Author Steven Bingen's book "Easy Rider: 50 Years Searching for America", written with Alan Dunn, was published last year to commemorate the film's 50th anniversary. In case you haven't already indulged in the book, here is an extended excerpt from it.
BY STEVEN BINGEN
The
road to Easy Rider began, of all
places. In a dark, pot-infused motel room in Toronto, Canada.
It
was November 27, 1967. We know this because Peter Fonda, then a young actor of unfulfilled
promise, remembered it for the rest of his life as it as the date his world
would change.
Fonda,
the actor son of screen legend Henry Fonda, was in Toronto to promote his
latest picture, The Trip (1967), a
low-budget counterculture circus, ring-led by low-budget counterculture
ringleader Roger Corman, The Trip had
been scripted by another unlucky actor, Jack Nicholson, and co-starred a third
underachiever named Dennis Hopper.
One
of Fonda’s duties in town was to attend a motion picture exhibitors conference
that day. He remembers that Jack Valenti, the keynote speaker, had just been
elected president of the Motion Picture Association of America. Peter Fonda
also remembers vividly part of the speech Valenti delivered that day.
“My
Friends, and you are my friends,†Valenti began, “It is time we stopped making
movies about motorcycles, sex, and drugs!†Fonda, who was involved and invested
in all three of those deadly sins at the time, remembers thinking that Valenti
sounded just like a television evangelist. He had a booming, pipe-organ voice,
even sported a rather cornpone southern accent (like several future
participants in our story, Jack Valenti hailed from Texas), and as if he knew
how Fonda felt, Valenti continually, throughout his long talk, seemed to be
staring right at, right into, the actor.
After
that endless, uncomfortable conference, Fonda walked back to the Hillcrest
Motel, where the notoriously spendthrift Corman was putting him up. Bored and
lonely, and admittedly paranoid from the dressing down he felt he had gotten
from Valenti up there on his makeshift pulpit, Fonda lit a roach and proceeded
to get stoned in that motel room.
Amidst
the pot smoke, Peter Fonda found himself inexplicably mesmerized by an old
publicity still from a previous Peter Fonda film, The Wild Angels (1966), which for some reason had been included
with The Trip’s press kit; probably
for him to autograph for some Canadian exhibiter’s teenage daughter. The still
depicted himself and actor Bruce Dern with a motorcycle near Venice Beach,
California.
Oddly, perhaps because of his enhanced state,
Fonda found himself looking at that photograph through the marijuana smoke and
thinking that the picture looked like something from, well, from a Hollywood
western. Perhaps it was because the two of them, Fonda and Dern, were
silhouetted, or almost, and how the bike, also nearly silhouetted, seemed to be
standing in for a horse. The still had been taken on an asphalt road, but it
had been reprinted so many times by Corman’s cut-rate photo lab that much of
the definition had bled away, and so this indistinct copy of a copy looked like
it had been taken in an earlier era on a western street in Tombstone Arizona,
or Deadwood, South Dakota, rather than near the Venice boardwalk. And he and
Dern looked, for all the world, to him, like two lonely Texas cowboys.
Right
there, in that smoke-filed room, amidst the stacked room service trays and
dirty towels, Peter Fonda decided to produce and costar in a western himself. A
western with motorcycles. He later pitched the story just as he first
envisioned it, as “a modern Western with two hip guys on bikes instead of old
movie stars on horses,