Original subtitles

Peter had made a motorcycle movie called Wild Angels...

...which was a big, big success.

And Jack Nicholson had made one called Hells Angels on Wheels.

And I'd made one called The Glory Stompers.

So Peter and I promised each other we wouldn't make a bike movie.

We wanted to do anything but make a motorcycle movie...

...because we were afraid that we were gonna become...

...the John Wayne and, you know, Gabby Hayes of bike films.

I went to Toronto to promote The Trip.

So I was there on the first day at this big exhibition.

Jack Valenti is up at this big table of bigwigs.

And he's the new boy in the block.

LBJ had just appointed him...

...had just created a thing called the Motion Picture Association of America.

And Jack's up there.

This is his first public utterance:

�My friends, you are my friends."

And looking right at me:

�We have to stop making movies about motorcycles, sex and drugs...

...and make more movies like Dr. Doolittle."

I went back to the Lakeshore Motel, smoked a couple of doobs...

...had some Heineken, sat down and began to sign photographs.

I came upon one photograph from The Wild Angels.

So the doobs and the Heine kicked right in and I fell into the photograph.

Oh, that's it.

I know what to do for my next sex-motorcycle-and-drugs movie.

First thing I thought of was these two guys...

...who have done this journey across America...

...and that they get bumped off by these guys who were poachers.

I'd call Hopper, and it was about 4:30 in the morning.

He woke me up in the middle of the night. He said, "What do you think?"

I said, "Did they tell you they'd give you the money?�

And I said, �You direct, I'll produce.

We'll both write and we'll both act. We can save some money."

Dennis said, �You want me to direct?�

I knew that Dennis would be the perfect person to direct this film.

And I wasn't wrong.

We'd gone through the whole '60s...

...and the '60s had been such a fascinating time.

There'd been no movies made...

...that had anything to do with our reality.

I mean, a movie that was made the year that we made Easy Rider...

...was Doris Day and Rock Hudson made Pillow Talk.

The young kind of movies were being made for kids...

...were Beach Blanket Bingo, you know, with Frankie Avalon.

They had very little to do with the reality of Haight-Ashbury...

...or the reality of the hippy love-ins.

So much was happening at that moment.

The visual arts were exploding.

The music was exploding.

All these creative things had happened...

...and basically this was tapping into the end of it.

Pop art had already happened.

Rock 'n' roll had already happened.

The Summer of Love was over.

I was in Roscoff in the West Coast of France in 1967...

...shooting a film with Jane.

One afternoon, I hear some scuffling on the stairs...

...and into my room walks Terry Southern...

...who had been in Rome looking at Barbarella...

...that he had written for Jane and Vadim.

Terry wanted to know, �What are you doing?

I told him the story of what Dennis and I were getting up to.

And Terry knew Dennis.

Terry said, �Den-Den, huh?

Well, what's your plan?�

I said, "Well, you know...

...we really don't want to write it into a screenplay form.

We're too impatient for it.

So we want to find somebody who will just mechanically write it...

...into a screenplay form for us...

...and then we'll go out and shoot the film."

Terry said, "I'm your guy."

I said, "Terry, your fee is the budget of the film.

Come on, give me a break.�

�No, you don't understand, Peter. I'm your guy."

We all got together and began to work it out.

By the time we'd spent about five days together...

...we had it locked into a story that I recorded on tape...

.-.and it was transcribed and made out of 21 pages...

...and that's what we went back to Hollywood with.

So we went in to Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider and our friends...

...who had just made The Monkees and had this tremendous success.

And Jack Nicholson was there because they were making Head.

And that's how Jack fell into it also.

Rafelson said, "It's the most commercial story I've ever heard.

Well, how much do you want for this movie?"

I said, �$350,000,.

I wasn't prepared for it. I just thought:

�Well, that's how much it cost Corman to shoot The Wild Angels.

I can do the same. No problem."

I said, "We ought to go to Mardi Gras...

...because we'll have a hundred thousand people in costume.

We won't have to pay for it."

And Bert wrote us a check for $40,000 to go shoot Mardi Gras.

And Schneider said, �This is your test.

I'm giving you money to shoot this 16 mm thing. If this works, fine.

If it doesn't, you're not going on with this picture."

There was some confusion...

...about when Mardi Gras actually took place.

So they were caught and they didn't have anything...

...except a number of volunteers.

I had to suddenly jam and get friends with 16 mm cameras together...

...to go and shoot in Mardi Gras, which is already a disastrous idea.

The night before they travelled to New Orleans, they had a meeting.

People would say, �Gee, okay, we need a gaffer.

Who wants to be a gaffer?�

And, you know, somebody- �Okay, you're the gaffer."

It was like that. It was just--

I went, "Oh, my God, this can't work.�

I mean, I wasn't that organized. But I was appalled.

And they all thought they were the first cameraman. They all thought that.

We were all out of our minds. Half of us were on acid.

We'd go to a meeting in a conference room.

Dennis and Peter are sitting up there.

�Dude, we gotta be careful here, because they know what we're doing."

I said, "Dennis, who knows what we're doing?"

He said, "The government."

I said, "The government?

Well, why? What are we doing that they know?"

He said, "They know that we're here to make this movie."

And I said, �Well, how do they know what the movie's about?

We don't have a fucking script. How the fuck can they know that?"

He said, "They know, man.

Man, they know because of who we are."

I said, "Who are we, man?"

Seymour Cassel was one of the camera assistants.

You know, this is great.

It was a nightmare.

And I was so convinced that we had to do this right and so on.

I was a maniac.

I'd tell them, "Nobody's to film anything unless I tell them to."

Every time I look around, there's a guy shooting out the window.

Because they all wanted to be directors. It was a nightmare.

It was a prison-like atmosphere.

Dennis was quite afraid that we would get some idea...

...that we should go shopping.

And then he wouldn't have us in that exact inspired moment...

...when he had something to shoot.

So he used to say, �Are you there? Are you there?"

And we'd-- Toni and I would look at each other.

�Yes, why?"

"I don't know, I just want you there."

Dennis would get into an argument with one of the cameramen.

�Give it to me, it's my camera." He'd go off and shoot without Peter.

We were supposed to be in the parade.

If you look at the film carefully...

...you'll see that we're never in the parade.

There's one shot where I'm in the parade.

I could not believe what was going on.

And I'm the producer.

A lot of people quit.

So they started to come back the second or third day.

And they'd all come by the office, and just tell me these horror stories.

I was taking a shower, I guess trying to wash the day off.

