Shoot a feature for roughly 400,000 dollars, then spend a million licensing the rock songs on the soundtrack. Have your custom-built motorcycles stolen from a garage before filming ends and keep shooting anyway. By every industry rule, the 1969 film Easy Rider should have been a disaster. Instead it grossed 60 million dollars, helped kill the classical studio system, and launched the director-driven new Hollywood era. This episode looks at what it actually took to get Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s road movie on screen.

The conversation covers the Western roots of Wyatt and Billy, Terry Southern’s claim that Hopper used union rules on ad-libbed lines to take a writing credit, the restaurant argument that cost Rip Torn the role that made Jack Nicholson a star and later produced a defamation lawsuit, and the Monkees money that funded the film. It follows Hopper’s fistfight over film reels in New Orleans, the real drugs on camera, the manipulation of Fonda at the cemetery, the temp track that became a million dollar soundtrack, the five-hour rough cut, and the bleak ending behind the line we blew it.

• How Peter Fonda’s Diners Club card kept a traveling guerrilla crew fueled and fed
• Why the choppers are missing from the final campfire scene
• The editor’s personal records, Steppenwolf and Hendrix, and the firing of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
• The producers who bought Hopper a vacation to Taos so the film could be cut to 96 minutes
• Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy, the two Black builders of the Captain America chopper who never got credit