Q: What kind of a lead is it to be?
A: It has to be a young man who’s involved with what’s going on.
Q: How long do you think it’s going to take you to get the movie started?
A: I don’t know. We’re mystified. We’re very mystified. We can’t find this boy. We know he must exist.
Cruising through Boston in an MGM limo after another unsuccessful round of auditions, Dennison spotted a situation unfolding at a bus stop. A sailor and his girlfriend were fighting. But it was the guy watching them fight who caught Dennison’s eye. The tall, good-looking, intense young man was taking it all in, seeming anxious and impatient, when someone in an apartment above the scene, fed up with the bickering, threw a potted plant toward the bus stop. Dennison told the driver to stop as pandemonium ensued. The young man looked up at the plant-launching culprit, shook his fist, and hollered a rage-filled string of obscenities. In his moment of uncontrolled anger, he embodied the same rebel spirit that made James Dean so magnetic. Dennison’s colleague, producer Harrison Starr, grabbed him from behind and asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty,” he answered, as he was escorted into the limo. Dennison was amazed: Their missing puzzle piece had fallen into place, as swiftly as a flowerpot tossed from a window. Starr raved over the two clinching attributes of their new find: “He’s twenty and he hates!”
Mark Frechette had just been cast as the lead in Zabriskie Point.
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RAISED IN FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT, Frechette started rebelling in his teens, getting booted from over a dozen schools. He was eighteen the first time his name made the papers—in the police blotter, for a “breach of peace” charge. When a Zabriskie Point employee somehow got hold of his medical records, they learned he had been placed in mental institutions twice. The psychiatric evaluation detailed a troubled childhood, distorted religious views, and a deep distaste for authority, advising that he be approached with caution. The information was never passed along to Antonioni. “He wasn’t equipped to handle the life he came into,” Harrison Starr said in hindsight. “I did the best I could to help him. But Mark had his destiny. It couldn’t have been changed.”
Frechette married at seventeen, had a child, and moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1966. “I was a self-respecting hippie dropout bum,” he told Rolling Stone’s David Felton. “Then I started reading the Avatar and it changed my life.”* He didn’t know anyone from the community personally at that point, but had made a practice of walking around the park surrounding the Cochituate Standpipe in the middle of the night when his child couldn’t sleep. With his kid strapped to his back, Frechette would think about what he’d read in Avatar. “Mel really made me see what a fool I’d been. It made me grateful that the Hill was there, that Mel was there.”
Frechette had made some unsuccessful attempts to speak with Mel, but after being cast in the film he was granted an audience. Lyman told Frechette that he could be the instrument that brought Avatar to Hollywood, and the young actor agreed. A week earlier, Frechette had been panhandling in Harvard Square, in between carpentry jobs; now he had been chosen as uniquely special by two controversial artists. In late August 1968, armed with a complete run of Avatars in his suitcase, Mark Frechette set out for California.
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ZABRISKIE POINT’S TITULAR LOCALE is a lookout spot in Death Valley National Park, its name an homage to a mining operation once headquartered nearby. “The feeling of space and time reminds me of the moon,” Antonioni told the press. “And the hills look as if no man has ever walked over them.”*
Rumors were circulating that the film would feature anti-American themes. The New York Times reported that the movie’s executive producer “flatly denied . . . that the troupe had filmed scenes in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles” where Robert F. Kennedy had been killed just months before. “We were all followed and tracked by the FBI,” Sally Dennison recalls. “Everyone was sure we were making a radical film. It made me very paranoid, I must say.” The American film crew often referred to Antonioni as a “pinko dago pornographer.”
For the film’s opening, a faux-documentary glimpse into a meeting of activist students, Antonioni cast Kathleen Cleaver, a high-ranking member of the Black Panthers, to deliver the dialogue. The FBI was actively trying to dismantle the Panthers, and her inclusion either initiated or magnified surveillance of the movie. When asked what the film was about, Antonioni would offer something like “America is my true protagonist.” Look magazine declared, “MGM still claims it doesn’t know what Zabriskie Point is all about.” The real problem was, neither did Antonioni.
