R.I.P.

[dimejinky99]

[spike]

Five time Academy Award winner

[Rangi Guy]

Seems somone was already mourning my guy, and I missed it. Post removed

[Ello Sailor]

Kinda like me posting new songs after psychobain.

[dimejinky99]

[Anders]

[Anders]

Loved him in Convoy as a kid. Great movie, perfect performance.

[dimejinky99]

Loved him in Convoy as a kid. Great movie, perfect performance.

breaker breaker

[dimejinky99]

Loved him in Convoy as a kid. Great movie, perfect performance.

i havent seen it since. wtf was that movie about??
the trailer
https://youtu.be/uDUXvR79wS4?si=Bz6gmRWPGaHItFiD

[Anders]

“Convoy,” published in 1976, tells the story of truckers driving cross-country to fight against an imposed speed limit and paper logs. While the group and their pilgrimage are fictional, the story is based on real issues and protests from that time.

One change Sam Peckinpah made to the script was the casting of black actors to add more dimension.

Spoiler: show

From a good review I found:

Within the first half hour I realized that this movie was way, way better than it needed to be. It also made good on the promise of filling in the song in such a way that could support a full length feature film. I mean, it blew away all those Smokey and the Bandit fiascoes and even Gator. Not because it was supposed to be better. No. The plot and the writing aren’t any better than those films’ writing, nor are the characters. For the most part they are the caricatures you’d expect: loner-turned-leader Rubber Duck (Kris Kristofferson), sexy city gal on assignment covering the trucker life (Ali McGraw), and racist, foul-mouthed sheriff (Ernest Borgnine) making life hell for our hero and his gang. But even though they aren’t written all that well, they are portrayed by actors and actresses who are better than the material they are given.

And Sam Peckinpah, a man in his late fifties who would not live to see sixty, had a lot of confidence in his actors and the emotional impact of the story he wanted to tell as well as his own filmmaking skill. A functioning alcoholic for most of his adult life, Peckinpah was supposed to be off the sauce during the making of Convoy–one New York Times piece has him talk about it–but he had relapses frequently, and he had also started using cocaine on a previous film, reportedly introduced to it by James Caan. By all accounts he was a miserable SOB on the set. Not many of the crew had anything good to say about their experiences on the movie and many of them quit along the way. Some days he remained in his trailer, wasted and ornery, and the day’s shoot would be overseen by actor James Coburn, a friend of Sam’s who had been hired as a second unit director.

Whatever Peckinpah filmed he filmed in such a way as to show its heroic qualities. His westerns directly descended from the work of John Ford and John Huston, depicting a world that was grittier and less honorable than the frontier myths that most Americans had been fed. His films were mostly about individuals attempting to cope with a mad, chaotic world. Kris Kristofferson’s Rubber Duck is not unlike the character Humphrey Bogart portrayed in more than one film–wanting to be left alone to carve out his own existence in an unfriendly universe, but dragged into heroic action by his humanity.

Convoy is a love letter to America in many ways, thanks in large part to the cinematography of Harry Stradling, Jr. The shots of trucks driving the highways and deserts of New Mexico are stunning, with the same kind of big skies and open roads that audiences are used to seeing in westerns. In one memorable sequence the convoy takes a back road that is little more than a trail, and the shots of trucks driving over the soft dirt, leaving cop cars in the literal dust, are like an eighteen wheeler ballet. Eventually the trucks dissolve into each other and, as daylight turns to dusk, their headlights merge with the moon in an eerie display of mechanized beauty.

Just like the westerns of old, Convoy is a mythical construct, a look at an America that receded into the mists of the distant past like Avalon. Some would argue that it truly never existed. Sam Peckinpah created a real sense of camaraderie around the truckers by encouraging actors to ad lib lines and to do what they thought their characters would actually do rather than slavishly devoting themselves to the script. He reportedly rewrote parts and it was his idea to include two black truckers, portrayed by Madge Sinclair and Franklin Ajaye, in the film. Ajaye’s character, Spider Mike, is a main character, one of Rubber Duck’s two main sidekicks (the other is portrayed by Burt Young, who distinguished himself as Rocky Balboa’s brother in law). When Spider Mike leaves the convoy to return home for the birth of his first child, his wife in the hospital, Rubber Duck comments ‘That’s some scary country for a black trucker.’ Predictably, Mike is picked up by the racist sheriff and beaten before being tossed into jail. What that shows, really clearly, is that many white Americans understood, as far back as 1978, that police, especially corrupt ones in rural areas, posed a real threat to the lives of any black people who crossed their paths.

In the end Peckinpah turned in a cut that was over three hours long, and the studio grew nervous, fired him, and had the film recut to 103 minutes. Peckinpah disowned the film as it was released; ironically, it was the most commercially successful of his career, even though it wasn’t released until June of 1978, well after the CB craze had abated and a full three years after the song that had inspired it ascended the charts. That song, by C.W. McCall, was in itself a construct.

[dimejinky99]

now thats a review!
wasnt aware of any of that, thanks Anders

[Bi_3]

Five time Academy Award winner

[Anders]

now thats a review!
wasnt aware of any of that, thanks Anders

No problem. It has a special place in my heart, where only a few movies I loved in the 80s are.

[dimejinky99]

now thats a review!
wasnt aware of any of that, thanks Anders

No problem. It has a special place in my heart, where only a few movies I loved in the 80s are.

Do you have a top 5?

[Anders]

now thats a review!
wasnt aware of any of that, thanks Anders

No problem. It has a special place in my heart, where only a few movies I loved in the 80s are.

Do you have a top 5?

Not really. But here’s a few:

Better Off Dead
Big
Big Trouble In Little China
Convoy
Temple Of Doom
Star Wars
Back To The Future
Coming To America
Innerspace
The Goonies
Spaceballs
The Champ
Armed and Dangerous
Superman
The NeverEnding Story

[dimejinky99]

now thats a review!
wasnt aware of any of that, thanks Anders

No problem. It has a special place in my heart, where only a few movies I loved in the 80s are.

Do you have a top 5?

Not really. But here’s a few:

Better Off Dead
Big
Big Trouble In Little China
Convoy
Temple Of Doom
Star Wars
Back To The Future
Coming To America
Innerspace
The Goonies
Spaceballs
The Champ
Armed and Dangerous
Superman
The NeverEnding Story

no Porkys?

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Anders]

First saw Porky’s as an adult.

I have never seen Big Wednesday, but I want to.

[dimejinky99]

First saw Porky’s as an adult.

I have never seen Big Wednesday, but I want to.

i was only kiddin

thats a fantastic list A

id add lost boys and license to drive and dream a little dream

[dimejinky99]

listenin to that song he wrote for Sinead..

a beautiful thing.