5. Dennis Hopper (Made Easy Rider About Motorbiking Across America And Getting Stoned While Motorbiking Across America And Getting Stoned)
Dennis Hopper's 1969 Easy Rider invented/reinvented that venerable genre, the American road movie, and more or less inaugurated the birth of the 1970's "New Hollywood" generation of filmmaking in the bargain, with directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Terrence Malick, George Lucas, et. all being allowed to make idiosyncratic, personal films with studio financing after its success. Easy Rider defied common wisdom about what kinds of movies would make money: a low budget film by two graduates (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) of the Roger Corman school of exploitation biker pics, concerning two motorcycling drug dealers who "went looking for American and couldn't find it anywhere", it made a ton of money and briefly encouraged major film studios to cater to a "youth audience" they hoped would save them from economic doldrums. Easy Rider also -
very briefly - made Dennis Hopper a star director, until his follow-up film,
The Last Movie, destroyed all his Hollywood cred. Maybe Universal shouldn't have been surprised that Hopper managed to basically flush his career down the toilet in a swirl of ego and copious drug use, though, since...well, that's basically the way he made Easy Rider. Everyone involved with the production of Easy Rider remembers it as
an...experience. Hopper by all accounts was basically following the trajectory of his two lead characters, wandering across country and sort of making the film up as he went along; drug use was so copious it didn't even raise eyebrows. Dennis Hopper stuck to alcoholism because "smoking made me too paranoid"; in contrast, co-star Peter Fonda made a vow that "if the film made enough money, I would quit acting and buy a farm in Madagascar and grow grass and smoke it all day." Jack Nicholson, who had an important supporting role in the film, did one campfire scene completely stoned, an interesting acting challenge; as Nicholson put it, "instead of being straight and having to act stoned...I was now stoned...and having to act straight...then gradually letting myself return to where I was - which was very stoned." (Nicholson apparently didn't flub a line, even when out of his mind on grass.) Maybe all the pot smoke filtered its way into the fabric of the film itself; whatever it was, '60s audiences who saw Easy Rider "smelled" the real thing, and made the film a massive "hit". (No pun - ah hell, I'm not gonna lie, that pun was totally intentional. I apologize.)