Chad and Jeremy – "Paxton Quigley's Had the Course" (1968)

Paxton Quigley’s had the course

And he’s feeling kinda run down

And he’s feeling kinda slowed down

Question Tarantino’s new movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has numerous shots of theatre marquees and billboards featuring movies that might have been playing in Los Angeles on August 8, 1969 – the day when Tex Watson and three female Manson Family members saddled up and drove to Beverly Hills to kill the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others.

I remember most of those movies, which were released when I was in high school: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Candy, Funny Girl, Ice Station Zebra, The Illustrated Man, Mackenna’s Gold, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, Oliver!, Romeo and Juliet, Sweet Charity, and The Wrecking Crew (which starred Sharon Tate).

One of the more obscure movies that Tarantino namedrops in Once Upon a Time is Three in the Attic, a 1968 movie I vividly remember seeing at a drive-in theatre in my hometown when i was a teenager.

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The star of Three in the Attic was a young actor named Christopher Jones – who was the James Dean of his day, but is now virtually forgotten.  

Jones, who had gone AWOL from the army to make a pilgrimage to Dean's family home in Indiana, was cast in a Broadway production of the Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana when he was barely 20 years old.  He then studied at the Actors Studio under the legendary "method acting" proponent, Lee Strasberg.  A few years later, Jones moved to Hollywood and landed the starring role in a short-lived TV series called The Legend of Jesse James, which aired on ABC in 1965-66.  

Christopher Jones as Jesse James

The actors who guest-starred on The Legend of Jesse James included Claude Akins, Charles Bronson, John Carradine, John Cassavettes, Jack Elam, Marietta Hartley, Dennis Hopper, Sally Kellerman, George Kennedy, Strother Martin, Kevin McCarthy, Slim Pickens, Kurt Russell, Ann Sothern, and many others who anyone who watched a lot of movies and TV shows in the sixties will remember.

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Christopher Jones’s first movie was Wild in the Streets, an American International Pictures production that was released on May 29, 1968 – the day before my 16th birthday.

American International Pictures – or AIP – specialized in making low-budget drive-in movies aimed at teenagers.  AIP's most famous director/producer was Roger Corman, who is best known for his series of horror movies based on Edgar Allan Poe stories that starred Vincent Price but who also made  western, sci-fi movies, motorcycle movies, gangster movies, and women-in-prison movies.  The young directors who cut their moviemaking teeth on Corman productions included Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Damme, Ron Howard, John Sayles, and Martin Scorsese.

In Wild in the Streets, Jones plays rock star Max Frost, who is asked to endorse a Kennedyesque Senate candidate who wants to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 (which actually happened three years after the movie’s release, when the 26th Amendment was ratified).  But when Frost performs at a televised rally for the candidate, he shocks his sponsors by proposing a more radical revision of the voting age in a song called “Fourteen or Fight.”

Christopher Jones as Max Frost

Max's anthem triggers massive protests and demonstrations throughout the country.  His girlfriend is elected to Congress, where she introduces a constitutional amendment to allow 14-year-olds not only to vote, but to hold political office.

Max's allies spike the Washington, DC water supply with LSD, and the amendment passes.  Max is later elected President, and his administration rounds up everyone over 35 (including his mother, memorably portrayed by Shelley Winters) and sends them to “re-education” camps where they are given daily doses of LSD and live happily ever after.  

Click here to listen to “The Shape of Things to Come,” the best song in Wild in the Streets.  (It was written by the husband-wife songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who also wrote “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” “On Broadway,” “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “Kicks,” and many other hits.)

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In Three in the Attic, a movie guaranteed to inflame the fantasies of male teenagers like moi even more than Wild in the Streets, Jones played a college student named Paxton Quigley, who picked up women as thoughtlessly (and about as frequently) as most men pick up the TV remote.  

Unfortunately, three different women he is simultaneously “dating” figure out what’s going on and decide to gang up on him.

Here's where Three in the Attic gets really good.  You know how the three women decide to avenge Paxton's infidelity?  They lure him to the dormitory where one of them lives and lock him in the attic.  Then they take turns having around-the-clock sex with him.  That’s his punishment – I kid you not!

Christopher Jones as Paxton Quigley

Apparently this is too much of a good thing for even a healthy young male like Paxton, who is quickly worn to a frazzle.  But after a couple of weeks, Paxton's absence from class is noticed, and rumors about what is going on in the attic get back to the college's dean.   Paxton is released from captivity just in the nick of time and is taken to the hospital to recover from his ordeal.

Three in the Attic, which was filmed on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, has a remarkably bad script.  My favorite line in the movie is the one Paxton uses to pick up Yvette Mimieux: “You have nice hair – it fits the mood of your butt.”  (Her response is scornful – “You're infinitely boring” – but it’s not long before the two are bumping uglies.)

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In 1970, Jones appeared in a serious, big-budget movie – Ryan's Daughter, a romantic drama set in Ireland during World War I and based very loosely on the novel Madame Bovary.  

Ryan's Daughter was directed by the legendary David Lean – who also directed the epics The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago – and also starred Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, John Mills (he's the village idiot), and Sarah Miles.

Christopher Jones (with Sarah
Miles) in “Ryan’s Daughter”

The role of the young British army officer that went to Jones was originally written for Marlon Brando.    Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, and Richard Burton were also considered for the role, but for some reason Lean decided he wanted Jones.  

Ryan’s Daughter was being filmed when the pregnant Sharon Tate was murdered.  Tate was married to director Roman Polanski, but Christopher Jones later claimed that he was the father of Tate’s baby.

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After Ryan’s Daughter, Christopher Jones simply walked away from his movie career.  He moved back to Los Angeles and devoted his energy to painting and to being a father to his five children.

In 1994, Quentin Tarantino asked Jones to appear in Pulp Fiction.  Jones turned the offer down.  

But in 1996, Jones did a cameo in a crime movie called Mad Dog Time, which featured Jeff Goldblum, Richard Dreyfuss, Gabriel Byrne, Ellen Barkin, Diane Lane, Burt Reynolds, Richard Pryor, Billy Idol, Paul Anka, and Rob Reiner – among others.  

One reviewer said the film was “jaw-droppingly incoherent.”  Siskel and Ebert picked it as the worst movie of the year, and Ebert said it was “the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.”  (I wish I had written that line.)  

That was apparently enough for Jones – he never appeared in another film. 

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The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood soundtrack includes the Chad and Jeremy song, “Paxton Quigley’s Had the Course,” which was written for the Three in the Attic soundtrack.  (The song was titled after the novel that the movie is based on.)

The song is very reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” which was featured on the soundtrack of The Graduate.  Since that movie was released months earlier than the Chad and Jeremy album that included the “Paxton Quigley” song was released, I’m guessing that if anyone stole from anyone else, it was Chad and Jeremy who stole from Simon and Garfunkel, and not vice versa.  But you never know.

Click here to listen to “Paxton Quigley’s Had the Course.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: