— Ch. 1 · Counterculture Road Movie Origins —
Easy Rider.
~7 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
Peter Fonda held a still photograph of himself and Bruce Dern from the 1966 film The Wild Angels. He saw two bikers traveling across America after selling drugs in that image. This visual sparked an idea for a modern Western story. Fonda called Dennis Hopper to discuss turning this concept into a movie. They named their project The Loners with Hopper directing and both men starring. Peter Fonda had become an icon of the counterculture movement through his earlier work. His persona would develop further in The Trip and Easy Rider. The Trip also popularized LSD use within cinema narratives. Easy Rider went on to celebrate sixties counterculture but did so stripped of its innocence. Author Katie Mills described The Trip as a way point along the metamorphosis of the rebel road story. She connected Peter Fonda's characters across those films while critiquing commodity-oriented filmmakers appropriating avant-garde techniques. It was also a step in the transition from independent film into Hollywood mainstream. When Fonda took Easy Rider to American International Pictures, they wanted to replace him if costs rose. Fonda instead brought the project to Bert Schneider of Raybert Productions and Columbia Pictures.
Independent Production Challenges
The filming budget for Easy Rider ranged between three hundred sixty thousand dollars and four hundred thousand dollars. Peter Fonda personally paid for travel and lodging expenses using his credit cards. Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs noted that an additional one million dollars was spent on licensed music tracks during editing. This amount represented about three times the budget for shooting the rest of the film. Associate producer Bill Hayward recalled Hopper fighting with the production ad hoc crew for control. During test shooting in New Orleans, Hopper demanded camera operator Barry Feinstein hand over footage he shot that day. Enraged, Feinstein hurled film cans at Hopper and the two got into a physical confrontation. After this turmoil, Hopper and Fonda decided to assemble a proper crew for the remainder of the film. Consequently, the rest of the film was shot on thirty-five millimeter film while New Orleans sequences were shot on sixteen millimeter film. The hippie commune was recreated from pictures and shot at a site overlooking Malibu Canyon on Piuma Canyon Road. Among extras appearing in the sequence were actors Dan Haggerty and Carrie Snodgress plus musician Jim Sullivan and Fonda's daughter Bridget. A short clip near the beginning shows Wyatt and Billy on Route 66 passing a large lumberjack figure. That statue remains inside the J Lawrence Walkup Skydome campus of Northern Arizona University today.