According to both Hopper and Fonda, after supplying the title Easy Rider, Southern left the picture. Southern always maintained that he wrote the entire script. Indeed, there exists a full script with Southern’s name on it, covered with his handwriting. In a 1969 interview, Nicholson said, “There was a pretty firm script, but we worked to get that feeling—so it would seem improvised.” Southern also claimed, shortly before his death, that the famous ending was his as well. He says Hopper and Fonda wanted the characters to go off into the sunset. “Dennis Hopper didn’t have a clue as to what the film was about,” he asserted. “When Dennis read it, he said, ‘Are you kidding? Are you going to kill off both of them?” He continued, “In my mind, the ending was to be an indictment of blue-collar America, the people I thought were responsible for the Vietnam War.”
Southern said Fonda and Hopper only got script credit because he did them a favor, called the Writers Guild and pleaded with them to add their names. “Neither of them are writers,” he said. “They can’t even write a fucking letter.” He never received a penny more than the $3,500 he was owed for the script. “It was supposed to be a third, a third, a third,” he added. “I would write, Peter would produce, and Dennis would direct.” The evidence is hopelessly contradictory, but Southern did maintain, “They ignored our agreement.”
Torn believes Hopper simply got rid of him and Southern after using their names to get the ball rolling. He says, “You have a director who’s in your face all the time, doesn’t want you there, does that mean that you dropped out or that you were driven out? I’ve never understood why it was necessary to attempt to destroy a man that only helped the project. Terry died penniless. Let’s give the guy his due.”
In any event, Peter gave half of the newly available points to Bill Hayward, and put the other half into Pando, his production company. When Hopper found out, he confronted them. He was so angry he wanted to push Fonda and Hayward out the window. “We’re supposed to have an equal split,” shouted Hopper. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Then you quit, you quit?” Fonda bellowed in reply.
“No, man, I’ll see you on the set.” According to Hopper, “From that point on, Peter was so paranoid he got bodyguards. Paul Lewis said, ‘Keep him in the fuckin’ trailer.’ So we locked him in his trailer. He screamed and cried and belched, ‘I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’m in the middle of the desert, I’m dying, I can’t work, I need a sandwich,’ it was fucking unbelievable. This complaining, bitching, crying wimp just went on and on. If you could have done anything to try to sabotage the movie, Peter Fonda did it.” (Fonda denies he hired a bodyguard, and Lewis has no recollection of locking him in his trailer.)
Fonda and Hopper’s relationship remained tense throughout the shoot. “I was never afraid of him,” says Fonda. “I was wearing a belt, the primary chain from the motorcycle, chrome. When you’re belted in the face with that motherfucker, you find that’s a skull crusher. At dinner someplace during the shooting Dennis was getting out of line, and I just said, ‘Well, at least I don’t hit women.’ He looked at me and didn’t say anything, because I knew he’d slugged Brooke.”
The production, which traveled to several locations in California and the South, was conducted on a considerably more professional basis than the Mardi Gras circus. Still, Hopper and Fonda broke a lot of rules, used real people picked up along the way, improvised much of the dialogue. If it was cloudy one day and sunny the next, they shot anyway, ignoring the mismatches. If some of the raw film stock had chemical stains on it, no matter. Fonda called it “cinema verité in allegory terms.”
Ironically, Hopper didn’t like bikes. “I can’t stand the goddamn things,” he said. “I was terrified of that bike. I once hit an oil slick on Sunset Boulevard with a chick on the back, and I was in the hospital for ten days. So when I made the movie, every time a shot was done, that bike went right back on the truck.”
Legend has it Nicholson smoked a prodigious number of joints during the shooting of the campfire scene when the three men discuss the prospects of a Venusian invasion. He boasted that he had smoked dope every day for fifteen years, said it slowed down the tempo of his acting.
The film took a little over seven weeks to shoot. Just as they were finishing up, all their motorcycles were stolen from their mechanic’s garage in Simi Valley. They were so out of it that they had the wrap party, and then realized they had forgotten to shoot the second campfire scene, where Captain America says, famously, “We blew it,” so they had to shoot it later. Fonda stared at the fire, thinking, What’s my motivation? My motivation is ‘Hello, you fascist fuck, you’ve blown our big chance.’”
