Few great playwrights are as inextricably bound to film as Sam Shepard. Personally, he has possessed a “star” quality since his earliest days as a would-be actor, musician, writer, and amateur playwright. Handsome enough to be a male model, Shepard's face had an even stronger impact on his public than his talent as a writer. It seems that he first wrote plays almost as a compensation for his not being a top-notch musician. As a boy he imagined himself as a film star, often Gary Cooper, and would act out scenes from favorite films as he did his chores, often to the astonishment of onlookers. Almost incidentally he was commissioned by Antonioni to write the screenplay for the Italian director's Zabriskie Point (1970) a few years after Antonioni had gained international recognition with his acclaimed movie, Blow-Up (1966). Antonioni was drawn to Shepard for his alienated but dangerously appealing manner, the very American nasal twang of his southwestern accent, and his irreverent and inchoate early plays, often performed in coffee houses or totally noncommercial venues. Somehow he perceived that Shepard stood for all disenchanted young Americans who could capture the loathing for contemporary capitalistic decadence while at the same time projecting oldfashioned, anarchistic longing for the carefree American individual of an earlier century. Shepard's first encounter with a movie production was something of a debacle. Although the playwright has claimed authorship of the Zabriskie Point screenplay, he abandoned the project before the movie was ever completed and Antonioni chose Fred Gardner to rewrite most of the script. Few of Shepard's lines of dialogue or artistic imaginings remain in the completed work. Yet Zabriskie Point had a traceable influence on Shepard's Operation Sidewinder (1970), which he completed after his resignation from the Antonioni film. In fact many of Shepard's best stage plays have been enriched by his primarily negative reaction to contact with mainline Hollywood films.