Bob Rafelson, who was one of the producers of “Easy Rider” and co-wrote the story for and directed the classic 1970 film “Five Easy Pieces,” died at home of lung cancer in Aspen, Colorado on Saturday. He was 89 years old. It’s hard to put into words what those two movies meant back at the time they were made, but prodded by Rafelson’s death, I’m going to try.
I was kidnapped(drafted) by my government in 1968 and forced to serve in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. While in basic training at a southern base we were REQUIRED to see John Wayne’s movie “The Green Berets”. I almost threw up and deserted. Later, at an off base theater, I saw Easy Rider and realized I wasn’t crazy or alone. Thank you Lucian for a great essay.
A part of me dies as I read this as I sit here waiting for that beautiful angel to come and call my name.. I am okay with my own mortality but I wanted those guys to live forever because that would mean it was all too dammed important to simply be forgotten. Sounds trite now but I rode my motorcycle to California too. Drove road racing cars, sailed oceans, loved women. My hero was Sterling Hayden. Sterling who? See what I mean? I just don't want it all to be forgotten. It is too dear to me.
Interesting what if: … Sterling Hayden had stuck with making a maritime living, writing off-hours till a literary career succeeded (it would have)—and he'd never set foot on a Hollywood set. Too independent, too much of a loner, I suspect, to embed in pop mythology—remembered if at all mostly as just another bad boy movie star. He deserves better.
I read Hunter Thompson at the same time I first read Noam Chomsky, another generational genius who could point out truck-size holes in the cheese that few others could see but who was a poor sentence writer and utterly, absolutely humorless. I connected them like you connected these guys; they permanently informed my world view.
"Easy Rider" was a big movie for me. It came out the year I graduated from high school, when I was pissed off at "America" (who wouldn't be after 1968?) mostly because of what I'd read and heard rather than what I'd seen or thought for myself. I saw it more than once. 50+ years later I still have the soundtrack on LP, but I don't need the record because virtually all the songs are hardwired in my memory. I saw "Five Easy Pieces" but it didn't stick with me. I think I read one of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing" books but it didn't stick with me either.
What's hard to miss is that these were *male* fantasies. There's no room for three-dimensional women in them. What makes this especially interesting is that coming up on the outside when these movies were being made was the women's liberation movement, along with the gay liberation/rights movement (which made many of us look at male buddy movies like "Easy Rider" from a different angle). Women weren't going on the road in search of America. They were discovering it through sharing experiences with each other, and using what they learned to start rape-crisis centers and newspapers and bookstores, and, in Chicago, to form a network to help women get abortions.
The male seekers see none of it. Of course not: to them, women represent the civilization they're running from, except of course when they're sexually available. The passage Lucian quotes from Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" gets this across. The hippie hitchhiker (female) that Thompson picks up says of the male friend she's going to see "I’m happy when I’m with him, because he makes me like myself." Whereupon Thompson goes into a paroxysm of contempt, seeing this as a sign that we're becoming "a whole culture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything."
If only Thompson had been able to get out of his XY-chromosome head long enough to at least sense what the hippie hitchhiker was saying: that the man who treated her with respect was rare, rare enough to be hitchhiking to New Hampshire in the freezing cold for. His arrogant ignorance still makes me angry, not least because it's still thriving: witness Matt Gaetz and the cheers he got at TPUSA, and all the woman-hating, fetus-fetishizing rhetoric justifying abortion bans.
I have to acknowledge, however, that Thompson was right about the "frightened illiterates," though at least in the 1970s he missed what was heading us in that direction. He also didn't see that these scared people do have faith in something: a white-male-dominated America, underwritten by a god of their making. That didn't start to become really clear till the Reagan administration, so one would have had to be psychic, or unusually prescient, to see it coming in 1972.
Indeed 1968 was a seminal year; assassinations of MLK And RFK, riots at the conventions in Chicago and Miami and the sad fact that 16,000 Americans soldiers were killed in Vietnam in just that year.
