![]() ![]() ![]() It was one of the first films to integrate found music. But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that their death was more or less mandatory.” 3. It wasn’t until the end that it took on a genuinely artistic dimension-when it suddenly evolved into an indictment of the American redneck, and his hatred and intolerance for anything remotely different from himself-somewhat to the surprise of Den Hopper: ‘You mean kill ‘em both? Hey, man, are you outta your gourd?!?’ 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. “Use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion, and that was slated to be the film’s final poetic sequence. “The initial idea had to do with a couple of young guys who are fed up with the system, want to make one big score, and split,” Terry Southern told Creative Screenwriting. One of the most shocking things about Easy Rider is its ending, where both of the leads violently perish. The film's original ending involved Bill and Wyatt sailing into the sunset. And then I think it went a bit far, because I kept seeing movie people vomit.” 2. “When you went to see a movie like Easy Rider and when you saw these guys really smoking grass by the fire, and really the camaraderie was warm, real, and rare, you went, ‘What the hell am I looking at? This has value! This has a completely different kind of value than Pillow Talk,” she said in the documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Karen Black, who co-starred in the film, agreed with Fonda’s sentiment. ![]() We made a movie for these people that didn’t have their own movie.” “Those were not really films of the youth that I had grown into and up with, shutting away the establishment, going on their own. Beach Blanket Bingo? C’mon,” Fonda told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “They were making films like Pillow Talk and The Glass Bottom Boat. Easy Rider was made for the youth of the time.īefore Easy Rider, Hollywood was churning out happier films starring the effervescent Doris Day, but Dennis Hopper’s film changed that. Despite a difficult shoot, it launched the prosperous New Hollywood period of moviemaking, and ignited a revolution in cinema that we haven’t recaptured since. Shot on a budget of well under $1 million, the 1969 guerilla film went on to gross more than $60 million worldwide the Criterion Collection referred to the movie as “the definitive counterculture blockbuster.” After filming finished in 1968, it took Hopper one year to edit 80 hours of footage-which included scenes of real drug use and a jaw-dropping conclusion-into a 95-minute feature that premiered at Cannes on May 12, 1969. Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson also starred, and Fonda co-wrote the script with Terry Southern and Hopper, and produced it. Once called The Loners, Dennis Hopper co-wrote, directed, and starred in the Oscar-nominated biker flick about two men riding motorcycles from Los Angeles to New Orleans to Florida during the tumult of the Vietnam-era ’60s. Now, at age 65, I’m still driving around, with a new and profound sense of wonder.Easy Rider’s tagline of “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere” transcended moviedom. ![]() Later I began to wander from them and ramble through towns with a litany of colorful names-Midnight, Alligator, Panther Burn, Egypt-unsure what I was searching for. In my mid-forties, to connect with the memory of my younger self, I began driving Delta roads as a pastime. I’ve always been fascinated by the dramatic drop you experience just north of Yazoo City-near the southern end of the Delta-when your car goes down a hill and, suddenly, the land looks tabletop flat for as far as you can see. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t fully appreciate the richness of this place until I was well into middle age, when I came back to Mississippi to teach after decades of living in the Northeast. My family once lived in the Delta, and I’ve been visiting it since I was a child. I know those photos intimately from the pages of books, but when I’m here, I’m also wandering through the early pages of my life. Sometimes when I’m driving through a stretch of this crescent-shaped part of northwest Mississippi-not to be confused with the region hundreds of miles south of here where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico-I look at the landscape and feel like I’m in one of those classic shots taken by a Depression-era photographer like Dorothea Lange. The flat fields of the Mississippi Delta seem endless, and they can magically transport a traveler into the past. ![]()
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