With Kevin Smith being attached, I was thrilled to dive into Long Lonesome Highway: The Story of Michael Parks, written and directed by Josh Roush. Drawing on archival interview footage from the making of Red State and Tusk, as well as Smith’s penultimate podcast interview with the man himself, the filmmaker reconstructs the life and work of Michael Parks, a complicated man and a naturally magnetic performer. Young Parks discovered his love for receiving applause while conducting the church choir as a boy. This lit a spark that wouldn’t appear again until after a wayward adolescence, when the then-Harry Samuel Parks stumbled into a theatre class and somehow found that he belonged.
What began in those classes was the birth of a topsy-turvy career that, as one of Parks’s daughters put it, would be a time of feast and famine, as the young actor, now renamed Michael Parks, found his way onto television. Most cinema-loving folks of the 21st century will recognize Parks through his collaborations with Smith, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez, most notably From Dusk Till Dawn. But I first saw Parks in John Houston’s The Bible, naked as the day he was born. But the man was a prickly pear that pulled no punches. He would eventually offend Lew Wasserman, the very mega-mogul producer who discovered him. This caused Parks to end up blacklisted and forced into the B-movie trade. With indelible character turns in films like Escape from Bogan County, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, Night Cries, and the evil dude in Death Wish V: The Face of Death, Parks was consistent until the role of Earl McGraw came across his desk and gave him new life and a whole new legion of fans.
Film historian Leonard Maltin in Long Lonesome Highway: The Story of Michael Parks (2026).
“…the life and work of Michael Parks, a complicated man and a naturally magnetic performer.”
The film leaves no stone unturned and no heartstrings unplucked as it unearths the width and breadth of the subject’s life. He was haunted by familial and personal tragedy, which contextualizes some of his choices in Hollywood nicely. His career was deepened by a rich and diverse musical career, which no one remembers. And finally, it was accentuated by a warm and hilarious character that knew how he wanted to do it, though it was just a question of whether his collaborators were willing to play along. Roush uses great clips from Sarah Kelly’s awesome Full Tilt Boogie to let Parls speak for himself. In it, the man himself tells the story of how this young guy named Quentin Tarantino, who had done nothing, showed up and let Parks read some of his stuff. This act impressed the veteran enough to join in the insanity of the From Dust Till Dawn shoot.
Long Lonesome Highway: The Story of Michael Parks is perfectly bookended by Parks’x five stages of being an actor. The first is “who is Michael Parks?” The second, “get me Michael Parks!” The third is “get me someone like Michael Parks.” The fourth is “we need a young Michael Parks.” And then “Michael who?” Thanks to the stellar work of Roush, along with all of Parks’s friends, family, and fellow actors, we received an intense, intriguing, illuminating, and important movie about one of the greatest character actors of all time.
"…intense, intriguing, illuminating, and important..."
