This movie sat on a shelf for 5 years, and was shown on TV only when Burt Reynolds became a big star. A romance heats up on a movie location in Utah, between a local guy and an assistant editor. It’s a ’70s ‘new Hollywood’ slice-of-life character study, but 5 years too early … and relying too much on ‘pretty’ travelogue shots. But the young Reynolds is excellent, and it’s a rare opportunity to see a very special actress, Barbara Loden, in a well-intentioned film role.

Fade-In
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1968 / Color/ 1:85 widescreen / 92 min. / Iron Cowboy / Street Date January 21, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Burt Reynolds, Barbara Loden, Patricia Casey, Noam Pitlik, James Hampton, Joseph V. Perry, Lawrence Heller, Sally Kirkland, Ricardo Montalban, Joanna Pettet, Terence Stamp.
Cinematography: William A. Fraker
Art Director: Albert Brenner
Costumes: Rosamund Lytele
Film Editor: Aaron Stell
Original Music: Ken Lauber
Written by Jerry Ludwig
Produced by Judd Bernard, Silvio Narizzano
Directed by Jud Taylor

Some movies simply had a curse laid upon them — or something. In 1967, producers preparing to film a western in Utah, came up with an idea Roger Corman would have liked: shooting an arty relationship film at the same time, using the expensive film shoot as a novel background. With film culture on an upswing the idea was progressive and commercial. The title term Fade-In promises the inside story on filmmaking, just when ‘film director’ had become the the most glamorous occupation in the public eye.

After years of TV work Burt Reynolds must have hoped this odd feature would help him break through. He had missed the brass ring early on with  one promising role, and had even  made a western in Italy, showing off his skills as a stunt man.

The second career of interest is that of co-star Barbara Loden. Known for a powerful role in Elia Kazan’s  Splendor in the Grass but almost nothing else, Loden must have taken the romantic lead in Fade-Inrole hoping to boost her career without being trapped in the Hollywood grind. The very independent Loden was not the kind to put up with Hollywood’s ‘starlet’- oriented notions about actresses.

Fade-In is a project with real potential. Numerous Hollywood creatives itched to make movies in a more European style. Some French pictures floated romantic stories without a strong dramatic structure or crisis conflicts — just people interacting, as in real life. A New Wave picture like Jules and Jim is a collection of scenes that try to be ‘living moments,’ not necessarily functioning elements of a narrative scheme. Burt Reynolds later thought the studio didn’t understand the movie. Fade-In was trying for loose, small-strokes impressions, like Claude Lelouch’s  A Man and A Woman. Interpersonal chemistry is everything in such a movie … with two personalities front and center, the actors have to give an impression of intimate communication.

The ‘progressive’ aspect of the movie is borne out by Francis Coppola’s  The Rain People, filmed just a year later. Coppola reportedly took his film crew out on the road with just a framework of a story, and experimented with letting his actors improvise parts of scenes.

Fade-In has an excellent subject, the ‘on location affair’ that happens as soon as a film crew gets far from home, away from spouses and the daily routine. Somebody connects with somebody, and pow, an affair begins off hours and/or on hours. Assistant editor Jean meets local farmer Rob the moment she’s off the plane in Moab, Utah, where a western will be filmed. It’s a three-week stint; he’s been hired as a driver. Rob has a legit reason to drop by her editing room; soon he’s openly admitting that he’s looking for her. They hit it off immediately, and make love on their first evening together. They are soon inseparable. Rob sees a little of what happens in the cutting room and watches some of the action of the filming. On their time off they’re out swimming, boating, and climbing around the majestic scenery. Rob has two encounters with a friend from school, who forces him to fight; but Rob also feels the need to show off for Jean by trying out some dangerous rodeo rides he hasn’t done in years.

Their conversation is believable but sparse. When the big question of ‘what happens when the movie moves on’ comes up, reality intervenes. Jean has a sometime-boyfriend back in L.A. name Bill; Rob sulks and pouts to think he’s just been someone for her to pass the time with. Jean talks over her problem with a production assistant, Pat (Patricia Casey). It looks like Rob and Jean will be parting for good when the company goes home.

Fade-In is certainly more honest than Dennis Hopper’s  The Last Movie, which also uses the filming of a western as a springboard for a foreground drama. The filmmakers have tried to set up natural situations to let an unforced relationship bloom. The problem is that it doesn’t follow through with its emulation of the looser European style. The story content that peeks in still feels ‘Hollywood.’

