First saw TLB on a crappy old video at the house of the bloke I bought my 70 GTO from. He had taped it off the TV at some ungodly hour and the quality was really bad. I was just excited that a 70 starred in it, but I also loved the real life American roadside in it as well.
Like Mike Noun mentioned, a movie reviewer out here also gave it a glowing report, it was Ivan Hutcheson's ( a popular and respected local movie reviewer) "Pick of the week" a few times, but it was always on at something like three am on a weeknight. Still have the video that I made and had cut out the review and stuck it on the case of the vid.
i know it is hard to watch, but there is something about the movie that gets me, not to mention the intrigue of the GTO. How can you not like a movie that has someone wiggling the ignition key to shut the damn annoying buzzer up? Or the scene where JT buys the 1970 Quadrajet rebuild kit, for what, 5 bucks plus tax? Or the very beginning, where the LA street racers are doing their thing? That took some real effort to hit the record button on time at 3am!
It wasn't available on video, or later DVD, for years either and that seemed to make the chance of watching it on TV some sort of holy grail.
The soundtrack is pretty good too, I knew it was Terry Allen singing on the GTO's stereo in the scene where they decide to race, but it drove me nuts trying to find what song it was. I eventually found it too, Truckload of art is the name, if you need to know. I even scored an original old Aussie TLB movie poster off ebay.
When I first got internet access there was nothing about Two Lane Blacktop out there, now you can retrace the movie in one of the 55's that has been found, saw the old Diamond T truck that the girl gets out of, it turned up on a farm somewhere, not to mention the 70 (or atleast one of them) right here on PY, turning up in Alaska.
I really enjoy the fact that the 70 featured in shows for years too, Adam 12 is running on TV at the moment and the few shows I've seen were the ones featuring the Judge, in fact Adam 12 is my new favourite car spotting show!
Just recently I got to see TLB on the big screen out here, that was really cool to sit and watch it, (some people in the cinema walked out though) the quality was really good too, almost like comparing crappy old taped video's to the new criterion release dvd...it was that good.
Geez, i rambled on a bit...guess I'm a fan of TLB.
