Easy Rider is a 1969 American road drama film written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. Fonda and Hopper play two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and the South, carrying money made from a cocaine deal. Other actors in the film include Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, and Toni Basil. The success of Easy Rider helped spark the New Hollywood era of filmmaking during the early 1970s.
Easy Rider was a landmark counterculture film and a "touchstone for a generation" that "captured the national imagination" and "mood of the drug culture" at the time. It explores the youth culture in the United States during the 1960s, including the rise of the hippie movement, drug use, and communal lifestyle. Real drugs were used in scenes showing the use of marijuana and other substances.
An independent production, the film was released by Columbia Pictures on July 14, 1969, and earned $60 million worldwide compared to a modest filming budget of $400,000. Critics have praised the performances, directing, writing, soundtrack, and visuals. It received two Academy Awards nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson). In 1998, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) are freewheeling motorcyclists. After smuggling cocaine from Mexico to Los Angeles, they sell their haul and receive a large sum of money. With the cash stuffed into a plastic tube hidden inside the Stars & Stripes-painted fuel tank of Wyatt's California-style chopper (motorcycle), they ride eastward, aiming to reach New Orleans in time for the Mardi Gras festival.
During their trip, Wyatt and Billy stop to repair a flat tire on Wyatt's bike at a farmstead in Arizona and have a meal with the farmer and his family. Later, Wyatt picks up a hippie hitchhiker, and he invites them to visit his commune, where they stay for the rest of the day. "Free love" appears to be practiced, with two of the women, Lisa and Sarah, seemingly sharing the affections of the hitchhiking commune member before turning their attention to Wyatt and Billy. As the bikers leave, the hitchhiker gives Wyatt some LSD for him to share with "the right people, at the right time".
Later while riding along with a parade in New Mexico, the pair are arrested for "parading without a permit" and thrown in jail. There, they befriend lawyer George Hanson (Nicholson), who has spent the night in jail after overindulging in alcohol. Mentioning that he has done work for the ACLU, George helps them get out of jail and decides to travel with Wyatt and Billy to New Orleans. As they camp that night, Wyatt and Billy introduce George to marijuana. As an alcoholic and a "square", George is reluctant to try it due to his fear of becoming "hooked" and it leading to worse drugs, but quickly relents.
Stopping to eat at a small-town Louisiana diner, the trio attracts the attention of the locals. The girls in the restaurant think they are exciting, but the local men, including the sheriff, make denigrating comments and taunts. Wyatt, Billy, and George decide to leave without any fuss. They make camp outside town. In the middle of the night, a group of locals attack the sleeping trio, beating them with clubs. Billy screams and brandishes a knife, and the attackers leave. Wyatt and Billy suffer minor injuries, but George has been bludgeoned to death. Wyatt and Billy wrap George's body in his sleeping bag, gather his belongings, and vow to return the items to his family.
They continue to New Orleans and find a brothel George had told them about. Taking prostitutes Karen and Mary with them, Wyatt and Billy wander the parade-filled streets of the Mardi Gras celebration. They end up in a French Quarter cemetery, where all four ingest the LSD the hitchhiker had given to Wyatt. Later at their campsite, while Billy enthusiastically recounts their travels, Wyatt melancholically muses that they "blew it" in their quest.
The next morning, as they are overtaken on a two-lane country road by two local men in an older pickup truck, the passenger in the truck reaches for a shotgun, saying he will scare them. As they pass Billy, the passenger fires, and Billy has a lowside crash. The truck passes Wyatt, who has stopped, and Wyatt rides back to Billy, finding him lying flat on the side of the road and covered in blood. Wyatt tells Billy he is going to get help and covers Billy's wound with his own leather jacket. Wyatt then rides down the road toward the pickup as it makes a U-turn. Passing in the opposite direction, the passenger fires the shotgun again, this time through the driver's-side window. Wyatt's riderless motorcycle flies through the air and comes apart before landing and being engulfed in flames. His body is seen lying still in the background. A final shot sees the motorcycle burning and the credits roll over the scene.
