The Neon Bible - Flashback: Easy Rider
The star of Easy Rider was a drunken hippy. The co-writer was an acid-fried biker. And the director was a paranoid control freak. But the really bad news was that all three of them were Dennis Hopper.
It isn’t the huge drug intake - both on- and off-screen - that links Easy Rider inextricably to the late 1960s. Or the sex. Or even the music. What really marks the film out as a product of that fractured, uncertain age was that it got made at all. And in particular that it got made by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda.
Certainly, when the pair announced their intention of making the ultimate biker movie, few sane punters would have wagered on them getting financing, let alone producing a film that not only became one of the biggest box-office hits of 1969 but also completely changed the way major studios treated their burgeoning baby-boomer audience.
If the film’s proposed subject matter - two doped-up philosophising hippies (Hopper and Fonda) use the proceeds from a drug deal to buy bikes and ride across America from LA to New Orleans in search of ‘freedom’ - wasn’t enough to put off potential investors, then Hopper and Fonda’s Hollywood reputations undoubtedly were.
Hopper was a Dean generation character actor who had been blacklisted following a bust-up with director Henry Hathaway. Kicked out of mainstream pictures, he was reduced to working with undergrounded filmmakers like Roger Corman.
It was while shooting Corman’s The Trip that Hopper became friends with Peter Fonda. The son of one Hollywood legend and the brother of another, Peter had thrown away a promising career in respectable cinema to appear in zero-budget exploitation movies like The Wild Angels.
Starring roles in The Trip did little to improve either man’s standing. Far more
helpful was their decision to hook up with the author and screenwriter Terry Southern. Southern’s involvement provided the pair with a title, Easy Rider, and a backer in the shape of Bert Schneider. The latter was a fledgling film producer who had just hit the big-time courtesy of his kit-form boy band The Monkees and was happy not only to provide money but to let Hopper and Fonda become director and producer respectively.
As it turned out, any problems the production may have had over finance paled into insignificance compared with the trauma of the shoot itself. During most productions, on-set drug-taking and a leading man breaking his ribs would constitute major problems. In the case of Easy Rider, these were just minor inconveniences considering the bizarre antics of Hopper himself.
A heavy drinker famed for his to-the-edge performances and confrontational manner, the director’s instability and paranoia resulted in clashes with everyone from Fonda to the people paid to score the film. And when he wasn’t picking fights, Hopper would fill his time forcing Fonda to relive memories of his mother’s suicide and dragging actress Karen Black through the streets of New Orleans in search of inspiration.
Hopper justified his behaviour on the grounds that he wanted to make a special film. And he did. The massive commercial success of Easy Rider ensured that, for a couple of years, major studios were happy to throw money at any wild-eyed auteur capable of capturing some of that youth buck - a period that Hopper himself brought to a close with 1971’s The Last Movie.
Even 50 years on, the film’s effect on subsequent generations of filmmakers can’t be underestimated. As Hopper recalled, “Before 1969, there were no real independent filmmakers in America. Easy Rider changed all that.
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