 Starring: Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack NicholsonDirector: Dennis Hopper Year Of Release: 1969 Plot: After selling some dope in Los Angeles and stashing the money in the gas tank of their motorcycles, two counterculture hippies head off towards New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Along the way they discover a few other people trying to find a way to live a non-conformist life, but also face a lot of bigotry from small town folk who hate them on principle. |
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In the annals of film history, Easy Rider really is a very important movie, even if it achieved that more by accident than design. Many credit it as the start of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, when the studios, almost in desperation, started experimenting with new subjects and styles, after realising the template had served them well for 30 years, was no longer exciting audiences and that the movie industry was in freefall. The studio system had ended in the 1960s, but Hollywood hadnt found a successful new model to fill the void, with the result that nearly all the major studios had faced bankruptcy in the previous few years, and the old guard whod built and run the studios for decades had either had to sell up or hand control to others.
However Easy Rider, along with the likes of Bonnie & Clyde, were more prototypes than anything else, which hinted to Hollywood there might be money to be made from changing the way they did business and handing the reins to a new generation of filmmakers.
Easy Rider was one of the most successful movies of 1969, which really did shock the establishment, as to them it was a nothing, arty road movie about hippies. The thinking at the time was that in order to make cash from films, you had to make movie that were safe and appealed to as many people as possible. The counter-culture that Easy Rider explored seemed to be the complete opposite of that after all, it was a counter-culture because it ran contrary to the way most people thought, and anyway, hippies werent exactly renowned for spending cash and filling cinemas. The idea of a film being a big hit that seemed to be deliberately designed for only a subsection of the population seemed almost nonsensical at the time, but has since become the norm.
Despite going completely against the grain of everything Hollywood believed worked, Easy Rider made $60 million around the world by 1972, which was serious money at the time, especially considering it only cost $400,000 to make. In the US, the movie outgrossed many of the studios big 1969 offerings such as Hello Dolly!, Paint Your Wagon and True Grit (in which Hopper also starred, with the volatile actor allegedly angering John Wayne so much that he chased Hopper while holding a gun). That, combined with the fact that Midnight Cowboy was an even bigger hit that year and went on to win the Best Picture Oscar, as well as that the decidedly unusual (for the time) western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the biggest film of the year, really made the studios take stock and realise they needed to do things differently. As a result over the next few years they started investing in new talent like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, allowing them to go off and make movies in a new style, rather than rigidly enforcing an old-fashioned studio template on them.
However the success of Easy Rider really was more luck than judgement, as its a miracle the film worked at all. At the time the film was made, Dennis Hoppers career was in a fairly precarious position. After early success as a Warner Brothers contract player in the likes of Rebel Without A Cause and Giant, hed gained a reputation for being a loose cannon, who was difficult to work with, always thought he knew best, was unreliable (usually because of the amount of narcotics he was experimenting with) and incredibly volatile. He was still getting decent roles, but there was a growing feeling that life was a lot easier without him around.
And Hopper really was volatile. For Easy Rider, Rip Torn was originally cast in the role eventually filled by Jack Nicholson, but things fell apart when Hopper pulled a knife on the actor during a meeting (Hopper later tried to turn it around and say it was Torn who pulled the knife, which rather backfired when Rip sued for defamation and won). At the time he was not an easy man to work for.
Nevertheless Hopper was convinced he could make a movie about the counter-culture and the life him and many of his friends were exploring. Yet despite the fact that by the late 60s hed been in the business for two decades and knew exactly how movies work, his determination to do things differently resulted in a project that could easily have been a disaster.
While the films script is co-credited between Hopper, Peter Fonda and Terry Southern (it was Fonda who came up with the initial idea, getting Hopper involved when he promised him he could direct), the film didnt really have a screenplay. In fact for most of the time it didnt have much more than a vague outline. The way it largely worked was that as Hopper and Fonda travelled around, they tended to improvise scenes as they went, with new scenarios invented and dropped, with the hope it would all eventually work out.
The movie didnt even have a proper crew or cast, at least initially, with Hopper picking up people at Hippie communes, getting passersby to hold the camera, and finding people to fill roles as they went along (which due to the fact they didnt have a script, perhaps isnt that surprising, because you could hardly pre-cast role you hadnt decided you needed yet). So, for example, the rednecks who taunt Hopper and Fonda in a coffee shop were all local residents the director found in the place they decided to shoot. Likewise, the rather rough and ready style meant that most of the time they didnt seek permission to shoot in various locations, merely turning up and setting up the camera. This annoyed quite a lot of people, not least the Catholic Church, who were so annoyed Hopper had used New Orleans St. Louis #1 cemetery as a location without permission, that they havent allowed anyone to film there ever since, unless its for a documentary.
After the New Orleans part of the shoot, Hopper and Fonda did eventually get a proper crew, as the people whod been drafted in, some of whom were experienced in film but most who werent, had become mired in arguments and fights, which threatened to destroy everything.
It didnt help either that the laissez faire filming style meant that much of the drug use in the film wasnt faked. Although they didnt really take LSD during the acid trip scenes (realising that would be too much to handle), it was all real marijuana, and both Hopper and Fonda spent most of the shoot completely stoned out of their noodles.
