Monte Hellman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 12, 1932, and moved to California with his family when he was five years old.

As a child, his shyness prompted Hellman's parents to pay for drama lessons.

Hellman directed his first stage play at the age of ten, while attending a YMCA summer camp.

Hellman studied drama as an undergraduate at Stanford University and film as a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles.

An early job cleaning the film vaults at ABC got Hellman work as an apprentice film editor, cutting commercials into 16mm film prints.

Hellman also worked as an assistant editor on the Richard Boone TV series Medic.

Hellman briefly studied acting, along with up-and-coming actors Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton and Shirley Knight. Their teacher was Martin Landau.

Hellman went from directing stage plays to films when the theatre space he worked out of was slated for demolition. One of the theater's investors was Roger Corman, who hired him to direct Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), his first film.

Hellman shot additional scenes for various Roger Corman films that were added to films that had been sold to television.

Hellman was, along with Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Nicholson, one of several uncredited directors who worked on Corman's piecemeal classic The Terror (1963).

Hellman edited the Roger Corman biker film The Wild Angels (1966), starring a pre-Easy Rider (1969) Peter Fonda.

Hellman was at work on an adaptation of the political play MacBird when presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and the project was canceled.

For a short time, Hellman belonged to a film director's company with B. L. Norton, Vernon Zimmerman and a young Steven Spielberg.

Returning from Italy, where he had been involved in a stillborn bid to adapt Patricia Highsmith's novel The Two Faces of January as a feature film, Hellman's agent Mike Medavoy got him a meeting with the producers of Two-Lane Blacktop.

Two-Lane Blacktop screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer is a descendent of the creator of the Wurlitzer jukebox.

Warren Oates had first been seen by Monte Hellman while acting in a Los Angeles production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The two had worked together previously on the western The Shooting (1967).

James Taylor's single "Fire and Rain" became a hit while he was working on Two-Lane Blacktop.

Dennis Wilson was the last member of The Beach Boys to learn to play an instrument but the only one who could actually surf.

Laurie Bird was a 17-year-old model at the time she was cast as The Girl in Two-Lane Blacktop.

Bird quit acting after appearing in a supporting role in Hellman's Cockfighter (1974) and a bit in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977).

As a photographer, Bird took the picture of Art Garfunkle used on his 1978 Watermark Album.

Laurie Bird committed suicide in June 1979. She was 25 years old.

Warren Oates died of a heart attack in April 1982.

A few days before Christmas 1983, Dennis Wilson checked himself into a Santa Monica rehab center to deal with his alcoholism and drug use. On Christmas Day he left the center abruptly. While boating with friends on December 28th, he drowned. His ashes were spread at sea.

After all these years, James Taylor still refuses to see Two-Lane Blacktop which was a terrible experience for him. In a column in TV Guide, he once commented on his television viewing, saying "I only watch about an hour a day, which may have something to do with the fact that I made a movie in 1971 [sic] that went very badly. Occasionally it [Two-Lane Blacktop] turns up on TV at 3 a.m. and I think the fear of seeing it may be why I'm so cautious of watching TV today."

by Richard Harland Smith

Sources:
Monte Hellman interview by Wheeler Dixon, Film Talk: Directors at Work
Monte Hellman interview by Keith Phipps, The AV Club, 1999
Monte Hellman interview by Marc Savlov, Austin City Chronicle, 2000
Monte Hellman interview by Mike White, Cashiers du Cinemart
Warren Oates: A Wild Life by Susan Compo (University of Kentucky Press)
Two-Lane Blacktop essay by Pat Padua, National Film Registry
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-and-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind
The Films of Roger Corman by Alan Frank
The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name: The Films of Monte Hellman by Kent Jones
"Death of a Beach Boy," People magazine, January 16, 1984