by Lee Hill
Before coming to France, Peter had been promoting The Trip, directed by Roger Corman for American International Pictures, at Showrama, a convention of North American exhibitors, in Toronto. He had gotten the idea for a modern Western while relaxing in his hotel room on September 27, 1967. Not surprisingly, Fonda had been smoking dope at the time. In his pleasant haze, the iconographic beauty of a publicity still of him and Bruce Dern standing in front of motorcycle bikes from another Corman film, The Wild Angels, began to mesmerize him. Gradually his musing coalesced into a high-concept epiphany. Let’s make a modern Western with two hip guys on bikes instead of old movie stars on horses!
Upon his return from Toronto, Fonda called Dennis Hopper and described his idea for a different kind of biker film. Hopper needed something to enthuse about. His marriage to Brooke Hayward was floundering. He had a not entirely undeserved reputation for drinking and drug taking combined with on-the-set histrionics. Through his interest in photography and collecting art, Hopper was becoming intrigued by directing (Corman had let him shoot second unit footage for The Trip) and was considering becoming an acting coach.
Fonda’s pitch for his hybrid biker Western, initially dubbed The Loners or Mardi Gras before Southern came on board, captivated Hopper. Without really knowing why, Hopper understood Fonda’s idea was a way to break out of their respective career doldrums. During a series of manic planning sessions where the two men paced up and down Fonda’s tennis court, they idealistically divided duties. They would both star. Fonda would produce and Hopper would direct. Hopper’s brother-in-law and a childhood friend of Fonda, Bill Hayward, came on board as coproducer. Pando Productions was formed to create an air of seriousness as they went ahead in the search for financing. Fonda also says he and Hopper approached Torn before meeting Terry in France.
Southern’s response to Fonda’s new project was enthusiastic: “That’s a great story. I’m your man.” Fonda was apprehensive about hiring Southern as his screenwriter. His mid-sixties fee was now $100,000 per script (although nobody could figure out what the hell Southern was doing with the money). But Terry said he would agree to work for scale, roughly $350 per week, in order to lend Hopper and Fonda’s independent production the legitimacy of a name screenwriter. There was also well-intentioned but vaguely defined talk of Terry sharing in the film’s profits.
Although the impetus for Easy Rider came from Peter, he admitted in his 1998 memoir, Don’t Tell Dad, that: “Terry was certainly doing more than just putting an idea into script form. The first thing he did when we began working was give the story a proper title. He explained to me what ‘easy rider’ meant. Perfect. This was going to be a humdinger. Terry fucking Southern! He’d come to Roscoff straight from Rome and a screening of Barbarella to help with the final editing stages and now he was drawn into the possibilities of our little low-budget motion picture.”
By late November, Fonda, Hopper, and Southern began meeting at Litvinoff’s West Fifty-fifth Street office in New York for regular story conferences. The conferences would spill over in the evening to Southern’s town house on East Thirty-sixth Street. Fonda would crash in the spare bedroom on the third floor. Hopper and Fonda would talk animatedly while Southern made occasional comments and made notes on his favorite yellow legal pad. These handwritten pages were given to a secretary to type up. According to Southern, Hopper and Fonda’s idea for a movie was still embryonic:
“The first notion was that it be these barnstorming cars, stunt driver cars, where they do flips and things, but that just seemed too unnecessarily complicated. So we just settled for the straight score of dope, selling it and leaving the rat race. We forgot about the daredevil drivers, which is a commonplace thing. It was going to be this troupe who play a few dates and places and eventually get fed up with that and make this score. Finally, we forwent any pretense of them doing anything else than buying cocaine. We didn’t specify that it was cocaine, but that’s what it would be. They go to New Orleans to sell it. Then once they got their money, they ride to coastal Florida or someplace like Key West where they could buy a boat cheap, not in New Orleans, because it would be too expensive.”
Fonda and Hopper related the concept to Southern verbally during the story meetings. Their conversations became the basis for the initial treatment and screenplay Southern wrote through December and April of 1967–68. The script, which went through two drafts, contained vividly detailed camera directions and lots of dialogue. In the final film, the dialogue would be pared down and several episodes abandoned or left on the cutting-room floor, but the visual strategy, the backstory and narrative, remained the same as it was in Southern’s script.
