by Sissy Spacek
The screen test at a producer’s house in the Hollywood Hills was just a formality, and it went well. I was more intrigued by the tall, young filmmaker operating the camera. Gary Weis would later go on to fame as the creator of short films for Saturday Night Live (including one of me twirling my baton in slow motion). But back then he was a cute, wild-haired guy just starting in the business.
Gary and I instantly hit it off. He took me to the beach in Santa Monica—not a great place for a redhead, but I was happy to watch him surf. He also invited me to visit the studio he was sharing with another artist named William Wegman and his soon-to-be-famous Weimaraner, Man Ray. I was fascinated by the work Gary and Bill were doing with photography and the new medium of video, but I felt more like a voyeur than a participant in their world. I still thought of art as something you put on your wall, and I wasn’t sure how posing a dog on a big white box fit into the equation. I had a lot to learn.
Shortly after, I was officially offered the part in Prime Cut—my first real film! But there was one thing that made me hesitate: The role called for at least one nude scene. It wasn’t an unusual requirement in those days; everyone seemed to be running around naked in the movies—and even on Broadway. So I figured if I wanted to be an actor, I’d better get over it. I called my parents and told them the good news. I’d gotten my first part in a movie, and it starred Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman. Then I told them the bad news: I wouldn’t always be wearing clothes. After much deliberation, we decided that this was a wonderful opportunity, and the good far outweighed the bad. I packed my bags and never looked back.
Filming started in Calgary, Alberta, in the summer of 1971. I loved working with Lee Marvin, and he was actually very protective of me. But he was a prodigious drinker, and he warned me to avoid him when he was inebriated. When we first met on location, I blurted out, “Lee, you have the greenest eyes!”
“Yeah,” said Lee. “And whenever you see them turn blue, stay away from me.”
It was true. When he’d had a few too many, his eyes turned ocean blue, and everybody gave him a wide berth. But mostly he was a good guy, and very professional.
Gene Hackman also starred, as a gangster with a sideline in human trafficking. Gene had appeared with Robert Redford in Michael Ritchie’s latest film, Downhill Racer, and was already well on his way to stardom after two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor. I was surprised that he was such a normal, humble person. A young actress named Janit Baldwin and I had adjoining rooms in one of the production honeywagons (that’s what we call trailers with flush toilets). We used to sit in our dressing rooms, playing games and making elaborate collages while we waited for the crew to set up shots. Gene would occasionally tap on the door and say, “Hey, can I come in and help work on the collage?”
“Sure, Gene, just don’t drop the glue this time!”
He was such a nice guy and a good artist that we didn’t mind.
I was so caught up in the filming that I hardly noticed the battles going on behind the scenes. Michael Ritchie was constantly fighting with the powers that be over the tone of Prime Cut. Michael wanted it to be more of a camp satire; the studio wanted a straight gangster thriller. Lee Marvin shared the director’s vision for the film, and it led to some tense moments on location. One day he had a huge fight with a production executive who was visiting the set. We were in the middle of shooting a scene that called for Lee to rescue me from a slave auction. I was wrapped in a horse blanket, and he was supposed to carry me to a waiting town car and drive off. We had done the scene numerous times and would get to the end of the road, hear “cut,” and then turn around and do it all over again. But this time, Lee was so furious with the studio that he threw me in the backseat, got in next to the driver, who was another actor, and barked, “Take me back to the hotel!” The hotel was more than an hour away, but of course, the actor driving the car followed Lee’s instructions and took off down the road for Calgary, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust, a very angry studio executive … and all of my clothes. I don’t remember a word being spoken on the drive back to the hotel. When we got there, I had to waddle through the lobby, still barefoot and rolled up in a rug. It was a rather humiliating experience, and I’m sure tongues were wagging. Janit brought me my clothes at the end of the day, and we all went back to work as if nothing had happened.
I might have been more upset about it if I’d known any better, but I was too busy having a great time on my first film location. Gary Weis had been hired to make a short film about the making of Prime Cut, and he asked me to write and record the music to go with it. We were an item for a while, but mostly I remember him as a happy and free-spirited artist who helped open my eyes to the possibilities of the world.
