Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's counter-culture flick "Easy Rider", like Warren Beatty's "Bonnie and Clyde", launched the genre of low budget, independent film-making, and is as an important a film as it is a Hollywood milestone..When the studio system faded away (the back-lot assembly line), there was a vacuum in Hollywood and studio heads were gasping for fresh air?..The industry conundrum was, who would fill the void away from candy-corn musicals like "The Sound of Music", "Mary Poppins", and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", that were putting movie-goers into a permanent state of snooze, and hemorraging red ink..Box-office receipts were in freefall, an omen revolution was in the air, and a upshift in audience taste was potentially going unrealized?..Columbia Studios figured they had to roll the dice, and test if a youth audience was ready in numbers to buy theatre tickets if original content was exhibited..Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were seasoned Hollywood hands that survived the studio wars, and sensed the time was ripe to seize control of their careers by producing new wave content..Collectively, Fonda and Hopper scripted a contemporary "noir western" screenplay, Fonda as (Wyatt), Hopper as (Billy), two drugstore cowboys, mounted on "iron horses" on an existentialist journey to find America, that reflected the angst, paranoia, and prejudices permeating the Johnson/Nixon Viet Nam War era.."Easy Rider" is a biker odyssey, and the end-game is to get to New Orleans and "experience" Mardi Gras before the apocalyptic collapse of culture, an Edenistic premise..See the movie now, and excuse the dated 60's precepts..Realize the movie was an emboldened out-of-the-box move by its creators and Columbia..View the movie in context, and you will overlook its rough edges, and cardboard cut-out stereo-types..The movie occupies a sacred place in indie filmmaking, and paved the way for maverick film-makers like Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin, meaning there are films today that stand on the shoulders of "Easy Rider", as primitive as the 16mm. film might seem relative to today's digitally enhanced standards..The film proved there was enormous profitability in "new realism", and ushered in packaging a rock soundtrack to accentuate the picture, at the time a sound-breaking strategy.