A true "radical" filmmaker is not satisfied to merely bloviate from the red carpet or screening room. One must turn art into action.
Alex Cox is ready with a personal manifesto: He calls feature filmmaking a dying art form in the Digital Age, has open contempt for corporate Hollywood and feels kinship mainly with hackers, who have "replaced filmmakers and investigative journalists as our best cultural revolutionaries."
From the man who began his career with the 1980s cult classics "Repo Man" and "Sid & Nancy," none of this should be surprising. He aims to displease.
And so he does from the opening pages of his engaging memoir, "X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker." The book begins with his arrival in Los Angeles in the late 1970s as a young British expat, finding inspiration at UCLA film school and the local punk-rock dives.
From there, he describes three decades of film work with the likes of Gary Oldman, Emilio Estevez, the Clash's Joe Strummer and a young, pre-fame Courtney Love.
In "X Films," Cox writes about the movies that got made, from "Repo Man" and the pro-Sandinista, historical epic "Walker" to his latest effort, the low-budget road movie "Searchers 2.0." He barely mentions the dozens of screenplays that found no takers, nor the aborted projects that crashed and burned. (Cox famously was set to direct "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" until a disastrous meeting with Hunter S. Thompson.)
Cox notes that dreams, like films, last about 90 minutes, and he writes accordingly, telling his tales of guerrilla moviemaking quickly, with breezy good humor and flashes of radical outrage.
"Repo Man" was based on his experiences riding shotgun across L.A.'s urban sprawl with a real repo man named Mark Lewis, who paid Cox $20 to drive his car home if a defaulter's wheels were successfully repossessed. They fueled up for the long nights on pre-mixed cocktails in a can.
For the film, Cox let his mind wander, inventing a story of repo cowboys, government agents and disaffected SoCal punks chasing after a '64 Chevy Malibu with a mysterious sentient force in the trunk.
Cox recounts his sales pitch and still cringes, observing the tensions between indie filmmakers and their investors: "People with spare money to invest in film are liable to have issues about their wealth, their parents; whereas independent filmmakers are apt to be political, angry, and scornful of the rich."
