“I remember walking out of the movie theater at the age of 15 and saying oh my gosh, who was that?" — Lucy Jones, organizer, Harry Dean Stanton Fest
Harry Dean Stanton: Cinematic Rorschach Test
Lucy Jones, festival organizer, before mural by Graham Allen (Photo: Kevin Nance)
By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer & Photographer
Lucy Jones was having coffee with friends from the brand-new Lexington Film League in 2010 when someone asked her what kind of movie-related event would get her excited. “I think we should have a festival in honor of Harry Dean Stanton,” she said without hesitation. Who’s that, they wanted to know — at which point Jones said, “We’re definitely having the festival.”
“They knew who he was, but they didn’t know him by name. But when I showed them a photo, they were like, ‘Of course,’” she says in an interview a few days before the 2025 Harry Dean Stanton Fest kicks off its 13th annual edition in Lexington this weekend. “Harry Dean Stanton is like a cinematic Rorschach test. If you show somebody a photo of him, they respond immediately with the name of a movie, and that movie tells you everything you need to know about them. If you ask a woman of my age, they tend to say, ‘Oh my gosh, “Pretty in Pink.” If you ask a fella my age, they tend to say Brett in ‘Alien,’ or maybe ‘Red Dawn.’ He resonates with different people for different reasons.”
This year’s Stanton Fest, officially hosted by the city of Lexington (where Stanton, a native of West Irvine, attended Lafayette High School and the University of Kentucky), includes free screenings of several of the prolific actor’s more than 200 films. They include director David Lynch’s “The Straight Story” (1999) in an outdoor showing in a field next to Blue Grass Memorial Gardens, where Stanton’s ashes are interred; a double feature of “Zandy’s Bride” (1974, opposite the late Gene Hackman) and director Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” (1973) at the Lexington Public Library’s Farish Theater; “Young Doctors in Love” (1982); the Oscar-nominated but rarely seen short film “Cruise Control” (1992, with Sean Penn) at the Farish and “Lucky” (2017), released the same year Stanton died and one of only two films with him as the leading man, at the Kentucky Theatre, preceded by a Q&A with one of his co-stars, actor Ed Begley Jr.
Special features of this year’s fest include a book signing by Begley, author of the memoir “To the Temple of Tranquility . . . and Step On It!” (2023), and a reunion concert by The Call — a band that Stanton toured with in the late 1980s after meeting one of the musicians on the set of “The Last Temptation of Christ” — at the Green Lantern.
Ed Begley, Jr. will appear for a pre-show Q&A at the Kentucky Theatre screening of "Lucky," 7:30 pm, Sunday, July 13
Jones’s own first exposure to Stanton’s work was in “Cool Hand Luke,” which she watched many times as a child on a VHS tape her family owned. Stanton’s character, a prison camp inmate called Tramp, sings and plays guitar in the film, providing a soulful musical commentary on two of the film’s most powerful scenes, including Paul Newman’s character’s final visit with his dying mother, played by Jo Van Fleet. But her a-ha moment came when she was 15, attending a midnight showing of “Repo Man” (1984), in which Stanton played an eccentric repossession agent opposite Emilio Estevez.
“There’s always this magic moment where you connect to him and you go, who is this guy? And then you realize you’ve seen him your whole life, essentially,” Jones says. “I remember walking out of the movie theater at the age of 15 and saying oh my gosh, who was that? And somebody said, ‘That’s Mary’s uncle.’ A friend of ours was related to him, and they said, ‘Yeah, that guy’s from Kentucky. He’s done a million things.’ And as soon as I realized who he was, I started watching his films and realizing how many incredible films he’d starred in over the decades.”
Jones’s favorite performances by the actor — whose gaunt and weathered face conveyed both “aloof cool and profound vulnerability,” she says — include director Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas” (1984), in which the actor plays an amnesiac drifter who reunites with his family, played by Dean Stockwell, Hunter Carson and Nastassja Kinski. The film became so important to Jones that she and Lexington photographer James R. Southard recreated a scene from it in Southard’s recent series of portraits of prominent Kentuckians.
Harry Dean Stanton in scene from "Paris, Texas"
She’s also fond of “Lucky,” which co-stars Lynch in a rare acting role, in part because it imagines Stanton’s life as it might have been if he’d never become a famous actor. “A lot of the lines that Lucky says come from Harry’s own life,” Jones says. “That’s wonderful, in part because what I enjoy about this festival is heralding someone who has not traditionally received the recognition that his peers received in his lifetime. Character actors like Harry are deeply under-appreciated, but they are the heart and soul of the film industry.” She laughs. “Harry actually hated the term character actor — he’d say all actors play characters — and he didn’t like seeing himself through that lens. But I’m so grateful that he was given two opportunities to be a leading man, because I think that was sort of his frustrated destiny.”
Harry Dean Stanton in scene from "Lucky"