Great stuff Lucian. Here is a story about the music for Rider. Fonda and Hopper approached Dylan to do the music. Dylan asked for the screenplay, met them a few days later and told Fonda that he would do it if they changed the ending. Fonda asked what he wanted to change. Dylan said "After the rednecks kill you i want Hopper to catch up to them and blow them away". Fonda said no. Dylan scratched out a few lines on a napkin and said "Give this to McGuinn, he will know what to do with it." The lines are the opening lyrics to the Ballad of Easy Rider.
Some people live lives of quiet desperation, others break windows hoping to see something amazing. All of us end up doing laundry paying phone bills and then we die.
Sorry to hear of Rafelson's death. He was brilliant - and this is a lovely essay. Thank you. Just want to ask if you've seen Albert Brooks' "Lost In America". It's very like your description of "Five Easy Pieces" ... as farce.
Lucian, your reminiscence warmed my heart, even if it was a little depressing. My husband and I have the famed “Easy Rider” poster with Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson on the back of Fonda’s motorcycle, and Dennis Hopper, beside them. It was certainly a trippy movie but both of us were hippies and we enjoyed it. We have had that poster which is nicely framed, for at least 40+years. “Five Easy Pieces” was crazy too. I remember the sexually charged scene with Jack and Sally Struthers. At that time, it seemed only underground films were showing naked body parts. Anyway, Bob Rafelson was obviously onto something. I never was a Hunter fan. Just too glum for me.
I didn't see either movie because I was busy working to pay the rent and thank God I never met anyone like those guys. In fact I don't think they were typical of my generation. The draft and drugs
problem and no job stability made it hard to be part of a healthy relationship. But I wonder how some of us actually turned out alright. That would be a worth while exploration.
That's a good one. Robin Morgan's essay "Goodbye to All That" (1970) was a reality check for me and other newcomers to the movement who didn't fully understand what we were seeing. Another illustration (symptom?) was the very, very famous poster GIRLS SAY YES TO GUYS WHO SAY NO, featuring Joan Baez and her sisters, Mimi and Pauline. I can't recall what year that was made, but seeing it was a "click!" moment for quite a few women I knew.
Actually, it seems to be a guy thing in every generation. I watched my oldest brother go through a crazy yen to have a motorbike. He outgrew that when he got a car. It was an extension of his manhood. He outgrew that need to use a car for freedom and power to escape when he had to go to work to pay for gas and repairs. When I got my first car, it became an extension of my house. Vive la difference!
It's kinda sorta maybe worth mentioning that the guys in that generation were cannon fodder in a war no one could justify. The old men who ran things wouldn't even have thought of drafting women.
As a transfer student at Franconia College, an epicentre of male entitlement in the 1960s, l got a significant part in “the show.”Woman learned the hard way, that Indifference was the operative word. We worked low-paying jobs (even at the College), while guys “tripped the light fantastic “.
Yet the tough love (complete was a found pair of motorcycle boots), prepared us for a life modelled on Diane DiPrima and Sally Fields, where poetry and political savvy ruled the day.
At 74 years, it still does! Exclamation point taken.
In 1969, age 18, I found myself at another epicenter of male entitlement: Jesuit-run Georgetown University. The counter-epicenter -- aka the antiwar movement -- had many of the same characteristics: men in the spotlight, women running the mimeograph and putting up posters. Fortunately the women's movement was already gathering steam and not hard to find.
I saw the "Five Easy Pieces" NY Film Festival premiere. No movie ever really registers with me on first viewing, and I never thought about "Five" again till maybe a decade ago when one of the broadcast old movie channels started showing it in frequent rotation. I watched again. And again. And again. Then my antenna konked out, and I don't watch tv anymore.
Instead I think about "Five" for awhile every day. When I mentioned the movie and you immediately brought up the sound of the lumber truck's gears heading north at the end I knew: You too.
