Walker

“People don’t go to the movies to be enlightened. They go to the movies to have a good time. If some social enlightenment occurs as a result of seeing Walker, seeing the faces of Nicaraguans, seeing the country, getting a feeling for the country, that’s good. Then we’ve achieved something.” – Alex Cox

Walker (1987) is an unconventional biopic that effectively burned any remaining bridges Alex Cox had with Hollywood. He took a modest amount of studio money and made a film about William Walker, an opportunistic American who invaded Nicaragua and became its president from 1855 to 1857, instituting slavery, which didn’t go over too well with the locals, and he was eventually executed in 1860. Cox wasn’t interested in making a traditional biopic and, with screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop), decided to include the occasional modern anachronism (Walker appears on the covers of Newsweek and Time; a Mercedes drives past a horse-drawn carriage) to give the film a satirical howl of protest against the Reagan administration’s support of the Contra war against the democratically elected Sandinista government. This did not endear Cox to his studio backers.

Stylistically, Cox was influenced by the films of Sam Peckinpah as the opening slow-motion carnage so lovingly demonstrates (he even has the director’s name on a grave in a later scene). The film begins with Walker’s (Ed Harris) unsuccessful attempts to colonize the Mexican territories of Sonora and Baja. He is put on trial back in the United States and argues that he was only exercising his God-given right of Manifest Destiny. He believes that expansion of the U.S. is its future and he is merely a patriot doing his duty. His girlfriend, Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin), sees through his posturing and argues that Manifest Destiny is just another way of condoning slavery.

However, powerful capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle) asks Walker to invade Nicaragua and restore order to a country torn apart by civil war so that he can continue to exploit its transportation routes. At first, Walker turns him down, but after enduring a personal tragedy, he needs something to fill the void and accepts Vanderbilt’s proposal. Walker recruits 58 men that the press dubs, “Walker’s Immortals,” and heads for Central America. The film documents Walker’s gradual descent into madness as he becomes drunk on power, delusional, believing he is control, that what he is doing in right, even when, in reality, this is not the case.

Cox clearly equates the self-righteous Walker, who sometimes refers to himself in the third person, with politicians like Ronald Reagan who believe that it is their moral right to “liberate” other countries in order to “save them” when in actuality they are exploiting their resources and doing irreparable damage to its people. How little things have changed. Walker is as arrogant and blithely dimwitted as George W. Bush and his pointless mission to liberate Iraq, a country, like Nicaragua, at war with itself. In came the Americans to try and fix things, only to make it worse.

With its Latin American beats, Joe Strummer’s score plays over the film’s opening carnage as people fly through the air in slow-motion and Walker’s men are systematically picked off by overwhelming forces. Shooting on location in Nicaragua and the rather exotic score do a great job of transporting us back in time. The nightmarish minimalism of the music in the scene where Walker’s men are slaughtered while he advances unscathed is incredible and adds to the surreal nature of the scene as the American acts as if he’s merely out for a afternoon stroll while his men die bloody deaths all around him. The film’s show-stopping sequence is the burning of the town that is Walker’s headquarters with Strummer employing a poignant piano sound and a soulful guitar that contrasts the madness of Walker’s actions and the end of his regime. Simply put, what Strummer does on this soundtrack is miles away from anything he did with The Clash and makes one wish he had tried his hand at more film scores.

Cox sets an absurdist tone and never looks back. This is evident in Walker’s first battle in Nicaragua. As his men are gunned down in the street, he brazenly walks through seemingly oblivious to the carnage going on around him. He takes refuge in a building and plays the piano as bullets whiz around him. It’s a crazy scene, but it works because of Ed Harris’ conviction. He portrays Walker as a self-important, power-hungry madman with characteristic charismatic intensity. Cox does some really unusual things in this film, like having an entire scene between Walker and his deaf girlfriend conducted completely in sign language!

