Mark Frechette, the beautiful and doomed star of Zabriskie Point

I kind of liked that movie…

Stunning.

I had such a crush on Mark Frechette. Hated the movie. I remember reading years ago about him getting killed in prison. Don't think I've thought of him since them.

His HAIR. WTF?

His hair was fashionable in 1970. He had a relationship with Daria Halprin, his co-star in ZP.

Here she is talking about ZP at 10.20.

He was beautiful. What a charmed, bizarre, and far too short time he spent on this planet.

[quote]His hair was fashionable in 1970.

Thanks R5. It's like a mushroom cloud. It's creepy and terrible. He has a lovely face and might have been attractive otherwise. Did he backcomb it and heavily spray it or something? Like a small men's bouffant? Did other males really wear hair like that?

Anyway - I googled him and he died at 27 while in prison in Massachusetts for 6-15 years for bank robbery. During the robbery - the police killed one of his accomplices and there were 2 left. He died in a "weightlifting accident" when a 150-pound barbell fell on his neck and he suffocated. Prison officials said there was no suspicion of foul play. And that was it for him.

I also googled Daria Halprin and she's 74! What a beautiful woman even now. She was drop dead gorgeous when younger.

I don't know who any of these people are. Are the films worth watching?

See? Even Daria Halprin is trying to flatten that ratty old thing out.

The ending is very trippy. The whole movie cries out for edibles. I kind of like it too.

He had a lover named Robert Dole

It's one of the best movies about the US. It takes a foreigner.

I remember he was on The Dick Cavett Show and he seemed weird. Nice hair and eyes but bad teeth.

[quote]His HAIR. WTF?

It looks artificially short on the sides for 1970. Someone upthread referred to it as a mushroom cloud, and I agree. Most guys had longer hair all the way around in 1970.

Meh.

If beautiful and doomed is what you are looking for, consider Pierre Blaise: a star at 19, dead at 20. Poor boy.

[quote]He had a lover named Robert Dole

Bob Dole is not gay!

Never heard of these people ot the movie.

OMFG, so I was Drunk Datalounging(tm) during a bout of insomnia the other night and sent the link to my husband, whose mother was a French Canadian in New England. Her maiden name was Frechette. I said C'est le Frechette.

I'm home from work now and this came up. I was just joking. Turns out Mark was his cousin. He says he didn't get a gay vibe from him and that he was a loser, and that he doesn't believe that the prison barbell incident was an accident. Everyone in his family saw this movie and they all said "what the fuck was THAT all about?!".

And now he's telling me that he thinks the movie was filmed in an area of SoCal en route to Palm Springs in which we took a wrong turn and got lost, ending up somewhere between Thousand Oaks, CA and Fillmore, CA, which looked like a moonscape. And now I'm telling him, "why didn't you tell me you had a hot actor-turned bank robber cousin who died in prison, when we got lost on that trip?!". I actually posted about that trip here on DL for other reasons.

And he just downloaded the film off the internet and were watching it. Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead did some of the music. Looks like it's going to be a bad movie.

Meanwhile, who was married to Carlo Ponti?

Carlo Ponti? Sophia Loren

There's also PETER Frechette (no relation to Mark), also an actor and definitely gay (he's married to a man.)

Thanks for both of those gems, r18!

Some nice shirtless shots of Mark in this gallery. In slide 7 he's getting head.

He was so beautiful. The movie was so pointless. Why'd you have to go and rob a bank, Mark?

Jim Morrison wrote "L'America" for the soundtrack, but Antonioni didn't use it.

One of the best movie endings IMO.

The movie is nonsense, the kind of drug-fueled anti-capitalist nudity-filled nonsense that got widespread funding for a brief minute, after the surprise success of "Easy Rider" in 1969. So Antonioni grabbed that moment and took some Hollywood money, spent more of it on drugs than the actual movie b the look of it, and roped in this troubled kid to be "molded" into an actor.

A person as troubled and angry as Frechette typically comes from an abusive home, and I can't imagine his relationship with Antonioni helped. Who knows what went on between them, as far as Antonioni was straight, so maybe he wasn't making this troubled kid put out for the role. But he had to be messing with Frechette's head, both to get reactions out of a non-actor, and by building him up to be an actor and a movie star, and dropping him back into the gutter when things didn't work out. Nothing makes a person crazier than seeming to give a person everything they ever wanted, and then taking it all away again, and that's how the relationship with Antonioni must have seemed to Frechette.

I thought that ending lame. R23 is just a pyro