EASY RIDER: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Columbia, 1969) Sony Home Entertainment

If ever a movie came to emblemize an entire generation, movement and cultural shift in American picture-making, director, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) is it. Indeed, the whole of 20th century American movie-making can be classified as everything gone before Easy Rider, and everything that followed it. Budgeted somewhere between $350,000 and $400,000, Easy Rider was a picture begun with ambition, but conceived in chaos. It holds the dubious distinction of having sacrificed more footage in the editing process than what ultimately showed up on the movie screen. Hopper’s rough cut is rumored to have run a whopping 4 hours. The resultant run time is barely an hour and a half. And while there is documentation to suggest a ton of stuff was shot, virtually none of this extemporaneous footage survives today. Star, Peter Fonda would later claim he personally footed the bills for travel and lodging of the cast and crew. Shot mostly outdoors under natural lighting conditions, because, as Hopper later explained, “God is a great gaffer”, Easy Rider would lug two five-ton trucks of equipment and props across many locations, including the iconic Monument Valley, perennially featured in John Ford westerns as the promise of an untamed American future, but in Easy Rider, symbolizing the desperation of two free spirits, unable to remain apart and free from the outside world.
Cinematographer, László Kovács has suggested producers spent an additional $1 million – or roughly three times the picture’s budget – to license music rights; a claim easy to digest when one considers Easy Rider’s pop-tune saturated soundtrack containing chart-smashing hits from Steppenwolf, The Byrds, The Band, The Holy Modal Rounders, Fraternity of Man, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Little Eva, The Electric Prunes, The Electric Flag, and, Roger McGuinn. Indulging perhaps a little too liberally in the drug culture of the times, Dennis Hopper’s erratic behavior on the set increasingly exacerbated the crew. During test shooting in New Orleans, he fought with his ad hoc crew and, at one point, threatened bodily harm to camera operator, Barry Feinstein. And such confrontations did not abate, even after a professional crew was assigned to the picture. The screenplay, written by Hopper, Fonda and Terry Southern is rumored to have drawn inspiration for its anti-heroes, Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) from Roger McGuinn and The Byrds’ David Crosby. But the production hit a major snag when the New Buffalo Commune near Taos, New Mexico absolutely refused Hopper permission to shoot there. Instead, the hippie commune featured in the movie was recreated from photographs and shot near Malibu Canyon.
Viewing Easy Rider today, one is immediately struck by how free-flowing the whole experience remains; the participation of untrained locals to fill the background voids in Morganza, Louisiana (where the restaurant scenes with Fonda, Hopper and Jack Nicholson – as disgraced attorney, George Hanson – were shot) and Krotz Springs (hiring farmers, Johnny David and D.C. Billodeau as the hillbilly assassins) lending an air of revitalizing uniqueness to these proceedings. Hopper, whose judgment during this particular time, arguably, veered toward the venial, in part due to his own obscene recreational use of pot and other mind-altering compounds to impair his tact, goaded Fonda to tap into the painful remembrance of his own mother’s suicide, addressing a statue of the Madonna as though he were speaking directly to her. Easy Rider was, in some ways, Hopper’s nadir, the actor/writer/director rumored to be consuming a half gallon of rum, 3 grams of cocaine, and well over a case of beer daily, just to see him through the shoot. On the hippie commune set, he carried loaded firearms at all times, presumably, ready to pick a fight at any moment, or merely to intimidate cast and crew into getting what he wanted from them. Later, arguably in his emeritus years, Hopper confided that he had mostly created unease and needless tension on the set – par for the course to gratify his mountainous ego, chronic and fidgety recalcitrance and self-destructive nature. In hindsight, these vices squandered his titanic aptitude, ultimately to brand him a veritable ‘loon’ in the industry.   
Directed through the malaise of Hopper’s drug abuse, after Hopper already had been given the ole heave-ho in Hollywood, Easy Rider remains the director’s outrageous ‘bitch slap’ to the industry that, in 1969, was still clinging to the last vestiges of the venerable studio system in-house style, to value uber-gloss and super-sheen above realism at the movies. While the film industry would be rocked this same year after the X-rated Midnight Cowboy took home the Best Picture Oscar statuette, the industry at large was still hellbent on producing such mainstream crowd-pleasers as True Grit, Hello Dolly!, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Italian Job and Sweet Charity. Despite the changing times, Hopper would forever view Easy Rider as the movie that changed Hollywood forever. Incredibly, Hopper’s psychotic episodes on the set, as in refusing to change his clothes for 6 months, or leaving an indentation in a coffee table with his drug dealer’s head, did not immediately end his career prospects in Tinsel Town; nor, his record-setting, 8-day marriage to Michelle Phillips (of the Mamas and the Papas’ fame), prematurely over, after Hopper shot up Phillips’ home and handcuffed her to the bed, under suspicions she was a witch. The ultimate runaway success of Easy Rider at the box office ought to have made Dennis Hopper the crown prince of Hollywood. Alas, this anointment was short-lived, as Hopper indulged his fancies on 1971's ironically titled The Last Movie – its epic blunder, causing Hopper to nose-dive into a self-imposed void of booze and drug-induced lunacy over the next 15 years.