The ‘background reality’ is the filming of Silvio Narizzano’s  Blue (1968). We see some coverage of action on the set, but also a lot of footage that could have been shot for a Paramount promo featurette. We get a glimpse of the stars of Blue, Terence Stamp and Joanna Petit.  ↑  Stamp’s actor arrives in Moab in a sleek blue Jaguar, making us want to warn him to avoid weird children and dangerous bridges.

The leads are charming and attractive. Burt Reynolds’s Rob is a thoughtful guy, unlike his friends, a pair of local yahoos. When he shows up at Jean’s café table, it’s not like stalking because there are only a couple of places open at night in Moab. He’s defensive about being a small-town type, but is forthright and honest with her. Barbara Loden had a gleam of intelligence in her eye as far back as  Wild River; her Jean likes what she sees in Rob from the get-go. Their mutual attraction works. We look forward to finding out if they can get to know each other outside of bed as well as in. The problem is that the narrative skips all that material.

We’re instead witnesses to a lot of very superficial activity. There is a lot of travelogue material as they romp around the desert, visiting scenic vistas. We expect more from Rob’s quick tour of the cutting room. She demonstrates a cut that doesn’t prove much. A major scene, mostly without dialogue, is Rob’s rodeo exhibition. They both know it’s his way of showing how much she means him. Jean realizes that Rob’s stunt is a primal ritual, which she communicates well in with her look of concern. Can a Utah farmer compete with some guy back in Los Angeles?  It’s caveman attraction time, yet such things do have weight.

Burt seems to have been very image-conscious. Rob gets a lot of scenes with no shirt on. None feel gratuitous. In a nice reversal of convention, Jean and the production manager come across Rob when he’s skinny dipping … he can’t come out of the water to greet them. Less effective is Rob’s being forced to fight one of his jerk local friends. Jean seems to accept it, but it isn’t very good advertising for abandoning L.A. for life in the sticks.

The movie ends up being slow because there are just too many wide shots of vehicles moving through the scenery, accompanied by Ken Lauber’s pleasant music score. Because we aren’t learning anything more about our lovers, most of it plays like filler. Any ‘New Wave’ connection dissolves in long scenes taken from a helicopter, of the couple galavanting up and down rivers, running and playing as if filming a shampoo commercial.

When they do talk the dialogue is good, but there isn’t enough of it even to begin to unwrap their characters. Barbara Loden is very expressive — we can guess that Jean has been under pressure and really needs this fling … reliable birth control pills make such a choice possible for a responsible woman. Jean is enjoying her fling for what it is worth. But we understand that there isn’t a lot of personal growth potential for her with Rob in Moab.

The movie purposely avoids most ‘relationship’ discussions, and it really dodges the emotional showdowns one would expect in a Hollywood romance. When Jean slips next door to have a big ‘what do I do?’ discussion with Pat, we don’t hear what’s being said. Our assumption is that we already know what’s being said — there’s no mystery about what’s going on.

We aren’t as invested in the lovers as we should be, and that’s a problem. The show is too long, and starts to stall out around the hundred minute mark. The travelogue scenes feel like a waste of time. Burt Reynolds would later say that he and Barbara Loden just didn’t click on a professional level; he never could figure out where she was coming from. That doesn’t tell us a lot. Ms. Loden may have had an entire list of problems not even related to Burt. Their chemistry on screen is just okay, but the real problem is that their romance has little weight. Even in the French romances, we know much more about the lover’s personal situations and backgrounds.

As the movie has a very standard narrative form, we keep expecting ‘Hollywood’ plotting and resolutions. But the possible conflicts go nowhere. Rob’s less-than-couth local friends remain on the sidelines. His fight with the other friend is inconsequential. Nobody in the crew complains that Jean is derelict from her work duties. We really expect Jean’s boyfriend Bill to show up and cause a fuss. Fade-In avoids these clichés, but tries to compensate with pretty scenery and an uneventful romance.

The ‘on location’ connection is weak. Rob hangs out on the set of Blue, but his shots don’t really seem connected to the movie-within-a-movie. When Jean and the director evaluate dailies in a local theater, some of the supposedly Moab-shot footage is obviously filmed back in Hollywood, in — wait for it —  Bronson Caverns.

