Some kind of hullaballoo in my building, loud voices in the hallway, a domestic dispute in progress on my floor. Kinda makes it hard to concentrate on writing.
But hey, I can offer you this seventies flashback:
Actually, that's a double seventies flashback, because not only do you get a slicker's exploitation of trucker culture ("C.W. McCall" was really advertising copywriter William Fries), but his appearance here was on the old Mike Douglas Show, the kind of straight-faced, non-ironic celebrity blabfest that pretty much ceased to exist by the mid-eighties.
The whole trucker thing was big in the seventies, thanks to McCall, Red Sovine and others. And man, did they crank out tons o' trucker movies! Smokey And The Bandit is the best known, Jonathan Kaplan's White Line Fever the most entertaining, Chuck Norris' starring debut Breaker, Breaker the stupidest--which is saying a lot.
The worst example of this genre--is "genre" too grand a word?--would be Sam Peckinpah's attempted adaptation of McCall's song, Convoy. To say this is Peckinpah's worst film is putting it mildly; it's probably the worst thing any major filmmaker ever put on the screen. (It's worse than Hook!) Peckinpah was famously drunk and stoned out of his mind during the shooting, and though it's certainly full of loathing and self-contempt, I wouldn't want to mistakenly convey the impression that the film is in any way interesting. Basically, it amounts to two hours of Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw riding around in a big rig, awaiting direction.
Incidentally, the music for all of McCall's singles--sadly, there were several; my mom inexplicably bought the 45 of Wolf Creek Pass, and worse, she listened to it--was by Chip Davis, and the massive profits he earned from these endeavors allowed him to found the Mannheim Steamroller empire. My hatred for that will just have to wait for another day.
