“As you get old, you forget. As you get older you are forgotten.” James Steele
Some of us never get to be old or even older, especially those doomed by the James Dean’s curse ‘live fast, die, and leave a good-looking corpse’.
Few men of the counter culture were as good-looking as Mark Frechette.
In 1968 Michelangelo Antonioni was searching for the male lead of his MGM film ZABRIKSIE POINT. A year had passed without finding the right actor, but casting director finally discovered Mark Frechette in Boston, while the handsome member of the Lyman family commune was having a shouting match with a man in a 3rd floor above a Charles Street bus stop.
“Motherfucker.”
The casting director wrote to the director that he was 20 and he hates.
Seeing his photo Antonioni green-lighted the new-comer. Neither Mark nor his co-star Daria Halprin had any previous acting experience, for Antonioni was looking for the raw quality of rebellious youth. The filming of a fugitive gunman took place in Los Angeles and finished in Death Valley. Mark Frechette hated the the experience. He thought the Italian director to be a phony. On THE DICK CAVITT SHOW the high school drop-out tells the TV audience not to waste their money on the film, which was later listed as one of THE WORST FIFTY FILMS OF ALL TIME.
Frechette returned to the Fort Hill commune with Daria Halprin and the $60,000. The lovely Halprin fled Boston to later marry Dennis Hopper, but Mark remained true to the guru, Mel Lyman, and attempted a bank robbery with two friends in 1972. His accomplice was shot at the scene of the crime. Mark Frechette had a gun without bullets.
“There was no way to stop what was going to happen. We just reached the point where all that the three of us really wanted to do was hold up a bank. It would be like a direct attack on everything that is choking this country to death.”
He was sentenced to 6-15 years, however the movie star died in a prison weight-lifting accident according to the prison officials.
Damn, he was good-looking.
And that I don’t forget.
To see how handsome please go to this URL