‘America Lost and Found: The BBS Story’: A Cinematic Open Road

The Criterion Collection’s synopsis for America Lost and Found: The BBS Story situates BBS Productions as “a company that was also a community.” The description is ideal, and the company’s brief, brilliant history attests to a unique happening — an intervention into American movies at a crucial time, with a strong vision, and courtesy of an extraordinary collection of artists who brought that vision to life. BBS might have only lasted for a few good years, but its effects on the art and business of American filmmaking continue to resonate.

In the documentary BBS: A Time for Change, one of several insightful special features included in Criterion’s seven-film, nine-disc retrospective, film critic David Thomson describes American independent films of the late-’60s and early-’70s as presenting a vision of the country “that had not been shown in movies before”. Thomson says such films upended “the serene fantasy of American movies that had worked so well for so long” in the studio system. This box set leaves no doubt that BBS Productions was one of the most important players in a cinematic revolution.

The company, run by Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider and Steve Blauner (B., B., and S.), originated in the unlikely form of the Monkees — a fact that is now recounted with irony because of the perceived inauthenticity of the prefab group. However, the first film in this set, Head (1968), is remarkably straightforward about the reality (which is to say the unreality) of being a manufactured pop group. Directed by Rafelson and starring the Monkees, Head is a psychedelic array of musical interludes, genre excursions, and reflexive quasi-philosophical nudging that surprisingly makes us think about some weighty issues.

In the early minutes of the film, the group chants, “Hey we are the Monkees / You know we love to please / A manufactured image, with no philosophies / We hope you like our story, although there isn’t one / That is to say there’s many, that way there is more fun.” During this mantra, we see small images from each of the mostly silly upcoming vignettes, yet these are interrupted by footage of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém. This image, which author David D. Perlmutter rightly classifies as an “icon of outrage”, is so strong that seeing it once is certainly enough to make a permanent impression.

Head, however, repeats footage of the execution over and over, linking war violence with images of youthful hysteria, such as a young woman screaming in the audience at a Monkees performance. Some argue that the repetition of the violence lessens its impact, but in Head, each time the footage appears we’re sufficiently shocked out of the show of songs and colors. The extreme juxtaposition creates a state of constant dissonance. Although the film relies too often on wink-wink references to drug culture, its use of narrative confusion and interruption conflict the senses in a way that evokes wartime tension, which truly was the bad trip looming over youth at the time. In the film, as in life, pop music can only distract for so long.

From the opening moments, when the band runs through a mayor’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, scenes are constantly breached, toppled and forgotten. The viewer risks getting lost in the narrative shifts, and the Monkees themselves grapple with fitting into their own film (and then later, racing to get out of the film’s rabbit hole). Most of the film concerns being stuck in media as we know it, a concept that gives Rafelson an excuse to cycle through several genres familiar to the studio system. The war film, the desert epic, the boxing tale, and the western are all represented. To be “stuck” in the movie, as a character or viewer, is an absurd and scattered experience, but purposefully so.

Through the Monkees, Head calls into question the War, advertising, pop music, masculinity, sports and romantic love, with assistance from the most unlikely supporting players, including Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, and Victor Mature. By challenging tradition without offering a clear roadmap for revolution, Head represents the birth pangs of New Hollywood.

No film in this collection speaks more directly about the clash between tradition and revolution than Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), here presented in a two-disc set with multiple commentaries and documentaries. On one of the commentaries, Hopper calls his film a fable of what was happening in America at the time. His comments are representative of the guiding ideology that connects all of these movies and results in the box set’s name. Of Easy Rider’s many extraordinary qualities, perhaps none is more lasting than the film’s visual evocation of a country simultaneously “lost and found”.

More than once on their shared audio commentary, Hopper and co-writer/producer/actor Peter Fonda discuss John Ford and Ford’s vision of America. The reverence with which they hold Ford and his old fashion is accompanied by the quest for a new fashion of filmmaking, of living, and of being patriotic. Fonda’s Wyatt/Captain America is both of these in one — the horse and the motorcycle, as the filmmakers like to point out. Wyatt’s other half, Hopper’s Billy, is more juvenile and off the map than Wyatt, but his desire for a new frontier is no less substantial.

