A Counterculture Blockbuster in Ohio
This weekend, the Gateway Film Center in Columbus, Ohio, will screen a 35 mm print of Dennis Hopper’s era-defining 1969 directorial debut, Easy Rider. Billed as the tale of a man who “went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere,” this radical road movie stars Hopper and Peter Fonda (who both contributed to the screenplay along with Terry Southern) as bikers who cash in on a drug deal and set off for a journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans. With a star-making performance by Jack Nicholson, an iconic rock soundtrack, and stunning landscape cinematography by the great László Kovács, Easy Rider is an ode to counterculture rebellion that continues to resonate generations later. As Matt Zoller Seitz writes in his liner notes for our release, the film is “about more than bikers and hippies or the tension between libertines and reactionaries. It’s about the difficulty of escaping social conditioning and economic imperatives and sustaining a truly free life.”
