Vanishing Point Forever
by Jerry Cimino
Fifty-three years ago this week, a very small film with a budget just north of a million dollars was released by 20th Century Fox without a lot of fanfare. It was soon relegated to double feature status at drive-in movie theaters across the country, where it took on a second life.
If this sounds familiar to you, it may be because I wrote about this very film three months ago when we published an article about artist Richard Prince and the greatest collection of Beat Generation and counterculture material in the world. I started that story with an anecdote related to the movie Vanishing Point, which featured a Dean Moriarty-type character named Kowalski racing from Denver to San Francisco in fifteen hours, driving a 1970 Dodge Challenger. I was intrigued because in 1970 my brother Jack owned that exact same car.
What I didn’t know when I wrote that article was that a brand new book titled Vanishing Point Forever was to be released a month later, covering every single aspect you could ever hope to know about the movie. This magnificent release clocks in at a robust 572 pages. It includes dozens of high-quality photographs of production stills from the movie, excerpts, ephemera, essays, remembrances, and brightly colored movie posters from around the world. It even reproduces the entire 137-page final draft of the screenplay by G. Cain (a pseudonym for Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante).
Guillermo Cabrera Infante was born in Cuba in 1929 and became a prominent novelist as well as a journalist, translator, essayist, and critic. Starting in the 1950s he used the pseudonyms G. Cain and Guillermo Cain. Choosing the first two letters of his middle name and surname to come up with “Cain,” Infante seemed to enjoy the notoriety that came with being associated with the world’s first criminal. In 1965 he moved to England for political reasons, which is where he was living when he wrote the screenplay for Vanishing Point as G. Cain.
Vanishing Point Forever – A Love Letter to a Moment in Time
Vanishing Point Forever is truly one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen. The unusual layout and design of the book, with its rich colors and variation in the textures of its paper stocks, reminds me of something Gypsy Lou and John Webb of Loujon Press in New Orleans might have created decades ago. Written by Robert M. Rubin, published by Film Desk Books, and designed for print production by COMA Design, it’s the type of book that can literally take your breath away—especially if you’re into muscle cars and film history!
Vanishing Point Forever is a deep dive into the movie, not only as a defining moment at the end of the counterculture era, but as an inquiry into its lasting influences as well. The film encompasses the burgeoning divisions within the USA, the loss of innocence, the end of the hippie scene, and the wind-down of the Vietnam War, along with its unsatisfying resolution.
How does this relate to Kerouac and the Beats? Really in the simplest of ways. On the second page of the final version of the screenplay there are only four words: “In Memoriam Dean Moriarty.” The truth is, Kerouac is all over the screenplay, as well as in the film itself, and Vanishing Point Forever succeeds where both the film Vanishing Point and Kerouac’s novel On the Road also succeeded: the idea of car as character.
The Car Becomes a Character
The 1970 Dodge Challenger of the movie can easily be seen as a stand-in for the way Kerouac casts the ’49 Hudson in On the Road. Both cars seem to take on a living, breathing persona as they roar across the American West.
In a number of ways, Vanishing Point realizes some of the storylines echoed in Jack Kerouac’s correspondence with movie producer Jerry Wald, who in 1958 discussed with Jack his vision for a movie version of On the Road. Wald wanted Dean Moriarty to die in a fiery car crash at the end of the movie. Kerouac wouldn’t go for it. He is reported saying “Neal could never crash a car. Unless he wanted to do it on purpose.” Jack wanted the closing scene of On the Road the movie to be Dean at home having supper with his wife and children.
Vanishing Point was a culture-shifting work of art borne out of the chaos and constraints of movie production. Just like Francis Ford Coppola needed to contend with a typhoon destroying his set, and Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack in the middle of filming Apocalypse Now!, so too did director Robert Sarafian need to accommodate sudden studio budget cuts and truncated shooting days. Entire scenes were deleted and dialogue ripped up to meet the demands of the studio.
