Trivia / Zabriskie Point

• Cast the Runner-Up: Harrison Ford's agent lobbied him for the lead role, but was unsuccessful. He has an uncredited role as one of the arrested student demonstrators being held inside a Los Angeles police station.
• The Danza: Both main characters use their real names during the film.
• Romance on the Set: Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin hooked up during production and were a couple for a time after. Frechette recruited Halprin for the Lyman cult. She stayed briefly and was subjected to berating and physical abuse from the other women for being "too much of an individual". The Family was the opposite of a hippie free-love commune and Lyman women were supposed to be subservient nonentities. When she left, Mark was prepared to join her, but was commanded to return to Fort Hill. The cult pursued Halprin, including death threats, for several years. There's a clip of them on Youtube, part of a The Dick Cavett Show interview. Taken out of context, their behavior looks self-absorbed and detached (see the comments by people who didn't know about their involvement with Lyman). They were both under orders from Lyman what to say and how to behave.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Richard Wright composed a piano piece for the film titled "The Violent Sequence", only for Michelangelo Antonioni to reject it due to it being too dissimilar from material like "Careful With That Axe, Eugene", the kind of music he was looking to include in the film. Wright would later recycle the piece for Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, with added lyrics by Roger Waters, under the title "Us and Them".
  • Lyman allowed Frechette to continue with the picture not just for the $60,000 he would earn but because he understood that Antonioni was going to use American folk music in the soundtrack. Lyman, a gifted harmonica player^note he had once played improvisations on "Rock of Ages" for twenty minutes to calm attendees storming out of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival — they were furious with Bob Dylan for playing with an electric guitar band, thus "selling out" believed himself to be the foremost expert on "the reality of America" and its music, and told Frechette to use every opportunity to promote his recordings and himself. Antonioni quickly dismissed Lyman's badly recorded tracks, but Frechette left copies of The Avatar, the group's newspaper, where the camera would pick them up. Antonioni caught on ("What's his picture doing in my picture?!?!?") and threw them out.

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