Two Lane Blacktop
 

Was one this morning on Encore Drama at 9:15 and i was to late to watch. But will also air Thursday December 15th at 1:35 pm and December 31 at 6:15 am.

it was on last night and i watched it until my wife couldnt take the "boring stupidity" any more.

So what did you do then Gary???

:D

handed her the controls and rolled over and went to sleep. i woke up about 1:30 friday morning with it coming out both ends. that went on till about mid day friday and just felt like $(!% until this afternoon. sorry no pics for you.

Copies can be found on ebay (and other sites as well) for a meager price. I picked up mine a couple years back for something like $10-$20. Stupidity for sure, but it's fun to put the girlfriend thru it every year or so. Smokey and the Bandit each year too for sure... :D

Got mine on Ebay. Only movie we have that the wife hates.

Found this site/info a few weeks back.
Has lots of great old pics/info.

Here is a TLB related section/link.
Enjoy.

http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com...71-road-flick/

Thanks Gary - not really the answer I expected, but I appreciate the honesty. :rolleyes:

Hell...
 

I watch it just to listen to that M-22 whine! At least they got THAT right! Also...it's Oscar material compared to that "Fast and Furious" comedic garbage. Had to use special effects to even make those cars look interesting...let alone fast.

I watched it for the first time a few months ago. First movie I've ever seen where the first 10 min only had 10 words of dialogue. I thought something was wrong with the dvd. lol Lot of neat cars in the movie if only for a sec.

Agree with Gary's wife, that is one BORING movie. I tried to watch it on two separate occasions & checked out.

Smokey & the Bandit was on again this weekend. Watched 1/2 hour of it:

Bar scene where the truck river gets punched & tossed out, so he gets into the truck, grins & runs his rig over the bikes.
Truck convoy where the T/A tuck into the Rt Lane, and truck puts the blinders on the Trooper passing by. Then the T/A goes off-roading a bunch. By then then the Remote got wrestled away.

Early '70s movies (Easy Rider is the exemplar) are totally unsuited to viewers conditioned by the Hollywood of the past 30 years. The disillusionment and sense of loss is part of the director's vision, as well as the characters'. 6 years of Vietnam, the draft, Watergate, Kent State and Jackson State. . .everyone just keeps moving, with nowhere to go. These give you the red pill, versus the blue-pill "everything's gonna be alright" daily 8-hour energy drink toxin of today that keeps us going to our jobs and paying taxes.

I watched it last night and my wife kept asking me when something
was going to happen and what the point of the movie was. She couldn't understand
what the point of the movie was since there never really was a race and they never actually
went to Washington D.C She also wanted to know why they were driving around with
their car titles in their glove boxes and why they didn't go to Washington since their
car titles had already been sent there! To me it's worth it to see a brand new Orbit
Orange Judge being driven like it was intended to be driven rather than being hauled
around in an enclosed trailer. I always thought it would have been a much better film
if James Taylor and Dennis Wilson had been driving a Hemi Cuda instead of a pile of
crap 55 Chevy.

Here ya go, there is some interesting info and pics here. May be more than you ever wanted to know!:D

http://twolaneblacktop.yuku.com/

So you got what I had, I feel your pain.

yes, it was horrible.

boss, with that last post, i think you are starting to sound like steved and i.

when we were young we were preverts, then we became just good ole perverts and now we are old proverts.

The point was to show the substantial differences between what is consumed/bought without thought and what is created from scratch with a great deal of care and thought i.e, - the GTO, the ultimate consumer icon car of the time versus something hand-made and home-built - the 55 Chevy street machine. Two showroom musclecars of the same year would have completely missed Hellman's vision.

And that Chevy was no pile of crap, it was built for the movie and was an honest 10 or 11 sec. street machine with the best parts and craftsmanship of the day.

Ironically, many GTOs, today, occupy the status that the '55 did back then.

I have to say I'm a little disappointed - after the TA convertible story you do have a reputation to uphold!

Two Lane
 

You are spot on, excellent explanation.

You have to ask permission to join. I would never want to be a member of a club that would allow me to join.

You'll notice that, by the end of the narrative, the character GTO (Warren Oates), so full of **** before, is converted to the vision of the Driver (Taylor) and the Mechanic (Wilson) that Starlightblack explained a few posts back. The value of the authentic.

