“Don’t look back, maybe something follows on your heels.” Part I. Part II. A lanky guy in a brown leather jacket is dragging a guitar case, which is getting heavier by the minute, to a distant pawnshop in the heat. The nickname of the lanky Cisco, he is a musician who once learned the take-off, since then his career has stalled, the studios kick off his demo recordings, and the “hack” – the trade in light “dope” – has led to two arrests. It is not possible to flog the guitar, Cisco returns home to his yoginizing girlfriend with the same full trunk and empty pockets. A little later, California policeman Leo Holland arrives at Lanky, holding Cisco on toast for previous offenses. Holland has a huge batch of dried herbs of the highest quality, and the money is needed by Monday. In return, the detective promises to change the testimony in court, which will mean the most lenient sentence. In this deal, everything will go wrong from the very beginning.
In 1970, Kris Kristofferson made his debut with a number of concerts in one of the most raunchy clubs in Los Angeles, The Troubadour, where agents of several film companies rushed to stare at him at once. The movie “Two-lane Highway” took place without Chris, because he was drunk already upon arrival at the negotiations, and there he decided that he should take acting lessons. However, Bill Norton’s script about a musician who, due to circumstances, was forced to engage in illegal activities turned out to be quite in the spirit of Kristofferson’s own songs, he could not refuse. “Dirty” Leo was played by Gene Hackman, and Susan “Viva” Hoffman, the star of Andy Warhol’s Factory, also played one of the roles. Cisco Pike, released in 1972, was Norton’s first directorial experience and Kristofferson’s first starring role. Although a few film critics lazily threw a couple of sophisticated curses into the picture, and the public did not notice it at all in the year of release, thanks to the reissue on DVD, this work acquired cult status already in the XXI century.
In 1973, Chris married singer Rita Coolidge, almost a real Cherokee, with whom he would later give birth to two joint albums (“Full Moon” 1973, “Natural Act” 1978) and one daughter. In the same year, the iconic director for the New Hollywood, Sam Peckinpah, staged the neo-western “Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid” with Kristofferson as the Kid. Bob Dylan is writing music for the film, including the notorious “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. In 1974, the young director Martin Scorsese, who had just declared himself “Evil Streets”, attracted Chris to the filming of the melodrama “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” with Ellen Burstyn as Alice. Burstyn won an Oscar as the best actress, the audience voted with a dollar, covering the costs many times, critics dropped saliva of delight on their laudatory writing, and only exalted feminists hissed angrily from their holes.
1976 was the peak of Kris Kristofferson’s cinematic career: the musical “A Star is Born”, where the duet was composed by Barbara Streisand, had a resounding success and corresponding box office receipts. The soundtrack album received platinum four times. And even if this was the second reinterpretation of the original of 1937 (the first happened in 1954, the next time Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga will take up the plot only in 2018), it is the version with Chris and Barbara that remains the best to this day.
A couple of years later, Peckinpah again calls Chris to play a little bit in the story of the conflict between truckers and the traffic police, openly and brazenly fleecing the workers of the “steering wheel” and diesel. It is curious that the script of the “Convoy” was born from the song “Convoy”, in 1975, Billy Dale Fries, known under the stage name W. C. McCall, unexpectedly straddled the tops of all the charts of the country hit. Despite the seemingly uncomplicated plot, screenwriter Bill Norton (yes, he again) laid some deep meanings in the narrative, from Rabelais’s “Panurge Herd” to the hint that a rebellion that has reasons but no ideas is doomed to fail. For Peckinpah, the film became the most profitable in his entire career, and after reaching the USSR some seven years later, it delighted Soviet viewers.
And today on the roads of Russia there are truck drivers who remember the Rubber Duck, even if they have forgotten the name of the actor who portrayed him.
The year 1980 drew a bold line separating Kristofferson’s decade of undoubted success from the rest of his life. Divorce from Rita: later, in her memoirs, she will put all her men in a rather bestial light, even Eric Clapton will get it, allegedly stealing a piece of music from her for his song “Layla”, and even more so Chris will be shipped as a “drunkard who belittled her talents.” Coolidge will call the memoirs “Delta Lady”, although it should have been “D’Artagnan and all these.”
The epic “Heaven’s Gate”: director Michael Cimino, like Scorsese, has just grabbed his luck by the tail with the painting “The Deer Hunter” and has now decided to surpass Coppola in epicness. The script was based on real events in Wyoming, when the rich cattle breeders of Johnson County began lynching newly arrived settlers, accusing them of horse theft, and then hired a small army to destroy all newcomers. During the filming, Cimino repeatedly exceeded the budget, and the final cut lasted more than five hours. The producers quickly shortened the timing to three hours, but in the beginning of the Reagan era, such a movie was expected to fail for ideological reasons in the first place, and only then because of unsuccessful editing. And the failure was deafening. The director’s cut reached the moviegoers only in the new century, having received some recognition. But Kris Kristofferson no longer got major roles.
In 1983, he married Lisa Myers and lived for his own pleasure, together with old friends Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, he joined the supergroup The Highwaymen, with them he starred in optional but intimate westerns, and in 1990 he moved to one of the blessed Hawaiian Islands. From this period until the end of his career, he recorded seven more solo albums, his occasional appearances graced films such as Payback with Mel Gibson or the Blade trilogy with Wesley Snipes.
Having initially invested a huge effort to break through the ice of obscurity, Chris found himself in big water and was caught up by its current. He did not drown, but enjoyed the coastal bends, the bottom reliefs and the change of currents. And finally reached the Ocean of Eternity.
