Director's Notes - Episode 236: "Truck Touchers"

Anyone familiar with the 1997 documentary Hands On A Hardbody would immediately recognize this episode as an homage, and they'd be half right.

If you haven't seen it, you can pay the filmmakers directly and stream the original documentary from their website, which is how I first saw it around five years ago. Pastiche is the highest form of flattery; consider this episode a recommendation.

The rules of the competition are essentially unaltered between those in the documentary and what's presented in "Truck Touchers", but I also tried to echo the themes of the film as well. Hardbody is concerned not just with the personalities of the contestants, but with the financial impact a free truck would have on their lives—a free truck is cool because hey, free truck, but also because it can open up job possibilities, or the chance to abbreviate an arduous commute on public transit. The more outlandish your fiction, the more it helps to have concrete stakes in which to ground your story. "I want to win this truck so my commute to work takes me twenty minutes instead of an hour" is as grounded as it gets.

But it's not the original documentary that really inspired this episode. "Truck Touchers" exists because Robert Altman is dead.

Altman was a legendary director, and one who made several films that are dear to me—since I'm slinging movie recommendations, check out Secret Honor while it's still on the Criterion Channel—but perhaps none dearer than one that does not exist, the one he was in preproduction on before he passed in 2006: a fictionalized version of Hands on a Hardbody.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I think about what this movie could've been at least once a week. The script was completed before Altman's death, and I am planning a trip to the Altman archives at the University of Michigan so I can read it. I'm not quite at Ahab-and-the-whale-level obsession about this—yet. There's still time.

In lieu of Altman's version, then, I wrote my own. A few more miscellaneous notes:

• The "Anticipator" name is pulled from one of the many rejected names poet Marianne Moore proposed for the Ford Edsel (at Ford's behest). The full story, as well as the entire, magnificent list of possible car names, can be found in this excellent Jalopnik article.
• Lest this interest in car branding and truck-touching brand me as a Car Guy, I will confess that I haven't driven a car in nearly a decade, and hope to live the rest of my life without needing to own one. There is only one car I think is cool: the Subaru Baja.

If you enjoyed this episode you might also enjoy my novel, Several People Are Typing, available wherever books are sold and in whatever format you prefer (including a full-cast audiobook).

-Calvin Kasulke