Original subtitles

Peter had made a motorcycle movie called Wild Angels which was a big big success and Jack

Nicholson had made one called Hell's Angels on Wheels and I had made one called The Glory

Stompers. So Peter and I promised each other we wouldn't make a bike movie. We wanted to

do anything but make a motorcycle movie because we were afraid that we were going to become the

John Wayne and uh you know Gabby Hayes of bike films. I went to Toronto to promote the trip.

So I was there in the first day of this big exhibition. Jack Valenti is up on this big

table of big wigs and he's a new boy in the block. LBJ had just appointed him and just created the

thing called the Motion Picture Association of America. And Jack's up there. This is his first

public utterance. My friends, you're my friends and looking right at me. We have to stop making

movies about motorcycles, sex, and drugs and make more movies like Dr. Dittle. I went back to

the Lakeshore Motel, smoked a couple of dubes, had some Heineken, sat down and began to sign

photographs. I came upon one photograph from the Wild Angels. So, the dubes and the heiney kicked

right in and I fell into the photograph and that's it. I know what to do for my next sex motorcycles

and drugs movie. First thing I thought of was these two guys who had done this journey across

America and that they'd get bumped off by these guys who were poachers. I'd call him Hopper and

it was about 4:30 in the morning. He woke me up in the middle of the night and he said, "What do

you think of that idea?" And I said, "Did they tell you they'd give you the money?" And I said,

"You direct, I'll produce, both write, and we'll both act. We can save some money." Dennis said,

"You want me to direct?" I knew that Dennis would be the perfect person to direct this film. And

uh I wasn't wrong. We've gone through the whole 60s and the 60s have been such a fascinating time

and there had been no movies made that had anything to do with our reality. I mean the

movie that was made the year that uh we made Easy Rider was Doris Day and Rock Hudson made

Pillow Talk. The young kind of movies were being made for kids were Beach Blanket Bingo, you know,

with Frankie Avalon. They had very little to do with the reality of Hate Ashberry or the reality

of the Hippie Love Ends. So much was happening at that moment. The visual arts were exploded. The

music was exploding. All these creative things had happened. And basically, this was tapping into the

end of it. Pop art had already happened. Rock and roll had already happened. The summer of love was

over. I was in Roskoff in the west coast of France in 1967 shooting a film with Jane. One afternoon I

hear some scuffling on the stairs and into my room walks Terry Southern who had been in Rome looking

at Barbarella that he had written for Jane Bonim. Cherry wanted to know, "What are you doing?"

tell him the story of what Dennis and I were going up to. And Terry knew Dennis. Terry said,

"Denden, huh?" "Well, what's your plan?" I said, "Well, you know, we really don't want us to write

it into a screenplay form. We're too impatient for it. So, we want to find somebody who will

just mechanically write it into a screenplay form for us and then we'll go out and shoot the film."

Terry said, "I'm your guy." He said, "Terry, your fee is the budget of the film. Come on,

give me a break." No, you don't understand, Peter. I'm your guy. We all got together,

began to work it out. By the time we'd spent about five days together, we had it locked into a story

that I recorded on tape and it was transcribed and made out of 21 pages. And that's what we went back

to Hollywood with. So, we went into Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and our friends who had just made

the Monkeys and had this tremendous success. and Jack Nicholson was there because they were

making Head and that's how Jack fell into it. Also, Raelson said, "You know, it's the most

commercial story I've ever heard." Well, how much do you want for this movie? I said, " $360,000."

I wasn't prepared for it. I just thought, well, that's how much it cost Corman to shoot The Wild

Angels. I can do the same. No problem. I said, "We ought to go to Marty Grove because we'll

have 100,000 people in costume. We won't have to pay for it." And Bert wrote us a check for

$40,000 to go shoot Marty Grove. And Schneider said, "Uh, this is your test. I'm giving you

money to shoot this 16 millimeter thing. If this works, fine. If it doesn't, you're not going on

with this picture." There was been some confusion about when Marty actually took place. So, they

were caught. They hadn't they didn't have anything except a number of volunteers. I had to suddenly

jam and get friends with 16 mm cameras together to go and shoot in Marty Gro, which is already a

disastrous idea. the night before they traveled to New Orleans, they had a meeting. People would say,

"Gee, okay, uh, we need a gaffer. Who wants to be a gaffer and you know, somebody put, "Okay,

you're the gaffer." And it was like that. It was just, "Oh my god, this can't work." I mean,

