The B-Movie Director Who Made the A-List
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Now 74, Monte Hellman is a cult director’s cult director. Though he hasn’t released a feature since 1989’s “Silent Night, Bloody Night,” his reputation thrives among peers and cinephiles who often consult his wisdom — he was the executive producer of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” for instance — and invite him to retrospective screenings of his own work. He’s become a kid of one-man cottage industry.
“I seem to be in the middle of the Atlantic half the time,” Mr. Hellman said one recent morning, on the phone in Los Angeles, where he as lived since childhood. He would soon be airborne again, heading off to a film festival on the Balearic Coast of Spain, where his contribution to a new horror anthology, “Trapped Ashes,” was shown this week. And he arrives in New York this weekend for a series of screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Starting tonight, BAMcinématek is reviving six of Mr. Hellman’s titles from the 1960s and 1970s, often difficult to find in complete and unblemished form, including the classic road movie, “Two-Lane Blacktop” (1971), and a quartet of films shot with a very young Jack Nicholson. Most notable of these is “The Shooting” (1966), the prototype of the “existential Western,” which — like too many of Mr. Hellman’s efforts — failed to find a wide commercial audience.
Even “Blacktop,” the director’s best-known production, eluded the box office. But Mr. Hellman can take comfort. The film has aged vastly better than other youth-oriented pieces that arrived in the immediate wake of 1969’s “Easy Rider.” Partly, that’s because it avoided much overt topicality. Even now, you’d have to be a pretty astute music fan to recognize a snatch of Texas songwriter Terry Allen’s song “Truckload of Art” twanging out of a car radio in one scene. The film was grounded in strong characterizations — Warren Oates as a GTO-driving rounder who dispenses long-winded yarns to bewildered hitchhikers; James Taylor as a stoic hippie motorhead known only as “the Driver” — and it flipped the stark, philosophical ambiguities of Mr. Hellman’s Westerns onto a then-contemporary frame of an America in flux.
“It was one of those rare cases where, for whatever reason, they left us alone and accepted completely uncommercial casting,” Mr. Hellman, whose artistic choices seemed always to be ahead of the curve, said. “And I was able to cast the people I thought were right.”
Mr. Taylor, who would shortly become one of the era’s biggest pop stars, was a “nobody” when he was hired for “Blacktop.” And a cover story in Esquire, which reprinted sections of Rudy Wurlitzer’s screenplay, oddly failed to boost prospects. “It raised expectations too much. It wasn’t a movie for people who went to Broadway theater.It was a movie for people who went to drive-ins. It played better in drive-ins because the screen was so big, it was fantastic!”
Mr. Hellman, who will field questions at screenings tomorrow and Monday at BAM, is abidingly modest about his own role. When he meets with his weekly class of budding filmmakers at the California Institute of the Arts, he said, “What I teach is that casting is 99% of it. The other 1% probably doesn’t need to be done anyway. When the picture is right, it’s the difference between Bette Davis and George Raft in “Casablanca” and Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.That was nearly what they did. We almost saw Davis and Raft. As great as they were, I don’t think we’d still be watching it. It’s not just getting good actors. It’s getting the right actors.”
The director cites his old friend Mr. Nicholson as one of the “right actors,” and points to Martin Scorsese’s new film, “The Departed,” as an ideal example of what he’s talking about. “It was so right-on in every role,” he said. “It’s best movie I’ve seen in years and I don’t think anything’s going to touch it. It’s a great story, he’s in top form, and Jack is better than ever. It’s his greatest performance. I was just talking to him. The problem is he’s this amazing icon, and it’s hard for him to really be convincing because the audience is thinking: ‘Oh, there’s our friend Jack up there.’ But he pulled it off this time. You totally forget that it’s Jack. He’s just so pure. It’s a joy. It’s beautiful. I told him it was his best performance since [Mr. Hellman’s 1964 adventure flick] ‘Flight to Fury.'”
And what did Mr. Nicholson say to that?
“He thanked me!”
Who knows, perhaps the pair will reunite for another film before too long. Mr. Hellman has never stopped developing new projects. His short piece for the yet-unreleased “Trapped Ashes,” which also features work by such directors as Joe Dante and Ken Russell, is just a warm-up.He’s hoping to film a new Western called “Desperados,” written by his late collaborator Carol Eastman (“The Shooting”), as well as a legal thriller,”El Niño,” which was finished by the screenwriter’s brother, Charles Eastman.
“I love them both but you never know which one is actually going to be made first,” Mr. Hellman said. “The best movies seem to take the longest.They’re the ones that are the least apparent to the investors.They take so long, but they are the most rewarding because people have faith in them, and keep plugging away until they get them made.”
Until October 17 (30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).