Recently, I was excited to stumble across an article about Johnny Knoxville’s new Evel Knievel documentary, Being Evel, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Over the weekend I was re-watching the Milius documentary about writer/director John Milius who wrote Apocalypse Now and wrote and directed Red Dawn. I’d seen the flick before, but I was surprised at an early entry on Milius’s filmography from 1971: Evel Knievel starring George Hamilton as the motorcycle maniac.

Here’s a bit about how Milius came to join the production:

A script had been written by a writer, but George Hamilton was not happy with it. He offered to pay John Milius $5,000 to write some lines in the script. Milius says he went to Hamilton’s home at Palm Springs to read the script “and it was terrible. So I threw the script in the pool and beat on it with an oar. And of course the script was waterlogged, so I just wrote another one. He later told me he knew that if I got down there with that script I’d write another one.”[3]

Milius later called Hamilton “a wonderful guy, totally underrated. A great con-man, that’s what he really is. He always said, ‘I’ll be remembered as a third-rate actor when in fact, I’m a first-rate con man’.”

Here’s a monologue Milius wrote for Hamilton to read in a voice-over at the end of the picture…

As the movie closes over the Grand Canyon, George Hamilton delivers a voice-over monologue in the Knievel character. In the monologue, he describes himself as the “last gladiator”, which would later be used by the real Evel Knievel in his 1998 documentary, The Last of the Gladiators.

Below is a transcript of the monologue from the movie:

Important people in this country, celebrities like myself — Elvis, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne — we have a responsibility. There are millions of people that look at our lives and it gives theirs some meaning. People come out from their jobs, most of which are meaningless to them, and they watch me jump 20 cars, maybe get splattered. It means something to them. They jump right alongside of me — they take the bars in their hands, and for one split second, they’re all daredevils. I am the last gladiator in the new Rome. I go into the arena and I compete against destruction and I win. And next week, I go out there and I do it again. And this time — civilization being what it is and all — we have very little choice about our life. The only thing really left to us is a choice about our death. And mine will be — glorious.

Here’s Evel Knievel (1971)…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

Several posts back I mentioned that this year is the 45 anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. It also happens to be the 35th anniversary of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now which was written by Zoetrope man of letters, John Milius and directed — of course — by Coppola himself.

Fellow Zoetroper George Lucas wanted to direct the film, shooting it with a small documentary crew on locations in California. Milius wanted to direct too — his plan was to film in Vietnam in the middle of a real war zone a la Haskell Wexler’s immortal Medium Cool which features a third act shot in the middle of the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. You know you’re in strange territory when the cooler head that prevailed was Francis Ford Coppola’s, who decided to helm the film himself in yet another bid to make a massive hit that would finally free him to direct the personal films he’d always yearned to make between his other massive hits.

The whole funny, willful, ignorant, hubristic, idealistic, psychedelic, militaristic, surf-tastic and cinematic story is told here, in this warm and generous interview of John by his old friend Francis, which illuminates the central role the writer played in the making of the classic film…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

This year we will be celebrating the 45th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. Conceived of as an alternative to the Hollywood movie machine, Zoetrope first opened its doors in San Francisco in 1969. Here is a note about the beginning of the dream from the American Zoetrope site:

Francis Ford Coppola decided he would name his future studio “Zoetrope” after receiving a gift of zoetropes from Mogens Scot-Hansen, founder of a studio called Lanterna Film and owner of a famous collection of early motion picture making equipment. While touring Europe, Coppola was introduced to alternative filmmaking equipment and inspired by the bohemian spirit of Lanterna Film. He decided he would build a deviant studio that would conceive and implement creative, unconventional approaches to filmmaking.

Upon his return home, Coppola and George Lucas searched for a mansion in Marin to house the studio. However, with equipment flowing in and no mansion found yet, the first home for American Zoetrope became a warehouse in San Francisco on Folsom Street in 1969.

A series of films later, the studio continues to strive toward innovative filmmaking strategies in the historic copper clad Sentinel Building, home to American Zoetrope since 1972.

From its giddy beginnings, through triumphs like Apocalypse Now and wipeouts like One from the Heart, Zoetrope continues to function as a dream factory even today. Here is a great documentary about the early days of AZ, featuring the key players who were there in the beginning: Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Brian DePalma, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Caleb Deschanel, John Milius, Walter Murch, Carroll Ballard, Willard Huyk, John Korty, Matthew Robbins and Robert Dalva.

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Books posts.