Significance
A box office smash with a $41 million intake (becoming the third highest grossing film of 1969), along with Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, Easy Rider helped kick-start the New Hollywood phase during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The major studios realized that money could be made from low-budget films made by avant-garde directors. Heavily influenced by the French New Wave, the films of the so-called "post-classical Hollywood" came to represent a counterculture generation increasingly disillusioned with its government as well as the government's effects on the world at large, the Establishment. Although Jack Nicholson appears only as a supporting actor and in the last half of the film, the standout performance signaled his arrival as a movie star, along with his subsequent film Five Easy Pieces in which he had the lead role.
The film's success, and the new era of Hollywood that it helped usher in, gave Hopper the chance to direct again with complete artistic control. The result was 1971's The Last Movie, which was a notable box office and critical failure, effectively ending Hopper's career as a director for well over a decade.
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Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.”
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“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.”
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