Never forget Bobby's talk "with" his braindamaged, demanding musician father. He has no way to know if the old man understands every word or none of his soul-baring monologue. I think the situation and what Bobby confides explain the movie. His performance on the pickup truck upright was a burlesque. What he tearfully tells his father reinforces what he says to Catherine after he snows her with his facile—what was it, "Moonlight Sonata?" He's brutal because now he knows she's as ready to wallow in mediocrity as everyone else. He grew up expecting his family to accept no less than exceptional excellence, and his sister and brother are two hot messes. He believes that if he cannot perform as a consummate artist, playing is pointless. What drives him is recognizing that he doesn't possess that kind of genius. Only Rayette is honest, and she's unbearable. …
Does everyone know about the actress who plays the dominant hitchhiker? Supposedly irl she asked Nicholson if she could move in and become his housekeeper. She's still there doing that. If not true, please nobody say so. For me, it's "Five Easy Pieces"' hidden happy ending.
PS: Such brilliant casting! One of the all-time best.
She has a house in the same compound off Mulholland as Nicholson. They have been there for decades along with Brando. I don't think she was ever his housekeeper. She ran an exceedingly hip restaurant in Hollywood for many years called the Canteen. In hip Hollywood, she's as famous and accomplished as he is.
Saw it. Seems insider info is necessary to make clear that there's more to it than "move in and become his housekeeper," which on the surface doesn't sound all that great for a capable actress.
There's a great boxed set of Bob's films on DVD available that contains both these classics, plus more! Starting with the overlooked psychedelic classic "HEAD" by the Monkees. Watch for Bob and Jack's brief on-screen cameo in this.
I was kidnapped(drafted) by my government in 1968 and forced to serve in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. While in basic training at a southern base we were REQUIRED to see John Wayne’s movie “The Green Berets”. I almost threw up and deserted. Later, at an off base theater, I saw Easy Rider and realized I wasn’t crazy or alone. Thank you Lucian for a great essay.
We who attended HS in Columbus, GA, loved the Georgia pines suddenly in Vietnam.
Class of 1965, Baker High.
A part of me dies as I read this as I sit here waiting for that beautiful angel to come and call my name.. I am okay with my own mortality but I wanted those guys to live forever because that would mean it was all too dammed important to simply be forgotten. Sounds trite now but I rode my motorcycle to California too. Drove road racing cars, sailed oceans, loved women. My hero was Sterling Hayden. Sterling who? See what I mean? I just don't want it all to be forgotten. It is too dear to me.
Hayden was my entry to the HUAC nonsense of that era, which, sadly, destroyed many careers.
Interesting what if: … Sterling Hayden had stuck with making a maritime living, writing off-hours till a literary career succeeded (it would have)—and he'd never set foot on a Hollywood set. Too independent, too much of a loner, I suspect, to embed in pop mythology—remembered if at all mostly as just another bad boy movie star. He deserves better.
Peace on Earth, Purity of Essence!
A truly great film moment.
Thanks for the insightful piece. It helped me to understand the person I was during those crazy times.
All I ever saw in either of them was a couple of self righteous arrogant assholes. The movies and the books were good. I guess.
I read Hunter Thompson at the same time I first read Noam Chomsky, another generational genius who could point out truck-size holes in the cheese that few others could see but who was a poor sentence writer and utterly, absolutely humorless. I connected them like you connected these guys; they permanently informed my world view.
Hunter S. Thompson is was of the funniest people I ever read.
True. And Chomsky one of the least funny. But coming from similar places.
"Easy Rider" was a big movie for me. It came out the year I graduated from high school, when I was pissed off at "America" (who wouldn't be after 1968?) mostly because of what I'd read and heard rather than what I'd seen or thought for myself. I saw it more than once. 50+ years later I still have the soundtrack on LP, but I don't need the record because virtually all the songs are hardwired in my memory. I saw "Five Easy Pieces" but it didn't stick with me. I think I read one of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing" books but it didn't stick with me either.
What's hard to miss is that these were *male* fantasies. There's no room for three-dimensional women in them. What makes this especially interesting is that coming up on the outside when these movies were being made was the women's liberation movement, along with the gay liberation/rights movement (which made many of us look at male buddy movies like "Easy Rider" from a different angle). Women weren't going on the road in search of America. They were discovering it through sharing experiences with each other, and using what they learned to start rape-crisis centers and newspapers and bookstores, and, in Chicago, to form a network to help women get abortions.
