Zabriskie Point
All actors and roles (10)
Short description
Zabriskie Point centres on two young Americans whose paths cross in the desert. Daria, who works for a property developer, is travelling through the Southwest on her employer's business when she meets Mark, a former student on the run after a violent clash between police and protesters on a Los Angeles campus. Their encounter turns into a brief romance amid the barren landscape, while the wider conflict that drove Mark from the city continues to close in.
Michelangelo Antonioni directed the film, his ninth of thirteen, coming between Blow-Up and The Passenger. He wrote the screenplay with Sam Shepard and Tonino Guerra, and Carlo Ponti produced it for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin play the leads, with Paul Fix, G. D. Spradlin, Bill Garaway and Kathleen Cleaver among a credited cast of twenty-seven.
Released in March 1970, the film runs 113 minutes and is a drama made between Italy and the United States. Its 7 million dollar budget was matched by a worldwide return of about 1 million. Audience scores are close to the critics' 6.9/10 from 33 reviews, with IMDb users giving 6.9/10 from 18,000 votes and TMDB users 7/10 from 456 votes, suggesting a warmer reception among viewers than the film's original commercial performance would indicate.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is named after the location “Zabriskie Point” in Death Valley.
- A 17-minute scene that was not included in the film, called “The Violent Sequence,” whose main theme was composed by Richard Wright, the keyboardist for Pink Floyd, later became the basis for the song “Us & Them” from the famous album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
- Harrison Ford appeared in the film, but all scenes with him were cut during editing.
- Mark Frechette worked as a carpenter. He was accidentally spotted on the streets of Boston when he got into an argument with a woman. This kind of explosive personality was exactly what was needed for the film envisioned by the outstanding film master Michelangelo Antonioni.
- A real house in Keefry, Arizona was used for filming. A replica of it was used for the explosion scene, built near Southwestern Studios in Keefry. Building the replica cost $100,000, and its explosion was filmed with 17 cameras.
- In the original finale of the film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, an airplane wrote the words “Fuck You, America” in the sky, but MGM president Louis F. Polk ordered it and many other scenes cut from the film. James I. Aubrey, who replaced Polk in that position, restored many of the deleted scenes to the film, but not the episode with the airplane.
- The orgy scene involved 100 people, half of whom were recruited from Joseph Chaikin's experimental theater troupe, the Open Theatre, and the other half from among the hippies.
- Conservatives condemned Antonioni for burning the American flag, the Oakland sheriff accused the director of coming to incite popular unrest, and the state authorities launched an investigation into alleged "anti-Americanism".
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