as George Hanson Luke Askew as Stranger on Highway Phil Spector as Connection Karen Black as Karen Toni Basil as Mary Antonio Mendoza as Jesus Mac Mashourian as Bodyguard Warren Finnerty as Rancher Tita Colorado as Rancher's Wife Luana Anders as Lisa Sabrina Scharf as Sarah Robert Walker Jr. as Jack Sandy Brown Wyeth as Joanne Among those uncredited in the commune scene were Bridget Fonda, Dan Haggerty, and Carrie Snodgress. Production Writing Hopper and Fonda's first collaboration was in The Trip (1967), written by Jack Nicholson, which had themes and characters similar to those of Easy Rider. Peter Fonda had become "an icon of the counterculture" in The Wild Angels (1966), where he established "a persona he would develop further in The Trip and Easy Rider." The Trip also popularized LSD, while Easy Rider went on to "celebrate '60s counterculture" but does so "stripped of its innocence." Author Katie Mills wrote that The Trip is a way point along the "metamorphosis of the rebel road story from a Beat relic into its hippie reincarnation as Easy Rider", and connected Peter Fonda's characters in those two films, along with his character in The Wild Angels, deviating from the "formulaic biker" persona and critiquing "commodity-oriented filmmakers appropriating avant-garde film techniques." It was also a step in the transition from independent film into Hollywood's mainstream, and while The Trip was criticized as a faux, popularized underground film made by Hollywood insiders, Easy Rider "interrogates" the attitude that underground film must "remain strictly segregated from Hollywood." Mills also wrote that the famous acid trip scene in Easy Rider "clearly derives from their first tentative explorations as filmmakers in The Trip." The Trip and The Wild Angels had been low-budget films released by American International Pictures and were both successful. When Fonda took Easy Rider to AIP, however, as it was Hopper's first film as director, they wanted to be able to replace him if the film went overbudget, so Fonda took the film to Bert Schneider of Raybert Productions and Columbia Pictures instead. When seeing a still of himself and Bruce Dern in The Wild Angels, Peter Fonda had the idea of a modern Western, involving two bikers travelling around the country and eventually getting shot by hillbillies. He called Dennis Hopper, and the two decided to turn that into a movie, The Loners, with Hopper directing, Fonda producing, and both starring and