The only ‘Easy Rider’ scene edited by Jack Nicholson: “Which everyone hates so much”
One can only imagine how exciting it must’ve been to be a part of the film industry during the 1960s, with Hollywood drastically changing and morphing into something more experimental and daring than ever before. Several key films emerged during the latter end of the decade that would change everything, like Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s honest love letter to America, a land of supposed freedom but ultimately, one of heartbreak.
The film sees Hopper’s Billy and Peter Fonda’s Wyatt ride across the country on their motorcycles, where they meet hippies, do drugs, spend a night in jail, and get beaten up; the road to freedom is paved with violence and destruction. Easy Rider was a seminal release where you can really feel the dying flame of optimism flickering in the background, signalling that the era of flower power and free love was coming to an end.
Yet, alongside Bonnie and Clyde, the movie marked the start of a new era for Hollywood. Harnessing the experimentalism seen in American B-movies and arthouse flicks while maintaining a sense of accessibility, Easy Rider helped to usher in more nihilism, explicit content, and grittiness, paired with unconventional formal techniques that felt strikingly different to the period of sound stages and studio sets that dominated Old Hollywood.
Jack Nicholson starred in the film as George, and during this time, the actor could also be found writing and producing various B-movies, like The Trip, directed by Roger Corman, a countercultural movie that significantly paved the way for Easy Rider. When it came to Hopper’s film, Nicholson had a relatively small but impactful part, and he earned an Oscar nomination for his memorable performance. Yet, he also made some contributions to the production of the film, including joining the editing team to lend some additional assistance.
While the film was predominantly edited by Donn Cambern, the actor soon made some suggestions as part of a collaborative team, telling Sight and Sound, “When they were shooting, I didn’t do anything on the production side; I was just there, and mainly paid attention to my acting job. Afterwards, at everyone’s request, I had a go-through of the editing of the film, from where my character entered to the end. Henry Jaglom had a similar job with the first half of it at the same time. That was the next-to-last stage of editing. It was just a very close collaboration of a lot of people.”
However, Nicholson once revealed that he worked on a specific scene from the film during this editing process, and it proved to be the most memorable of all. In Jack Nicholson: The Early Years, the actor explained, “What I did was more like literary editing… They offered me an opportunity to edit the section of the film that I was in—again, all was subject to Dennis’ feelings. Also, from the time I came in through to the end, I had an editorial position about it. I put the ‘trip’ sequence in, which everyone hates so much. I put it together out of the film they had. Within my editing, of course, were things that other people had solved already. You know, mine was just a repositioning and refining; more of a polish job than an editing job.”
That iconic trip sequence, in which the pair do acid in a cemetery with two prostitutes, is a claustrophobic and intense scene, and its fast-paced editing truly brings you into the chaos firsthand. Nicholson soon broke through into the mainstream following his performance in Easy Rider, but it appears his contributions to the film were much bigger than many people realise.
