In 1969, Dennis Hopper and friends set out to make one of the last great movies of the decade, changing independent film-making foreverIt’s a matter of historical record that Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson smoked marijuana while shooting in character on the epochal road picture Easy Rider.
They would not be the last to do so, and this writer would gladly wager that they weren’t the first, but posterity has cast them as the poster boys for the practice.
More so than anyone else’s, their casual ingesting reflected a devil-may-care attitude that began with their characters – Captain America in biker leather Wyatt (Fonda), fringe-jacketed hippie Billy (Hopper) and their lawyer companion George (Nicholson) – and extended to the men themselves.
When they light up, we catch a glimpse of something real, a roustabout spirit that director Hopper and his merry band lived as they acted it.
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