MovieNite 8th Anniversary celebration! 
Pamela's Nite
Beef bourginon, camembert mashed potatoes, braised red cabbage, lemon butter broccolini and lemon bundt cake
Malick interview from Sight and Sound via Eskimo:
Interviewing Terry Malick,producer-writer-director of Badlands, turned out, like his film, to be full of idiosyncratic surprises. My prepared list of questions went by the wayside as Malick talked with passion, conviction and sometimes anger about his film. Acknowledging that he "couldn't have asked for more" in terms of critical acceptance, he also indicated that the actual filming was painful. Working in the dead heat of the 1972 summer, with a non-union crew and little money ($300,000, excluding some deferments to labs and actors), Malick encountered all sorts of problems, from difficulties over finance to the destruction of all the cameras during a fire sequence. Eventually, upon completion, Warners bought Badlands for just under a million dollars. It might turn in a decent profit for them.
The son of an oil company executive, Malick grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He went to Harvard and later to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. Philosophy was his course of study, but he never completed his thesis--in fact, his topic wasn't even acceptable to his Senior Tutor, Gilbert Ryle. Summer jobs took him from the wheat harvests in America and Canada, to work in oilfields and riving a cement mixer in a railyard, to journalistic endeavours for Life, Newsweek and the New Yorker. He was sent to Bolivia to observe the trial of Regis Debray; Che Guevara was killed the day after his arrival. In 1968, he was appointed a lecturer in philosophy for one year at MIT.
"I was not a good teacher; I didn't have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else. I'd always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else. I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to study at the AFI; I made a short called Lanton Mills. I found the AFI very helpful; it's a marvellous place. My wife was going to law school and I was working for a time as a rewrite man-two days on Drive, He Said, five weeks on the predecessor to Dirty Harry at a time when Brando was going to do it with Irving Kershner directing. Then we all got fired by Warners; the project went to Clint Eastwood. I rewrote Pocket Money and Deadhead Miles. I got this work because of a phenomenal agent, Mike Medavoy.
"At the end of my second year here, I began work on Badlands. I wrote and, at the same time, developed a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot. To my surprise, they didn't pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith. I raised about half the money and Edward Pressman (the executive producer) the other half. We started in July of 1972.
"The critics talked about influences on the picture and in most cases referred to films I had never seen. My influences were books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn--all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I didn't actually think about those books before I did the script, but it's obvious to me now. Nancy Drew, the children's story child detective--I did think about her."
"There is some humour in the picture, I believe. Not jokes. It lies in Holly's mis-estimation of her audience, of what they will be interested in or ready to believe. (She seems at time to think of her narration as like what you get in audio-visual courses in high school.) When they're crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what's going on between Kit and herself, or anything of what we'd like and have to know, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience, this way."
"Kit doesn't see himself as anything sad or pitiable, but as a subject of incredible interest, to himself and to future generations. Like Holly, like a child, he can only really believe in what's going on inside him. Death, other people's feelings, the consequences of his actions-they're all sort of abstract for him. He thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean-a Rebel without a Cause-when in reality he's more like an Eisenhower conservative. 'Consider the minority opinion,' he says into the rich man's tape recorder, 'but try to get along with the majority opinion once it's accepted.' He doesn't really believe any of this, but he envies the people who do, who can. He wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn't kill, the only man he sympathises with, and the one least in need of sympathy. It's not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there."
"And there's something about growing up in the Midwest. There's no check on you. People imagine it's the kind of place where your behaviour is under constant observation, where you really have to toe the line. They got that idea from Sinclair Lewis. But people can really get ignored there and fall into bad soil. Kit did, and he grew up like a big poisonous weed."
"I don't think he's a character peculiar to his time. I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this owuld, among other htings, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children's books are full of violence. Long John Silver slits the throats of the faithful crew. Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale. Holly says, "Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened." But she enough believes there is such a place that she must confess to you she never got there."
Via Sense of Cinema:
Malick's first film Badlands (1973) is ostensibly a semi-factual account of a mass-murderer and his girlfriend, set in the 1950s. What's immediately unusual about the film is its lack of interest in trying to explain the causes of its protagonists' violent behaviors, and furthermore, its lack of moral judgment of these individuals or the culture that produced them. Instead the film's focus is concentrated on their experience of alienation from the world that they inhabit and its values. As Heidegger might put it, the intelligibility of the world and the values people share are, at bottom, not based on justifications, nor are they arbitrary. It is a given fact, if you will, that they are based neither on unshakable foundations nor on arbitrary consensus.
Malick's lack of interest in the causes of the characters' behaviors should not be understood as itself a moral judgment, as if their actions are in some nebulous way justified. This film is not a polemic, like Kiéslowski's A Short Film about Killing (1988). Rather, Malick's point seems to be that mere condemnation, or trying to determine the causes of their actions, essentially evades the fact that our world and values sometimes are unable to deal with certain human possibilities.
Via Crime Library:
In 1958, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather was desperate. Desperate to marry his jailbait girlfriend. Desperate to make some money for himself so he wouldn't be broke every day of his life. Desperate to get out of the Nebraska town where everyone had figured him for a loser.
