have put me in January and I could not have made the film. To wait till next summer would have dated the material I was dealing with, so I wanted to bring the film out early." Armitage recalls, "We went back in '69 to shoot in New Mexico and Texas. I was the associate producer as well, and we were writing it as we went—which is something that Roger liked to do. "It was a very inexpensive film", said Corman. "It was shot with a skeleton crew, with a cast of almost entirely amateur actors. Only the leads were professionals." Shooting took around four weeks. Corman sold the movie to American International Pictures for the negative cost. The film features a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. Corman says "It was actually a second thought when we put Poe in it. We just started putting things in. In the original concept, he wasn't in it. And we just decided to put him in on a motorcycle—it seemed appropriate." "There was some sense of disorganization and experimentation as we went along", says Corman. He says the film showed: that I was beginning to get a little disillusioned with the youth culture of the time. I intended that the picture be sympathetic toward our lead gang of kids yet, at the same time, I wanted to show that I was beginning to suspect that all of the ideas being spouted by the counter-culture and all of the dreams were not totally rooted in reality. In the picture, I wanted to literally give youth the world they desired and, then, make a cautionary statement about how youth might not be able to handle it as perfectly as they anticipated. Corman said there were themes in the film "which go back through all my previous pictures, such as the theme of the destruction of the world which I've played with to a certain extent, and there are some certain political and religious overtones I've dealt with before but I've never put them all together like this. The film became something I firmly believe in." He added in 1971 that the film was an attempt to look at certain aspects of the youth movement and an attempt to move to a better way of life. I end there with something I probably believe, which is that there is a struggle and that it is possible to