No. 1
She was born August 20, 1961, in Manhattan. She died August 14, 2020, in Palmdale, California. She was 4’10” according to some sources, 5’2” according to others. Her eyes have been described as dark brown, and they do look it in certain roles, certain lights, but elsewhere they look light green-grey-blue-brown. She had a prominent scar on the bridge of her nose and another on her right cheekbone. She said she got them from “falling down”.1 In 1985, she married camera-operator Bobby Guthrie, who is said to have put out the fire in Michael Jackson’s hair during the 1984 filming of a Pepsi commercial – though I’ve also seen the rescue attributed to Jackson’s brothers. She raised three sons, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident in 2018. Her mother worked as a cleaning woman at the World Trade Center. Her father left when she was two. Altogether she appeared in 11 films, two television series, and one made-for-television movie, she is best known for her roles in Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, and Harmony Korine’s Gummo. Out of the Blue was her only starring role.
No. 2
Along For the Ride (Nick Ebeling, 2016)
It’s her last appearance on film: a documentary by Nick Ebeling about actor, visual artist, and filmmaker Dennis Hopper (1936 – 2010), co-produced by Satya de la Manitou, Hopper’s friend and assistant, who narrates his perspective on Hopper’s turbulent life and career. Manz sits across from de la Manitou in her kitchen, at a Formica-topped, chrome-legged table. Next to her is a metal bread box on an antique stool and behind her is a chrome diner-style napkin holder, a glass jar of fountain straws, and an oversized mug that says ‘Mom’s Kitchen’. She’s wearing blue jeans and a loose cotton top with a dainty floral print. Her dark hair is cut in a shoulder-length shag. She has one leg tucked beneath her on her chair and she’s leaning forward with her arms – tanned, veined, muscular – resting on the table.
De la Manitou and Manz’s conversation is disappointingly brief, shallow – it lasts only a few minutes, and is mostly about working with Hopper. She says, I never really knew who Sid Vicious was. Or Johnny Rotten for that matter. But Elvis, I knew Elvis. The camera cuts to framed photographs of young Manz on set – outtakes from her early films – hung on the walls of her home. She hands de la Manitou stills from Out of the Blue. Raymond Burr, he played my shrink. He told me he owned an island in Fiji, I could go down there anytime I want. But I never did. In a polaroid from that time, Manz – in a black vest, white shirt, black bowtie, red lipstick, and wavy, shoulder-length hair – looks like an elegant underage croupier. She’s arm-in-arm with Hopper. That’s Cannes Film Festival, she says.
No. 3
She left Manhattan for California in the late seventies to pursue her acting career. She lived with a chaperone – a former schoolteacher – until she turned 18 and was free to be on her own. By the time she married Guthrie in 1985, she’d acted in seven films and had three television gigs, but roles were becoming scarce. “There was a whole bunch of new young actors out there, and I was kind of getting lost in the shuffle,” she said in 1997. “So I laid back and had three kids. Now I enjoy just staying home and cooking soup.”2 She and Guthrie left Los Angeles for Lake Hughes, a small community two hours north, where Guthrie got a job as a part-time caretaker on a peach orchard. She was 23 or 24 years old; Guthrie was 20 years her senior. In 1994, when her sons were eight, six, and three, she told People: “It’s wonderful up here, but I do want to go back to work. Give me something to do. I’d like to get back. Be on the set. Be Linda Manz again.”3 As recently as 2011, she didn’t have a phone: she’d pick up messages at the local gas station or borrow a neighbour’s landline to speak to reporters.
No. 4
Buddy Boy (Mark Hanlon, 1999)
She’s in the paper goods aisle of a grocery store, dressed in a white car coat, knee-length skirt, flip flops. She’s holding a black handbag and her hair is cut in a sixties-style fringed bob. She’s speaking to a child she may or may not have abducted but we can’t hear what she’s saying. She’s nervous, suspicious. I’ve been watching the film for more than an hour, waiting for her to appear. When she turns toward the camera, which pulls in on her face – worried, tired, a little blank, a little slack, age 37 or 38, minimally made-up – I have a rush of feeling, like I’ve just spotted a friend in a crowd. She hustles the child past the register, out the door, across a nighttime parking lot, and into the backseat of a truck where a man is waiting at the wheel. Later she’s in the window of a brightly lit apartment, enjoying herself at a party. Her role in the film is uncredited.
No. 5
Harmony Korine interviewed by Dantek Walczak, Index Magazine (1997)
Walczak: You cast Linda Manz in Gummo, and she hadn’t appeared in a film in a long time, although people certainly remember her for Days of Heaven and Out of the Blue.
Korine: I had always admired her. There was this sense about her that I liked — it wasn’t even acting. It was like the way I felt about Buster Keaton when I first saw him. There was a kind of poetry about her, a glow. They both burnt off the screen. She had married an orchard farmer in Northern California, and had three boys. She had to return my calls from a Texaco station.
Walczak: And what was it like working with her?
Korine: It was what I knew it would be. She was very elf-like. Always dancing around. She would spin on her belly.
No. 6
Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997)
We hear her off-screen – Solomon, are you down there? – and then she’s descending the basement steps quickly in heeled sandals. She crosses the room, lays hands on her son (Jacob Reynolds). What are you doing, lifting weights? You’re gonna stunt your growth with those things. You’re gonna get peg-leg shoulders and pinched neck nerves. Her voice is tough, loud. She’s wearing a hot pink terrycloth top, matching short shorts, and her skin looks like she’s spent a lot of time in the sun. Her hair is chin-length, reddish blonde, stiffly wavy. Her legs are skinny, her chest and belly fuller, slightly thrust forward, puffed-up. Her son ignores her, continuing his exercises with what are in fact taped-up bundles of silverware, but she continues. It’s not good to lift while you’re growing. I can see your shoulder popping out. Look at the way it raises and gets smaller, raises and gets smaller – she imitates him, lifting and dropping her shoulders, too – You’re gonna pop out a joint. That’s not healthy. Look at it. It’s gonna pop. She shuts off the stereo, pulls a pair of men’s black patent leather shoes from a pile of junk at one end of the room. Your dad’s old taps. Holds them out, dusts them lightly with one hand. He used to be good. Said he was blessed with the gift of tap. She’s cradling the shoes now, looking at them wistfully. Took up tapping when he got his bald spot. He wanted to get transplants, but I thought that was a bit drastic. Told him, if he wanted to, he should take up tap. He said if Marlene Dietrich could see him dance, she would fall in love. What do you want with Marlene Dietrich? She had a bottom rib removed so she’d have more of an hourglass figure! Now she’s standing next to Solomon in front of the mirrored wall, twisting her middle, posturing. Don’t you know, stars are flawed? She starts to tap dance quickly, her tiny legs and feet shuffling in the big, loose shoes. She taps up behind Solomon, says, Will you smile? Brings her hands up to his mouth, tickles his waist. Come on, I want a smile. Tuck in that tummy. One smile. Come on, I’m gonna tickle you ‘til you smile. Flatten that tummy. Hold your shoulders back. Grabs him in a hug, brings her face up close to his. You miss your dad? I do. Slaps his stomach. Come on, hold that tummy in. Come on, can you smile for me, please? She leans over another pile of junk and when she stands up again she’s holding a gun. She puts it against the back of her son’s head while he continues to lift, says in a campy wise guy voice, Hey, you son of a bitch, if you don’t smile I’m gonna kill you! Okay? I’ve killed before and I’ll kill again. I will pick up your brains all over the floor. You came outta my womb and I’ll stick ya right back in my womb. If you don’t smile, I’m going to kill you! She mimes shooting; the gun clicks. She turns away and starts to tap again, letting loose, swinging her arms, feeling it. Yeah! Party! Break dance! she whispers to her reflection; then she’s thrusting her face forward, rotating her head on her neck like a chicken, strutting, breathing hard through her nostrils, eyes wild and fixed on the mirror.
No. 7
In 2014, she told a reporter about teaching her then three-year-old granddaughter how to tap dance, just as she’d been taught as a child in New York: “We were tapping all over the place yesterday!”4 Though she was working in the seventies, eighties and nineties, Manz seems like a performer from an older era, a different world: a vaudevillian actor, a tomboy urchin. She created a non-conforming portrait of girlhood and womanhood which feels increasingly rare and valuable.
No. 8
The Game (David Fincher, 1997)
Michael Douglas knocks on the door of a dilapidated apartment building after dark. She answers in a robe and floral housedress, says, Who are you? and drags on a cigarette. Her face is freckled, sun-worn, her hair wavy and set. She’s like a character from a noir: the tough, jaded, suspicious landlady saying, Whaddya want?
Christine, is she here? Douglas asks. She’s sleepin’, Manz says, blowing smoke, making no move to let him in. Later, when Douglas walks James Rebhorn into a green-lit cafeteria at gunpoint, Manz is sitting at a table in a washed denim jacket, turquoise t-shirt, little gold earrings. She looks up, watches them go by. She’s not frightened or surprised or upset.
No. 9
After ‘discovering’ her for Days of Heaven, casting agent Barbara Claman became Manz’s manager. I don’t know how long she represented her, or whether Manz worked with anyone else prior to her screen hiatus after 1985, but comments by Claman in Time and People profiles in the late seventies indicate she might not have been the best person for the job.
“Physically and emotionally, she’s about 13,” Claman said, predicting a “stormy” future for her young client (Manz was 17 at the time).5 Claman also said, “I suspect that Linda wouldn’t feel bad if no more acting jobs come up.”6 In one of those same profiles, Manz was quoted as saying, “Acting’s in my blood. I hope it lasts forever.”7
When asked by The Village Voice in 2011 about her mid-eighties disappearance from the screen, the reporter refers to her “early retirement”, and I’ve seen it phrased similarly in most later profiles of Manz. “I kinda got lost in the shuffle of being in the movies because I didn’t have an agent at the time and things were slow and… I dunno,” Manz responds. “Retirement” implies a voluntary action. It seems more accurate to say she’d been dropped by her agent, she didn’t work particularly well in run-of-the-mill movies, and there were too few filmmakers who recognised or wanted to utilise what she had to offer.
Claman reportedly tried to find a voice coach to help Manz lose her strong, distinctive New York accent, with the idea it would make her a more versatile (and hirable) actor. I suspect Manz’s inability (or unwillingness) to do so significantly impacted her career. In 1994, Claman said, as if Manz were already dead: “She never went to classes, never studied. She was wonderful at being. But there weren’t a lot of jobs open for just being.”8
No. 10
Faerie Tale Theatre: “The Snow Queen” (TV Episode, 1985)
The bland heroine, Gerda – played by Melissa Gilbert, on the heels of her nine-year stint as Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie – walks through a snowy forest, searching for her friend. She sits on what she thinks is a rock, but it’s actually Manz, crouched and camouflaged in animal skins. Manz – ‘Robber Girl’ in the credits – jumps up, flashes a knife, says, Don’t move! Or I’ll fricassee your gizzards and feed you to the wolves! When Gilbert says, You shouldn’t pretend you’re something you’re not, Manz thrusts the knife and shouts, ‘Fraidy cats like you give girls a bad name! Forest is no place for sugar and spice and everything nice! Her face is dirty, her hair tangled and wild under a fur hat. She’s a foot shorter than the prim girl in her pilgrim dress. She steals the girl’s shawl. She threatens to slit the girl’s throat. But when the girl starts to cry, she softens, saying, You’ll only shrink your leathers. When the girl observes she doesn’t have any leathers, Manz drapes her in a pelt of her own. She takes the girl back to her camp and feeds her pork and brown bread for dinner. You’re a robber? Gilbert asks. A girl’s got to make a living somehow, Manz says.
No. 11
Longshot (E.W. Swackhamer, 1981)
She’s at a foosball table in a large arcade with a mullet haircut, dressed in denim pinned with badges, a long white scarf around her neck, chewing gum. I’m the Max you’re looking for, she says to Leif Garrett. I don’t give performances. You want a game? I’ll give you a game, she says. At a takeout window she hops up to the counter, orders Three corndogs, double fries, and a large coke. At home, she’s pulling on her shoes while her mother answers the phone – Oh, Bill! – and twirls her hair. Well, I’m going, Manz says, gets no response, amps it up: We’re gonna win the tournament. Then we’re gonna go out and park. We’re really gonna steam up the windows. I’ll probably be home around dawn. Her mother waves her off: Oh, that’s fine Maxine, have a good time!
Garrett says, The only person she ever had a crush on was Johnny Rotten. Manz comes home to an empty house and cries in the dark. We hear her but we can’t see her face.
In a pink striped shirt, pulling on one tight white leather glove to play; in a pink fringed sleeveless top, bumping hips with Ralph Seymour when she wins; in a long pink t-shirt and no bottoms, jumping into the tub in the hotel suite when Seymour won’t give up the bathroom; in pink belted satin overalls at breakfast, piling caviar on a piece of toast and taking a huge bite because she thinks they’re little berries; dressed for the party in a tuxedo with a burgundy jacket, frilled shirt, black bowtie, and pink carnation, her hair slicked back. Oh Max, you look good, Garrett says. No kiddin, she says. At a table in a ballroom, alone, in her tuxedo, in a pink flood of light. She gets up and leaves.
To a half-clad Garrett: You don’t give a rat’s ass about me. Nobody does. You’re just like everybody else. Her face in the window of a dark bus at night, leaving – then back in the casino the next day in her tuxedo, the bowtie and carnation gone, the shirt unbuttoned at the neck. She shrugs, smiles, cocks her head. Okay, so I’m a jerk. Let’s go.
No. 12
On Amazon, the cover image for the streaming version of Longshot is titled Long Shot Kids instead. Leif Garrett is freakishly orange, his chest bare beneath an open white blazer (nothing like what he wears in the movie). The girl at the bottom of the image – long-haired, full-lipped, conventionally beautiful – is definitely not Linda Manz, though her name is printed there, next to the girl’s face.
No. 13
Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)
She’s wearing full clown makeup and holding a little stuffed bear, making it dance, bouncing around, singing Elvis’s ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’ in the cab of a big rig next to her father (Dennis Hopper), trying to make him laugh. Am I as sexy as Elvis? he asks. Eh! You could be, she says, kisses him lightly on the mouth. Says to him, laughing, Am I that bad that you gotta drink? just before they plow into a school bus full of kids. She wakes, sweaty, in her bedroom in the middle of the night, then she’s sitting in the wrecked, vine-covered big rig outside, talking into its CB radio: Hello, this is Gorgeous. Anybody out there read me? She walks along a bleak highway in pale blue jeans and a matching jacket with Elvis arching in cursive across the shoulders and a guitar painted on the back. She turns around, lifts her hand to hitch a ride, flips off the cars that pass without stopping.
At the diner where her mother (Sharon Farrell) works, they sit down to breakfast together. Wait ‘til you meet your dad – again, her mother says. I forgot what he looks like, Manz says. Who do I look more like? she asks. Him, sorta, her mother says – Tough and sexy in a real kind of nice way, you know? Manz says, I’m not hungry, suddenly dropping her fork.
In her bedroom, in underwear and black knee-high socks, she smokes a joint, tattoos her hand with needle and ink, grips a drumstick between her teeth, sets fire to an album cover, drops it flaming in front of a framed photo of her parents, plays drums, makes screeching feedback sounds with a guitar and amp.
Visiting her father in prison, she’s dressed like her mother: fitted top, high-waisted skirt, strappy sandals, hair held back by barrettes – a conspicuously feminine costume compared to her denim uniform. Hopper puts his palms against the glass barrier; Manz and Farrell press their hands to his on the other side. Manz looks at him a long, silent beat – curious, excited, guarded – then all three pick up the phones to talk through the glass. Smiling, vulnerable, eager, Manz says: I miss you, Flash. Her eyes are wide and bright as they take him in. She searches his face while he speaks to her, her mouth moving, twitching a little, like she wants to say something, like she’s trying to work out an answer to a problem. God, please forgive me, Cebe, Hopper says. I want you to come home now, Manz says, sounding like a parent but also like a child demanding a toy.
Walking down an alley, carrying books, kicking a metal trash can, picking up a loose piece of thin lumber and tossing it like a spear, lifting the leaves of a shrub and letting them drop, saying, Pretty. But not edible. She’s playing pinball at a bowling alley when her father’s friend comes up, touches her face, says, Hey, that’s a nice scar you got, where’d you get that scar? Dad, she says. She’s in the back of a pickup truck on a highway, she’s standing on an overpass in a large city, she’s walking along a city sidewalk between a dwarf woman on crutches and a man in a cape and bedazzled bellbottoms singing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’. She’s got her legs wrapped around a lightpole, leaning against a temporary construction wall, then bending forward to let someone pass: he rubs roughly against her as he goes. Hops into a cab, says, Yeah, why not? when the driver asks if she wants to go somewhere and get high. At a flophouse, she smokes what the hulking cabbie gives her, ignores the aggressive woman in the room sucking a lollipop with her crotch out, curls up on the bed and puts her thumb in her mouth. When the cabbie starts touching her, she breaks a vase on his head, runs.
At her father’s coming home party, her hair is curled and she’s sitting on his lap in a frilly blouse, a laced-up frock, a fluffy white cardigan. Later she’s singing ‘Teddy Bear’ – loudly, off-key – between her parents in a convertible, an arm around each of their necks, her hands all over them, rubbing popcorn into their faces, mussing their hair. At the ice cream parlour, an off-screen female voice: Did you hear Cebe’s dad’s out of jail? And my dad’s gonna get him for killing my little brother? Manz turns her head, says, What the fuck you talking about? She goes to the girl, grabs her by the jacket, says, I never liked your face – I should rearrange it for you, then smears a blue ice cream cone onto it. She’s leaning against a chain link fence in a brick-red sweatshirt – smoking, agitated, – then she’s striding across the school’s football field, cutting through the marching band ranks, cigarette in her mouth, knocking a cheerleader to the ground without losing her stride, smiling. There’s something you’re not telling me, Cindy, her psychiatrist says. What is it? Her defiant, angry, self-contained face.
In her bedroom, she’s lighting a cigarette, painting her lips, greasing her hair back with goopy green pomade. Hopper, downstairs, drunk, yells to his friend, You should fuck her, man! Her hands stop moving a moment. She hears them coming upstairs, picks up a chair, faces the door with it in a lion tamer’s pose. Motherfuckers, come in and get me, I’m ready for you! She slaps Hopper when he grabs her, says, I hate fuckin men. Let go, goddammit! She’s on the edge of her bed, he’s on the floor in front of her. She slaps him, then slaps him again. Why don’t you let go when I say so, huh? You make me so fuckin pissed. I hate you, I hate you. Asshole. I hate men. Yeah, Hopper mumbles. Huhhhm, she grunts, mocking him. Slaps him again. Get outta here. Now. Her mother kneels in front of her, towelling the grease from her hair, and Manz grips her by the collar of her nightgown, shakes her, says, I hate fuckin men, I hate em! You fuckin – she pounds her fists on her mother’s shoulders, shakes her – I hate em, I hate em! Get the fuck out of my room. Go. Go! Go! Then she’s alone, a grey beret on her mussed hair, her lip paint smudged, her face tragic like a mime’s, a silent film star’s, looking up at the photos of Elvis on her walls, breathing heavily. She puts her thumb in her mouth.
Hopper’s crouched at her bedside. She’s lying on her back, her nightgown wadded above her hips. She sits up, pulls her knees to her chest. She’s got long white socks on. She lights a joint, says, Want a hit? Feeds it to him. What are you lookin’ at? she says, dragging, confident. His face is level with her crotch. She raises her eyebrows, says, again, What are you lookin’ at? Come here. She grabs his hair, drags his head between her legs, says, Take a good look. Drags again, puts the joint down, pulls a pair of panties from behind her. You remember, don’t you? he says. You’re fuckin-a right I remember. Do you remember, Daddy? She stuffs the panties in his mouth and slaps him, grabs his hair again and pulls him close. Come here. Take a good smell.
She switches on a lamp. She’s in her father’s leather biker jacket and hat again and she’s run a large safety pin through her cheek, fastened it inside her mouth. In the cab of her father’s truck, she lights a fuse. What is that? her mother shrieks. Whatever the fuck you want it to be, she says in a sad, tired voice, then, It’s a fuse! and laughs. It’s a fuse, she says again, but her voice this time is flat, empty, dead.
No. 14
Interview with Rebecca Bengal, criterion.com (2020)
RB: “How much of Cebe was you?”
LM: “Probably 100 percent.”
RB: “How so? Would you have described yourself as punk?”
LM: “Not at all, I was into disco!”
RB: “But Cebe’s whole mantra is ‘Disco sucks’!”
LM: “Hahahaha!”
RB: “So maybe you were 99 percent Cebe?”
LM: “Hahahaha!”
RB: “’Cause Cebe was into Elvis, Johnny Rotten . . .”
LM: …“[It was] attitude…Just strong-willed, strong emotion.”
No. 15
Dorothy: “Lies and Whispers” (TV Episode, 1979)
She sits cross-legged at a school desk in a sailor-collared uniform and smart black knee-high socks. The other girls have long, fluffy, elaborately styled hair, but Manz’s is bobbed, sleek, neatly pinned from her face. Her shoulders are spread, casual. One hand rests on the desk, the other is propped on the back of her chair: a defiant and disobedient pose, typically masculine. She gets into it with the snobby blonde behind her. Suck eggs! I’m talkin’ to you, Goldilocks! Later she bursts into a room looking like a 12-year-old boy in a green ball cap, faded jeans, and mock neck sports tee, waving a pennant. Okay, what’s the take? she says to her classmates. Didn’t I tell ya before this thing was over we’d really clean up? She pops an Oreo into her mouth and laughs.
No. 16
Orphan Train (TV Movie, William Graham, 1979)
Night. Manz is backlit in an upper window, framed by sheer curtains, an ornate ironwork balcony. She’s in a sleeveless white undergarment and her hair falls straight and plain to her shoulders. How many times do I have to tell you to get away from that window? Sally’s got a customer up there, snaps the madam in a ruffled red dress. When Manz sneaks a hand through a trap door to snag the wallet from a distracted john’s discarded trousers, the madam smooths things over by saying, Ain’t she sweet? You’d be her first apology. Well, says the sweaty john. Please no, Manz says. Her look is wide-eyed, a little frozen. I expect her – not this character necessarily, but Manz – to fight back, to yell, to run, but instead she says, again, Please. The lights go out. In the morning she escapes the brothel through a back door and sprints barefoot down the city street in her slip. Away from here? That’d be wonderful, thank you, she says to the newsboy who offers to help. On the orphan train, to the woman enabling her escape: Could I sit with you ‘til I get sleepy? My mother had pretty hair like yours. A deep sadness in her voice – low, mournful, resigned. She used to brush it every night.
No. 17
She was raised by her mother – Sophie E. Manz – on East 78th Street in New York City. “My mother had an idea of me being in movies—I never had an idea of me being in movies,” she said in 2011. “Yeah, she always put me in drama classes, she put me in dancing schools, talent classes, she put me in Charlie Lowe’s professional whatever-it-was…I think Elliot Gould went there, too. They taught you how to sing, how to dance, how to improv… stuff like that.”9
I’d like to think her mother’s aspirations for her came from a recognition of Linda’s talent, but a few lines in a 1979 profile indicate that, as with many overbearing parents, they might’ve originated in thwarted aspirations of her own: “Now based in L.A., Linda is beginning to put her past behind her. Her mother is still in New York, with Linda paying the $450 monthly rent. “That’s where I want her,” says Linda. “We still don’t get along too well.” (Indeed, her jealous mom was given a part in Linda’s upcoming CBS movie Orphan Train and got into a public fight with Linda at Savannah’s airport.)”
“For a long time, I was always asking people to adopt me,” Linda says later in the profile.10
Sophie E. Manz is not included in the credits for Orphan Train. I search the internet for a picture of her or any reference to her role in the film, but find nothing. The version of the movie I watch is grainy, poor quality. In every crowd scene, I wait for an older woman who looks like Linda to appear but I can’t see the faces well enough to tell. Any of them could be her.
No. 18
Boardwalk (Stephen F. Verona, 1979)
In the credits, she’s ‘Girl Satan’: the only female member of a Coney Island gang that terrorises the neighborhood’s elderly Jewish residents. She’s dressed in a sweatband, denim short-shorts, striped knee socks, canvas high-tops, stalking Lee Strasberg’s character on the boardwalk with the rest of her crew, or glaring at him from across the street, in white short-shorts and a green plastic visor with the brim flipped up, shouting at a friend who’s just stolen four chocolate malteds: come on, come on! She’s in a cropped top and black beret, smoking a cigarette, striding down the boardwalk at night, and when the gang leader says something about smoking herb, she lifts up her fists and yells, All riiiiight! Outside an elderly couple’s house, she accepts stolen silver objects handed to her through an open window. She’s standing lookout in a muscle tank and sweatband, then running to the busted-out basement window, yelling, Hey, here he comes! From under a pier on the beach, she emerges swinging her arms, thrusting her torso forward. When her friends drag Strasberg through the sand, she’s egging them on. She’s frowning while they empty an old woman’s purse and she’s running from the building when the gang leader starts to beat the old woman. She’s spraying graffiti on the wall of Strasberg’s temple. She’s flinching when the gang leader busts up Strasberg’s train set with a chain. She’s sitting on a railing in jeans and a lavender t-shirt. She’s running away, down the boardwalk, alone.
No. 19
The cringe-inducing title of People’s 1979 Manz profile – ‘The Brutal Years Over, Linda Manz Fonzes Her Way from N.Y. to L.A.—and Her Own First Days of Heaven’ – tells us a lot about the culture’s perceptions of Manz at the time (a female Fonzie, right?), its inane loyalty to the Hollywood mythology of “making it”, and its relentless scorn for poor people. “Growing up, Linda never dreamed of having a regular job at $5,000 a week,” the writer declares, as though teenaged Manz is now set up for life, as though fortunes don’t shift constantly in this country. When work slowed for Manz a few years later, she survived on savings from that first flush of success, and when she died of lung cancer and pneumonia in 2020, her family set up crowdfunding to help pay her funeral expenses.
No. 20
The Wanderers (Philip Kaufman, 1979)
What’d you just say? She comes straight for them – Joey (John Friedrich) and Turkey (Alan Rosenberg), members of the Wanderers, a rival gang – tiny in comparison but tough, her short hair greased back, the collar of her black leather jacket flipped up, hands jammed in her jean pockets. She shouts, Hey, Terror! (Erland Van Lidth de Jeude) – this asshole just said we look like a bunch of pricks with ears! Then she’s chasing Friedrich and Rosenberg with Van Lidth de Jeude and the rest of the Baldies, climbing a chain link fence, vaulting herself over the top. Come on, Terror! At the end of a dark passageway, Van Lidth de Jeude steps into view – hulking, head shaved, face like a giant baby’s – and Manz steps in front of him, two feet shorter, her face sharp, lean. It’s a visual gag, a sideshow kind of spectacle, his largeness exaggerating her smallness, her smallness exaggerating his largeness. Manz wags her finger, says, You better watch your mouth, kid!
On a bridge in a park, she’s leaning over a railing, watching her friends tie rocks to the dicks of two Wanderers, a funny, curious, intent little smile on her face. When the Baldies get tricked into signing up for the Marines by a recruiter, Manz watches from outside, forlorn, shaking her head. Terror, don’t do it, she says, her face wet with tears. When they come out, she hits him. You stupid baboon! Then Van Lidth de Jeude is cradling her like you’d hold a toddler: they’re making out. Come on, how bout it, baby? he says. Sorrowful, tender, she says, Put me down Terror, you’re drunk. You know it’s no good when you’re drunk.
Later she’s on a sidewalk, standing by a restaurant window, looking in at a party. Her hair is ungreased and she’s wearing a grey cloth coat, her hands in the pockets. Hey PeeWee, get out of there! Friedrich yells, grabs her. She struggles, hits back – Let go of me! Damn you! – but he wrestles her to the ground. Hey you hurt me, you big shithead! She’s clutching her head, hair tousled, voice cracking like she’s going to cry. She starts crying. All that time I was with the Baldies, and not one of em even drops me a card, she says.
No. 21
King of the Gypsies (Frank Pierson, 1978)
According to her filmography, she had an uncredited walk-on part, but I watched the film twice, searched every scene for her face, and did not find it.
No. 22
Interview with Bobbie Wygant, The Texas News (1978)
The two-minute segment begins with an irritating layering of Wygant’s commentary over Manz’s narration in Days of Heaven. It’s hard to hear what either is saying and the contrast in tone is jarring – Wygant is declarative, patronising; Manz is artful, wondering – but then Wygant’s voice takes the lead: In Linda Manz, director Terrence Malick saw qualities close to the character he was casting: a young, uneducated, rough-hewn child of unfortunate circumstances.
BW: Did they ever try to explain why they picked you over hundreds of other kids?
LM: Well, they think I’m a natural. I was born in the streets, raised in the streets, and I know everything that’s going on in the streets.
BW: So you were a part of what was going on in the streets?
LM: Well, kind of.
BW: You ever been busted?
LM: Uh-uh. Never. I always chicken out of those things. Like if the kids are gonna go rob something I say, See ya later.
The camera pans out on the stiffly-coiffed, made-up woman, smiling, a little bewildered, holding the microphone in Manz’s face, and the speech-layering starts again, this time imposing Wygant’s voiceover onto their real-time conversation: Linda Manz says the movie hasn’t changed her, but she has sober reflections on where she might be today if Days of Heaven hadn’t come along:
LM: Probably in the streets or in the grave. Probably would’ve been murdered by those kids.
No. 23
Terrence Malick described Manz as “a sort of street child we had discovered in a laundromat.”11
But People recounted a different version of the “discovery”: “a teacher at Quintano’s, a showbiz high [Manz] attended sporadically, told her that casting director Barbara Claman was searching bars, drug rehab groups and topless joints for a young unknown…When Manz showed up at her office, Claman recalls, ‘Linda was smoking and looking all of 10 years old but had that special quality we wanted.’”12
And Billy Weber, the film’s editor, provides yet another version of the origin story: “Linda came in because her [acting] teacher thought she was a real character…When she came in to meet Terry, she looked at him and said, ‘I liked your script.’ He hired her on the spot!”13
No. 24
Terrence Malick interviewed by Yvonne Baby for Le Monde, 1979
“At first it was a bit frustrating to work with her. She couldn’t remember her lines, couldn’t be interrupted, and was difficult to photograph. Despite this, I started to love her and I believed in her more than anything else. She transformed the role […] I feel like I have not been able to grasp a fraction of who she really is.”14
No. 25
Her character in Days of Heaven was originally named Ursula, but the character became Linda because Manz wouldn’t respond to anything else. To read Malick’s script for the film is to encounter a much more conventional and dramatically less interesting character than what Manz (and Malick) ultimately crafted. In the script, for example, instead of reuniting with the blunt-speaking, funny, vulnerable girlfriend (Jackie Shultis) from the wheat fields, as the film’s Linda does, Ursula escapes the girls’ school to meet up with a young man:
[Ursula] runs down an alley. A man steps out of the shadows – George, the pilot. She throws herself in his arms. “You’re here! Oh, hug me!” They kiss madly. The moonlit, midsummer night thrums with mystery. “Aren’t we happy? Oh, George, has anybody ever been this happy?”
No. 26
Malick spent two years editing Days of Heaven but couldn’t get the film to cohere until he had the idea to invite Manz to the studio. He played the footage and asked her to narrate what she saw. He recorded her talking while she watched – an unscripted, off-the-cuff, stream of consciousness – then cut it to structure the final work. “I just ad-libbed everything […] I made all that stuff up. It wasn’t hard, there wasn’t any pressure. I was just having fun,” Manz said in 2014.15
She was 15 when the film was shot, a year or two older when Malick invited her to record. He’d used voiceover in his first film, Badlands (1973), in which 15-year-old Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) narrates her runaway romance and crime spree with Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen). But where Spacek’s narration is fairly traditional and explanatory (it sounds like Spacek is reading aloud in class, a little stiffly, a little sing-songy), Manz’s is strange, meandering, and psychologically complex in the way of authentic, spontaneous speech: a story told at night, in private, or to oneself. Her monologue runs a thread through the film’s fragmentary, impressionistic sequence of scenes, linking them in a way that lets mystery and association inhabit the gaps.
No. 27
Days of Heaven (1978)
Four minutes in, she starts talking:
Me and my brother —
It just used to be me and my brother
We used to do things together
We used to have fun
We used to roam the streets
There was people suffering of pain and hunger
Some people, their tongues were hanging out of their mouth
He used to juggle apples
He – he used to amuse us
He used to entertain us
In fact, all three of us been goin places,
looking for things, searching for things,
going on adventures
They told everybody they were brother and sister
My brother didn’t want nobody to know
You know how people are
You tell em somethin, they start talkin
I met this guy named Ding Dong
He told me the whole earth is goin up in flames
Flames will come out of here and there
and they’ll just rise up
The mountains are gonna go up in big flames
The water’s gonna rise in flames
There’s gonna be creatures runnin every which way
some of them burned, half their wings burnin
People are gonna be screaming and hollering for help
See, the people that have been good are gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire
But if you’ve been bad, God don’t even hear you
He don’t even hear you talkin
This farmer, he didn’t know when he first saw her
or what it was about her that caught his eye
Maybe it was the way wind blew through her hair
He knew he was gonna die
He knew there was nothin that could be done
You’re only on this Earth once
And I — to my opinion, as long as you’re around,
you should have it nice
From the time the sun went up ‘til it went down
theys were working all the time
No — nonstop
Just keep going
You didn’t work, they’d ship you right out of there
They don’t need you
They can always get somebody else
This farmer, he had a big spread
and a lot of money
Whoever was sitting in the chair when he’d come around
why, they’d stand up and give it to him
Wasn’t no harm in him
You’d give him a flower, he’d keep it forever
He was headed for the boneyard any minute,
but he wasn’t really going around squawking about it
like some people
In one way, I felt sorry for him
cause he had nobody to stand out for him
be by his side
hold his hand when he needs attention or somethin
That’s touchin
He was tired of living like the rest of em
nosing around like a pig in a gutter
He wasn’t in the mood no more
He figured there must be something wrong with him
the way they always got no luck
and they oughta get it straightened out
He figured some people need more than they got
other people got more than they need
Just a matter of getting us all together
I’ve been thinking what to do with my future
I could be a mud doctor
checkin out the earth underneath
We’ve never been this rich, all right?
I mean, we were just, all of a sudden, living like kings
Just nothin to do all day but crack jokes, lay around
We didn’t have to work
I’m telling you, the rich got it figured out
I got to like this farm
Do anything I want
Roll in the fields, talk to the wheat patches
When I was sleeping, they’d talk to me
They’d go in my dreams
Nobody sent us letters
We didn’t receive no cards
Sometimes I’d feel very old
like my whole life’s over
like I’m not around no more
Instead of getting sicker, he just stayed the same
He didn’t get sicker, he didn’t get better
They were kindhearted
They thought he was going out on his own steam
I don’t know, the doc musta come over or something and gave him something
Probably some kind of medicine or something
I coulda just took it, put it in a ditch, like they do to a horse
They shoot em right away
Just when things were about to blow, this flying circus come in
After six months on this wheat patch, I needed a breath of fresh air
They were screaming and yelling and bopping each other
He — the big one pushed the little one and said, “Come on. I start it, you start.”
The little one just started in
If they couldn’t think of a good one to come back with, they’d start fighting
The little one said, “No, I didn’t do this.”
The big one said, “Yes, you did do this.”
You couldn’t sort it out
The devil just sitting there laughing
He’s glad when people does bad
Then he sends em to the snake house
He just sits there and laughs and watch
while you’re sitting there all tied up and snakes are eatin your eyes out
They go down your throat and eat all your systems out
I think the devil was on the farm
He seen how it all was
She loves the farmer
He taught me keys on the piano and notes
He taught me about the parts of a globe
Nobody’s perfect
There was never a perfect person around
You just got half devil and half angel in you
She promised herself she’d lead a good life from now on
She blamed it all on herself
She didn’t care if she was happy or not
She just wanted to make up for what she did wrong
The sun looks ghostly when there’s a mist on a river and everything’s quiet
I never knowed it before
You could see people on the shore but it was far off and you couldn’t see what they were doing
They were probably calling for help or somethin
or they were trying to bury somebody or somethin
We seen trees that the leaves are shakin
and it looks like shadows of guys comin at you and stuff
We heard owls squawkin away, hootin away
We didn’t know where we were going
what we were gonna do
I’ve never been on a boat before
That was the first time
Some sights I saw was really spooky that it gave me goose pimples
I felt like cold hands touchin the back of my neck, and
And it could be the dead coming for me or something
I remember this guy his name was Black Jack
He died. He only had one leg, and he died
And I think that was Black Jack making those noises
This girl, she didn’t know where she was going or what she was gonna do
She didn’t have no money on her
Maybe she’d meet up with a character
I was hopin things would work out for her
She was a good friend of mine
No. 28
Her smallness, her androgyny, her physical expressiveness. The unmistakable gravity and delight of her voice, the surprise of it, the strength and vulnerability of it, the delivery of her whole self through it. Her wounded, watchful face. In her look, her glance, the expectation of a blow. Her loneliness. Her acceptance of pain and her vigorous rejection of it. Her weariness, her wariness, her resistance, her confidence. She’s not an actor but a presence. She needed parts, entire films, written for her. Instead of valuing an actor’s ‘range’ and ‘versatility’, why can’t we value what makes her rare, strange, inimitable, irreplaceable?
“In all my movies,” she said, “I’m just being myself.”16
1. Eleanor Hoover, People, August 13, 1979.
2 Sheryl Farber, Time Out New York, October 1997.
3. People Staff, ‘Linda Manz’, People, November 28, 1994.
5. Eleanor Hoover, People.
6. Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice, June 1, 2011.
7. Eleanor Hoover, People.
8. People Staff, ‘Linda Manz’.
9. Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice.
10. Eleanor Hoover, People.
11. Yvonne Baby, Interview with Terrence Malick, originally published in Le Monde, May 17, 1979.
12. Eleanor Hoover, People.
13. Ryan Gilbey, The Guardian, August 17, 2020.
14. Yvonne Baby, Le Monde.
15. Rebecca Bengal, criterion.com
16 Ibid.