The Hollywood Renaissance by Peter Krämer & Yannis Tzioumakis

Author:Peter Krämer & Yannis Tzioumakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

‘Hardly a pickup’: Easy Rider, Raybert Productions and Columbia Pictures

Following the collapse of any potential deal with AIP, Hopper and Fonda ended up bringing Easy Rider to independent film and television production company Raybert Productions. As I would like to focus in this section primarily on the nature of Columbia’s role, I will not review the literature that discusses who initiated the sequence of events that brought the film to Schneider and Rafelson’s company. This is also because, unlike the film’s production ‘pre-history’ with AIP, this part of Easy Rider’s production trajectory has been examined rigorously, with all accounts agreeing that it was Hopper and Fonda’s network of relations with a number of actors, directors, producers, writers and technicians who shared their youth and countercultural ideas that brought them to Raybert at a very particular moment in time.

Instead, what I concentrate on, is how Columbia is represented in these accounts and, more importantly, when these accounts report its presence in the film’s production process. This is a particularly pertinent question for determining the nature of the film’s ‘independence’, especially given Bert Schneider’s familial relationship to Columbia’s top executives, its chairman and chief executive officer (as of 1968) Abe Schneider (Bert’s father) and its head of production (as of 1968) Stanley Schneider (Bert’s older brother).42 As my discussion will demonstrate, questions emerge in terms of who financed the film fully and with what funds; whether the film was an independent production the distribution rights of which were bought as a negative pick up by Columbia; and whether it was Columbia that paid for the rights to the film’s music.

One good starting point for this part of the story is provided by the trade press of the time, which, once the film was put officially in production by its producing partners Pando and Raybert, started reporting updates on its production status. In this respect, one can get a good steer as to when particular events in the film’s production timeline appear to have taken place. The first mention of Easy Rider seems to have appeared in Variety on 21 February 1968, with the trade publication announcing the film’s launch as filmmakers and crew were going to New Orleans to start the shoot at the Mardi Gras.43 This is confirmed by Biskind’s account who dates this trip on 23 February.44

Following a number of updates on the film’s location shooting that situate it in a seven week period between mid-May and early July,45 the next mention of the film appears on 31 July 1968 when Variety reported that Easy Rider was ‘about to be bought by a major’.46 This report, on the one hand, clearly points to the film’s independent status in the six month period (February–July) since Easy Rider’s first mention in the trade press and, on the other, allows for a period of approximately one month from the end of the shoot (estimated in early July) for the producers of the film to ‘shop’ for a distributor. It would be another two

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