Ballad of Easy Rider

It was 45 years ago this month that Easy Rider hit the screens and took in $40 million by the end of the year. Not bad for a counterculture movie financed largely out of Bert Schneider's and Peter Fonda's pockets and shot on the road with plenty of drugs along the way.

This visceral feel struck home with viewers and is why the film continues to make capture audiences. Fonda had always loved motorbikes. He had teamed up with Bruce Dern and Nancy Sinatra in The Wild Angels and experimented with LSD in The Trip, but he wanted something more than just an acid trip in Easy Rider. He approached Dennis Hopper saying he had a vision of two bikers riding across John Ford's West like in The Searchers. They recruited Jack Nicholson to join the ride, who to this point had been little more than a Hollywood screenwriter.

Kalem Aftab caught up to Fonda at a BFI retrospective of Dennis Hopper. Sad to read that the two had a falling out over the writing credits for the movie and were never able to repair their friendship. Fonda was expressly barred from attending Hopper's funeral in 2010. Odd that Hopper should take such offense, especially since he was given top billing as director, but who knows what animus lay at the heart of this dispute.

The film launched Nicholson's acting career. Fonda and Hopper had initially approached Rip Torn to play the third part, but he had taken offense to the way Hopper sized up the South and the part was given to Nicholson. Jack would go on to star in classic 70s films like Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge and Chinatown over the next five years. Not bad for a guy who had a relatively minor role in the film as an ACLU lawyer and local drunk. He helped spring Wyatt and Billy from jail. He joined the ride to New Orleans but meets his end by a campfire on the way, savagely beaten by local thugs.

The Mardi Gras scene is probably the most memorable, as the two meet up with Karen Black and Toni Basil, enjoying an acid trip in a local cemetery that allowed Hopper to experiment a bit with the film, which Fonda jokingly referred to as "an endless parade of shit." But, somehow it worked.

Fonda and Hopper treat the South as a place still rooted in Jim Crow hatred toward outsiders, in sharp contrast to the hippie commune they had visited earlier in New Mexico. There was no room for hippies in the Deep South and the film comes to an abrupt and violent end in Florida where the two hoped to retire with their drug money.

When watching this film today it seems like a whole other era, yet strangely intimate. The Soundtrack doesn't hurt either. Supposedly, the characters of Wyatt and Billy were loosely based on Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, but you get the sense they pretty much played themselves. McGuinn and Dylan did team up to write Ballad of Easy Rider for the movie.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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