Hopper and Fonda had previously collaborated with Jack Nicholson on 1967’s The Trip, a long-since forgotten movie, celebrating LSD – very ‘trippy’ indeed - and similarly themed to Easy Rider. It maintained Fonda’s reputation as a counterculture pop icon, inculcated since his star turn in The Wild Angels (1966). However, with Easy Rider, Fonda’s formulaic biker image matured into a full-stream iconoclast; dare-devilish, but reserved – enough, to manhandle and maintain independence on his own terms. Hopper could invest a certain level of egocentric pride in Easy Rider’s self-segregated isolation from the rest of Hollywood’s output. There is, in fact, nothing of Hollywood in the picture. Even its ‘art house’ elements transgress against the nature of the small and crudely made indie-pic. As for Fonda, his inspiration for Easy Rider derived from the notion of creating a modern-age ‘western’ – motorcycles having replaced horses as the preferred mode of cross-country travel. Initially titled, The Loners, with Hopper directing, Fonda producing, and both starring and writing, Terry Southern eventually came up with the title Easy Rider instead. Miraculously, a budget was green-lit without a screenplay, most of the movie shot on the fly with ad-libbed dialogue. Interestingly, Hopper, Fonda and Southern would share the credit for the screenplay; Southern, later disputing Hopper’s claim, most of the picture was written by him, and suggesting he – Southern – had only agreed to share credit for his work in the spirit of camaraderie.
Easy Rider was actually shot in the early half of 1968, its U.S. premiere delayed by nearly a year, mostly thanks to Hopper’s crazed editing process which resulting in various rough cuts, the first, running 220 mins. with an extended ‘flash forward’ sequences. With the exception of a very brief scene involving Wyatt in a brothel, the rest of this footage did not survive the final edit.  Jack Nicholson’s involvement on the project was almost an accident; the part of George Hanson first conceived by Southern for his buddy, Rip Torn. Alas, ego intruded yet again – the first, casual meeting between Hopper and Torn resulting in some fairly off-color remarks made by Hopper about ‘rednecks’ to which Torn took umbrage, and, after a near physical altercation, immediately withdrew his consideration. Decades later, Hopper implied Torn had drawn a knife on him, resulting in a lawsuit Torn won for defamation of character. In the eleventh hour of the editing process, producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider quietly brought in editor, Henry Jaglom to whittle down the extemporaneous footage into a manageable release print. And although Hopper was initially displeased with this cut, claiming Jaglom had turned his masterpiece into a TV show, he eventually came to recognize the assembly as adhering to the essence of the picture he had set out to make. Ironically, Jaglom would only receive credit as an ‘editorial consultant.’ However, it is important to note Jaglom was chiefly responsible for Easy Rider's visual style — the discombobulating jump cuts, loose time shifts, flash forwards and backs, all of it conspiring to create a fractured cinematic equivalent of someone on LSD.
Easy Rider opens with Wyatt and Billy smuggling cocaine from Mexico to Los Angeles. Selling their haul for some quick cash, cleverly concealed in a plastic tube stuffed inside the fuel tank of Wyatt's California-style chopper, the pair rides east, aiming for New Orleans to catch the Mardi Gras festival. During their cross-country journey, the men pause at an Arizona farmstead to make several repairs and have a meal with the rancher (Warren Finnerty), his wife (Tita Colorado) and their many children. Wyatt is particularly impressed with the rancher’s independence from the outside world, while the rancher appears to admire Wyatt for his youth. Further along the road, Wyatt elects to offer a hippie hitch-hiker, Jesus (Antonio Mendoza) a ride to his commune, isolated in the mesas – a lost oasis where free love is practiced by two women, Lisa (Luana Anders) and Sarah (Sabrina Scharf), both of whom turn their affections to Wyatt and Billy. Before departing once more for the open road, the hitch-hiker gives Wyatt some LSD to be shared with ‘the right people’. Later, while riding alongside a parade in New Mexico, Wyatt and Billy are arrested on a trumped-up charge of ‘parading without a permit’ and thrown in jail. There, they befriend ACLU attorney, George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), in lock-up for getting drunk. George liberates the trio and decides to accompany them to New Orleans. That evening, Wyatt and Billy introduce George to marijuana.