The male seekers see none of it. Of course not: to them, women represent the civilization they're running from, except of course when they're sexually available. The passage Lucian quotes from Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" gets this across. The hippie hitchhiker (female) that Thompson picks up says of the male friend she's going to see "I’m happy when I’m with him, because he makes me like myself." Whereupon Thompson goes into a paroxysm of contempt, seeing this as a sign that we're becoming "a whole culture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything."
If only Thompson had been able to get out of his XY-chromosome head long enough to at least sense what the hippie hitchhiker was saying: that the man who treated her with respect was rare, rare enough to be hitchhiking to New Hampshire in the freezing cold for. His arrogant ignorance still makes me angry, not least because it's still thriving: witness Matt Gaetz and the cheers he got at TPUSA, and all the woman-hating, fetus-fetishizing rhetoric justifying abortion bans.
I have to acknowledge, however, that Thompson was right about the "frightened illiterates," though at least in the 1970s he missed what was heading us in that direction. He also didn't see that these scared people do have faith in something: a white-male-dominated America, underwritten by a god of their making. That didn't start to become really clear till the Reagan administration, so one would have had to be psychic, or unusually prescient, to see it coming in 1972.
Indeed 1968 was a seminal year; assassinations of MLK And RFK, riots at the conventions in Chicago and Miami and the sad fact that 16,000 Americans soldiers were killed in Vietnam in just that year.
No one remembers the first 1968 event.
Remember the Pueblo?
Yes Sir, I remember the incident. I believe the ship is still in North Korea and is used as a museum/tourist attraction.
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 has been high on my list ever since it happened.
I served with Bundeswehr, German Military, in the early 70's. One officer expected NATO to go to war at that time.
Great stuff Lucian. Here is a story about the music for Rider. Fonda and Hopper approached Dylan to do the music. Dylan asked for the screenplay, met them a few days later and told Fonda that he would do it if they changed the ending. Fonda asked what he wanted to change. Dylan said "After the rednecks kill you i want Hopper to catch up to them and blow them away". Fonda said no. Dylan scratched out a few lines on a napkin and said "Give this to McGuinn, he will know what to do with it." The lines are the opening lyrics to the Ballad of Easy Rider.
Some people live lives of quiet desperation, others break windows hoping to see something amazing. All of us end up doing laundry paying phone bills and then we die.
Sorry to hear of Rafelson's death. He was brilliant - and this is a lovely essay. Thank you. Just want to ask if you've seen Albert Brooks' "Lost In America". It's very like your description of "Five Easy Pieces" ... as farce.
Lucian, your reminiscence warmed my heart, even if it was a little depressing. My husband and I have the famed “Easy Rider” poster with Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson on the back of Fonda’s motorcycle, and Dennis Hopper, beside them. It was certainly a trippy movie but both of us were hippies and we enjoyed it. We have had that poster which is nicely framed, for at least 40+years. “Five Easy Pieces” was crazy too. I remember the sexually charged scene with Jack and Sally Struthers. At that time, it seemed only underground films were showing naked body parts. Anyway, Bob Rafelson was obviously onto something. I never was a Hunter fan. Just too glum for me.
Thanks for the Sally Struthers...incredible!
I didn't see either movie because I was busy working to pay the rent and thank God I never met anyone like those guys. In fact I don't think they were typical of my generation. The draft and drugs
problem and no job stability made it hard to be part of a healthy relationship. But I wonder how some of us actually turned out alright. That would be a worth while exploration.
I worked for the fun of it and to get out out of the house.
Money wasn’t the goal, just a token to buy stuff with.
I married a high school buddy who was politically active and shared my values.
We’ve known each other for almost 60 years, four children and four grandchildren and we’re still getting along.
Not perfect, but perfectly acceptable.
Marriage (1973 - still going) was a way of getting out of “the meat market”. Respect is key, but it doesn’t mean we are glued together.
You nailed it, TCinLA: they were *guys*. The women were, at best, collateral damage if they appeared at all.