Prime Cut came out in the summer of 1972 to lukewarm reviews. Michael Ritchie had made wonderful films before, and would make wonderful films after—including the classic film The Candidate. But because he lost the battle with the studio over who would have final creative control, everybody suffered. Instead of having a funny, edgy film, the studio had outsmarted themselves and ended up with an uninspired movie created by committee, which is never a good thing. For my own purposes, Prime Cut served me well. I was now a working actress with footage, who’d been in a film with Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman.
By then, I was already living in LA, and starting work on a film that would change my life forever.
I returned to my New York apartment after we finished filming Prime Cut, but the city seemed to have lost some of its luster. The bustling streets just felt crowded, and the noise level was obnoxious. I missed going barefoot; I missed the sun on my face in the morning. Besides, most of my best friends were leaving town to be part of the growing music scene in LA. It felt like time to move on.
I stopped by to visit Rip and Gerry shortly after I got back from Canada. Gerry was immersed in a household project in one of the bathrooms, so I sat on the edge of the tub and entertained her with tales from location while she spackled the ceiling. I can still see the great Geraldine Page applying the spackle in slow, graceful strokes with her long, beautiful fingers while she listened to me rattle on about acting. I cringe to think of it now, but she was patient with me, and supportive—and, I’m sure, thoroughly amused. But she made me feel like we were two seasoned actors talking.
I felt like a door had opened, and it was time for me to step through. All I wanted was to be a performer. Music was the magic wand that had gotten me this far, but I was tired of banging on doors, asking to be let in. With acting, I seemed to have something that people wanted. It was a whole new feeling.
It also felt good to pay off the landlord who had been threatening to evict me every time the rent was two days late. Mr. DeLorenzo was so impressed that I was in a movie with Lee Marvin that he offered me a whole week’s grace period. I handed him a check and walked out that door for the last time.
Janit Baldwin offered me a room in the California bungalow-style house in Beechwood Canyon where she lived with her mother, Dona. It was like having a real home, with regular meals and clean sheets. I helped with the rent while we were trying out for parts and Janit was working as a photographer. Dona ran the local Schick clinic that helped people quit smoking. She was pretty tolerant of us. One day she walked through the living room with her arms full of groceries and found us sitting on the floor. Janit and I had taken the legs off all the tables and chairs in the house. We were giggling, and there was a lingering whiff of smoke in the air. “Well, isn’t that an interesting thing to do with the furniture!” Dona said with a smile as she continued into the kitchen.
Like other young actors in town, I tried out for commercials. Once I was cast in a national commercial for some big product (that I can’t remember now), but when Janit walked in to pick me up, the director saw her curly auburn hair and said, “No! Wait! Her! We want her!” He saw the puzzled look on my face and said, “Oh, sorry, Sissy.” I didn’t hold it against her; that was the business. The moral of this story: take
your own car to auditions.
Not long after I arrived in LA, I met with a young director named Terrence Malick. He had written an amazing script called Badlands and was just beginning to interview actors. The plot was based on the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, teenage lovers who went on a killing spree through the northern plains in the late 1950s.
Terry held the auditions in a big, half-empty house he’d rented off Doheny Drive, in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. He was an MIT graduate who had studied philosophy at Oxford before deciding to become a filmmaker. Terry had won a fellowship at the American Film Institute, where he produced and directed a short film about two cowboys plotting to rob a Texas bank. Badlands would be his first feature. He was only twenty-eight years old, but he was an old soul, with an easy laugh and a gentle way about him. He spoke in a quiet drawl that I immediately recognized as coming from my corner of the world. We shared a love of the Southwest and small-town Texas. We’d both grown up there in the 1950s and were deeply connected to that time and place. From the moment we met, we felt like family. We knew the same things, and could communicate them without speaking. I was thankful that I’d ignored all those New York agents who told me to lose my accent and hide my Southern roots. Terry hired me for the film because of all those things. I hadn’t changed. I was still a small-town girl from Texas. That was what he wanted for the role of Holly Sargis, a naive, impressionable high school girl who falls for Kit Carruthers, a charming, sociopathic young garbage man who happens to shoot people.
