The 1972 movie Martin Sheen called the worst he ever made: “A dishonest piece of trash”
Even though he’s been in some classic, timeless, seminal, and era-defining movies, Martin Sheen doesn’t look back on his career with any great fondness. In fact, he thinks his filmography is full of shite.
Despite earning his stripes as one of the greatest actors to have never been nominated for an Academy Award, collaborating with some of cinema’s true heavyweights, and pulling his weight in a string of acclaimed pictures, the veteran doesn’t think he’s got a particularly good body of work.
He’s got well over 200 credits under his belt across film and television, but when push came to shove, he admitted that he’s only proud of six of them. As for the rest? He surmised 90% of everything he’s ever made as “basically trash”, confessed that “most of them weren’t good,” and said he only made them for the money.
You can’t fault him for his honesty, but those sins can be forgiven when he’s got Apocalypse Now, Badlands, Catch Me If You Can, The Departed, Gandhi, The American President, and others in his locker. If those are the other 10%, then it’s a better 10% than many actors could ever dream of.
However, even a guy who seems to hate most of what he’s done onscreen has to have something that lurks right at the bottom of the barrel. Make no mistake, Sheen has been in some terrible, terrible pictures dating back to the 1960s, but at least he managed to get his nadir out of the way pretty early.
When asked to name and shame the worst movie of his career, he didn’t have to think twice. “That would have to be a film called Pickup on 101,” he said. “It was a very interesting story, about a wandering musician and an old guy on his way back to his hometown to spend his last days, but they made it into a pile of dishonest trash.”
Directed by John Floria, the 1972 drama stars Sheen as Lester Baumgartner, a folk singer who partners up with Jack Albertson’s ageing drifter and Lesley Anne Warren’s runaway ingenue to hitchhike their way to California. Clearly, he was drawn in by the story, but the execution left a sour taste in his mouth.
If there are any positives, it was only the sixth feature-length appearance for a young Sheen, so in the last 50+ years of making films almost exclusively for the money and telling anyone who’ll listen that the majority of his performances came in trash movies, he hasn’t found anything he hates more than Pickup on 101.
It’s a small mercy, sure, but finding the lowest point of your professional life at the beginning of it is a blessing in a way, since the only way to go from there is up.
