![]() But the real inflection point, when it comes to the explosion of cinematic motorcycle films, was the release of the Canon 5D Mk. ![]() YouTube? The iPhone? Netflix? All of those (plus a thing called the internet) contribute to the fact that none of the handful of folks under 25 who I asked about watching "Easy Rider" had ever seen it from start to finish. Until we arrived at one of the most important moments in modern film history, in September 2008. This race to capitalize on new art forms only got faster through the 1990s and 2000s with globalization and advancements in technology. The explosion of biker B-movies in the 1970s and '80s were the reverberation of this (though Fonda and Nicholson had already dabbled in motorcycle cheese prior to 1969 with "The Wild Angels" and "Hell’s Angels on Wheels"). What did happen in the ensuing half century since the debut of "Easy Rider" is the speed, and efficacy, with which studios, brands and corporations were able to glean “the next big thing” from the youth of America and spin it into a marketable form. Look no further than the history of American popular music. That’s not to say that business people hadn't been leveraging that approach for a long time prior. That, my friends, is a blueprint for how you attract every capitalist on the planet to your art form with the hopes of recreating the success by any means necessary. Columbia Pictures image.įirst, what matters more than anything is the chain reaction of events that occurred when a couple of filmmakers from Southern California produced a Cannes-debuting film for $400,000, which in turn went on to a box-office haul of $60 million worldwide. The reason for this is two-fold.Ī copy of the original theatrical release poster hung on my bedroom wall for years. The impact this film had on a young man was that I went on a 10-year tear of films from directors who actually had something to say: the Coen Brothers, Stanley Kubrick, Errol Morris, Danny Boyle, etc.ĭespite everything that this film meant to me, what role does this piece of avant-garde, counter-culture art play in today’s world of overabundant content that’s bastardized nearly every form of cinematic commentary into hackneyed oblivion? The more I thought about it, the more I had to come to terms with the fact that "Easy Rider" just doesn’t matter anymore. The wild success of Hopper and Fonda with a piece of counter-culture commentary that took the masses by storm. Complementing my experience of the film was my art teacher's enthusiasm for the story behind it. Drug-dealing protagonists who end up dead before the closing credits showed me that films didn’t have to be Indiana Jones or Austin Powers. Not in the fact that I hadn’t been exposed to the world before, but in the way the film was unlike any piece of storytelling I’d seen. Comparing it to the most venerable of film genres, the American Western, is more flattering than an award from Cannes or a nomination from the Academy.Īs for me, a 15-year-old who spent his life in a coat and tie at an all-boys prep school for 10 years, I can tell you that it was eye-opening. The quote from Roger Ebert’s original review of the film sums up just what a critical success the film was upon release. “And someday it was inevitable that a great film would come along, utilizing the motorcycle genre, the same way the great Westerns suddenly made everyone realize they were a legitimate American art form, 'Easy Rider' is the picture.” - Roger Ebert, 1969. Civil War regalia at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969. But to keep this party moving, here’s the gist of the film: Two chopper-riding drug dealers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) ride across America with an alcoholic lawyer (Jack Nicholson) to discover that hating other people who don’t look like you is as American as gerrymandering, racial profiling and all the other shit we’re really good at being really bad about.Įxploiting the “uniforms” loophole in Cannes' strict dress code, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper dressed in U.S. If that’s the case, you can read the synopsis here. Maybe your digital-device-addled brain won’t let you sit still for more than an hour at a time. If somehow you haven’t seen the film, you can stream it pretty much anywhere for a few bucks (YouTube, iTunes and Amazon, to name a few). The fact that this press release can be seen published across such diverse sites as Forbes, Ultimate Motorcycling and Variety should remind you of the rather glorified place in history this film has achieved in the last 50 years. By now you’ve likely seen that "Easy Rider" will be celebrating its 50th anniversary with a 400-theater re-release to mark the day it first hit U.S.
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