It really was a recipe for disaster, and the fast and loose, made-up-as-we-go style initially resulted in a film that was over three hours long. Realising this was a bit excessive, he hacked it down to around 90 minutes, creating a road movie that is far more cohesive and spirited than perhaps it ever should have been.
Quite how lucky it was that Easy Rider worked was revealed in the years following the films release, as both Hopper and others tried to capitalise on the fact that now studios were prepared to bankroll unusual directors and let them go off and do their own thing. This resulted in things like the ill-fated first version of Francis Ford Coppolas American Zoetrope, which was virtually a filmmaking commune, but collapsed amidst battling egos, a raft of underperforming films, and a far bigger vision than it had the practical tools to achieve (Ill hopefully write more about Zoetrope some other time, as it is interesting).
As for Hopper, buoyed by the success of Easy Rider and convinced that he was some sort of visionary, he was given a bunch of cash by Universal studios and let loose to make The Last Movie. The was part of a very New Hollywood programme by Universal Studio, which was set up to make films for under a million dollars that appealed to the youth market, but which gave the directors free reign, final cut and a share of profits. Although the programme didnt last that long partly due to The Last Movie it did produce the likes of George Lucas American Graffiti, Peter Fondas first film as a director, The Hired Hand, Silent Running and Two-Lane Blacktop.
Due to the fact nobody in the film industry knew quite how Hopper had made Easy Rider work (and probably neither did he), they just left him to it, with the actor/director heading off to Peru to make The Last Movie. The film had been a pet project of Hoppers for years, but nobody had been interested before Easy Rider, and now he found himself with enough money and perhaps more freedom than he should have had, particularly considering he was becoming increasingly dependent on drink and drugs. The result was that he filmed for months and months, with Universal unsure what he was doing, eventually ending up with over 40 hours of footage.
He then holed himself up in Mexico for ages, putting the movie together, still not telling the studio that was bankrolling it what he was actually doing, and missing every deadline he was given. Indeed he was so keen to keep Universal out of the loop, that he screened it at the Venice Film Festival before he showed it to his backers, even though by that point the final cut was over six months past when it was due to be delivered. Although it won a prize in Venice, when Universal did eventually see The Last Movie, their worst fears about what they had already come to see as an out of control production were confirmed, as they found it utterly incomprehensible.
Interestingly, it appears that originally Hopper, under pressure from the studio to deliver the film, was going to produce a relatively straightforward cut in terms of storytelling. However his friend, the cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, mocked him for it, saying he was compromising his original intentions. As a result Hopper went back and created a far stranger and more disjointed film, which left Universal scratching its head, but which the director thought was visionary.
Despite the promise of giving him final cut, the studio told him that if he didnt re-cut The Last Movie, it would only get a limited release in the US and never be seen in Europe. The volatile Hopper absolutely refused, which sparked a feud with Universal studio exec Lew Wasserman that lasted for decades. As a result, the film got a two week run in New York and was screened in a few other cinemas, but it failed to make any money, and that was it. That wasnt just Universal teaching Hopper a lesson, as it wasnt just them who found the film utterly perplexing, but as theyd given the director final cut, they couldnt do anything about it.
Although the success of Easy Rider had seen Hopper cautiously embraced by an industry that wasnt quite sure about him, his action of The Last Movie led to his virtual exile. He didnt direct another movie until 1980s Out Of The Blue, partly because hed been jaded by his experiences on The Last Movie, but largely because absolutely nobody had any desire to hand Hopper any money when they knew how hed been with Universal. Likewise, Easy Rider should have ensured he was in-demand as an actor, but his drug problems, volatile temper and bad reputation meant he could barely get paid to make the tea in Hollywood movies. Instead he had to make do with minor, often unnamed roles in small film, with his biggest starring role during the 1970s coming from going to Germany to star in Wim Wenders The American Friend. Even though he appears in Apocalypse Now, his star had sunk so low that while hes perfect for the role, his character doesnt even have a name. Hopper’s career didn’t really get back on track until the mid-80s, around the time of Blue Velvet.
As Hollywood quickly learned, there was a lot of money to be made from counter-culture, youth skewing movies, and while Hopper helped start this, he also became its first big casualty. For Hollywood, it was almost as important for them to learn from The Last Movie that handing young directors cash and then sending them off into the wild with no oversights was as likely to result in a disaster as a triumph. Over the next few years they took the lessons learned and fashioned a new business model, where the director was more central than they had been in the old days of Hollywood (back in the Golden Age producers had all the power), but that the backers still got to retain control of the production.
Hopper became both shining light and cautionary tale. Theres little doubt true artistic freedom can result in something as fresh and free-wheeling as Easy Rider a movie that could never have been made under the studio system, but equally it can result in disasters like The Last Movie. With movies costing so much money to make, Hollywood decided it couldnt risk the flops to get a few truly special hits, and so through the 70s, they learned what worked and what didnt and took back control. Following the likes of Easy Rider, Hollywood was never the same again, but it certainly didnt lead to the looser, egalitarian style the movie aimed for.
TIM ISAAC
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