The production was about to encounter a series of hurdles, but Antonioni’s choice of leading man would become his most reliable headache. That’s not to say Antonioni didn’t like Frechette; he was by all accounts quite fond of him, even as he resisted the movie he was starring in. “There is something mystical about him,” Antonioni mused to The New York Times.
The two leads, Daria Halprin and Frechette, met for the first time in August on set in Los Angeles, where Antonioni filmed the opening sequences.* “[Mark was] sitting there in his big armchair, looking like a zombie, not saying a word to anyone, real white and pasty,” Halprin recalled, “and he’s got these huge Benjamin Franklin glasses on.”
“Are you wearing a wig?” Mark flatly asked Daria.
Their chemistry was natural: The two began an affair during production. Still, both leads were shy, inexperienced, and needed prodding. “Turn and grab Mark as if you really wanted him,” Antonioni instructed Daria. “Oh Michelangelo,” Daria chided, “you Italian pervert!” Look, one of many media outlets that dispatched a journalist to the set, reported that Antonioni was drawn to Daria’s “bratty, free, earth-child quality” and believed Mark had “the elegance of an aristocrat, though from a poor family.”
The Times’s coverage bordered on fanatical: reporting on the film at length before and after its release, hailing the inexperienced Frechette as “this year’s James Dean.” Frechette wasn’t impressed or fazed by the press coverage; he was just trying to figure out the best way to promote the Fort Hill Community. Press agent Beverly Walker recalled that Frechette “brought copies of Avatar to the producer, the director, the reactionary Southern crew, and always, to every journalist that visited the set, tirelessly explaining over and over again the importance of non-violence. Everyone indulged him. ‘Oh, this is very interesting.’ After all, he was the star.”
In mid-September 1968, as Antonioni was moving the seventy-person crew from downtown L.A. to Death Valley, Frechette left the set for what would be the first of several unscheduled breaks from making Zabriskie Point. “Mel had announced that the Aquarian Age was about to begin, on the date of a particular astrological configuration that most others didn’t interpret that way,” Lyman follower Michael Kindman recalled. “It was time to ‘come home.’” Members of the community returned to Roxbury from all over the country, watching the sun rise on Fort Hill together, certain the New Age had commenced. Frechette, emerging as an important member of Lyman’s inner circle, was more excited about the events of his visit home than he had been by any of the moviemaking process. “That was the first time I heard [Mel’s] music,” Frechette explained. “We stayed up and smoked some of his fantastic weed, and listened to his music. All the music he ever recorded he played for me that weekend.” Frechette reluctantly departed for Death Valley with a stack of Mel’s tape reels, hopeful that Antonioni might consider it for the soundtrack.
“It’s hard to say what he thought of them,” Mark told Rolling Stone. “I noticed that during one of the more spirited pieces he was twitching in his chair quite a bit.” The soundtrack, featuring Pink Floyd and John Fahey, was one of the strongest features of the finished film, but it did not feature the music of Mel Lyman. After this failure, Frechette tried sneaking issues of Avat
ar into shots, setting it up so Lyman’s image would be visible in the frame. Each time, an incensed Antonioni spotted the planted image and chucked it.
Meanwhile, Daria Halprin was falling head over heels for Frechette, and she was far more receptive to his stories about his community back home. “After eight or nine months of my ranting and raving [Daria] had a vision,” Frechette said. “She saw the face of Melvin. She must have recognized it from the Avatar cover since she’d never met him before. A few days later she made her decision for Mel and agreed, once the movie was finished, to live with her costar on Fort Hill.” For Mark, scoring a successful conversion revealed how little was being included in Antonioni’s portrait of revolutionary America. Frechette’s Fort Hill Family believed the revolution was spiritual; here, the Italian director was filming a surface-level political revolution. In protest, the leading man flew back to Boston, refusing to continue working on the film. It was going to be impossible now, Frechette figured, for Antonioni to continue to ignore the Fort Hill Community.
