When Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider grossed somewhere around 120 times its cost in 1969, the Hollywood studios took notice and began scrambling to find their own Easy Riders, and their own Hoppers and Fondas. Universal executive Ned Tanen’s approach was to start a division that would give young filmmakers creative control provided they stuck to a one-million-dollar budget; the idea was that at that price Universal couldn’t really lose much, but if just one of the movies broke big it would pay for the rest and then some. The experiment yielded several very interesting films, including Fonda’s […]

On a scale of one to ten, I’m probably about a 6.5 when it comes to Bob Dylan. Define one as “Dylan is the single most visible/still living manifestation of hyper-steroidal Boomer nostalgia and must be destroyed,” ten as the level of obsessiveness practiced by the singer-songwriter’s personal scourge A.J. Weberman, who literally coined the term “Dylanology” and famously dug through Robert Zimmerman’s trash for clues. Dylan wasn’t having it; in Weberman’s indelible telling: I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker… I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming […]