Word: rider
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Greetings to Peter Fonda, the old Easy Rider himself, who has slipped back into the driver's seat. This time around, he has four wheels instead of two and plays a heist artist with racing ambitions instead of a romantic outlaw biker. Fonda has dreams of glory on the fast track. To get himself a stake in the big time, he knocks over a large super market in a small California town...
...kinetic performance in Easy Rider, the shrewd observation of the frantic womanizer in Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge and the unflappable incarnation of J.J. Gittes, the private eye on the make in Chinatown, Nicholson has built up one of the most impressive actor's portfolios in Hollywood. His are the kind of credentials the town likes best. The recent movies Nicholson stars in are generally well received, and he himself invariably is. His presence in a starring role seems to guarantee both prestige and a profit. That makes Nicholson the man most in demand, the dearest form of collateral...
...Easy Rider (1969) and in the freer, more personal films that flowed from its success, Nicholson became a kind of figurehead for a loose group of actors and film makers who were trying to expand the commercial genre. Nicholson, Actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, Writer-Directors Bob Rafelson, Monte Hellman, Carol and Charles Eastman-none of them then well known-all cheered and boosted each other. Their work was almost always full of aggressive invention (Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Hopper's The Last Movie, Nicholson's own Drive, He Said), but the new Hollywood passed...
...motorcycle movie. Rafelson thought there was a good part for Nicholson, but Hopper wanted Rip Torn. Nicholson was dispatched to the set as a sort of production watchdog. He quickly became the right man at the right time. Torn dropped out of the movie, Nicholson moved in. Easy Rider wound up making $35 million. It also got Nicholson an Oscar nomination. All the scuffling was finally starting...
Nicholson is honest enough to concede that there have been certain disadvantages. "There are two ways up the ladder-hand over hand or scratching and clawing. It's sure been tough on my nails." It has also been taxing on his social energies. After Easy Rider, Pal Harry Gittes (after whom Chinatown's shamus was named) remembers Nicholson buttonholing people if he got a look of even tentative recognition, "introducing himself and making himself unforgettable, one person at a time." Last year at Cannes he was observed doing similar gladhanding because he wanted to win the best-actor...