Liverpool-born Alex Cox first became interested in the country of Nicaragua when he became fascinated by how the media portrayed the revolution that took place there in the late 1970s. At first, the Sandinista rebels were portrayed favorably and then this changed dramatically. Cox visited Nicaragua in 1984 during the National Election campaign for which Daniel Ortega became president to see if conditions were as bad as the American media had reported. He discovered that this wasn’t the case. He was persuaded to return to the country by two wounded soldiers from the Sandinista Army.

While he was there, Cox saw a sign on the wall of a church in Granada that said it was burned down in the 1850s by the retreating army of William Walker. This intrigued Cox and when he returned home, read an article on United States foreign policy in Central America in Mother Jones magazine, and decided to bring the Walker’s story to the big screen. A history professor from the University of California leant Cox a library card so he could do more research and “the more I read about him the more bizarre this seemed.” Furthermore, Cox realized that “you couldn’t invent a character like Walker. He was much too incredible. He was a complete lunatic: a strong believer in chivalry, a murderer, a pathological liar, a criminal, totally fearless, full of heroic and noble qualities, and mad.”

Cox hired Rudy Wurlitzer to write the screenplay because, according to the director, “he understands American guys and the mad impulse that drives certain Americans to be great men.” He wasn’t interested in making a long, respectful historical drama a la Masterpiece Theatre because Walker “leads a disastrous misadventure. He’s a pretty bad guy. I didn’t think it was possible to approach it in this normal, historical, respectful style.”

Cox was given a budget of $6 million and decided to shoot most of the film in Granada. Amazingly, he got the cooperation of the Sandinista government and the Roman Catholic Church. One of the benefits of shooting in Nicaragua was that the dying economy received a significant boost by the presence of the production. 300 local carpenters were hired to build sets, 6,000 people were hired as extras and the army supplied security guards and a Soviet-built MI018 transport helicopter that was used in the film. One of the conditions of being allowed to film in Nicaragua was that the screenplay was edited by the country’s vice president Sergio Ramirez and the Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, who were also a novelist and a poet respectively. Both men, along with the Minister of Education, the country’s Interior Minister, and a military commander would occasionally visit the set.

Electricity poles in the plaza were torn down, leaving homes without light. Some families were left temporarily without a telephone because the production needed their lines and the government couldn’t afford to install new ones. The central square was covered with several inches of dirt in order to recreate 1850s conditions. Unfortunately, two people were accidentally killed during production, both in separate vehicular-related incidents. For one of the deaths, the production paid for the funeral and compensated the family. The shooting conditions were difficult because of the many fires that were set by the locals, which made the air thick and hard to breath.

Cox cast Ed Harris as Walker. He was drawn to the challenge of playing someone “who has incredible moral convictions but turns into such an evil person in the name of spreading democracy.” He was also drawn to the script’s politics, claiming to be anti-Contra and anti-intervention in Nicaragua. He saw making a film there as a way to possibly stop the bloodshed. To get into character, Harris led the entire cast on a ten-mile forced march through the Nicaraguan countryside.

Even after filming had ended, Cox stayed in Granada, editing Walker. He said, “I think we have kind of a duty not to just be the rich gringos and come down here and spend eight weeks and then disappear.” To provide the film’s eclectic soundtrack, Cox brought on board his friend and frequent collaborator Joe Strummer. They had worked together previously on Sid and Nancy (1986) and Straight to Hell (1987), contributing songs to their respective soundtracks. The Clash frontman had wanted to compose an entire score to a film and Walker afforded him such an opportunity. After filming his small part in the film, Strummer would go back to his room and record bits of music onto a four-track cassette using an acoustic guitar and a little plastic synthesizer with guitarist Zander Schloss. Both men became influenced by local music played in bars, which was a mix of reggae, calypso and Brazilian music.

