As a boy I tacked to my wall a seven-foot-long rectangular Easy Rider movie poster bearing the tagline “A man went looking for America….and couldn’t find it anywhere.” I hadn’t looked much beyond the borders of Genesee County, but I was pretty sure it was out there—or in here—somewhere.
Unfashionable as that shaggy landmark film of 1969 eventually became, my affection for it only grew, as I came to think of it as an audaciously wistful attempt to fix the back-to-the-land counterculture of the 1960s within the American agrarian tradition.
When in the spring of 2012 Peter Fonda, star and co-screenwriter of Easy Rider, dropped in to film a small yet crucial role in Ron Maxwell’s film Copperhead, I had lunch with the America-seeker of the poster....