Cast
Peter Fonda as Wyatt, "Captain America" Dennis Hopper as Billy Jack Nicholson as George Hanson Luke Askew as Stranger on Highway Phil Spector as Connection Karen Black as Karen Toni Basil as Mary Antonio Mendoza as Jesus Mac Mashourian as Bodyguard Warren Finnerty as Rancher Tita Colorado as Rancher's Wife Luana Anders as Lisa Sabrina Scharf as Sarah Robert Walker Jr. as Jack Sandy Brown Wyeth as Joanne
Production Writing Hopper and Fonda's first collaboration was in The Trip (1967), written by Jack Nicholson, which had themes and characters similar to those of Easy Rider. Peter Fonda had become "an icon of the counterculture" in The Wild Angels (1966), where he established "a persona he would develop further in The Trip and Easy Rider." The Trip also popularized LSD, while Easy Rider went on to "celebrate '60s counterculture" but does so "stripped of its innocence." Author Katie Mills said that The Trip is a way point along the "metamorphosis of the rebel road story from a Beat relic into its hippie reincarnation as Easy Rider", and connected Peter Fonda's characters in those two films, along with his character in The Wild Angels, deviating from the "formulaic biker" persona and critiquing "commodity-oriented filmmakers appropriating avant-garde film techniques." It was also a step in the transition from independent film into Hollywood's mainstream, and while The Trip was criticized as a faux, popularized underground film made by Hollywood insiders, Easy Rider "interrogates" the attitude that underground film must "remain strictly segregated from Hollywood." Mills also wrote that the famous acid trip scene in Easy Rider "clearly derives from their first tentative explorations as filmmakers in The Trip." The Trip and The Wild Angels had been low-budget films released by American International Pictures and were both successful. When Fonda took Easy Rider to AIP, however, as it was Hopper's first film as director, they wanted to be able to replace him if the film went overbudget, so Fonda took the film to Bert Schneider of Raybert Productions and Columbia Pictures instead.
When seeing a still of himself and Bruce Dern in The Wild Angels, Peter Fonda had the idea of a modern Western, involving two bikers traveling across the country after a drug sale. He called Dennis Hopper, and the two decided to turn that into a movie, The Loners, with Hopper directing, Fonda producing, and both starring and writing. Back in LA, Fonda introduced Hopper to Cliff Vaughs, who Peter had met after his second arrest for marijuana in 1967, when Cliff interviewed Peter for radio station KRLA. Over multiple meetings, Vaughs provided his experiences riding a chopper through the South while working on civil rights with the SNCC in 1963–1965, including being shot at by two duck hunters in a pickup while he was riding his chopper with Iris Greenburg on the back, between Jackson and Little Rock.'Mississippi Summer Project: Running Summary of Incidents'(1964), SNCC Vaughs had a handmade poster on his living room wall with collaged letters spelling 'Where has my easy rider gone?' atop a poster from the Mae West film She Done Him Wrong.d'Orléans, Paul (Nov.10, 2014). 'The Chopper: the Real Story' Gestalten. ISBN 978-3899555240 Vaughs was made Associate Producer of the film, and designed/built the two choppers, with the assistance of Ben Hardy and Larry Marcus.'Cliff Vaughs Filmmaker', Choppers Magazine, Jan 1969 Fonda and Hopper later brought in screenwriter Terry Southern. The film was mostly shot without a screenplay, with ad-libbed lines, and production started with only the outline and the names of the protagonists. Keeping the Western theme, Wyatt was named after Wyatt Earp and Billy after Billy the Kid. However, Southern disputed that Hopper wrote much of the script. In an interview published in 2016 [Southern died in 1995] he said, "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. Now it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film—but, by George, he manages to do it every time." According to Southern, Fonda was under contract to produce a motorcycle film with A.I.P., which Fonda had agreed to allow Hopper to direct. According to Southern, Fonda and Hopper didn't seek screenplay credit until after the first screenings of the film, which required Southern's agreement due to writers guild policies. Southern says he agreed out of a sense of camaraderie, and that Hopper later took credit for the entire script.
According to Terry Southern's biographer, Lee Hill, the part of George Hanson had been written for Southern's friend, actor Rip Torn. When Torn met with Hopper and Fonda at a New York restaurant in early 1968 to discuss the role, Hopper began ranting about the "rednecks" he had encountered on his scouting trip to the South. Torn, a Texan, took exception to some of Hopper's remarks, and the two almost came to blows, as a result of which Torn withdrew from the project. Torn was replaced by Jack Nicholson. In 1994, Jay Leno interviewed Hopper about Easy Rider on The Tonight Show, and during the interview, Hopper falsely claimed that Torn had pulled a knife on him during the altercation when it was actually the other way around. This infuriated Torn, so he sued Hopper for defamation seeking punitive damages. Torn ultimately prevailed against Hopper on all counts.
Filming
The filming budget of Easy Rider was $360,000 to $400,000 ($ to $ in ). Peter Fonda said that on top of this, he personally paid for the costs of travel and lodging for the crew, saying, "Everybody was taking my credit cards and would pay for all the hotels, the food, the gas, everything with Diner's Club". Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs said that an additional $1 million, "about three times the budget for shooting the rest of the film" was spent on the licensed music tracks that were added during the editing. He already had made two outlaw biker films and suggested that a 1968 Chevy Impala convertible be purchased to carry his camera smoothly, with speeds not exceeding .