I wasn't that organized, but I was appall. And they all thought they were the first camera. They

all thought that. We're all out of our minds. Half of us were on acid. We go to a meeting in

a conference room. Dennis and Peter are sitting up there. We got to be careful here because they know

what we're doing. And I said, Dennis, who knows what we're doing? He said, the government. I said,

the government. Well, why? What are we doing that that they know? He said, they know that

we're here to make this movie. And I said, well, how do they know what the movie is about? We don't

have aing script. How the can they know that? He said, they know, man. Man, they know because of

who we are. Who are we? Seymour Cassell was one of the camera assistants. You know, this is great. It

was a nightmare. And I was so convinced that we had to do this right and so on. I was a maniac.

I tell them nobody's to film anything unless I tell them to. And every time I look around,

there's a guy shooting out the window. And again, because they all wanted to be directors. It was a

nightmare. It was a prison-like atmosphere. Dennis was quite afraid that we would get some idea that

we should go shopping and then he wouldn't have us in that exact inspired moment when

he had something to shoot. So he used to say, "Are you there? Are you there?" And we Tony

and I would look at each other. Yes. Why? I don't know. Just just want you there. Then I get in an

argument with one of the cameramen. Give me it's my camera and he go off and shoot without Peter.

We were supposed to be in the parade. If you look at the film carefully, you'll see that we're never

in the parade. There's one shot where I'm in the parade. I could not believe what was going on. Uh,

and I'm the producer. A lot of people quit. So, they started to come back about the

second or third day, and they'd all come by the office and just tell me these horror stories of

what happened. I was taking a shower, I guess, trying to wash the day off. It was so amazing.

So, I got cleaned up and and dried off, put on a t-shirt and some jeans and a jacket. Went

next door where Karen Black and Tony Basel were bunkked together. Picked up Karen's guitar and

started playing songs and you know, location love. There's a scuffle going on outside. I was drawn to

the scuffle. And out there is Barry Feinstein holding his $30,000 three lens combo Aeraflex.

And Barry Feinstein is the Golden Glove champion while Dennis is kicking at him and trying to get

the camera. Barry Feinstein and I get in a fight. We're rolling around and fighting. I want all the

film in my room and he starts throwing it at me. The room is full of film. Did you work me? Ran me

through the streets night and day hearing you screaming about how Orson and Wells had failed

and like how you weren't going to fail. fight fell into the room with the two girls and upside

down. Dennis tumbles through the door crashing in through a door where Peter is in bed with Karen

and Tony. Dennis picked up the guitar was Karen's guitar and slammed it over Barry. Dennis was

sitting on him. He was pinned to the phone. Picks up a television, threw it at Barry and Dennis

looked at him and he says, and he meant it, I love you, man. Man, I love you. The whole thing has

been like a Rashimon experience. the whole movie, the entire production, everybody's got an entirely

different story on the thing. Terry Southern, a grown-up, someone who can put order in here,

someone who can make it pragmatic and workable. So, we all had a meeting. Dennis was going.

Terry said, "I don't think I can bear the cacophony of your speech much longer." Dennis

said, "The cacophony, huh? The cacophony of my speech, huh?" and they were like having these

arguments and things and nothing was decided. So we started this very badly. This was did not start

off as a couple come some friends now making a movie. The big schism seemed to have come down

to New Orleans. They never were the same after that and they argued considerably throughout

the remainder of the picture. They started out great pals and they didn't end up great

pals at all but they could pretend they were great pals to the outside world and they did

for years. Next thing was to get the script done. So now there's a lot of controversy about that,

but basically Terry Southern had been one of the original producers and Terry ducked out after

the New Orleans tobacco. So we made a deal with Terry to be one of the writers on the project. We

decided to shut down and get a screenplay written and hire a real crew of real people and get kind

of professional about the whole thing. We hired a production manager named Paul Lewis. I had done

a series of pictures with Jack Nicholson. Jack and I were talking one time. He says,

"Have I got a thing for you?" He said, "I've got a great great picture for you to do. It's a bike

picture and it's with two crazies, but at least you have one guy there who will drink with you."

I didn't think we were doing anything special at all. Dennis always thought we were doing something

special. The movie was a like a western to me. I thought of Wyatt as Wyatt and I thought of Billy

as Billy the kid. These two thrown together as partner. For me, it was a western idiom. We were

working with riding a motorcycle. I'm wearing spurs. I was the Duke. Dennis was wardro and

we're going across John Ford's American. It's a couple of guys and rather than riding horses,

they're riding like motorcycles. Uh they camp out around campfires. They're the bad guys.

