Interview by Paul Salfen
New York City, 1980s. A struggling, deadbeat musician named Julius (Kevin J. O’Connor) has fallen on hard times. With no guitar, band or paying gigs, he cooks up a get-rich-quick scheme – to find the legendary, yet elusive guitar-maker Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin). Considered one of the greatest luthiers in the business, Silk’s disappearance from the scene has only made his work more coveted by musicians and executives looking to make a buck off his name. Julius agrees to track the man down and sets out on the road. Meant to be a simple journey upstate, the erstwhile rocker stumbles down a long, winding road full of dead-ends and wrong turns towards an eventual revelatory conclusion in the Canadian wilderness. One of the great cult classics of the 1980s and starring character actors Kevin J O’Conner and Harris Yulin, as well as the legendary actress Bulle Ogier, the supporting cast features real-life music legends Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Joe Strummer, Dr. John, David Johansen and Arto Lindsay. “A wry, laid-back Heart of Darkness” (Chicago Reader), CANDY MOUNTAIN combines the keen eye of the legendary Frank with novelist/screenwriter Wurlitzer’s mythic American prose to produce the quintessential road movie.
Called “Frank’s ultimate work” by J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, top critics feted the now cult classic with Desson Thomas of The Washington Post saying, “The big surprise in Candy Mountain is how much fun it is. Co-directors Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer take the dated road movie off its bricks, gussy it up and keep it chugging along. And you get sweeter on ‘Candy’ with every passing mile” and Caryn James of The New York Times wrote, “’Candy Mountain… seems to be a small, quirky film, but it easily assumes the weight, ambition and success that many larger films aim for and miss.”
This year the art world will also be celebrating Frank, the Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker who broke new ground with his candid, poignant images of American life in the mid-20th century. Among the events and exhibitions to be held, celebrating his radical approach to image making that forever changed the course of photography and film are “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue,” the first-ever solo exhibition of his work to be presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York which will begin in September 2024.
