Happy Mardi Gras!

If you can’t get down to New Orleans today (because maybe you have a sprained ankle like me), fear not!  Mardi Gras has been immortalized in a number of films.  In fact, some have theorized that the whole reason 1969’s Easy Rider was filmed was because Dennis Hopper wanted to go to New Orleans.

The Mardi Gras sequence occurs towards the end of Easy Rider.  After a long and eventful journey, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) reach New Orleans and experience Mardi Gras with two women that they met at a brothel (Karen Black and Toni Basil).  However, the Mardi Gras scenes were actually amongst the first to be shot and Hopper actually filmed several hours of documentary footage of New Orleans’s most famous party.  If you watch the footage, you can see bystanders looking directly at the camera.  They were not extras hired for the film.  They were people on the street who became a part of one of the most important indie films in the history of American cinema.  These scenes were shot guerilla style, without permits or, by most reports, any advanced planning.

Hopper also filmed Fonda having an actual bad acid trip.  For obvious reasons, Fonda was not happy about being filmed in that condition but he did say, in later interviews, that Hopper made the right decision to include the footage in the film.

For the record, I relate to Toni Basil in this film.  She’s having fun and dancing no matter what.