Jul 10, 2025
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Cisco Pike (Bill Norton, 1971)
“She had a face that was so striking you had the choice of whether to call her beautiful or ugly. I happened to love the way she looked, and I was impressed by all the references she kept dropping to literature and politics. She talked constantly and she had the most tiresome voice I’d ever heard – it was incredible to me that one woman’s voice could convey so much tedium … We all loved Viva; we’d never seen anything like her, and from then on, it was just taken for granted that she’d be in whatever movie we did. She was funny, stylish and photogenic and she gave great interviews … And if a good way to get around the censors was to confuse them, then Viva was perfect for the times, because when she took her clothes off, there was always the question of whether her bony body was a turn-on or -off – the “prurience” was really in question there.”
/ Andy Warhol reminiscing about his leading lady Viva in his 1980 memoirs POPism: The Warhol Sixties /
Born on this day 86 years ago: superbly deadpan, often naked Warhol Superstar and long-term denizen of New York’s bohemian Chelsea Hotel (she now resides in Palm Springs) - Viva (née Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann, 23 August 1938)! I vividly recall watching her in Warhol’s perverse 1968 underground Western Lonesome Cowboys (pictured) at The Scala Cinema in the early nineties. (At the beginning, the theatre was full. By the bitter end, there was only a hardcore of us left!). Outside of Warhol’s films, Viva impressed me as the heavily pregnant groupie Kris Kristofferson picks up in Cisco Pike (1972) and I particularly treasure Viva’s cameo appearance in 1982 cult oddity Forbidden Zone, in which she delivers with peerless nonchalance the killer line, “See you guys later – I need to change a Tampax.”
Kris Kristofferson and Karen Black in a promo photo for "Cisco Pike" (1972)
Cisco Pike, Bill L. Norton
Cisco Pike (1972) Bill L. Norton
July 3rd 2024
Videodrome :: Cisco Pike And The Gargoyles (1972)
For director Bill L. Norton, 1972 was a big year. The UCLA graduate had two movies coming out: Cisco Pike, a counterculture drama starring Kris Kristofferson as a down-on-his-luck musician and ex-con being forced by corrupt cop Gene Hackman to sell a garage full of weed in one weekend … along with the release of his low-budget made-for-tv movie, Gargoyles. As one might guess, these two films could not be more different from one another.
Cisco Pike, 1972