Facts about the movie are very
elusive with many different
versions coming from many
different people, but most of
the following I believe to be
correct.
Two African-American
bike builders, Clifford ‘Soney’
Vaughs, who is said to have
designed the bikes and Ben
Hardy, a prominent chopper-
builder in Los Angeles, are
reputed to have worked on
their construction. This was
kept pretty quiet as back in
those times a popular sticker
found on Harley-Davidsons
said: “Built by whites, for white.”
The Wyatt character (played
by Peter Fonda) was named
after Wyatt Earp and Billy
(played by Dennis Hopper)
after Billy the Kid.
In a recent radio interview
Peter Fonda revealed that
each member of Steppenwolf
received only $1000 for their
music and in fact that was the
going rate for all the artists.
The opening scene, of
the boys buying their coke
wholesale in Mexico, was
actually filmed in New
Mexico. And while the actors
smoked real marijuana during
the filming, the cocaine seen
at the start of the film is fake.
According to Peter Fonda, this
is because they couldn’t afford
the real thing!
The key scene of Fonda
tossing his watch to the
ground was staged in a remote
town called Ballarat, on the
western edge of Death Valley.An immigrant from Australia
named this Californian ghost
town after our very own
gold rush town of Ballarat in
western Victoria.
The town where Billy and
Wyatt cheerfully tag along on
their bikes behind a marching
band was filmed in ‘Las Vegas’- but not the glitzy casino
city in Nevada – but the tiny
frontier town in New Mexico
of the same name, about 50
miles east of Santa Fe.
It’s been said that even
the crazily fearless Hopper
had second thoughts about
filming a hippie epic in the
late ’60s Lone Star state,
so Texas seems to have just
gone missing. It’s straight
on to Louisiana and the acid
trip in the cemetery. Some
of the weird lighting effects
in the acid scene came about
because a can of film was
accidentally exposed before
being developed.
Regarding that famous
soliloquy that Peter Fonda
does in the cemetery while
tripping on acid, director
Dennis Hopper asked Peter to
talk to the statue as if he were
talking to his mother, who
suicided when Fonda was just- He didn’t want to do it but
Hopper insisted, which is why
you hear Peter call the statue
‘Mother’.
Tragically, his real mother,
Frances Ford Seymour,
suffered from mental illness
and fatally cut her throat with
a razor on her 42nd birthday.