Zabriskie Point (film) - Production

Production

While in the United States for the 1966 premiere of his film Blowup, which had been a surprising box office hit, Antonioni saw a short newspaper article about a young man who had stolen an airplane and was killed when he tried to return it in Phoenix, Arizona. Antonioni took this as a thread with which he could tie together the plot of his next film. After writing many drafts, he hired playwright Sam Shepard to write the script. Shepard, Antonioni, Italian filmmaker Franco Rossetti, screenwriter Tonino Guerra and Clare Peploe (wife of Bernardo Bertolucci) worked on the screenplay.

Neither Mark Frechette nor Daria Halprin had any previous acting experience. Most of the supporting roles were played by a professional cast, notably Rod Taylor along with G.D. Spradlin in one of his first feature film roles following many appearances on national television in the U.S. Paul Fix, a friend and acting coach of John Wayne who had appeared in many of Wayne's films, played the owner of a roadhouse in the Mojave desert. Kathleen Cleaver, a member of the Black Panthers and wife of Eldridge Cleaver, appeared in the documentary-like student meeting scene at the opening of the film.

Shooting began in July 1968 in Los Angeles, much of it on location in the wider southern downtown area. Exteriors of the art deco Richfield Tower were shown in a few scenes shot shortly before its demolition in November of that year. Various college campus scenes, excluding the scene of the student meeting, were filmed on location at Contra Costa Community College in San Pablo, California. The production then moved to location shooting near Phoenix and from there to Death Valley.

Early movie industry publicity reports claimed Antonioni would gather 10,000 extras in the desert for the filming of the lovemaking scene, but this never happened. The scene was filmed with dust-covered and highly choreographed actors from The Open Theatre. The United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act (which forbade the taking of women across state lines for sexual purposes), however no sex was filmed and no state lines were crossed for that segment of the production, given Death Valley is in California.

During filming Antonioni was quoted as criticizing the U.S. film industry for financially wasteful production practices, which he found "almost immoral" and compared to the more thrifty approach of Italian studios.