Delaney & Bonnie & Friends perform “You Got To Believe" from the 1971 Vanishing Point soundtrack.
The Turner Classic Movies network broadcasts Richard C. Sarafian’s 1971 “road movie” Vanishing Point on Saturday, May 19 at 10:30 p.m.
Sarafian wanted to use material from Delaney & Bonnie’s acoustic album Motel Shot as the soundtrack for his 1971 film, Vanishing Point, but “Lionel Newman, head of 20th Century Fox’s music department at the time, denied Sarafian’s request because the studio did not want to spend a substantial amount of money obtaining rights to the tracks,” according to Wikipedia. The director then suggested that Lionel’s nephew, musician Randy Newman, would be a good candidate to score the film, but Fox nixed that request as well. Sarafian then did the next best thing and created his own original soundtrack with help from various musicians, including Delaney & Bonnie, who supplied a song “You Got to Believe” and appear in a scene as a “Christian” band performing the song. Kim Carnes made her recording debut on the soundtrack, performing “Nobody Knows” as Kim & Dave (with her husband David Ellingson) and also wrote a tune, “Sing Out for Jesus,” that was sung by Big Mama Thornton.
Vanishing Point, shot in the deserts of the American Southwest, is hand’s down one of the most unusual movies ever made with Hollywood money. Among the film’s stars is a car – a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T, chosen by Fox studio executive Richard Zanuck to do Chrysler a favour for their long-time practice of providing 20th Century Fox with cars on a rental basis for only a dollar a day. Many of the other cars featured in the film are also Chrysler products,” (Wikipedia).
Cuban post-modernist writer-in-exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote the screenplay under his cinematic pseudonym Guillermo Cain. Sarafian wanted Gene Hackman as Kowalski (a pill-addicted driver for hire who transports the car from Colorado to California), but Zanuck insisted on casting unknown actor Barry Newman to play the lead. Cleavon Little plays a blind DJ "Super Soul," Hollywood veteran Dean Jagger (who first started acting in the 1920s during the silent era) plays Prospector and Severn Darden plays the Rev. J. ‘Jessie’ Hovah (who is accompanied by a band made up of Delaney Bramlett, Bonnie Bramlett, their infant daughter Bekka Bramlett, Rita Coolidge, Patrice Holloway and David Gates on piano). Some versions of the film include Charlotte Rampling as a hitchhiker.