Two stunt riders, Billy and Wyatt a.k.a. Captain America (to be played by Hopper and Fonda, respectively) buy cocaine in Mexico and sell it for a profit to a big dealer in Los Angeles. With their big score hidden in Wyatt’s gas tank, the two travel through the southern United States from Los Angeles toward Key West. During their ill-defined journey, they encounter a startling contrast of groups representing America at the end of the sixties—ranchers, rednecks, commune dwellers, etc. In a nondescript Texas town, they are briefly jailed for riding in on the end of a civic parade. In the cell next door, they meet George Hanson, a good ole boy turned ACLU lawyer who is recovering from one of his regular drinking binges. Hanson joins Billy and Wyatt on their trip so he can visit a mythic New Orleans brothel, Madame Tinkertoy’s, but Hanson is killed when the trio’s campsite is ambushed by a group of locals. Arriving in New Orleans, Billy and Wyatt drop in at Madame Tinkertoy’s out of respect for Hanson. They hire two prostitutes and take in the Mardi Gras bacchanal. The four take an LSD tab that was given to Wyatt at the commune. Their acid trip culminates in a terrifying series of hallucinations in a cemetery. In the script’s final scene, Wyatt and Billy are back on the road traveling faster toward their dream in Key West. Two men in a pickup drive by. Intending only to scare the two “longhairs,” their shotgun blast accidentally hits Billy and he crashes. As Wyatt rides back to assist his fallen comrade, the pickup circles back. Wyatt is also gunned down. The gasoline tank on his bike explodes and both script and film end with:
LONG SHOT from above as the old pickup truck turns around again and drives down the desolate highway leaving in the ditch, the two bodies and the wounded chrome bike, which as distance lengthens, continues to burn with a small bright glow.
According to Fonda, the story sessions in New York were a manic and volatile hothouse of brainstorming. Hopper and Southern had the idea of going to a whorehouse in honor of Hanson’s dying wishes, says Fonda. Michael Cooper was there, says Fonda, when a now legendary “missing tape” of Fonda and Hopper talking out the entire story was made. Southern came up with the ending in which the two bikers are gunned down by two good ole boys in a pickup. The tape was transcribed by a secretary, says Fonda, and edited to a twenty-one-page treatment. This treatment and the now lost tape were used to secure financing.
Southern says one of the secretaries at the Fifty-fifth Street office was also a devotee of UFOs. She apparently entertained Hopper, Fonda and Southern with her fervent belief in flying saucers and secret bases in Mexico. Southern worked some of her conversation into George Hanson’s famous campfire speech. Hopper says the UFO soliloquy by Hanson came out of his readings of a book by George Adamski.
The script, however, was still unfinished in January 1968, when Fonda and Bill Hayward took the treatment and a tape to a series of meetings in Los Angeles. One stop in Fonda’s search for a production deal was Samuel Arkoff at AIP, which had financed most of his biker flicks. Arkoff, a strong believer in low overhead and short-term gains, passed. A few days later, Fonda met up with Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, whose Raybert company had created The Monkees TV show. Raybert agreed to a $360,000 budget in exchange for a third of the film’s profits. Columbia, where Schneider had important connections through his father, Abe, and brother, Stanley, would distribute the film on a pickup basis. Schneider and Rafelson advanced Pa
ndo (Hayward and Fonda’s company) $40,000 to complete preproduction.
As Easy Rider gathered momentum, the film version of Candy had started shooting at Rome’s Incom Studios in December 1967. The baton had been passed from Frank Perry to French actor and Marlon Brando pal Christian Marquand, best known to North Americans for supporting roles in The Longest Day and Flight of the Phoenix. Southern was friendly with Marquand and initially gave his blessing to the actor’s efforts to put Candy Christian on the big screen. Marquand had directed one film, Les Grands Chemins, in 1962, but the new backer, ABC Pictures, came on board mainly because of Brando agreeing to star. Brando’s involvement consolidated the participation of James Coburn, Richard Burton, Ringo Starr, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Walter Matthau in well-paying cameos. Southern had originally hoped either Hayley Mills or Jane Fonda would play Candy, but under the rationale that the auteur knows best, Marquand decided Ewa Aulin, a recent Miss Sweden, would give the role a more universal appeal. It was at this stage that Southern parted ways with Marquand.
