Monte Hellman + Laurie Bird

This is a film about Hellman's relationship with the "I'm not an actress" model he chose to play the "Girl" in Two Lane Blacktop... a woman he became smitten with and then cast in his subsequent feature Cockfighter.

The fictional accounting of Hellman's obsession with Bird is interesting as it is seemingly one he's never gotten over -- but the acting in Road is simultaneously so abysmal and pretentious that the picture crashes like the plane in the opening 10 minutes.

Bird committed suicide in the mid-70's at the age of 25.

I realize it sounds completely presumptuous to make a statement like the above, but it is so obviously a trigger for this exercise that it needs to be part of whatever discussion it prompts.