Easy Rider’s episodic plot is unremarkable, but it is the journey that the characters must take to find out if there is anything left to discover, beyond what’s been lost. Yes, it’s a road trip movie, a one-last-deal and we’re-retired movie, and a drug trip movie. Yet the synthesis of the many conflicts that develop across those plots is a conclusion that rests not so easy for any viewer who takes the journey seriously. In short, “we blew it” or we didn’t, but either way, the road definitely comes to an end. This is a bummer. To this day, there is something especially bold in the film’s ambiguous failure to resolve the difficulties that have arisen across the beautifully photographed landscape. Easy Rider was, and remains, a warning shot for Hollywood and for America as a whole.

The importance of cinematographer László Kovács’ involvement with Easy Rider cannot be overstated. He greatly enabled Hopper and Fonda’s intention to display the past splendor and future potential of the American landscape, and the film would certainly be less meaningful without his innovative shooting. The versatile Kovács’ contribution to the next film in the set, Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, is equally vital to its atmosphere. In this case, however, the dreams of Easy Rider are left behind, replaced by alienation and the rejection of romance.

The BBS Films are Full of Wanderers

Five Easy Pieces begins with a familiar, but altered image that represents this shift in perspective. As in Easy Rider, men’s silhouettes are framed against the sunset, but unlike the dusky desert vista of Easy Rider, the men stand on oil rigs rather than rocks. Life is no longer an open adventure, but instead a routine, a machine.

Jack Nicholson, whose performance in Easy Rider brought him back to acting after considering retirement, plays Bobby Dupea, the central character of Five Easy Pieces. For a while, Bobby’s life goes nowhere beyond the rig, the home, and the bowling alley. He doesn’t appreciate his domestic life, which includes an emotional and very sympathetic girlfriend (Karen Black). His sexual affairs are unfulfilling.

Although there is a hint or two of wildness in the first act of the film (the highlight being an impromptu traffic jam/piano jam session), Five Easy Pieces is a strangely flat film. One might expect Bobby to find what he’s looking for when he has a chance to return home to a sick father and to the passions of his youth. Yet he rejects feeling anything too deeply, except resentment, which seems to be his overriding response to both love and loss. Nicholson’s performance is magnetic, but the real energy of Five Easy Pieces is in its female characters, played by Black, Lois Smith (as Bobby’s sister), and Susan Anspach (as his brother’s wife-to-be). The fullness of life within these characters can probably be attributed to the script’s co-writer, Carole Eastman, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the film.

The BBS films are full of wanderers, but Bobby Dupea is so dissatisfied with all of the options available to him, that he’s never likely to be happy. Five Easy Pieces could be called honest for its depiction of a lead character that fundamentally refuses to commit to a traditional lifestyle. However, his self-imposed alienation, and the film’s non-conclusion leave the audience with none of the poetic possibilities of Easy Rider or the dazzling dissonance of Head.

Without America Lost and Found: The BBS Story two lesser-known films in the box set might have been “lost” entirely within cinematic history. The box set revives Jack Nicholson’s Drive, He Said and Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place, films that are premiering on home video in this collection. Perhaps coincidentally, these are also the two most obviously dated films of the set.

Drive, He Said, Nicholson’s directorial debut, is a spirited but flawed movie. Covering much of the same ground as Head (as well as Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds, a BBS production not included here), the film connects sports, war, and what it means to be a man. However, it lacks Head’s vaudeville playfulness or the bravura editing and intellectual heft of Hearts and Minds. Shot on the University of Oregon campus, Drive, He Said is on one hand a basketball movie about the pressures facing Hector (William Tepper) on the court and in his personal life with girlfriend Olive (Karen Black, in another powerful performance).

On the other hand, Nicholson’s scattershot film (adapted from Jeremy Larner’s book) is an anti-war piece that challenges the draft and attempts to educate the audience on the horrors of war, all from the safety of a University campus. Although it seems unlikely that a film could overcome that distance between setting and subject matter, the war material is much more effective than the individual plot of Hector, who would be the star in a more traditional sports film. His friend Gabriel (Michael Margotta) is terrified of being drafted and increasingly moved to take counter measures on campus.

Through Margotta’s totally committed performance and other directorial touches, such as rousing footage of a real riot on campus, Drive, He Said communicates a genuine fear about going to war. One antiwar student in the film describes the difference between the “theater” and real life as being that in real life, when you’re dead, you’re dead. Gabriel cannot accept that reality, even as it seems inevitable. Hector doesn’t need to consider war and death, because basketball allows his escape. What makes Hector a classic BBS leading man is that he’s lost passion for his game and for his lover, and there’s little hope that he will return to them. Like Bobby Dupea, he risks becoming option-less by design.