In the editing room, Hopper continued to follow his vision. The French New Wave directors had dispensed with traditional optical effects like dissolves, fades, and so on, because they couldn’t afford them, but their absence created a different aesthetic, gave their films a documentary flavor and speeded up the pacing. Hopper liked that, and he was also influenced by the American underground filmmakers. He refused to discard technical “imperfections” like lens flair* that had always ended up on the cutting room floor, which also lent the film a homemade, amateur look. “It was Bruce Conner’s influence on Dennis that got him to cut as wildly as he did, which was totally against the principles we all had studied, and it seemed free-form and abstract,” says Fonda. “I liked that. One of the reasons I called Hopper from fuckin’ Toronto was that I knew he had the gift, he had the knowledge and ability and I didn’t.”
Some of his ideas were just nutty, Brecht on acid. For example, he wanted to run the credit sequence upside down. According to Bill Hayward, Hopper’s knowledge of editing came from the hot splicing days, where you cut into a frame every time you make a splice, losing the frame in the process. In the ’60s, film editors developed butt splicing, cutting between frames. Consequently he would never cut anything. One day, Hayward asked him to take out a scene: “If we hate it, we’ll stick it back in.” But Hopper stared at him blankly. “Dennis believed,” he continues, “and this was a revelation after we found it out, because he cut for months under this misapprehension—that once you made a cut you couldn’t put anything back. It was absolutely stunning. He was the worst editor that’s ever been.” Worse still, a prestigious French director attended a screening, told Hopper he had created a masterpiece, not to lose a frame. Hopper dug in his heels.
“Every day there was a screening,” recalls Rafelson. “There was an enormous amount of dope floating around, and not very much progress by way of, I’m going to take this out, I’m going to reshape this. It was sort of like, he loved it. Well, the reason he loved it at that length was because everybody who came to those screenings was doped up.” The cut he loved best was four and a half hours long, without the 16mm footage. Hopper was convinced that it should play as a road show, with an intermission, high-priced tickets, reserved seats. “Dennis, there is no fucking way Columbia is going to go for that,” said Hayward. “This is not Lawrence of Arabia! We gotta get this film cut down to a normal length.”
Months and months dragged by, with the film no nearer to completion. Fonda complained to Schneider that Hopper was cutting him out of the movie: “What we have here is a movie called Billy and his friend, Captain America.” Hopper went way past his deadline getting the picture to Pando. Pando was late delivering the picture to Raybert. Raybert was later still getting the film to Columbia. Schneider kept asking, “Where’s the picture? Where’s the picture?” Hayward told him, “Listen, we can’t do any better than this without getting rid of Dennis, because Dennis is still jerking off in the editing room.”
Nobody wanted to be the one to tell Hopper to leave. Says Fonda, “I wasn’t going to, because I was sure that he would try to kill me. And as I refused to pack a pistol just because of Dennis Hopper, I was defenseless against him. He could jump out at me anyplace, get me with a bottle or a knife.” Once again, it was Schneider who made the call. After a year, he finally told Dennis, “T
he film’s too long, we’re not going to destroy your movie, but I want you to take a holiday.” Like everyone else, Hopper found it hard to say no to Bert, and allowed himself to be persuaded to go to Taos for Christmas while they reedited the movie. Bert bought Dennis and his girlfriend, Felicia, first-class tickets to Taos. He told Hopper to work on the fifteen hours of footage from Mardi Gras. “Dennis could go dick with this stuff, fuck around with it forever, think he was doing something, and we could go on and finish the movie,” says Hayward. Adds Brooke, “Bert was the heroic savior of that movie. Without him, there never would have been an Easy Rider.”