They're outlaws. If you look at the Wild One, that was the beginning of glamorizing the biker

as the kind of fantasy outlaw. And what that did is it created the atmosphere to allow the Hell's

Angels to become a big gang. The same time that we were making Easy Rider 1968, the whole country

was ablaze. The Black Panthers were causing riots everywhere and the cities were burning. We were

living in a society that was amoral because we could no longer believe in the moray of the

society and that we were all breaking the laws of society. People wanted change. They wanted us out

of the war. They wanted a different kind of life. You know, everybody was giving away acid in the

beans and the love endings. Everybody was smoking dope. If you didn't have it and somebody else had

it, everybody shared. It was a nice feeling. And it all changed. And when harder drugs came in,

it became a business. When hard drugs started to come in being dealt by people who had absolutely

no values whatsoever, that was the beginning of the end of it. When we first started doing

meascul came before acid actually we were just looking for different take on things because

of smoking marijuana and the kind of things that we were doing in the 60s. It seemed like

everyone was outside of the law at that time. The exact producer told us you can't have heroes who

smuggle hard narcotics. can you do it with grass? And then I looked at Hopper and I said, "Well,

yeah, if we have three Peterbuilt triple tractor trailers waiting for us." We couldn't really get

that much marijuana on a motorcycle, you know, to make it interesting, you know, moneywise. I

changed that to cocaine because heroin had just a bad connotation to it. And cocaine was a drug

of kings and nobody really knew what it was. I didn't really want to make it a drug you could

identify. It was just a white powder. I wanted the moralists in the country to feel whatever was the

worst drug for them, that was what this was. And that we would score this in a junkyard in Mexico,

scoring junk in a junkyard. Haro loved that thought. He also promised he'd give me real

coke. It's a test. Oh man, I'll tell you, powdered sugar really hurts. I had flown into LAX with John

Lyn in a lair jet and looking out the window I saw this is a public road and I just thought this is

really wild. This would be a great place to do a scene where there's so much noise you can't

hear what goes on but you know what's going on. Planes were landing from 20 ft to 50 ft over our

heads almost every minute every minute and a half and every time a plane went everybody was ducking

down. There were the planes roaring overhead, roaring, taking off. And at the same time,

a train went by carrying halftracks and tanks on its way to Vietnam. And I said, "Mixed media." And

we elected not to put the tanks in there because we did not want to make a film about or against

any judgment on the war in Vietnam. We got Phil because he had his own Rolls-Royce. So, we picked

up that free and his own bodyguard. Another one we picked up for free. But we ran into some problems

because Phil really was scared. By the end of the day, I mean, people were going to kill each other

because you couldn't hear, you couldn't talk to anybody. And the first day of the picture

was almost the last day of the film. One of the first things I did after I talked with Hoppers,

I drew out the pictures of the motorcycle with the teardrop gas tank. It's extended with the

far front end, the two big Harley V twin poppers. Boom. I'm just riding one big phallic down the

road. They weren't motorcycles that you drove back and forth across the country. Nobody tried that,

I don't think. I There must be some nut cases that did, but no rational human being tried

it. Llo Kovac is the greatest telephoto operator I've ever seen. Our camera car was hysterical.

What we would do was mount the camera either in a convertible or on the back of a station wagon.

soft tires, back seats out, just some sandbags and an Aeraflex and and lassel. ABC Leathers had

made two jackets and one set of pants for me. And I wore the outfit all the time. In fact,

I'd got in a bathtub with pants on and got them all wet and then let them dry with me and my

legs bent so they would look like I'd been born in them. So, it was a hot day. We'd stop. We're

waiting. I'm getting hot in the black leathers. By the time we got to Kingman, we were all going to

go out by the pool to have a cocktail. That sounds cool. Got into my room, peeled off the leathers.

I had these purple legs from the diet pants. I was very embarrassed about my skinniness. I said,

"I'm not about to go out with skinny purple legs." So, I pulled on some clean pants and went to the

bar and I said, "Bring me the tallest, coldest beer you have." So, they came with this big stein,

glass stein of defrosted at that. And I grabbed it, thinking to myself, [ __ ] And this is the

first day on the road with the movie, you know, my first production. This is wonderful. All these

people were all together making this movie. Babis picked up the beer. Couldn't move to my face. I

could pick it up, put it down, but no hinge. So, nobody saw that one. I'll wait and I grab with the

other arm, pick it up, and it won't move. And then I just try without the beer. I can't make my hands

move this part of my body because for the entire day at 25 miles an hour because you had to see the

background. We could not go fast with my hands up in the air so high and they're just hanging

on trying to keep this sucker from going over at faster speeds. It was easy to ride at slow speeds.

