One of the most fundamental urges of the Hollywood machine is to recycle and recombine elements of its previous productions in the pursuit of profit. In an industry that generates massive expenditure at all stages of production and distribution, and with no promise of safe financial returns, each studio film represents the culmination of a precarious balancing act between the familiar and the new. The familiar can lure established audiences back but can also quickly bore through repetition. The new can alienate or fail to attract an audience at all.
The unheralded success of Easy Rider pointed to new, untapped markets. In the following years the major Hollywood motion picture companies set about producing and/or distributing a number of films that attempted to repeat Easy Rider’s success by incorporating varying combinations of some of the earlier film’s central preoccupations: alienated young men traveling America’s highway system, motorcycles, rock ’n’ roll, drugs, the counterculture and violent death, and an exploration of stylistic and narrative tropes lifted from the previous decade of European art house cinema. A sampling of such films would include The Strawberry Statement (dir. Stuart Hagman, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970), Little Fauss and Big Halsy, Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost Bag Blues (dir. Paul Williams, Warner Bros., 1972), Slither (dir. Howard Zieff, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973), The Last American Hero (dir. Lamont Johnson, Twentieth Century Fox, 1973), Your Three Minutes Are Up (dir. Douglas Schwartz, Cinerama, 1973), Scarecrow (dir. Jerry Schatzberg, Warner Bros., 1973), Electra Glide in Blue (dir. James William Guercio, United Artists, 1973), and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (dir. John Hough, Twentieth Century Fox, 1974). Clearly this is not a list of titles with enduring legacies to rival that of Easy Rider.
This chapter considers five such films, all of which were released in the wake of Easy Rider and incorporate elements of that film in strikingly different ways. Raybert Productions’ follow-up to Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, represents a significant progression toward the kind of American art house style that Bert Schneider strove to make synonymous with the BBS brand. Two-Lane Blacktop explores even stranger existential territory than does Easy Rider, displaying the influence of contemporaneous developments of the post-May 1968 last gasp of the French New Wave. Vanishing Point distills the elements of Easy Rider into a more familiar commercial context, leaving generic conventions intact even as it extracts all material extraneous to its lean narrative drive. Little Fauss and Big Halsy and Adam at 6 A.M. are similarly pared-back exercises, both noteworthy for their relationship to stardom and the perils of its subversion and the enduring power base situated around film distribution. The varied stylistic approaches of these five films, as well as their relative successes and failures, shed much light on the inner workings of the Hollywood studios at the time and how young American audiences saw themselves (or in some cases, pointedly did not see themselves) reflected in the silver screen.