Stories from Terry Southern, Part 4 (Easy Rider)

More from screenwriter, novelist, essayist, and screenwriting instructor Terry Southern. Today Southern discusses his involvement with the movie Easy Rider (1969). Here are more excerpts from Backstory 3:

Wasn’t it during the making of Barbarella that you first began working on Easy Rider?

Yes. Very early on it was called “Mardi Gras” to identify it. The first notion was that it would entail barnstorming cars, stunt-driver cars, which do flips and things — a troupe who play a few dates and places, and eventually get fed up with that, so they make this score — but that just seemed too unnecessarily complicated. So we just settled for the straight score of dope, selling it, and leaving the rat race. We forgot about the commonplace thing of daredevil drivers. Finally, we forewent any pretense of them doing anything else other than buying cocaine. We didn’t specify that it was cocaine, but that’s what it was. They go to New Orleans to sell it. Then, once they got their money, they ride to coastal Florida or some place like Key West where they could buy a boat cheap — not in New Orleans, because it would be too expensive. That was basically the story, which I then started to flesh out after our initial script meetings.

Did they actually do some kind of formal writing, or was it mainly in the form of tossing around ideas at story conferences?

Story conferences, mainly.

So, when you worked with Hopper and Fonda at your office and during the New Orleans shoot, you would just talk the story out and then go off and physically write the pages?

I did all the writing on it. They just had the idea in the beginning of the two guys making a score and using the money to buy their freedom from the rat race of America. Their pilgrimage on the road. That was all they had. No dialogue.

So you were the only one doing the actual, physical writing on it?

I did the only writing on it. Peter Fonda was the only working actor in the group. Dennis wasn’t really into acting at this time. He was a photographer. He had acted a long time before and had been a child actor. He was in Sons of Katie Elder [1965]. Peter Fonda had been in several of these really low-ball series of biker movies for AIP [American International Pictures]. He had a contract for one more in a three-picture contract. Dennis had this idea they would do instead of doing one of their typical B-picture dumbbell movies: under the guise of doing a biker movie, they could maybe pull off a movie that might be more interesting, [and] Dennis would be able to make his debut as a director in one fell swoop. It seemed possible under these auspices, whereas he couldn’t get arrested ordinarily. Under the setup where Peter Fonda owed AIP this picture, it would be possible to get this different approach in under the wire. He persuaded Peter to go along with this, “We’ll get Terry to write the script!” I had this good reputation off of Dr. Strangelove and Candy.

How did Easy Rider end up at Columbia?

That was through this guy [the producer] Bert Schneider, who made a deal for the distribution rights. He wasn’t involved during the production. He made some kind of deal with Dennis and Peter. Peter was the nominal producer. So that was the situation when they came by my place in New York. They said, “We want you to write this, and we’re going to defer any money in exchange for splitting 10 percent three ways.” For a variety of complicated business reasons, I wasn’t in a position where I could defer; so they said, “You can get $350 a week for ten weeks in lieu of that.” So I did it that way. So I never had a piece of the film, which turned out to be very lucrative.

Anyway, they told me the basic notion of two guys who were fed up with the rat race and commercialization of America. So, in order to get out of it, they’re going to make this score and then head to Galveston or Key West, and buy a boat and take off. The story would involve a cross-country trip and the various adventures that could befall them. The idea of meeting a kind of a straight guy, which turned out to be the Jack Nicholson role, was totally up to me. I thought of this Faulkner character, Gavin Stevens, who was the lawyer in this small town. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and studied at Heidelberg, and had come back to this little town to do whatever he could there. So I sort of automatically gave the George Hanson character a sympathetic aura. I wrote the part for Rip Torn, who I thought would be ideal for it. When

shooting began, we went to New Orleans and Rip was going to come, but he couldn’t get out of his stage commitment in a Jimmy Baldwin play, Blues for Mr. Charlie. At the time, it seemed like there was a possibility he might. We could shoot his part in a few days, and he would still be able to make this theatrical commitment. It wasn’t a big part. [The Baldwin play] was a Greenwich Village production and very little bread for him. He was doing it because he felt committed to it. Because he’s very much that kind of guy. So he missed the role of a lifetime. And Jack Nicholson was just on the scene, always around. He was a good choice, because he had that sympathetic quality.

How did you feel after the release of Easy Rider, when in interviews Dennis and Peter kind of downplayed the fact that you had written the screenplay. It seemed almost like an attack of amnesia on their part.

Well, vicious greed is the only explanation. And desperation for some ego identity material, because neither one had much of that. Whereas for me, I was filled with an abundance of praise and things.

You said you wanted to talk more about Easy Rider because of a possible lawsuit regarding your rights to it.

I don’t want Dennis to do [Easy Rider II ] without notifying me or anything, because in order to get their names [Hopper’s and Fonda’s] on Easy Rider I had to call the Writers Guild to say it was okay. For a director and a producer to be named on the writing credits is practically unheard of. Since there has been so much coercion, bribery, and so on by directors in the past, tacking themselves onto the credits, nowadays it’s an automatic arbitration. And so, I received this phone call from Peter saying, “Well, we’ve got this print. I think we’ve got a nice little picture here. Dennis and I want to get our names on the writing credits, but in order to do that, you’ll have to notify the Writers Guild to say that it’s all right.”

Did you think it was a fair request at the time?

It wasn’t fair, but it didn’t matter to me at the time because I was ultrasecure. I had Candy and Dr. Strangelove. I said, “Sure, that’s fine.” I didn’t mind. So I spoke to the Writers Guild. They were a little surprised. They said, “Well, those guys aren’t even members of the Writers Guild. They’re not really writers, are they?” I said, “Yes, that’s true, but you don’t have to be in the Writers Guild to write something,” although you are supposed to be in order to participate [in the profits, residuals, et al.].

A lot of people still seem to think Easy Rider was this completely improvised film, but looking at the shooting script, I was surprised to find even the graveyard hallucination scene was completely scripted out. Why did Peter and Dennis take the lion’s share of the credit on that film?

Yeah, neither of them is a writer. It’s often the case with directors that they don’t like to share credit, which was the case with Stanley. He would prefer just “A Film by Stanley Kubrick,” including music and everything. Aside from Kubrick, other directors I worked with rarely did anything on the script.

And tomorrow one more set of stories from Terry Southern.

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