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Candidates for the National Film Registry: Two-Lane Blacktop

Introduction by Pat Padua

Fast cars on the big screen raise certain expectations: adventure; the great race; getting away from it all; rebellion; fast women. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Bonnie and Clyde. James Bond. James Dean. Revved-up engines mean excitement. Two-Lane Blacktop rejects this fantasy world: a '55 Chevy can't go fast enough to escape the loneliness of the road. Characters are aimless and lost. They have no names -- just iconic titles.

Producer Michael S. Laughlin found a "suggestion of rural America" in the cover photo of James Taylor's album Sweet Baby James, and cast Taylor as The Driver. Beach Boy Dennis Wilson is The Mechanic. A '55 Chevy is The Car, a character more important to them than even The Girl (Laurie Bird). Warren Oates, as GTO, gives a tremendously moving performance of mid-life crisis.

Monte Hellman used a couple of unusual strategies to ensure that his film would evoke the tired alienation he wanted. With Warren Oates the only professional actor in the main cast, Hellman subjected his non-actors to an exhausting series of repeated takes, made more frustrating by the fact that he would only let them see one page of the screenplay at a time. In an interview with VH1, James Taylor said this repetition flattened and drained them, resulting in the weary performances on screen.

Hellman also decided that cast and crew really would drive across the country, even though many scenes take place inside cars. Production notes chart a transient route through Needles, CA, Flagstaff, AZ, Santa Fe and Tucumucari, NM, Boswell, OK, Little Rock, AK, Memphis, TN. This slice of life on the road seems especially important thirty years later, with the small-town diners and gas stations they drive by reminding us of a recent past that has disappeared from today's America. If these characters couldn't find themselves along what now looks like a landscape of great character, how would they feel if they made the same trip today in a sea of anonymous strip malls and chains?

If Two-lane Blacktop occasionally plays as if the avant-garde somehow got its hands on a drag-racing picture, there's good reason. Screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer wrote the experimental novel Nog. Monte Hellman broke into film after directing a Los Angeles production of Waiting for Godot. You wonder what Roger Corman was thinking when, after seeing Godot, hired its director to make the horror movie, Beast from Haunted Cave (1959). Hellman went on to make two Westerns for Corman, both starring Jack Nicholson: Ride in the Whirlwind (1965), which Nicholson wrote, and The Shooting (1967), with Warren Oates. But what could have been Hellman's breakthrough became the victim of a souped-up hype machine. In April 1971, Esquire magazine ran a cover story publishing the screenplay and touting this "movie of the year" before anyone on staff had actually seen the picture. Naturally, the film's release didn't meet these great expectations.

Hellman has directed only a handful of movies since Two-Lane Blacktop, his last completed feature being 1989's Silent Night, Deadly Night III. He returned to independent cinema to serve as executive producer for Reservoir Dogs, and is currently working on an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Freaky Deaky. Screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer continues to work in film. His notable screenplays include Candy Mountain (1987) and Little Buddha (1993) - both of which involve journeys.

Pat Padua works in the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, helping save and preserve America's film heritage.