For those who DO like this sort of dark, anti-consumerist/existentialist picture, I'll recommend a few others in case you haven't seen 'em yet:

-Five Easy Pieces (Jack Nicholson)
-The Mechanic (Charles Bronson original, not Jason Statham remake)
-The French Connection (Gene Hackman)
-Planet of the Apes (Charlton Heston original, no remakes--sorry, no cars here.
Horses!)
-Vanishing Point (Barry Newman original)
-Easy Rider, of course

oh, and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by R. Pirsig

all great early '70s stuff. No, your wives will not like these either.

I know this has been mentioned before on this forum a few years ago, but for
those who missed the previous post, the same Orbit orange Judge reappeared
in more than one tv show after the movie wrapped. It was in studio inventory
and was dragged out on more than one occasion for tv duty. One place it appears
is in a chase scene on the cop show Adam 12. You can find this episode on Hulu
and watch it on your computer. I watched it on Hulu about a year ago. I'm sorry but
I can't recall which episode it is on. Maybe someone else here knows the number
of the episode it appears in.

"Two-Lane Blacktop" is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Some good car scenes, but it's boring, slow moving, poorly acted (except for Warren Oates), and overall a total disaster. Yet somehow, the critics seem to think it's a classic. Leonard Maltin gives it 3 stars out of 4, and that's the rating the cable channels use when they air it. So in Maltin's opinion, this POS movie is as much of a classic as Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings, and a hundred other true classic films that made hundreds of millions of dollars and have spawned another billion dollars in sequels.

"Two-Lane Blacktop" is a 1/2 star movie, on par with "Plan 9 From Outer Space".

What's happened over the years is that because Maltin loved the movie, other reviewers feel like they missing something when they watch it, like it's too sophisticated for them to understand. So they analyze the movie, every line of it, as if it's poetry. They begin to interpret scenes and dialogue as if there's something more there than there really is.

So let's say there's a scene where the girl is quiet, staring out a window of the '55, a writer starts going into a whole description about how she's longing for true love, wandering the country, her parents don't care about her, she wants adventure, etc.

In reality, it's a lousy scene, no dialogue, there's nothing there.

Then you have modern writers using OTHER reviews from the past, and then they take their own intellectual slant on the dialogue and direction of the movie, as if that gives them credibility. Like they "see something" that others don't get.

No, it's just a horrible, boring, slow moving movie, only interesting for a few car scenes.

And this coming from me, a James Taylor and Beach Boys fan!

When I have insomnia & time to scan the late night cable lineup and want to see a Pontiac flat getting it in an old movie, there's only one choice. I'll wait through the movie to see Gene Hackman thrashing the 4 door '71 or 72 LeMans in the French Connection. There is no way there's a 350 2bbl under the hood of that LeMans.

Well stated, Roger! That ol' LeMans took a BEATING!

I happen to like Two Lane Blacktop, the acting as mentioned earlier is bad, except Warren Oats .But the movie reminds me what this country use to be like. Rt66, American Iron(no imports with fart cans),old dinners,old full service stations etc.No fast food joints at every corner and strip malls.

I definitely agree with that! America used to be such a great country. If they re-did this movie today, the girl would be texting all her friends throughout the movie, the Driver would be some sort of porno fiend, the Mechanic would be black, the GTO character would be some weird effeminate dude, and the roads would be bumper-to-bumper traffic. http://www.smilieshq.com/smilies/happy0009.gif

I've seen the TLB Judge on a few episodes of Kojak reruns as well....umm maybe I shouldn't of mentioned I was watching old Kojak reruns.............

Interesting! Anyone figure out which episode it was on? There are 102 episodes of Adam-12 on Hulu right now. I don't think I have the patience to watch that many... ;)

Here you go . . . the TLB Judge first appears at 20:29.
Chase sequence starring the Judge and a couple of Plymouth police cruisers . . .

http://www.hulu.com/watch/46145/adam...0,vepisode,1,0

Lloyd, that was cool! I captured a frame from the video. It appears the schnoz was drooping a bit. Was this show before or after the Baretta crash-through-a-fence shot? I wonder if they had to repair the nose?

