When Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider grossed somewhere around 120 times its cost in 1969, the Hollywood studios took notice and began scrambling to find their own Easy Riders, and their own Hoppers and Fondas.
Universal executive Ned Tanen’s approach was to start a division that would give young filmmakers creative control provided they stuck to a one-million-dollar budget; the idea was that at that price Universal couldn’t really lose much, but if just one of the movies broke big it would pay for the rest and then some.
The experiment yielded several very interesting films, including Fonda’s […]The post Silent Running, Year of the Dragon and Rolling Thunder Revue: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
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