The original deal Cox made with Universal Pictures was to give Walker a traditional theatrical release and to that end felt that if he could make a satirical western a la Blazing Saddles (1974), it would appeal to a mainstream audience. At some point, the studio realized that they had a strange film on their hands and began treating it as an art house oddity, giving it a very limited release with little advertising. Walker received mostly negative to mixed reviews with Roger Ebert leading the charge. He gave the film a resounding thumbs down and felt that Cox didn’t “seem to have a clue about what he wants to do or even what he has done. Although the ads for Walker don’t even hint it, this movie is apparently intended as a comedy or a satire. I write ‘apparently’ because, if it is a comedy, it has no laughs, and if a satire, no target.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Walker is a witty, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. Without being solemn, it’s deadly serious … Walker is something very rare in American movies these days. It has some nerve.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen criticized Cox’s direction: “His scenes have no shape, his characters are stick figures, the wit is undergraduate, and his soggy set pieces of slow-motion carnage are third-rate Peckinpah imitations.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “Cox exposes the limitations of historical drama in Walker with a calculated disregard of its conventions.” Finally, the Washington Post’s Rita Kempley found it to be as “gross as it is muddled as it is absurd.”

In some respects, Walker fuses the pastoral epic scope of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) with Cox’s own irreverent aesthetic. He actually had the chutzpah to make the film in Nicaragua with the approval of the Sandinista government, which demonstrates just how far he was willing to put his money (or rather the studio’s) where his mouth was. The filmmaker adopts a very playful attitude as he gleefully deconstructs the biopic (much as he shredded the spaghetti western and gangster film genres in Straight to Hell) in such an off-kilter way that had never been done before and rarely attempted since (perhaps Kevin Spacey’s take on Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea or Tony Scott’s gonzo take on Domino Harvey in Domino). However, Walker remains a cinematic oddity as he applies the punk aesthetic to the biopic, making a political statement about the abuse of power that is eerily relevant today as it was in 1987.

SOURCES

Dafoe, Chris. “Hollywood Knocks on Strummer’s Door.” Globe and Mail. December 11, 1987.

Ford, Peter. “Desperado with a Mission.” Financial Times. August 22, 1987.

Grove, Lloyd. “Hollywood Invades Nicaragua.” Washington Post. August 20, 1987.

Lim, Dennis. “Alex Cox, Revolutionary.” Los Angeles Times. February 17, 2008.

Murray, Noel. “Alex Cox.” A.V. Club. March 13, 2008.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. “Cox to Show Walker Film in Nicaragua.” The New York Times. December 4, 1987.

Yakir, Dan. “For Harris, The Appeal was Political.” Globe and Mail. December 11, 1987.

Two-Lane Blacktop

In anticipation of its release later that year, Esquire magazine ran a substantial piece on Two-Lane Blacktop, boldly proclaiming it to be the best film of 1971. Despite such high praise from a prestigious periodical, the studio refused to promote the film and it was barely released theatrically. Perhaps the studio felt that the minimalist plot and characterization, coupled with the existential vibe, wouldn’t appeal to a mainstream audience. However, over the years Two-Lane Blacktop has developed a small, but loyal following among car enthusiasts who fetishized the 1955 Chevy and 1970 Pontiac GTO featured so prominently that they deserve top billing alongside the lead actors. The film also found an audience with people who dug other nihilistic road movies like Easy Rider (1969) and Vanishing Point (1971).

Two-Lane Blacktop’s plot (if you can call it that) follows two young men who race other cars in their customized ’55 Chevy. We never find out their names and the credits list them simply as the Driver (James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson). Early on, they pick up the Girl (Laurie Bird) in Santa Fe, New Mexico and cross paths with a rival driver (Warren Oates) in a ’70 Pontiac GTO. The Driver and the Mechanic say little to one another and when they do it’s only about cars – their own and others. The Girl, in comparison, is infinitely chattier. Eventually, they meet GTO at a gas station and challenge each other to a cross-country race to Washington, D.C. for “pink slips,” the title to the loser’s car. GTO is gregarious to a fault, scaring off a hitchhiker by repeating the same stories twice and telling his life story, which changes with every new person he picks up.