In a supplemental interview on the Drive, He Said DVD, Nicholson describes the environment that motivated his film: “It was gradually getting more open, more expressive, freer. Fame, money, the war–the tragedy of the story is the problems with free love.” Nicholson’s unexpected admission of the failure of free love to cure the mounting pressures of the day does cast the film in a slightly different, more conservative light. Despite their distinctive crusades to destroy the paths the system provides, Hector and Gabriel are in the end victims of a generation that “blew it” by latching onto shortsighted solutions.

A Safe Place, Jaglom’s directorial debut, is the only film in the BBS box to put a woman front and center. Tuesday Weld is Susan, a woman who seems to literally float through her bohemian New York City surroundings. Orson Welles appears as a park magician, recounting a dream and describing the uncertainty of waking and sleep, of reality and dream. This serene foundation is broken once it becomes apparent that Susan (called Noah) is indeed a very lost woman. The magician is her refuge from hurt in the “real” world, and his floating orbs become a sign that Susan risks drifting away entirely if she doesn’t find some way to connect to life around her.

The cutting pace and soundtrack of A Safe Place emphasize her dislocation, as straight cuts and discontinuity between picture and sound remove Susan from present, continuous action. On one of Easy Rider’s commentaries, Dennis Hopper comments that he knew he had to use straight cuts adventurously if he wanted to win at Cannes, and Jaglom appears to have tried the same bold editing strategy here, though to different effect.

Weld is fascinating to watch. She is flighty and birdlike, always on the verge of a new mood or discovery. She kisses her reflection in the mirror and remembers having flown as a little girl. The film consistently presents objects — “Ouija”-like messages, a magic box, and the park magician’s collection of illusions — that play into and preserve her fantasies. Jaglom says in the disc’s supplemental interview that the character was inspired in equal thirds by Weld, Karen Black, and himself. He also discusses the roots of the film as a mixture of improvisational theatre, European art films, and John Cassavetes. The latter comparison in particular rings true because Weld’s performance in A Safe Place contains the same sort of unpredictability that was present in Cassavetes’ collaborations with Gena Rowlands.

Jaglom also says the film was an attempt to reflect how the dreams of a generation were being shattered, and that Susan is like America at the time — happy in dreams, but tormented in reality. Gwen Welles’ brief but pivotal performance in the film connects strongly to this theme of creeping death within a dream. Though Weld does all she can to communicate her character’s strange magic, A Safe Place tests our patience with free-spiritedness. The film rarely challenges Susan in any direct fashion. As a result we meander too frequently in her dreams. The aesthetic of the film follows along, with excessive montages eventually deadening the narrative development. As in Drive, He Said, the film is full of the idealism and fatalism of being young in America during the Vietnam War. Despite their shortcomings, both films are worthwhile for the snapshots they provide into that mindset and moment in time.

A Real Gun Amongst the Water Pistols

The BBS story is largely about the arrival and life cycle of political and social revolution, but the best two films in the set seem to take place far away from those concerns. In a literal sense, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) and Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) are traditional American stories. Each film revolves around men wanting to succeed within existing business and social structures, in towns where men before them have become kings and lions.

Conventional as they are on the surface, these films are actually in some ways more radical than the earlier BBS releases. Their sense of frustration is more deeply felt than that of Easy Rider and their alienation more consequential than that of Five Easy Pieces. What appear as king-making opportunities in Anarene, Texas and Atlantic City more often than not turn out to be ghosts or illusions.

The Last Picture Show, written by Larry McMurtry and Bogdanovich and based on McMurtry’s novel, is set in the early-’50s. Anarene is already a small and sad Texas town when the film begins, but its young characters are hopeful. Timothy Bottoms is the well-intentioned Sonny, forever trying to meet expectations but constantly failing in the rituals of small town life. The old men in town wonder why Sonny and the other high school seniors don’t tackle in football anymore. This observation is one of many by the film’s older generation that the younger generation has somehow gone soft. Sonny falls short in football, makes the wrong moves on his date, doesn’t have enough money at the diner, and is late to the picture show. Although the film features an excellent ensemble cast, The Last Picture Show is primarily the story of Sonny’s maturation.

Like Easy Rider and other BBS productions, Sonny comes with a contrasting male character, in this case Jeff Bridges’ Duane. Their bond is that of brothers. Cybill Shepherd’s Jacy is an object of desire to every male in Anarene. Though we know she exists to break hearts, it’s particularly heartbreaking when she creates a rift between Sonny and Duane. Robert Surtees’ black and white cinematography becomes an analogue for the characters’ limited options and the impracticality of compromise.