It was a major [ __ ] I couldn't put anything in my mouth. I couldn't even smoke a joint. We've

been smoking since early that morning. What we did was we drove along in three Cortezes

and we jump out and shoot, jump out and shoot, get back in the Cortez. And we were diligently

figuring out what we were going to say. And of course, it started coming up very serious and very

heavy. And by the time we got to where we were going to shoot, which is an Indian burial place,

and there were park rangers standing there watching us, they didn't want a pebble moved.

We sat there with a camera running, I don't know, 5 minutes before anybody said anything.

We were so loaded, we didn't even know where we were. Some of the hostilities you'll see

between some of the people showing some of the scenes. I think Luke and Dennis may have had some

words earlier in the day, and I think you'll see some of the hostilities in the way it was done,

between the porky pig and, you know, certain things. But it really worked for the picture.

It was our first real day off and we all gathered in the lounge of the Americana in in Flagstaff.

We put all these roundts out in the circle and we all were having a good time and I had my 12 string

guitar and I was singing and playing and we were having a grand old time till some son of a [ __ ]

came out from the real bar drunk staggered in into the middle of our circle and started

saying you hippies youing hippies. you know, he's an ex-Marine and he's thinking you peace next and

he gets on a rant. He pisses off quite a few people on the show, some of them whom served

in Korea and he picked him up, put him outside the circle and we all thought that's good enough.

And as we all went to sit down again, he pulled Joyce's chair out, Joyce King, our script clerk,

and she sat down and fell on the floor. You do not with the film company when they're all together.

We picked him up, put him down in the bar as we all went sighing hail out of this bar and into my

room. The whole company uh went into Peter's room, everybody. And Peter was sitting there

rolling a lot of joints and uh everybody sat down, everybody in the company and including people who

had never done grass before. Everybody sort of like smoked and you know got a little high. It was

a nice it was a nice start for the road trip. It was hysterical what went down. I can't tell you.

I'd be invading people's privacies, but it was absolutely hysterical how that that evening ended

up. And we bonded beautifully. The only time I ever had anything to do with con basically pretty

ugly scenes. They were run by usually two or three guys on a total power trip. Total control over

some poor chicks that they ran ragged. Bunches of children around that weren't being taken care of.

But this was a polystyrene commune in the hills of Malibu. So a little different. We shot the commune

in the Malibu Hills here in California and we had the art director copy almost identically

New Buffalo. We had sent some people down to Panga Canyon just to pick up hippies wherever

we could find them so we could populate this thing more. When I first come into the commune and I'm

fully clothed and I lean over the wash basin and splash my face and then my armpits and I've got

on a shirt and a jacket. Why would a guy do that? It was just something funny to do. I felt at times

the movie was taking itself so seriously that I had to harpoon it. Peter character would very

likely maybe stayed in the commune. He seemed to be very happy wherever he was. It was sort

of okay, you know, and I'm the one we got to keep going. We got to keep going. Dennis may

be the dark force pulling this thing to a bad end. You could just tell that if he stuck with Billy,

he kept on doing what he was doing, that one or both of them were going to wind up dead.

The marching band is America to me. And marching without a permit is something that I knew quite

a bit about since I was in the civil rights and trying to stop the war. So, we get in the parade

and we get busted for parading without a permit. We had to do that line. You're in the parade or

you're not in the parade, right? We're on the bus, not on the bus. As I said, an ACLU type will see

it go down and and buses out of jail. Dennis put the ACLU type in jail with us. Thing in the prison

that Jack says about, you they're cutting off their hairs with rusty razor blades. If

you have long hair, you guys are lucky. You know, those are things that I stories that I'd actually

heard that Paul and I had heard about what was going on in Texas and not to go through Texas.

We were running into these young kids with their head shaved. Really beaten badly by uh Texas uh

police and they would see us and they would say, "Do not go through Texas or they're going to catch

you. They're going to shave your head and they're going to kick the [ __ ] out of you." We stopped.