All these guys are is reflected in their cars and the open road that stretches out in front of them. Even though they’re racing against each other, they help each other out, sharing food and offering mechanical advice. They may be polar opposites personality-wise, but they share a love of going fast in their cars – it’s the fuel that keeps them going. The Driver, the Mechanic and the Girl are enigmatic blank slates and this allows us to imprint on them our ideas and theories as to their backstories and motivation for what they do. If they give Two-Lane Blacktop its existential vibe then it is GTO who gives the film its humanity with Warren Oates’ genial performance. He welcomes hitchhikers and delights in telling the same stories, inflating his own ego.

Director Monte Hellman’s camerawork is very minimalist, almost documentary-like in how matter-of-factly it depicts the race, the places and the people that they encounter along the way. For example, the near-dialogue-less prologue depicts illegal street racing that is eventually broken up by the police. Later on in the film, the Driver and the Mechanic come across a car accident and the Mechanic’s first instinct is to check their car before he sees if the others are okay. With all of the car-speak and loving shots of fast, muscle cars, Two-Lane Blacktop is a car lover’s dream. It has also become a nostalgia piece as they just don’t make cars like the ones in this film anymore. This film also immerses us in the car-racing culture of its day like no other film then or since.

The two cars travel across the country through desolate landscapes. They travel on backroads and through small towns, existing on the margins of society. Director Monte Hellman and screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer have an innate understanding of the expansive nature of the United States while traveling through it by car. I would love to see these guys team up again for an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I think that they could do the book justice because they also understand the loneliness and camaraderie that is associated with cross-country travel.

Two-Lane Blacktop originated with producer Michael S. Laughlin. He had a two-picture deal with Cinema Center Films and convinced them to pay Will Corry $100,000 for his screenplay about two men, one black and one white, who drive across the country followed by a young girl. The script was inspired by his own cross-country journey in 1968. Returning from Italy after a film project had fallen through; Hellman was introduced to Laughlin and presented with two films, one of which was Two-Lane Blacktop. Laughlin asked Hellman to direct and he agreed on the condition that he could hire another writer to give the script a polish.

Hellman found Corry’s story “interesting but not fully realized.” A mutual friend recommended underground writer Rudolph Wurlitzer. Hellman read and enjoyed his novel Nog, “a strange ‘60s road novel,” according to its author, and was impressed enough to hire Wurlitzer. The writer began reading Corry’s script but gave up on page five. Hellman and Wurlitzer agreed to keep the basic idea of the cross-country race as well as the Driver, the Mechanic and the Girl characters. To prepare for Two-Lane Blacktop, Wurlitzer stayed in a Los Angeles motel and read car magazines. He also hung out in the San Fernando Valley with several obsessive mechanics and “stoner car freaks.” He didn’t know much about cars but did “know something about being lost on the road.” Wurlitzer wrote a new screenplay in four weeks and invented the GTO character as well as all of the others.

In February 1970, Hellman did some location scouting and was a few weeks from principal photography when Cinema Center suddenly canceled the project. Hellman shopped the script around to several Hollywood studios that liked it but wanted a say in the casting. However, a young executive at Universal Pictures by the name of Ned Tanen gave Hellman $850,000 to make the film his way, including final cut. At the time, Tanen was quite the maverick, overseeing some pretty adventurous fare with films like Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971). According to Hellman, at the time Universal was trying to “figure out what it was that made independent films, particularly Easy Rider, successful.”

Hellman saw James Taylor’s picture on a billboard on the Sunset Strip and contacted him, inviting the musician to do a screen test which was impressed the filmmakers. Four days before principal photography was to begin, the role of the Mechanic had not been cast. Hellman was desperate and screen-tested people he met in garages. A friend of Fred Roos, the film’s casting director, suggested Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. Hellman chose the musician because he felt that Wilson “had lived that role, that he really grew up with cars.”