It was so amazing.

It's like I cleaned up and dried off...

...put on a T-shirt and some jeans and jacket and went next door...

...where Karen Black and Toni Basil were bunked together...

...picked up Karen's guitar and started playing...

...songs and, you know, vocation love.

There's a scuffle going on outside.

I was drawn to the scuffle, and out there is Barry Feinstein...

...holding his $30,000, three-lens combo Aeroflex.

And Barry Feinstein is a Golden Gloves champion, right?

While Dennis is kicking at him and trying to get the camera--

Barry Feinstein and I get in a fight.

They're rolling around and fighting.

Got all the film in my room and he starts throwing it.

The room is full of film.

Said, "You worked me, ran me through the streets night and day.

And you're screaming about how Orson Welles had failed...�

The fight fell into the room with the two girls.

And upside down, Dennis tumbles through the door.

We go crashing in through a door...

...where Peter's in bed with Karen and Toni.

Dennis picked up the guitar, Karen's guitar...

...and slammed it over Barry.

Dennis was sitting on him. Pinned to the floor.

Picks up the television, threw it at Barry.

Dennis looked at him and he says-- And he meant it.

"I love you, man. Man, I love you.�

The whole thing has been like a Rash�mon experience.

The whole movie, the entire production.

Everybody's got an entirely different story on the thing.

Terry Southern, a grown-up.

Someone who can put order in here.

Someone who can make it pragmatic and workable.

So we all had a meeting.

Dennis was going:

Terry said:

"I don't think I can bear the cacophony of your speech much longer."

Dennis said, "The cacophony, huh? The cacophony of my speech, huh?"

And they were, like, having these arguments and things.

And nothing was decided.

So we started this very badly.

This did not start off as some friends now making a movie.

The big schism seemed to have come down in New Orleans.

They never were the same after that.

And they argued considerably...

...throughout the remainder of the picture.

They started out great pals...

...and they didn't end up great pals at all.

But they could pretend they were great pals to the outside world.

And they did for years.

Next thing was to get the script done, 30...

Now, there's a lot of controversy about that.

But basically...

...Terry Southern had been one of the original producers.

And Terry ducked out after the New Orleans debacle.

So we made a deal with Terry to be one of the writers on the project.

We decided to shut down and get a screenplay written...

...and hire a real crew of real people...

...and get kind of professional about the whole thing.

We hired a production manager named Paul Lewis.

I had done a series of pictures with Jack Nicholson.

Jack and I were talking. He says, �Have I got a thing for you.

I've got a great picture for you to do.

It's a bike picture and it's with two crazies.

But at least you have one guy there who will drink with you.�

Here's to the first of the day, fellas.

At the time, we were making a low-budget motorcycle movie.

I didn't think we were doing anything.

Dennis always thought we were doing something special.

The movie was like a Western to me.

I thought of Wyatt as Wyatt Earp...

...and I thought of Billy as Billy the Kid...

...and these two thrown together as partners.

For me, it was a Western idiom we were working with.

Riding the motorcycle and wearing spurs.

I was the Duke, Dennis was Wardell...

...and we're going to cross John Ford's America.

It's a couple of guys in leather and riding horses...

...they're riding like motorcycles.

They camp out around campfires.

They're the bad guys. They're outlaws.

If you look at The Wild One...

...that was the beginning of glamorizing the biker...

...as the kind of fantasy outlaw.

And what that did is it created the atmosphere...

...to allow the Hell's Angels to become the big gang.

The same time that we were making Easy Rider in 1968...

...the whole country was ablaze.

The Black Panthers were causing riots everywhere...

...and the cities were burning.

We were living in a society that was amoral...

...because we could no longer believe in the mores of the society...

...and that we were all breaking the laws of society.

People wanted change.

They wanted us out of the war.

They wanted a different kind of life.

Everybody was giving away acid and the be-ins and the love-ins.

Everyone was smoking dope.

If you didn't have it, somebody else had it.

Everybody shared. It was a nice feeling.

It all changed and then harder drugs came in.

It became a business.

When hard drugs started to come in...

...being dealt by people who had absolutely no values whatsoever...

...that was the beginning of the end of it.

When we first started doing-- Mescal came before acid, actually.

We were just looking for a different take on things.

Because of smoking marijuana...

...and the kind of things that we were doing in the '60s...

...it seemed like everyone was outside of the law at that time.

The exec producer told us:

�You can't have heroes who smuggle hard narcotics.

Can you do it with grass?"

And then I looked at Hopper and I said:

�Well, yeah, if we have three Peterbilt, triple-tractor trailers waiting for us.

We couldn't really get that much marijuana on a motorcycle...

...you know, to make it interesting, money-wise.

I changed that to cocaine...

...because heroin had just a bad connotation to it.

And cocaine was the drug of kings, and nobody really knew what it was.

I didn't really wanna make it a drug you could identify.

It was just a white powder.

I wanted the moralists in the country...

...to feel whatever was the worst drug for them.

That was what this was.

And that we would score this in a junkyard.

In Mexico, scoring junk in a junkyard.

Hopper loved that thought.

He also promised he'd give me real coke.

It's a test.

Oh, man, I tell you. Powdered sugar really hurts.

I'd flown into LAX with John Lear in a Learjet...

...and looking out the window I saw this is a public road.

And I just thought, �This is really wild.

This would be a great place to do a scene...

...where there's so much noise, you can't hear what goes on...

...but you know what's going on."

Planes were landing from 20 feet to 50 feet over our heads...

...almost every minute, every minute and a half.

And every time a plane went, everybody was ducking down.

There were the planes roaring overhead or taking off.

And at the same time, a train went by...

...carrying half-tracks and tanks on its way to Vietnam.

And I said, �Mixed media.�

And we elected not to put the tanks in the original...

...because we did not wanna make a film about or against...

...or any judgment on the war in Vietnam.

We got Phil because he had his own Rolls-Royce...

...so we picked up that free.

And his own bodyguard. Another one we picked up for free.

But we ran into some problems because Phil really was scared.

By the end of the day, people were ready to kill each other...

...because you couldn't hear, you couldn't talk to anybody...

_..and the first day of the picture was almost the last day of the film.

One of the first things I did after I talked with Hopper...

...was I drew out the pictures of the motorcycle...

...with the teardrop gas tank.

It's extended with the far front end, the two big Harley V-Twin peppers.

I'm just riding one big phallic down the road.

The California Chopper, of which those are representative...

...was all about style and made no sense at all.

The bikes that they're based on, the Harley-Davidson Police bike...

