(1971)

Starring James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates; dir: Monte Hellman

You gotta remember the impact Easy Rider had on Hollywood. It’s always been a town that followed the money. But more than Easy Rider’s simple dollar multiples (costing thousands, but making millions) was its psychological impact of finally unlocking the wallets of the previously elusive ‘60s youth market in the free-spending rock’n’roll generation.

Two Lane Blacktop would never have struggled out of director Monte Hellman’s bottom desk drawer without this context. It’s really a ‘non’-movie by Hollywood standards, but nothing that would startle a Europhile. Sight and Sound called it "as much Waiting For Godot as Easy Rider".

The two films are really polar opposites, with Blacktop shutting down every avenue of optimism opened up by Peter Fonda & co. The iconography of its casting two rock stars (James Taylor was just coming off his hit Fire and Rain, while Dennis Wilson had known fame for virtually a decade with The Beach Boys) underlines its true vernacular - springing more from the pages of CREEM magazine than Film Comment.

In their characters’ inscrutable and oblivious nihilism (the National Lending Collection calls it "an existential parable"), Blacktop presages the ‘Blank Generation’ by a good half decade – it’s the first punk movie!  A reluctant studio consigned it to death at the box office, but no matter. In 1971, not even the youth market was ready for this kind of vision.