Finally, the moment of truth arrived. Hopper was summoned from Taos to view the cut. Hayward ran the picture for him. “I was just horrified by this idea,” he recalls. “I had always managed to somehow avoid Dennis’s horrible temper. But I never wanted to be on the downside of it. We cut the shit out of the movie, from like four hours to ninety-four minutes or whatever. We had seen it in the intervening stages, but he hadn’t. I knew that when the lights came up, he would be pissed; everybody was going to get it, but I would be the principal recipient.” When the screening was over, and Hayward asked, tremulously, “Do you see anything wrong with it?” Hopper screamed, “You ruined my film. You’ve made a TV show out of it.” But he eventually accepted it.
There was a lot of residual ill-feeling. Fonda had told Hopper they’d divvy up the profits, but now Fonda and his company had fifteen and a half points or so, and Hopper only had eleven. Just before they shot the credits, Fonda says Schneider called him into his office. Schneider said, “Hopper wants to take your name off the writing credits.” Fonda thought, Jesus, Dennis, how ‘bout that I just dreamt I was a part of the film and you acted my part too? You know, let’s get serious.” Fonda wanted to just get the film out, was willing to appease Hopper. He said, “I’ll think about it overnight.” The next day he went into Bert’s office and said, “Okay, Bert, you know what I did, Rafelson knows what I did, Nicholson knows, I mean the people who made the movie know. So fuck it, you know. Let him have the credit, just say it’s based on an original story by Peter Fonda, even though I was involved in the entire writing process. Just get him out of my life.” The next day, Bert told him, “He won’t go for it.”
“He won’t go for what?”
“For based on your story.”
“Did he say it was his story?”
“He was yelling a lot about it was all his ideas and his things.”
“I don’t understand. Why can’t he make the compromise if I’m willing to make the compromise?”
“Well, then he wouldn’t be able to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay because it would be screenplay based on a previous story.”
“Fuck him! Shoot the credit like it is in the contract.” The credit reads, “Screenplay by Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Terry Southern.” Hopper then sued Fonda for what he considered his rightful share of the points, but the suit was thrown out of court. Says Fonda, “Hopper will forever believe that I’ve cheated him and that he was the only person who wrote Easy Rider. Dennis has always resented the fact that I hired him, that it wasn’t his own original idea.”
Peter got the new supergroup that had just recorded its first album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, to do the score, and Bert made the deal. But any friend of Peter’s was an enemy of Dennis’s. “I sabotaged that,” Hopper says. “They picked me up in a limo at Columbia, and drove me over, played the music, I told Steve Stills, ‘Look, you guys are really good musicians, but very honestly, anybody who rides in a limo can’t comprehend my movie, so I’m gonna have to say no to this, and if you guys try to get in the studio again, I may have to cause you some bodily harm.” As if that weren’t enough, the group hired a new manager, an ex-agent from William Morris whom Schneider allegedly referred to as “the little asshole.” One day, at the recording studio, David Crosby introduced the manager to Schneider: “This is Bert Schneider. Bert’s the guy who thinks you’re an asshole.” That was it. There was no way Crosby, Stills & Nash’s music was going on the track of Easy Rider. The manager’s name was David Geffen.*
For the most part, Hopper and Fonda just used the music from the temporary soundtrack. This was one of the first times a movie was yoked to the driving power of’60s rock ‘n’ roll, and in the future, rock music would become a major element in films like American Graffiti, Mean Streets, and Apocalypse Now.
BBS screened Easy Rider for the Columbia brass, many of whom had come from New York to see it. After three or four reels, most of them walked out. Blauner, who was still at Screen Gems, went out to dinner at Don the Beachcomber’s, with his boss, Jerry Heims. “He was sitting there like somebody had died, and he smiled like his lips were gonna crack and he was gonna start to bleed,” recalls Blauner. “What’s Bert doin’ to his father?” Heims asked Blauner.
“What’s Bert doin’ to his father? Don’t you understand what you got here?”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“Look, the worst you got is a bike movie, which you paid half a million dollars for. Which will gross $8 to $10 million.”
Columbia may not have known what to make of Easy Rider, but within the counterculture, word began to build. Actor Bruce Dern knew Nicholson from the old days, and was just finishing They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with Jane Fonda. One day, Jane said to him, “Wait’ll you see Peter’s movie, you’re gonna freak out, ‘cause there’s a guy in that movie who is so fantastic, somebody has finally made a good biker movie.”
