Tripping cross-country [Fonda on Easy Rider]

Tripping cross-country

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/03/1c3easym183122/?features&zIndex=126090

Peter Fonda describes the odyssey of filming 'Easy Rider' 40 years ago

By Norma Meyer
July 3, 2009

LOS ANGELES ­ Forty years later, Peter Fonda cracks up explaining why
a grinning, glassy-eyed Jack Nicholson did an awesome job of acting
high on pot in an infamous "Easy Rider" campfire scene. Simply put,
that was no acting. And co-stars Fonda and Dennis Hopper also smoked
real grass on-screen during their rambling campfire chats.

Nicholson, who earned his first Oscar nomination for the 1969 cult
classic, plays a boozing ACLU lawyer who in the campfire scene is
being introduced to marijuana by bikers Billy (Hopper) and Wyatt
(Fonda). Things may have gotten convoluted because Hopper, who was
also the film's director, decided to shoot his and Fonda's parts
first while Nicholson sat nearby, off-camera.

"We would do our lines and I would fire up a joint and pass it to
Jack, and Jack would take a hit on it," recalls Fonda, who not only
acted but also co-wrote and produced the film. "By the time we get to
him, he's stoned out of his brain. In a stoner way, as we're filming,
he forgot his lines ­ it was a long speech about (Venusians) meeting
people from all walks of life."

Nicholson's giggle-punctuated babble about UFOs fits perfectly in
"Easy Rider," the counterculture film that helped propel him to
stardom. (It returns, in a newly restored 35mm print, for an
exclusive engagement beginning tonight at the Ken Cinema.) Fonda and
Hopper received Oscar nods for the screenplay co-written with Terry
Southern. (Much of the dialogue was improvised, however.)

Premiering July 14, 1969, the road-trip flick stars Fonda and Hopper
as two disillusioned, shaggy-haired bikers who encounter prejudice
and bigotry as they ride cross-country during the turbulent '60s. The
low-budget box-office hit was groundbreaking; it reflected the social
and political climate and was shot in less than seven weeks with
$500,000 of nonstudio money, ushering in the wave of indie filmmaking.

What went on behind the lens, though, adds even more to the "Easy
Rider" lore. The talkative 69-year-old Fonda, who conceived the
movie's idea and plays the cool Wyatt, aka Captain America, in a
recent interview discussed it all ­ from Hopper's maniacal rants to
the time Nicholson nervously squeezed so hard with his legs while
holding on the back of Fonda's chopper, he cracked Fonda's rib.

The way Fonda tells it, the whole production was unconventional. Just
listen to how he got his iconic American flag-emblazoned leather
jacket and tight leather pants to look worn: "I stood in my shower
and got it soaking wet. And then I sat in the sun with my legs bent
and my arms bent and let it dry."

But the Hollywood scion ­ his father is the late Henry Fonda ­ turns
serious when he recounts the powerfully emotional scene in which he
clings to a female statue in a New Orleans cemetery while on a bad
acid trip. In the film he calls the statue "Mother," asks why she
left and sobs, "I hate you so much."

Before cameras rolled, Hopper had asked Fonda to talk in the
graveyard about his mother, Frances. She committed suicide when Fonda
was 10 and his actress sister Jane was 12.

"I didn't want to do it. Dennis and I were arguing about it and
finally Dennis, with tears in his eyes, he's begging me to do it. I
said, 'Well, give me one good reason.' He said, 'Because I'm the
director.' I couldn't argue with it.

"I had never gone there before about my mother. I had never gone down
that road. It was very upsetting to me."

Fonda says the scene later helped persuade Bob Dylan to allow use of
"It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" on the "Easy Rider"
soundtrack. Dylan had originally balked, according to Fonda, because
he didn't like his harmonica-playing on the song, the lyrics of which
include, "Suicide remarks are torn / From the fool's gold mouthpiece."