Another aspect of The Last Picture Show that breaks with BBS Productions’ preoccupation with youth is the fully formed middle-aged and older characters that populate the physical and emotional landscape of the film. These include Ruth (Cloris Leachman), dissatisfied wife of the school coach, Lois (Ellen Burstyn), Jacy’s desperate mother, and most of all Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), Anarene’s heart and soul. The film develops along a series of complicated intersection points between the teenage and adult worlds.

Sonny matures in his sexuality through his affair with Ruth, but he’s unprepared to deal with her sorrow. Jacy wants to live up to Lois’s standard for attracting and landing a man, but this precipitates a number of romantic crises. By the time Lois is revealed to have no faith or satisfaction in the very advice she dispenses, Jacy has forever transformed the bond between Sonny and Duane.

The most significant turning point in Sonny’s maturation is not the effect of sex or romance, but the death of Sam the Lion. Sam is the height of an old school of manhood that Sonny and Duane could only dream of living up to. He’s also this film’s surrogate for America. When Sam says, “You wouldn’t believe how this country’s changed,” his 1951 context might just as well be 1971, and his death within the film is another of the sort of symbolic losses and transformations that Rafelson, Hopper, Nicholson and Jaglom express in their works. Sonny inherits from Sam’s passing a mantle he is not ready to handle, and Anarene all but disappears in the dust.

The King of Marvin Gardens provides a final contrasting duo of male characters, played with gusto by Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. Nicholson is David Staebler and Dern is his brother Jason. Jacob Brackman’s screenplay distinguishes “businessman” and “artist” as two distinct modes of operation, and the drama between these brothers grows from that divide. Jason is an artistic personality who desperately wants to succeed in business, and David is a stable business type who wants to be an artist.

Both brothers are fabulists. David tells stories on the radio, and his creative non-fiction keeps the audience in a state of uncertainty and uneasy belief. His storytelling is a game that plays upon the listener’s notion of the truth. Jason also tells stories, but his game – his hustle – is of a much more dicey variety. Jason lives in Atlantic City, where his pathway to fulfilling real estate dreams has landed him temporarily in jail. When David comes to Atlantic City to see Jason at jail, it is the beginning of what Jason calls their brotherly “renaissance” and later a “kingdom”.

Jason’s goal to open a casino in Hawaii is far-fetched, and David stays with him in Atlantic City to live out that fantasy for a little while in the company of two women: Sally (Burstyn) and her step-daughter/rival Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson). The endless role-playing between this foursome is entertaining, but there always seems to be some threat or danger around the corner: a real gun amongst the water pistols, a sharp pair of scissors in the cosmetic kit, and a couple of mysterious guys trailing the brothers’ every move.

It’s been said that The King of Marvin Gardens visually imagines Atlantic City as a Monopoly board game, and the script deals in risk-taking and rolls of the dice that propel some to success and others to failure. Distinguishing the film from others in the BBS set is its lack of faith in any traditional ideals that might remain. The realities of crime and business have extinguished the pursuit of an individual path. Youth is fleeting. The game is over.

The screenplay for The King of Marvin Gardens is not necessarily cinematic, and in fact the text would likely hold up very well as a stage play. Once again, however, Kovács’ work elevates a BBS production into cinematic art. His deep focus cinematography (essentially montage within the frame) enlivens the picture and turns the immobile camera into a virtue. This strategy is almost the exact opposite of Easy Rider’s freewheeling shooting technique, but it is the ideal choice for the film’s board game conceit. Exterior shots are filmed against the grey sky, and several interior shots use boldly colored hotel curtains as backdrops. Dern’s performance, in particular, benefits from the theatricality of such settings. Throughout, Rafelson and Kovács use creative geography to create convincing matches out of disparate locations – a technique Rafelson discusses in “Reflections of a Philosopher King”, a video interview included on the DVD.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story could be called a time capsule, but that description seems restrictive. The social and artistic impulses that drive these films aren’t to be buried. More than four decades have passed since Head was released, yet the questions and expressions of these seven films share a lot with the existential and political issues of the present day. It would be overstating the films’ impact to suggest they contain all the answers for understanding America and its place in the world. Yet the act of taking in what they have to offer is a great way to reconnect to an ongoing conversation about the highs and lows of an exceptional country. America Lost and Found: The BBS Story makes a case for keeping the canvas wide and the road open.