Today's movie for Hippie Hotties is perhaps THE hippie movie. Let's take it back to 1969 to talk about the monumental Dennis Hopper film Easy Rider.
Easy Rider is a hippie motorcycle drama where two young friends hit the road on their hogs with the intention of going down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. While on their trip down there, they meet all kinds of different people that show them what America is all about.
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper star with Jack Nicholson giving an absolutely stellar early performance. There are all kinds of stories behind the story here, but let's focus on the plot first. Our leading hippies, Wyatt and Billy, go from LA to N.O. after making a large profit on a cocaine deal at the very beginning of the movie.
Wyatt is a really easy-going hippie and Billy is a bit more cautious of all the strange characters they come across. They learn a lot about America and other people in the counter-culture. What do they learn exactly? That not everyone is as chill and laid-back as they had hoped. Still, they find spirituality and peace...and hot naked women.
One of the girls who goes nude in the movie is the one and only Toni Basil. Yes, that's right. Toni Basil from "Oh, Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind" fame. Over a decade before she donned a cheerleading uniform and danced her way into our 80s living rooms, she went totally nude as a prostitute in New Orleans.
This is actually not Toni's nude debut. She went nude in a short experimental film in 1966 called Breakaway in which she danced totally naked. You can also treat yourself to her nude debut here:
Back to Easy Rider. Let's talk myth. The story goes that Dennis and Peter never actually wrote a script for this movie, that most of it was made up as they went along. They used hippies at communes all over the country and different friends to hold cameras - all allegedly being stoned and drunk the entire time. That's part of what feels so real about the movie. It truly adds to the authenticity of the film.
In a way, Easy Rider is a movie about myth that has an immense amount of myth surrounding it. It's almost more fascinating to read about all of the stories surrounding the movie than watch the actual movie.
Before you get your pitchforks out, let me explain. This film was clearly so influential at the time and it continues to be referenced to this day. It has all of the groundwork of American indie films that we would know and love for decades after. When you watch it now, it definitely meanders. It's one of those films that you have to remind yourself 'this was groundbreaking' as you watch it.
That being said, this movie is SO quintessentially American that it definitely deserves continued study and respect. It is also SO hippie because of its real use of drugs behind the scenes. Legend has it that they smoked 150 joints while filming the campfire scene alone. The only things they didn't do for real were LSD and cocaine because they couldn't afford them.
There are so many stories about fights behind-the-scenes, drugs, the ways that scenes were shot guerilla-style, the ways that they got certain effects, etc. The fact remains that Easy Rider made a killing in the box office, partially because it was made for such little money to begin with (the majority of the budget was given to music rights), and it came to define a generation that wanted to hit the open road.
Get high off this nude scene that is super trippy, but Toni strips naked and shows off her hairpie.
