by Lee Hill
Like amateurs prepping a community-theater play, Hopper, Fonda, and company stumbled through the finer points of hiring cast and crew, drawing up contracts, securing locations, and nailing down the script. Many mistakes were made, but the team was rewriting the template for independent feature film production in the process. One of the most famous mishaps occurred when Fonda got the dates for Mardi Gras mixed up, thinking he had a month to spare.
As a result, Fonda, Hopper, Southern, and an ad hoc crew hastily convened in an airport hotel parking lot in New Orleans on February 23. It was a wet and cold morning that began unpromisingly with Fonda and Hopper yelling at each other. Somehow over the next six days, several hours of cinema verité footage of Billy and Wyatt wandering through Mardi Gras was shot. Hopper and Paul Lewis were angry at Fonda and Southern, claiming they had written only three pages of script. Whether this was true or not at the time, it was a moot point. Judging from the paper trail, only three pages were needed—backstory and additional dialogue for the cemetery sequence—since the bulk of the New Orleans footage was essentially second unit work that would eventually be accompanied by a wild track of street noises and music.
Despite Hopper and Lewis’s claims, Southern did supply the following guidelines for the acid trip sequence:
Ghost figures of parades in off colors through multiple optical illusions. Dark areas of umbrellas. In tearing the clinging objects of clothing from her body, MARY finds new freedom from light that bursts from wrought-iron crosses. In the light BILLY and LILA become more piglike in their orgasm and mannerisms. They wallow in the mire and in open tombs. WYATT saints himself by revealing his mother’s death and the tears and the begging for forgiveness and his hate for her having left him in such an early stage of his development. The same time he sits talking to a giant tombed statue of Miss Liberty. He asks to hold her hand. He rocks MARY, still fully clothed, in his black leathers. She, nude, her white body standing out firmly. She tries to remember her rosary, the confessional, from years and years before. She believes she is conceiving the Son of God. She stretches nude as raindrops fall and tear the rounded prism. She reaches forward, hands stretching to the sky. The tears fall and hit her stomach and blur her as if in an impressionistic dream.
Hopper claims that he went off to write his script of Easy Rider when the New Orleans segment was wrapped. But when the production reconvened in Los Angeles, where the drug buy and the commune scenes were staged in Topanga Canyon, cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs clearly remembers it was a Terry Southern script they were given by Hopper.
“We had a very specifically written script by Terry Southern, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda. All the scenes were carefully followed, especially the dialogue sequences after the Jack Nicholson character joins them. It wasn’t just a bunch of stoned guys sitting around a campfire improvising that.”
To add to the increasingly Rashomon-like proceedings, Fonda would assert that Southern withdrew as coproducer because he couldn’t afford to stay on for $350 a week plus expenses and deal with Hopper. (Given that Southern’s next project was another indie, the equally low-budget End of the Road, this explanation seems a tad pat.) However, Fonda does remember returning to New York after the New Orleans shoot to finish the script with Terry. In his memoir, Fonda states that Hopper’s claim that he wrote the script stems from the time when Hopper dictated a portion of “treatment” into a tape recorder. Fonda also says Hopper had the idea of Billy and Captain America at a drive-in watching their own credits. Terry took credit for creating the George Hanson character.
“The idea of meeting a kind of a straight guy, which turned out to be the Jack Nicholson role, was totally up to me,” Southern recalled. “I thought of this Faulkner character, Gavin Stevens, who was the lawyer in this small town. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and Heidelberg, and had come back to this little town to do whatever he could there. So I sort of automatically gave the George Hanson character a similar sympathetic aura. I wrote the part for Rip Torn, who I thought would be ideal for it. When shooting began, we went to New Orleans and Rip was going to come, but he couldn’t get out of this stage commitment.”
Hopper claimed Hanson was inspired by a drinking buddy, Jack Sterritt, who later directed Fonda in Race with the Devil and had attended the University of Texas.