“Whaddya mean, a biker movie. We made all the biker movies. I did eleven of them. It’s over for biker movies.”
“No, this one’s different.”
“Who’s in it?”
“Dennis, and this guy Jack Nicholson.”
“Jack Nicholson? I gotta pay attention to Jack fuckin’ Nicholson, he’s gonna be a movie star? Sure enough, six months later, he was.”
Bert insisted the picture go to Cannes, where it won an award for the best movie by a new director. Fonda wore the uniform of a Union cavalry general and a bushy fake beard to the premiere. The symbolism was evident to him, if nobody else; it was meant to suggest that he and his generation were engaged in the second Civil War. When it became clear that the movie might be a hit, he quipped that the Columbia executives stopped shaking their heads in incomprehension, and began nodding their heads in incomprehension.
Easy Rider opened on July 14, 1969, at the Beekman, then on Third Avenue and 58th Street in New York. As Blauner recalls, “The management of the Beekman had never seen people like this on the East Side. They were sitting on the sidewalk, no shoes. They had to take the doors off the stalls in the men’s room because people were in there smoking pot.” Easy Rider stunned the counterculture with a shock of recognition.
According to Bill Hayward, the picture cost $501,000. It took in $19.1 million in rentals, a phenomenal return on the investment. Said Hopper happily, “We made all of our money back the first week. In one theater.”
Like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider portrayed rebels, outlaws, and, by extension, the counterculture as a whole, as victims; they were extinguished by the straight world, by LBJ, by Richard Nixon’s silent majority or their surrogates. Easy Rider also shared Bonnie and Clyde’s Oedipal anger at authority in general and parents in particular, most evident in the cemetery sequence. But, also like Bonnie and Clyde, a certain darkness, a premonition of disaster hovered around the edges of the story. There was a spirited debate in the press over what Captain America actually meant when he said, “We blew it.”
The impact of Easy Rider, both on the filmmakers and the industry as a whole, was no less than seismic. Hopper was catapulted into the pantheon of countercultural celebrities that included John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, and Timothy Leary. He was surrounded by groupies and acolytes. He may have started down the slippery slope to megalomania and grandiloquence on his own, but he had plenty of help. Life magazine called him “Hollywood’s hottest director.” He was cr
edited with single-handedly creating “a style of a New Hollywood in which producers wear love beads instead of diamond stickpins and blow grass when they used to chew Coronas.” Along with Southern and Fonda, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Hopper himself credits the picture with putting cocaine on the hippie map. “The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me,” he says. “There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider it was everywhere.”
Hopper was only too happy to discourse on the significance of Easy Rider to anybody who would listen, which was just about everyone. “When we were making the movie, we could feel the whole country burning up—Negroes, hippies, students,” he said. “I meant to work this feeling into the symbols in the movie, like Captain America’s Great Chrome Bike—that beautiful machine covered with stars and stripes with all the money in the gas tank is America—and that any moment we can be shot off it—BOOM—explosion—that’s the end. At the start of the movie, Peter and I do a very American thing—we commit a crime, we go for the easy money. That’s one of the big problems with the country right now: everybody’s going for the easy money. Not just obvious, simple crimes, but big corporations committing corporate crimes.”
To the Hollywood old guard, the good news was that after nearly a decade of floundering, the movies had finally connected, found a new audience. The bad news was that Easy Rider was another slap in the face, more punishing even than Bonnie and Clyde. Unlike Beatty, who was an insider, Hopper and Fonda were renegades, Hollywood-bashers, the Vietcong of Beverly Hills. To them, it was vindication, beating Hollywood at its own game, proof that you could get high, express yourself, and make money all at the same time. In a certain sense, as Buck Henry puts it, Easy Rider was authorless, the automatic handwriting of the counterculture. He says, “Nobody knew who wrote it, nobody knew who directed it, nobody knew who edited it, Rip was supposed to be in it, Jack was in it instead, it looks like a couple of hundred outtakes from several other films all strung together with the soundtrack of the best of the ’60s. But it opened up a path. Now the children of Dylan were in control.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 10