With Kevin Smith also being attached now to another documentary I am expecting, The Shark That Roared, it thrilled me to dive into Long Lonesome Highway: The Story of Michael Parks. Taking archival interview footage from the making of both Red State and Tusk together with Smith’s penultimate podcast interview with the man himself, Josh Roush reconstructs the life and work of 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 found somehow, he belonged.
What began in those classes was the birth of a topsy-turvy career that would, as one of Parks’ daughters amply put it, be a time of feast and famine, as the young actor, now renamed Michael Parks, found his way onto television. While most cinema-loving folks of the 21st century would have realized Parks via his collaborations with Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Kevin Smith, most notably From Dusk till Dawn, I first saw Michael Parks in John Houston’s The Bible, naked as the day he was born.
It’s ironic that what Parks did next would be a cult TV series by which he would become known, loved, and ever appreciated for the wayfarin’ stranger on the back of a red Harley-Davidson Sportster: Then Came Bronson. Still, in the picture business, what’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander, and Michael Parks was a prickly pear that pulled no punches.
Film historian Leonard Maltin in Long Lonesome Highway: The Story of Michael Parks (2026).
“Josh Roush reconstructs the life and work of a complicated man and a naturally magnetic performer.”
He took off the last mogul, Lew Wasserman, and came off second best, ending up blacklisted and forced into the B-movie trade. But it was here that other aficionados of the genre and I first came to know the man. 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.
With great clips from Sarah Kelly’s awesome Full Tilt Boogie, where the man himself tells the story of how this young guy named Quentin, who had done nothing showed up and let Parks read some of his stuff impressed the veteran enough to join in the insanity of the Dusk shoot when he came back from being at liberty and found Tarantino was the new king in town.
Yes Long Lonesome Highway: The Story of Michael Parks leaves no stone unturned and no heart-string unplucked as it unearths the width and breadth of a life, haunted by family and personal tragedy, deepened by a rich and diverse musical career which no one remembers, and accentuated by a warm and hilarious character that knew how he wanted to do it, it was just a question of whether his collaborators where able or willing to play along.
The picture is perfectly bookended by Parks’ own five stages of being an actor. The first is, who is Michael Parks? The second, get me Michael Parks! The third, get me someone like Michael Parks. The fourth, we need a young Michael Parks. And finally…Michael who? Thanks to the stellar work of Josh Roush, along with all of Michael’s friends, family, and fellow filmmakers, we received an intense, intriguing, illuminating, and important movie about one of the greatest character actors of all time.
"…the life and work of a complicated man and a naturally magnetic performer."
