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Zabriskie Point (1970)
David Fricke
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Zabriskie Point was to be Michelangelo Antonioni's
greatest triumph, a crowning achievement in an already seminal body of work
and a bold affirmation of his commercial ascendance in America. It was to be
the Italian-born director's state-of-the-epoch address, a provocative
document of the political injustice, civil warfare, and extreme moral and
cultural polarities defining the end of the 1960s. The eagerly awaited
successor to Antonioni's stunning 1966 success,
Blow-Up,
a stylish mystery and an enigmatic study of naïveté and ennui in swinging,
pop-art London, Zabriskie Point was to be nothing less than
Antonioni's portrait of the United States -- and by extension, Western
society -- at war with itself. And it was to be a film made with the kind of
financial largess, technical facilities, and corporate indulgence that only
a major, old-school Hollywood studio like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in its
infinite blockbuster fantasies, could sanction.
But just about everything that could go wrong
with the project did go wrong, and Antonioni's great dream would
prove to be his worst nightmare. Released in March 1970 after nearly two
arduous years in production -- a period that included long, exhausting
shoots on location in the California desert, pitched battles between
Antonioni and M-G-M executives, and a protracted, frustrating search for the
perfect musical score -- Zabriskie Point was one of the most
extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history. The arithmetic alone
was astonishing. Reeling from severe management trauma yet eager to
capitalize on the booming counterculture youth market, M-G-M -- which went
through three presidents during the production of Zabriskie Point --
poured $7 million into the film, an extravagant figure for that time and
nearly five times what Antonioni spent to make Blow-Up. But where
Blow-Up (the first release in Antonioni's three-picture deal with
M-G-M) had taken in more than $20 million at the box office, Zabriskie
Point made less than a tenth of that -- a mere $900,000 -- in its
humiliatingly brief theatrical run.
For the 58-year-old Antonioni, Zabriskie Point was a calamity of a
more serious and personal nature. His first feature film to be made in
America -- where Antonioni first became a celebrated figure for his early
and mid-'60s works L'Avventura and Il Deserto Rosso --
Zabriskie Point was also the director's first big flop and a
crippling blow to his artistic reputation. Critics of all ideologies --
establishment, underground, and otherwise -- greeted the movie with howls of
derision. They savaged the flat, blank performances of Antonioni's
handpicked first-time stars, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, and assailed
the script's confused, unconvincing mix of hippie-buzzword dialogue,
self-righteous, militant debate, and free-love romanticism. (Five writers
were credited with the final screenplay, including Antonioni, Tonino Guerra,
the playwright Sam Shepard, a left-wing journalist and political organizer
named Fred Gardner, and Clare Peploe, who was Antonioni's companion at the
time.)
In his lengthy 1970 review of Zabriskie Point in Rolling
Stone, critic John Burks chastised Antonioni for the clichéd images of
freedom and social oppression in the sequence in which Frechette steals a
small private plane and, from his wild-blue perch above Los Angeles, gazes
down at the blanket of smog and the rat's nest of freeways meant to
symbolize the soiled heartlessness of consumerism-run-amok. "Corny? You bet
your ass it's corny," Burks wrote. "Antonioni has constructed his movie of
so many lame metaphors and bad puns that it's staggering."
But in the introduction to his review -- actually one of the kinder
published assessments of Zabriskie Point -- Burks insisted that while
the film was definitely a failure, it was not a total loss. "It is seriously
flawed, true," Burks said. "But even the flaws have a grandeur about them."
Today, free of the heavy air of debacle that
haunted the film at its release, Zabriskie Point can be seen as a
fascinating period piece with some startling qualities. It is combative in
its thematic intentions, even for its time. Violence is presented as a
justifiable tool in social change: Frechette buys a gun and attends a campus
protest with the expressed purpose of killing a cop (almost 25 years before
the rapper Ice-T outraged the conservative establishment with his revenge
fantasy "Cop Killer"). Antonioni's contempt for commercial imperialism is
symbolized by the long, ugly parade of advertising billboards and brand-name
logos visible through Frechette's windshield as he drives through Los
Angeles.
The casting of two neophyte actors may have been an attempt on
Antonioni's part to underscore an impression of documentary-style realism in
the film. Mark Frechette was reportedly spotted by Antonioni's scouts at a
Boston bus stop yelling "Motherfucker!" A tense, angry young man, he would
later belong to a creepy Boston commune run by self-styled guru Mel Lyman.
And Daria Halprin was the daughter of avant-garde dancer Ann Halprin.
The real star of Zabriskie Point, however, is the desolate,
parched-white landscape of Death Valley, in particular the vista from
Zabriskie Point, the desert lookout that gives the movie its name and where
Frechette and Halprin consummate their brief relationship in a hallucinatory
sex scene. It is an eerie, skeletal expanse of stony ridges and dry stream
beds, stunning in its ancient, unearthly emptiness. And the climactic
explosion of the opulent desert retreat belonging to the real estate tycoon
played by Rod Taylor -- a fit of imaginary vengeance envisioned by Halprin
over and over in her mind's eye after she hears of Frechette's death at the
hands of the L.A. police -- is spectacular in its composition and
compelling, repetitive effect.
But nothing symbolizes the grand designs
Antonioni had for Zabriskie Point more -- and the lengths to
which he would go to achieve his ends -- than the movie's musical
soundtrack, a remarkable mélange of abstract sound sculpture, expansive
solo-guitar reveries, full-blown psychedelic rock, old-time country ballads,
and 1950s jukebox corn. Even Easy Rider, Peter Fonda and Dennis
Hopper's 1969 smash about two bikers on an ill-fated cross-country odyssey,
featured a relatively orthodox rock soundtrack comprised of music (by Jimi
Hendrix, The Band, and Steppenwolf, among others) that Fonda pulled from his
personal record collection. In Zabriskie Point -- a film about the
collision of youthful innocence, hardboiled commerce, and social mutiny --
bizarre bedfellows such as Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, the Eisenhower-era
siren Patti Page, the brilliant guitarist John Fahey, the ethnic-folk-rock
fusion band Kaleidoscope, and the hillbilly country singer Roscoe Holcomb
could all be heard in strange but effective juxtaposition.
As he did in Blow-Up (which boasted a Blue Note-style jazz score
by the pianist Herbie Hancock and a fiery cameo by The Yardbirds), Antonioni
used music sparingly in Zabriskie Point, with meticulous attention to
placement. A spacious instrumental fragment of The Grateful Dead's "Dark
Star" -- just over two minutes taken from a 23-minute concert
performance on the 1970 album Live/Dead -- can be heard as Frechette
pilots his stolen plane over L.A. A short taste of "Sugar Babe" by
The Youngbloods, from the band's 1967 LP Earth Music, plays on a car
radio as the lithe and beautiful Halprin first meets Frechette out in the
desert. And Halprin hears a disc jockey announce Fahey's "Dance Of
Death," a 1964 recording from his Takoma album The Dance Of
Death & Other Plantation Favorites, following a radio news report
of Frechette's demise.
That radio voiceover was done by Don Hall, a real-life DJ who was
holding down the prime-time evening shift at the L.A. underground station
KPPC-FM in 1969 when he was approached by Antonioni, through a mutual
acquaintance, to work on Zabriskie Point as music coordinator. It was
Hall, to a large degree, who brought the catholic vitality of late '60s
free-form FM radio to bear on the Zabriskie Point score. "There was
no idea, when we were doing the film, that a rock soundtrack meant
everything had to be hard, intense, electric music," says Hall, who was
officially hired by M-G-M as an A&R executive and company liaison with
Antonioni. "I was trying to do a soundtrack using the many different types
of music that were being played on FM radio at the time." Many of the
previously recorded pieces heard in Zabriskie Point -- "Dark Star,"
"Sugar Babe," Roscoe Holcomb's jaunty, Appalachian-back-porch rendition of
"I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again" -- came from Hall's playlist of
personal favorites. One of his earliest suggestions to Antonioni was to use
in the desert-jukebox scene Patti Page's sweetly old-fashioned "Tennessee
Waltz," written by country songmen Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart in 1948
and recorded by Page two years later for Mercury.
In its original, 11-track vinyl release on the
M-G-M label, the Zabriskie Point soundtrack was a testament to
Antonioni's deep research of and appreciation for pop music, not to mention
his excellent taste. Pink Floyd's "Heart Beat, Pig Meat," heard
during the film's opening credits as a radical-student meeting is in
process, effectively sets the scene's tone of menace and cross talk with a
naked, foreboding pulse-beat and a disruptive sequence of television and
radio sound bites. "Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up" is a
cryptically titled remake of the Floyd's volcanic 1968 B-side "Careful With
That Axe, Eugene." But its bonfire sound -- all roaring guitars, crashing
drums, and death-throe screaming -- is the perfect complement to the movie's
cataclysmic finish. The extended piece by The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia,
a solo-guitar improvisation accompanying the love scene, is not just a
highlight of the film -- Garcia's fluid melodicism and elegant, crystalline
picking make "Love Scene" one of the finest studio performances of
his career.
