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Easy Rider

Director: Dennis Hopper Run Time: 95 min. Format: 35mm Rating: R Release Year: 1969

Starring: , Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Peter Fonda

Friday night introduction by Sean Young! Both Easy Rider screenings include a very special pre-taped introduction and Q&A with Karen Black about the film and her role!

Easy Rider is a landmark American film about the encroaching disillusionment of the country’s counter culture movement in the late 1960s. 

They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent…Freedom.

Directed by Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider shows the real and metaphorical journey of two bikers Captain America and Billy (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) as they travel from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Along the way they realize the fabric of American culture is so fundamentally flawed that the promise of change invoked by the counter culture in the early 1960s seems to fade away. And although the tagline says that it’s about “a man who went looking for American…but couldn’t find it”, it seems more dangerous to suggest that perhaps he did.

In one of her first film roles, Karen Black (along with dance legend Toni Basil) plays one of the New Orleans prostitutes who takes up with Billy and Captain America during Mardi Gras and ends up in the Big Easy graveyard doing LSD, amongst other naughty deeds.

Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.

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