Bill L. Norton also wrote the screenplay (with some uncredited script doctoring by Robert Towne) for his directorial debut, 'Cisco Pike', the story of a washed-up rock musician and convicted pot dealer who, after a stint in prison, is trying to break back into the music business and avoid another spell behind bars. Originally slated for the lead role, Cisco Pike, was John Cassavetes stalwart Seymour Cassel ('Shadows'; 'Faces') but Cassel dropped out before principle photography started to star in 'Minnie & Moscowitz' (1971). His last minute replacement was country-folk singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson in his first starring role in the movies (he had a bit part in Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie). Kristofferson also wrote and sang the music for the film. Starring opposite Kristofferson is Gene Hackman—fresh from his Oscar-winning turn as "Popeye Doyle" in William Friedkin's 'The French Connection' (1971). Here Hackman plays a cop of an entirely different stripe: crooked, desperate police sergeant Leo Holland, who blackmails Pike into selling 100 kilos of pot over a weekend in order to raise a quick $10,000. The other three notables are: Karen Black as Sue, Pike's stereotypical sexy-but-dumb-and-dependent hippie-chick girlfriend; Harry Dean Stanton as Jesse Dupre, Pike's heroin-addicted friend and former band member (who eventually suffers a fatal overdose); and Andy Warhol "superstar" Viva (real name: Janet Hoffman) providing some quirky color as Merna, a slow-talking denizen of the counterculture. Norton's storyline concerning a man struggling to break free of his past—a tried and true film noir staple—is grafted onto a somber meditation on the transmogrification of Sixties idealism into Seventies cynicism and despair. Shot on location in the Los Angeles area by veteran TV cinematographer Vilis Lapenieks (production design by Norton's wife, Rosanna White), 'Cisco Pike' is decidedly gritty-looking and downbeat, also surprisingly sympathetic toward Hackman's corrupt cop, who is facing dismissal from the force for medical reasons just shy of the twenty year's service he needs to qualify for a pension. In the end, 'Cisco Pike' posits the grim notion that, when all is said and done, "the System" crushes both its opponents and its adherents with equal indifference. Despite fine performances by Kristofferson and Hackman, 'Cisco Pike' did poor box office, so poor that Bill L. Norton decided to stick with television work thereafter. DVD (2006).
Review of Cisco Pike
