Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage

Charles Kiselyaks 1999 docu Shaking the Cage is an uncritical but beautifully constructed opportunity for Fonda and Hopper to tell the tale of their coup de cinema. Fonda is gratingly full of himself and his accounts of drug use on the road are nowhere near as amusing as he thinks they are. But Hopper allows other testimony to affirm that he was a director on a power trip and an unforgivable control freak. He says that after cutting the film for a year (!) (!!!) Fonda, Nicholson and others took over and whittled it down to its final modest running time. At least the film is not an overblown endurance test. Hopper told his friends to never let him cut a movie again!