Principal photography began on August 13, 1970 in Los Angeles and lasted for six weeks with a crew of 30-35, three matching Chevys, and two matching GTOs traveling through the southwest towards Memphis, Tennessee. Hellman took an unconventional approach with his three non-actors by not letting them read the script. Instead, he gave the pages of dialogue on the day of shooting. They felt uncomfortable with this approach but it achieved the desired affect that Hellman was after. In particular, James Taylor, used to having control when it came to his music, was upset at this approach. Hellman finally relented and allowed Taylor to read the script in its entirety but he never got around to it. Hellman also insisted on actually going across country because he felt that the only way to convince the audience that the characters raced across the United States was to actually do it. He said, “I knew it would affect the actors – and it did, obviously. It affected everybody.”

Hellman shot almost the entire script as written and edited the film himself. He said, “I can’t look over someone’s shoulder. I need my hand on the brake.” The first cut of the film was three-and-a-half hours long. He had final cut but was contractually obligated to deliver a film that was no longer than two hours. The final version ran 105 minutes.

In their April 1971 cover story, Esquire magazine proclaimed Two-Lane Blacktop “Film of the Year” and published Wurlitzer’s script in its entirety. Hellman thought that this would be good publicity but in retrospect would not have done it because “I think it raised people’s expectations. They couldn’t accept the movie for what it was.” There was a lot of advanced buzz about the film but Lou Wasserman, then head of Universal, saw and hated it. He refused to promote the film. It opened in New York City on the fourth of July without one single advertisement in the newspapers.

Two-Lane Blacktop received mixed to positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and found the characters to be “too impersonal, though, and that's bothersome. After half an hour or so, the fact that we're told so little about their inner workings becomes a distraction. There doesn't seem to be a good reason for making them so awesomely one-dimensional,” but did enjoy “the sense of life that occasionally sneaked through, particularly in the character of G.T.O. He is the only character who is fully occupied with being himself (rather than the instrument of a metaphor), and so we get the sense we've met somebody.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby felt that it was a “far from perfect film (those metaphors keep blocking the road), but it has been directed, acted, photographed and scored (underscored, happily) with the restraint and control of an aware, mature filmmaker.” Time magazine’s Jay Cocks wrote, “Few film makers have dealt so well or so subtly with the American landscape. Not a single frame in the film is wasted. Even the small touches—the languid tension while refueling at a back-country gas station or the piercing sound of an ignition buzzer—have their own intricate worth.” The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman wrote, “Two-Lane Blacktop is a movie of achingly eloquent landscapes and absurdly inert characters.” Finally, in his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful.”

Laurie Bird, James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are attractive actors and Two-Lane Blacktop captures them at a time when they had their whole lives ahead of them. Sadly, both Bird and Wilson would die way too early in their respective lives – Bird at 25 and Wilson at 39. Taylor was so unhappy with the experience of making the film that he never acted in another one again. The characters in Two-Lane Blacktop never really connect with each other in a meaningful way. The Driver and the Mechanic only talk about their car, GTO talks about his car and lies about his past, and the Girl is just along for the ride until something better comes along. They live on the fringes of society, living a vagabond existence, striving to live constantly in motion. Being on the road is what defines these characters. It isn’t where they’ve been which is important, but where they’re going as the film’s final image demonstrates.

Ed Howard posted an excellent take on the film over at his Only the Cinema blog. This Distracted Globe also takes a solid look at it. Finally, over at The Huffington Post, Kim Morgan wrote a fantastic tribute to the film.

SOURCES

Benoit, Shelly. “The Making of Two-Lane Blacktop.” Show Magazine. March 1971.

Liebenson, Donald. “Classic Two-Lane Blacktop Takes the Long Road to Video.” Los Angeles Times. November 3, 1999.

O’Brien, Joe. “On the Drift: Rudy Wurlitzer and the Road to Nowhere.” Arthur magazine. May 2008.

Phipps, Keith. “Monte Hellman: Two-Lane Blacktop. The A.V. Club.

Savlov, Marc. “The Continuing Career of Director Monte Hellman.” Austin Chronicle. March 10, 2000.

Walker, Beverly. “Two-Lane Blacktop.” Sight and Sound. Winter 1970/71.