...they were '40s police bikes.

They had a rigid frame. They didn't have a rear suspension.

But they had an amazing seat suspension.

The seat took all the abuse.

You were semi-protected from the vagaries of the highway...

...by the seat.

But, of course, the stylistic thing...

...was to get the seat as close as you could to the frame of the bike...

...so you could sit as low as possible...

...and have that kind of look with the ape hangery.

So they took away the one thing...

._.that saved you from losing your back altogether.

There's a lot of guys that used to ride those things...

...that can't even begin to ride a motorcycle.

We had to cross every bridge that Dennis could find.

And sometimes they had planks...

...running parallel to the run of the bridge...

...with spaces wider and smaller...

...and that from end would get a little squirrelly.

Our first day of riding, which was only a 55-mile ride--

But we crossed the Colorado River about a dozen times.

They weren't motorcycles...

...that you drove back and forth across the country.

Nobody had tried that, I don't think.

There must be some nutcases that did...

...but no rational human being tried it.

L�szl� Kov�cs was the greatest telephoto operator I've ever seen.

Our camera car was hysterical.

What we would do is knock the camera...

...either in a convertible or on the back of a station wagon.

Soft tires, back seats out.

Just some sandbags and an Aeroflex and L�szl�.

One moment when were riding...

...Dennis swings to his left and L�szl� pulls out.

It's just like Dennis is pushing the frame right when you're watching it.

It's a great shot.

L�szl� was just so hip that he saw Dennis swinging...

...and started pulling back.

And I did this very subconsciously.

I wasn't designing this shot a night before and storyboard it.

It comes out of an instinct, you know?

And they responded.

Well, when I was swinging my arm, he swings over to the other side.

It was just a wonderful-- Almost like a musical ballet.

ABC Leathers had made two jackets and one set of pants for me.

And I wore the outfit all the time.

In fact, I'd gotten in a bathtub with the pants on.

I got them all wet and then let them dry with me...

...and my legs bent...

...so they would look like I'd been born in them.

So it was a hot day, we'd stop.

We're waiting. I'm getting hot in the black leathers.

By the time we got to Kingman...

...we were all gonna go out by the pool to have a cocktail.

And I thought, �That sounds cool." I got into my room...

...peeled off the leathers. I had these purple legs from the dye of the pants.

I was very embarrassed about my skinniness.

I said, �I'm not about to go out with skinny purple legs."

So I pulled on some clean pants, and went to the bar and I said:

�Bring me the tallest, coldest beer you have.�

So they came with this big stein. Glass stein.

Frosted at that.

And I grabbed it, thinking to myself:

�Shit, man, this is the first day on the road with the movie.

You know, my first production. This is wonderful.

All these people. We're all together, making this movie."

I just picked up the beer, couldn't move it to my face.

I could pick it up, put it down, but no hinge.

So nobody saw that one. I'll wait and grab it with the other arm.

Pick it up and it won't move.

And then I just try without the beer.

I can't make my hands move to this part of my body.

Because for the entire day, at 25 miles an hour-

Because you had to see the background.

You could not go fast.

With my hands up in the air so high--

And they're just hanging on...

...trying to keep this sucker from going over.

At faster speeds, it was easy to ride.

At slow speeds, it was a major bitch.

I couldn't put anything in my mouth.

I couldn't even smoke a joint.

Where you fellas from?

LA.

L.A.?

Los Angeles.

Dennis wanted Warren, who played the farmer--

He said, "Maybe you should do it without your teeth.�

Now, no actor wants to work without their teeth.

He didn't have any from teeth. He had these false teeth.

Hey, baby. Hey, baby.

How you doing?

And Warren had been the original Leach...

...in The Connection, off-Broadway.

He was just incredibly full of life.

We'd been smoking since early that morning.

What we did was we drove along in three Cortez's...

...and we'd jump out and shoot, jump out and shoot...

...get back in the Cortez.

And we were diligently figuring out what we were gonna say...

...and, of course, it started coming out very serious and very heavy.

And by the time we got to where we were gonna shoot...

...which is an Indian burial place--

And there were park rangers standing there watching us.

They didn't want a pebble moved.

We sat there with the camera running five minutes...

...before anybody said anything.

We were so loaded, we didn't even know where we were.

This is a weird place, man.

Peter, I think, must have forgotten that he was in front of the camera.

And I was actually having some problems...

...because I was sitting closest to the real fire.

The smoke was getting to me.

The smoke's getting to me.

So I said, �I don't see you moving.�

Because actually if he moved, we're in his shot.

But I notice you're not moving.

Busted, you know?

And I went:

I laughed a full Fonda--

I wasn't Captain America at all.

You ever wanna be somebody else?

I'd like to try Porky Pig.

Porky Pig didn't have any more meaning than anything else.

It was just the first thing that came to my mind.

And as soon as I said it, I was sorry...

...because I wished I had said Daffy Duck.

Because Daffy Duck is somebody that I've patterned a lot of my work on.

Where are you from, man?

Hard to say.

Hard to say? Where are you from, man?

It's hard to say because it's a very long word, you know?

I just wanna know where you're from.

Some of the hostilities you'll see between some of the people...

...show in some of the scenes.

Luke and Dennis may have had words earlier in the day...

_..and I think you'll see some of the hostilities in the way it was done...

...between the Porky Pig, and, you know, certain things.

But that really worked for the picture.

It was our first real day off.

And we all gathered in the lounge...

...of the Americana Inn in Flagstaff.

We put all these round tables out in a circle...

...and we all were having a good time and I had my 12-string guitar...

...and I was singing and playing and we were having a grand old time...

...till some son of a bitch came out from the real bar, drunk...

...staggered into the middle of our circle...

...and started saying, "You hippies. You fucking hippies, you know--"

And he's an ex-Marine and he's thinking, "You peaceniks."

And he gets on a rant.

He pisses off quite a few people on the show...

...some of whom even served in Korea.

They picked him up, put him outside the circle.

We all thought, �That's good enough."

And as we all went to sit down again...

._.he pulled Joyce's chair out.

Joyce King, our script clerk.

And she sat down, fell on the floor.

You do not fuck with a film company...

...when they're all together.

We picked him up...

...put him down on the bar as we all went sieg heil-ing.

Heil out of this bar and into my room.

The whole company went into Peter's room.

Everybody. And Peter was sitting there rolling a lot of joints.

And everybody sat down.

Everybody in the company...

...including people who had never done grass before.

Everybody sort of, like, smoked and, you know, got a little high.

