in order to utilize their futuristic-looking rapid transit system, it shows Snake robbing a federal facility in the desert and getting caught, which explained why he was being sent to New York City. However, test audiences didn’t like it and Carpenter took the sequence out. He said, “I had high hopes for this sequence – it was an introduction to the world and an introduction to the characters. Unfortunately, the audience didn’t care for it.” In retrospect, this scene may have over-explained what was later alluded to in the initial conversation between Snake and Hauk but it does offer even more, albeit brief, tantalizing glimpses of the world that exists outside of the prison.

Escape from New York received mostly positive reviews when it was released. Newsweek magazine felt that Carpenter had a “deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility – which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "[The film] is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season." However, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr felt that the film, “fails to satisfy–it gives us too little of too much.”

First and foremost Escape From New York is a fast-paced action film that is never dull to watch. However, the film also contains a dark, satirical edge that never falters, even right up to the film's conclusion. One the most frustrating problems of most films are how they end. No one seems to know how to end a film without relying on tried and true clichés. Carpenter's film does not fall into this trap. Escape may be an action film but it also makes some very interesting comments about crime in the United States that are still relevant even today. One could argue that Carpenter's film is almost intended to be a warning. That if things get any worse, the world that is depicted in this film isn't that far off. It is these sobering thoughts that make Escape From New York as powerful and entertaining today as it was when it first hit the screens in 1981.

SOURCES

Boulenger, Gilles. John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness. Silman-James Press. 2001.

Hogan, Richard. “Kurt Russell Rides a New Wave in Escape Film.” Circus. 1980.

Maronie, Samuel J. “On the Set with Escape from New York.” Starlog. April 1981.

Maronie, Samuel J. “From Forbidden Planet to Escape from New York: A Candid Conversation with SFX and Production Designer Joe Alves.” Starlog. May 1981.

Osborne, Robert. “On Location.” The Hollywood Reporter. October 24, 1980.

Yakir, Dan. “Escape Gives Us Liberty.” The New York Times. October 4, 1980.

DVD of the Week: Paris, Texas: Criterion Collection

Films made about the United States by foreign filmmakers are interesting because quite often they provide a unique perspective – someone from the outside looking in. German filmmaker Wim Wenders did just this with his film Paris, Texas (1984). It was a collaboration with acclaimed playwright and actor Sam Shepard and can be seen as a kind of lament for an era of the American west that no longer exists. It’s an American road movie about characters living on the fringes of society and was made during the peak of the materialistic Reagan era. Paris, Texas went on to win the coveted Palme d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and firmly established Wenders as an art house darling.

The film begins with an absolutely breathtaking shot of vast canyons of the American southwest while Ry Cooder’s mournful slide guitar plays. Walking through this harsh, desolate landscape is a bearded man in a suit and red baseball cap. The man’s name is Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and he makes it to a Texas bar before passing out from exposure to the severe climate. The doctor that treats him finds contact information for his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) who travels from Los Angeles to meet Travis at this remote town. The brothers haven’t seen each other in four years and when Walt arrives he finds Travis walking along a deserted stretch of road. We eventually learn that four years ago Travis and his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski) abandoned their child Hunter (Hunter Carson) and both promptly disappeared. Travis is reunited with his son and they decide to go looking for Jane.

With his scruffy beard, world weary eyes and dressed like a hobo, Travis could be a character right out of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Wedged between such diverse fare as Repo Man (1984) and Pretty in Pink (1986), Paris, Texas serves as a reminder of the impressive range of actor Harry Dean Stanton. For the first 26 minutes of the film he says nothing, relying instead on his expressive eyes and body language to convey how Travis is feeling. Compared to Travis, Walt is a lot chattier and Dean Stockwell plays him as a down-to-earth working stiff. In some respects, he’s our audience surrogate, trying to decipher the enigmatic Travis and figure out his story. This role turned out to be a career resurgence for the veteran character actor who went on to memorable turns in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and Blue Velvet (1986).

Paris, Texas features some absolutely gorgeous cinematography by Robby Muller (Down by Law). For example, there is a great shot of Walt at a gas station bathed in green light while in the background the sky is red. It is a striking contrast in colors. Another memorable shot is of an orange, brown stormy sky at sunset as seen through the windshield of Walt’s car. Muller and Wenders’ compositions are fantastic as they illustrate how the characters relate to their environment. For example, in the opening scenes, Travis is constantly dwarfed by the vastness of the desert.

Paris, Texas is about how more than just geography can keep people apart. There’s the emotional distance too. This is a film about two people who got lost on purpose. They dropped out of mainstream society and lost touch with each other and their son. How does this happen and why? These are some of the questions that the film examines as Travis and Jane sift through the emotional wreckage left behind from their damaged relationship.

Special Features:

The first disc features an audio commentary by filmmaker Wim Wenders. The director talks about how he and Ry Cooder decided to use the music that is in the Paris, Texas. Wenders also talks about the origins of the film and working with Sam Shepard on the screenplay. The director talks about the genesis of the film’s title and how it relates to Travis. Wenders tells many filming anecdotes on this informative track.

Also included is a theatrical trailer.

The second disc starts off with an interview with Wenders from 2001. He had wanted to make a film about America but hadn’t done it to his satisfaction with his previous films. It wasn’t until Paris, Texas that he felt like he had achieved this goal. It was also the first time he worked in a spontaneous fashion without a pre-planned shot list.

“The Road to Paris, Texas” is a collection of interviews with key collaborators of Wenders over the years. They all speak admiringly of the man. Wenders talks about the influence of rock ‘n’ roll and road movies on his work.

Also included are interviews with both Claire Denis and Allison Anders, who worked on the film as first assistant director and production assistant respectively. They went on to become directors in their own right. They give their impressions of Wenders, how they met him and what it was like to work with the filmmaker. In addition, Anders reads from the diary that she kept while working on the film.

“Cinema Cinemas” is a segment from an April 2, 1984 episode of this French television programming featuring Wenders and composer Cooder working on the score for Paris, Texas. Wenders talks about his love of rock ‘n’ roll music. It was a dream of his to have Cooder work on his film.

There is a collection of deleted scenes with optional commentary by Wenders. We see more of the German doctor taking care of Travis at the beginning of the film. Most of this footage is bits and pieces that just didn’t fit and were ultimately cut. Also included is fantastic Super 8 mm footage, some of which was used in the flashback sequences so as to resemble old home movies.

Finally, there are “Galleries,” one a collection of photographs that Wenders took while location scouting in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. The other gallery is a nice collection of on behind-the-scenes stills taken on location.