Emilio Estevez on the set of ‘Repo Man.’
 
Alex Cox was thirty-years-old when he took on the task of directing his first feature-length film, 1984’s Repo Man. It’s a film which seems to perfectly encapsulate gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s apocalyptic quote “Too weird to live, and too rare to die” as it nears its 35th anniversary this March.

Unlike what the ravages of the aging process does to most of us mortal types, Cox’s film endured and remains as defiantly DIY as does its equally angry soundtrack, containing venomous jams from the Circle Jerks, Iggy Pop, and Suicidal Tendencies. However, Cox faced an uphill battle while trying to shop Repo Man around because nobody outside of actor and writer Dick Rude understood what the fuck the film was supposed to be about. Rude had approached Cox with his short story Leather Rubbernecks, hoping to make it into a short film but ultimately Leather Rubbernecks would become a part of Repo Man, as did Rude in his role of sushi chew and screwer Duke in the movie. At some point, the Repo Man script would end up in the hands of former Monkee and visionary in his own right, Michael Nesmith. According to folklore, Papa Nez was instantly impressed and stepped into the role of Executive Producer for the film because, as we all know, Papa Nez gets it and helped Cox (a former repo man in real life) bring Repo Man to the big screen.

Wild stories surrounding this timeless film have been discussed and dissected by writers, film historians, and scholars since its release. A few weeks ago I cracked open my copy of Criterion’s impeccable 2013 release of the film and rewatched it in all of its pissed-off glory. Of the film’s vast merits, which are too numerous to lay out in this post (all of the repo men are named after domestic beer brands, and so on, and on), let’s focus on what many consider to be Harry Dean Stanton’s best acting performance as unhinged repo man Bud (a play on the gross suds known as Budweiser).

Stanton was 58 when he took on the role of Bud (which almost went to Dennis Hopper) and had long since established his alpha hangdog status in Hollywood starring in films with elite actors like Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, and Donald Sutherland. Stanton didn’t waste any time letting everyone know, especially Alex Cox, what he was and was not going to do during filming. Within a few days, he was already refusing to learn his dialog for the film. Stanton supported his decision by citing actor Warren Oates who Stanton claimed read his lines off of cards stuck to a car dashboard while filming 1971’s Two-Lane Backdrop. All of Stanton’s complaints finally set Cox off and the director began to think it might be easier to cut their losses by writing Stanton out of any future scenes. With Nesmith’s support he shut down Cox’s quest to make Bud disappear and eventually, Stanton delivered his lines without skipping a beat. But that didn’t mean Stanton suddenly became some sort of fucking choir-boy after almost getting ghosted by Cox. And this time his bad-boy behavior involved baseball bats.
 

Stanton and his trusty baseball bat.
 
For a scene involving Otto (played by a 22-year-old Emilio Estevez), Stanton pitched the idea of using a modified baseball hand signal used in a scene to tell Otto where to park a car. Cox said no, and Stanton went off telling Cox that other “great” directors he had worked with like Francis Ford Coppola let him do “whatever the fuck he wanted.” Later in a scene where Stanton was to act aggressively with a baseball bat at competing repo dudes the Rodriguez brothers, Stanton requested he be able to use a real baseball bat claiming he could do the scene in one take. The film’s cinematographer, Robby Müller, didn’t get behind the idea of arming Stanton with a baseball bat for the scene and was afraid the combination of an unruly Harry Dean Stanton and a baseball bat equaled bad times for someone’s head or worse. When Stanton was told he would have to switch out his Louisville slugger for a plastic version he went batshit and allegedly screamed the following in response:

“Harry Dean Stanton only uses REAL baseball bats!”

The quote “Harry Dean Stanton only uses REAL baseball bats!” is on par with Dennis Hopper’s terrifying endorsement in Blue Velvet for Pabst Blue Ribbon and it’s regretful at best that no footage of Stanton screaming these words seems to exists. In closing, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of the Criterion release of Repo Man as, in addition to a fantastic booklet full of illustrations by Cox and Mondo artists Jay Shaw and Tyler Stout. I’ve included all kinds of cool visual artifacts from Repo Man below including rare photos taken on the set, vintage German and Japanese lobby cards and posters, and some of the gritty neon artwork from the Criterion release.
 

Michael Nesmith and Harry Dean Stanton on the set of ‘Repo Man.’
 

A candid shot on the set of ‘Repo Man’ of Emilio Estevez, his father Martin Sheen, Harry Dean Stanton and Alex Cox.
 

Estevez, Stanton, and Cox.
 
Continues after the jump…

 
David Lynch has a new memoir out named Room to Dream, and it looks fantastic. He co-wrote it with journalist Kristine McKenna. Lynch also did the audiobook, which is great news because that means we now have fifteen or so more hours of Lynch saying “bladder” and “pretentious bullshit” and other interesting words.

