It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point

Here I finally present It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point, a feature-length essay film that began as an editing mashup, a bit o’ fun with found footage, and ended as a pop meditation on American iconography and mythologies, a cine-exegesis of the American desert through the prism of both culture and counterculture, and a very personal exploration cum reckoning on the root of some strange longtime personal obsessions. “What does that all mean, Basil?” It means it’s a trip I hope you wind up taking (i.e. watching), and as the tagline of Mr. Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) has it, “How you get there depends on where you’re at.”

I attempted getting film festival showings for this film, but I was met with too much pushback in some extremely annoying ways. Many said, “We would only show it as a double feature with the Antonioni film, and we’re not keen on doing all that right now,” even despite having been successfully shown to one-off audiences who had seen neither It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) nor the Antonioni film — and meeting with very positive responses. Even when I implored these programmers, “You don’t have to show it with the Antonioni and I’d honestly really rather you didn’t,” it didn’t cut any ice. That, and I really don’t think most festivals have opened themselves to the essay-film/video-essay form. In some cases, it’s an altogether alien form to this lot, and I do believe this needs to change and that programmers desperately need to expand their horizons. It screened at the Tallahassee Film Festival and at a couple venues in the San Francisco Bay Area before I decided to do this online roll-out.

But the film got excellent responses from some important people, including Elliott Gould, fellow Trailers from Hell Guru Allan Arkush, onetime Harvard Film Archive head curator and critic Gerald Peary, friend of Trailers from Hell Daniel Waters, multiple film critics, as well as those polled in a British Film Institute/Sight & Sound year-end best list. And now I unleash it upon you all.

Some frequently asked questions:

1. Where did you get that footage of you at age 12 saying that Zabriskie Point was your favorite movie?

Sundance-winning documentarian Peter Nicks made his thesis doc Danny and the Scatman on me when I was that age. The subject was stuttering and I was a cinemaniac even back then. When I wanted to add the autobiographical aspect, I asked Pete if I could comb through his old tape rushes on the doc, to find the footage I remembered he shot of me watching the Antonioni. I got lucky.

I got the idea randomly during the pandemic lockdown in 2020. When I brought it up to Joe Dante over lunch a couple years ago, he laughed and was clearly amused at the prospect. It all started there.

I wanted to package it into a real movie, rather than just a bunch of editing samples. I began weighing what the mashups meant historically and aesthetically, and I started writing a voice-over script around that. Lo and behold, it wound up at 99 minutes.

I just finished another non-fiction feature with an essayistic dimension. Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano, the very first anything (book, film, article, anything) to cover the Canadian director of Die! Die! My Darling and Georgy Girl, and you can expect that on an upcoming Imprint Blu-ray release. I’m also finishing a fiction feature Countercurrents, which ties in with some of the themes in It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point.