"Now it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film-but, by George, he manages to do it every time." "You know if Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting room floor he'll put in for screenplay credit," he said later. Terry Southern, who had written Dr Strangelove and Barbarella, was hired to deliver the script and, despite Hopper and Fonda also receiving credit, always argued that he was the only force that mattered. To this day, arguments rage as to who was responsible (or to blame) for the film's creative direction. Later producers of Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show, those men were midwives to the coming movement. None of this sounded very likely until Jack Nicholson, still an obscure oddball, urged them to bring the project to outsiders Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider at BBS Productions. For some reason, he felt that Dennis Hopper – already impressively confused – might be able to direct such a thing. The notion of a film concerning bikers on a drug deal bumped its way into his (we're betting) addled brain. The industry made a real effort to connect with the funkier aesthetic that had been harvested in Woodstock and matured in Haight-Ashbury.ĭennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson in a scene from the 1969 film Easy Rider Peter Biskind knew what he's was up to when he chose the title Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for his seminal (and much disputed) 1998 book on the so-called "New Hollywood". Half a century later, few low-budget films with an alternative inclination can hope to make $60 million in cinemas.Įverything changed for a while. Made for around $400,000 – cheap for a studio picture, expensive for a countercultural entity – it went on to take $60 million at the box office and utterly confound the men who ran the industry. More often it reflects them.Īt any rate, the decade hit home with force when Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider freaked out American cinema-goers in July of 1969. Hollywood has always been slow to catch up with trends in popular culture. That decade may have begun with the release of Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier. Okay, we may be a few years off the mark.
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