It was a nice start for the road trip.

It was hysterical, what went down.

I can't tell you. I'd be invading people's privacies.

But it was absolutely hysterical how that evening ended up.

And we bonded beautifully.

It kept the glue there when it would get a little shaky.

Everybody was bonded on a different level...

...and that held it together.

We'd heard about a commune called New Buffalo.

And we're roaming around...

...and nobody knows anything about this commune...

...which is maybe 10 miles outside of town.

And there was this Native American...

...who was absolutely drunk and kept on coming up to us:

�I know you. I know you. I know you."

I'm saying, "Come on, Dennis, we gotta get out."

He says, �No, no. Maybe this is the thing, you know?"

And the guy says, "Follow me."

So we get into our car and he's in his truck...

...and he's breezing down the road.

And he takes us and we end up in New Buffalo.

We spent three days trying to convince them at New Buffalo...

...to let us film.

And they told us the stories of their lives...

...they told us everything that happened to them.

But they would not let us film.

The only time I ever had anything to do with communes--

They were basically pretty ugly scenes.

They were run by usually two or three guys on a total power trip.

Total control over some poor chicks...

...that they ran ragged.

Bunches of children around that weren't being taken care of.

But this was a polystyrene commune...

...in the hills of Malibu, so a little different.

We shot the commune in the Malibu Hills here in California...

...and we had the art director copy, almost identically, New Buffalo.

We had sent some people down Topanga Canyon...

...just to pick up hippies wherever we could find them...

...so we could populate this thing more.

When I first come in to the commune and I'm fully clothed...

...and I leaned over the washbasin and splash my face and my armpits...

...and I've got on a shin and a jacket.

Why would a guy do that?

It was just something funny to do.

I felt at times the movie was taking itself so seriously...

...that I had to harpoon it.

Hey, Sarah. How's it going?

I saw this guy mainly as living off people in communes...

...by bringing them dope, getting laid and moving on.

I didn't see this guy as a spiritual messenger at all.

Dennis came up with the idea.

He started putting the people in a circle...

_..and he was at the same time telling me--

He says, �We're gonna do a prayer.

And I wanna go through all these faces."

And we're putting the camera right on the top in the centre of the circle.

Suddenly, I'm looking around and started seeing these faces.

It was almost like a Renaissance painting.

All this hippy hair, faces, hats, women, children.

It was just amazing collection of young people.

It's one of my favourite shot in the whole movie.

I gotta get out of here, man.

We got things we wanna do, man.

I gotta get out of here, man.

Peter's character would very likely maybe stayed in the commune.

He seemed to be very happy wherever he was.

He was son of okay, you know? And I'm the one--

"we gotta keep going. We gotta keep going."

We're not no travelling bureau, man.

- Why don't they get their own ride? - Hey, hey, hey.

We're eating their food.

Dennis was the future.

Peter was the, you know-- Was what going on then.

Dennis may be the dark force...

...pulling this thing to a bad and.

When you get to the right place with the right people...

...quarter this.

You know, this could be the right place.

Your time's running out.

Hey, man. Hey!

If we're going, we're going. Let's go!

You could just tell that if he stuck with Billy...

...and kept on doing what he was doing...

...that one or both of them were gonna wind up dead.

This hot pool was on the Rio Grande.

It was really there. And we're supposed to be all naked.

And the girls were very upset, so they were saying:

�We can't have everybody on the set.�

So Dennis made it a closed set and everybody had to stand back.

One of the girls said, �Somebody's looking."

You know, it was Bert looking over the edge.

And Tom Ramsey, who was the camera grip...

...had a pistol for snakes.

He told the girls, �This is for snakes."

He shot at our executive producer.

How do we cut from the commune to suddenly we're in a parade?

People accepted it because it was a different kind of movie anyways.

The marching band is America to me.

And marching without a permit is something I knew quite a bit about...

...since I was in the Civil Rights and trying to stop the war.

So we get in the parade and we get busted...

...for parading without a permit.

We had to do that line.

You're in the parade, you're not.

You're on the bus, you're not on the bus.

Parading without a permit? You gotta be kidding.

Because-- I said, "An ACLU type will see it go down...

...and bust us out of jail."

Dennis put the ACLU type in jail with us.

I'm a lawyer.

Done a lot of work for the ACLU.

The thing in the prison that Jack says...

...about they're cutting off their hairs with rusty razor blades.

If you have long hair, you guys are lucky, you know?

Those are things, stories that I'd actually heard...

...that Paul and I had heard about what was going on in Texas...

...and not to go through Texas.

They got this here...

...scissor-happy, beautify-America thing here.

They used rusty razor blades on the last two longhairs...

...they brought in. I wasn't here to protect them.

We were running into these young kids with their heads shaved.

Really been beaten badly by Texas police.

And they would see us and they would say:

�Do not go through Texas. They're gonna catch you.

They're gonna shave your head and kick the shit out of you."

We stopped, I bought Dennis a hat, made him tuck his hair under the hat...

...and he wouldn't do it.

He was, "I'm not gonna go this way. I'm going the way I'm going."

We get to the border, he said, "I'm not going through Texas."

We had a guy along with us called Gypsy...

...who was working with the bikes.

And Gypsy had a thing that he did...

...a physical thing that he did all the time...

...which was he used to go:

And Jack saw it and usurped it...

...and adopted it for his character.

Indians!

We said to Gypsy, �Don't ever do it again.

If you ever do it again, people are gonna think you stole it from Jack."

Jack wasn't gonna be an actor anymore. I remember he told me that.

He didn't want to be an actor. I said, �What you gonna do?"

He says, "I wanna run a studio.�

Jack didn't originally wanna do the picture.

Jack had reached the point...

...where he was not sure he wanted to act anymore.

We had a production assistant whose name was Chris.

And Chris...

...could roll a joint better than anybody I ever saw.

And somewhere in there, we bought...

...a kilo of marijuana for the picture.

Do this instead.

There's no time you see anybody smoking dope in that movie...

...that it isn't dope.

No, man. This is grass.

You mean marijuana?

It was very hard for all of us when Jack said:

�So this is marijuana."

Lord have mercy, is that what that is?

I was amazed at the way Jack...

...was so much this fellow George Hanson.

I was buying into it.

Go ahead. Light it up.

Oh, no, no, no...

...I couldn't do that. I've got enough problems...

...with the booze and all. I can't afford to get hooked.

The shooting of that was magnificent...

...because I was getting Nicholson loaded, you know?

Really good pot.

