Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
An extraordinary work of scholarship that's also a a pleasure to look at and flip through, Vanishing Point Forever is a limited-edition, 567-page, hardcover labor of love, dedicated to one of the great action films of all time.
Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (20th Century Fox, 1971) is the ultimate analog car chase movie with that hard-to-pin-down something extra. Written by renowned Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante under a pseudonym (Guillermo Cain), it’s nominally the saga of a speedaddled Vietnam vet existentially on the lam in a Dodge Challenger. It’s also a modern Western, a dystopian allegory of our surveillance society, and a love letter to the muscle car, all rolled into one. No surprise it’s become a cult classic, adored and paid homage to by Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Prince, Alberto Moravia, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Primal Scream, Audioslave, and countless others. In the fifty-plus years since the film’s release, the lore and legends around it have grown like Topsy. Now, Robert M. Rubin’s Vanishing Point Forever brings together everything there is to know in one lavishly illustrated volume.
A monumental treat for anyone who loves film culture, Vanishing Point Forever explores the movie’s profound impact across popular media, the arts, and the car world in obsessive detail. Nearly 600 pages include a complete reproduction of the film’s final shooting script, pages from Cabrera Infante’s early drafts, his own location scouting photos (never seen before), and a gold mine of production and publicity stills, ephemera, excerpts, reflections and essays. Rubin details how the movie came to life — from stars Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, and Charlotte Rampling (so enigmatic she was cut from the main release); to the groundbreaking stunts coordinated by Hollywood legend Carey Loftin; to its unique, remarkable half-life. In the words of Sarafian, the film just “wouldn’t die.”
Rubin’s tribute also includes assembled insights, interviews and quotes from a broad range of essential voices, including Cabrera Infante, Prince, Moravia, J. Hoberman, cinematographer and director Janusz Kaminski, Raymond Chandler, Jean Baudrillard, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Lucy Sante, race driver Sam Posey, and many more. Designed by COMA Amsterdam | New York, this is the latest graphic treat in a long collaboration with Rubin, including their most recent, the award-winning Richard Prince: Cowboy (Prestel, 2020
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"She thinks I'm a fascist? I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce!" —Margot Robbie as Barbie in Barbie (2023)
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He is currently launching a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater.
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.