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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