So when it came time to shoot his end of it...

...he was really ripped.

I couldn't believe that actors could do that.

They could get that loaded and still remember to do anything.

You know, it's just--

It was a stunning kind of eye-opener for me.

That was a UFO beaming back at you.

Watch his eyes, because you'll see him go up on:

�Meeting people of all walks of life."

He's lost it right there.

The Venusians...

_..have contacted people at all walks of life...

...all walks of life...

That's a hell of a phrase, "All walks of life"...

...when you try to put a visual to it.

All walks-- And if you're stoned, it becomes hysterical.

And Jack went up, laughed his ass off.

Well, we cut. �Okay, that's a print and a pickup.�

And Jack starts:

�No, no, Dennis, let me do it from the top."

Because he had been studying very hard.

And Jack's just almost in tears, begging.

And the camera's now rolling, slated.

And Dennis says, "Okay, Jack."

And Jack's, "Where were we?"

And Joyce King, the script person says:

�Meeting people from all walks of life."

He starts it up just a bit before that and goes through it.

Now Venusians are meeting with people in all walks of life...

...in an advisory capacity.

What it becomes is a real moment...

...with somebody who's really stoned who drops the thread.

In Morganza, Louisiana, in the cafe, it was basically a segregated state.

And they had a white section and a non-white section.

The best part of that cafe was in the black section...

...because they had great music in there and a great jukebox.

And the people who were there were much looser and everything else.

Some of our crew went in the back and were dancing to the music...

...and dancing with some of the people who were in that section.

That added to the antagonism...

...and added to the hostilities.

The sheriff who was actually in the picture said:

�Either you get them out of there or I'm putting them in jail."

So I arrive at this place, Morganza, Louisiana...

...this little coffee shop, which is about all there is there.

I'd had this location scout go ahead.

And he would find actors that might be suitable to be in the picture.

And I kept telling him: �Don't go to, like, you know, little theatre groups.

I don't want little-- I want real people and I'll try to work with them.�

Tony had lined up 50 or 60 people.

He had gone to the local little theatre group.

And he had gotten a group of actors together...

...who had all dressed up and looked like they were ready to perform.

And I went, �Oh, man, this is terrible."

So we arrived before anybody else was there, as we walked in.

They're standing around there. "I can smell them. Can you?�

They got fancy bikes. That's some Yankee queers.

Check the flag on that bike.

Dennis says, �Those guys, we want them."

I said, �I want those guys," and he goes:

�You've gotta be kidding. I can't ask those guys, they'll kill me."

And I said, �Those are the guys I want for the movie.�

I said, �You see those girls over there?"

Hot damn!

I'll tell you.

"We're gonna get in so much trouble, we'll never leave this town."

Everybody wants to be in the movies.

So they did. They wanted to be in the movies.

Don't look too close because the sheriff's right over there.

I told them there's nothing you can say that's too bad about us.

Feel free to say anything you want about us...

...because we raped and killed a young girl outside of town.

They go, �Oh."

So that freed them up to use all their bigotry...

...and all their stuff and all their nastiness...

...which they wanted to use anyway.

Look like a bunch of refugees from a gorilla love-in.

- A gorilla couldn't love that. - Nor could a mother.

And especially hit pay din with Hayward Robillard, Jr...

...the man in the Cat hat.

We ought to put them in a cage and charge admission to see them.

They did not really like us.

And conversely, the girls did like us.

Please let us have a ride.

I don't mind giving you a ride.

They resented the fact that the girls did like us.

The man is at the window The man is at the window

The man is at the window

When I saw the faces...

...they loved it, they loved to hate, you know?

And it was kind of scary, you know, because--

But, you know, at the same time, what really toned down...

...the real hatred got in the movie.

What do you think we ought to do with them?

I don't know, but I don't think they'll make the parish line.

You know...

...I'm not real hungry at the moment.

I hate to say it, but I do believe...

...that they would have enjoyed if Jack was real in the killing scene later on.

For years I was criticized:

�Why didn't you use a black guy on the back of the bike?"

You know, well--

Why? Because it would be too obvious...

...that there would be a reason for them to kill us at that time...

...because of the racial implications of going into the South.

But in point of fact, we didn't need to be different.

We didn't need to be black- We just needed to have long hair.

- Check that joker with the long hair. - I checked him.

We might have to bring him to the Hilton before it's over.

I think she's cute.

I wanted them to kill one of their own.

I wanted America to kill their own son when they kill Jack Nicholson.

And the worst thing he's done is get drunk...

...and work for the ACLU...

...which everybody wanted me to take out of the picture.

Which I thought was really ludicrous at the time, but anyway...

...that's how uptight everyone was.

They didn't object to anything else but that ACLU line.

You know, �Can't we do something about that?"

Jack distils it all.

He's our mouthpiece. He explains it.

Dennis is, "All they're worried about is our hair."

�Oh, yeah, they don't like the hair...

...but don't go tell them they ain't free.�

And this is what we were seeing in the movie.

We're not free.

All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.

Oh, no.

What you represent to them...

...is freedom.

They're gonna talk to you and talk to you...

...about individual freedom.

But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare them.

Well, it don't make them running scared.

No. It makes them dangerous.

It was tough. But Jack had to die.

He was the one person everybody identified with the most.

He was the drunk.

If anybody had trouble getting with any of our characters...

...at that point, because we were potheads.

With Jack's character, as a drunk, they can get into the scene.

And they're more comfortable with him.

Why did they kill Jack and not them?

He was worse than these two guys.

He was a renegade, a turncoat, a traitor.

Those people aren't stupid. You know, those redneck killers.

They knew that if he was found dead with his skull crushed...

...had been seen with these two guys...

_..and those two guys had left the scene...

...probably the idea would be that those guys did it.

When he goes, you're forced to go with either me or Billy.

This is a knife-throwing LA. speed freak...

...versus this very enigmatic, cool-looking dude, you know?

They're gonna go with me.

The interior of the whorehouse.

I found a place in the Hollywood Hills there...

._.in an old house of a movie star, an old silent-picture star.

And these things were written in the library.

It's only determined when a man dies...

...what his reputation whether he was good or bad.

And that's when I put in the flash.

And seeing the ending of the helicopter shot with fire on the end.

That was an editing thought.

They wanted me to play this whore.

And they wanted me to improvise a scene with Dennis...

...who was brilliant.

- What are these things? - What are these things, huh?

I'm kind of a freak myself.

We had a tremendous argument about going to the whorehouse...

