Review: Jon Lewis’s Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture

Jon Lewis’s Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture is divided into four parts, the first two of which feature insightful portraits of famed directors and obscure actors to whom major movie studios turned in their desperate quest to entice the Woodstock-era youth market. The book’s second half, a medley of short profiles and ruminations on notorious tragedies, raises some questions. Among them: Do we need another piece of cultural analysis pegged to the Manson family murders? Is it possible to be more wrong than Lewis is when he describes the intelligent, funny, and not-at-all lurid I Shot Andy Warhol as one of American Psycho director Mary Harron’s two “notoriously grisly indies”? And what in heaven’s name is Dolores Hart, straitlaced even before she quit acting and became a Catholic nun, doing in a book about the counterculture?

But questioning a writer’s points of emphasis isn’t the same as saying their book isn’t absorbing; Road Trip to Nowhere is, even as it becomes obvious that its parts don’t quite cohere. Lewis’s approach is circuitous, yet he’s perceptive about filmmaking, human nature, and several of the many regrettable aspects of show business. His book also benefits from an undeniable reality: that people like to read about lurid crimes and expensive catastrophes.

Lewis, the author of numerous books on film history, is a talented chronicler of the clash between artistic impulse and commercial imperative. Such a collision occurred when MGM partnered with Michelangelo Antonioni on Zabriskie Point, the Italian auteur’s follow-up to 1966’s Blow-Up. The studio’s multi-film contract with the Italian director was calculated “to cash in on a transitioning marketplace” of customers under 30, Lewis writes. The deal “took into account the astonishing popularity with young filmgoers of the European art picture in general and with Antonioni in particular.” Indeed, Blow-Up, a high-energy quasi-thriller with a budget of around $2 million, ended up grossing $20 million in the United States.

MGM allotted Antonioni $7 million to make Zabriskie Point, in which disaffected twentysomethings shun an organized student protest, opting instead to have group sex in the desert and paint bare breasts on a stolen airplane. This was a huge sum for a film with a small cast of inexperienced actors, and when it was released in 1970, critics pounced on it. Roger Ebert called it “silly and stupid,” and to Pauline Kael, it was a “pathetic mess.”

What went wrong? Per Lewis, Zabriskie Point’s problems started at conception and mushroomed during production. Antonioni was injudicious with his budget, and he rejected the notion that he should promote the film in a way that might persuade people to see it. The natural majesty of Death Valley didn’t fully suit his vision, so he “spent thousands of dollars dyeing portions of the desert various shades of pink and green,” Lewis writes. Antonioni also began “trucking in finer-grain sand” so that the film’s “extras might more comfortably cavort under the desert sun.” For various reasons, the production alienated park rangers, local laborers and Teamsters, the latter of which staged costly sickouts and work slowdowns. And after casting two unknowns—Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin—as his leads, Antonioni effectively described them as cyphers. “What happens to (the characters) is not important…People think that the events in a film are what the film is about,” he said. “Not true.”

For his part, Frechette didn’t pretend to be an Antonioni-ite. In the director’s films, Frechette said, “(n)othing happens, man.” As recounted at length in Ryan H. Walsh’s terrific book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, Frechette was a member of the Fort Hill Community, a Boston group some called a cult, and he was cast in the movie after a production assistant spotted him at a bus stop (Lewis cites Walsh but mistakenly states that Van Morrison “wrote and recorded” the book’s titular album in Boston; it was recorded in New York.) In the half-decade that followed the film’s release, Frechette was convicted of trying to rob a bank and died in a strange prison gym incident that authorities called accidental.

To Lewis, Frechette is an emblematic figure, part of “a new breed of Hollywood talent: movie stars who didn’t want to be movie stars.” This applies as well to Christopher Jones, the subject of Road to Nowhere’s second section. Jones, whose primary asset was his resemblance to James Dean, starred in Wild in the Streets and Three in the Attic, inexpensive features made by American International Pictures, which knew better than most film companies how to attract young moviegoers. (Perhaps best known as the studio for which Roger Corman produced and directed many films, AIP is the subject of an edifying subplot in the book about how its films boldly dealt with the Vietnam War, the military draft, and other issues that major studios weren’t ready to take on.) Jones’s good looks landed him a key role in David Lean’s 1970 drama Ryan’s Daughter, but afterward, “for reasons he never articulated, Jones walked away from the business, away from the money and the celebrity,” Lewis writes. “Forever.”

Researching the actor’s life in the hope of understanding why Jones packed it in, Lewis finds considerable evidence that the actor lived his last 40 years—he died in 2014—in pain, a periodically heavy user of drugs and alcohol who appears to have battled mental illness. Jones’s early films may have espoused countercultural ideas, but his personal troubles, handled with great sensitivity by Lewis, were well within the American mainstream.

Road to Nowhere’s final two sections are patchy. One is devoted to admiring mini-profiles of actors Jane Fonda, Barbara Loden, Jean Seberg, and Dolores Hart; these aren’t particularly memorable, and the Hart piece is wildly off-topic. Lewis concedes that Hart, who appeared in, among others, two Elvis Presley movies, “was never counterculture—at least not in the way the term is generally used.” The closest he comes to justifying her inclusion is to describe Hart as someone who, in 1960s parlance, “dropped out” of the frequently superficial entertainment industry, opting instead for life in a convent as a Roman Catholic Benedictine nun.

As a piece of criticism, the book’s closing section, which focuses on Charles Manson and his depiction in various films, is solid (aside, of course, from its mischaracterization of Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, which gets a mention in a section about her Manson-related film Charlie Says). Lewis notes that the victims were partially obscured by the reactions of egotistical Hollywood observers, who, subsequent reporting suggested, were interested in the crimes mainly to the extent that they themselves might be in peril. And his dissection of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a worthwhile guide to Quentin Tarantino’s numerous references, in-jokes, and camera techniques (that said, if you’re going to use terms like “Dutch-angled close-up,” you ought to credit cinematographer Robert Richardson, which Lewis fails to do).

But as can happen with any piece of creative work based on appalling, exhaustively covered real-life events, a discerning reader might find this section of the book at once engrossing and futile. Does Lewis alter, even slightly, our understanding of those horrible summer nights in 1969 that left six people, including Sharon Tate, dead? I don’t think so, and until someone offers a new way of thinking about Manson’s crimes and their context, Tom O’Neill’s sprawling, underrated, slightly nutty 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties can stand as a provisional final word on the subject. Which is not to say that Lewis has wasted his time. For a hodgepodge, this is a surprisingly gripping book.

Jon Lewis’s Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture is available on July 26 from University of California Press.