Movies - Zabriskie Point

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	Movies - Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie Point is a low-budget 1970 film by Michelangelo Antonioni. It was intended to capitalize on the U.S. counterculture movement of the time by sympathetically telling the story of a young couple -- an idealistic student, and a militant radical -- with a pointedly anti-establishment message. It stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, neither of whom had any previous acting experience.

The soundtrack album, Zabriskie Point, features music from various artists, including Pink Floyd, The Youngbloods, Jerry Garcia, Roy Orbison, and the Grateful Dead.

The film was a notorious box office bomb, attacked by critics and ignored by the counterculture audience the studio, MGM, was courting. The film cost $7 million US (in 1970 dollars), and made less than $900,000. Even the booklet released with the CD version of the soundtrack was unsympathetic, declaring that "ritics of all ideologies -- establishment, underground, and otherwise -- greeted the movie with howls of derision. They savaged the flat, blank performances of Antonioni's handpicked first-time stars, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, and assailed the script's confused, unconvincing mix of hippie-buzzword dialogue, self-righteous, militant debate, and free-love romanticism."

Ironically, some critics have speculated that it was precisely the simplistic, buzzword-heavy view of hippie life that has given the film some minor continued popularity. In the 1990s and 2000s, the film was occasionally screened on college and university campuses to young audiences curious to see a film sympathetic to the counterculture of the 1960s.

Trivia

Harrison Ford
has an uncredited role as an airport worker.

After making the film, stars Mark Frechette
and Daria Halprin
moved into the same California commune. Halprin married Dennis Hopper
in 1972. In 1973, Frechette participated in a bank robbery in which one of his accomplices was killed. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but died in a weightlifting accident in 1975.

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