"I said, 'I've got to hear those words, because my mother cut her
throat from ear to ear in an insane asylum when I was 10.' And that
blew his mind. Bobby looked at me and said, 'OK.' "

From the get-go, filming started off shakily, according to Fonda.
The first sequence shot was in New Orleans, and the voice of Hopper
on-screen is raspy for good reason. Over the years, "Easy Rider" cast
and crew members have recounted how a controlling Hopper went
ballistic at times. Fonda, who describes Hopper as both "brilliant"
and "paranoid" (he had his own burly bodyguard during filming), says
the director was definitely the latter when he gathered the ad hoc
crew on the first day in a parking lot.

"Dennis was screaming at us. It's his 'effing' movie and nobody was
going to take his 'effing' movie away from him. He was literally
screaming the same thing over and over for an hour, and he lost his voice."

By the time Hopper was done yelling, the Mardi Gras parade, which was
to figure prominently in the movie, had already kicked off. That was
a huge screw-up, since the filming permit stated the actors had to
start with the parade at the beginning. At one point, a cameraman
sneaked in and shot actress Karen Black briefly jumping into the parade.

If the production's start was dicey, so was the end. Fonda's and
Hopper's customized Harleys (which were former Los Angeles Police
Department bikes bought at auction for $500 apiece, then "built by
five black guys from Watts," according to Fonda) aren't in the final
campfire scene.

"We had already had a wrap party. We had forgotten to shoot that
scene," Fonda says. By then, the motorcycles had been stolen from a
Simi Valley garage where they were stored.

Casting was also done on the fly. The two Southern hunters in the
pickup in the violent climax were nonactors who had pulled over out
of curiosity in Louisiana to watch the film crew set up. And the
rednecks and teenage girls in the tension-filled diner scene were
locals (that's a real deputy sheriff, too) who happened to be at the
backwater Louisiana cafe.

In that scene, the men hurl insults at Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson
and mock the bikers' long hair. To get the newfound extras riled up,
Fonda says they were told that in the movie, the trio had just raped
and killed a white girl outside of town ­ which wasn't true. "They
became incensed. We said, 'The worst thing you can say about us is perfect.' "

The cameos are also a trip ­ the hippies at a commune include Fonda's
first wife, Susan Brewer, their children, Bridget and Justin, and Dan
Haggerty of "Grizzly Adams" fame. And record producer Phil Spector,
now in prison for murdering an actress at his mansion, has a cameo as
a cocaine dealer who snorts a sample of his buy. His character
arrives in a Rolls with a bodyguard at a runway at Los Angeles
International Airport.

"Phil had been a friend and he had his own Rolls-Royce and a
bodyguard. It was a budget decision," Fonda says with a laugh. "Phil
was so scared of the planes ­ he really was ducking."

The cocaine, which Fonda also tries on-camera, was fake. "That was
powdered sugar. Man, that really hurt going up my nose." And the LSD
dropped in the New Orleans segment was actually aspirin.

But Fonda says he provided about a kilo of marijuana that was used
whenever the actors smoked weed on-screen. "It was what hippies were
doing in those days. And bikers."

Fonda says he got the idea for his anti-establishment film in 1967,
while in Toronto promoting "The Trip," an LSD-themed movie written by
Nicholson and co-starring him, Fonda and Bruce Dern. As he
autographed photos, he came across a silhouetted publicity still of
himself and Dern riding motorcycles on Venice Beach. It was from
their 1966 outlaw biker movie, "The Wild Angels."

In his new movie, he envisioned "two guys riding across John Ford's
West" to retire. In "Easy Rider," the biker buddies plan to use the
coke proceeds, which are stuffed in Captain America's
stars-and-stripes gas tank, to retire in Florida.

Looking back, "Easy Rider" made an indelible mark ­ a
40th-anniversary Blu-ray version comes out in the fall ­ because "it
spoke to this country and it also spoke to an audience which had
never had a film made for them," Fonda says. "The studios were making
'Pillow Talk' with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. We were trying to put
out the message of bigotry, injustice, racism. We wanted to show a
different part of America."

And no surprise, Fonda has been repeatedly asked to explain what he
meant when he uttered the movie's lingering line, "We blew it." (He
also notes he and Hopper had a screaming fight over the line, but he won.)

"Well, look out the window today," Fonda muses. "The air is bad,
everything has gone further south; it's all gone to hell in a
handbasket. We all had this idea you get rich and you're free. And
that's wrong."

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