Vitals

Mark Frechette as Mark, revolutionary college dropout and forklift driver

Los Angeles to Death Valley, California, Summer 1968

Film: Zabriskie Point
Release Date: February 5, 1970
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Costume Designer: Ray Summers

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Michelangelo Antonioni refocused his existential “Antoni-ennui” lens onto the American campus counterculture for the offbeat drama Zabriskie Point, which premiered 56 years ago today on February 5, 1970, four days before its wider release. Poorly received by critics and audiences upon its release, Zabriskie Point earned a cult following in the decades to follow as newer audiences appreciate the raw style and performances, the deeply human story photographed by cinematographer Alfio Contini against the vast California desert, and a contemporary rock soundtrack featuring Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia, The Rolling Stones, and The Youngbloods.

“Who the hell is he?” someone asks of our protagonist in the opening scene. Indeed, the moviegoing public may have wondered the same thing. After directing the likes of Alain Delon, Richard Harris, David Hemmings, Marcello Mastroianni, and Monica Vitti, Antonioni anchored Zabriskie Point with non-professional actors Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in its leading roles. Casting director Sally Dennison discovered Frechette at a bus stop during the 20-year-old carpenter’s shouting match with a man leaning out of a window three stories above them. “He’s twenty, and he hates,” Dennison tersely explained in her recommendation to Antonioni.

Of course, there’s still familiar faces like Rod Taylor, G.D. Spradlin (our favorite crooked senator from The Godfather, Part II), and even Harrison Ford in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit part as an arrested student demonstrator. But Mark and Daria are the beating heart of the story, their characters named after the actors to underscore the raw authenticity of their untrained performances.

Mark prefers individual action over organized revolt, explaining to his roommate that “the day you don’t count on losing is the day I’ll join the movement.” After witnessing a demonstration turning violent on his L.A. campus, the gun-wielding Mark is mistaken for TV cameras and witnesses as the gunman who shot one of the assembled policemen. Realizing he’s wanted for a murder he didn’t commit, Mark steals a Cessna T210G from an airstrip outside Hawthorne and flies it into the desert. (Yes, that did escalate quickly!)

Each fleeing L.A.—by air and by road, respectively—Mark and Daria don’t meet until halfway through Zabriskie Point when their paths converge near the titular landmark in Death Valley. The disparity between the two locations could not be more apparent; even with its burgeoning youth counterculture, congested L.A. may well stand for “Labels and Advertising” as its overcrowded population strains from under the domain of its aging establishment. Only in the wide-open desert—an area changed only by the natural forces of the Earth—do they enjoy even the illusion of freedom, exemplified by the movie’s famous choreographed orgy performed by the Open Theatre of Joe Chaikin. (Almost too on-the-nose for the movie’s general themes, this trippy scene was investigated by the federal government to determine if its production violated the Mann Act… which it did not.)

Mark: Would you like to go with me?
Daria: Where?
Mark: Wherever I’m going.
Daria: Are you really asking?
Mark: Is that your real answer?

Filmed in the summer of 1968, Zabriskie Point would prove tragically prescient with its themes of campus violence. Three months after its release, unarmed students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder were killed by National Guardsmen during a May 1970 protest against the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Ohio.

Despite the movie’s lack of success, Frechette and Halpern became faces of the American countercultural movement. After briefly dating in real life, their relationship ended—presumably when he failed to recruit her into the Fort Hill Community, Mel Lyman’s commune to which he tithed his entire $60,000 salary from Zabriskie Point. In August 1973, Frechette was arrested after he and two fellow Fort Hill members attempted to rob a bank in the Boston suburbs with an unloaded gun. The 27-year-old Frechette died in prison two years later when a 150-pound barbell fell onto his neck while weightlifting.

Zabriskie Point lives on as a Antonioni’s moody meditation about freedom curdling into emptiness. It’s my kind of movie, joining existential contemporaries along a desolate highway that includes Five Easy Pieces, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Vanishing Point, and it could even make great companion viewing to this year’s Oscar contender One Battle After Another, from its chaotic revolutionary prologue to its culminating chase through the rolling California desert.

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What’d He Wear?

Envisioning himself as the antithesis of his contemporaries with their interminable ideological debates regarding revolutionary credentials and demands, Mark actively rejects demonstrative clothing—whether that’s the hippie, biker, or movement-adjacent mil-surp styles associated with ’60s rebellion—and instead favors almost aggressively unfashionable clothing: preferring aged anonymity to brash style statements.

Mark introduces himself to the campus revolutionaries—and the audience—when he rises during a meeting, sporting a crew-neck T-shirt from a simple single-needle cotton that’s been softened by sun, sweat, and laundering into a muted indigo. Clinging closely to Mark’s already lean frame, the reinforced crew neck and short, tight sleeves are typical of the era’s undershirt-informed tees before relaxed fits took over.

For most of Zabriskie Point, including the climactic day that begins with a confrontational demonstration and commandeering a Cessna, Mark wears a long-sleeved shirt made from a lightweight washed plain-weave cotton, faded and distressed beyond its initial chalky pale-blue color. The shirt has white buttons up the distressed front placket, which he typically wears with the top few buttons undone, working with the looser cut to emphasize airflow rather than shape. It also has a narrow spread collar, two button-through open-top patch pockets over the chest (also worn unbuttoned), and button cuffs that he typically keeps unfastened and rolled up his forearms.

