![]() ![]() They were responsible for most of the screenplay, yet Hopper would later demand that he be given sole credit for it. ![]() But it took a long time before Peter and Dennis grew on one another. The crew did all their filming at the Lafayette Cemetery, which is Protestant.Īs Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson traveled from state to state making their movie, the three men gradually developed a friendship. The 1999 thriller Double Jeopardy was filmed in New Orleans, but not in the Catholic grounds. Catholic members of the audience took offense at this and the Church has since banned all film crews from shooting there unless they are doing a documentary. The graveyard scene with Peter Fonda was shot, without permission, in the New Orleans cemetery, St Louis # 1, a Catholic cemetery. ‘If you guys try to get into the studio again, I may have to cause you some bodily harm.’ Dennis was one stroppy guy. The highly volatile actor then confronted them, and issued a warning. #Easy rider quotes movie#A band that drove around in limos, he said, had no comprehension of the movie they were making. Fonda actually wanted Crosby, Stills & Nash to record the soundtrack, but Hopper would not have a bar of it. The Beatles used their own songs in their films, but to take previously recorded tracks and insert them into a movie, instead of having someone create a score was revolutionary at the time. The soundtrack would prove to be a major component of the picture’s success. Torn with himself, and even took a major hand in the selection of the sixties hit songs for the soundtrack. He got the show back on the road, replaced the recently departed Mr. In fact, Fonda did all in his power to have Hopper replaced, but was stymied by the fact that Dennis had written much of the screenplay, was one of the stars and was directing the picture! Aware of the problems, BBS sent Jack Nicholson down to New Orleans as an executive producer come trouble-shooter. ![]() Fonda and Hopper quarreled continuously as well. Hopper’s drug-induced tirades were so disruptive that crew members wrote to BBS in New York explaining why they were quitting the production. He then sued Dennis for defamation – and won. Torn quickly refuted his story and said it was Hopper who had actually pulled the knife. During an interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1992, Hopper claimed Torn had pulled a knife on him during a pre-production meeting. So, when the third man, Rip Torn, demanded $4,500 for his services, he and Hopper clashed, Rip took a walk and the production was suddenly minus one third of its stars. Even Fonda and Hopper themselves were working to scale, being paid just a few hundred dollars. There simply was not enough money to pay everyone. This was just not done with feature films, but the miniscule operating budget left them little choice. Apart from the three stars and a handful of cameos, almost everyone else in it were non-actors, collected from wherever the film crew stopped to shoot scenes. The picture was about to break new ground in movie-making. Biker movies were cheap to make and they always made money, so the two hopefuls wrangled a budget of $375,000 out of BBS and were told to go make the thing. #Easy rider quotes plus#The feature would star both men plus the unknown Jack Nicholson, and they would be playing former members of the Kennedy administration, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk and Lyndon Johnson, who would be plotting the assassination of JFK! BBS would not touch it with a barge pole, but they did show interest in the duo’s alternative idea – a biker picture. In 1968, Fonda and Hopper attempted to peddle an idea for a feature (titled The Queen) to a new production company called BBS. #Easy rider quotes professional#He desperately needed to regain some professional respect, so getting Easy Rider up and running was vitally important to him. Witnesses recalled him once stuffing his finger in an executive’s nose during a meeting at Columbia Studios! His marriage to society girl Brooke Hayward was also, not surprisingly, on its last legs. He was also so anti-establishment that scarcely a soul in any kind of authority in the movie business would even talk to him…and he had a deep and dark, unnatural obsession with the late James Dean. He suffered from severe bouts of depression, flew into rages at the slightest provocation, was heavily into amphetamines and LSD, and was in his sixteenth year of smoking marijuana on a daily basis. His professional reputation was in the toilet and he was, not too inaccurately, deemed by most of Hollywood as a man on the brink of insanity. Easy Rider (1969) was intended to star Peter Fonda, Rip Torn and Dennis Hopper, but Fonda encountered impenetrable opposition when he went in search of financial backing, because nobody wanted to get involved with a project that included the notoriously difficult Dennis Hopper. ![]()
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