I bought Dennis a hat, made him tuck his hair under the hat. And he wouldn't do it. You know,

he I'm not going to go this way. I'm going the way I'm going. We get to the border. He says,

"I'm not going through Texas." Jack wasn't going to be an actor anymore. I remember he told me

that. He said, "What? You didn't want to be an actor?" I said, "What are you going to He said,

"I want to run a studio." Jack didn't originally want to do the picture. Jack had reached a point

where he was not sure he wanted to act anymore. We had a production assistant whose name was Chris.

And Chris could roll a joint better than anybody I ever saw. And somewhere in there, we bought a

kilo of marijuana for the for the picture. The one thing is there's no time you see anybody smoking

any dope in that movie that it isn't dope. The shooting of that scene was magnificent because

I was getting Nicholson loaded. You know, really good pot. This was going on. So when it came time

to shoot his end of it, he was really ripped. I couldn't believe that actors could do that.

They could get that loaded and still remember to do anything, you know? It was a stunning kind of

eye openener for me. And Jack went up, laughed his ass off. Well, we cut. Okay, it's a print

and a pickup. And Jack starts, "No, no, Dennis, let let me do it from the top." Because he had

been studying very hard. And Jack's just almost in tears, begging. And the camera's now rolling,

slated. And Dennis says, "Okay, Jack." And Jack, uh, well, well, where where were we? In Morganza,

Louisiana, the cafe. It was basically a segregated state. And they had a white section and a

non-white section. The best part of the cafe was in the black section because they had great music

in there and they had a great jukebox and the people were there were much looser and everything

else. Some of our crew went in the back and were dancing to the music and dancing with some of

the people who were in that section. That added to the antagonism and added to the hostilities.

The sheriff who was actually in the picture said, "Either you get him out of there, I'm putting him

in jail." So, I arrive at this place, Morganza, Louisiana, this little coffee shop, which is about

all there is there. I'd had this location scout go ahead and he would find actors that might be

suitable to be in the picture. And I kept telling him, don't go to like, you know, little theater

groups. I don't want little I want real people and I'll try to work with them. Tony had lined up

50 or 60 people. He had gone to the local little theater group and he had gotten a group of actors

together who had all dressed up and looked like they were ready to perform. And I went,

"Oh man, this is terrible." So we arrived before anybody else was there as we walked in. They're

standing around the house. I can smell them. Can you smell them? Dennis says, "Those guys,

we want them." I said, "I want those guys." And he goes, "You've got to be kidding. I can't ask those

guys. They'll kill me." And I said, "Those are the guys I want for the movie." And I said, "You see

those little girls over there?" And he said, "Oh my, we're going to get in so much trouble here.

We'll never leave this town." I said, "Everybody wants to be in the movies." So they did. They

wanted to be in the movies. I told them, "There's nothing you can say that's too bad about us. Feel

free to say anything you want about us because we raped and killed a young girl outside of town."

Oh. So that freed them up to use all their bigotry and all their stuff and all their nastiness,

which they wanted to use anyway. For years, I was criticized. Why didn't you use a black guy on the

back of the bike? You know, well, why? because it would be too obvious that there would be a reason

for them to kill us at that time because of the racial implications of going into the South, but

in point of fact, we didn't need to be different. We didn't need to be black. We just needed to

have long hair. And I wanted them to kill one of their own. I wanted America to kill their own son.

And when they killed Jack Nicholson, the worst thing he's done is get drunk and uh and uh work

for the ACLU, which everybody wanted me to take out of the picture, which I thought was ludicrous

at the time. But anyway, that's how uptight everyone was. They didn't object to anything else,

but that ACLU line I, you know, can't we do something about that? Jack distills it all.

He's our mouthpiece and he explains it. Genesis foil. All they worried about is our hair. Oh yeah,

they don't like the hair, but don't go tell them they ain't free. And this is what we were seeing

in the movie. We're not free. It was tough. But Jack had to die. He was the one person everybody

identified with the most. He was a drunk. If anybody had trouble getting with any of our

characters at that point, cuz we were ptheads. With Jack's character as a drunk, they can get

into the scene and they're more comfortable with him. They knew that if he was found dead

with his skull crushed, had been seen with these two guys and those two guys had left the scene,

probably the idea would be that those guys did it. Dennis had found this graveyard, which I

found to be rather bizarre, but it worked for me. Everybody's buried above ground in New Orleans

cuz you dig 3 ft down, you're in the water. And we go up the side of the [ __ ] and we take the acid

when he Peter breaks up the acid and gives it to us. And I say my sensitive line. Oh, shut up. just

take it. We were going to go to the cemetery and shoot the next day. I said, you know, I don't know

if I can sleep tonight and we're getting really up early. And so Peter said, uh, take this. Take this

and you'll sleep. What is it? He says, sleeping pill. Yeah. So, I take it and I sort of feel like

um I'm lying there trying to go to sleep and Tony is next to me in the other bed and she's listening

to me and I'm going, "Tony, I know this sounds really strange, but I feel like I can't get in

my body. I feel like I can feel the outside of my skin. It feels really cool and cold and and

I can't go to sleep because I'm out. I can't get in." So she wakes up in the morning. She says,

"Karen said the most wonderful things last night. Why doesn't she say them in the movie?" The whole

sequence was not scripted. Dennis saw the statue was Italian Statue of Liberty with me sitting on

her lap asking my mother why she'd coped out on me because my mother committed suicide when I was 10.

And I said, "Dennis, you can't ask me to do that. Just because you know doesn't give you the right

to go public with it, especially in the film. I I don't feel comfortable doing that." No, no, man.

You you've got to, man. I mean, man, man, you man, you you got to, man. You mean you know,

man, I mean, it's Dennis, I don't want to do it. I don't want to go out there and say that. I don't

want to be that public with it, but man, you you got to and we're arguing and arguing and give me

one good reason, man. You know, because I'm the director. I couldn't argue with that. So, I got

up on the statue and I went for something I had never done in my life. That to me was talking to

the Statue of Liberty and saying, "Are you just a piece of paper? Is liberty just a piece of paper?"

I thought of those things as being symbolic of what was happening in the country. Barry, who

was filming it, could see it through the lens. And I don't know why Dennis wanted to move the camera,

but Dennis wanted to move the camera. Barry wanted to let it roll. And I could hear the argument. And

finally, I go, "Shut up. It's in the film." We had shot the whole movie and I said, "But there's one

more scene that we have to shoot." And he says, "No, no, we've shot the movie the movie." And I

get him out in the middle of the night. I said, "We're shooting this scene." And he said, "Well,

I'm not saying all that crap." Dennis started out. What do you want to say, man? Well, you know,

I just want to say we blew it. Yeah, it's good. We have to say we blew it when we went for the big

money, man. You know, we say we blew it our hair. No, no, I just want to say we blew it. And this

boiled into an argument, you know, basically with Dennis, it's high level, high decibel. I said,

"Well, then don't worry about it. You just say we blew it and I'll say the rest." He said, "Well,

how you going to do that?" I said, "Don't worry about it." Dennis and I were at a gas station and

found this gentleman with a goiter on his neck. And Dennis said, "Get me him." So I said, "Those

are the two guys that I want to do the killing." He said, "But we need somebody with a uh pickup

truck. Do you have a pickup truck?" And he said, "No, but my friend does." And he points out his

friend from the back and I said, "Dennis, yeah, right. Get him." So Dennis, we got them both,

put them in the car, and you know, Dennis told him what he wanted to do. Basically gave them roughly,

you know, what they were supposed to say and and then let them go. I really wanted to win

the con film festival. Yeah. And uh I had enough knowledge to know that superimposers were like

frowned on in the u European art uh art market. People said, well, that was because they couldn't

afford the money that it took to superimpose. But I that may be partly it, but I I think that

superimposer is really cheating, you know? I mean, I think that if you can direct cut something,

it's much cleaner. Dennis had cut together the picture in a in a very long version and we'd seen

this long version endlessly and it was too long to ever think about releasing. Dennis wanted to

road show the movie which is when you have the intermission you know ticketed signed seat and

all that and I kept saying Columbia isn't going to do that Dennis just there's not a chance in the

world that they're going to road show this movie. So, at some point the picture was taken away,

if you will, from Dennis. We had to take the film and re-edit it from three hours down to a

reasonable length film. Jack edited edited his part of the scene. Hayward edited, I edited,

uh, Bird edited, Bob edited. We'd cut it down from over three hours to 90 minutes. And we had

a screening for Dennis at Columbia in the big theater. And I just thought he's going

to go so nuts when he sees what we've done. You know, he was my brother-in-law and I liked him,

but he had a temper and I knew this was cutting to his creative soul. And the lights came on and

I was prepared for anything, you know, to be anything from being shot to, you know,

like and he and he was there was tears in his eyes. And he said, "That's beautiful." He said,

"That's amazing. Don't ever ever let me cut another photo of film.