“The whole thing was a big Hollywood lie, it wasn’t real,” Frechette told Lyman. “So I put a stop to it. I quit.” Antonioni’s American film debut now held hostage by its own lead, he finally agreed to two of his star’s demands: Frechette could rerecord some of the dialogue to tone down the political nature of his character, and after completion of the film, Antonioni would spend ten days at Fort Hill.
Back in California, five months behind schedule, Zabriskie Point’s production team was heading toward a literal blowup—a culminating scene in which a house in the desert explodes, sending the residue of American culture into the air. “No one knew how high and wide debris might be flung,” recalled Walker. “Local airports were keeping planes away.”
In gorgeous slow motion, set against a haunting Pink Floyd track, refrigerators, rotisserie chickens, a cucumber, a box of Special K, onions, apples, beer bottles, a newspaper, and hundreds of books launch into a perfect blue sky, then fall to the ground. The film was finally finished.
With Zabriskie Point wrapped, Mark and Daria drove east across the United States, to their new home in Fort Hill. As the Globe would put it in 1970:
No plastic living beside the Hollywood pools for them. Frechette and Miss Halprin are members of the community of 100 or so men, women, and children on the Roxbury hilltop.
The somewhat utopian group is headed by 31-year-old Mel Lyman and is a completely cooperative community.
Miss Halprin, a West Coast girl, has been at Fort Hill since last April. “Yes, I will make more films if that is what I am expected to do. I will do it for Mel. I’ll do anything to serve my purpose of living.” Asked what that was she replied, quietly, “Mel, to serve Mel.”
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THREE DIFFERENT MGM presidents had been involved with Zabriskie Point by the time it was released. There was talk that the company was about to go belly up, or be sold off. In February 1970, when the troubled production finally arrived in theaters, a man named James Aubrey headed MGM. To Antonioni’s face, Aubrey called Zabriskie Point a masterpiece, but privately, he was deeply worried. MGM was in for $7 million—he needed the picture to succeed, and the finished project smelled like disaster. In desperation, he decided that the silent ending, in which Daria drives into the sunset alone after the explosion, was too bleak. What if she rode out to an uplifting song, to convince audiences that they had not just been taken for a pointless, dour ride? He tapped his young protégé, Michael Curb, to write a tune with Roy Orbison and sneak it into the final print without Antonioni’s knowledge. Curb, the new president of MGM Records—a role in which he would trash the Bosstown Sound and purge the label’s “drug acts”—also wrote the liner notes for the soundtrack. “If seeing is believing, then experiencing is being,” he incoherently declares. The finished film has only a slightly clearer message.
Unsurprisingly, almost no one cared for Zabriskie Point. Journalists jumped at the chance to explain how a genius director from Italy got America wrong. Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it “one of his most ambiguous and least profound films . . . [As] a dramatization of what he sees as a contemporary American state of mind, it is both superficial and overly intellectualized.” Richard Goldstein wrote that the film “is far more interesting to me as a failure than Blow Up was as a success,” imagining the director traveling the country, “[m]eeting real Black people and politely asking where the next race riot was being held.” Local music magazine Broadside noted its beauty, then lamented, “too bad the medium isn’t the message. The director has seriously misread America.” Nevertheless, the film made its two plucked-from-obscurity leads semifamous, landing them on the cover of Rolling Stone.
The press tour kicked off a month after the film’s release. If the couple were not ready to star in a major motion picture, they were spectacularly ill equipped to execute a press tour. In nearly every interview, the leads disparaged the movie and/or its director. The Rolling Stone cover story called the movie “seriously flawed” but of “exceptional importance.” It was as if this Italian director’s failed attempt to capture American youth culture had emboldened that same youth culture with the confidence to say: Here is what we’re not. It lent credence to the idea that the New Left movement and hippie revolutionary scene were real, complex, and easily mischaracterized, even by a sympathetic maestro such as Antonioni.
