we spent several hours recording an interview with her which we used in the creation of the part . .
[of "The Girl," nameless]
later we couldn't find anyone to play the part." According to production notes she was:
"asked to fly to Little Rock, Ark., this time as a candidate for the role. A screen test was arranged in Hollywood after she was rehearsed by Hellman and his wife...
A few days later she was signed to the picture."
Principle photography commenced on August 13, 1970. Rolling Stone visits the set in October, 1970 and finds: a 17-year-old high school graduate they pick up somewhere in Arizona.
JT finishes shaving, and sings a line or two from "Mean Mr. Mustard" to the desert.
Laurie, who looks like she has just gotten out of the hospital for some undiagnosed high fever (she has), picks up the song. She sings softly,
privately,
really to herself. "You know,
this is just how I imagined this movie would be. All I knew about it before I read the script was that it was about some people who drive cross-country, and sometimes their car breaks down and they fix it.And that's just what's happening."
| . . . she mutters something, and the sound man complains, 'That's too soft Monte, I'm not getting it.'
'All she said was that she wanted some orange juice,' says JT.
'I know the lines. . . The first line is I wish we were back in Santa Fe. The second line is, San Francisco is groovy.'
She has been keeping a diary-a mixed media collage with annotations in different colored inks and she lets us read some of it:
'Beginning of her story . . . although she has been on her own for two years and she hasn't any plans of what to do. Now that she has broached this odd predicament, she has to find an answer right away . . . to bring herself into Summer happily!' |  |
The conversation drifts predictably to the problems attendant on being a superstar. 'I'll have my day" 85 percent kidding. She smiles a private smile. . .
The last line is 'No good.'
Film is released in 1971
1972, Montana: she writes dialog for a character in the film Dream of Passion. She was not cast in the film. The film was never completed...
1974. . .in Los Angeles she lives with Monte Hellman on Sunset Plaza. They live next door to some porno mafia gangsters ala Cassavetes. She acts in The Cockfighter, screenwriter Charles Willeford will say, "Monte has a personal theory about being the director of repertoire films. He has used Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Pat Pearcy, Laurie Bird, and Millie Perkins in his other films
I could see why he wanted to use Laurie Bird for Dody White (they live together and her salary stays in the family, so to speak), but now there are three tall, skinny women playing the only three major female roles in the film."
Later Monte Hellman will marry a . . .
In July 1975 the Bird meets Art Garfunkel
She makes the cover photo on his LP Breakaway along with the fast talking hitchhiker (Helena Kallianiotes) from Five Easy Pieces.
It's worth noting that the screenplays for Five Easy Pieces, The Shooting, and Ride the Whirlwind were written by Carole Eastman, another unsung bird.
1977 she plays Paul Simon's girlfriend in Annie Hall.
Paul Simon plays record producer Tony Lacey, a LA music biz type. The Bird wears all white and walks slowly towering above him.
. . . in 1978 AG and Laurie move from the West Coast back to New York.
March 1979, AG spends the next four months shooting on location in Vienna and London for Bad Timing.
. . . filming was to take place in New York in June. On June 15th she commits suicide in his penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park. "She left a note indicating that she was depressed."
Willeford writes that she: "leaped out of a window and killed herself in New York. She was with a famous pop singer when she defenestrated herself, and he was quite upset by her suicide."
Hellman counters: "Although the overdose of valium was not accidental, Laurie expected Art Garfunkel to arrive momentarily and save her, and therefore didn't intend to die"
. . . [too] curiously echoing Theresa Russell's OD in Bad Timing. As does the photograph on AG's LP Scissors Cut.
And doesn't explain the note, or how
she could not bring herself into Summer happily.
Works cited:
Art Garfunkel - Official Web Site. 8 Jul. 2006.
Elsaesser, Thomas. The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005
Goodwin, Michael. "On Route 66. Filming Two-Lane Blacktop." Rolling Stone, October 15, 1970.
Stevens, Brad. Monte Hellman: His Life and Films. North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2003.
Willeford, Charles. Cockfighter Journal. Santa Barbara, California: Neville Publishing, Inc., 1989. |