This lavishly expanded reissue edition of the Zabriskie Point
soundtrack -- boasting previously unissued tracks by Pink Floyd and four
exquisite outtakes of Garcia's "Love Scene" (the final version is a
composite of edits from the full-length improvisations) -- documents in even
greater depth the vision and labor that went into the movie's music. In
discussing the cinematography of Zabriskie Point, specifically
the use of colors, Antonioni once said, "You cannot argue that a film is bad
but that the color is good or vice versa. The image is a fact, the colors
are the story."
The music created and compiled for Zabriskie Point is an essential
part of the film's story -- and one of its saving graces. To listen to it
now is to wonder again: How did everything else about the movie go so wrong?
Chester Crill, the singer, violinist, and keyboard player for Kaleidoscope,
remembers all too well the preview screening at which he saw Zabriskie
Point. "When it was over," he says, "there wasn't a person who left that
was looking anyone else in the eye. It was the most embarrassing thing that
I'd ever been to. Everybody just slunk away."
* * * * * *
In a 1969 Rolling Stone interview conducted with Antonioni during
the shooting of Zabriskie Point, writer Gene Youngblood asked the
director about the very spare and particular use of music in his movies.
Youngblood cited a quote from the composer Giovanni Fusco, who had worked on
Antonioni's early Italian-language films, including Il Grido (1957),
L'Avventura (1960), L'Eclisse (1962), and Il Deserto
Rosso (1964). "The first rule for any musician who intends to
collaborate with Antonioni," Fusco said, "is to forget that he is a
musician."
Antonioni was straightforward in his reply: "I don't like music that
makes a commentary on the film. Of course, there will be rock music in the
film [Zabriskie Point] as heard on the radio or record players.
That's just natural. But I don't necessarily want a rock score. That would
be too easy, too obvious."
Scoring Zabriskie Point would prove to be anything but easy. And
in telling the artists what he wanted -- or more importantly, what he
didn't want -- Antonioni was anything but obvious.
Born on September 29, 1912, in Ferrara, Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni
studied political economy at the University of Bologna and was a film critic
before making his debut as a director in the late 1940s. His first
productions were short documentaries about Italian culture and society, but
they set the tone for much of the work to follow. During the 1950s Antonioni
perfected an unorthodox but enthralling style that emphasized evocative
moods and psychological tension over linear narratives. The terse, oblique
dialogue and the long, haunting stretches of complete silence in
Blow-Up were classic Antonioni, a reflection of his signature themes:
alienation, indecision, the failure of communication.
Antonioni was rigorous in his attention to detail, although he could be
very elusive in the way he explained himself to other people, including
collaborators. "Michelangelo never, never articulated anything that
he didn't have to," says Harrison Starr, who was the executive producer of
Zabriskie Point. "And sometimes he didn't articulate the things he
had to. There is a famous story. When he was going to do Blow-Up,
Vanessa Redgrave [the movie's female lead] came to meet with him in a hotel
in London. And in his usual way, he told her very little. Finally, she said,
'Well, is there a script?' And he said, 'Oh, let me see.' He began rummaging
around the hotel room. He had notes on a matchbook, notes on hotel
stationery. He had notes everywhere. He got them together and handed them to
her.
"In fact," Starr continues, "he had pages of manuscript.
Michelangelo always tried not to define anything until the moment when it
would define itself to a certain extent. He had a very delicate touch, and
he was very careful about letting things take their place."
That anecdote explains a great deal about the problems Antonioni had in
settling on a final soundtrack for Zabriskie Point and the ultimate,
rather motley character of the music. Pink Floyd, John Fahey, and
Kaleidoscope were all asked to compose and record extensive scores for the
movie. All three submitted new, original music for the love scene in
particular. (It is possible that Jerry Garcia was considered for other
work on the film as well.) But in each of those three cases, Antonioni
dismissed most of the results as unsatisfactory and confounded the artists
to an infuriating degree with his cryptic, sometimes imperious manner.
Antonioni's first choice to score Zabriskie Point -- in its
entirety -- was Pink Floyd. It was, on the face of it, a strange notion.