...which was not part of my program. I said:

�No, man, you know, Captain America doesn't have to do that.

He doesn't have to pay for it."

And Dennis said, �Okay, okay, man, here's what it is.

That's your job in the scene in the whorehouse.

You gotta get us out on the street."

I've got an idea.

Let's go outside.

Dennis had found this graveyard which I found to be rather bizarre.

But it worked for me.

Everybody's buried above ground in New Orleans.

Because you dig three feet down, you're in the water.

And we go up the side of the crypt and we take the acid.

When Peter breaks up the acid and gives it to us.

And I say my sensitive line, �Oh, shut up, just take it."

What do you do with it?

Give it to me.

Just shut up and take it.

And in the middle of it, I realize, as we're doing this:

Oh, my God, it's a communion.

We were gonna go to the cemetery and shoot the next day.

I said, "You know, I don't know if I can sleep tonight.

And we're getting really up early.�

So Peter said, "Take this. Take this and you'll sleep.�

What is it? He says, �A sleeping pill.�

Yeah? "Something like that.�

So I take it and I sort of feel like I'm lying there...

...trying to go to sleep.

And Toni is next to me in the other bed.

And she's listening to me and-

I'm going

�Toni, I know this sounds really strange...

...but I feel like I can't get in my body.

I feel like I can feel the outside of my skin.

It feels really cool and cold and--

And I can't go to sleep because I'm out.

I can't get in."

So she wakes up in the morning, she says:

�Karen said the most wonderful things last night.

Why doesn't she say them in the movie?"

I can feel the outside but I can't-

I can't feel the inside.

Oh, dear God, please let it be!

I'm right out here.

He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe--

So guess who's writing this. Karen.

I've got this wacky typewriter in this Winnebago...

...and Terry Southern is sitting across from me going:

"I really love underpants.

Do you think that we could have a scene...

...where you take your underpants off and stuff them in a rock?"

Please help me to conceive a child.

I found this guy who's a Shakespearean actor...

...who was walking through the streets of New Orleans...

...spouting Shakespeare.

He's sort of the symbol of Jean Cocteau...

...the man with the umbrella, the death figure, a surrealist image.

And also I thought of Peter's father being the actor.

Peter wanting to know who his father was.

The whole sequence was not scripted.

Dennis saw this statue.

It was an Italian Statue of Liberty with me sitting on her lap...

...asking my mother why she'd copped out on me.

Because my mother committed suicide when I was 10.

I said, �Dennis, you can't ask me to do that.

Just because you know...

...doesn't give you the right to go public with it, especially in a film.

I don't feel comfortable doing it."

�No, no, man. You've got to, man. I mean, man, man.

You, man, you got to, man. You know, man. I mean it's--"

�Dennis, I don't wanna do it.

I don't wanna go out there and say that.

I don't wanna be that public with it."

�But, man, you got to.�

And we're arguing and arguing and--

�Give me one good reason, man." You know, he said:

�Because I'm the director.�

I couldn't argue with that.

So I got up on the statue...

...and I went for something I'd never done in my life.

Why did you leave like that?

And you're such a cruel mother and I hate you so much.

That to me was talking to the Statue of Liberty and saying:

�Are you just a piece of paper? Is liberty just a piece of paper?"

I thought of those things as being symbolic...

...of what was happening in the country.

Barry, who was filming it, could see it through the lens.

And I don't know why Dennis wanted to move the camera.

But Dennis wanted to move the camera.

Barry wanted to let it roll.

I could hear the argument.

And finally, I go, "Shut up."

It's in the film.

Shut up.

I was really into it.

And I was-- It was--

Forget about making movies.

I was into this thing about asking my mother this question.

Forgiveness of sins...

...the resurrection of the body.

I wanted it taken out of the film from the get-go.

So it's in there.

And history has its own way of working these things well.

And it actually played well for me when I tried to convince Dylan...

...to give me the first part of �It's Alright, Ma"

He had all these reasons why not to do it.

"I don't like my harmonica. I don't like this, I don't like--"

I said, "Look it, Bobby, you might not like your harmonica.

I'm the producer of the film.

It's truly my call to say, 'That's out.'

But I'm overridden by everybody else who's involved with this...

...saying it's in. And that's the part where I say to my mother:

'Why did you cop out on me?'

I don't like that.

It embarrasses me every time I see it, Bobby.

Makes me very, very upset.

But because it's there...

...and because I was convinced to do it at the moment...

...and then convinced to leave it in the film...

...I have to hear:

Suicide remarks are torn

From the fool's gold mouthpiece

The hollow horn plays wasted words

My mother cut her throat from here to here, and you have to sing about it.

I wanna hear those lines."

It blew his mind. He had no idea.

No, actually, I didn't do it to blew his mind.

I was serious. I was passionate about it.

And he had no way to argue that.

We went to shoot the last campfire.

The motorcycles had been stolen.

This is why it's the campfire you don't see the motorcycles in.

We'd shot the whole movie.

And I said, �There's one more scene to shoot."

He says, �No, we've shot them. We've completed the movie."

I get him out in the night. I said, "We're shooting.�

He said, "I'm not saying all that crap.�

Dennis started to ask, �What do you wanna say, man?"

�Well, you know, I just wanna say we blew it."

�Yeah, that's good. We have to say we blew it.

When we went for the big money, man, you know?

We'll say we blew it--"

�No, I just wanna say we blew it.�

And this boiled into an argument, and, you know-

Basically, with Dennis, it's high level, high decibel.

I said, �Well, then, don't worry about it.�

You just say, �We blew it." and I'll say the rest.

He said, "How are you gonna do that?" I said, �Don't worry about it."

We've done it. We've done it.

We're rich, Wyatt.

Yeah, man.

We blew it.

I said, �We'll shoot it two ways.

First, we'll shoot it your way, then my way."

So we stepped out of the home and I said:

�Let's give each other a hug...

...and they'll just think we're nutty actors...

...having screamed their selves into method acting the scene out."

Dennis threw his arms around me. "I love you man."

I said, �I love you, man." We went down and shot the scene.

I didn't say anything other than "We blew it."

We did it, man! We did it.

We did it.

We're rich, man.

We're retired in Florida now, mister.

The whole idea of retirement absolutely is abhorrent to me.

You know, we blew it.

The idea that people think we can retire.

We have so damn much work to do here.

I hear people say, "I'm gonna retire." And I wanna say "Fuck you."

I wanna get right in their face right away.

How can you do that?

When you see that tube going into the gas tank...

...and I'm stuffing money into it, what's the symbol for you on that?