Marquand then brought in Buck Henry, who had just completed The Graduate with Mike Nichols, to write a new adaptation. Henry, who would get to know Southern on a casual but friendly basis in later years, described the shoot as follows: “I didn’t know anything about Terry’s screenplay of Candy although I think I heard he’d written one. I never talked to Terry about it although I heard he didn’t think very highly of the film. But then, neither did I. Marquand was a friend of mine and has remained so through the years…. I was still writing the screenplay while he was shooting. Inspite of the result, a good time was had by all.”
The seventeen-year-old Aulin was blond, beautiful, and generally naive, but she could not act. Her halting English did little to disguise her modest acting talent. Aulin found the Candy shoot a harrowing initiation into the seedier aspects of big-time moviemaking. Brando and other cast and crew members took turns propositioning her. After Candy, she appeared in Bud Yorkin’s Start the Revolution Without Me opposite Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland and then it was a few Z-grade Italian horror films and obscurity.
Candy was released to almost universally bad reviews in December 1968. Time compared Henry’s screenplay to “scrawlings on a cave wall.” Many of the reviews seized upon the film’s shortcomings as an opportunity to take potshots at the source material. The novel’s daring episodic simplicity was seen as a demonstration of its shallowness rather than an example of big-budget filmmaking at its most reckless and wasteful. Southern’s attempts to distance himself from the film were only partially successful. Middlebrow tastemakers like Richard Corliss would cite Candy and the forthcoming Magic Christian film as examples that Southern’s satire was now becoming old-hat.
In defense of the movie, one could at least argue that it wasn’t boring. With its garish sets and multiple cameos, the film unfolded like a series of car accidents viewed in slow motion. Richard Burton is amusing as the pompous Professor Mephesto. James Coburn seems genuinely crazed wielding a giant hypodermic. Anita Pallenberg looks life-threatening as a leather-clad nurse. And for fans of Brando in autodestruct mode, Brando’s embarrassing turn as a libidinous guru is one for the record books. Like Michael Sarne’s equally weird and awful adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, Candy keeps one watching in stunned disbelief at good people making bad film. If Southern and Hoffenberg’s novel was an artful burlesque of liberal and conservative assumptions about sex, the movie was a kind of “so bad it’s good” case study of the worst pretensions of the European art film and the crass greed of a studio system in decline.
The writing of Easy Rider was energized by the decade’s shift from the Summer of Love’s blissed-out optimism to 1968’s raging nihilism. The Tet offensive gave greater weight to the growing sense that the U.S. government was fighting a war in Vietnam it didn’t understand. Lyndon Johnson’s dream of a Great Society that would reinvent the New Deal for the country’s inner cities failed to achieve bipartisan support. More left-leaning, antiwar Democrats were finding it harder to accept LBJ’s blueprints for a welfare state in the face of the escalation in military spending. In France, clashes between the government and various student-worker coalitions culminated in strikes, sit-ins, and ugly rioting. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring that brought a human face to communism was about to end as the Soviets authorized a police action. It was a year in which mainstream and countercultural notions of order seemed on the verge of meltdown.
The world seemed to be going mad. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, their deaths provoking despair among whites and outbursts of understandable fury among blacks. Each day seemed to bring new magazine, newspaper, and television images of fires, barricades, fighting, protests, shouting, and so many angry, contorted faces. Two of the most popular songs of the year, “Hey Jude” by the Beatles and “Those Were the Days” by Mary Hopkin, tried to counter the black days with evocations of communal joy and nostalgia.
In the February issue of Ramparts, Southern signed a petition protesting the Vietnam War and announced his refusal to pay taxes. It was a well-intentioned act of protest, but the sad reality was that Southern had not been paying taxes since he started making crazy money in Hollywood. His lawyer and business manager, Si Litvinoff, tried to advise him, but it was an uphill struggle working with a client who believed money was meant to be spent.
