#Jack nicholson easy rider movie#
Yet what’s even more significant is what the movie represents as an artistic statement.ĭennis Hopper said “ ‘Easy Rider’ was never a motorcycle movie to me. Easy Rider landed hot on the heels of well-received hits The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, gathering huge earnings of sixty million on top of a modest budget. It may not have single handedly made large studios sit up and take notice of low-budget, independent movies but it did reinforce the idea. Looking back fifty-years later it is easy to recognize its impact on cinema in the nineteen-seventies. Where the lost innocence and truth of the movement was displayed for all the world to see, not just those in San Francisco or Los Angeles. These ideals danced in the daylight as Easy Rider displayed the counter-culture stripped to its bare bones.
A country torn apart by racial hatred, the Vietnam War and a desire to change without the knowledge of how to.Īs a movie, it brought all the underground notions and views to surface. This outsider montage fired a shot of rebellious-equality into the heart of a country. In the midst of all these situations, the revolution became cinematic with the release of the ultimate road movie, Easy Rider. These dark-days called a halt to the dreams of a generation, as murder and violence extinguished the notions of peace and love. Whilst in December of that year, The Rolling Stones played Altamont outside San Francisco, where the ‘Hells Angels’ rampaged, killing African-American Meredith Hunter. Then of course the world witnessed the lows as the Manson Family murders rocked the Los Angeles hills. Here, a deep dive on the big three, and their frame choices.In nineteen-sixty-nine the world experienced the heights of the hippy-movement and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar soared over Woodstock signaling the highs. (Plenty of all three could be found at Studio 54 any night of the week.) Not to mention the eyewear is out of sight. If only because it set the bar for what would become the core masculine cool guy archetypes of the seventies: Nicholson’s drunken, down-for-anything prep in cream suits and varsity jackets, Fonda’s swinging leading man in biker leather and denim, and Hopper’s Taos cowboy-shaman. Dennis Hopper calls Jack Nicholson, and a rag tag crew heads out on the road with badass bikes, cool clothes, and enough cocaine to jumpstart a Harley to make what would become Easy Rider.Įasy Rider is a seriously stylish movie. Amongst it all, a trio of stoned Hollywood buddies who had collaborated on 1967’s The Trip, got together again and created a movie that would blow any remaining naiveté about the changing times out of the water. Woodstock had just brought 400,000 people to an upstate New York field looking for musical salvation. Vietnam was raging, rock n’ roll and LSD were everywhere.