SFIFF Dispatch. 7.

One of the discoveries at the San Francisco International Film Festival was an essay on an icon who barely had the 15 minutes of fame to be a shadow on the media record of his moment in history. Death Valley Superstar takes us back to Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni's epic 1970 meditation on the American landscape and American culture at the height of the war in Vietnam, which is never mentioned in the film.

The male lead of the movie, inspired in part by a young man who stole an airplane for a joy ride in the desert and was gunned down by the police on his return, was Mark Frechette, who was "discovered" when he was spotted in a fight at a Boston bus stop. Death Valley Superstar is a 27-minute elegy to Frechette by Michael Yaroshevsky, a Russian living in Montreal. (Before showing at San Francisco, Death Valley Superstar premiered at the International Festival of Film on Art [FIFA] in Montreal.)

Frechette had the perfect deadpan for his character - a young man of student age who was willing to die, but not before he killed a policeman who had just murdered a Black protester, and not before he borrowed a plane for a ride out to Death Valley, and not before rolling in the sand with beautiful Daria Halprin. The non-professional had the perfect look of the new Peter Fonda, just one year after Easy Rider made its mark. Hollywod had a formula it wanted to exploit (although Antonioni was the last person on whose shoulders you would want to build an exploitation industry), and Frechette had the monosyllabic detachment that made Dick Cavett's efforts to interview him on television of the time seem ridiculous. He also had a face that was nothing if not marketable. Remember that Zabriskie Point was an MGM production, with a budget that matched its ambitions.

But Frechette, non-professional in movies and politics, ended up drinking the Kool-Aid. He and friends who were committed to revolution robbed a bank in Massachusetts, and were sentenced to long prison terms. ("We didn't know a fucking thing about robbing a bank," says one of his accomplices candidly, who notes that, once inside, the team got plenty of advice from real bank robbers on how they could have pulled off the job.) In prison, Frechette became notorious again when he staged a performance of the House Watergate hearings, with an all-prisoner cast - a Watergate Marat/Sade. The show got some snide TV coverage; its Nixon was one of Frechette's bank-robbing colleagues, who looked like Don Adams of Get Smart with a nose meant to resemble Nixon's. It reminds you that you can make just about anything with materials you can find in a prison. He talks of the anger that led him and Frechette to rob the bank, in his Nixon Cyra-nose, in a 1974 prison interview that even Mel Brooks couldn't have concocted. Soon after that show, Frechette died in September of 1975 in what was described as a weightlifting accident - some prisoners around at the time said it looked a lot like murder. (Read Rolling Stone's obit.)

In voice-over narration, we hear from Michael Yaroshevsky on the idea of "someone dying to believe in something," and from Frechette's wife and son, now much older than Mark ever was, whose faces no longer bear any of the beauty that Frechette wore so unassumingly well (as did Daria Halprin, who played a girl named Daria who abandons her secretarial job to drive into the desert). Frechette, the vagrant-turned-icon, is the doomed rebel who ended up remembered as an idealistic ghost. Throughout the short doc we hear the drumbeats from the beginning of Zabriskie Point. It's the memento mori, the reminder that the romance that you will see is the prelude to a fatalistic adventure.

-David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at May 11, 2008 3:57 AM