How a new generation of counterculture talent changed the landscape of
Hollywood, the film industry, and celebrity culture.
By 1967, the commercial and political impact on Hollywood of the sixties
counterculture had become impossible to ignore. The studios were in bad
shape, still contending with a generation-long box office slump and
struggling to get young people into the habit of going to the movies.
Road Trip to Nowhere examines a ten-year span (from 1967 to 1976) rife
with uneasy encounters between artists caught up in the counterculture
and a corporate establishment still clinging to a studio system on the
brink of collapse. Out of this tumultuous period many among the young
and talented walked away from celebrity, turning down the best job
Hollywood--and America--had on offer: movie star.
Road Trip to Nowhere elaborates a primary-sourced history of movie
production culture, examining the lives of a number of talented actors
who got wrapped up in the politics and lifestyles of the counterculture.
Thoroughly put off by celebrity culture, actors like Dennis Hopper,
Christopher Jones, Jean Seberg, and others rejected the aspirational
backstory and inevitable material trappings of success, much to the
chagrin of the studios and directors who backed them. In Road Trip to
Nowhere, film historian Jon Lewis details dramatic encounters on movie
sets and in corporate boardrooms, on the job and on the streets, and in
doing so offers an entertaining and rigorous historical account of an
out-of-touch Hollywood establishment and the counterculture workforce
they would never come to understand.
