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,
Back
in Los Angeles, and with the second “hip guy,†his friend Dennis Hopper in tow
as both costar-and director, the two of them somehow secured $40,000 from prospective
co-producer Bert Schneider for a location trip to New Orleans during Mardi Gras.
The idea was that Fonda, already learning to be a producer, realized that just
by showing up and pointing their cameras at the crowds and colors and revelries
there, he would achieve a lot of classy production value, and not have to pay a
cent for any of it.
The
idea was for Fonda and Hopper, accompanied by a few friends, and by Karen Black
and Toni Basil, whom they had cast as the two hookers Hopper and Fonda’s
characters drop acid with, to show up and then to just to film whatever
happened, cinema verité style, using
lightweight 16mm equipment. Unfortunately, producer Fonda got the dates mixed
up as to when exactly Mardi Gras was, so the crew had to scramble to arrive in
late February 1968, while the celebration was still going on.
That
“crew,†made up of enthusiastic, soon-to-be-accomplished friends, was eclectic
indeed. It included the documentarian Les Blanc, character actor Seymour
Cassel, production manager Alan Pariser, another actor, Richard Rust, and at
least three actual, or future cinematographers; Peter Pilafian, Baird Bryant
and Barry Feinstein.
At
the motel parking lot in New Orleans, Hopper assembled his eager crew on the
first morning and proceeded to deliver a paranoid, exploitive-riddled diatribe
about how this was his movie, and how
no one was going to take it away from
him. This pep talk lasted for two hours, while Fonda impatiently worried about
how much of the Mardi Gras reveries they had come two-thousand miles for their
cameras to record they were missing. Production finally started at 11:30 AM. It
was February 23, 1968. It was Peter Fonda’s twenty-eighth birthday.
Karen
Black remembered about that day, and the following four days that “Dennis was
afraid that if we got too far away from him physically, that he would have an
idea, and that we wouldn’t be there to shoot his idea. So, he would say, “Are
you there? Are you There? Are you there? We’d say “Yes. What do you want us to
do?†He’d say, I don’t know I don’t know…â€
Hopper
warned his “cameramen†not to shoot anything without his consent, and then
would get manic when he would see his auteurs filming clouds or puddles or
parades. Everyone there had ambitions to direct, or to shoot, and so they did,
to their actual directors’ detriment.
In
the evenings, the crew would tiredly gather in someone’s hotel room to try to
figure out what exactly their director wanted from them for the next day.
Hopper, instead of telling them, would launch into yet another exhaustive
monologue, which would raise, not assuage those somewhat relative questions,
and only leave his alleged crew still shaking their heads.
One
night, early in the shoot, Hopper decided that he absolutely had to run outside with one of the
cameras and film some cool neon signs out in the hotel parking lot. But Barry
Feinstein, not surprisingly didn’t want to give his director the camera, which
was his, and which he was afraid would be damaged by Hopper. The two of them
somehow then got into a fight, a noisy, physical punching and shoving match
which climaxed with their crashing through the door of Basil and Black’s room,
where Peter Fonda was entertaining the girls with Black’s guitar – which Hopper
promptly smashed over Feinstein’s head. The director then picked up the TV set
and threw it, again at the allusive Feinstein, before falling face down into
the coffee table. Fonda picked up his sleeping partner and dragged him onto a bed
(no one remembers whose bed it was), and then pulled off his cowboy boots and
socks. At this, Hopper abruptly sat upright. His eyes popped open. “Don’t ever
take off my boots again,†he slurred. His last bit of direction for the night
before finally falling asleep.
The
Madi Gras scenes which Fonda had wanted so badly were largely a bust. There are
only a handful of grainy shots of the cast in the parade or out on the street.
It’s even been reported, reported but never confirmed, that some of the Mardi Gras
material was made up after the fact from stock footage pilfered from another
production. Later, however, away from those crowds and time constraints, and
having relocated to a secluded cemetery, Hopper was able to indulge in his Jean-Luc Godard inspired penchant
for non-narrative, non-linier cinema for the last two days of the shoot.
These
scenes were shot at what is still called the New Orleans Cemetery No. 1, which had opened in 1789 in the city’s
beloved French Quarter. No one bothered to ask permission of the
Catholic Church before the crew showed up, and apparently the church was not
happy with the assorted desecrations and humiliations upon the site which
Hopper’s cameras documented amid the graves. Today this location, although
perhaps not for this reason, is no longer open to the general public.
Hopper
still had trouble controlling his associates, who now had taken to quitting in
frustration or disappearing behind buildings or tombstones. In one case, at
least, the inexperience of his minions gave him an interesting effect, however,
when Less Blanc accidently opened up an exposed film magazine, slightly fogging
the images inside and giving the result a curious hazy ambiance, which Hopper
was completely thrilled with.
In
Los Angeles, the resultant 25,000 feet of blurry Louisiana footage was screened
for Bert Schneider and co-producer Bill Hayward. And sure enough, that
material, in spite of Hopper’s enthusiasm was, as Hayward unpromisingly called
it “an endless parade of shit.â€
Fonda
agreed that the honorable thing to do would be to offer to let Schneider out of
his deal – and to offer to let Pando Productions, Fonda’s newly formed company,
refund that squandered $40,000, which they did. Fonda even contritely said that
he would be willing to step aside and let Schneider produce Easy Rider by himself.
Instead
Schneider asked Fonda if he still wanted to make the movie, of which Fonda said
that he most certainly did. Then, surprisingly, Schneider quietly told Fonda to
get out of his office and go out and make it.
There
would, of course, be some stipulations. For one thing, no more guerrilla
tactics with friends. From now on, for the entire seven week shoot, the
production would get serious, with 35mm film, schedules, permits and budgets,
and with a fully unionized crew, which Schneider assumed, rightly as it turned
out, Hopper would have a harder time bullying and browbeating, and which would
also be more likely, and better able, to give their director what he needed to
realize his, perhaps crazed, vision.
Most of that crew came out of the ranks of exploitation
filmmaking. Many of those they hired had already worked with Fonda, or Hopper,
or each other, before – which meant that they could be counted upon to do their
jobs quickly, and economically, and most importantly, that they could be
counted upon to bond as a unit over the course of what promised, it goes
without saying, to be a very difficult and unusual shoot.
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