I was the first actor cast in the film. From the very beginning, Terry included me in his creative process. He asked me all kinds of questions about my life, as if he was mining for gold. When he found out I’d been a majorette, he worked my twirling routine into the script. Before I knew it, we were driving down Hollywood Boulevard to a music store to buy a Starline baton like the one I’d had in high school. Terry would give me little pieces of paper with a few lines of dialogue on them, and when I read the lines out loud to him, he’d fall over laughing. My opinions mattered to him. I felt like a filmmaker.
Terry interviewed just about every up-and-coming young actor in Hollywood for the role of Kit, and I got to read with a lot of them. I didn’t really know what Terry was looking for, but I figured he’d recognize Kit when he saw him. So we kept looking. The casting director suggested bringing in Martin Sheen. Terry wasn’t very optimistic about him because he thought he might be too old for the role, but since his agent had been so nice, he decided to audition him anyway.
The moment Martin walked into the room, everything changed. The chemistry was immediate. Martin wore his hair slicked back and had a swagger like James Dean, and he looked plenty young. I had done that scene with dozens of actors—wonderful actors—but with Martin, it was completely different. He was Kit. And with him, I was Holly. Terry and I could hardly contain ourselves. After Martin left, we were like giddy schoolkids.
I spent the summer and fall of 1972 on location in La Junta, Colorado, a tiny town on the south bank of the Arkansas River, surrounded by endless miles of short-grass prairie and not much else. This part of the state leans more toward the dustbowl of Kansas than the Rocky Mountains to the west, and it was the perfect location to film Badlands. Sometimes the sky seemed so blue and limitless that it had a weight of its own, pressing down on us and wiping out all memories of the other world beyond the one we inhabited at that very moment. Out on the edge of nowhere, working with a virtuoso first-time director on a shoestring budget and always perched on the edge of disaster, nothing else mattered, or even existed. It felt like we were the center of the universe. While we were filming, some people working on another film that had just wrapped in Montana drove through La Junta to visit friends of theirs on our crew. I remember being amazed, thinking, Somebody’s making a film somewhere else?
In this rarified world, two life-altering things happened to me: I learned that filmmakers can be artists. And I fell in love with Jack Fisk.
Terry Malick had been telling me all about this great young art director for weeks when I finally met him during preproduction. I was coming down the stairs at Terry’s one day, when I saw a tall, thin man with long, nearly black hair and an equally shaggy black dog at his feet. I was wearing my favorite tapestry boots, snug overalls, a Cub Scout shirt, and a tiny toy car dangling from a silk cord around my neck. I remember thinking, That’s the brilliant art director that Terry’s been talking about? He wasn’t much older than me. But he was very cute, and so was his dog.
Jack remembers thinking, She doesn’t look like Caril Ann Fugate. That’s the girl my character was based on. We said a few words to each other, but I was still seeing someone else, and we didn’t meet again until Colorado.
In the meantime, it was beginning to dawn on me that someone I currently thought of as my boyfriend didn’t think of me as his girlfriend. Or at least not his only one. I visited him once when he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. The Chelsea was the place where the über-cool stayed, and you had to be careful not to step on people passed out in the hallways from drug overdoses. He had a meeting that morning, so he left the room before I did. He was gone for about two seconds when he stuck his head back inside and said, “Oh yeah, and don’t answer the phone while I’m gone, okay?” That was like saying to me, “Oh, and don’t eat the chocolate cake you’re holding.” So as soon as the phone rang, I dove for it. “Hello,” I said in my most seductive voice. There was a woman with a French accent on the other end of the line. “No, he’s not here right now,” I said. “He just stepped out. Who should I tell him called?” I heard a click and then a dial tone.
Another time we were driving through Topanga Canyon outside LA, when out of the blue he said, “So, what do you want to do with your life? Find a man, or what?” I don’t think I said a word, but it was a moment of epiphany for me. NO FUTURE IN THIS RELATIONSHIP began flashing like a neon sign inside my head.