He and Caril Fugate embarked on a murder spree that horrified the country. This was the country that had elected Eisenhower and Nixon for a second term in 1956 and where the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover was firmly entrenched as the national policeman. This was also a country that was undergoing unsettling cultural changes. Frightening and offensive symbols of rebellion emerged and thrived: Elvis Presley, James Dean and the whole rock 'n roll culture focused on a new generation that challenged the status quo of the sterile 1950's.
The horror and science fiction films of the 1950s were always in search of new monsters. A teenage werewolf was a compromise, targeting the new audience with a variation on an old idea. The original creations made their pictures unforgettable: Invaders from Mars (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), This Island Earth (1955), The Fly (1958).
The son of an ordained minister (but never a minister himself, despite some accounts), he was reportedly a radio performer as a child, and a radio and television producer as an adult. He first achieved a modicum of prominence in the 1950s as the head of a small Pennsylvania company, Valley Forge Films, producing noncommercial short subjects on religious themes; he had also by this time been credited as the producer and director of The Flaming Teen-Age (1956), an obscure teen exploitation movie with a devotional spin. One of his works must have been pretty impressive, for it inspired New York producer Jack H. HARRIS to invite Yeaworth to direct a cheap science fiction film for general release. In response to this odd opportunity, the devout Yeaworth surely prayed earnestly for divine guidance, and the Lord, once again displaying His infinite wisdom, advised him to accept the assignment.
For what emerged from the unlikely collaboration of Yeaworth and Harris was The Blob—perhaps not one of the best, but surely one of the most distinctive and memorable science fiction films of the 1950s. Its amorphous, pulsating silicone represented an original variation on the monster-from-space theme, and filming on location in Pennsylvania allowed Yeaworth to effectively employ unusual settings like the railroad-car diner and the small-town movie theatre where the Blob oozes menacingly towards the audience. Yeaworth also had a flair for innovative camera work, as in the scene in a store where stars Steve McQueen and Aneta Corseaut are strangely filmed from a disconcerting low angle; then, relating this to the image of the Blob slithering across the floor, we suddenly realize that we are being given a Blob's-eye view of the proceedings.
Most impressively, unlike almost every other teenagers-versus-monster movie of the era, The Blob insists upon treating its youthful protagonists with the utmost respect; the brilliantly cast McQueen and Corseaut may be inexperienced, but they are keenly observant—more so than the film's adults—and they take the responsibilities thrust upon them very seriously. Amidst scores of crudely made films that sought to extract money from teenagers' pockets while portraying them as fools, The Blob almost uniquely imbues its teenagers with a gawky gravitas that would not be observed again in American films until, perhaps, George LUCAS's American Graffiti. Just about Yeaworth's only misstep was his use of Ralph Carmichael's jarringly inappropriate, jazzy score which not only failed to enhance the film but was sometimes at cross purposes to it, as in the scene where McQueen and Corseaut contemplate their impending deaths to the accompaniment of soft, romantic music.
While promoting the film, Harris and Millgate toured the country together. "On our trips, we would talk about the great movie that I was gonna make one day, because that's what I wanted to do," recalled Harris. “Millgate said, ‘What is your formula?’ I said, ‘It's gotta be a monster movie. It's gotta be in color instead of black?and?white. It can't be a cheapy?creepie -- it’s gotta have some substance to it. It's gotta have characters you can believe in. And there's gotta be a unique monster -- never been done before. And the method of killing the monster would have to be something that grandma could have cooked up on her stove.’”
Millgate developed this notion into a treatment, which Harris took to Valley Forge Films, a production company in suburban Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, headed by Irvin S. ("Shorty") Yeaworth, Jr. Under Yeaworth's direction, Valley Forge Films had made hundreds of low?budget TV shows and numerous 16mm films. Along with producer Lou Kellman (The Burgler), Yeaworth had been trying to co-produce a feature, but they were unable to raise financing for a script they had developed -- “a Bridie Murphy kind of situation,” according to Yeaworth. The real-life case of a woman who became famous for allegedly recalling past lives under hypnosis had led to a brief vogue with reincarnation, but other films had already cashed in (e.g., Roger Corman’s THE UNDEAD in 1957). When Kellman approached his friend, distributor Jack Harris, for help raising money, Harris suggested making THE MOLTEN METEOR instead.
A screenplay was developed from Millgate’s treatment. The script went through several drafts at Valley Forge, including uncredited input from the director’s wife, Jean Yeaworth, with a final draft credited to Theodore Simonson and actress Kay Linaker (who had written “Scandal at Peppernut,” an episode of The United States Steel Hour, under her pen name, Kate Phillips, in 1955).
Months of pre-production went into preparing the film so that it could be complete on its limited budget. Harris felt that intense advance planning was the key to keeping the budget in check. "To me the most important part is preparation – that’s where it all happens. We had about three-and-a-half months preparation, besides story development. [It was] the best-prepared movie I've ever done; I thought they were all that way. I've found out since that time, they ain't all that way."
For the most part, filming was an exercise in achieving results with very little. Luckily, the crew was willing to put in a maximum amount of effort for a minimum amount of money. "We were interested in the progress of our studio; therefore, we were all really participants in the project, even though we're not participants in the profits,” said Spalding.