During March and April of 1968, Southern and Fonda finished working on the script. Fonda became increasingly preoccupied with production details, which would include some studio and backlot work in Los Angeles and Topanga Canyon for the brothel and commune scenes, then location work along the Colorado River to Needles, California; Kingman and Flagstaff, Arizona; Taos, New Mexico; and Wichita Falls, Texas. The famous roadside café scene in which Billy, Captain America, and Hanson encounter hostile locals was shot in Morganza, Louisiana, with real hostile locals.
As his work on the script came to a close, Southern grew worried that Fonda and Hopper would discard much of the dialogue for portentous silences and monosyllables. In a letter to Fonda dated April 24, Southern criticized Fonda for the “dumb-bell dialogue” that he had introduced into the brothel scene. “I am certain that you will remember that probably the worst scene in The Trip was the ‘merry-go-round’ scene where Dennis ran off at the mouth, trying to explain things to the audience, instead of to the person he was talking to…whereas one of the very best scenes in the movie was the one in which he was talking exclusively to the other character, i.e., the scene in which you come back to his pad, and he questioned you saying: ‘Man, I can’t tell if you are still high or if you’re putting me on.’”
But as Southern grew increasingly detached from Easy Rider, Fonda and Hopper continued to pare the dialogue down. It was a decision that worked against the characters that Fonda and Hopper were trying to embody. The character that the audience warms up to the most is George Hanson, who doesn’t stop talking during his brief twenty minutes in the film.
Jack Nicholson would turn out to be the script’s (and hence Southern’s) greatest ally. After Torn moved on, Bruce Dern was considered for the part. Burt Schneider persuaded Hopper and Fonda to cast Nicholson instead. The former lifeguard from Neptune, New Jersey, had worked as an office boy in the MGM cartoon department and studied acting under Jeff Corey in the late fifties and early sixties. Nicholson had spent much of the sixties in minor roles in such films as The Raven and Ensign Pulver, but seemed to be having more luck as a scriptwriter with work on Ride in the Whirlwind, The Trip, and Head. By the age of thirty-two, his future as an actor was not encouraging. His only A-list role, as a flower child opposite Barbra Streisand in Vincente Minnelli’s On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever, was strictly paint-by-numbers stuff.
Hopper was reluctant to cast Nicholson because he couldn’t picture him as Hanson, but Schneider’s gut instincts prevailed. When Nicholson arrived in Texas to film his scenes, he knew his lines and carried the script protectively. Nicholson understood George Hanson was Easy Rider’s conscience. The conviction he brought to the part energized the film. Nicholson was also funny and easy to be around—a considerable advantage on a film set that was fraught with constant bickering between Hopper and Fonda.
Southern’s extensive work and input were played down by Hopper and Fonda after Easy Rider’s release in favor of the more exotic notion that the screenplay was largely improvised. Neither man, however, disputed that Southern came up with the title, a gritty colloquialism for a man who lives off the earnings of a whore. The title was a stroke of genius: simple, imagistic, and elusive. It reinforced the basic pitch of two bikers “on the road” but also underscored the idea that America had become lazy and materialistic in its pursuit of money at all costs. Terry’s work on the script of Easy Rider was embarked on in a very sixties spirit of idealism and cooperation. Through a combination of naïveté and indifference on his part, and insecurity and ego on Hopper and Fonda’s, Southern’s work would become reduced to footnote status. Although he was involved with the project practically from the beginning and thro
ugh the beginning of production, Terry found himself almost erased from the film’s history by two men he considered friends. Easy Rider became the gig that launched a thousand bad vibes.
As Easy Rider began shooting in earnest, Southern kept busy with a variety of projects. In addition to completing the novel Blue Movie, he and Larry Rivers began talking about a collaboration called The Donkey and the Darling for lithographer Tanya Grossman and her specialized press, Universal Art Limited Editions. The Donkey and the Darling was a children’s story that Southern had been playing around with since his days in Geneva.
Southern was also working on the final drafts of The Magic Christian screen adaptation for Peter Sellers. And as if this weren’t enough, he and Aram Avakian were meeting regularly about The End of the Road, an adaptation of the John Barth novel. Max L. Raab, a garment manufacturer in Greenwich Village and friend of Si Litvinoff, had raised a modest half-million dollars to independently produce the film. It was during this busy summer period that Terry decided to grow a beard and eschew the clean-shaven jacket-and-tie urban hipster look of his generation. He began to wear a silver chain with a peace symbol and jeans with a matching jacket.
As End of the Road began to gear up for a late summer shoot, Terry was approached by Esquire to cover the Chicago Democratic Convention along with William Burroughs, Jean Genet (a last-minute substitute for Samuel Beckett), and John Sack. It didn’t take a psychic to intuit that the convention was going to be an event of some historical significance. After the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, racial tensions were literally aflame in America’s inner cities. Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for a second term, leaving the Democrats to decide between Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, whose liberal pieties and good intentions seemed beside the point in an increasingly fragmented and disillusioned political climate. Many Americans were finding the rise of baby-boomer counterculture about as comforting as a constantly mutating virus. Richard Nixon, the candidate who wouldn’t die, along with his running mate, Spiro Agnew, was getting raves from the Silent Majority for his law-and-order platform. Before the convention started, the United States had resumed a bombing campaign in Vietnam.
Southern flew to Chicago with Gail during the weekend of August 26–28. He would be paid $1,250 and expenses. At the Sheraton Hotel, he met up with his fellow correspondents and Richard Seaver, who was acting as Genet’s translator. Michael Cooper was on hand to take photos. This group would offer their impressions of the convention that many pundits anticipated would be an epic standoff between police, hippies, Yippies, and middle-of-the-road liberals. John Berendt, an Esquire editor who later achieved bestsellerdom with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, accompanied this motley crew as a kind of chaperon. For Southern, the assignment would become his last venture into the New Journalism he had helped to pioneer.
“Going there wasn’t our idea. The magazine may have known something,” recalled Southern in 1993. “We had no idea it would be that dangerous. I got hit on the head and back a couple of times. You have no idea how wild the police were. They were just totally out of control. I mean, it was a police riot, that’s what it was.”
On Saturday, August 24, Southern joined Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs at a massive gathering at Grant Park. A lot of the time he was hunkered down in the bar of the Chicago Sheraton riffing on the crazy scene beyond the glass and getting drunk. Southern called Genet “Jean-Jacques Genet.” Genet called him “Folamour,” the French word for Strangelove. Despite the dark mood in the streets, there was a convivial school-outing spirit among the Esquire team, which went out to the airport to see the arrival of Eugene McCarthy on Sunday, August 25.
On Monday evening, a group of 3,000 or more young people, some claiming to be members of the Youth International Party or Yippie movement founded that year by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, refused to leave Grant Park at closing time. Southern and his Esquire team joined the group marching on police barricades. At approximately 12:30, the police charged on the marchers with tear gas and clubs. This led to chaos, with crowds fleeing into Clark Street, where they encountered police more than ready to use their clubs. In fleeing the scene with Genet, Berendt and Seaver knocked on a door and took refuge with a University of Chicago student working on a dissertation about Genet. On Monday morning, at a protest hosted by Ed Sanders, Southern, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Genet read statements condemning the police riot. An afternoon march at Grant Park led to another round of police violence.
Michael Cooper took a famous picture of Burroughs, Southern, and Ginsberg walking along a bridge into Grant Park. Ginsberg recalled the event as follows: “Burroughs on my right looking young and lighting up a cigarette, Terry and I practically arm to arm. I’ve got a little shoulder bag and to my left there’s Genet and behind him a monitor for the peace march. A barefoot kid, probably a nature boy, walks behind. David Dellinger had asked for a peaceable march and for those who wanted a violent thing to separate out and go somewhere else. I think I had lost my voice chanting earlier through tear gas. The night before, the Chicago police had tear-gassed the cross which a group of priests had raised in Lincoln Park. My own speech had been a sort of croaked ‘ohm,’ prefaced by some remarks explaining the use of the mantra. My intention was to unite and co-ordinate everybody’s attention and calm everyone down. So I was probably talking to Terry Southern about the importance of keeping calm and not escalating the anxiety and violence. Jean Genet is probably thinking about the blue pants of the soldiers or the police, and Burroughs is probably considering which riot sounds on his tape recorder would recreate psychic conditions for further escalation of hysteria.”