“When money came in I would take care of bills with his approval, but he was on a short leash…[unless] there were some expenses he needed [to pay for]. When he came back from Dr. Strangelove he took me and Peter Duchin, who had taken him out before, to the Russian Tea Room. I’ll never forget it. He said to the waiter, ‘I want that chicken where you shoot the needle through it!’—which is chicken Kiev. And he turned to us and said, ‘From now it’s first class all the way, first class all the way!’…Terry could spend but he was on a short leash with me in terms of the cash he was given; he managed to spend it, but not crazily.”
Carol Southern remembers things differently and wishes Litvinoff had been more diligent. Although they were separated, Terry was generous with financial support for his estranged wife and son. As Terry’s expectations of the high life rose and his spending increased exponentially, Carol was becoming frantic about whether enough money was being set aside for tax purposes. “I remember bursting into tears on the telephone with Si and saying, ‘You’ve got to do this or there’s going to be terrible trouble.’ It just goes to show that recognizing something is wrong doesn’t mean you can prevent it from happening.” Carol believes Litvinoff was too impressed by the movie business and she recalls him playing down her fears by saying, “The guy’s never had a chance to enjoy himself. For God’s sake, let the guy live a little!”
“I was so worried about this that I persuaded Terry to change accountants,” recalls Carol. “Because [songwriter] Jerry Leiber always had money I thought maybe he should use Leiber’s accountant. This was as big a mistake as using Si. This accountant was a very straight arrow and he filed these taxes for 1966–67, but there was no money to pay. So he filed the returns without a check. And Si later said he would have made a deal with the government if I hadn’t done that. So I compounded the problem…. And that started Terry’s terrible financial problems.”
Despite Carol’s concern and Litvinoff’s advice, which had served clients like Jack Gelber well, Southern continued spending money as if he were Guy Grand. He often carried a thick roll of bills in his pocket. Its presence prompted Southern to sudden sprees of largesse such as picking up the check in the Russian Tea Room for ten people or giving various friends and acquaintances “loans” (a word synonymous with “gift” in the Southern lexicon). He gambled a lot and often lost. He acted like someone anointed by Hollywood with a special kind of grace instead of just another scribe whose status was determined by commercial considerations rather than aesthetic ones.
The year 1968 was when the cash flow began to slow down. The IRS cloud would descend on Terry three times: fir
st in 1968, then in the eighties, and finally in 1992, when the IRS placed a lien on his Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider residuals. It took the better part of the seventies to pay off the first tax bill. The second was settled in 1988 with an offer of compromise. The final lien was removed after Southern’s death in 1995.
Whereas Barbarella had been a big-money gig, Easy Rider was strictly Indiesville. Neither Fonda, Hopper, Rafelson, Schneider, nor Southern had a clue the little film they were preparing would become a phenomenon. According to Gail Gerber, Terry was paid a mere $3,900 for his work on Easy Rider. He would receive residuals (usually fifty to one hundred dollars a year) from film rentals and TV screenings of the film, but nothing compared with the money he would have gained from even a single profit point in the film.
After Fonda had secured the deal with Raybert, he returned to New York to finish the script with Terry. Fonda and Hopper’s relationship was growing more tense and fractured. As the director, Hopper believed the film would be written in the process of filming the road trip. In preparation, he and Paul Lewis, the film’s production manager, took off for a two-week location scouting trip in late January/early February.
Back in New York, Hopper turned up at a restaurant where Fonda, Southern, and Rip Torn were gathered. Torn had been the first choice to play George Hanson. The actor was lukewarm about the film because he found Hopper too much of a loose cannon, and two upcoming theater projects, a James Baldwin play and Jack Gelber’s controversial The Cuban Thing, were probably going to interfere with his availability. When Hopper began to rant about the Southern rednecks he encountered on his trip, Torn, a Texan like Southern, began to politely disagree. This further enraged Hopper and the two got into an argument that almost reached the point of a fistfight. Things eventually cooled down, but Hopper’s flare-up convinced Torn to withdraw his involvement. Since no contracts had been signed and the project was still far from being cast, there appeared to be no hard feelings.