What's the Big Deal?: Easy Rider (1969)
http://www.seattlepi.com/movies/414989_film31962370.html
February 3, 2010
By ERIC D. SNIDER
FILM.COM
When you hear the title Easy Rider, there's a good chance you start
humming "Born to be Wild," the rock anthem on the soundtrack that has
come to represent the movie's philosophy of youth, freedom, and
drugs. Peter Biskind considered the movie so significant that he put
it in the title of his New Hollywood history book, Easy Riders,
Raging Bulls. But this movie, about motorcycle-riding hippies on a
road trip across America ... what's it about? Why does it matter?
What's the big deal, man?
The praise: The film's screenplay and Jack Nicholson's supporting
performance were nominated for Oscars, and director Dennis Hopper won
the Best First Work award at the Cannes Film Festival. (To be fair,
there was only one other film in that category.) The movie appears on
the American Film Institute's top 100 list, both the 1998 and 2007 surveys.
The context: It's hard to imagine now, but until the late 1960s
Hollywood studios didn't pay much attention to young moviegoers.
Films aimed specifically at teenagers and young adults tended to be
cheap afterthoughts, not the raison d'etre they are for Hollywood now.
But in the '60s there was a confluence of three events. One, the Baby
Boomers -- people born just after World War II -- were becoming
adults and, if only by their sheer numbers, starting to dominate
American culture. Two, the first filmmakers to have actually gone to
film school were breaking into the business. These guys (they were
mostly guys) had studied film, learning its philosophies and
techniques in a formal setting, while their predecessors had learned
the craft on the job. Three, the Vietnam War and the other turbulent
events of the decade had made many of these Baby Boomers jaded and
suspicious of authority. The "rebels" of the '50s, with or without
causes, had been a fringe element, easily ignored or downplayed by
Hollywood. Now there was a big pot-smoking elephant in the room, and
the movies couldn't ignore it -- especially now that the Boomers
themselves were the ones making the movies.
Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, both from 1967, had achieved
extraordinary critical and financial success by tapping into that
young market. For the first time, viewers in their early 20s were
seeing characters that they could relate to, with the levels of sex
and violence that they considered realistic, not the watered-down
phoniness of Old Hollywood. This new movement came to be called New
Hollywood, and its directors included Francis Ford Coppola, Steven
Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Robert Altman, Roman
Polanski, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, and a couple dozen others.
Easy Rider was shot in the early months of 1968, when The Graduate
and Bonnie and Clyde were still in theaters -- before anyone really
knew the impact they would have, in other words. Unlike those films,
which had studio backing, Easy Rider was a truly independent
production, made for very little money, none of it from a studio,
with all the creative decisions in the drug-addled hands of the filmmakers.
Drugs played a huge part in the film, both onscreen and off. Legend
has it the filmmakers threw a wrap party after "finishing" the movie
before realizing they'd forgotten to shoot a pivotal final scene.
Roger Ebert, reflecting on the film years later, wrote that "it did a
lot of repeat business while the sweet smell of pot drifted through theaters."
The movie: Two hippies, called Captain America (Peter Fonda) and
Billy (Dennis Hopper), make a load of cash on a drug deal, hop on
their motorcycles, and head from California toward New Orleans, where
they hope to arrive in time for Mardi Gras. Along the way, they
encounter much persecution and harassment because of their longhaired
hippie ways. They also visit a commune, smoke a lot of marijuana, and
ingest some other illicit substances.
What it influenced: One of the film's most significant contributions
was its soundtrack, composed primarily of preexisting rock songs that
the film's editor, Donn Cambern, had listened to while he worked.
Licensing for these songs cost $1 million, more than twice what the
film had cost to make. But it was worth it. The soundtrack added
immeasurably to the film's youth appeal, thus enhancing its
box-office gross, and the album itself sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Before this, rock 'n' roll in movies was mostly limited to Elvis
Presley musicals and beach party films. A compilation album featuring
songs not written specifically for the movie, and recorded by
numerous different artists working for different record labels, was
unheard of. The Easy Rider LP changed that, opening the door for
soundtracks like American Graffiti, The Big Chill, and Almost Famous.
Today, almost all films, especially youth-oriented ones, have
compilation soundtracks. In fact, the trend became so common that it
eventually hurt Easy Rider: The album went out of print in the 1980s
and '90s because the record labels, who'd had no problem with the
silly soundtrack idea in 1969, were now overly familiar with the
process and no longer wanted to license their songs without charging
an arm and a leg. I suspect the film's hippies would have a few
choice words for that attitude.
Jack Nicholson, appearing only in the second half of the film, earned
a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance and was
launched into stardom, aided considerably by Five Easy Pieces a year
later, which got him his first Best Actor nomination. He was lucky,
too -- his role in Easy Rider was supposed to have been played by Rip
Torn, who dropped out early in the production after arguments with
Hopper. (A great many interesting things in Hollywood have happened
because of arguments with Dennis Hopper.)
