I'd taken a couple of aspirins and was lying on the bed looking at a picture of Marlon Brando in his Wild One get-up. And then it came to me: a modern Western set on motorbikes! The next day, I called Dennis. Easy Rider is celebrated as a turning point in groundbreaking American cinema; scripts were partially improvised, locations were authentic, the budget was small and the actors were almost perpetually stoned on camera.
Hopper and Fonda wrote, directed and starred in the movie as Billy and Wyatt respectively, Terry Southern wrote the script and Jack Nicholson delivered a character that launched his hugely successful acting career. Immersing themselves in the American counterculture of the early s, the film is dripping with symbolism both subtle and sledgehammer-obvious.
In the opening credits, Wyatt takes one look at his watch and — apparently disliking what he sees — removes it from his wrist and flings it in the dust, dismissing the corporate constraints of time and routine. She was praised as one of the first female owners of a racing jacket company appropriate considering the progressive nature of the film , and it was she who made some of the first colourful biker jackets in an era where they were mostly black and riders were near impossible to tell apart.
Nobody wanted to see us around there. We were wearing our costumes to break them in, so the two of us were walking around looking like a couple of hippies. When we were on the street, people would run away from us! Their costumed characters may have been rejected by society, but audiences devoured Easy Rider like no film before it.
This has value! Not fitting in with the commune-dwelling hippies or the rough-and-ready bikers in the film, Billy and Wyatt represented the growing concept of the outsider, in a period of social, political and cultural unrest, and an ideological way to break the mould.
