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His son, Nile Southern, now the literary executor of the Terry Southern Estate and Literary Trust, has a copy of the original script. Hopper claimed, according to author Peter Biskind, to have spent two solitary weeks writing the Easy Rider script, and unequivocally said, “Terry never wrote one fucking word, not one line of dialogue.”įor the record, let’s state up front: Terry Southern wrote a screenplay for Easy Rider.

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But, beyond that, the attempts over the ensuing years, especially by Hopper, to diminish Southern’s role in creating the screenplay have needlessly muddied the waters of countercultural history.įor example, in Hopper’s revisionist history, he has taken full credit for everything related to Easy Rider. The money was, of course, a bone of contention for the rest of Terry Southern’s life (he died in 1995 at age 71).

Easy rider movie movie#

Southern never received another penny, despite the film’s success-unprecedented for a youth-centric pop culture movie and soundtrack-while Columbia Pictures, Hopper and Fonda and anyone else who owned “points” pocketed the rest. Terry Southern was paid the princely sum of $3,500 for his work on Easy Rider-he agreed, as a friendly gesture, to take the screenwriting union’s bare minimum, at the time, of $350/week for ten weeks. The resultant film of Easy Rider, directed by Hopper, was made for less than half a million dollars and, to date, has grossed more than $60 million.

He was, at the time, on contract with Corman at American International Pictures for one more biker movie. It’s true Hopper had had a promising early career, with roles in Giant and Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean, but he’d squandered that promise by making the wrong enemies in Hollywood, while Fonda was best known for riding a chopper in Roger Corman’s biker flick The Wild Angels and taking acid on camera for The Trip. Strangelove was nominated for an Academy Award (and whose Easy Rider script would be nominated for the same award). At the time, they were Hollywood lesser lights, at least compared to the veteran screenwriter Southern, whose screenplay for Dr. Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band album (he’s the guy standing behind John Lennon in the sunglasses).ĭennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who played the two leads in Easy Rider, Billy and Wyatt, respectively, were given co-writing credits for the screenplay (more on that later). Back then, Terry Southern’s profile was high enough to be seen on the Sgt. Strangelove, Barbarella, and The Cincinnati Kid, among others. The screenplay for that film was written by Terry Southern, who also put his stamp on the scripts for Dr.