Zabriskie Point (film)
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Zabriskie Point is a 1970 film by Michelangelo Antonioni that depicts the U.S. counterculture movement of that time. It sympathetically tells the story of a young couple — an idealistic young secretary, and a militant radical — to put forward an anti-establishment message.
This cult film stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, neither of whom had any previous acting experience. The screenplay was written by Antonioni, fellow Italian filmmaker Franco Rossetti, American playwright Sam Shepard, prolific screenwriter Tonino Guerra and Clare Peploe, wife of Bernardo Bertolucci. The film was the second of three English-language films that Antonioni had been contracted to direct for producer Carlo Ponti and to be distributed by MGM. The other two films were Blowup (1966) and The Passenger (1975).
The soundtrack album, Zabriskie Point, features music from various artists, including Pink Floyd, The Youngbloods, The Kaleidoscope, Jerry Garcia, Patti Page, and the Grateful Dead. A Rolling Stones track ("You Got the Silver") did not appear on the soundtrack album. The songs by Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia, and The Kaleidoscope were written for the film.
The film was a notorious box office bomb, attacked by critics and ignored by the counterculture audience that the MGM was courting. The film cost $7 million to produce, and made less than $900,000 in its domestic release. In the booklet that was released with the CD soundtrack, it is unsympathetically declared that
- ... [c]ritics 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.
More recently, however, film scholars like Robert Philip Kolker and Sam Rohdie have emphasized its importance in Antonioni's filmographyTemplate:Fact.
The name refers to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, the location of the film's famous desert love scene, in which members of the Open Theatre simulate an orgy.
Trivia
- Harrison Ford has an uncredited role as one of the student demonstrators inside the police station.
- In the cityscape scenes of Blade Runner, some of the fireballs were taken from footage from Zabriskie Point.
- After making the film, stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin moved into the same California commune shown in the film. Halprin married Dennis Hopper in 1972. In 1973, Frechette participated in a bank robbery in which one of his accomplices, Christopher Thien, was killed. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He died in prison under suspicious circumstances.
- The siege at the university was filmed at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, California.
- According to Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins fame, Zabriskie Point may have been the inspiration to director Stephane Sednaoui for the "Today" video from the band's Siamese Dream album.
- Antonioni visited The Doors while they were recording L.A. Woman, and considered including them in the soundtrack, but nothing ultimately resulted.
- The tune from the widely known Pink Floyd song, Us and Them, was originally written on the piano by Richard Wright for the movie in 1969; this is where the "The Violent Sequence" title came from. Director Michelangelo Antonioni rejected it on the grounds that it was too unlike their "Careful with That Axe, Eugene"-esque work; as Waters recalls it in impersonation, Antonioni's response was, "It's beautiful, but too sad, you know? It makes me think of church." <ref>"The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon" Pt. 5 (Us and Them)</ref>. The song was shelved until The Dark Side of the Moon.
- John Fahey, in his book "How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life," writes about how unpleasant it was working for Antonioni.