When I arrived in La Junta, Jack had already been at work for weeks, scouting locations and building sets out on the prairie. I knew he was supposed to be the art director, but at first it looked like he was pretty far down on the food chain, because he was doing all the work. He was always walking back and forth hauling wood and props and furniture and hammering and painting things, while his assistant art director was sitting in the shade having a cigarette and telling us all what was going to happen next.
We were staying at the Capri Motel in La Junta, which was the only motel for miles in any direction, and it had seen far better days. But the Capri had a restaurant attached to it, the people were friendly, and almost every room was filled with cast and crew. It became our home away from home. I was happy to have Janit Baldwin there for company. She had been cast as Holly’s best friend (sadly, all her scenes were cut from the film), and her mother, Dona, was hired to do makeup and hair. Dona also played the part of a deaf maid who is spared by Kit. Janit and I had a scene under the bleachers where the two girlfriends practiced kissing each other so they’d know what to do if they ever had boyfriends. But Terry said the scene turned out to be a little weird. Janit and I certainly thought it was weird while we were shooting it—but then, what did we know?
It was that kind of film; everybody pitched in. Terry even had a tiny speaking role after an actor didn’t show up. It wasn’t the only time he’s acted in one of his own movies, although it’s always uncredited and he’s incognito. Terry is warm and funny and engaging with his friends, but he is an utterly private person who shuns all publicity about himself. Which has, of course, just added to his mystique.
We started shooting in mid-July with temperatures hovering around one hundred degrees. One afternoon Janit and I were sipping cold milk shakes through straws, when Jack and one of his friends walked by. I offered Jack the rest of my shake and he took it from me with a grin. It felt like a primal act, a “stranger in a strange land” moment—sharing water in the hot desert. I learned that he was an artist from back East, a trained
painter and sculptor who had moved to LA and started working as a grip and set dresser. When he was still in art school, Jack created huge environmental sculptures in his studio, but longed to see people moving through them and interacting with them. While in Philadelphia, he began designing sets for the Theater of the Living Arts, which led to his work in film. It was a natural evolution.
Badlands was his first serious film as an art director. His previous experience was on exploitation films and biker movies, one of which had an art budget of $300. Jack went to the hardware store and bought $100 worth of plywood, $100 worth of black paint, and $100 worth of chain. That kind of austerity turned out to be good training for Badlands.
Terry only had a budget of $250,000 for his entire film, which was tiny, even for an independent feature back then. Jack did his best to stretch things out. When he arrived in Colorado, he found an abandoned house that had belonged to a junkman who’d recently died. He paid the man’s family $100 cash for everything in it. To Jack it was a diamond mine, filled with amazing things like jars of black widow spiders and balls of string the size of pumpkins, an old iron bed, and a Sears and Roebuck catalogue from the early 1950s. ‘ There were rusty tools and beat-up furniture, perfect for “Cato’s shack,” an important location where Kit visits his old buddy (and then shoots him). Jack and I found out right off that both of us loved going to flea markets; our idea of a perfect date was rooting around at the town dump.
We were all in awe of Jack’s ability to incorporate these junk-store finds into the set to help develop the characters. I could only marvel when I walked into the house he had created for Holly and her father to live in. I spent hours in Holly’s bedroom, preparing for my role by imagining myself in her world. And everywhere I turned, there was some kind of treasure Jack had left for me. He had found an old stereopticon just like the one my grandparents Momsy and Pops had. Terry later shot a scene of Holly looking through it. The closets and drawers were filled with trinkets and books that Jack thought my character might have liked: a horned toad made of plaster of Paris, a tiny lead soldier on a three-legged horse, a door knocker shaped like a butterfly with painted enamel wings. I loved them so much; I still have them. I’d lay on Holly’s bed and hold these gems in my hands, feeling like I was Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Boo Radley was leaving me gifts in the hollow oak tree. And, also like Scout, I had the eerie feeling that I was being watched, even though there didn’t appear to be anyone else around.