The convention was one of many ideological turning points in 1968, in which no one—liberal, pacifist, radical, law-and-order patriot—came out looking good. Twenty percent of registered Democrats deserted the party following the debacle. While the Yippies had captured the media spotlight, their two founders, Hoffman and Rubin, would become embroiled in a long, protracted trial along with Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner.
Southern’s piece on the convention, “Groovin’ in Chi,” was delivered promptly. It would be his last contribution to Esquire. Describing himself as “the anchor man,” Southern seems at a rare loss to find the right tone for the piece. On one hand, he accurately describes the police reaction to the young protesters in Grant Park as “a phenomenon somewhat unexpected, which we were to observe consistently throughout the days of violence—that rage seemed to engender rage; the bloodier and the more brutal the cops were, the more their fury increased.” Yet the truncated nicknames, such as Big Dave for Dellinger, and the reference to Ginsberg as “that loony fruit” reduce much of Southern’s outrage to mere slapstick. The carefully modulated irony of “Twirling at Ole Miss” is absent. Instead, Southern seems to be struggling between turning his observations into a routine and recording his sense of ineffectiveness. Toward the end, he describes himself sitting with William Styron and John Marquand in the hotel bar aware that “there was a certain undeniable decadence in the way we sat there, drinks in hand, watching the kids in the street getting wiped out.” More of that candid self-examination would have made “Groovin’ in Chi” another classic Southern piece.
To be fair, none of the other Esquire pieces had the immediacy of the live TV news footage. Genet’s “Member of the Assembly” eventually sank into a murk of obscurantism. Burroughs’s “The Coming of the Purple Better One” was a cut-up that made use of Robert Ardrey’s theories of animal and human violence. The conceit was intriguing, but shed little light on the long-term implications of the convention. John Sack’s “In a Pig’s Eye” attempted to understand why the police reacted with such hostility toward the crowds (many of whom were registered convention delegates). The piece was written from a Chicagoan’s point of view after numerous interviews with police, but lacked a sense of direction. Esquire’s convention team looked great in pictures and on the cover of the magazine,
but their respective accounts were far from definitive. As commentary, Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago was more rigorous in its inquiry into the growing schism between left and right, mainstream and counterculture, while Haskell Wexler’s dazzling film Medium Cool used a mix of fiction and documentary footage of the rioting in an almost visionary way to capture the surrealistic tension between competing visions of America.
The agony of a country tearing itself apart, which Southern witnessed at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, became an explicit part of End of the Road when it began principal photography in September and October of 1968. Whereas his Esquire piece rambled, End of the Road was cold and unrelenting in its analysis of crisis and disillusionment.
Adapted from John Barth’s first novel, published in 1958, Southern and Avakian’s film is faithful to the book’s distanced narrative. Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach), a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins, is found in a state of catatonia on a rail station platform by Doctor D (James Earl Jones), who takes him to his Remobilization Farm, a combination mental hospital, commune, and experimental lab, where Esalen meets A Clockwork Orange. In his examination room, Doctor D bombards Horner with a variety of stimuli, from shouting abuse to role-playing and flashing slides of sex, pop art, and Vietnam. The doctor also introduces Horner to the other patients, a motley crew of psychopaths, obsessives, and fetishists. These unorthodox methods shake Horner back to something resembling consciousness. In order to complete his recovery, Horner is instructed to get a normal job and avoid personal and political engagement, and finds work at a small college teaching prescriptive English grammar. He becomes friends with a senior professor, Joe Morgan (Harris Yulin) and his wife, Rennie (Dorothy Tristan). Joe is a narcissistic tyrant who humiliates and starves Rennie of real affection and friendship. In response, Horner, as if preprogrammed, embarks on an affair with Rennie. When she becomes pregnant, she decides she doesn’t want to have the baby or leave her husband. Horner, with little conviction, arranges an abortion performed by Doctor D, who accidentally kills Rennie on the operating table and is reduced to the same catatonic immobility that Horner was lost in at the beginning of the film. All the characters, not just the aimless Horner, find there are indeed limits to the politics of self.