by Lee Hill
End of the Road, more than Easy Rider, was one of the few truly independent feature films of the sixties. Avakian, a talented editor (The Miracle Worker, You’re a Big Boy Now), had directed only Lad: a Dog and a small part of Paper Lion. These experiences convinced him that playing by the rules was doing little for his directorial career. Southern was looking for more creative control over his scripts. They optioned Barth’s novel and began refashioning an earlier treatment by Dennis McGuire. Max Raab raised the meager half-million-dollar budget. A distribution agreement was worked out with Allied Artists.
Shooting started in an abandoned button factory in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and the surrounding countryside in the fall of 1968. Southern and Avakian pooled their contacts and assembled an unbelievably talented cast and crew. Gordon Willis, late the legendary cinematographer behind The Godfather films, Annie Hall, and All the President’s Men, made his debut on the film. He was selected after Avakian and Southern saw a showreel of his work lensing commercials. Willis’s assistant, Michael Chapman, later shot Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Fueled by the bitter passions of the times, Southern and Avakian encouraged cast and crew to collaborate and improvise.
Avakian’s wife, aspiring actress Dorothy Tristan, was not the first choice for the part of Rennie. Southern lobbied for someone like Tuesday Weld.
“During the writing of it, they all hung out in the house…. I, of course, was the cook and cleaner. I had no part in it. I was studying acting by then. I wanted to be in the film, but they would talk about the casting in front of me, which was very difficult for me,” said Tristan. “I would be sitting there washing the dishes and feeding them. I was intimidated by those guys. Anyway, I finally was given the role. I was standing right in front of their faces, but they wanted a name and my opinion was that Terry and those other guys, not Aram because he wasn’t like that, wanted somebody whose pants they could get in. That’s been my experience with a lot of filmmakers including any of the stars. When they are choosing scripts, who they want to go to bed with has a lot to do with their choices. Who’s available? Who will allow herself to be taken to bed?”
While Tristan found her first film role difficult to adjust to, she later realized that the working environment’s freedom and spirit of intense collaboration was the exception not the rule. Max Raab was a hands-off producer who simply wanted to help his friends get a film made. She did think Southern and Aram were spending too much time working the political ferment of the year into the script.
“I felt that this was a mistake. I think that the novel was enough. I did not think that the political [slant] was needed. But of course, that was going on at the time. Aram and Terry were very politically minded, so that was the direction it took. And I think that was to a large degree the film’s downfall and led to the X rating it got. I think it was not only the abortion [scene], but the political aspect. Nobody was stepping out that far at that time.”
The film’s marital theme placed a strain on Avakian and Tristan’s marriage. While they managed to keep their disagreements to a minimum, it was sometimes difficult for Avakian, as director, and Southern, as writer and coproducer, to control their actors. “There was one thing I didn’t like and neither did Aram, and that was the relationship between Stacy and Harris,” said Tristan. “They were very good friends, but as sometimes happens between actors, they formed an alliance and decided what they were going to do. Which was difficult because Aram was very strong minded. Terry was also very strong-minded and he also gave line readings, which didn’t really work. Terry was on the set a lot. Normally that wouldn’t work between a writer and director, but Aram and Terry’s relationship was so good and close that there was no conflict. However, the actors often went to Terry for information about the characters. Naturally they would go to the writer if the writer is there. But it’s annoying nonetheless when the director is standing right there. I felt he had no place doing it. There is a difference between writing a novel and hearing those voices in your head and hearing the actors speak. It’s almost forbidden to give line readings, frankly. He did it and he was so well respected that the actors would not [object], but I felt it was detrimental to particular performances.”
During the shoot, Keach was also playing Falstaff for Joseph Papp’s N.Y. Shakespeare Festival in the evenings. After a day’s shooting in Great Barrington, he would don his makeup in a station wagon en route to Manhattan. After the performance, he would drive back and catch a few hours’ sleep. Keach thought Southern’s writing was “terrific” but felt “Aram Avakian, our director, had his own agenda, and I don’t think anybody ever knew what it was. What finally ended up on the screen is simply not the movie we shot. Some of it was way ahead of its time, and some of it is brilliant. But it’s not the story we were trying to tell. End of the Road, which was supposed to explode on the American scene like another Graduate, instead was withheld for two years. When it finally did come out, it received an X rating because of the abortion scene. Women fainted, it was so graphic. Aram would not listen to anyone who spoke in such mundane terms as ‘This scene is unwatchable.’”
Avakian described the scene to Keach as “symbolic of the abortion of America.” It was one of the first scenes that Keach and Tristan filmed. Tristan had injured her left arm learning to ride a horse for a montage sequence. When she managed to complete the harrowing abortion scene without indicating there was anything wrong with her arm, any reservations about her ability to play Rennie were cast aside.
Southern’s input on End of the Road would be superseded by Avakian once the film wrapped. The director spent almost a year tinkering with the film before its New York release in January 1970. The cuts were very self-conscious, heightening the framing and chiaroscuro lighting of Gordon Willis. As the musical consultant, George Avakian spent a great deal of time gathering sound effects as well as music to add to the aural assault that Keach’s character experiences in Doctor’s examination room.