Thanks, Lloyd! That was neat to see the TLB Judge again. In fact, @ 20:55, it looks like there's a 70-73 Formula parked on the side of the street during the chase. Certainly very cool to see an espisode shot when these cars were still drivers and sitting on every street corner... Nice! :D

Also, I assume that it's been determined by now that the TLB Judge was a RAIII car, not a RAIV. I know "GTO" in TLB says it's a "455 with Mark IV Ram Air" (which we all know never existed), but the actual car was a RAIII, right? (I just saw the words "Ram Air" on the hood scoops leading me to believe this. I'll have to watch TLB again to see if the "Ram Air IV" decals are on the scoops in that movie)

Nope - it's a Fremont Plant, RA IV M40 car . . .

Dunno 'bout that, Mike.

That Adam-12 episode first aired March 15, 1972. Have to find the Baretta episode info to know for sure, I suppose.

OK, that 1972 Adam-12 episode was definitely prior to this 1975 Baretta episode . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WsAfD3UGPA

From "Kojak" season 1 (1974), episode 14 . . .

First glimpse of the TLB Judge hood at around 47:09 into this Kojak episode . . .

http://www.hulu.com/watch/164/kojak-...fore-they-wake

Off-topic, but I just stumbled across another Kojak episode (season 2, episode 14). At 6:25 into the episode Kojak arrives upon a crime scene in his GF's 1970 GTO 'vert!

Lloyd, funny you mention that 70 vert, it was in a few other Kojak episodes. In one it was a backround car that went by two times in the matter of minutes. I guess the producers didn't think we'd notice over 30 years later...

Wow Lloyd, great detective work finding these episodes! I don't know about you guys, but I cringe inside when I see the Judge rear end that Bel Air before blowing thru the fence. Yikes! :eek:

That's interesting to see the 70 'vert as well. So many cool cars... :cool:

btw, sorry for not being in the loop on the Judge, but who owns the car today? :confused:

At about 21:43 in the Adam 12 episode, the quarter panel has a pretty bad kink it in and the rear bumper is pushed down. I wonder if that happened in TLB filming?

here ya go

Attachment 266271

Apparently "Car Craft" didn't think too much of it either when it first came out....

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b3...6/000_5610.jpg

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b3...6/000_5611.jpg

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b3...6/000_5612.jpg

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b3...6/000_5609.jpg



K

I know this site should be old news but this link may be of interest, based on the direction this post is heading it contains 170+ images of Pontiacs from many films...

http://www.imcdb.org/vehicles.php?make=Pontiac&model=

I'm sure most people on this board know this already, but for those of you
who don't......The black 55 chevy in the movie American Grafitti is the same car that
stars in Two Lane Blacktop......just has a new black paint job.

Starlight Black and Mechanic 17 know exactly what's going on. This movie, IMO, is an excellent reflection on what was going on in 1970-71 in the US. There is a lot more than what's on the surface, if you're a true "car guy". This is how it was....grimy, unvarnished, warts and all. I love the idea of the drummer of the Beach Boys buying an overhaul kit for a "1970 Quadrajet" and doing a roadside rebuild while Warren Oates falls asleep trying to steal a license plate. James Taylor has a few choice lines about the blandness of Detroit Iron...how they all look the same and "perform about the same." Great soundtrack, and an excellent performance by the late, great, Warren Oates.

somewhere about a year ago this GTO surfaced with a new member here. I can't seem to find the thread but I'm thinking he's in Canada or something?

unrelated car but I was crying when I saw the original Night of the livng dead from 1968 the other night and it starts off with them driving around in a 67 Lemans, then the chick rolls it into a tree crushing the drivers side. It was a horrible thing to watch. As bad as the first episode of that new AMC series "The Walking Dead" when they killed a 71 GTO Judge (abviously a clone but it was a T41 car regardless) What is it that zombies have against Pontiacs?!

I can explain the problem with zombies and Pontiacs. The uninformed masses were
drawn to Fords , Chevies and Mopars back before the zombie plague hit, so it is only
natural that they would prefer Fords Chevies and Mopars after they became zombies.
It's just that when they become a zombie, due to the previous dislike of something special and unique, they become agressive towards the special and unique Pontiacs after the plague hits.
I suspect that they would dislike Hudsons and Studebakers as well.

Dumb movie, but it had some hot women. And Ron; you'd be surprised how fast some of the imports are running now at the strips and down on Hall street in St louis.

Probably the best race movies ever made were Lemans, Grand Prix, or Funny Car Summer.