Easy Riders Raging Bulls

He continued, “In my mind, the ending was to be an indictment of blue-collar America, the people I thought were responsible for the Vietnam War.”

Southern also claimed, shortly before his death, that the famous ending was his as well. He says Hopper and Fonda wanted the characters to go off into the sunset. “Dennis Hopper didn’t have a clue as to what the film was about,” he asserted. “When Dennis read it, he said, ‘Are you kidding? Are you going to kill off both of them?”

Hopper and his friends were seized with a millennialism that seemed to be sweeping everything before it. As he put it, “I want to make movies about us. We’re a new kind of human being. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries.... We want to make little, personal, honest movies.... The studio is a thing of the past, and they are very smart if they just concentrate on becoming distributing companies for independent producers.”

In a certain sense, as Buck Henry puts it, Easy Rider was authorless, the automatic handwriting of the counterculture. He says, “Nobody knew who wrote it, nobody knew who directed it, nobody knew who edited it, Rip was supposed to be in it, Jack was in it instead, it looks like a couple of hundred outtakes from several other films all strung together with the soundtrack of the best of the ’60s. But it opened up a path. Now the children of Dylan were in control.”

Hopper himself credits the picture with putting cocaine on the hippie map. “The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me,” he says. “There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider it was everywhere.”

The cut he loved best was four and a half hours long, without the 16mm footage. Hopper was convinced that it should play as a road show, with an intermission, high-priced tickets, reserved seats.

At that point, Hopper claims he shut himself in Southern’s office for two weeks and wrote the script himself. Hopper had already tried to get rid of Southern, but Bert refused, saying, “You don’t have any names in this, he’s a big name.” Says Hopper, “Terry never wrote one fucking word, not one line of dialogue.”

The new power of directors was legitimized by its own ideology, “auteurism.” The auteur theory was an invention of French critics who maintained that directors are to movies what poets are to poems. The leading American proponent of the auteur theory was Andrew Sarris

In those days, there was apparently nothing anomalous about a blind director. Way back in the ’30s and ’40s, the producer on the studio payroll was the only person who would see a picture through from beginning to end. Directors, on salary, were there to make sure the actors hit their marks while the camera was running. They exited the production after the shooting phase was over.

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD implies an Old Hollywood, of course. In the mid-’60s, when Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were gestating, the studios were still in the rigor-mortis-like grip of the generation that invented the movies. In 1965, Adolph Zukor at ninety-two, and the only slightly younger Barney Balaban, seventy-eight, were still on the board of Paramount; Jack Warner, seventy-three, ran Warner Bros. Darryl F. Zanuck, sixty-three, was firmly in command at 20th Century-Fox. “If you were these guys, you weren’t going to give this up,” says Ned Tanen, who at the time was a young man with the music division of MCA, and later headed motion pictures at Universal.