Highway 66 Revisited

"The U.S. 66, also called Route 66, is a transcontinental road. It starts in Chicago and crosses eight States and three time zones along 2200 miles to Los Angeles. Route 66 is meanwhile part of the myths of the American West The discovery of the continent by horse and then by train in the 19th century has started again by car in Twenties and Thirties of this century. Route 66 was the first corridor through the unsettled plains and deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Starting with the steady flow of cartraffic, small settlements. businesses and towns sprang up. In 1946 a young man, Jack D. Rittenhouse started his trip West in a 22 PS Bantam Coupè to write the first guidebook about Highway 66. which was by many travellers still considered as uncertain and even dangerous. Since then, many things have changed. The old twolane road has been replaced by modem Interstate freeways. which bypass many loops the old road once took. The villages, born and relying on the throughtraffic, are mostly bypassed and lost nearly all their economic basis. Wealth and life disappeared from these communities, many people lost everything they built up in a lifetime. Route 66 today is a 'ghost street'; the villages and the settlements are vanishing, still dreaming of liveful past. Jack Rittenhouse's Guidebook to Highway 66 is a collector's item, and we used it to retrace the old road. We found a different America, an Atlantis. The film tries to preserve what's left of this famous road and its people. It's a document." (Thomas Repp)

Director: Thomas Repp.
Director of photography: Rudolph Barmettler.
Editor: Patricia Loncle.
Sound: Karl Michael.
Director of Production: Thomas Repp.
Produzione e vendita all'estero: Thomas Repp Fiimproduktion, c/o Loncle, Valleystr. 29, 8000 München 70, Germania, tel. 89763512. fax 89763512.