and malign place prosecuting a monstrously evil war in Vietnam. A hotshot producer of the day, Bert Schneider set the stage by making Easy Rider in 1969 , featuring a couple of wonderful motorcycling hippies who end up being gunned down by a redneck for no reason other than that they don’t conform to society’s rules, man. He followed it up with Five Easy Pieces , a highly regarded picture about a scion of the upper middle class so disgusted by bourgeois life that he becomes a day laborer. “Keep telling me about the good life,” says the scion of the America he is rejecting, “because it makes me puke.” While all this was happening, Schneider hid Black Panthers on the lam from murder charges and helped smuggle Huey Newton into Cuba on another rich guy’s catamaran. The cognitive dissonance of people making millions of dollars living in paradisiacal conditions and yet determined to believe the worst of the country in which they were reaping such a bounty was not dissonant to them. In 1975, Hearts and Minds – a pro- Hanoi documentary Schneider produced about the Vietnam War, even as Americans were dying by the thousands fighting for their country – won an Oscar. Schneider took the stage and announced he was delivering “greetings of friendship to all the American people” from the lead North Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris peace talks. This was less than a month before the last helicopter would fly away from the American
From Top: Easy Rider, Nashville, Apocalypse Now . Image source: IMDB.com
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July 2019
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