The studio’s decisions also brought a lot of positive aspects to the production. In Guillemo’s orginal screenplay, Kowalski’s car was a Ford Galaxie 500. But then fate intervened when Chrysler offered to lease the studio five brand new white Dodge Challengers for $1 a day to promote their new muscle car competing with the Camaro and Mustang for the 1970 model year.
Kowalski. No First Name. Just Kowalski.
The lead character in Vanishing Point played by actor Barry Newman is simply Kowalski. He has no first name, neither in the movie nor in the screenplay, and director Sarafian suggested he wanted the character to appear “otherworldly.” When we first meet Kowalski he’s buying Benzedrine from his drug dealer to make the drive from Denver to San Francisco.
Sound familiar?
So this raises the question: is the name Kowalksi a nod to Marlon Brando’s character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire?
Guillermo Cabrera Infante actually interviewed Marlon Brando in Havana, Cuba in 1956. That interview is included in its entirety in Vanishing Point Forever in both Spanish and English.
Brando confesses that he only agreed to the interview because Infante was Cuban and not an American journalist, most of whom only seem to want to write gossip, and that his reason for being in Havana was simply to buy a conga drum.
During his time with Infante, Brando opines on the likes of Elia Kazan, Katherine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Muni, Judy Garland, and Grace Kelly. Infante and Brando go to dinner to continue their conversation and Brando is relieved no one in the restaurant recognizes him. At the time Infante met Brando the actor had already been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor four years in a row: for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1952; for Viva Zapata! in 1953; for Julius Caesar in 1954; and On the Waterfront in 1955, for which Brando finally won his first Oscar.
They take to the streets of Havana, where Infante has to hail the cab because Brando is so well known people are shouting his name on the street. The same thing happens in the clubs where they go to listen to music—the club owners even stop the show to focus a spotlight on Brando—to the point he and Infante need to make a fast exit to avoid being overwhelmed by fans. Commenting on James Dean’s recent death in a car wreck, Brando states, “He had poetry inside him. With time he would have learned to bring it out and express it.” And, of course they speak of Brando’s own films, including 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire where he played Stanley Kowalski.
Other stars in the film include Cleavon Little, who plays ‘Super Soul’, a radio DJ who tries to guide Kowalski away from the cops (“the blue meanies”). Another scene, in which Kowalski picks up Charlotte Rampling’s character as she’s hitchhiking west in the middle of the night, was cut entirely from the film’s American release, but stole the show for Europeans.
The Long Tail of Vanishing Point
It would be hard to overstate the influence of this film in the last half-century. Not only do high-profile cultural icons like Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg count it among their favorite films, but it regularly receives a nod or attribution from other filmmakers as well, such as in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. References to the film can be seen in many quarters even today, and one might even make the case that the resurgence of muscle cars in the 2000s was due in part to what Robert Rubin likes to call “the long tail of Vanishing Point.”
The End of the Road
The last Challenger to roll off the Dodge assembly line did so on December 22, 2023. Because of government mileage requirements, the line is being retooled for electric vehicles, though there’s talk that the Challenger may return for a fourth generation as an EV in 2025.
So strongly embedded in the culture is the legend of this film that when actor Barry Newman died in 2023, half of his New York Times obituary was dedicated to his role as Kowalski in Vanishing Point, which the Times described as “One long psychedelic car chase.”
It seems Robert Rubin’s Vanishing Point Forever has arrived just at the right time in 2024.
Robert M. Rubin is a writer, collector and cultural historian. Often these three areas overlap. He writes about topics that interest him and collects items that have meaning for him. He’s curated the exhibitions Richard Prince American Prayer (2011), and Avedon’s France: Old World, New Look (2017), both at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, as well as Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact (2015) at the Museum of the Moving Image. Vanishing Point Forever is his latest book.
You can purchase Vanishing Point Forever here:
An article on Vanishing Point Forever was published in Car and Driver magazine just last week.