As they gave interviews, the young couple already knew that most people regarded the film as a flop, and they agreed. “Antonioni didn’t represent reality,” Frechette told the Globe. “It is all surface phenomenon, period piece, part of the prehistoric past.” Halprin took it further: “The whole movie embarrassed me.” Both claimed that Antonioni barely gave them any direction. On The Merv Griffin Show, Mark threw a punch at another guest, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tony Dolan, who had written critically about Avatar in 1968.
Perhaps MGM’s PR people were pointedly ignoring their stars’ interviews, or maybe they perceived Mark and Daria’s trash talk as some weird form of antimarketing. In any case, things reached a new low the following month, when the couple appeared on The Dick Cavett Show.
After interviewing film critic Rex Reed and director Mel Brooks, Cavett sets the stage: They didn’t know each other before the film, they now live together in a commune. The couple walks out, towering and beautiful; the audience applauds. Everything seems pretty standard for a talk show appearance, save for one problem: The actors are barely talking. Cavett prompts Frechette to tell the now infamous bus-stop-casting story, but he refuses: “I was cast at a bus stop. That’s about it.” When asked about their living situation, Frechette tells Cavett, “It is a community, but the purpose of the community is not communal living. . . . The community is for one purpose, and that’s to serve Mel Lyman.”
MGM suspended the tour. Mark and Daria resumed their life together in Roxbury. Michelangelo Antonioni never made good on his promise to visit.
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WHEN DARIA MOVED to Fort Hill with Mark, they were welcomed as commune royalty. “Mark loved being one of the Hill workers, when he wasn’t planning future filmmaking endeavors with Mel or going off to act in a couple of Grade-B movies,” community member Michael Kindman later recalled. “Daria had a harder time fitting in, and was really out of her element. Mel and Jessie named their baby after her, but that didn’t help.”
In September 1970, Mark left to go perform in a movie in Yugoslavia, leaving Daria alone on Fort Hill for the first time. “From fairly reliable, anonymous sources we know that life on Fort Hill gradually became very trying for Daria,” David Felton wrote. “She may have been too independent for their tastes, but several people have mentioned violent encounters, some physical, between Daria and the Fort Hill women, particularly Jessie.”
A publicist at MGM recalled to Felton that Daria asked for help getting work in commercials around this time. Her Zabriskie Point earnin
gs had all been ceded to the Fort Hill Community, she confessed. When the publicist found a job for her, Daria was ordered back to Fort Hill for “retraining.” Later, with both Mark and Daria in Los Angeles at the new West Coast Lyman outpost, Daria left the community and asked Mark to do so as well. He did, but days later a few community members showed up with an airline ticket to Boston. Frechette accepted the offer, glad that the decision had been made for him. In the end, he chose the Lyman Family over Daria Halprin.
“People on the Hill have to learn to put Melvin and the community ahead of themselves, and she just couldn’t do that,” Mark later explained. “I don’t know if she’ll ever come back.” She didn’t. Daria appeared in one more film, 1972’s The Jerusalem File. That year, she met, married, and had a child with Dennis Hopper—the star, writer, and director of a counterculture film that audiences actually had gone out in droves to see, 1969’s Easy Rider.
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• • •
THE THREE MEN dressed differently. Mark, now twenty-five and sporting a mustache, wore an olive green suit and carried a suitcase. Terry was casual in short sleeves, and Herc had on dark sunglasses and a shirt resembling a guard’s uniform. He stood at the front door with his hand in a paper bag. Inside was a .38-caliber revolver. The three men had walked a mile to rob the New England Merchants National Bank.
This was not something from a new Mark Frechette movie. This was a scene from the real world.
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