As finished, Fade-In doesn’t have a ‘different’ feel, like The Rain People or  Two-Lane Blacktop. Some in-car dialogue is filmed on a process stage, as are the close-ups when Rob and Jean have a heart-to-heart atop a lonely butte … which, when the helicopter recedes, reveals that they are on a precipice that would require a helicopter to access. The other ‘big mistake’ scene is a romantic fantasy where they pretend to be western actors on a movie set. They take turns wearing a black mustache. The scene ends with a takeoff of  Duel in the Sun, where they pretend to be mortally wounded lovers, crawling to touch hands again for one last time. It plays like a reject movie fantasy from a William Friedkin movie,  Good Times.

That fantasy montage employs a series of involved dissolve opticals; the cutting suggests that it and another montage or two (some incorporating still photos) were rearranged in a recut … after the film was taken away from its director.

Screenwriter Mart Crowley reportedly bowed out of accepting credit for the movie, when he saw how much it was changed. Crowley is the playwright of  The Boys in the Band. Can we assume that the queer joke Rob’s friends say in the first scene was his?  The release of Blue didn’t get a lot of attention from Paramount, but Fade-In ran up against a studio roadblock. Whatever the original cut was like, it’s not hard to imagine the studio brass (Robert Evans?) throwing his hands in the air and shouting, ‘there’s no movie here.’ It was recut, and then shelved, and never released theatrically.

Director Jud Taylor began as an actor ( Attack,  The Great Escape) and slipped into TV directing in 1965. Fade-In would be his first feature film. His response to the recut was to ask that his name to be taken off the movie as well. The show became the first Hollywood feature to use the notorious  Allan Smithee alias.

Little did Jud Taylor know that his big movie break would sit idle for 5 years, to see the light of day only as a TV movie. It shares that status with the equally maudit feature-turned TV movie  The Picasso Summer, an ambitious show with bigger stars.

Fade-In must have felt like a genuine thorn in Burt Reynolds’ side, another ambitious project that didn’t work out, that would pain him when people asked, ‘whatever became of that weird picture you made on the set of Blue?‘

Just a couple of years later Burt finally broke through playing opposite  Raquel Welch. His best movie is still John Boorman’s  Deliverance, and he became a genuine superstar when his ‘good ol’ boy’ action films clicked in 1973 … which was when Paramount finally decided to let Fade-In show on late-night TV.

Barbara Loden’s career path stayed totally separate from that of her director superstar husband. Her experience on Fade-In likely reassured her that she did the right thing by avoiding becoming contracturally beholden to Hollywood. Wouldn’t it have been fantastic to see talents like Loden and Gena Rowlands work together on shows with strong roles for women?  Ms. Loden instead tried her hand at gritty independent filmmaking, gaining cult notice as the star and director of an independent, eccentric crime drama filmed in 16mm,  Wanda. It’s a brave picture — Loden plays an uneducated, demoralized drifter who abandons her husband and baby, and falls in with a shabby stick-up man.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Fade-In is a fine HD master (from a 2021 4K scan) of a movie almost nobody has seen in a theatrical format — on TV it was opened up to the full frame, censored, and peppered with TV commercial breaks. The color is excellent, although a few opticals are a bit dirty … some scenes may be dupes because of the re-cut process to which the movie was subjected.

Overall it looks fine. If you like relaxing shots of red-rock mesas, buttes, canyons and rivers, this be the place. Veteran cinematographer Stanley Cortez handled the Panavision scenery for Narizzano’s Blue, while newcomer William Fraker made beautiful images in 1:85 for Fade-In. Fraker clicked, as had his mentor Conrad Hall … this show was filmed in the same year that Fraker lensed  The President’s Analyst, and his next assignments would be  Rosemary’s Baby and  Bullitt.

No trailer exists for Fade-In because there was no theatrical release; like Picasso Summer, it’s not in the AFI’s database. Kino does provide the film with two separate commentaries. Filmmaker Daniel Kremer carries one of his own; he’s the writer and director of a  new documentary on Silvio Narizzano.

We listened to big piece of that commentary, plus a slightly more nuts & bolts track by entertainment writers Bryan Reesman and Max Evry. Their accounts of the movie’s troubled history overlap nicely.

Our reason to see Fade-In to catch another show with the fascinating, elusive Barbara Loden — there aren’t very many. It’s also a fine showing by Burt Reynolds, and is nothing to be ashamed of or make excuses for.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Fade-In
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good + / –
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
All new Supplements:
Audio commentary by Daniel Kremer
Audio Commentary by Bryan Reesman and Max Evry.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: February 12, 2025
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