‘Easy Rider’ turns 50: Secrets of the counterculture classic
“A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.”
That was the tagline to “Easy Rider,” the beloved buddy pic that starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as a Harley-riding hippie duo who meet a boozy lawyer, played by Jack Nicholson, in prison.
It’s been 50 years since the movie first hit the big screen, and, in the decades since its release, the movie has become a classic of American cinema.
Here, five facts that even film geeks might not know about it.
The movie was truly made in the moment
The plot for “Easy Rider,” was outlined in the screenplay, but a good deal of the dialogue was ad-libbed on set. “[The] improvisation was always within the framework of the obligations of the scene — a scene which already existed,” Terry Southern, who wrote the screenplay with Fonda and Hopper, told The Paris Review before his death in 1995.
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The drug use is real
In 2009, Peter Fonda confirmed the longstanding rumor that he, Nicholson and Hopper really did inhale during the film’s pot-smoking campfire scene. “Man that stuff burned,” he told ExtraTV. The acid the actors drop in a New Orleans cemetery, however, was faked. “We did not take LSD, no matter what the rumors say,” said Fonda, “You can’t make a movie when you’re ripped like that.”
It never would’ve happened without The Monkees
Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider created “The Monkees,” and the financial success of the pop band and its TV show funded their film studio, BBS Productions, which made “Easy Rider.” BBS also made several other influential films of the era, including “Five Easy Pieces” and “The Last Picture Show.”
It’s had a strange half-life in sequels
In an attempt to replicate the success of “Rider,” Hopper made a sequel of sorts in 1971, called “The Last Movie.” It was a financial flop and ended Hopper’s directing career. Then, in 2012, director Dustin Rikert made a prequel, “Easy Rider: The Ride Back,” with no involvement from the original cast.
The ending was supposed to be happy
The final shots of “Easy Rider” were initially conceived to be a poetic sequence showing Wyatt and Billy enjoying the loot from a big score and making off. Maybe they’d “use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion,” Southern told The Paris Review. But, the actual ending is much bleaker: Wyatt and Billy are shot and killed by a passing trucker. “I think for a minute he was still hoping they would somehow beat the system and sail into the sunset with a lot of loot and freedom,” said Southern of Hopper, “But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that their death was more or less mandatory.”