Pausing the next morning for breakfast at an out of the way greasy spoon, the boys attract the attention of several girls, who find their ‘bad boy image’ exciting. The local roughnecks and constabulary do not share this view however, and thus, the boys are once again bound for the open road. Making camp just outside of town, Wyatt, Billy and George are ambushed by a small contingent of the locals who mercilessly beat them with clubs. Billy regroups and threatens his attackers with a knife, causing the roughnecks to reconsider their stance and retreat. While Wyatt and Billy have sustained only minor injuries, they discover George has been bludgeoned to death. The pair wrap George’s body in his sleeping bag and make a solemn oath to return his effects to his family. In New Orleans, Wyatt and Billy find the brothel George was earlier raving about and engage prostitutes, Karen (Karen Black) and Mary (Toni Basil) to walk the parade-filled streets in their company. Later, this foursome finds their way to the French Quarter cemetery where Wyatt offers them hitch-hiker’s LSD. Unfortunately for all, it proves to be a very ‘bad trip’.
At dawn, Wyatt and Billy are overtaken on an isolated two-lane country road by two hillbillies in a weather-beaten pickup. The passenger (David C. Billodeau) brandishes his double-barrel shotgun, pointing it out the window at Billy, who is neither startled nor impressed by what he perceives to be merely a scare tactic. Billy flips the bird. Instead, the passenger fires buckshot into Billy’s chest, sending him careening into a ditch on the side of the road. Startled by the attack, Wyatt doubles back and attends to Billy, offering him his leather jacket as comfort. Promising to get help, though likely knowing he is too late to save his friend, Wyatt mounts his chopper and heads for town. But only a short distance up the road he is confronted by the hillbillies again, the passenger firing a second fatal shot into Wyatt, thrown from his chopper while it bursts into flames. The picture ends with an aerial shot of this unexpected and senseless carnage, these ‘easy’ riders having met with an untimely end along an isolated stretch of country road where their smoldering remains will not likely be discovered for quite some time – if ever.
The finale to Easy Rider is such a sobering acknowledgement of the inescapable nature of fate, it remains as shocking today, some 50 years after the picture’s theatrical release. Impossibly brutal, it seems, at least in hindsight to summarize Wyatt’s own fatalism. Indeed, of the two travelers, Fonda’s is the more quietly resigned to accept that their lifestyle is too liberated and detached from the rest of society to endure. Coming on the heels of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Easy Rider’s social commentary spoke both pithily, yet pertinently about the rise of pointless violence in American culture, calling out the malaise in more rudimentary, yet personalized terms.  At a world-wide gross of $60 million, clearly Easy Rider touched a raw nerve in the American psyche of its generation. And yet, even as the times have continued to evolve and move on from this epoch of imploding sixties’ liberation, Easy Rider’s penultimate message about the fragility of dreams – even such as misguidedly recognized in this movie – has remained perennially satisfying. The underpinning of the ‘pioneer spirit’ – having mutated into the halcyon-age of hippie counterculture then - is what continues to buoy the movie today, what keeps it fresh and perpetually revitalized. While most counterculture pop ‘epics’ from this vintage have not aged well at all, Easy Rider somehow manages to grow more youthful by contrast. As it did in 1969, I suspect, today it continues to buck the status quo.
Easy Rider has made its way to 4K UHD via an immaculate transfer from Sony Home Entertainment. The remastered Blu-ray Sony presented some 10 years earlier, and reissued by Criterion as a Special Edition less than 5 years ago, was cause for celebration. But this newly remastered and restored 4K derivative is a revelation. The inherent grit and grime in László Kovács’ cinematography has never appeared more resplendent or accurately rendered. Easy Rider’s visuals are very grainy – as they should be. But for the first time since its theatrical engagement, that level of organic film grain has been properly reproduced.  Colors are bold and invigorating with superb flesh tones. The image favors an almost sepia-esque tint. So, yellows, greens and warm beige are favored.  It all looks rather exquisite in ultra-hi-def. Sony has remixed the audio to a 7.1 Atmos which shows off both the many great songs featured in the movie in their full stereophonic glory, but also illustrates the limitations in the original mono audio sound mix where dialogue-scenes are concerned. Nothing more could have been achieved here and the results, while uneven, are stellar for a movie of this vintage. Easy Rider has been repurposed many times on standard Blu-ray, including a deluxe edition via Criterion. On the UHD 4K disc, we lose virtually all of the extras accrued on either Sony’s old Blu-ray or Criterion’s reissue.
So, gone is the audio commentary from Peter Fonda, production manager, Paul Lewis and Dennis Hopper, as well as BBC2’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ half-hour documentary, and the footage of Hopper and Fonda at Canne in 1969; also, the interview with Steve Blauner, expressly recorded for Criterion’s Blu-ray reissue from 2017.  What remains? Well, mercifully, Sony’s UHD disc also includes a copy of their old standard Blu-ray and this features the original commentary that Dennis Hopper recorded in 2001, plus the hour-long making of documentary, Shaking the Cage, just about the most comprehensive back story one would ever hope to possess on this counterculture classic. Bottom line: Easy Rider remains a seminal work of art, so startling in its departure from what then passed for entertainment, it cannot help but to be considered ground-breaking in its day. This 4K UHD transfer is the ultimate way to take ‘this trip’ at home and should be considered the touchstone ‘go to’ disc for future generations. Bottom line: very highly recommended!
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
3.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS

3

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