| Matthew Tchepikova-Treon |
Cisco Pike, presented by the Cult Film Collective, plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, June 12th, through Sunday, June 14th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org
Have you ever been hungover in church? That particular feeling is what Kris Kristofferson’s album The Silver Tongued Devil and I sounds like. Or it’s how I’d describe it anyway. Sweat, salvation, and self-loathing, but in a fun sorta way. Because by Sunday night you again remember: “The going up is worth the coming down.” This line is from Kristofferson’s song “The Pilgrim—Chapter 33,” one of three tracks from Silver Tongued Devil that appear in the singer’s acting debut, Cisco Pike. Well, technically his actual screen debut was in The Last Movie (1971), where he was billed as “The Minstrel Wrangler,” but in that beautiful debacle of a film, I’d say he was more just performing and hanging out than actually acting. Cisco Pike is where Kristofferson (alongside Gene Hackman, Karen Black, Antonio Fargas, and Harry Dean Stanton) first brought his west coast brand of an outlaw balladeer to the silver screen. And right now, as you read this, Cisco’s final circulating 35mm print is traveling from Culver City, CA to Minneapolis, MN for its last ever public screening in a cinema.
Another line from “The Pilgrim—Chapter 33”: “He’s a walking contradiction / partly truth and partly fiction.” This refrain is essentially a character sketch for Cisco Pike, an acoustic guitar-wielding, weed-smoking drug dealer who casually gallivants around Venice Beach, the Sunset Strip, and West Hollywood. Whereas Two-Lane Blacktop (for which Kristofferson attempted to audition but showed up too intoxicated) had James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, Cisco capitalizes on Kristofferson’s emerging mythos as a rugged bohemian in the world of country music, blurring biographical distinctions between truth and fiction. [Nota Bene: Two-Lane Blacktop in 35mm will be showing at the Trylon starting September 6th.] Self-exiled from Nashville to Los Angeles, his music stood in stark contrast to the rhinestone cowboys who populated country music’s conservative mainstream. In the film, a marquee above the legendary Troubadour nightclub reads “Waylon Jennings.” This was Kristofferson’s confraternity, as declared in a roll call that opens “The Pilgrim” when he namechecks fellow highwaymen such as Johnny Cash, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and Jerry Jeff Walker, as well as Dennis Hopper.
From our vantage point today, it can be easy to hear this as an overly romanticized cast of rough-hewn figures who walked the line between counterculture and commercial success. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was indeed a brief moment, before Nixon’s “Silent Majority” began laying claim to country music as a reactionary coat-of-arms while many industry figures responded in kind, the country outlaw still had space to be “a poet … a picker … a prophet … a pusher… a pilgrim and a preacher,” as well as “a problem when he’s stoned.” That’s Cisco Pike. Written and directed by Bill Norton (with some screenplay touchups from Robert Towne), the film, which began production under the working title “Silver Tongued Devil,” is in many ways a New Hollywood manifestation of Purgatory shot through with exploitation-film verve spiked with hangout-movie lethargy, and Kristofferson/Pike is a long-haired Virgil, our reluctant poet guide. His songs serve as eulogies for the protagonist’s own wasted grace, searching for a drive-through baptism in the middle of a drought and an oil crisis.
Again, however, lest we slip into quixotic nostalgia for some historical fiction, it’s important to note that while Cisco Pike achingly documents the end of something classically edenic (call it what you will, “free love,” etc.), I don’t believe Kristofferson would’ve ever called this film, nor his accompanying album, a love letter to any idyllic notion of “the sixties” in California or some unfulfilled destiny of social transubstantiation. Afterall, Culver City (mere miles from Cisco’s small Venice Beach apartment), was established in 1913 as a whites-only Christian enclave and remained a sundown town for decades, well after movie studio lots began springing up, starting with Thomas H. Ince (a pioneer of the Western, another cultural progenitor of the country outlaw lineage) and Culver Studios, which Ince helped build at 10202 West Washington Boulevard. In other words, a few songs and some grade-A hallucinogenics were never going to have a fair fight against an original sin so deeply rooted in the land. But Cisco keeps peddling his demo tapes around West Hollywood all the same. God bless him.
When the Cult Film Collective booked Cisco Pike for this weekend, we were informed that, because Sony has recently produced a digital restoration of the film, this would be the 35mm print’s last ride out of town. Shortly after Cisco’s initial theatrical run, Kristofferson followed up The Silver Tongued Devil & I with Border Lord, an album that, fittingly, begins with him singing, “Darkness had us covered / when we split from Minnesota.” This last circulating print of Cisco Pike will soon leave the Trylon to travel back westward once more, through the Rockies, across the desert, to the Sony Pictures Studios archive at 10202 West Washington Boulevard, formerly Culver Studios, where it’ll be laid to rest, forever “humming to a half forgotten echo / hangin’ over in the brain.”
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon