Lanton Mills

Lanton Mills is a rarely seen seventeen-minute comedy written and directed by Terrence Malick and starring Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Paula Mandel and Terrence Malick. It was completed in 1969, while he was a student at the American Film Institute. The story concerns two cowboys (Harry Dean Stanton and Terrence Malick) plotting to rob a bank in Texas. Paula Mandel (who plays a hysterical customer) is rumoured to have starred in an even more scarce Malick short entitled Old Age at around the same time.

The film was distributed nontheatrically (i.e., to collegiate film societies) in the 1970s but today reportedly can only be viewed in person at the A.F.I. by researchers.

Reference

• Theresa Schwartzman: Can Terry Malick tell a joke? The serious and the absurd in Terrence Malick's Lanton Mills. IN: COP: Why you did it? I don't know. I always wanted to be a criminal, I guess.* Edited by Dietmar Schwärzler & Sylvia Szely. Vienna: Sonderzahl, December 2005 (Rohstoff: Eine filmhistorische Recherche nach der kleinen Form: Fanzine #2), pp. 21–23, online here