(picture not mine)
“He’s 20 and he hates.”
—Sally Dennison, assistant to director Michelangelo Antonioni, on why Frechette would be a good actor
I apologize in advance for the lack of information. Though Mark Frechette was an actor, there’s not a whole lot for me to work with. I will make do with what I have, however. The main thing to bear in mind is that this young actor had a short, turbulent life and died under suspicious circumstances. A lesser-known member of the “27 Club”, Frechette struggled with mental illness and anger management. Like James Dean, he only made three movies– two in Europe, and one in North America –but his troubled legacy lives on.
Mark Ernest Frechette was born on December 4th, 1947 (Sagittarius) in Boston, Massachusetts to a French-Canadian father and Irish-American mother. He dropped out of high school and was arrested several times for angry, violent outbursts. He was also hospitalized twice due to mental illness, most likely rage-related. Frechette arrived in Boston from New York in 1966 with his former wife and child. He panhandled around Harvard Square before becoming a carpenter in Roxbury. A talent scout saw Frechette, scream and throw a flowerpot at a woman on the street. Instead of running away, the scout decided to make an actor out of him.
(Personally, I think the reason why the scout was drawn to Mark Frechette is that he was conventionally attractive. If he was a scraggly, older man, he’d been written off as a creep.)
He made his film debut in Michelangelo Antonioni’s controversial Zabriskie Point (1970). The film tells the story of a radical college student (Mark Frechette) who steals a plane and meets a secretary (Daria Halprin) in Death Valley, California, where they make love at Zabriskie Point, one of America’s lowest elevation points. The film also featured brief appearances by famous actors Rod Taylor and Harrison Ford.
According to one source:
“As Antonioni toured the U.S., experiencing cultural clash firsthand and shooting background footage, Antonioni immediately cast Frechette, a non-actor, in the movie’s lead role: a college student, wrongfully hunted for the murder of a policeman during a campus uprising.”
Throughout the filming, Frechette and the director disagreed bitterly about the script. Mark wanted the movie to depict the 1968 student revolt, while Antonioni envisioned an art film. Antonioni also had a frugal, “Italian” approach to filmmaking, and didn’t want to overspend and cheapen his art into what he considered “American excess.” When it was released, Zabriskie Point was panned by critics. However, several years later, it achieved some cult status, being praised for its direction, cinematography, and use of music. Antonioni was also praised by acclaimed directors Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese.
In an interview with Dick Cavett, (on YouTube), Mark Frechette tells Dick not to waste his money and that the movie wasn’t that good. This must have enraged Antonioni, who had been feuding with Frechette for a while now. However, the co-star Daria Halprin also wasn’t impressed with the end result.
“I’d never had any formal acting training, as you can tell immediately when you watch Zabriskie Point,” she said, “It’s unfortunate that it wasn’t a silent film. I would have been better off.”
Mark Frechette also had an affair with Daria Halprin. Involved in the counterculture movement, the couple joined “guru” Mel Lyman’s Fort Hill Community. However, Halprin refused to be as involved as Frechette was in the Community– causing their relationship to end.
I read about the Fort Hill Community, and it was…interesting, to say the least (and to put it respectfully). It was a cult. Also known as the Lyman Family, I found this about it:
“The Lyman Family, also known as The Fort Hill Community, centered in a few houses in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury, then a poor neighborhood of Boston. The Fort Hill Community, to observers in the mid-to-late Sixties, combined some of the outward forms of an urban hippie commune with a neo-trancedendalist, socio-spiritual structure centered on Lyman, the friends he had attracted and the large body of his music and writings….
Although Lyman and the Family shared some attributes with the hippies – prior experimenting with LSD and marijuana and Lyman’s cosmic millennialism– they were not actually hippies; “in fact, the ethos of the community was virulently anti-hippie. Female members dressed and behaved conservatively and male members wore their hair relatively short by the standards of the era.” According to both Felton and Kindman, Lyman discouraged sexual activity and at least once ordered a pregnant member to get an abortion. Couples were discouraged from spending private time together. Women were expected to be obedient and serve in domestic capacities only, while men were expected to dominate and control them.”
Yikes. Personally, I’m glad Daria Halprin got out of there when she did. After Zabriskie Point, Halprin made one more movie, The Jerusalem File, then married actor Dennis Hopper and moved to Taos, New Mexico.
One year later, she left Hopper and returned to her hometown, San Francisco, California.
“I was in a lot of trouble, very close to burnout,” she said, “I just got through by the skin of my teeth. It took me a long time to find my way again. I began to work on myself. Out of that I came to a new interest in movement therapy and education. My professional interest in those fields came out of my commitment to save myself.”
She became a creative-arts therapist and founded the Tamalpa Institute Dancer’s Workshop in Marin County with her mother, Anna, a professional dancer. Years later, she was still recognized for Zabriskie Point.
“There was a time when I felt quite embarrassed about it, but at my age it becomes enjoyable.”
In Italy and Yugoslavia, Frechette acted in two more films, Many Wars Ago (Uomini Contro, 1970) and The Big Black Sow (La Grande Scrofa Nera, 1971). He donated his $60,000 earnings to the Fort Hill Community. In 1973, he was arrested for robbing a bank with a few friends (from the Community), and received a short sentence.
Mark Frechette died at the young age of 27 in a freak accident while lifting weights. According to “The Sorry Life & Death of Mark Frechette” by Dave O’Brian:
“He was the apparent victim of a bizarre accident in a recreation room at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk, where Frechette had been serving a 6 to 15-year sentence for his participation in a 1973 Boston bank robbery.”
Frechette’s body was discovered by a fellow inmate early on the morning of September 27th, 1975, pinned beneath a 150-pound set of weights, the bar resting on his throat. An autopsy revealed he died of asphyxiation and the official explanation was that the weights slipped from his hands while he was trying to bench press them. He died instantly. The county DA’s office termed the circumstances ‘a little strange,’ especially since the bar didn’t leave any markings on Frechette’s neck. However, Frechette’s lawyer, Harvey Silverglate, dismissed foul play, claiming that “the handsome, bright and sensitive young man was well liked by other inmates, had only relatively minor hassles with guards at the medium security institution and was too strong to have been subdued without leaving some sign of a struggle.”
In the weeks before his death, Frechette’s friends reported that he was deeply depressed. He hadn’t eaten in a while and lost a considerable amount of weight. They traced this depression back to August 29th, 1975, the second anniversary of his friend’s death. (in the same bank robbery that landed him prison) A court psychiatrist warned that Frechette might become ‘increasingly depressed’ in an institutional setting, but nobody took this seriously. No one suggested suicide, but Harvey Silverglate admitted that Frechette was “reckless” to lift weights in his weakened state.
While Mark Frechette sounded like an unpleasant person, I believe that he should have gotten help for his anger issues. I don’t think acting or fame helps with mental illness, either; it makes one more self-conscious and destructive.
We don’t realize how hurt people are until it’s too late.
Curious History Girl 