Word: fraker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...script owes some of its incident and much of its spirit to Monte Walsh, both the Jack Schaefer novel and William Fraker's underrated film version. But Culpepper is less about growing old than coming of age. Ben Mockridge (Gary Grimes) is barely past his teens when he talks Trail Boss Frank Culpepper (Billy "Green" Bush) into taking him along on a drive. Ben is hired on as "little Mary" (cook's helper), and he has to work his predictable way up from there...
Mutrux and Cinematographer William Fraker capture the feeling: the neon and chromium, the chili-dog stands, the freeways, the drive-in stereo stores and the supermarkets. Nearly all of the characters are played by junkies, not actors. They relive their lives for a camera that observes compassionately as each fix brings them that much closer to self-destruction. Mutrux views his characters as victims, if rather romantic ones. That attitude lends his film a distinct but unsatisfactory ambiguity...
...gives it all up to wed the hardware-store widow, but Monte won't relinquish his ways even for the golden-hearted, dross-tongued whore (Jeanne Moreau) he loves. By the time the film ends, just about everyone has been killed off except Marvin and Director Wil liam Fraker, who might well have been the first target...