Shunned director relaunched career by discovering Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs
In a fever of page-turning, Monte Hellman read the script from an unknown writer called Quentin Tarantino and decided to direct Reservoir Dogs. The veteran director mentored the young film fanatic, who worked at a video store in Manhattan Beach, California, and helped to raise money from every sympathetic source he could squeeze. With a modest budget cobbled together, Hellman later deferred to Tarantino’s insistence on directing the 1992 black comedy heist movie himself.
The result was a movie acclaimed by Empire magazine as ‘‘the greatest independent film of all time’’, marked by its dark humour amid the stylised violence and extended dialogue on irrelevant minutiae laced with references to popular culture (while not featuring the actual heist at all). Tarantino retained Hellman as executive producer, later calling the veteran director his ‘‘spiritual father’’ and a ‘‘minimalist poet’’.
Hellman, who has died aged 91, had inspired Tarantino and other emerging directors of off-beat films with his canon of B-movie horror, low-budget westerns and the 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop.
The latter chronicles a pair of laconic drifters who drive across the American South in a 1955 Chevrolet challenging ‘‘rednecks’’ to races and end up challenging an ageing playboy (played by Warren Oates) to be first to Washington DC. The pared-down dialogue, desolate desert landscapes, washed-out Americana of late-night diners, remote gas stations and sleazy motels and, above all, a nihilistic attitude to everything apart from the road, have made the film a cult classic.
Singer-songwriter James Taylor as ‘‘the Driver’’ and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson as ‘‘the Mechanic’’ turn in ‘‘nonperformances’’, along with ‘‘the Girl’’, a hitchhiker they pick up (insouciantly played by 18-year-old Laurie Bird, then Hellman’s muse and girlfriend).
Hellman said the enigmatic work was about ‘‘inner life’’ but Lew Wasserman, head of Universal Studios, who had been hoping that the movie would be the next Easy Rider, was baffled and refused to promote it. Thereafter, Hellman struggled to find work, becoming as much an anti-hero as one of the protagonists in his films. Two-Lane Blacktop only gained wider critical recognition – with the aid of Tarantino – when Hellman had lost the appetite to shoot all day and edit all night.
Monte Jay Himmelman was born in New York City to parents who ran a grocery store, and spent most of his childhood in Los Angeles. After dropping out of a film course at the University of California, he helped to found a theatre troupe called the Stumptown Players and directed several productions. The film producer Roger Corman invited Hellman to join his stable of young actors and directors working on the production line of his exploitation horror and action flicks. Other alumni in Corman’s stable would include Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, as well as actors such as Bruce Dern, William Shatner and Jack Nicholson.
Corman handed Hellman his directorial debut on the Beast from the Haunted Cave (1959) and was encouraged enough to entrust him with more films, including two war movies shot in the Philippines in 1963 and featuring a young Jack Nicholson: Back Door to Hell and Flight to Fury. ‘‘I was editing one at night while I was shooting the other, getting by on three hours’ sleep. It’s the madness of a young man.’’
If Two-Lane Blacktop sealed Hellman’s reputation as a father of the American B-movie cool, studio bosses remained wary of him. Corman came to his rescue by commissioning him to direct the controversial Cockfighter (1974), a tale of chancers in the underworld of chicken bouts, which was given added authenticity by using footage of real cockfights in Georgia, where the fights were legal. The film is still banned in Britain.
Over the next 15 years Hellman made only two films, while teaching film directing at the California Institute of the Arts. Hollywood had rejected him, but he did occasionally work as a ‘‘gun for hire’’ on bigger budget fare, as second unit director on Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), for example.
His first wife was Barboura Morris, a member of his early theatre troupe, whom he married in 1954. They divorced in 1961. In 1962 he married Jacqueline Ebeier; they divorced 10 years later. His third marriage, to Emma Webster, a writer, also ended in divorce. He is survived by a son and daughter from his second marriage.
His daughter produced his final film, and his first full-length feature for 21 years, Road to Nowhere (2010). This final act as an auteur was, for the first time, met with universal acclaim. –