#Easy rider magazine art movie#
He figured he’d just need someone to play his partner in the movie and someone (maybe the same someone) to direct it, which is why he called his friend Dennis Hopper that very night. Despite his illustrious surname, he was still, after half a decade in the business, mostly stuck in low-rent indie movies and television shows, his career eclipsed by his more famous father (Henry) and sister (Jane). Not a brilliant insight, to be sure, but Fonda reasoned that with his Hollywood connections it wouldn’t be too difficult for him to raise the money to produce a contemporary Western starring himself. Bikers, it dawned on him as he puffed on a joint, were modern cowboys. The idea for the movie, fittingly, was born in a cloud of marijuana smoke, coming to Fonda one evening in a Toronto motel room as he gazed at a still from one of his recent movies, The Wild Angels (1966). To some extent, obviously, it’s the fact that Easy Rider is a late-60s time capsule, conveying not just the look and sound of the period but the zeitgeist, as well-that blend of idealism, radicalism, optimism, and solipsistic smugness that flourished between the Summer of Love and Altamont. What is it, his book asks, that, half a century on, continues to draw so many viewers to this movie? Unlike Biskind, though, Bingen isn’t only interested in the film’s production he’s equally interested in its reception over the decades. ) Now, to mark the film’s 50th birthday, author Steven Bingen has written a new book about the picture, Easy Rider: 50 Years Looking for America.
(They ranked it 88th, well below The Third Man but still ahead of Pulp Fiction and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Reading it, one wonders how Hopper and company made a coherent film at all, let alone one that the American Film Institute would later rate one of the best 100 American films of all time. In the years since, the film’s production has become nearly as famous as the movie itself, largely thanks to historian Peter Biskind’s 1998 bestseller, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which portrayed the shoot as an orgy of chaos, rife with drugs, brawls, and monumental artistic pretention.
And it kick-started Jack Nicholson’s sputtering career, propelling him out of B-movies and into 70s superstardom. 1 Its leads, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, became (albeit briefly) Hollywood’s hottest new wunderkinds. Though shot on a shoestring budget, Easy Rider ended up being the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1969, raking in around $60 million worldwide. Or maybe, like Sutherland’s character in Flashback, I was just easily charmed by members of the counterculture. Maybe it was the motorcycles-those souped-up Harleys with their teardrop gas tanks. Maybe it was the music-all that Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, and Roger McGuinn. Strangely, I liked that too, though, again, I’m not quite sure why. At one point, Hopper declares, “It takes more than going down to your local video store and renting Easy Rider to be a rebel.” For some odd reason lost on me now, I liked this airy nothing of a movie and so, of course, insisted that my family rent Easy Rider the next time we visited our local video store. Naturally, the straight-laced fed can’t keep his laces very straight after Hopper doses him (or pretends to dose him) with LSD, releasing the young Republican’s inner hippie. In the former, Dennis Hopper plays an aging 60s dissident, busted after 20 years on the lam, who gets taken cross-country by a no-nonsense FBI agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland. It was the 1990 comedy Flashback that sparked my interest in Easy Rider (1969) when I was eight or nine years old. A review of Easy Rider: 50 Years Looking for America by Steven Bingen, Lyons Press (November 2019) 200 pages.
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