In the book Lynch tells a story about a movie script that he generated with Robert Engels around 1994 that never got made with the name Dream of the Bovine. Around the same time Engels co-wrote Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me with Lynch.
 

 
The things Lynch and Engels have said about this screenplay are really weird. Engels actually said of the script that it was about “three guys, who used to be cows, living in Van Nuys and trying to assimilate their lives.” For his part, Lynch has said of the project that it was “a really dumb, really stupid, meant-to-be-pitifully-bad-quality budget thing” and also that it was to be a “very stupid comedy.” On The City of Absurdity, a website devoted to Lynch, it is stated without attribution that the action of the movie “should take place in Paris 1911.”

In the new book Lynch discloses more about Dream of the Bovine in which we learn that Brando enjoyed mirth with tomatoes at every opportunity. The part about Brando’s conception of the project comes at the end.
 

Around that time I was also trying to get Dream of the Bovine going. Dream of the Bovine is sort of in the same realm as One Saliva Bubble in that they’re both about misunderstanding and stupidity, but One Saliva Bubble is more normal and is kind of a feel-good movie. Dream of the bovine is an absurd comedy. The script needs a lot of work, but there are things in it that I really like. Harry Dean and I went up to talk to Marlon Brando about the two of them doing it together, but Brando hated it. He looked me and I and said, “It’s pretentious bullshit,” and he started telling us about these cookies made out of grass that grows in salt water that he wanted to promote. Then he told us about a car he wanted to build that had this bladder underneath that would cook this grass and make fuel, like the car would digest the grass. You could never tell if Marlon was putting you on or he was serious.

The thing about Marlon was, he just didn’t give a shit about anything. Every business has bad behavior going on, but there’s something about this business, with all the egos and lies and backstabbing, that makes you want to do something else rather than be in it. For sure, if anybody had that feeling it was Brando. He played the game for a while, then he couldn’t do it anymore because it made him sick, and he’d reached a point where he just wanted to have fun. In a weird way I think he was having fun, too, and it was fun talking to him. This was around the time he went on The Larry King Show and kissed Larry King.

He came here to the house a couple of times. One time he came up here by himself––I guess he’d driven himself––and he came in big, you know, just being Brando in this house. It made me a little nervous because I didn’t know why he was here or what we were going to do. I figured I’d make him a coffee, but right after he got here he says, “So, you got anything to eat?” I thought, Oh my God, but I said, “Marlon, I don’t know, let’s go look.” There was one tomato and one banana in the kitchen and he said, “Okay, that will do,” so I got him a plate and a knife and fork and we sat down and started talking. Then he says, “You got any salt?” So he was salting the tomato and cutting it up and eating it while we were talking. Then Mary came over with Riley, and Brando says, “Mary, give me your hand, I want to give you a gift,” so she put her hand out. He’d made a little ring out of the Del Monte sticker that had been on the tomato and he slipped it onto her finger.

Marlon was dressing in drag now and then during that period, and the thing Marlon really wanted to do was dress up as a woman and have Harry Dean dress up as a woman, and the two of them would have tea together and ad-lib while they were drinking tea. Think about that. It would’ve been fucking incredible! All I’d have to do is turn the camera on, but Marlon chickened out. It would drive me nuts. He should’ve done it!

 
More after the jump…...

 
Bob Dylan gets in touch with his inner Zimmerman, playing “Hava Nagila” on harmonica with his son-in-law Peter Himmelman and Big Love patriarch, Harry Dean Stanton on the 25th annual Chabad telethon.

And speaking of Harry Dean Stanton, the actor—who got his start during the Eisenhower-era—turns 89 today. The man can still be seen, indefatigably tying one on most nights of the week somewhere out and about in Los Angeles.

There’s a longer clip of this at Facebook.
 

 
Who knew Harry Dean Stanton was such a mystical Zen master? Apparently Marlon Brando did and the two actors spent many an hour sharing their wisdom about acting, life and the meaning of existence. One day, Brando asked Stanton what he thought of him? Stanton replied:

“I think you’re nothing.”

Brando laughed.

“He knew what I was talking about. The old eastern concept, one guy phrased it, ‘To realise you’re nothing is wisdom. To realise you’re everything is love. Or pure intelligence or pure awareness.

“Ultimately that can’t be defined in words, it’s beyond words, beyond consciousness. And that’s a hard sell, but it’s true.”

If that doesn’t twist your melon, then you may be surprised to hear that Mr. Stanton thinks everything is predestined. That might scare the shit out of some people, but dear old Harry still thinks life is predestined. When asked to explain what he means and how predestination affects the reasons he chose one role over another, Stanton responds:

“Again there’s no answer to that. Don’t you follow what I’m trying to say? Everyone wants an answer to why I did this, why all this happened, ultimately there is no answer to it.

“Everything happens the way it’s going to happen, no one’s in charge, it’s all going to go down, you know, Iraq, war, Napoleon, serial killers, wars, all of it. You never know what’s going to happen next. We think we’re in charge and ten seconds from now none of us in this room know what we’re going to be thinking or saying. So who the fuck’s in charge?”

You are Harry, and for the next twenty minutes you’re going to tell us all about it.
 

 
Hard-of-hearing cowboy Slim (Harry Dean Stanton) encounters an alien spy - or maybe not - in this goofy short film from David Lynch.

From Lynch’s website:

After the international success of Blue Velvet, Lynch was approached by Fiagaro Magazine and Erato Films to create a film as a part of their “The French as Seen by…” TV series. At first Lynch turned them down, but then he caught some ideas and agreed. The Cowboy and the Frenchman was the first time Lynch worked with veteran actor Harry Dean Stanton, who would later be featured in several other Lynch projects.

Stanton is a real hoot.
 

 
Etsy shop Alltheway Emporium make these rather odd yarn portraits of totally random celebrities like Harry Dean Stanton and… ‘70s teen heartthrob Robby Benson!? And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also Richard Pryor, the kissing scene from 80s flick Some Kind of Wonderful, Dolly Parton, “Blake” from the TV show Workaholics and The Big Lebowski‘s “Jesus.”

All of these yarn portraits were “created one string at a time” and will cost you anywhere from $200 to $300.
 

 

 
In 1979, the acclaimed French director, Bertrand Tavernier arrived in Glasgow to shoot his latest project - a science fiction film called Death Watch. It was a move away from Tavernier’s best known work - historical drama (Que la fête commence…), crime (The Watchmaker of St. Paul’s), and his scripts which focussed on the complex psychological interactions between characters.

Based on the novel, The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton, Death Watch centered on a young man, Roddy, who is hired by a TV organization to have a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may follow and film the last days of a terminally ill woman, Katherine. Tavernier developed this into clever and layered film starring Romy Schneider as Katherine, Harvey Keitel as Roddy, with a supporting cast of Harry Dean Stanton and Max Von Sydow, and early appearances for Robbie Coltrane and Bill Nighy.

For the cast alone should have ensured Death Watch‘s cult status, but it opened to negative reviews, and was quickly damned to obscurity in the growing multiplex world of The Empire Strikes Back, Smokey and the Bandit, Airplane! and Any Which Way You Can.

Tavernier had proven himself to be too clever by half and had made an intelligent and polemical film, which raised issues of the ethics and morality involved in film-making. Tavernier was also presciently examining the affects of Reality TV and Ob Docs, and questioning the role of media intrusion in our lives. Big issues, big subjects, and worth far more than comic book mix parped out by Lucas and co.

Almost entirely filmed in Glasgow, Death Watch captured the city at its most bleak and desolate - its heart ripped-out by unthinking town planners, who wanted to create a container city that mimicked an idealized America of freeways and skyscrapers. Their actions were akin to hacking off the legs of a prize winning racehorse, then entering it in the Grand National. Communities were destroyed, rehoused in high-rise, shoe-box apartments on the outskirts of the city, or scattered further afield in New Towns. The city’s industries were in fatal decline, the docks abandoned, ship-building almost gone. Yet, for all this, there is an inherent beauty to Tavernier’s vision, where Glasgow looks like a martian out-post, while at the same time capturing the mahogany warmth of its mythical Victorian past as the “Second City of the Empire”.
 

 
Previously on dangerous Minds

Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘Death Watch’

 
With thanks to Joseph McKay
 

 
Along with Dangerous Minds, it’s Harry Dean Stanton’s birthday. Hard to believe that he’s 85 years old.

Here’s an amusing and rare clip of Harry in A Fistful Of Dollars.

When A Fistful Of Dollars was aired on the ABC Sunday Night Movie in 1977 network execs felt a prologue needed to be shot to give Clint Eastwood’s character less of an amoral edge. They wanted there to be some clearly defined motivation for the carnage that followed in Sergio Leone’s existential western. Thus, they hired director Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) to create this intro with Stanton (who appears nowhere else in the movie) and a stand-in for Eastwood.

Neither Leone or Eastwood had anything to do with this scene. The reaction shots of Eastwood were inserted using footage from other scenes in the film. This results in some unintended humor.
 

 
Bob Dylan gets in touch with his inner Zimmerman, playing “Hava Nagila” with his son-in-law Peter Himmelman and Big Love patriarch, Harry Dean Stanton on a telethon.