(Although not as strange and intriguing as Don Hall's first inspiration
-- the English art-pop band Procol Harum: "I thought of them as being great
for a lot of the desert scenes.") The Floyd were a band of former
art-and-architecture-school students whose idea of rock 'n' roll revolution
had more to do with cruising inner space than brandishing guns in the
streets. Distinguished by an understated tension and long stretches of
gravity-free improvisation, Pink Floyd's music was a far cry from the
marching-song kicks of The Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" and
the guitar-army aesthetic of explicitly radical U.S. groups such as the MC5.
Yet if they were virtually apolitical, the Floyd were nevertheless a
pivotal force in a tight, vibrant English network of underground bands
(including the Soft Machine, Hawkwind, and the Deviants) that was both
inspired by, and an inspiration to, the student uprisings in Europe during
the late 1960s. Antonioni was in London in October 1966, filming
Blow-Up, when he first saw Pink Floyd at a launch party for Britain's
first underground paper, IT (International Times). By the time he
contacted them about working on Zabriskie Point, the Floyd already
had substantial film experience. With founding singer and guitarist
Syd Barrett, the group
appeared in Peter Whitebread's Britain-gone-psychedelic documentary
Tonite Let's All Make Love In London. A realigned Floyd, with
guitarist David Gilmour replacing Barrett, had contributed an embryonic
version of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" to Peter Sykes' 1968 movie The
Committee and provided the entire soundtrack for director Barbet
Schroeder's 1969 release, More. According to Gilmour, Pink Floyd
wrote and recorded all of the More music in eight days.
The Floyd spent at least a month in Rome, working 12-hour days
unsuccessfully trying to please Antonioni. In Nicholas Schaffner's 1991
biography of the band, Saucerful Of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey,
the group's bassist Roger Waters is quoted on the experience: "We could have
finished the whole thing in about five days...." But Antonioni "...would
listen and go -- and I remember he had this terrible twitch -- 'Eet's very
beautiful, but eet's too sad,' or 'Eet's too stroong.' It was always
something that stopped it being perfect. You'd change whatever was wrong and
he'd still be unhappy. It was hell, sheer hell."
The third Floyd song (in addition to "Heart Beat, Pig Meat" and "Come In
Number 51") to make the soundtrack was "Crumbling Land," which
Gilmour described in an interview as "a kind of country & western number
which he [Antonioni] could have gotten done better by any number of American
bands. But he chose ours -- very strange."
At least 50 minutes of other, presumably unfinished Floyd material,
mostly instrumental sketches, were left in the vault. It's hard to
understand what fault Antonioni found in them. The previously unissued
pieces in this deluxe edition of the Zabriskie Point soundtrack are
not only a vital addition to the official Pink Floyd discography; they are
also quite good, even in this early blueprint form. The liquid grace of the
band's melodic ideas and performances are a revelatory preview of the lush,
refined soundscape on the next two Floyd LPs, Atom Heart Mother and
Meddle. "Country Song" in particular, is cut from the classic
Floyd-ballad mold: a potent Waters vocal, the stately pacing of drummer Nick
Mason, Gilmour's meaty guitar outbursts. A nice extra touch is the fit of
uncharacteristic, honky-tonk piano by Rick Wright under Gilmour's long,
climactic solo.
"Unknown Song" (the makeshift titles of the unissued tracks hint
at the state in which the band left the music after splitting with
Antonioni) is characteristic of the instrumental fantasias that typified
Floyd's turn-of-the-'70s shift from the burn-nerve-ending psychedelia of Syd
Barrett to a lusher, gravity-free melodicism. In fact, "Unknown Song" is
hardly a song at all. It is a shimmering blend of acoustic strumming,
skittish electric picking, and the metallic skidding of Gilmour's slide
guitar. Note, however, the slight country-funk undertow of the piano and
congas and the way the track goes a bit atonal at the end, as if the guitars
and Wright's piano are working at cross purposes.
Apparently, the Floyd tried damn near everything to come to grips with
Antonioni's vision for the desert sex sequence. At over seven minutes, the
Floyd's "Love Scene (Version 6)" is an atypically straightforward --
for the Floyd anyway -- blues jam, albeit with plenty of room for David
Gilmour to show off his silvery, stabbing attack and taut phrasing. "Love
Scene (Version 4)" is an entirely different approach, a languid exercise
in galactic-lounge jazz performed on piano and what sounds like a vibraphone
-- closer to the Modern Jazz Quartet than A Saucerful Of Secrets. An
even earlier take, not included here, is a long blue-water stretch of
humming keyboards and guitar dreaming, marked at points by the tidal wash of
Mason's cymbals and moments when Gilmour's guitar sounds like a pack of
agitated seagulls.
