Easy Riders Raging Bulls

He continued, “In my mind, the ending was to be an indictment of blue-collar America, the people I thought were responsible for the Vietnam War.”

Southern also claimed, shortly before his death, that the famous ending was his as well. He says Hopper and Fonda wanted the characters to go off into the sunset. “Dennis Hopper didn’t have a clue as to what the film was about,” he asserted. “When Dennis read it, he said, ‘Are you kidding? Are you going to kill off both of them?”

Hopper and his friends were seized with a millennialism that seemed to be sweeping everything before it. As he put it, “I want to make movies about us. We’re a new kind of human being. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries.... We want to make little, personal, honest movies.... The studio is a thing of the past, and they are very smart if they just concentrate on becoming distributing companies for independent producers.”