Arlo Acton
When Antontioni’s crew got to there, they ran into long-haired guy named Arlo Cubit Acton, MFA: future friend of Bill Rathbun’s and Pilgrim’s. Acton was living with wife Robyn Cubit and their children on about 60 acres of mountain side north of Nevada City. Arlo was smart, energetic, media wise, and a first rate raconteur. He was also maker of hot-selling, free standing sculptures sold at San Francisco bay area galleries. Not only were they anamorphic and mysterious: each contained secret compartments to hide your drugs.
Lots of friends had dinner at their farm out in the wilderness and on one of those nights: someone, probably Arlo got Antonioni stoned. Arlo said it was Antonioni’s first experience with Cannabis. That’s debatable: but soon afterwards: Antonioni and filming crew grew wilder, and Robyn and Arlo were busy painting one of the Cessnas used in the movie. Antonioni was also insisting that male and female protagonists cohabit while they shot the movie.
The female lead was a young aspiring actress, while the male lead: Mark Frechette, was a young carpenter and member of an politically militant Boston commune. According to Arlo, neither really liked the other, but they complied, but according to Wikipedia: the liason continued long after the film was released.
Frechette became a media celebrity then returned to Boston and to his commune. A few years later several people from that commune including Frechette: tried to rob a bank and were arrested. A couple years later: he died in a “non-scripted” industrial accident at a minimum security prison.
Pilgrim got to see the Antonioni film on VCR tape loaned to him by Arlo. It was immediately apparent this was Antonioni’s “stab” at a Roman or Greek war tragedy! And after thinking about it fifty years: he agrees with Antonioni’s thesis.
To his best recollection: a young student protester is sent to fetch a rifle belonging to his roommate. The roommate has called him urgently: as the National Guard masses to retake the college chancellor’s office. As he struggles through a crowd to get there, our protagonist is caught in the middle of the National Guard charge. He stumbles through that melee intent on his mission, and in the confusion: kills an advancing, gun-firing guardsman.
Seeing what he’s done, he runs away from the carnage on foot, and then stumbles though a fence and into a small airport. Someone’s private Cessna is sits on the airport runway with keys left in it. Pilgrim would like to note: the private Santa Monica Airport is just a couple miles from UCLA’s campus, filled with Cessna’s just like ones used in the film shoot.
So the student takes off inside the Cessna and flies due east. Some hours later, he lands it on a desolate salt pan in the middle of the Arizona desert. Perched above on the mountainside is a prismatic, glass house, with a twisty dirt road leading up to it. He stumbles up through desert heat waves toward this mirage. Upon reaching it, he finds offices of a real estate development firm: built to sell plots on the desert floor beneath.
So our young hero enters this air conditioned office. There: in total isolation, sits “Venus”: young, hopelessly beautiful, and naïve. Her boss has left her alone there for the day!
In a few compressed movie minutes, our hero somehow persuades her to step out of her air conditioned (ahem) “shell”, leave that immaculate fishbowl, and “fly away” inside the stolen plane!
After that his memory gets muddy. They travel place to place. Then they join a commune full of wild-looking people: probably hired at Arlo’s parties. At one stop a group hippies paint the plane to disguise it. All sorts of ominous things start to happen: crew-cut men in dark, sunglasses, sport coats and ties are driving around in plain white vehicles asking questions at desert communities. The federal government’s closing-in!
It’s obvious to everyone that any social evolution taking place on the Southwest’s desert floor is directly in the path of a Viet Nam-like extinction. As the feds close in on the commune, our reluctant hero gets into the plane and returns Venus to her real estate office. Her boss looks up, sees her enter and returns to his paper work!
Now he flies the plane back to the same airport near his university. He’s decided to “face the music”, and state what happened. He notifies flight controllers by radio of his return, and lands the plane, and then he emerges with arms in the air. As he does: soldiers behind parked vehicles riddle him with bullets!
That film was a “set-back” to Antonioni’s budding Hollywood movie career. He’d made investors a financial killing with his previous English film “Blow Up”. He was an Italian aristocrat with a house full of ancestral armor. But his film “nailed” that brainless menace lying inside nameless bureaucracies filled with nameless educated, well meaning people: just following their job descriptions.
Like educated Europeans of his time: Antonioni was angry at the Vietnam War and its ongoing slaughter. He was also “naïve” about North American youth, and very “Italian”. “Zabriskie Point” came in way over budget. The crew with its inexperienced young principals and busloads of “hippies” struggled to illustrate his Greek tragedy of North American anti-war youth.
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