Fucking the flag with money. Retirement.

Well, that's what it's all about. Like, you know.

You go for the big money, and then you're free.

You dig?

We blew it.

Dennis has always felt that I should have said more.

I wanted to be enigmatic about it.

And I still today wanna be enigmatic about it.

This is had happened when I said, �We blew it,� without explanation.

Everybody in theatres said, �What does he mean?"

Well, the whole point is we don't let anybody out of this picture that way.

You can't put it under the seat in the means.

You have to truck it home with you and figure it out.

What did we do? Why did we see that?

What happened?

We were with these guys, they were so cool.

And they're gone.

You blew whatever chance you had to become something good...

...something inspiring, something different.

Dennis and I were at a gas station...

...and found this gentleman with a goitre on his neck.

Dennis said, "Get me him."

So I said, "Those are the two guys that I want to do the killing.�

He said, "But we need somebody with a pickup truck.

Do you have a pickup truck?"

He said, "No, but my friend does.�

And he points out his friend from the back.

And I said, �Yeah, right, get him."

So Dennis-- We got them both, put them in the car.

And Dennis told them what he wanted to do, basically...

...gave them roughly what they were supposed to say...

...and let them go.

You want me to blow your brains out?

People would take their cars...

...and come right at the bikes.

And the bikes would have to go off the road sometimes...

...when we're shooting. You know, and-

And then they would scream and say:

�We're gonna get our guns, we're gonna come back and shoot you.�

Why don't you get a haircut?

Dennis wanted to extend the moment of the shotgun.

The pickup truck went down on the road and started turning back.

And suddenly we went into slow motion.

And that was very, very effective, very scary...

...because you knew- You knew that they're gonna get him.

And they were firing right into the lens.

I got a couple of, kind of a little gunpowder on my forehead.

It could have been dangerous...

...because in order to enhance the gunfire...

...somebody would stuff napkin into the shell...

...so it gets more force.

We did things like you're not supposed to do...

...but we didn't know because we were ignorant.

We didn't have a special effect.

We didn't have a gun specialist with us, you know?

And, you know, so we had to just deal with it.

We wanted to do that helicopter shot.

We had no helicopter mounts. We wanted it to be steady.

Again Kov�cs was very nervous.

�Around the car, you know?

Then when the car moves, it's gonna be shaking all over.�

We weren't able to get a strong helicopter.

That was overlapped with Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

And they wouldn't release it until the whole, you know, was over.

And there was this small helicopter.

And this tiny mount wouldn't even fit in a doorway where it should be.

It fits in a larger helicopter.

So the key grip came up with the idea...

...he's gonna build the car mount on the skids...

...and put 2-by-12 planks across...

...and put the helicopter mount on one side of the helicopter...

...and he counterbalanced with sandbags on the other side.

There was standing the pilot.

And he was kind of looking at it and shaking his head.

He's like, "It won't fly.

This helicopter has smaller engine than your Mustang."

Well, that didn't feel very good for me.

You know, because I had to ride this.

My key grip just insisted, �No, it's gonna work."

So he revs the engine up.

And I feel- And the cabin is going up but the skids are not moving.

The pilot says, "That won't work because we are overweight.

I'd rather deal with taking off the sandbags...

...and I'll deal with the off-balance.�

And that made me nervous because I'm on one side.

And if it don't balance, the chopper could tip over.

I said, �I'm gonna start going straight down on that road.

And when I get over the wreck-

I mean, the explosion.

--Hopefully, I gonna have a wind."

I combine into it and going up.

Like sort of a 45. And then--

First of all, I didn't wanna go 45.

I had-- I said a steeper angle.

It would be more dramatic.

He says, �I'll be lucky if I can go, like, 30 degree...

...maybe 45 if I have a good headwind."

So, okay, let's try it. So we go back and we start going.

And out there there's no wind. So we just kept going forward.

We tried two, three times.

And I think the fourth time, he starts yelling in the intercom.

He says, "I'm getting a wind. I'm getting a wind."

You know, he says, "Okay, great.�

And he puts me in the right altitude over the bike.

And he just gets above it and starts pulling up, up.

And I'm opening the lens getting wider and wider.

And he just keeps going on a wonderful steep angle.

The little flame-- And the flame is almost invisible now.

And on the left side of the frame...

...I see the bank of the river and I start lifting the camera...

...and leaving the scene of the wreck.

And I keep yelling, "Keep going up, higher, higher, higher.�

And I hear the chopper just going like crazy.

I still get the goose bumps, you know?

Because I remember every time...

.-.l see the ending of this movie, I remember this.

How-- How exciting, how difficult and how tough was it to make it.

You know, but we made it.

Bobby Dylan said, �What does the end of the movie mean to you?"

I wasn't ready for that question.

I said, "Well, you know, you see there's the road that man builds.

We can see that.

And then there's the river, and that's the road that God builds.

So you can see what happens on the road that man builds."

So he just picked up a pad.

That river flows, flows to the sea

Wherever that river goes That's where I wanna be

Flow river, flow Pass the green shady tree

Flow river, flow to the sea

I spent a year editing the film.

Movies had fallen into a pattern of doing everything a certain way.

And so the whole idea of using quick cuts and all that...

...was totally foreign to feature films at that time.

I really wanted to win the Cannes Film Festival, you know?

And I had enough knowledge...

...to know that superimposures were, like, frowned on...

...in the European art market.

People said, �Well, that was because...

...they couldn't afford the money that it took to superimpose."

But I-- That may be partly it.

But I think that superimposure is really cheating, you know?

I mean, I think that if you can direct cut something, it's much cleaner.

Dennis had cut together the picture...

...in a very long version.

And we'd seen this long version endlessly.

And it was too long to ever think about releasing.

Dennis wanted to road show the movie...

...which is when you have the intermission, you know...

...ticketed, assigned seat and all that.

And I kept saying, "Columbia isn't gonna do that, Dennis.

There's just not a chance in the world they're gonna road show this movie."

So at some point...

...the picture was taken away, if you will, from Dennis.

We had to take the film and re-edit it...

...from three hours down to a reasonable length film.

Jack edited his part of the scene.

Hayward edited. I edited.

Bert edited. Bob edited.

And the scene that everybody tried--

Everybody that asked what we were doing tried to edit was--

The restaurant scene in--

Wherever that horrible place was in Louisiana.

Everybody would look at that and say:

�God, I know how to cut that, that's-- Let me try it."

And they would and nobody could get it right.

My scene was 20 minutes longer than the one that's in the movie.

I fell in love with the scene...

...because there was so much really incredible material in that...

...that they were saying.

I just-- I kept playing it and I wouldn't get off of it.

I couldn't let it go.

When I came back and saw the scene, I said:

�You made a television movie out of it.

You made a television-- This is just television."

You know. But it's fine, it's good.

We cut it down from over three hours to 90 minutes.

And we had a screening for Dennis at Columbia in the big theatre.

And I thought, �He's gonna go so nuts when he sees what we've done.�

You know, he was my brother-in-law and I liked him.

But he had a temper and I knew this was cutting to his creative soul and--

And the lights came on, and I was prepared for anything to be--

You know, to be-- Anything from being shot to-

You know, it was like- And he was-- There was tears in his eyes.

And he said, "That's beautiful."

He said, "That's amazing. Don't ever, ever let me cut another foot of film."

This was the first time a score hadn't been written...

...and I actually used found music.

And I used music that I heard on the radio.

This was the music that best reflected the movie.

And also it gave a literary comment...

...upon what was happening when we were doing the rides.

It was his record collection and some of mine.

That was what it was.

Crosby, Stills and Nash were supposed to be the ones...

...to write the real score for the movie.

When they came and saw it...

...I said, "You can hear it with the sound on, the music on or off.�

They said, �Let's hear it with the music on."

And Stills had a six-string guitar with him.

He never touched the guitar. They just all were...

...that the movie jaws to the jersey.

And basically said at the end:

�We can't beat that.

We can't-- We can't even get near that.

We're lost."

The wonderful thing about seeing the movie when it was in the theatre...

...when it first came out was the reaction that people had.

And the different reactions--

Because people had different reactions...

...depending upon where you are.

If you're in New Orleans...

...they applaud the guys that shoot you at the end.

Applaud, okay?

And if you're in Los Angeles, they get up screaming, "Kill the pigs."

Shake the fucking cage.

That's what I thought the night I-- This is gonna surely shake the cage.

And now it's part of the National Registry.

It's gonna shake the cage.

If you wanna go back and study about this part of our culture...

...one of the things that the government-- Isn't that far out?

The government offers you is the availability of Easy Rider.

It was a metaphor for what happened after the '60s.

It became that kind of tag end...

...hungover sadness...

...that happens right after a great age.

I screened it for my father...

...who's a very mainstream creative producer, mostly Broadway.

And he knew instantly that it was gonna be a huge hit.

Instantly.

He was terribly pleased because his son had finally done something...

...that he could tell his pals about.

And we had a screening for Peter's father, Henry.

And he knew immediately.

He was very proud of the picture.

I was ashamed of Easy Rider.

I was terribly ashamed I'd done it.

When I would make my r�sum�, I always left it out.

So that when it came out and was a huge hit...

...I had a bit of transition, you know, to make.

I thought, �Well, gee, this is a great movie.

How'd that happen?"

It was the first real independent movie...

...that was ever distributed by a major company.

And it changed the way we looked at things.

Changed filmmaking. It'll never be the same again.

I came from a very small little village in Hungary.

I came back to visit and my mother said:

�There's this young man who is a hairdresser in a village.

And he really wants to shake your hand."

She said, �Please, don't deny it from him."

I said, "Okay, no problem. Come on, let him come in."

So this man comes over to our house and he looks at me, he says:

�Let me hold your hand."

He said, �This movie changed my life.

I saw it 34 times."

I said, �What was it? What was it changed?�

He says, �Everything. Everything.�

He says, "I see the world differently now."

An easy rider is a person that liv-

Is not a pimp, but he lives off a woman.

He lives off of a whore.

He's an easy-- He's her easy rider.

She-- He's the one that she loves and she gives money to.

He doesn't pimp her, but he's her easy rider.

Dennis was in Cool Hand Luke.

He played Babalugats.

I don't know what that was about.

But he was one of the prisoners.

And Dennis latched onto me very quickly...

...curious.

Because I had long, long hair.

Nobody in Hollywood had long hair at that time.

And I wouldn't cut it.

They put it in a French twist and put it up under the hat, right?

And Dennis started hanging out with me.

We went places. I had a car that I'd rented.

And we'd go here, go there.

And he started telling me about this idea he had...

...for a movie about two guys on bikes.

And I said, �Sounds like Captain America and Bucky.�

He said, "What's that? Tell me about that."

�Well, Captain America and Bucky were old 19405 comic-strip heroes."

The ultimate thing with the bikers was...

...when we finished the picture and brought the bikes back...

...I told Tex Hall, who was the head guy...

...who was handling the bikes and put them together...

...finally made them work, to keep the bikes at his house.

And somehow-

This is before they were known or popular or anything else.

The bikes themselves, even before the picture came out.

Somehow, somebody knew...

...they were used in the film and they were lead bikes.

They came into Tex's house with shotguns...

_..and put shotguns to his head.

He was with his girlfriend in bed...

...and they put shotguns to his head and they took the bikes.

He called me that night. He said, �They came and took the bikes.�

He said, "I know who did it. I wanna go get them back."

He went out and shot somebody.

He didn't kill them. He went out and shot somebody.

And ended up going to jail.

But by the time he got to them...

...which was maybe a couple of hours later...

...the bikes had been dismantled and everything was gone.

We didn't smoke, you know...

...because we figured somebody has to make this movie, you know?

Because we are already having too much fun, you know?

If we had more fun, we were just gonna sit, don't do any work anymore.

Everybody was taking my credit cards and running.

We paid for all the hotels, the food, the gas, everything with Diner's Club.

I was going everywhere...

...signing Peter Fonda's name on the credit card.

And sometimes I'd sign my name on it, sometimes I'd sign his name on it.

They'd look at me and say, �Are you Peter Fonda?�

And I'd say, "Sure."

I came up to Diner's Club and I said:

�You ought to have me just say:

�The things you couldn't get with Master Charge...

...I made Easy Rider on Diner's Club."

But it didn't fit the corporate image too well.

It's funny to me now when I hear...

...how preempted the old language of hip has become.

When I see guys in three-piece suits saying:

"I'm out of here."

�Dig this."

�Look at that chick.�

�Man, I'm gonna crash.�

�Could I crash at your pad, man?"

You know, it just--

It gets sucked up so fast.

They love the accoutrement of it.

The hipness. But they don't like the thing itself.

What it really requires is a very strong desire...

...that drives you through...

...the fears and the pain and the lack in life...

...that you're gonna quite naturally go through...

...if you wanna get something creative done.