A few month’s before End of the Road’s release, Life magazine ran a favorable cover story which Tristan believes irritated the New York critics.
“There was this seven-page rave on the film. It was very hard for the film because the critics did not like that. It was like ‘are you going tell me what is good and what isn’t?’ And it had a negative effect on them, plus there was plenty to get your teeth into as far as political content, aside from the abortion. To a large degree, the political content was more aggravating to people than the abortion sequence. Although that’s what everybody talked about.”
Barth’s novel was informed by the apolitical conformity of fifties college life when McCarthyism kept liberal academics in a state of paranoid silence and retreat. By contrast, Avakian and Southern underscore Horner’s nervous breakdown with images of the social and political meltdown of 1968. A hypnotic opening montage of still photos and newsreel footage presented a sideshow of postwar history, culminating in the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, riots and protests, the resurgence of law and order Republicans like Nixon and Agnew, and of course, the Vietnam War. Horner’s catatonia is a direct response to the madness of LBJ’s Great Society. Whereas the doctor’s race was not significant in the novel, the film’s casting of James Earl Jones is central to Avakian and Southern’s adaptation. Jones’s interpretation of D’s therapy of shock acts as a counterpoint to the ineffectual liberalism of the white characters.
Southern and Avakian also found a corollary to Barth’s arch, self-referential prose. The editing combines scenes of seamless, flowing cuts with others that are disassociative and allusive. The dialogue is simultaneously banal and charged with menace and foreboding.
“We tried to give the film a full-on sixties flavor—student unrest and so on—which seemed inherent in the book. A very good book, and, I like to believe, a most faithful adaptation, with a little something extra in the form of Doctor D’s theories,” Southern said.
Upon release, End of the Road was met with either indifference
or incomprehension. In a typical review, Molly Haskell wrote, “The apocalyptic vision is an excuse for blackwashing moral distinctions.” Judith Crist dismissed it as tasteless and superficial. With no hot young stars (but fine actors) or groovy rock score (but Bach, Billie Holiday, and Teo Macero), Road was a film that fell between the cracks of youth culture, the New Hollywood, and the traditional art-house audience.
In his memoir, Once Upon a Time, John Barth dismissed the adaptation as “vulgar,” but actually the film extends the ideas of his novel. It pushes the book’s nihilism further and stresses the links between the personal and political. The result is a raw cry over the death of sixties idealism filmed in a year when this anguish was starkly felt by millions around the world. Like Two-Lane Blacktop and Performance, End of the Road is an elegy for a decade that we are still coming to terms with.
End of the Road was forgotten, but it has built up a small cult reputation thanks to video. Nicolas Roeg, who probably appreciated Avakian’s fragmented mise-en-scène, paid homage to the film in The Man Who Fell to Earth. When Thomas Newton watches his bank of multiple TV sets, one of them shows James Earl Jones taunting Stacy Keach.
Written and shot in 1968, End of the Road is a great lost film of the period. Dismissed by critics during its brief New York run in January 1970, End of the Road was burdened with an X rating because of its explicit abortion sequence. Allied Artists, the film’s distributor, didn’t go to bat for it, and as a result, the film never got the kind of promotion Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy enjoyed. Perhaps it wouldn’t have helped much anyway, since End of the Road is an uncompromising study of alienation and political despair. Avakian came closer to emulating the Brechtian outrage of Jean-Luc Godard than any other American director of the time, surpassing in many respects the work of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn.
End of the Road is a tattered signpost pointing to a road not taken by American cinema. The New Hollywood of the late sixties and early seventies, like most new waves, promised more than it could deliver. As great as the work of Coppola, Scorsese, and Spielberg was in the seventies, their politics were often safely couched in genre or technical display. If Road had been even a modest success, Avakian might have joined Robert Altman or John Cassavetes in creating a more rigorous brand of new American cinema.
Southern’s work on End of the Road overlapped with the completion of a workable shooting script for The Magic Christian. As a result, he wasn’t able to keep an eye on the Christian script as preproduction went into high gear. Since 1965, Southern had written several drafts for Sellers that were used to raise money. Commonwealth United, a relatively new American/British production company, was financing The Magic Christian’s $15 million budget as part of a slate of films that would make them a minimajor like United Artists. (The company’s president, Bernie Cornfeld, was implicated in a financial scandal shortly after the film’s release and spent four years in a Swiss prison.) Sellers had convinced Joseph McGrath, who had since made two small comedies, to forget the rancor of Casino Royale, and to direct the big-screen version of a book they both loved.
Between 1965 and November 1968, Southern had worked on a dozen different versions of the script. Additional writing went on with McGrath when the director came on board the summer before filming. Somewhere along the line Southern had agreed to the idea that Guy Grand be accompanied by an adopted son to play on the generation-gap theme that was all the rage in sixties mass media. Sellers thought it would be good to get one of the Beatles to play the son. Initially John Lennon was approached, says McGrath, but his relationship with Yoko Ono eventually precluded a long-term film commitment. Ringo Starr, who apparently decided to ignore the terrible reviews of Candy, was more than eager to take Lennon’s place as Youngman Grand. McGrath and Southern also approached Stanley Kubrick about playing a director not unlike himself who decides to take a bribe. While the reclusive director passed on the rare opportunity to do a Hitchcock in somebody else’s film, others were more than willing to sign on, including Yul Brynner, Laurence Harvey, Roman Polanski, Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Spike Milligan.
Sellers’s love and admiration for The Magic Christian did not prevent the impetuous actor from tinkering with the script while his favorite writer was distracted by End of the Road. In the interim between delivering a final draft and principal photography, Sellers, who was prone to sudden bouts of insecurity, decided to have Southern and McGrath’s draft rewritten by Graham Chapman and John Cleese, a talented Oxford-educated acting/writing team who were establishing a name for themselves through work on British TV programs like The Frost Report and Doctor in the House. According to Cleese: “The Terry Southern script had been through thirteen drafts by the time it got to us. We read one that contained the most elegant and verbose stage directions I have ever come across in my life, but quite hopeless dialogue, I’m afraid…. Graham and I managed to put this script into shape in three or four weeks until we got it the point where they were able to raise money on it, at which point Terry Southern arrived and was laid to rest in a nest of bourbon crates.”
In addition to his low opinion of Southern’s work on the film, Cleese described McGrath as a “a very nice man who had no idea of comedy structure and [the film] finished up as series of celebrity walk-ons.”
“I always remember John Cleese saying after reading the opening of Terry’s Magic Christian script, ‘Hah, I mean who wrote this, this is rubbish, why does it have to say there is an ormolu clock on the mantel shelf? This attention to detail is ridiculous. Who needs this!’” recalled McGrath. “Well, that’s just silly. Terry wrote an ormolu clock because he wanted to get across it’s Guy Grand and the man is rich and you don’t just cut to any clock.”
The soon-to-be founding members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus would also act in The Magic Christian film. Chapman would play an easily bought rowing coach in the Cambridge-Oxford regatta scene. Cleese played an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. Southern hated this scene as Cleese wrote it. He argued that defacing a Rembrandt had nothing to do with his concept of Guy Grand as a deflater of middle-class pretensions. Intriguingly one of the other scenes Cleese and Chapman wrote for the film, which was cut, was “The Mouse Problem,” a mock TV exposé depicting men wanting to be mice in the same context as closet homosexuals. According to Cleese, the scene was cut because Sellers’s milkman didn’t like the sketch. It was later used in the premiere season of Monty Python.
The Magic Christian began shooting on February 2, 1969, and ran through May 2. Filming took place on all three stages of Twickenham Film Studios as well as various locations in and around London. Ringo began work on the film just after completing the Let It Be documentary/album with his fellow Beatles. Southern and Gerber arrived a week later. They stayed in the Whitehouse Hotel near Regent’s Park.
Both McGrath and Southern found Sellers fun to work with, but were wary of his mood swings. “Working with [Sellers] was like working with two people,” said Southern. “He was an ultratalented person who was one of the fastest improvisers ever. He could add to and enrich a scene or character tremendously beyond what was written. On the other hand, he could take it too far and detract from the quality of humor when it was his own. He was too complicated because he was so insecure. If he had reached the saturation point with the particular innovations he was making and you said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think we should go any further with this,’ he would take it very personally as though you were putting him down as a friend. He thought you were withdrawing your affection from him or whatever he felt was there. Then he would just get more and more into [the improvisations], which would represent something excruciatingly personal, which was a lot more important than the movie or any of the aesthetics involved. It was tough because it was a constant balancing act.”
McGrath believed one of the problems was that Sellers did not know how to play Guy Grand:
“There’s a sequence right at the beginning of the film on the train where Guy Grand talks to his Bo
ard, introduces his son to them and then throws them all off the train. We did some camera tests and stuff with extras and Peter. Peter wanted to play the scene and get the character. He did one camera test as Groucho Marx, which was wonderful, and then he lost his courage and did it the way he did it. He was always very keen to go on rewriting until he felt this is wonderful and then he would work on top of a wonderful script. He would never go in loose. He always wanted to know exactly what to do and then he would deviate, but he would know that he had to go back [to the script]. It’s very funny. He did another sequence where he had to go through a room full of priceless objects, ceramics and stuff. And he said, ‘The thing is if I go through that room and we close the door, one of them could fall over and that would be funny. What I should try and do is go through the room as quickly as possible so that it looks as though I’m going to knock everything down. But I don’t knock anything down and then when I close the door still nothing falls down.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s very funny, do you want to walk it and try it?’ Then he said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and he closed his eyes and we’re all standing there, the film crew and everything. He stood there for about a minute, opened his eyes and pointed to his forehead, and said, ‘Oh, I wish you could have been with me in there. It was wonderful. Let’s just do it now. It can never be as good.’ That sums him up.”