Dusty and Sweets McGee

Floyd Mutrux's first film as director is the kind of project that a major studio could have produced/"released" only in the 1970s. I put quotation marks around "released" because the film essentially disappeared after opening on the coasts in the summer of 1971. (The summer when American box offices were owned by "Summer of '42.") Besides the unvarnished rawness of its semi-doc approach--which foreshadowed the 21st century reality TV mania--it's an extraordinary piece of Filmmaking (yes, with a capital "F"). Think of it as a heroin-laced valentine to the dying, post-Manson embers of 1960's L.A. hippie counterculture. When I finally got to see the movie a decade or so ago, I was struck by how much George Lucas borrowed from it visually and aurally (the nighttime, neon-bathed shots of cruising cars w/ a golden oldies soundtrack) in "American Graffiti." I actually wondered if Lucas himself was responsible for the film's invisibility for decades: perhaps he didn't want anyone to know just how beholden he was to Mutrux's movie. Of course, Mutrux (kinda/sorta) got the last laugh by hiring "Graffiti" star Paul Le Mat in "Aloha, Bobby and Rose" and making his very own (sorta/kinda) "Graffiti" with 1980's "The Hollywood Knights." The fact that Mutrux never truly got his due (or had the directing career he deserved) remains one of the great tragedies of the New Hollywood era. Speaking of which, when is Mutrux's masterpiece (1978's "American Hot Wax") ever going to be properly released on DVD and/or Blu-Ray? It's quite simply the greatest rock-and-roll movie ever made!