One day Geisler'was stunned to receive an invitation to a screening of Days of Heaven, Malick's new picture. Geisler kidded him that it looked like the seersucker jacket that Kit Carruthers-Sheen's Starkweather surrogate-stole from a rich man's house in Badlands.įor 18 months or so, well into 1979, Geisler and Malick worked on a project based on the life of Joseph Merrick, the 19th-century British sideshow celebrity who suffered from a rare, debilitating disease. Malick invariably wore jeans and a seersucker sport coat a little too small for him. He had the beef-eating habits of a boy raised in Texas and Oklahoma as he talked he wolfed down hamburgers, two at a time. Malick, about 35 then, was bearish and bearded. Still, he and Geisler had hit it off and began meeting at Los Angeles restaurants little frequented by celebrities, such as the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset and Doheny, where they sat in back batting around ideas. Badlands made its debut at the New York Film Festival in 1973, overshadowing even Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. With its stunning mix of psycho and pastoral, Badlands inspired subsequent lovers-on-the-lam films, culminating in Oliver Stone's notorious homage, Natural Born Killers, in 1994. Geisler-short and cheerful with long, thinning locks and an accent that softly suggests the South-was a novice producer who had been deeply impressed by Badlands, which starred then unknowns Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in a story loosely based on the bloody career of spree killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.
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But one thing is definite: offscreen a battle rages about who deserves the credit for bringing Malick home.īobby Geisler first met Malick in 1978 when he approached the filmmaker to direct a movie version of David Rabe's play In the Boom Boom Room.
Nobody knows why, at the height of his powers, after those two unforgettable films, he walked away from directing. He has always been an enigma, one of modern Hollywood's genuine myths. A fleeting presence, like the rare birds he loves to watch, Malick is the kind of seductive talent sought after as much for his elusiveness as for his eye. Malick, who declined to speak for this article, has established himself as a sort of cinematic Salinger, as silent as Garbo, as evasive as the Fugitive. The project marks the return, after exactly two decades, of the mysterious director Terrence Malick, whose Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) are classics. When The Thin Red Line, a tale of World War II, unleashes its artillery-including an all-star cast of Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Travolta, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Bill Pullman, Gary Oldman, George Clooney, and others-in December, expect a 21-gun salute to a hero who seems certain to remain an unseen soldier. The herculean struggle to get Terrence Malick's first movie in two decades-a film version of James Jones's war epic The Thin Red Lineto the screen was complicated not only by its elusive director's reticence but also by the two producers who believe they made it all happen
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