In the greater context of Pink Floyd's long career, these newly
discovered pieces are transition music. But if they are incomplete, they are
certainly not inconsequential. Antonioni's quality-control instincts
definitely failed him when he overlooked one ravishing piece of music from
the Floyd's Rome sessions, a six-minute piano hymn played by Rick Wright
for, of all things, the campus riot scene. It's fascinating to think of how
the Floyd were trying to upset, in their way, conventional notions of
soundtrack scoring (action equals frantic music; love scene equals soft
music). Even more interesting is the fact that the Floyd didn't waste the
piece themselves. "Riot Scene" was later used by the band to superbly
enriched effect in the song "Us And Them" on 1973's The Dark Side Of The
Moon.
As postproduction of Zabriskie Point dragged on, Antonioni had
John Fahey brought to Rome to create music specifically for the love scene,
the lengthy, central dream sequence in which Halprin and Frechette have sex
while a corps of rolling, groping couples and threesomes materialize around
them at Zabriskie Point and, after consummation, vaporize. (The desert orgy
was performed by members of an avant-garde drama troupe called the Open
Theater, supplemented by extras flown in from Las Vegas.) In a hilarious and
brutally candid account of his Zabriskie Point experience, written as
part of a major autobiographical project to be issued by the independent
label Drag City, Fahey plainly states his opinion of the footage that
Antonioni showed him in Rome: "a really terrible and long skin flick." To
compound Fahey's disappointment, Antonioni refused to show him any other
parts of the movie.
"Although I ask him, beg him to show me some of the other parts of the
film, so I can see what kind of context this footage is in, he will not tell
me, or show me this," Fahey writes. "In fact, he even tells me that he
doesn't want me to know anything about the film other than what I see, and
what music I write. Because if I do see other parts, or know anything more
about the movie than I already know, that could very easily spoil the music
that he wants me to write.
"Let me say this: In all the days, and in all the films for which I have
written musical scores, nobody, not one single person, has ever treated me
like Antonioni did.... Everybody else always showed me anything I wanted to
see, answered any questions I asked, in the belief that the more I knew
about the movie, the better I would understand what kind of score they
wanted."
Nevertheless, Fahey wrote and recorded a new solo-guitar piece for
Antonioni, who expressed great delight with it. But the music was never
used. According to Fahey, he and Antonioni got into a heated argument over
dinner one night in Rome; Fahey says Antonioni was expounding on the evil
and decadence of the United States. The exchange escalated to fisticuffs.
"And," writes Fahey, "I decked him." The only John Fahey music to be used in
Zabriskie Point was the brief excerpt from "Dance Of Death."
Jerry Garcia did not go to Rome to record his marvelous guitar fantasia
for the love scene. The Grateful Dead guitarist flew alone from San
Francisco to Los Angeles, where he performed on the M-G-M soundstage there;
apparently he didn't even take a roadie. That Garcia was not Antonioni's
first choice for the job is, in retrospect, astonishing. In Garcia, the
director found not only a dynamic and sensitive improvisor -- a pithy
melodicist whose soloing combined a thoughtful folk-blues clarity and a
pungent jazz-blues attack shot through with genuinely psychedelic rapture --
but also a keen enthusiast of the cinema. In the early 1960s Garcia
unofficially attended film classes at Stanford University, where his first
wife, Sarah, had been a film student. Garcia was certainly
well-versed in Antonioni's Italian-language work and flattered to be
asked to contribute to Zabriskie Point.
"Michelangelo liked The Grateful Dead, and I had a friend who lived
across the street from Jerry at the time," Don Hall recalls. "He talked to
him about the movie and we got together. It was almost done as an
afterthought. Michelangelo wasn't even in town when we did the music; he was
back in Rome.
"We went into the large studio at M-G-M, which they usually used for
the symphony orchestras. And Jerry sat there by himself, on a stool, laying
it down. They had the love scene on a loop, and he played live while the
film was running. He didn't want to do it away from the film and then cut
things in. He played right to every single shot in the scene. That's why
there are certain notes over certain frames, over people moving in the
desert. He played right while watching it. It was miraculous -- pure
genius."