Easy Rider grossed $60 million worldwide -- which would be about $300
million at today's ticket prices -- and shocked Hollywood into the
realization that, what do you know, young people like to see movies
about themselves. Prior to this, counter-culture figures, if depicted
cinematically at all, were side characters or villains, not
protagonists, and young people in general were portrayed like the
squares in the beach party movies. Easy Rider spoke to a segment of
society that felt marginalized by the Establishment, a segment that
had rarely been reflected in movies.
Roger Ebert, age 27 when the film came out, loved it, and wrote in
his four-star review, "I suspect many members of the Hollywood older
generation believe, sincerely and deeply, that Easy Rider doesn't
have a story, and doesn't mean anything, and that the kids are all
crazy these days." He was right about that. The New York Times'
Vincent Canby, age 45, wrote condescendingly:
Easy Rider ... is a motorcycle drama with decidedly superior airs
about it. How else are we to approach a movie that advertises itself:
"A man went looking for America. And couldn't find it anywhere"?
Right away you know that something superior is up, that somebody is
making a statement, and you can bet your boots (cowboy, black
leather) that it's going to put down the whole rotten scene. What
scene? Whose? Why? Man, I can't tell you if you don't know. What I
mean to say is, if you don't groove, you don't groove. You might as well split.
Hollywood's first response to the film's success, of course, was to
crank out more really cheap movies that catered to -- OK, pandered to
-- the rebellious youth culture. Most of these were terrible and have
titles you wouldn't recognize. But over time the studios learned how
to really target teenagers and young adults, whom they hadn't taken
seriously before. Easy Rider, along with Bonnie and Clyde and The
Graduate, caused a major shift in thinking. Films like Transformers
represent a perversion in that thinking, where films aren't just made
for young people, they're made ONLY for young people.
Hopper, who'd had moderate success as a TV and movie actor before
this, thought he'd have a career as a director after Easy Rider. His
next film, though, called The Last Movie (and it almost was), was
even more absurd, non-linear, and minimalist than Easy Rider had
been, and audiences and critics rejected it. He didn't direct another
film until 1980; today he's primarily known as an actor.
What to look for: Many of the New Hollywood filmmakers were inspired
by the French New Wave, which we discussed in conjunction with Jules
and Jim. Easy Rider has many of the stylistic flourishes, including
the occasional burst of frantic editing, zooms, and close-ups. It
also has the stark realism, the casual dialogue, the natural
lighting, and the same kind of less-than-happily-ever-after ending as
many New Wave films.
You might think a movie made by young people aimed at a youthful
audience would be fast-paced and energetic. You would be mistaken.
Easy Rider has only the barest wisp of a plot, and there are many,
many scenes of the guys riding motorcycles. The film's editor
originally put the rock songs over those scenes to make the footage
more interesting while he was editing them, and it helps
tremendously. If you get into the rhythm of the movie -- the freedom
of the open road, the easy-goin' rock tunes playin' -- you can get a
sense of what 1969 audiences saw in it. Of course, to really feel
what they felt, you'd probably need to smoke some grass first, but I
cannot publicly endorse that.
The guys are on the road looking for "freedom." They talk about
freedom a lot. Your discussion question for afterward is: Did they
find it? Why or why not? What does "freedom" mean, anyway? Explain
your answers in a paragraph and turn it in at the beginning of class
next week.
Oh, and Captain America and Billy visit a whorehouse in Louisiana.
The women whose services they hire are played by Karen Black and Toni
Basil. And in an early scene, the man who buys drugs from the guys,
sitting in a car and wearing huge glasses, is record producer Phil
Spector, in his pre-wife-killing days.
What's the big deal: It's easy to write Easy Rider off as a movie
made by hippies, for hippies, and fueled by copious amounts of drugs.
And while that's all true, it's somewhat reductive. Hopper, who had
never directed anything before, was in over his head, and trying to
emulate the French New Wavers his first time out was ill-advised.
Nonetheless, there's a certain charm in seeing a new filmmaker strive
so earnestly to replicate the style of someone he admires. Whether
the film is entertaining to a 21st-century audience or not, the
moviegoers of 1969 -- the people it was made for, the people it spoke
to -- saw themselves in it. Think of the times you've felt like a
movie was speaking to you. That's pretty far out, man.
--
Further reading: As always, wait until you've seen the movie before
reading these items.
Here's a review of the soundtrack album that has some insight into
the compilation process.
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:7kt67ui080j3~T0
Vincent Canby's original review of the film is here;
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9E0CE0D91538EF3BBC4D52DFB1668382679EDE
for comparison, here is Roger Ebert's review.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19690928/REVIEWS/909280301/1023
And here's Ebert's "Great Movies" essay from 2004.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041024/REVIEWS08/410240301
Here's a fascinating interview with the film's cinematographer,
Laszlo Kovacs, from 2004, offering plenty of juicy behind-the-scenes
information.
http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/easy_rider_35_years_later_2921/
And here's the always insightful Tim Dirks discussing the film in
detail at AMC's Filmsite.
http://www.filmsite.org/easy.html
.
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