Mark’s gray hardy cotton twill flat-front trousers are a casual hybrid styled with flat-felled outseams and curved front pockets of denim jeans, contrasting with the jetted back pockets (with a button through the back left pocket) and medium-rise structure of dressier slacks like chinos. These have a fashionably close fit through the hips and legs, tapering down even narrower to the plain-hemmed bottoms. Mark holds them up with a dark-brown leather belt worn to a weathered patina, fastened through a large squared brass-framed single-prong buckle.

Suggesting his willingness to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk, Mark wears aged plain-toe combat-style work boots with tan roughout leather uppers that rise to mid-calf. These are derby-laced with rawhide laces through three sets of eyelets over the instep, then two more pairs of gunmetal-finished eyelets up the shaft, followed by six sets of gunmetal speed hooks and a final row of eyelets across the top. He undoes the top row of lacing to crudely fashion his left boot into an ankle holster for his hastily purchased snub-nosed .38 Special revolver.

No watches, rings, or jewelry for Mark; just a set of sunglasses that he may wear for the very practical purpose of shading his eyes from the sun, the more Roger O. Thornhill-informed intent of a rudimentary disguise, or simply to look cool. Tucked in his shirt’s left pocket for much of Zabriskie Point, Mark’s rectangular-shaped sunglasses have simple matte gold-finished wire frames.

During this same phase of his getaway, Mark also slings a dirty gray trucker jacket over his shoulder, but he never actually wears it on screen. Possibly matching his trousers, this waist-length jacket has sew-through buttons up the front, single-button cuffs, and button-tab waist adjusters.

Mark’s costume follows the same gray and faded-blue scheme as his opposing force, Daria’s former boss Lee Allen (Rod Taylor), in his late-’60s corporate garb of a smartly tailored gray silk suit, pale blue patterned shirt and tonal blue tie, and a steel Bulova Accutron “Astronaut” wristwatch.

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The Truck

Both Mark and Daria drive older automobiles, between Mark’s red 1963 Ford F-100 flareside pickup truck with its three-on-the-three shifter to Daria’s dust-covered matte gray 1952 Buick Special two-door “Tourback” sedan. Like his clothing, Mark’s truck is distressed and sun-faded but still functional enough to get him where he’s going.

Ford launched its F-series of light pickup trucks in 1948 in eight different weight ratings, starting with the half-ton F-1. For the second generation introduced in 1953, the F-1 became the F-100, which would be the F-series’ base model for three decades. Mark’s F-100 was produced during the early 1960s fourth generation, characterized by a longer, lower profile that more closely aligned the F-series with modern pickup trucks than the previous models. Engine options for Mark’s 1963 F-100 ranged from the 223- and 262-cubic-inch “Mileage Maker” inline six up to Ford’s 292 cubic-inch “Y-block” V8 that generated 170 horsepower.

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The Gun

“We need some guns right away… for self-defense,” Mark’s friend tells a gun store clerk, who responds that they should expect to wait at least four or five days until they’re cleared to purchase by California’s state government. Mark plays on the older clerk’s likely conservative leanings, avoiding their own revolutionary intentions and saying they need “to protect our women” in an increasingly rough “borderline” neighborhood. “Well, I’m sure as hell gonna see that you don’t go defenseless,” the clerk responds. “For your purposes, fellas, I wouldn’t recommend anything smaller than a .38.”

After they purchase a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Model 36 Chiefs Special and a long gun, another clerk (Bill Hickman) advises them that “the law says you can protect your house, so if you shoot ’em in the backyard, be sure you drag ’em inside.”

Mark secures the snub-nosed .38 butt-forward in the tall shaft of his left boot before leaving his dorm for the demonstration on campus. It remains tucked away here throughout his adventures, first drawn on campus and then again in Death Valley after a passing patrolman briefly interrogates Daria.

Daria: Man, you’re really crazy! Is it loaded?
Mark: (empties all five bullets onto the ground) … Nope.

Smith & Wesson introduced this five-shot .38 Special revolver during the 1950 International Association of Chiefs of Police convention, where the attendees voted on its “Chiefs Special” name—which only lasted seven years before Smith & Wesson numbered all of its models and this “belly gun” was officially re-dubbed the Model 36. As opposed to six-shot competition like the Colt Detective Special, the Model 36’s five-round cylinder sacrificed one bullet for a flatter profile that concealed easily on Smith & Wesson’s small J-frame, making it an easily carried favorite for cops, crooks, and civilians alike across the second half of the 20th century.

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How to Get the Look

Mark dresses simply with a broken-in comfort and insouciance: a sun-faded denim-like work-shirt only half-buttoned with the sleeves rolled up, tucked into informal trousers that have seen better days and held up by a leather belt that could tell the same story, grounded by high-lacing boots that reinforce their practicality when he tucks his snub-nosed .38 into the shaft.

• Faded pale-blue lightweight washed cotton shirt with narrow spread collar, distressed front placket, two button-through chest patch pockets, and button cuffs
• Gray cotton flat-front straight-leg trousers with belt loops, curved front pockets, jetted back pockets (with button-through back-left pocket), flat-felled out-seams, and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Dark-brown weathered leather belt with large brass-finished squared single-prong buckle
• Tan roughout leather plain-toe work boots with derby-style lacing/speed hooks up the mid-calf shafts
• Matte gold rectangular-framed sunglasses

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

I also love this gag sign that cracks Daria up in a desert bar:

You can still find vintage examples of this on eBay.

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The Quote

When it gets down to it, you have to choose one side or the other.