DreamWork’s The Island still isn’t tracking — the hoped-for boost from last Saturday night’s nationwide sneak simply didn’t happen. Everything has been tried, loads of TV ad money has been spent trying to get it off the runway and it’s just not taking. Awareness and interest is also on the low side for Rob Cohen’s Stealth (Columbia, 7.29), according to recent data…despite Jamie Foxx (a costar along with Josh Lucas) being front-and-center in the trailer. Opening tracking figures on Warner Bros.’ The Dukes of Hazzard showed a 72% general awareness, a 36% definite interest and 5% first-choice…which is pretty good for a movie three weeks away from opening. However, it also got a very high “definitely not interested” rating from urban respondents.

I’m repeating myself but I want to be clear that a source in Laura Kim’s office at Warner Independent didn’t tell me when I spoke to her on Wednesday that Douglas McGrath’s Truman Capote biopic, which isn’t being released until September ’06, has been retitled Have You Heard? and is therefore no longer being called Every Word is True.

Former Dukes of Hazzard costar Ben Jones (a.k.a., “Crazy Cooter”) can tut-tut all he wants about the upcoming Warner Bros. film version having too much sex and profanity and trashing the legacy of the TV series…nobody’s listening. The first taste of tracking data on The Dukes of Hazzard (8.5) will be available later today, but I can smell the wanna-see from here. For me, it’s the latest Al Qeada recruitment film disguised as the Return of the Stupid Redneck Movie. Burt Reynolds starred in nearly all of these dumb-ass things (in fact, making too many of them is what killed his career, which makes it heavily ironic that he’s costarring in the new film) and Jerry Reed, the most irritating and affected redneck second-tier stooge of all time, co-starred in a lot of them. White Lightning, Smokey and the Bandit (and the sequels and spinoffs), Stroker Ace, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Gator, Hooper, Convoy and several others flaunted the usual backwoods stereotypes — souped-up cars, stupid cops, southern-fried machismo, hot-to-trot Daisy Mae chicks, corrupt local politicians, etc.

All of those ’70s Burt Reynolds redneck movies and their relations were shit, of course…and of course no one remembers or would dare to think about remaking a certain Lamont Johnson flick that did it first and best and pretty much inspired the blue-collar, wild-ass, hot-babe-riding-shotgun, moonshine-in-the-trunk, outrunning-the-local-fuzz genre. I’m speaking of a quality film about a scrappy southern guy with an appetite for speed and souped-up cars — a dude who makes a semblance of a living smuggling moonshine before becoming a famous stock-car racer — called The Last American Hero (’73). It starred Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Gary Busey and Art Lund (who gave a wonderfully moving performance as Bridges’ bone-weary dad) and it really captured the whole southern rural aesthetic without turning it into a pile of cheap cliches, like the Reynolds films did. A genuine classic and a huge Pauline Kael favorite, Hero was a film with vigor, heart, humor and dignity about hard-striving, sometimes hurting rural Americans. A good way of getting people to take another look would be to release it on DVD to coincide with the opening of The Dukes of Hazzard on 8.5. Are there any plans to do this? Appparently not. The Last American Hero was released only on VHS by Fox Home Video in 1997.

The inspiration for Lamont Johnson’s film was, of course, Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about famed stockcar racer Junior Johnson (“The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”). It’s a great piece and the whole article is right here. Please read it…it’s fantastic. Articles like this one and films like The Last American Hero make me momentarily forget about red-state attitudes and even inspire admiration for the vitality of working-class types and blue-collar culture. They make me briefly ashamed of having used terms like “redneck.” It’s not genuine Americana that I hate — it’s the degraded, stupid-ass, hee-haw stuff peddled by downmarket opportunists and turned into corporate-brand jackoff diversions like The Dukes of Hazzard TV series and motion picture. What galls me is that most consumers out there don’t even know what genuine backwoods Americana is — they just know the Happy Meal-kind that corporations have sold to them.

It’s a good thing, of course, that AMC Theatres has decided not to show Thinkfilm’s The Aristocrats in Atlanta and Chicago, as stories about this will up the want-to-see among people who otherwise might not have paid any attention. Everyone needs to see this thing. It’s not what I would call hugely funny at first, but it gets funnier and skankier and more creative as it goes along, and gradually you just succumb. Not a movie that enobles the human experience, exactly, and yet it is that in a certain way…it’s a celebration of particularity most perverse.