That's a good one. Robin Morgan's essay "Goodbye to All That" (1970) was a reality check for me and other newcomers to the movement who didn't fully understand what we were seeing. Another illustration (symptom?) was the very, very famous poster GIRLS SAY YES TO GUYS WHO SAY NO, featuring Joan Baez and her sisters, Mimi and Pauline. I can't recall what year that was made, but seeing it was a "click!" moment for quite a few women I knew.
We grew up and became adults. But we kept our political views. That’s why we read this column.
“Yes indeed, my darlings.”
Anyone remember the wonderful West Indian singer who introduced Calypso to American children on TV in the 1950’s?!
Yes, of course.
😆
Actually, it seems to be a guy thing in every generation. I watched my oldest brother go through a crazy yen to have a motorbike. He outgrew that when he got a car. It was an extension of his manhood. He outgrew that need to use a car for freedom and power to escape when he had to go to work to pay for gas and repairs. When I got my first car, it became an extension of my house. Vive la difference!
It's kinda sorta maybe worth mentioning that the guys in that generation were cannon fodder in a war no one could justify. The old men who ran things wouldn't even have thought of drafting women.
Sexual abuse and rape in the military is still a well kept secret, with only cracks in the facade.
Stunning and insightful analysis.
Your eloquence is appreciated,
an oldster
As a transfer student at Franconia College, an epicentre of male entitlement in the 1960s, l got a significant part in “the show.”Woman learned the hard way, that Indifference was the operative word. We worked low-paying jobs (even at the College), while guys “tripped the light fantastic “.
Yet the tough love (complete was a found pair of motorcycle boots), prepared us for a life modelled on Diane DiPrima and Sally Fields, where poetry and political savvy ruled the day.
At 74 years, it still does! Exclamation point taken.
In 1969, age 18, I found myself at another epicenter of male entitlement: Jesuit-run Georgetown University. The counter-epicenter -- aka the antiwar movement -- had many of the same characteristics: men in the spotlight, women running the mimeograph and putting up posters. Fortunately the women's movement was already gathering steam and not hard to find.
I saw the "Five Easy Pieces" NY Film Festival premiere. No movie ever really registers with me on first viewing, and I never thought about "Five" again till maybe a decade ago when one of the broadcast old movie channels started showing it in frequent rotation. I watched again. And again. And again. Then my antenna konked out, and I don't watch tv anymore.
Instead I think about "Five" for awhile every day. When I mentioned the movie and you immediately brought up the sound of the lumber truck's gears heading north at the end I knew: You too.
Never forget Bobby's talk "with" his braindamaged, demanding musician father. He has no way to know if the old man understands every word or none of his soul-baring monologue. I think the situation and what Bobby confides explain the movie. His performance on the pickup truck upright was a burlesque. What he tearfully tells his father reinforces what he says to Catherine after he snows her with his facile—what was it, "Moonlight Sonata?" He's brutal because now he knows she's as ready to wallow in mediocrity as everyone else. He grew up expecting his family to accept no less than exceptional excellence, and his sister and brother are two hot messes. He believes that if he cannot perform as a consummate artist, playing is pointless. What drives him is recognizing that he doesn't possess that kind of genius. Only Rayette is honest, and she's unbearable. …
Does everyone know about the actress who plays the dominant hitchhiker? Supposedly irl she asked Nicholson if she could move in and become his housekeeper. She's still there doing that. If not true, please nobody say so. For me, it's "Five Easy Pieces"' hidden happy ending.
PS: Such brilliant casting! One of the all-time best.
She has a house in the same compound off Mulholland as Nicholson. They have been there for decades along with Brando. I don't think she was ever his housekeeper. She ran an exceedingly hip restaurant in Hollywood for many years called the Canteen. In hip Hollywood, she's as famous and accomplished as he is.
How is that a "happy ending"?
Cf Lucian's reply.
Saw it. Seems insider info is necessary to make clear that there's more to it than "move in and become his housekeeper," which on the surface doesn't sound all that great for a capable actress.
I favor doing whatever makes you happiest if doing that harms no one else—even if your choice is to be a housekeeper.
There's a great boxed set of Bob's films on DVD available that contains both these classics, plus more! Starting with the overlooked psychedelic classic "HEAD" by the Monkees. Watch for Bob and Jack's brief on-screen cameo in this.