The session was a productive one. There is more than a half hour of
previously unheard, solo Garcia in this collection. And it is essential
Garcia. With the Dead, on his solo records, with his various offshoot bands,
and in his large body of session work, Garcia was always a sensitive,
telepathic player -- a master accompanist and generous partner. In these
versions of "Love Scene," he is heard utterly alone, playing with a serene
confidence and luminous purity that is unlike anything else in his canon.
There are bum notes; he stumbles into the occasional cul-de-sac; but it is
live, spontaneous composition, the intimate sound of one of rock's greatest
guitarists caught at the moment of creation. And he was paid well for his
labors. At a time when Garcia and the Dead were heavily in debt to their
official label, Warner Bros., the M-G-M check that he received for "Love
Scene" was enough to buy him a new house.
The amount of music commissioned, recorded, and rejected for
Zabriskie Point could probably fill a separate two-record set.
According to group member Chester Crill, Kaleidoscope was the final act
brought in to work on the soundtrack. The Los Angeles band had been
tapped by Hall, who had known and loved the group during his DJ days.
"We were told that they were disappointed in all of the stuff they had from
the other people," Crill recalls. "Particularly for the little filler
material -- people walking down the street, turning on a radio, stuff like
that. They claimed they didn't have anything usable."
Venerated in the underground for their instrumental dexterity and
electrifying compounds of acid rock, straight-up country, greasy R&B,
and Middle Eastern music, Kaleidoscope had three fine albums out on Epic
Records -- Side Trips, A Beacon From Mars, and Incredible
Kaleidoscope (a fourth, the disappointing Bernice, was already on
tape but not yet released) -- when they went to the M-G-M lot for two weeks
of recording for Antonioni. "The reason Don Hall hired us was that we'd done
a bunch of stuff like this before," Crill explains. "We had done films for
Encyclopaedia Britannica. We had worked for Disney and Roger Corman. And we
could pretty much imitate anybody because of the personnel we had." With
gifted players in the group like the multi-instrumentalists David Lindley
and Solomon Feldthouse, says Crill, "we could play 40, 50 instruments
between us."
"Initially, they wanted us to match music with certain sections of the
soundtrack, to fix certain parts," he continues. "But we did 10 original
songs too. And for the desert groping scene, we did 10 or 12 takes. It was
mystifying, to say the least, as to what they wanted." According to Don
Hall, Kaleidoscope worked in a small Los Angeles studio next door to the
room where schmaltzmeister Lawrence Welk recorded overdubs for his weekly
television show. At those Kaleidoscope sessions where Antonioni was
present, the director said little or nothing about what he thought of the
music or what he wanted from the band.
"He seemed totally flipped," Crill says. "At the time, I had a red violin
and he was crazy about it. 'Do you like the music?' I asked him. He said,
'No. But the red violin was great." In the end, Antonioni only used two
short, rather conventional Kaleidoscope pieces. The bouncy country song,
"Brother Mary," was played mostly by Lindley and sung by Jeff Kaplan,
who had recently joined the band. "Mickey's Tune" was an instrumental
rereading of the Buck Owens song "Hello Trouble" that Kaleidoscope had
previously covered on a 1968 single.
"The funny thing is that when they asked us to do the project, by the
time they got to us, they said, 'Well, we really don't have much money left
in the budget to give you guys'," Crill says, laughing. "In fact, it was the
most money we ever made."
Some music used in the film was left off the soundtrack album. One such
piece -- performed by MEV (Musica Electronica Viva), a collective of
American experimental composers based in Rome and specializing in live
electronic improvisation -- was a segment of avant-junkyard clatter heard in
the movie as Frechette drives his truck through the heart of L.A.'s
industrial wasteland. (Members of the ensemble included noted contemporary
musicians Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum.)
Licensing restrictions accounted for The Rolling Stones'
absence from the record. The aching country blues "You Got The Silver," sung
by Keith Richards and taken from the Stones' 1969 album Let It Bleed,
momentarily surfaces in the movie as Halprin hits the road, fiddling with
the radio in her car, after Frechette flies back to L.A. to return the
stolen plane.
Ironically, one of the most expensive pieces of music in the film and
on the record was "Tennessee Waltz." The state of Tennessee had passed
legislation declaring "Tennessee Waltz" the official state song; and they
were extremely reluctant to allow the tune to be used in a film associated
with drugs, free sex, and student revolution. In the end, after long, tough
negotiations with the Tennessee government, M-G-M -- which had already
pressured Hall (to no avail) to use a number from the label's extensive Hank
Williams catalog -- paid dearly for the use of the song. "It wouldn't have
hurt to use a Hank Williams song," Hall admits. "But I'd played the Patti
Page record for Michelangelo and he loved it. And he was not going to change
his mind."
The depths to which relations between Antonioni and M-G-M plummeted as
Zabriskie Point lurched to completion can be measured by the
last-minute inclusion -- behind Antonioni's back -- of Roy Orbison's "So
Young" at the very end of the film, as Halprin drives off after the
explosion sequence. Harrison Starr claims that M-G-M president James Aubrey
and Mike Curb, the young head of the company's record division, devised a
plan to stick an additional song in the movie -- probably because, after
spending so much money on the project, they discovered there were no M-G-M
artists represented on the soundtrack. Orbison was an inappropriate choice,
however; with his longtime collaborator Bill Dees, the great, melodramatic
singer wrote, by his standards, a hackneyed ballad completely out of sync
with the sound, look, and intent of Zabriskie Point.
Nevertheless, "So Young" was literally pasted on to the picture, probably
after Antonioni delivered what he believed to be the completed product. The
song is not even listed with the rest of the musical performances in the
movie's opening credits. "I didn't know anything about that song," says
Hall, "until I went to one of the first actual public showings of the film,
at a theater in Westwood in Los Angeles. At the end of the movie, we had the
explosion music, which I thought was quite effective. Then, all of a sudden,
there was a freeze frame -- I went 'What the hell?' -- and all of a sudden
this droning sound came out of the speakers. I love Roy Orbison. But, my
God, it's a horrible song." Oblivious to the banality of Orbison's
performance and the song's incongruous place in the film, M-G-M released
"So Young" as a single in April 1970; it was even given the subtitle
"Love Theme From Zabriskie Point." But it did not appear on the
soundtrack LP. (Appropriate to Antonioni's original designs, it is not
included in this edition.)
Not that many people noticed. In one more crushing disappointment for
Antonioni, the Zabriskie Point album never appeared on the Billboard
charts.
* * * * * *
It would be five years before Antonioni fully recovered from the
disastrous experience of Zabriskie Point. He finally concluded his
M-G-M contract in 1975 with The Passenger, an existential thriller
starring Jack Nicholson that restored his critical standing. (Iggy Pop named
a song on his 1977 album Lust For Life after the film; and in 1995 U2
and Brian Eno released a soundtrack-music project under the alias
Passengers.)
Ironically, Mark Frechette died in 1975 under suspicious circumstances in
a Massachusetts prison, where he was serving a 6-to-15-year sentence for his
participation in a 1973 bank robbery in Boston in which two men were killed.
He was found in the prison's recreation room asphyxiated, pinned to the
ground by a set of barbells perched on his throat. Only 27 at the time of
his death, Frechette had gone from playing an angry young man with a gun in
Zabriskie Point to actually wielding a pistol in a bungled real-life
stickup that he characterized as a political act after his arrest: "It would
be like a direct attack on everything that is choking this country to
death." (Daria Halprin, who had an affair with Frechette during the
production of Zabriskie Point, later married -- and divorced --
Dennis Hopper.)
Antonioni has continued to make movies, despite a 1985 stroke that has
impaired his ability to speak. He has also lived to see the same nation that
once outraged him, and which in turn rejected his vision of social
revolution, pay him one of its highest artistic compliments. In 1995 the
director was awarded an Academy Award® for Lifetime Achievement.
Zabriskie Point remains an important part of that life, an epic
work of ambition symbolizing the spirit of its time, even if the movie does
not effectively capture it. Antonioni himself may have suspected that
capturing the energy, optimism, and desperation of such a volatile era in a
single motion picture was a difficult, even hopeless, task. "What's
different about this revolutionary generation is not what the young people
want -- freedom. Everybody always has wanted that," Antonioni said in the
1969 Rolling Stone interview. "What's different is the way they go
after it. It's a matter of practical application. They know what they want,
but they don't know exactly how to reach for it."
Zabriskie Point is not a historic film. But it is a fascinating
window into a pivotal chapter of American political and cultural history. So
is this music.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Beverly Walker, Harrison Starr,
Chester Crill, Don Hall, Dennis McNally, Dean Blackwood, and Chris
Darrow for their assistance and insights in the preparation of these notes.
From
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